What Is Ethnic Cleansing? A Case for Conceptual Disaggregation

• In Event: Forced Displacement, Wartime Refugees, and Integration

Abstract

Despite significant scholarly disagreement about its definition, core meaning and corresponding cases, ethnic cleansing has escaped careful conceptual examination. Analyzing the scholarship on ethnic cleansing over the past thirty years, this article identifies five key areas of conceptual confusion that undermine the integrity and utility of the concept. These include the lack of boundedness between ethnic cleansing and other related concepts; the definitional discrepancies over its core meaning; the tension between ethnic cleansing as a practice versus a policy; the universe of cases that belong together; and disparate sub-type classification criteria. This conceptual confusion undermines effective comparative analysis, and in turn, our understanding of the causes of ethnic cleansing and associated policy recommendations. The solution is to abandon the concept of ethnic cleansing and instead disaggregate it into its component parts—genocide, mass expulsion, coercive assimilation and massacre—based on the distinct intents of the perpetrator(s). This disaggregation eliminates ambiguity, solves the membership problem and distinguishes related concepts within the mass atrocity semantic field.

Author

• Meghan Garrity, Harvard Kennedy School