Ethnic cleansing – the violent forced removal of members of a particular group from a region by a more powerful group – is one of the most abhorrent phenomena in contemporary world politics. It has been the subject of numerous international inquiries, including investigations by two ad hoc tribunals that were established to prosecute violations of international humanitarian law committed in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda (and which later evolved into the International Criminal Court), as well as by domestic courts and hybrid tribunals. It is also a key element of the definition of genocide as codified in the 1948 Genocide Convention, which has been ratified by 153 States and is considered part of general international law.
In a new article published in Political Science Quarterly, Schar School of Policy and Government assistant professor Meghan Garrity recommends that social scientists abandon the term ethnic cleansing, describing five critical areas of conceptual confusion surrounding it: discrepancies in its core meaning, practice versus policy, lack of boundedness, universe of cases, and subtype classification criteria. She proposes the use of four alternative concepts that — she writes — “eliminate ambiguity, improve theoretical precision, and open a promising new research agenda.”
Garrity’s first alternative concept is coercive assimilation, which includes policies to destroy specific characteristics that identify members of a particular group, such as language, religion, or customs. Another is mass expulsion, which focuses on removing the targeted group from an area rather than annihilating it. The final alternative is control, in which the aim is to subjugate a group.