Ethnic Cleansing

Modern scholarship typically differentiates utilitarian ethnic cleansing from ideological ethnic cleansing. Pre-twentieth-century acts of ethnic cleansing typically were of the utilitarian type, in which perpetrators were pursuing land, economic wealth, slaves, or simply settling old scores. Modern ethnic cleansing, however, tends to be ideological, whereby the perpetrator proceeds for reasons having to do with race, ethnicity, religion, politics, or some other ideological factor. …