Ethnic cleansing is a relatively new term for the ancient practice of expelling a people, using a variety of means, from a geographic area to secure it for another people's exclusive use. The term began to be used extensively in an international context during the early 1990s in relation to the wars surrounding the collapse of Yugoslavia. It was a translation of a Serbo-Croatian phrase for the practice of using forced deportation, random attacks, and systematic rape to encourage people of a specific ethnic origin to leave a region. Ethnic cleansing was practiced to varying degrees by several sides in the conflict as a strategic goal to help establish ethnically homogeneous areas that could then be incorporated into a larger nation-state.

Since its use to describe events in Yugoslavia, the term has been widely utilized by reporters, international governmental organizations such as the United Nations (UN...