Introduction

In her book "The Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide, Samantha Power recounts the story of Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew, who was determined to find a word that would capture the barbarity of the Nazi agenda and also carry the moral implications of targeting a specific ethnic group. Lemkin finally settled on the term we commonly associate with the horrors of the Holocaust: genocide. It is a combination of the Greek geno, which means "race" or "tribe," and the Latin derivative cide, which means "to kill."

Many people consider the term "ethnic cleansing" to be synonymous with genocide. In The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective, for example, Robert Gellately and Ben Kiernan explain that "'ethnic cleansing' involves the 'purification' of a territory, not necessarily of a population. This means the deportation, usually...