“Right-Peopling†the State: Nationalism, Historical Legacies, and Ethnic Cleansing in Europe, 1886-2020

Carl Müller-Crepon, Guy Schvitz and Lars-Erik Cederman

Journal of Conflict Resolution, 2025, vol. 69, issue 2-3, 211-241

Abstract: Many European nation-states were historically homogenized through violent ethnic cleansing. Despite its historical importance, we lack systematic evidence of the conditions under which groups where targeted with cleansing and how it impacted states’ ethnic demography. Rising nationalism in the nineteenth century threatened multi-ethnic states with “right-sizing†through secessionism and irredentism. States therefore frequently turned to brutal “right-peopling†, in particular where cross-border minorities and those with a history of political independence increased the risk of territorial losses. We test this argument with new spatial, time-variant data on ethnic geography and ethnic cleansing from 1886 to the present. We find that minorities that politically dominated another state and those that have lost political independence were most at risk of ethnic cleansing, especially in times of interstate war. At the macro-level, our results show that ethnic cleansing increased European states’ ethnic homogeneity almost as much as border change. Both produced today’s nation-states by aligning states and ethnic nations.

Keywords: ethnic cleansing; nationalism; Europe; territorial competition; nationstate formation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00220027241227897 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:jocore:v:69:y:2025:i:2-3:p:211-241

DOI: 10.1177/00220027241227897

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Conflict Resolution from Peace Science Society (International)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().