RESEARCH STARTER

Cultural cleansing

Cultural cleansing refers to the intentional removal or destruction of cultural markers associated with specific groups or heritage within a geographic area, often linked to violent conflicts or oppressive political regimes. This phenomenon can manifest in diverse contexts, including wars, where efforts to erase a culture's presence are part of broader ethnic cleansing campaigns aimed at achieving racial or cultural homogeneity. Historical examples abound, such as the systematic destruction of Armenian culture during the Ottoman Empire and the cultural annihilation associated with the Holocaust during World War II.

In contemporary contexts, cultural cleansing has been observed in the aftermath of military conflicts. For instance, the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 led to the destruction of cultural sites and the targeting of intellectuals, raising questions about intentional efforts to dismantle existing cultural frameworks. Similarly, during the Syrian Civil War, the Islamic State engaged in the systematic destruction of significant historical artifacts, exemplifying tactics designed to demoralize local populations. More recently, Russia's invasion of Ukraine has prompted concerns regarding targeted attacks on Ukrainian cultural heritage, indicating a potential strategy to assimilate the nation culturally. Understanding cultural cleansing is crucial as it highlights the intersection of culture, identity, and power dynamics in global conflicts.

Full Article

The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) describes cultural cleansing as a purposeful effort to remove markers of a particular culture’s presence and heritage from a geographic region. Cultural cleansing is usually associated with war and other forms of violent conflict. It can also take place under political regimes seeking to remove the presence of one or more cultural traditions in a multicultural society or supplant the dominance of an established culture with an ascendant one.

Cultural cleansing is often, but not always, part of a wider program of ethnic cleansing, which describes efforts to establish ethnic and/or racial homogeneity in a geographic region through campaigns of intimidation, force, or both. Links between cultural and ethnic cleansing are evident in the interchangeable use of the two terms, which is common but not technically accurate. According to experts, cultural cleansing primarily targets a group’s cultural identity, heritage, and memory, while ethnic cleansing is rooted in the physical presence of an undesired population in an area.

Background

Human history contains countless examples of expansionist civilizations seeking to assert their dominance and control over geographic territory by purging the presence of racial, ethnic, cultural, or religious minority groups. Numerous such events took place on large scales during the twentieth century. During World War I (1914–1918), the Turkish rulers of the Ottoman Empire waged a systematic campaign of destruction against the empire’s Armenian population in what has been alternately described as an ethnic cleansing and a genocide. The most infamous modern example of such an effort occurred during World War II (1939–1945) when Nazi Germany sought to exterminate Europe’s Jewish population alongside other groups that the regime’s leadership considered socially undesirable. The Holocaust, as the event is known, resulted in the murder of six million Jews. The legacies of these tragic events have prompted United Nations (UN) officials and other human rights experts to draw links between cultural cleansing, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. While distinct from one another, the three concepts share multiple points of contact.

Genocide was first recognized as a criminal act under international law in 1946, during the immediate aftermath of World War II. The UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines the act as an intentional effort to partially or fully destroy a specific national, racial, ethnic, or religious group. While such efforts frequently involve the systematic slaughter of targeted victims, genocide can also include inflicting severe physical or psychological harm on a population, deliberately exposing the targeted population to living conditions that will destroy it, preventing members of the targeted group from having children, or forcibly removing children from the targeted group and resettling them with members of another population.

The UN’s Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect notes that international law does not formally recognize ethnic cleansing as a specific crime. However, the UN and many other governments and human rights groups acknowledge the gravity of ethnic cleansing and the severe harm it inflicts on victimized populations. While no universally agreed-upon definition of ethnic cleansing exists, the concept is generally understood to describe the violent removal of a specific civilian ethnic population from a particular geographic region in favor of a competing civilian population. The term entered the international human rights lexicon in the context of the brutal divisions that occurred as Yugoslavia violently devolved toward dissolution during the 1990s.

Topic Today

Cultural cleansing can occur independently or as an offshoot of a wider ethnic cleansing or genocidal campaign. Numerous examples of cultural cleansing have occurred during the early decades of the twenty-first century and have mainly occurred in the context of international political and military conflict.

In 2003, the United States (US) led a coalition invasion of Iraq, justifying the actions by claiming that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and had to be neutralized as part of US antiterrorism objectives. No weapons of mass destruction were found after the invasion, prompting commentators to opine on subsequent events that saw cultural sites destroyed, intellectuals and academics executed, and libraries and museums looted and burned, including the looting of the National Museum of Iraq, from which museum staff estimated that about 15,000 items were stolen. In 2025, UNESCO reported that reconstruction work at major heritage sites in Mosul had been completed as part of its Revive the Spirit of Mosul initiative. While Iraq’s internal unrest was widely described as a natural and predictable phenomenon tied to democratic change, some experts believe that it was perpetrated by design and carried out to demolish the country’s existing institutions and remake oil-rich Iraq as a compliant satellite state to better serve Western economic interests.

Against the chaotic backdrop of the Syrian Civil War (2011–), the Islamic State (IS, ISIS, or ISIL) terrorist organization waged a campaign to establish a caliphate of religious extremism in war-torn areas of the Middle East. In 2015, the group captured the historic Syrian city of Palmyra and proceeded to systematically destroy culturally significant architectural artifacts including the two-thousand-year-old Temple of Baalshamin to the consternation of a shocked international community. Commentators widely described the destructive acts as an example of cultural cleansing designed to demoralize the native population and create more favorable conditions for ISIS to impose its radical ideology on residents.

In February 2022, Russia staged an unprovoked military invasion of neighboring Ukraine in what has been widely interpreted as a contemporary revival of historical Russian imperialism. Within weeks, UNESCO reported that Russian forces had damaged hundreds of cultural sites, with 525 sites verified as damaged. UNESCO also estimated total damage to cultural assets at about $4.5 billion. UNESCO officials stated that the conflict had the potential to evolve into an existential threat to Ukrainian culture, noting that the targeted destruction of important cultural sites has emerged as a relatively common military tactic. Commentators widely believe that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has an objective of assimilating some or all of Ukraine into the Russian Federation.

In October 2023, Hamas attacked Israel in a coordinated attack, killing over 1,000 people. Israel responded, launching the Israel-Hamas war. During the conflict, many of Israel’s attacks have resulted in the death of thousands of civilians, including many women and children. Members of the international community have accused Israel of ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. UNESCO also inscribed the Monastery of Saint Hilarion/Tell Umm Amer in Palestine on the World Heritage List and the List of World Heritage in Danger in 2024, underscoring the vulnerability of Gaza’s cultural heritage during the conflict. In 2025, UNESCO member states also emphasized the protection of cultural heritage and the role of culture in peace and recovery in the MONDIACULT outcome document. In 2026, the United Nations Human Rights Office also raised concerns that attacks, destruction, and displacement in Gaza and the West Bank could amount to ethnic cleansing. Israel’s destruction of 164 verified cultural and archaeological sites in the Strip has garnered accusations of attempts at cultural cleansing.


Bibliography

“Archaeological Museums in Iraq.” UNESCO, 7 Dec. 2023, www.unesco.org/en/museums/iraq. Accessed 15 Apr. 2026.

Baker, Raymond W., editor. Cultural Cleansing in Iraq: Why Museums Were Looted, Libraries Burned, and Academics Murdered. Pluto Press, 2010.

Bellamy, Daniel. “‘Cultural Cleansing:’ Ukraine’s Heritage is in Danger, UNESCO Warns.” Euronews, 12 Mar. 2022, www.euronews.com/culture/2022/03/12/ukraine-s-cultural-heritage-is-in-danger-unesco-warns. Accessed 15 Apr. 2026.

Bell-Fialkoff, Andrew. “A Brief History of Ethnic Cleansing.” Foreign Affairs, vol. 72, no. 3, 1 June 1993, pp. 110–21. www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/bosnia-herzegovina/1993-06-01/brief-history-ethnic-cleansing. Accessed 15 Apr. 2026.

Boyle, George. “What is Ethnic Cleansing?” The Borgen Project, 16 Jan. 2017, borgenproject.org/ethnic-cleansing/. Accessed 15 Apr. 2026.

“Damaged Cultural Sites in Ukraine Verified by UNESCO.” UNESCO, 23 Feb. 2026, www.unesco.org/en/ukraine-war/damaged-cultural-sites. Accessed 15 Apr. 2026.

“Four Years on: Supporting Culture, Education, Sciences, and Journalist’s Safety in Ukraine.” UNESCO, 23 Feb. 2026, www.unesco.org/en/articles/four-years-supporting-culture-education-sciences-and-journalists-safety-ukraine. Accessed 15 Apr. 2026.

“Introduction to the Holocaust.” Holocaust Encyclopedia, 20 Sept. 2024, encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/introduction-to-the-holocaust. Accessed 15 Apr. 2026.

May, Larry. Ethnic Cleansing: A Social and Legal Examination. Routledge, 2025.

Millender, Michaela, and Nicolette Lyubarsky. “When Protectors Become Perpetrators: The Complexity of State Destruction of Cultural Heritage.” Global Observatory, 24 Apr. 2024, theglobalobservatory.org/2024/04/when-protectors-become-perpetrators-the-complexity-of-state-destruction-of-cultural-heritage/. Accessed 15 Apr. 2026.

“The Monastery of Saint Hilarion/Tell Umm Amer in Palestine Is Inscribed on the List of World Heritage in Danger.” UNESCO, 26 July 2024, www.unesco.org/en/articles/monastery-saint-hilarion/tell-umm-amer-palestine-inscribed-list-world-heritage-danger. Accessed 15 Apr. 2026.

“MONDIACULT 2025 Outcome Document.” UNESCO, 1 Oct. 2025, www.unesco.org/sites/default/files/medias/fichiers/2025/09/EN_MONDIACULT_Outcome_Document%20Final%2027.09.25.pdf. Accessed 15 Apr. 2026.

Quran, Layla. “What’s the Difference Between Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing?” PBS News, 24 Oct. 2017, www.pbs.org/newshour/world/whats-the-difference-between-genocide-and-ethnic-cleansing. Accessed 15 Apr. 2026.

“Revive the Spirit of Mosul.” UNESCO, www.unesco.org/en/revive-mosul. Accessed 15 Apr. 2026.

“UNESCO’s Action in the Gaza Strip / Palestine.” UNESCO, www.unesco.org/en/gaza. Accessed 15 Apr. 2026.

“Victims First. Action Now: Join Us to Prevent and Stop Enforced Disappearances.” United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, 30 Mar. 2026, www.ohchr.org/en/stories/2026/03/victims-first-action-now-join-us-prevent-and-stop-enforced-disappearances. Accessed 15 Apr. 2026.

Weiss, Thomas G., and Nina Connelly. Cultural Cleansing and Mass Atrocities: Protecting Cultural Heritage in Armed Conflict Zones. Getty Publications, 2020.

Full Article

The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) describes cultural cleansing as a purposeful effort to remove markers of a particular culture’s presence and heritage from a geographic region. Cultural cleansing is usually associated with war and other forms of violent conflict. It can also take place under political regimes seeking to remove the presence of one or more cultural traditions in a multicultural society or supplant the dominance of an established culture with an ascendant one.

Cultural cleansing is often, but not always, part of a wider program of ethnic cleansing, which describes efforts to establish ethnic and/or racial homogeneity in a geographic region through campaigns of intimidation, force, or both. Links between cultural and ethnic cleansing are evident in the interchangeable use of the two terms, which is common but not technically accurate. According to experts, cultural cleansing primarily targets a group’s cultural identity, heritage, and memory, while ethnic cleansing is rooted in the physical presence of an undesired population in an area.

Background

Human history contains countless examples of expansionist civilizations seeking to assert their dominance and control over geographic territory by purging the presence of racial, ethnic, cultural, or religious minority groups. Numerous such events took place on large scales during the twentieth century. During World War I (1914–1918), the Turkish rulers of the Ottoman Empire waged a systematic campaign of destruction against the empire’s Armenian population in what has been alternately described as an ethnic cleansing and a genocide. The most infamous modern example of such an effort occurred during World War II (1939–1945) when Nazi Germany sought to exterminate Europe’s Jewish population alongside other groups that the regime’s leadership considered socially undesirable. The Holocaust, as the event is known, resulted in the murder of six million Jews. The legacies of these tragic events have prompted United Nations (UN) officials and other human rights experts to draw links between cultural cleansing, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. While distinct from one another, the three concepts share multiple points of contact.

Genocide was first recognized as a criminal act under international law in 1946, during the immediate aftermath of World War II. The UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines the act as an intentional effort to partially or fully destroy a specific national, racial, ethnic, or religious group. While such efforts frequently involve the systematic slaughter of targeted victims, genocide can also include inflicting severe physical or psychological harm on a population, deliberately exposing the targeted population to living conditions that will destroy it, preventing members of the targeted group from having children, or forcibly removing children from the targeted group and resettling them with members of another population.

The UN’s Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect notes that international law does not formally recognize ethnic cleansing as a specific crime. However, the UN and many other governments and human rights groups acknowledge the gravity of ethnic cleansing and the severe harm it inflicts on victimized populations. While no universally agreed-upon definition of ethnic cleansing exists, the concept is generally understood to describe the violent removal of a specific civilian ethnic population from a particular geographic region in favor of a competing civilian population. The term entered the international human rights lexicon in the context of the brutal divisions that occurred as Yugoslavia violently devolved toward dissolution during the 1990s.

Topic Today

Cultural cleansing can occur independently or as an offshoot of a wider ethnic cleansing or genocidal campaign. Numerous examples of cultural cleansing have occurred during the early decades of the twenty-first century and have mainly occurred in the context of international political and military conflict.

In 2003, the United States (US) led a coalition invasion of Iraq, justifying the actions by claiming that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and had to be neutralized as part of US antiterrorism objectives. No weapons of mass destruction were found after the invasion, prompting commentators to opine on subsequent events that saw cultural sites destroyed, intellectuals and academics executed, and libraries and museums looted and burned, including the looting of the National Museum of Iraq, from which museum staff estimated that about 15,000 items were stolen. In 2025, UNESCO reported that reconstruction work at major heritage sites in Mosul had been completed as part of its Revive the Spirit of Mosul initiative. While Iraq’s internal unrest was widely described as a natural and predictable phenomenon tied to democratic change, some experts believe that it was perpetrated by design and carried out to demolish the country’s existing institutions and remake oil-rich Iraq as a compliant satellite state to better serve Western economic interests.

Against the chaotic backdrop of the Syrian Civil War (2011–), the Islamic State (IS, ISIS, or ISIL) terrorist organization waged a campaign to establish a caliphate of religious extremism in war-torn areas of the Middle East. In 2015, the group captured the historic Syrian city of Palmyra and proceeded to systematically destroy culturally significant architectural artifacts including the two-thousand-year-old Temple of Baalshamin to the consternation of a shocked international community. Commentators widely described the destructive acts as an example of cultural cleansing designed to demoralize the native population and create more favorable conditions for ISIS to impose its radical ideology on residents.

In February 2022, Russia staged an unprovoked military invasion of neighboring Ukraine in what has been widely interpreted as a contemporary revival of historical Russian imperialism. Within weeks, UNESCO reported that Russian forces had damaged hundreds of cultural sites, with 525 sites verified as damaged. UNESCO also estimated total damage to cultural assets at about $4.5 billion. UNESCO officials stated that the conflict had the potential to evolve into an existential threat to Ukrainian culture, noting that the targeted destruction of important cultural sites has emerged as a relatively common military tactic. Commentators widely believe that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has an objective of assimilating some or all of Ukraine into the Russian Federation.

In October 2023, Hamas attacked Israel in a coordinated attack, killing over 1,000 people. Israel responded, launching the Israel-Hamas war. During the conflict, many of Israel’s attacks have resulted in the death of thousands of civilians, including many women and children. Members of the international community have accused Israel of ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. UNESCO also inscribed the Monastery of Saint Hilarion/Tell Umm Amer in Palestine on the World Heritage List and the List of World Heritage in Danger in 2024, underscoring the vulnerability of Gaza’s cultural heritage during the conflict. In 2025, UNESCO member states also emphasized the protection of cultural heritage and the role of culture in peace and recovery in the MONDIACULT outcome document. In 2026, the United Nations Human Rights Office also raised concerns that attacks, destruction, and displacement in Gaza and the West Bank could amount to ethnic cleansing. Israel’s destruction of 164 verified cultural and archaeological sites in the Strip has garnered accusations of attempts at cultural cleansing.


Bibliography

“Archaeological Museums in Iraq.” UNESCO, 7 Dec. 2023, www.unesco.org/en/museums/iraq. Accessed 15 Apr. 2026.

Baker, Raymond W., editor. Cultural Cleansing in Iraq: Why Museums Were Looted, Libraries Burned, and Academics Murdered. Pluto Press, 2010.

Bellamy, Daniel. “‘Cultural Cleansing:’ Ukraine’s Heritage is in Danger, UNESCO Warns.” Euronews, 12 Mar. 2022, www.euronews.com/culture/2022/03/12/ukraine-s-cultural-heritage-is-in-danger-unesco-warns. Accessed 15 Apr. 2026.

Bell-Fialkoff, Andrew. “A Brief History of Ethnic Cleansing.” Foreign Affairs, vol. 72, no. 3, 1 June 1993, pp. 110–21. www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/bosnia-herzegovina/1993-06-01/brief-history-ethnic-cleansing. Accessed 15 Apr. 2026.

Boyle, George. “What is Ethnic Cleansing?” The Borgen Project, 16 Jan. 2017, borgenproject.org/ethnic-cleansing/. Accessed 15 Apr. 2026.

“Damaged Cultural Sites in Ukraine Verified by UNESCO.” UNESCO, 23 Feb. 2026, www.unesco.org/en/ukraine-war/damaged-cultural-sites. Accessed 15 Apr. 2026.

“Four Years on: Supporting Culture, Education, Sciences, and Journalist’s Safety in Ukraine.” UNESCO, 23 Feb. 2026, www.unesco.org/en/articles/four-years-supporting-culture-education-sciences-and-journalists-safety-ukraine. Accessed 15 Apr. 2026.

“Introduction to the Holocaust.” Holocaust Encyclopedia, 20 Sept. 2024, encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/introduction-to-the-holocaust. Accessed 15 Apr. 2026.

May, Larry. Ethnic Cleansing: A Social and Legal Examination. Routledge, 2025.

Millender, Michaela, and Nicolette Lyubarsky. “When Protectors Become Perpetrators: The Complexity of State Destruction of Cultural Heritage.” Global Observatory, 24 Apr. 2024, theglobalobservatory.org/2024/04/when-protectors-become-perpetrators-the-complexity-of-state-destruction-of-cultural-heritage/. Accessed 15 Apr. 2026.

“The Monastery of Saint Hilarion/Tell Umm Amer in Palestine Is Inscribed on the List of World Heritage in Danger.” UNESCO, 26 July 2024, www.unesco.org/en/articles/monastery-saint-hilarion/tell-umm-amer-palestine-inscribed-list-world-heritage-danger. Accessed 15 Apr. 2026.

“MONDIACULT 2025 Outcome Document.” UNESCO, 1 Oct. 2025, www.unesco.org/sites/default/files/medias/fichiers/2025/09/EN_MONDIACULT_Outcome_Document%20Final%2027.09.25.pdf. Accessed 15 Apr. 2026.

Quran, Layla. “What’s the Difference Between Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing?” PBS News, 24 Oct. 2017, www.pbs.org/newshour/world/whats-the-difference-between-genocide-and-ethnic-cleansing. Accessed 15 Apr. 2026.

“Revive the Spirit of Mosul.” UNESCO, www.unesco.org/en/revive-mosul. Accessed 15 Apr. 2026.

“UNESCO’s Action in the Gaza Strip / Palestine.” UNESCO, www.unesco.org/en/gaza. Accessed 15 Apr. 2026.

“Victims First. Action Now: Join Us to Prevent and Stop Enforced Disappearances.” United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, 30 Mar. 2026, www.ohchr.org/en/stories/2026/03/victims-first-action-now-join-us-prevent-and-stop-enforced-disappearances. Accessed 15 Apr. 2026.

Weiss, Thomas G., and Nina Connelly. Cultural Cleansing and Mass Atrocities: Protecting Cultural Heritage in Armed Conflict Zones. Getty Publications, 2020.

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