Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe - Norman M. Naimark

A book with some points of interest.  Reviews the ethnic cleansings one would expect:  Armenians, Jews, Soviet deportations from the Caucasus, Yugoslav ethnic conflicts.  He does cover one ethnic cleansing I didn't know about - post WW II expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia and Poland.

Notable also are some missing ones - Palestinians, Turkish speaking people from Balkans.

Looks at how ethnic cleansings come about - says pretty much what you would expect.

Some interesting ideas, though...

p. 141 discusses how the effects of the Ottoman conquest wars in the Balkans, and later the intraethnic strife when they withdrew, had little effect on modern Yugoslav conflicts.  He sees these earlier conflicts as significant only because of how they were used by nationalistic politicians and ideologues.  The concept of identity politics as a political tool.

p. 190 "One aspect of ethnic cleansing that links to "high modernism" and the ambitions of the modern state and its leaders is its totalistic quality.  In the European cases examined here, the goal is to remove every member of the targeted nation; very few exceptions to ethnic cleansing are allowed.  In premodern cases of assaults of one people on another, those attacked could give up, change sides, convert, pay tribute, or join the attackers.  Ethnic cleansing, driven by the ideology of integral nationalism and the military and technological power of the modern state, rarely forgives, makes exceptions, or allows people to slip through the cracks."

p. 192 "Ethnic cleansing involves not only the forced deportation of entire nations but the eradication of the memory of their presence.  The physical remnants of the nation are the first to be destroyed.

...

   In addition to levelling churches, houses, and graveyards, ethnic cleansers burn books, encyclopedias, and dictionaries... (RE Tatars and Chechen-Ingush deportations) In neither case was anyone allowed to talk about the fact that the respective peoples had been deported.  It was as if they had vanished into thin air, never really having existed in the first place.