The Dictionary of Human Geography

of moral convictions – meaning that moral
systems are always systems that come from
somewhere, that somewhere often being a
privileged, masculine sphere (e.g. the state,
the church) (see alsosituated knowledge).
At the same time, a feminist geographical per-
spective, because of its concern for social just-
ice and the righting of wrongs, may argue
explicitly in favour of partial, as opposed to
impartial, decisions regarding distribution
of scarce resources – thus the enormous influ-
ence in the geography of the 1990s of philoso-
pher Iris Marion Young’s work on group rights
(as opposed to individual rights) (Young,
1990a).
Feminist-standpoint epistemologies share
with post-structuralism a scepticism
towards, or even wholesale rejection of, the
notion of universal truths, including the idea
of universally applicable moral principles (see
universalism). For this reason, the ethical
and the moral are sometimes distinguished
from each other, as when Cornell (1995,
p. 78) states: ‘The ethical as I define it is not
a system of behavioral rules, nor a system of
positive standards [morality] by which to jus-
tify disapproval of others. It is, rather, an atti-
tude towards what is other to oneself.’ This
shying away from the enunciation of rules
and opting instead to cultivate a considered
refelexivity(although the difference between
the two can be overdrawn) is what has drawn
some geographers towards thinkers such as
Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida and Jean
Luc Nancy. The aim is to develop an ethics
that is responsible to the need for openness
and difference, as against an ethics built upon
foundational, universal certainties (see Popke,
2003; see also Gibson-Graham, 2003).
Whether an ethics can properly be built upon
the notion ofhuman rights, for example, is a
case in point. Extending from the philosophies
of Gilles Deleuze, Giorgio Agamben, Donna
Haraway, Baruch Spinoza and others, a con-
cept of ‘posthumanism’ has emerged in recent
years in human geography and elsewhere that
challenges the boundaries and the identity of
the humansubjectupon which the idea of
human rights relies (see Braun, 2004a). The
specific interest in post-structuralism as a
resource for ethics and geography should not
necessarily be construed as a radical break: it
is, instead, a tool or tools for grappling with
what it means to think and act in terms of
relationality and in alliance with struggles for
a better world. At the same time, it should be
noted that there are streams of ethical thought
relatively untapped by human geographers.

These would include ethical systems beyond

the Judeo-Christian legacy (see Esteva and

Prakash, 1998), as well as the thought of

‘Western’ thinkers, such as Friedrich Nietzsche

and Alain Badiou, for whom responsibility to

the ‘other’ is not the objective of ethics (cf.

Dewsbury, 2007). ghe

Suggested reading

Badiou (2001); Smith, D.M. (1994a); Whatmore

(1997).

ethnic cleansing The forced removal of an

ethnic group from a particular territory or pol-

itical space by deportation, forcedemigration

orgenocide. Examples of ethnic cleansing

include theholocaust(in which six million

Jews and millions more Roma and other

groups were killed), the German resettlement

of western Poland during the Second World

War and the attempts of the South African

state to relocate blacks during apartheid.

While the practice is anything but new, the

term itself gained widespread use in the

1990s, when it was used to refer to Serbian

attacks on Muslims in Bosnia and Albanians

in Kosovo. Political geographers have shown

how the idea of ethnic cleansing is an out-

growth of the ideology ofnationalism, which

promotes a unity between theboundariesof

thestateand theidentityof the population

(Flint and Taylor, 2007 [1985]). Ethnic

cleansing thus attempts to create a territorial

order based on ‘an idealized convergence of

identity and space’ (Dahlman and O ́Tuathail,

2005a, p. 273). Kevin Cox (2002, p. 188)

writes that ethnic cleansing ‘is a solution that

arises in particular geographic situations’, such

as when a minority population is dispersed

within the dominant national population of

the state and so cannot easily secede from the

larger political unit.

Ethnic cleansing involves not only the

removal of populations, but also the destruc-

tion ofplaceandcommunitythrough ‘the

erasure of ‘‘other’’cultural landscapes, the

renaming of locales and the repopulation of

the land by a new group’ (Dahlman and O ́

Tuathail, 2005a, p. 273). Marcus Doel and

David Clarke (1998, p. 57), in their discussion

of the Holocaust, show how ethnic cleansing

seeks to configure ‘social, physical, moral, and

aestheticspace’ through desires for ‘purity’.

Ethnic cleansing can thus be seen as a violent

policing of the boundaries between the Self

and the Other (seeother/otherness). In their

work on Bosnia-Herzegovina, Carl Dahlman

and Gearoid O ́ Tuathail (2005a) show how

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ETHNIC CLEANSING