This book confronts the problem of the legal uncertainty surrounding the definition and classification of ethnic cleansing, investigating the status of ethnic cleansing in international law. It addresses the question of the specificity of the act and its relation to existing categories of international crime, exploring the relationship between ethnic cleansing and other categories of international crime, including genocide, but also extending to war crimes and crimes against humanity. The book goes on to show how the current understanding of ethnic cleansing singularly fails to provide an efficient instrument for identification, and argued that the act, in having its own distinctive characteristics, conditions and exigencies, ought to be granted its own classification as a specific independent crime.