Eliminationism is a political ideology that views a group within a larger social group as harmful and therefore believes it must be eliminated—by separation, censorship, or extermination—for the benefit of the larger group and in order to preserve its "purity."

The various forms of eliminationism have included attempts to delete or change the cultural identity of the targeted group, the political disenfranchisement of the group, the creation of ghettos for the group, the enslavement of the group, the segregation of the group, the voter suppression of the group, various forms of apartheid targeting the group, the deportation of the group, various methods of forced removal and forced marches targeting the group, the creation of concentration camps for the group, the forced sterilization of the group, anti-miscegenation laws targeting the group, the systematic rape of the group, mass murder campaigns targeting the group, and the attempted genocide of the group.

The term eliminationism was made popular by American political scientist Daniel Goldhagen in his 1996 book Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, in which he posits that the German public not only knew about, but supported, the Holocaust because of a unique and virulent "eliminationist antisemitism" within the German national identity, which had developed in the preceding centuries.

The purpose of defining eliminationism is the inherent weakness of the term "genocide", which only allows for action where mass slaughter has already occurred. However, according to Goldhagen, extermination is usually seen as one (and the most extreme) option of getting rid of an unwanted people group seen as a threat, and in any case of extermination many of the other methods of eliminationism will also be present and probably used first.

There are five forms of eliminationism:

In his 2009 book Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity, Goldhagen argued that eliminationism is integral to politics due to mass murder being "a political act", writing that "mass elimination is always preventable and always results from conscious political choice." Goldhagen describes various 20th-century atrocities, such as the Indonesian mass killings of 1965–66 and genocides in Darfur, Yugoslavia, Rwanda and Guatemala, arguing that each of these events were products of eliminationism, being perpetrated by "the decisions of a handful of powerful people" in contrast to popular perceptions of such events being carried out "in a frenzy of bloodlust."

During the 1991–2002 Algerian Civil War, the predominant faction of the conflict's first phase was known as les éradicateurs for their ideology and for their rural and urban tactics. These hardliners were opposed in the Army and the FLN by les dialoguistes.^{[citation needed]}

Journalist David Neiwert argued in 2009 that eliminationist rhetoric is becoming increasingly mainstream within the American right-wing, fuelled in large part by the extremist discourse found on conservative blogs and talk radio shows, which may provoke a resurgence of lone wolf terrorism in the United States.