Genocide

Genocide is the intentional destruction of human groups, in whole or in part, by mass killing and other methods. Such, at least, is a shorthand definition based on the United Nations Genocide Convention of 1948. The Convention capped two decades of scholarly work and activist endeavor by Raphael Lemkin (1900– 1959), a Polish-Jewish jurist troubled by the failure of international society to suppress atrocities inflicted by states against their own minority populations. Lemkin had a vision of cultural bonds and collective identities as essential to human civilization, and thus his framing of ‘genocide’—combining the Greek genos (race, tribe) and the Latin cida (killing)—downplayed the physical killing of individuals, highlighting instead the destruction of communal integrity and identity. This emphasis survives in contemporary conceptions of ‘ethnocide’ and ‘cultural genocide.’ It is also reflected in the UN Convention, which defined genocide as ‘any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such’:

• 1.
  Killing members of the group
• 2.
  Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
• 3.
  Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part
• 4.
  Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group
• 5.
  Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group

The Convention definition is notable, indeed notorious, for its lack of specificity in key areas. How to define the groups covered ‘as such’ by the Convention (national, ethnic, racial, and religious), and why are other groups excluded (e.g., those united by political belief, social class, or gender)? Can groups be ‘destroyed’ by means other than mass killing, for example, by the infliction of ‘mental harm’? What ‘part’ of the group must be destroyed to qualify as genocide? And how might a genocidal ‘intent to destroy’ be ascertained?

In part because of these ambiguities, the concept of genocide languished for over two decades after the Genocide Convention entered into force in 1951. The renewal of interest in genocide can be traced to two main factors. First, the trial and execution of the captured Nazi Adolf Eichmann, in Israel in 1961 to 1962, spawned a flood of research and commentary on the Jewish Holocaust—for many, still the paradigmatic case of genocide. The analyses gradually assumed a comparative bent, as scholars became interested in other cases of genocide, such as the destruction of the Armenian population of Ottoman Turkey during World War I. Following the publication of Leo Kuper's seminal 1981 work Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century, a field of ‘comparative genocide studies’ gathered steam, hitting full stride in the latter half of the 1990s and into the 2000s. In part, this reflected the second key factor in the renewed [Page 424]prominence of genocide for governments and publics: the continued prominence of the phenomenon itself in the post–Cold War era. This was brought devastatingly home by the apocalyptic slaughter of nearly 1 millionTutsisinRwandain1994, and by the less destructive—but European-centered, and hence heavily publicized—mass atrocities against Bosnian Muslims following Yugoslavia's collapse in 1991. Both genocidal outbreaks prompted the formation of international criminal tribunals to try alleged perpetrators. Subsequent initiatives included ‘mixed tribunals’ of national and international judges to preside over tribunals for Sierra Leone, and most recently for atrocities in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge regime (1975–1979). The new International Criminal Court (ICC) also includes genocide in its jurisdiction.

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