Understanding genocide
Investigating the meaning of a politically potent concept.
The concept of genocide is intellectually and politically potent and gains ever-greater currency, but its meaning is confused and contested. The term ‘genocide’, proposed by Raphael Lemkin in 1944, was originally used to describe a comprehensive attack on the existence of a people, involving an attempt to destroy their social networks and way of life. However, the United Nations Genocide Convention of 1948 began a process of narrowing the definition of genocide to the ‘physical and biological’ destruction of populations. This narrowing process has continued until some authorities simply equate genocide with mass murder along the lines of Hitler’s Final Solution. My research provides a new basis for approaching these issues.
For example, what has happened to the ‘African’ peoples of Darfur since 2003? Is it ‘genocide’ or ‘ethnic cleansing’, or just a ‘civil war’ and a ‘humanitarian disaster’? It is not only politicians and activists who give different answers to such questions: scholars of political violence are thoroughly divided on them too.
My work argues that mass killing is only one of the ways that regimes and armed movements attempt to destroy population groups. We need to understand how it is combined with expulsion, forced migration, cultural suppression, rape and abduction. Labelling these as different types of political violence – for example, calling forced migration ‘ethnic cleansing’ and only mass murder ‘genocide’ – artificially separates violent actions that are usually combined in situations like Darfur.
My research also suggests that while genocide is something that armed power organisations do to innocent civilians, it is also more than that. It is usually enmeshed with more conventional war, and sets up new forms of conflict because of the resistance of the target group and the intervention of other states.
This insight has led me to a new research project, which will propose that genocide should be seen not as a question of a few big, isolated genocides such as the Holocaust, but as one of clusters of genocidal violence involving both larger and smaller episodes. Thus, the mega-genocide in Rwanda in 1994 was preceded by genocidal massacres of Tutsis in Rwanda and Hutus in Burundi, as well as by Idi Amin’s atrocities in neighbouring Uganda. These eventually led to the Tutsi–émigré Rwandan Patriotic Front, whose invasions helped provoke the crisis that led to the 1994 genocide, which in turn contributed to the Congolose wars. Investigating the international structures that produce such complexes of genocide is a challenging new agenda for the emerging field of genocide studies.
