Welcome back to Members’ Corner, where our community members talk about the issues they’re most passionate and knowledgeable about. While this often leads us into happy or whimsical niches, this week, we’re giving mar1gold the floor to discuss a deeply important and serious issue.
‘It’s just semantics’ is often used as a way of saying ‘we’re in agreement; let’s not get lost in definitions’. A noble sentiment, but - as Mar1gold’s essay highlights - words matter. Our word choices and their definitions have real-world consequences. Mar1gold is doing a politics degree and has a special academic interest in genocide studies. Below, she discusses how the UN currently defines genocide and her thoughts on why the current definition is too limited. She concludes that the study of genocide makes clear “the importance of not tainting political theory with power politics”.
“Genocide remains the most atrocious crime a state can commit. However, the UN’s understanding of genocide is flawed. The UN’s present convention defines 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: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.’
“The issue with the definition here lies in who is defined as victims of genocide. Only ‘national, ethnical, racial, or religious’ groups are viewed as being able to be victimised by genocidal efforts. This leaves out a plethora of identities, from political ideology to gender and sexuality.
“This is problematic; it’s an issue of how we understand the act of genocide. Many genocides in history have included groups that aren’t included in the UN convention. During the Holocaust, homosexual men were targeted and systematically killed in concentration camps. During the Cambodian genocide, anybody considered an ‘enemy’ of the Khmer Rouge was targeted. This included people associated with the then-incumbent regime before the Khmer Rouge took power and ‘new people’, who were from urban areas.
“I would argue that there is therefore a gaping hole in the UN convention, one that limits our ability to both understand genocide as a concept and prosecute individuals involved in these acts of mass killing.
“The seemingly obvious answer here would be to add more groups to the convention. However, as our societies evolve and shift, this would only lead to more and more groups needing to be added over time. Genocide is not a static concept; it fluctuates with the technologies available and how societies are structured.
“Chalk and Jonassohn’s definition of genocide can provide an alternative solution able to resist the winds of societal change; it states victimhood in genocide should be ‘as defined by the perpetrator’. This definition allows for a wider scope of who can be affected by genocide and acknowledges how these targeted groups can often be arbitrarily created by perpetrators. For example, the Nazis’ understanding of alcoholics and criminals was that their alcoholic and criminal traits stem from a genetic flaw that could not be solved through rehabilitation. We can therefore argue that the groups ‘alcoholics’ and ‘criminals’ were racialised by the Nazis; they were seen as deviants from a ‘pure’ Aryan race. The current UN convention does not provide the subtlety in its definition to deduct this. Chalk and Jonassohn’s definition, by putting the onus of defining the victim group on the perpetrator, does.
“So why does the UN convention have such a limited victim group scope? The UN convention as we know it was born out of Cold War tensions, with the Soviet Union and the US playing a large role in drafting the convention. Both powers were wary of being implicated by their domestic affairs. The US fretted over Jim Crow laws and the prevalence of lynching becoming an issue on the world stage. The Soviet Union had the issue of Gulags and previous mass killings against certain political groups that could similarly implicate them in genocidal acts.
“When analysing victim group construction, the Soviet Union becomes significant in the crafting of this aspect of the UN convention. Political groups as potential victims were a key part they wanted omitted, due to their domestic actions. This is despite the original creator of the term ‘genocide’, Raphael Lemkin, including political groups in his first draft. And yet, largely due to the Soviet Union playing a key role in creating the convention, political groups never made it into the final cut.
“While the exclusion of political groups in the convention isn’t the UN definition’s only limitation, this is most scholars’ primary bone to pick with the convention. We live in a time when political ideology is as potent as religion. So, surely, in this era of party politics and ideology, political identity could be a thing for which people are persecuted. We have already seen this in the case of the Holocaust and the Cambodian genocide. There have also been numerous mass killings in history that could be counted as genocides due to the targeting of political groups.
“Overall, issues with the UN convention for genocide highlight a wider issue. International bodies and the policies they create are always tainted by geopolitics. Genocide can never be an ‘apolitical’ issue, as our understandings of it are shaped by politics. In order to amend this, the UN should look to scholarship (academics mostly agree on the issue of the omission of political groups) and make changes accordingly. Otherwise, our analysis and ability to prosecute those responsible for this horrendous crime will always be limited.”
“References and further reading:
“https://documents.un.org/doc/resolution/gen/nr0/044/31/img/nr004431.pdf
“Chalk , F.R. and Jonassohn, K. (1998). The History and Sociology of Genocide, Analyses and Case Studies. New Haven: Yale University Press.
“Lemkin, R. (1944). Axis Rule in occupied Europe Laws of occupation ; Analysis of government ; Proposals for redress. Washington: Carnegie Endowment For International Peace.
“Midlarsky, M.I. (2008). The killing trap : genocide in the twentieth century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“Straus, S. (2001). Contested meanings and conflicting imperatives: A conceptual analysis of genocide. Journal of Genocide Research, 3(3), pp.349–375.
“Theriault, H.C. (2010). Genocidal Mutation And The Challenge Of Definition. Metaphilosophy, 41(4), pp.481–524.”
“These sources are mostly about how we define genocide. If you want more information about the mechanisms of genocide I would suggest looking at the different ‘understandings’ of genocide in scholarship. Below are the three different main theories of genocides with recommended works for each:
“Socio-psychological (Hitler’s willing executioners: ordinary Germans and the Holocaust by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen and The Psychology of Perpetrators and Bystanders (6)1 by Ervin Staub)
“Macro-sociological (Genocide, Civilization and Modernity (46) 2 by Michael Freeman and Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arednt)
“Strategic accounts (Final solutions: The causes of mass killing and genocide (9)3 by Benjamin Valentino and Patterns of twentieth century genocides: the Armenian, Jewish, and Rwandan cases (6)4 by Vahakn N. Dadrian”
We’d like to give our thanks to Mar1gold for sharing her thoughts on a difficult but important topic. Mar1gold produced an equally interesting piece on Bristol’s historic links to the slave trade and the modern-day repercussions of those connections, which you can read using the link above. Alternatively, check out our two most recent Members’ Corner submissions: TrialByStory on the unique narrative medium of wrestling and Konquest's introduction to musical theory.
Keep an eye out on our Just About Just About curated content tab for more Members’ Corner pieces as well as platform news and more. We plan to run another Members’ Corner call for submissions next month, so do have a think if there’s anything you’d like to share. Some text has been edited for brevity and clarity. You can find the original wording at the bounty post.
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