Ok I know this is super dark (i do a politics degree ok!) but I have a special academic interest in genocide studies. They're super important.

Here is an essay I wrote about how we define genocide and how this has implications for our real world application of the term. I think genocide studies demonstrates 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 defines genocide as:

‘In the present Convention, genocide means 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 can be 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 an issue in how we understand this act, as many genocides in history have included groups that aren’t included in the convention. In 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 regime before the Khmer Rouge took power, and ‘new people’, who were from urban areas. Therefore, there is a gaping hole in the UN convention, that limits our ability to both understand genocide as a concept and prosecute individuals involved in these acts of mass killing.

The obvious answer here, surely, would be to add more groups to the convention. However, as our societies evolve and shift, surely this will 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. Instead, Chalk and Jonassohn’s definition of genocide can provide the solution for this.

Chalk and Jonassohn’s definition states victimhood in genocide ‘as defined by the perpetrator’. This allows for a wider scope of who can be affected by genocide and acknowledges how these groups can be often arbitrarily created by perpetrators. For example, the Nazi’s understanding of alcoholics and criminals was that these traits are a genetic flaw that could not be solved through rehabilitation. We can argue that, therefore, the groups ‘alcoholics’ and ‘criminals’ were racialised by the Nazis; they were seen as deviants from a ‘pure’ Aryan race. The UN convention does not provide the subtlety in its definition to deduct this. Chalk and Jonassohn’s definition, by putting the onus of defining victim group on the perpetrator, does.

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 in 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 possibly implicating them of 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. Due to the Soviet Union playing a key role in creating the convention, political groups never made it to the final cut.

Whilst the exclusion of political groups in the convention isn’t the UN’s only limitation in their understanding of genocide, this is most scholar’s bone to pick with the convention. We live in a time where political ideology is as potent as religion. So, surely, in this era of party politics and ideology, political identity could be a thing people are persecuted for. 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 displays a wider issue. International bodies and the policy 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 issue, the UN should look to scholarship on the issue (who all mostly agree on the issue of 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:

Scott Pilgrim vs the world

For this bounty I have the say Scott Pilgrim vs The World (I guess genre can be somewhat debated with a lot of films but google classed this one as a romantic action comedy so I'm counting it!)

Since this is a question about action films I'm gonna mainly focus on the aspects of this film that aligns with the action genre element :)

The driving conflict of the film is basically that Scott Pilgrim has to defeat Ramona Flower's 7 evil exes (not ex boyfriends!). This conflict works really well as, even though the premise is a little silly, it's a very relatable experience of feeling like you are in competition with your partner's exes (even though I hope not having to kill them!). I like how this film deviates from the usual 'epic' conflicts that action films have (CIA man fights against spies, smoking hot Brit must save the world!) and instead places incredibly high stakes on a kind of petty, overdramatic situation. It's fun! I think it also serves to make the audience feel closer to these characters, as their hopes/wants/dreams are closer is scale to theirs!