ABSTRACT
‘Genocide’ is a label, coined by Raphael Lemkin in 1944, that commonly denotes the worst of all crimes: the deliberate mass killing of a whole population group. However, its political application has been widely inconsistent, and its meaning in international law diverges from its standard definition in dictionaries. This chapter begins by tracing the origin and development of the term genocide in the late 1940s, noting that during the Nuremberg Trials it became strongly linked to the Holocaust, but that the wording of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide took the term in a different direction: an intent to destroy a group in whole or in part. During the Cold War era countless crimes manifestly fell within the remit of the Convention, but there was no international consensus about its application. Since the 1990s, however, genocide has been used quite frequently to describe certain situations. The Rwanda genocide of 1994 is the paradigmatic example, but there have been successful prosecutions for genocide with reference to events in the former Yugoslavia, and warrants issued for counts of genocide in Sudan. Genocide has also been deployed widely as a tool of advocacy and lobbying by activists, and on occasion has been used as justification for military intervention on humanitarian grounds. We discuss how the political and popular will means that choices about when to use genocide as a concept in relation to particular atrocities often has little to do with the gravity of crimes. In addition, we show how meanings ascribed to the term genocide are less clear than they seem. The popular conception of genocide is associated with vilification of the accused. It is a morally imbued concept. Yet the legal application of genocide may mean that it is a lesser crime than a war crime or a mass murder. We ask if the use of the term genocide can be counterproductive. It makes compromise and negotiation more difficult, and may potentially exacerbate suffering.
