ABSTRACT
Raphael Lemkin coined the word “genocide” between 1941 and 1942, and inspired a movement after the Second World War to outlaw genocide under international law at the United Nations. The word genocide first appeared in print in Lemkin’s 1944 magnum opus, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress. Genocide had two phases: “One, the destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor”. Lemkin believed that twentieth-century nationalist movements were not the first to inspire genocide, and he sought a definition of genocide that would capture what it was as a type of conflict. As such, in Lemkin’s conceptualization, genocide could be achieved through direct and indirect violence or through forms of repression that could be called in today’s parlance “structural violence”.
