ABSTRACT
Examining genocide as political violence transports us directly to some core debates in genocide studies – the field invented by the Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin in the 1940s, and transformed by successive waves of comparative genocide scholars from the late 1970s onward. First and most fundamentally, what is genocide? Given that virtually all scholars and legal theorists agree that genocide above all means the destruction of human groups, through a targeting of their actual or alleged members, which collectivities merit inclusion in scholarly analyses, and protection under international law? And how do multiple identities overlap, including – perhaps – political ones? That is, how do such identities blend and interweave, both in the minds of those who claim them as their own, and those who impute negative identities to their targets, paving the way for the marginalization and massacre of people who are often utterly mystified by such mythical constructions as “witch,” “enemy of the people,” “Judeo-Bolshevik,” and so on.
