Editor's Note

Genocide is a constant in human history, occurring from antiquity to the present and in most parts of the inhabited globe. Time and again, peoples, nations, states, colonial powers, and empires have seen the eradication of certain groups as a “solution” to the “problem” posed by those groups. This enduring scourge of human existence is investigated in the present issue of Global Dialogue. Our survey moves from general explorations of questions of definition, causation, and prevention, to examinations of specific historical genocides.

We begin with a reflection on what shape genocide might take in the present century. Much genocide research today consists of transhistorical analysis that seeks to identify thematic similarities between mass slaughters that are widely separated in time and place. This kind of analogical reasoning about genocide has its use, but it risks misleading us when we seek to understand the dangers of genocide in our time, argues Martin Shaw of the Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals (IBEI) and the University of Roehampton, London. “What if,” he asks, “despite all the similarities and continuities across periods, there are in fact crucial differences and discontinuities?” The danger of genocide in the twenty-first century is not a repetition of the Holocaust, Armenia, or even Rwanda, but something which has a significantly different form. Shaw shows how genocide has evolved over the decades, changing radically in tandem with epochal changes in the international system.

The article that follows considers an aspect of the thought of the founding father of the study of genocide, Raphael Lemkin, the Polish–Jewish legal scholar who coined the term in 1944. Tony Barta of La Trobe University, Australia, looks at Lemkin’s views on a notion central to discussions of genocide, that of intent. The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948)—which Lemkin did so much to bring into being—states that for an act to count as genocidal, it must have been committed “with intent to destroy” a group “in whole or part”. A possible consequence of this focus on intent is that it may restrict guilt and responsibility for genocide to its front-line perpetrators and back-room planners, absolving the wider society. Lemkin insisted that responsibility could not be thus confined. Barta uses the examples of Poland under the Nazis and Australia under the British to show how Lemkin’s concept of “interest”—of material gain or profit—can serve to widen the circle of genocidal responsibility and deepen our historical understanding.

The question of intent—one of the thorniest in attributing responsibility for genocide—is pursued further in our next contribution, by John Quigley of Ohio State University. Article II of the UN Genocide Convention lists a number of acts against members of “a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” that may constitute genocide—acts such as killing, causing bodily or mental harm, preventing births within the group, transferring children outside the group, and so forth. If any of these acts are committed “with intent to destroy” the group “as such”, “in whole or part”, then genocide has been committed. As Quigley shows with reference to his experiences in legal proceedings against Khmer Rouge leaders in Cambodia and on behalf of Bosnia against Yugoslavia, this definition of genocidal intent conceals a number of issues of interpretation.

So great is the suffering caused by genocide that it is regarded as the most terrible of human offences, whose prevention is an absolute moral priority. The question of how genocide may be prevented is addressed by our succeeding two articles. Adam Jones of the University of British Columbia Okanagan in Kelowna, Canada, examines the quandaries involved in attempting to meet the obligation to prevent genocide. States that intervene militarily in other countries on the basis of a “responsibility to protect” threatened civilian populations lay themselves open to accusations of hypocrisy and neo-colonialism. Jones considers the lessons to be drawn from the crises and controversies over “humanitarian intervention” in Kosovo and East Timor (1999), Darfur/Sudan (2000s), Libya and Syria (2011–13), and Mali (2013).

The very title of the UN Genocide Convention imposes on states signatory to it a duty to prevent the crime. Yet the convention has been criticised for allegedly providing insufficient guidance on how to do this. Caroline Fournet of the University of Groningen disagrees. She argues that one of the acts the convention proscribes, that of “causing bodily harm to members of the group”, could serve as an early warning sign of genocide and so assist in the task of prevention. Although the Genocide Convention does not define the act of causing serious bodily harm, the international criminal tribunals for Rwanda and for the Former Yugoslavia have considered it repeatedly. Fournet analyses these judicial findings and contends that the act, once qualified, “could contribute to the fulfilment of the two promises made by the UN Genocide Convention itself, namely, the prevention and punishment of the crime”.

A sociological perspective on genocide is provided by Christopher Powell of the University of Manitoba, Canada. He utilises the insights of Norbert Elias to argue that genocide in the modern era is inherent in the very constitution of society, in the civilising process which has generated both the sovereign state and the sovereign individual subject. Genocide’s stubborn persistence and the movement to oppose it are both expressions of the same social formation. Abolishing genocide requires the generation of a form of political society not premised on the maintenance of social deference by the military monopoly of the sovereign state.

European settler colonialism was massively destructive of hunter–gatherer societies, be it in Africa, Australia or the Americas. Mohamed Adhikari of the University of Cape Town notes that a certain subset of confrontations between colonial settlers and indigenous peoples was frequently genocidal in outcome—namely, encounters between livestock farmers linked to the global capital market and hunter–gatherers. Adhikari asks why this form of settler colonialism should so often have resulted in the near complete destruction of forager societies. He identifies a number of key factors that tilted the balance towards genocidal violence.

We next proceed to investigations of specific genocides. In the opinion of some genocide scholars, the fate of the indigenous peoples of the Americas following Columbus’s “discovery” constitutes the most devastating genocide in history, in terms of the absolute numbers killed, the duration of the extermination, the number of separate peoples eradicated, and the absoluteness with which native presence was expunged from the land. Alfred A. Cave of the University of Toledo, Ohio, considers the origins of genocide against Native Americans by looking at events in England’s first permanent North American colony. He describes the process of ideological dehumanisation of Native Americans and the policies it inspired in seventeenth-century Virginia.

One of the earliest genocides of the modern era is the Ottoman Empire’s annihilation of its Armenian population. Initiated in 1915, and persisting after the First World War, it claimed the lives up to 1.5 million Armenians. Uğur Ümit Üngör of Utrecht Univeristy provides an overview of the genocide. He finds that it was the result of three major causes: military defeat and loss of territory in the Balkans in 1912–13; the Young Turk coup in January 1913; and the outbreak of the First World War. The genocide was not a single phenomenon, but a multifaceted process of destruction that involved the mass execution of elites, expropriation of property, deportations, forced assimilation, artificial famine, and the destruction of material culture.

One of the peoples targeted by Hitler for extermination were Europe’s Roma. They were killed in vast numbers, and their destruction was motivated by precisely the same racial ideology that drove Nazi Germany’s genocide of its Jewish victims. Yet while the Shoah is one of the most widely known and comprehensively studied aspects of the Second World War, the Romani Porrajmos (Devouring) has received comparatively little scholarly and public attention. No one has done more to dispel ignorance of the genocide of the Gypsies than Ian Hancock of the University of Texas at Austin. Focusing on events before, during and after the pivotal year 1938, he describes the origins, course, and outcome of the Nazis’ persecution of the Roma.

Hitler’s destruction of European Jewry was not the sole genocide perpetrated by his regime, but part of a unified if uneven process that swept up other groups and peoples for annihilation. Besides the Roma (discussed in this issue by Ian Hancock), Russians, Soviet POWs (3.5 million killed), and Poles fell victim to ideologically motivated murder by the Nazis in such numbers that the killings may be seen as individual genocides. John Cox of the University of North Carolina Charlotte describes the roots in racism and imperialism of Nazi Germany’s wide-ranging genocidal programme. His account both discusses the Shoah and throws light on the inadequately acknowledged other genocides of the Nazis.

The UN Genocide Convention defines the crime as the intentional destruction of “a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”; contrary to the wishes of Raphael Lemkin, political groups are excluded from the scope of the convention. In 1965–8, Indonesia was swept by violence that saw an estimated five hundred thousand people killed. The victims were predominantly members of Indonesia’s communist party and their associates, rounded up and killed by the Indonesian army in a purge that accompanied Major-General Suharto’s assumption of power from President Sukarno. The nature and magnitude of the slaughter have caused it to be seen as a genocide, even though its victims were targeted not on racial or religious grounds, but primarily on the basis of political affiliation. Katharine McGregor of the University of Melbourne brings our issue to a close with an account of the massacre that assesses whether it may properly be regarded as a genocide.

Paul Theodoulou
Winter/Spring 2013