A Primer on Stop Genocide

The term "genocide" encapsulates the worst of human behavior and experience—the most extreme actions motivated by the most extreme manifestations of racism, fear, and power. Though the precise definition of the term is subject to ongoing debate, in short, genocide entails the destruction of a people based on their membership to a particular group—a violation of the most basic right to exist, a crime against not only individuals, but entire populations.

Far from spontaneous mob violence or chaotic frenzy, genocide is characterized by high-level state organization, whereby racist ideologies and fear-mongering become tools in a calculated political power play. Genocide represents a complicated confluence of actors, causes, and consequences that vary according to situation and circumstance, but find commonality in the motivation of the perpetrators: that is, the total destruction of a people.

Working Toward a Definition

Human rights attorney Raphael Lemkin first used the term "genocide" in 1944, as World War Two still raged across Europe, to describe the Nazi's extermination of the Jews and other "undesirable" populations as well as their general plans for world domination by the "Aryan race." from the Greek word genos (race) and the Latin cide (killing), Lemkin defined genocide broadly as "the practice of extermination of nations and ethnic groups," a "coordinated plan of different actions" intended to annihilate an entire group.

In response to the horrors of the Holocaust, the United Nations ratified the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (commonly, the Genocide Convention) in 1948, providing a legal framework for the identification and prosecution of genocidal actors. The Convention defines genocide as "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group" through any of five delineated acts: murder, serious bodily harm, infliction of conditions of life mean to bring destruction, imposition of measures to prevent births, and forcible transfer of children.

Many find the definition offered by scholars Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn more useful, as the Convention definition represents a political compromise among member nations of the UN, and thus reflects the calculations of its drafters. Chalk and Jonassohn refer to genocide as "a form of one-sided mass killing in which a state or other authority intends to destroy a group, as that group and membership in it are defined by the perpetrator." A multitude of other definitions remain the subject of heated debate among scholars, activists, policy-makers, and attorneys alike.

Never Again?

Despite the legal commitments established by the Genocide Convention, international bodies like the United Nations repeatedly fail to intervene to prevent or stop genocide. The UN received warnings, for instance, of the 1994 Rwandan genocide months before it occurred, and the US condemned the current killings in Darfur, Sudan as genocide, but has yet to exercise significant enough political will to stop the perpetrators.

After multiple experiences of genocide in the 20th and 21st centuries — namely, Armenia, the Holocaust, Rwanda, Cambodia, Bosnia, and Darfur — an increasingly vocal community of human rights advocates organized to address what Samantha Power refers to as the "gap between the promise and the practice." Through vigilant monitoring and research, activist mobilization, and targeted advocacy, these organizations work to make inroads into the largest obstacle of the anti-genocide movement—the lack of international political will to make the oft-cited mantra of "never again" a reality.