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INTRODUCTION: THE IMPORTANCE OF DEFINITION

This book addresses the question: how should we understand the idea of genocide? Genocide has been a central issue of world politics several times in recent decades, especially in Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur. Its history has also been a topic of controversy, in countries like Germany, Japan and Turkey over murderous violence in the two world wars, and in North America and Australia over earlier violence against indigenous peoples. The spectres of the Holocaust and the Nakba stalk twenty-first-century conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians. Genocide issues continue to arise in all too many current conflicts where populations are targeted with violence. Allegations of genocide are widely made and, invariably, disputed. All too often, 'genocide' becomes a tool in political controversy, claimed by one side and denied by the other. Whenever new challenges arise, the same confused debate occurs over whether attacks on civilians constitute 'genocide', 'ethnic cleansing' or just the excesses of a dirty 'civil war', often as though similar arguments had not already raged in earlier cases. Few ideas are as important in public debate, but in few cases are the meaning and scope of a key idea less clearly agreed.

It might seem axiomatic that scholarship should assist in the clarification of 'genocide', and thus help all those who feel that the idea assists them to understand terrible episodes of human history. Yet to many, 'definitional' discussion over horrendous experiences of violence can seem beside the point. On this subject, normal academic assumptions cannot be taken for granted. The Auschwitz survivor Charlotte Delbo speaks of 'useless knowledge', when she refers to experiences that were 'so dark as to be unforgettable but also so overpowering that the more one encounters their stark realities - even in reading about them, let alone in the flesh or in personal memory - the more likely we are to be disoriented and overwhelmed by them.'1 Genocide has often been seen as involving murderous tendencies so horrible and irrational as to be both utterly exceptional and virtually inexplicable. It can seem devaluing to discuss them within the explanatory frameworks that scholars adopt. This crime of crimes demands more than a normal commitment to scholarship and truth. Study presupposes, John Roth argues, 'values that are not contained in historical study alone. . . . Any debate . . . is worthwhile just to the extent that it never loses sight of the fact that ethical reasons are the most important ones for studying these dark chapters in history.'2 Here scholars must bear witness, show solidarity with victims and stand unequivocally on one side of the historical process.

Hence, even scholars complain about 'definitionalism', excessive attention to the details of the concept. The psychologist Israel Charny warns that extended debate on definition can lead to the point 'where the reality of the subject under discussion is "lost", that is, no longer experienced emotionally by the scholars conducting the enquiry'.3 The historian Herbert Hirsch concurs: 'It is unfortunate that Holocaust and genocide studies are being pressured into a phase of social science rationality . . . only to become bogged down in the elusive variable and definition, as everyday life becomes almost entirely eliminated from their concern.'4 But if we are to do justice to the victims, and help understand the enormities of violence, we cannot but engage with these issues abstractly as well as concretely. The point is certainly to 'prevent and punish' genocide; but to do this, we must clearly understand the beast. Issues of definition cannot be avoided in this task, and they will take time and care because simple ideas are often too simple. As the social theorist Max Weber put it: 'The apparently gratuitous tediousness involved in the elaborate definition of . . . concepts is an example of the fact that we often neglect to think out clearly what seems to be "obvious", because it is intuitively familiar.'5

Lemkin and the necessity of classification

In any case, definition is part of the subject matter of genocide. The Nazi genocide was a crime of social classification, a sociological crime in which pseudoscience defined and classified people according to their 'race'. The journalist William L. Shirer described the Nazis, whom he observed at first hand, as 'sociologists' because of how they were obsessed with these classifications.6 Not all genocide is systematically pseudoscientific, but classifying populations and individuals in racial and other hostile terms is one of its essential components. The danger of classification is always, Nigel Eltringham suggests, that 'we "misplace concreteness" and set out to "prove" that our abstract concepts . . . really do correspond to reality, rather than being contingent approximations.'7 Genocidists try to enforce their classifications through physical violence, which backs up the conceptual violence of arbitrary representations.

This is, however, an abuse of definition and classification, which are inescapable parts of human cognition and social life. It is important to note that the targets of genocide also classify, and implicitly or explicitly advance, their own definitions. They assert their understandings of groups to which they belong, their versions of identity, rather than simply accepting their attackers' classifications. They assert their status as civilians, refuting genocidists' beliefs that unarmed people can be treated as combatants. They define themselves not only as victims, the passive recipients of genocidal violence, but also as resisters, civilian or armed. In the struggles over genocide, people who are targeted with violence also try to impose counter-classifications on those who would classify them, often describing them as tyrannical, cruel and criminal.

The idea of 'genocide' fits into this pattern. Its originator, Raphael Lemkin, wanted to impose, through international law and historical inquiry, a new kind of classification on the perpetrators of violence. In his definition - which I discuss fully in the next chapter - all kinds of destructive anti-group acts, committed by any actors, are seen as belonging to the same class, and are thereby criminalized. The strength of the idea is its breadth: for Lemkin acts like killing, deportation, dispossession and cultural destruction were not simply distinct crimes but manifestations of the overarching crime of group destruction. He aimed to entrench this idea both in international law and in historical inquiry so that a general problem of violence against population groups would be widely recognized.

Lemkin's is a powerful legal and sociological classification, imbued with universal and humanistic values, containing huge moral and political significance. It would not be so powerful if it was vague or imprecisely defined. We do not have to adopt Lemkin's terminology or definitions; indeed we cannot avoid modifying them. Yet if it was important that he defined 'genocide', it is also important that we are aware of how we change its meaning. If we use it in new ways, or introduce new terms to describe some of the phenomena it originally designated, we need to explain why.

The changing problem of definition

Lemkin coined the word in 1944, and initially it meant what he said. However, 'genocide' quickly became widely used and - as is normal when a word escapes its inventor - its meaning began to change, in subtle and not so subtle ways. In particular, it was redefined for a crucial international legal document, the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (the Genocide Convention) in the drafting of which Lemkin played an important role. After that, it entered popular political discourse in most languages and - somewhat belatedly - became a concept of academic social science and history from the 1980s onwards. After the end of the Cold War, in 1989-91, it gained new leases of life in all these fields. World politics opened up more to human rights concerns, legal institutions actually began to try genocide cases and academic study deepened.

A large part of the problem of this book is that public, legal and scholarly discourse has changed genocide's meaning in questionable ways, often without bothering to justify it, or has simply used the term loosely. In the expanding field of genocide studies, amidst the array of often impressive case and comparative studies, the debate on what genocide means has hardly advanced since the early 1990s. Many scholars (not just lawyers, who are bound to acknowledge its centrality to genocide law) uncritically use the Convention as their benchmark, despite its generally admitted inadequacies. This situation means that, despite many insights, much scholarship gives inadequate answers to the vexed question of the meaning of genocide.

Partly because of the powerful emotional, moral and political interests at stake in all these discourses, 'genocide is an essentially contested concept par excellence', Christopher Powell notes.8 This is not just...