Some crimes are so large that ordinary words seem to fail. This course studies the deliberate destruction of groups of people and the mass crimes that often come with it: what they are called, how they happen, how the world has responded, and how they might be prevented. We begin with the words, because the words shape how law and politics respond.

Lemkin and a new word

The word genocide was coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jewish lawyer who had escaped to the United States. He joined the Greek genos (people, race or tribe) to the Latin -cide (killing). For years Lemkin had been troubled that the law had no name for the attempt to destroy a whole people. He pointed to the fate of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, and he was writing while Nazi Germany was murdering the Jews of Europe, including most of his own family. For Lemkin, genocide meant more than mass killing. It was a coordinated plan to destroy the foundations of a group's life: its culture, language and institutions as well as its members.

The Genocide Convention

Lemkin campaigned tirelessly, and in December 1948 the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. It defines genocide as certain acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such. The acts are:

1. killing members of the group;
2. causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
3. deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the group's physical destruction;
4. imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
5. forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Two features stand out. First, genocide does not require a death toll of any particular size; what matters is the specific intent to destroy a protected group. Second, the treaty obliges states not only to punish genocide but also to prevent it.

Debates about the definition

The definition was a political compromise, and scholars still debate it. Political and social groups were left out, partly because several states objected during drafting, so the mass killing of people for their class or political views may not legally count. Lemkin's idea of cultural genocide, destroying a group's culture without killing its members, was also largely dropped. And intent is hard to prove, since perpetrators rarely state their aims plainly. Some scholars therefore use broader definitions in research, while courts must work with the treaty's words.

Related crimes

• Crimes against humanity are grave acts such as murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, torture and persecution committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against a civilian population. Unlike genocide, they need no intent to destroy a particular group, and under modern law they can occur in peacetime as well as in war.
• War crimes are serious violations of the laws of war, such as deliberately attacking civilians, killing prisoners or using banned weapons. They require an armed conflict, and the Geneva Conventions of 1949 are their central modern source.
• Ethnic cleansing came into wide use during the wars in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. It describes forcibly removing a group from a territory to make an area ethnically uniform. It is a descriptive term, not a separate crime in international law; depending on the facts, it may amount to crimes against humanity, war crimes or genocide.

Scholars and the United Nations often use the umbrella term atrocity crimes for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes together, and the rest of this course uses it too. Keeping the terms distinct matters: calling everything genocide can blur real differences, while refusing the word when it fits can become a way of avoiding the duty to act.

Worked example: sorting three situations

The terms in this level are easier to hold apart when applied to cases. Here are three invented situations, each simplified.

• Situation A. During a war, an army repeatedly shells a city's markets and hospitals to break the defenders' will, killing many civilians. Deliberately attacking civilians is a war crime. If the attacks were part of a widespread or systematic campaign against the civilian population, they could also be crimes against humanity. Nothing yet shows intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group as such, so genocide is not established.
• Situation B. In peacetime, a government secretly arrests and kills thousands of people it labels political enemies. There is no armed conflict, so these are not war crimes. They are clearly crimes against humanity. Because the victims were targeted for their politics, a group the Convention leaves out, a court would struggle to call this genocide, even though some scholars might use the word in a broader sense.
• Situation C. A militia drives a religious minority out of its villages, burns their places of worship, and kills many of the men. This is ethnic cleansing in the descriptive sense. Whether it is also genocide depends on intent. If the leaders' orders and speeches show they meant to destroy the group, not just move it, prosecutors could argue genocide; if the aim was only to seize the land, they would more likely charge crimes against humanity.

Notice how much depends on evidence of intent and context. That is why investigators collect orders, speeches and patterns of conduct, and why careful language matters: each label carries different legal duties and different political weight.