What is Genocide

Daniel Feierstein

The term genocide was coined by the Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin, who

wrote that “By genocide we mean the destruction of a nation or … ethnic group”.

Lemkin went on to argue that “Genocide has two phases: one, the destruction of

the national identity of the oppressed group, the other, the imposition of the

national identity of the oppressor.”

The distinctive feature of genocide, according to Lemkin, is that it aims to

destroy a group rather than the individuals that make up the group. The ultimate

purpose of genocide is to destroy the group’s identity and impose the identity of

the oppressor on the survivors. This idea gives us a useful insight into the

workings of power systems in the modern era. In particular, the nation state has

tended to destroy the identities of ethnic and religious minorities within its

boundaries and impose a new identity on them: the national identity of the

oppressor.

My contention is that modern genocides have been a deliberate attempt

to change the identity of the survivors by modifying relationships within a given

society. This is what sets modern genocide apart from earlier massacres of

civilian populations, as well as from other processes of mass destruction. It is a

process that starts long before and ends long after the actual physical

annihilation of the victims.

The Article II of the 1948 Genocide Convention defines genocide means:

Any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

But in contrast to the legal definition of genocide, the concept of genocide

as a social practice allows historians and sociologists to adopt a broader and

more flexible approach to the problems of causality and responsibility. It also

helps to distinguish genocide from other social processes of mass destruction

that have occurred at different periods of history, such as high death rates among

certain segments of the population as the result of economic policies, or the more

or less intentional destruction of the environment.

Now, despite the obvious differences between law and social sciences, we

should point out that it is organization, training, practice, legitimation and

consensus that distinguish genocide as a social practice from other more

spontaneous or less intentional acts of killing and mass destruction. Also,

because a social practice is comprised of shared beliefs and understandings as

well as shared actions, a genocidal social practice may be one that contributes to

genocide or attempted genocide, including symbolic representations and

discourses promoting or justifying genocide.

In addition, it is clear from this definition that social practices are ongoing

and under permanent construction. In many instances, the appropriateness of

the term genocide has been questioned on the grounds that the process has not

gone far enough to speak of full-blown genocide. But when does genocide

actually begin? At what moment can we consider that the term is being correctly

applied? Adopting the concept of genocidal social practices allows us to address

a thorny methodological issue in history and the social sciences, namely, that of

periodization.

Bearing all this in mind, I have defined a genocidal social practice as a technology

of power – a way of managing people as a group - that aims (i) to destroy social

relationships based on autonomy and cooperation by annihilating a significant

part of the population (significant in terms of either numbers or practices), and

(ii) to use the terror of annihilation to establish new models of identity and social

relationships among the survivors. Unlike what happens in war, the

disappearance of the victims forces the survivors to deny their own identity – an

identity created out of a synthesis of being and doing - while a way of life that

once defined a specific form of identity is suppressed.

A sociological understanding of genocide as a modern social practice

needs to take into account three interconnected processes: the construction,

destruction, and reorganization of social relations. I will present a six-stage

process of genocidal social practices, beginning at the moment that a group of

individuals with an autonomous social identity is negatively constructed as

“Other,” and continuing until its symbolic extermination in the minds of the

survivors, which may happen after the physical acts of extermination

themselves.1 Not all the stages described are strictly sequential. In practice, there

is often considerable overlap between the different stages, although each of

those on the path to mass murder constitutes a necessary step in the process.

The model emphasizes the negative ways in which the state brands those

who think or behave differently in such diverse areas as sexuality, politics,

religion and the workplace, but also the fact that the extermination of those

groups that lie outside the “norm” is a clear message to the population that no

deviation from the “norm” will be tolerated. The ruthless efficiency of state

punishment, reinforced by official rhetoric and allowing no exceptions, is

designed to make the standardization of society seem inevitable.

Stage One: Stigmatization: the construction of “negative otherness”

The first step in destroying previously cooperative relations within or between

social groups is stigmatization. In order to construct the “negative Other” as a

distinctive social category, those in power draw on symbols in the collective

imagination, build new myths, and reinforce latent prejudices. Two groups are

thus created: the majority or in-group (“us”) and a minority or out-group

(“them”) that do not wish to be like everyone else – and therefore do not deserve

to exist.

1 This structure is derived from my earlier work, Cinco estudios sobre genocidio, Acervo Cultural Editores, Buenos Aires, 1997 and later Seis estudios sobre genocidio. Análisis de relaciones sociales: otredad, exclusión, exterminio, EUDEBA, Buenos Aires, 2000. At the time of publication, these books were only available in Spanish.

Stage Two: Harassment

This stage marks a qualitative leap from symbolic to physical violence. In

general, it advances more quickly in times of crisis, as the anxiety and latent

violence resulting from current deprivations and uncertainty about the future

can be directed against those who insist on maintaining a separate identity.

Typically, the stigmatized group is accused of causing the crisis by corrupting

public morals, undermining national unity or conspiring with foreign agents in

ways that would not normally stand the test of common sense.

Harassment is characterized by two types of simultaneous and complementary

actions: bullying and disenfranchisement.

First, radicals or “shock troops” carry out sporadic attacks, claiming that their

“tolerance” is at an end and calling for “firm action.” These attacks achieve

several goals simultaneously. They deepen the process of stigmatization; they

test society’s readiness to buy into physical violence; and they provide an excuse

to recruit and organize a repressive apparatus to “manage” the situation. 2

Second, the authorities gradually deprive the stigmatized group of its civil rights.

This begins with restrictions on property and marriage, as well as on practicing

certain professions and customs and ends in the loss of citizenship.

Stage Three: Isolation

At this stage, the focus shifts to social and territorial planning. This stage

has taken different forms at different moments in modern history, but the goal is

always the same: to demarcate a separate social, geographical, economic,

political, cultural and even ideological space for those who are “different,” and at

the same time to sever their social ties with the rest of society.

2 This effect should not be overlooked. In Nazi Germany, the victims often asked to be isolated in order to escape the harassment to which they were subjected. At the same time, others demanded that the victims be removed so that they would not have to witness more unpleasant scenes of public degradation. Thus, once the other has become a 'negative other', the victims are blamed for any discomfort or unpleasant situations that occur when they are punished for continuing to live among “normal folk”. In Argentina, the actions of the AAA (Anti-Communist Alliance Argentina) and other paramilitary forces during the years 1974 and 1975 caused large sectors of the population to argue for the “need” to regulate these actions within an institutional framework. The state terrorism of the military dictatorship was implemented to meet this “need and to organize terror, murder and repression from the appropriate institutional bodies: the security forces (i.e. the police and the military).

Stage Four: Policies of systematic weakening

At this stage the perpetrators set priorities. They distinguish between

those that must be exterminated, and those that may be exterminated, depending

on the political and social circumstances and the perpetrators’ capacity to kill.

Once the victims have been isolated from the rest of society, the perpetrators

typically implement a series of measures aimed at weakening them

systematically. These consist of strategies of physical destruction through

overcrowding, malnutrition, epidemics, lack of health care, torture, and sporadic

killings; and of psychological destruction, manifested in humiliation, abuse,

harassment or killing of family members, attempts to undermine solidarity

through collective punishment, the encouraging of collaboration in categorizing

and classifying prisoners, and denunciation and peer abuse.

Stage Five: Extermination

The extermination stage is characterized by the physical disappearance of

those who once embodied certain types of social relations.

Stage Six: Symbolic enactment 3

Destruction only benefits the perpetrators if it can be turned into certain

forms of social narrative - that re-present –annihilation. Genocidal social

practices do not end in the physical annihilation of the victims, but rather in the

symbolic ways that this trauma is represented. If the overarching purpose of

genocide is to transform social relationships within a given society, it is not

sufficient to kill those who think or behave differently. The types of social

relationships that these people embodied (or potentially embodied) must be

replaced either with traditional in-group models of relating or, more commonly,

with new ways of relating. The most effective form of symbolic genocide is not

oblivion, which ignores the disappearance of a way of life as if it had never

disappeared, but does not preclude its reappearance. The most effective form of

3 For a more extended account of what I understand by this concept, see my Cinco estudios sobre genocidio (Buenos Aires: Acervo Cultural Editores, 1997), and Seis estudios sobre genocidio. Análisis de relaciones sociales: otredad, exclusión, exterminio (Buenos Aires: EUDEBA, 2000).

symbolic genocide is the pious pretense that genocide is somehow irrational and

inexplicable.

For genocide to be effective while the perpetrators are in power it is not

enough for the perpetrators to kill and materially eliminate those who stand for

a particular social order the perpetrators wish to destroy. They need to spread

the terror caused by genocide throughout society. Conversely, the best way to

perpetuate the effects of terror a post-genocidal society is by dissociating

genocide from the social order in which it occurred. Not in a crude and obvious

way by denying the facts, but by changing the meaning, logic and intentionality of

genocide.

The six stages of modern genocide described above form a cycle, the

central aim of which is to transform the society in which genocide takes place by

destroying a way of life embodied by a particular group, and thus reorganizing

social relations within the rest of society. The disappearance of the memory of

the victims brought about by symbolic enactment – that is, by the enactment of

genocide through discursive and other symbolic means – is an attempt to close

the cycle. Not only do the victims no longer exist, but they allegedly “never

existed” – or, if we know that they existed, we are no longer able to grasp how

they lived or why they died.