Genocide was established as a crime in international law by the United Nations Genocide Convention of 9 December 1948. Contracting states committed themselves to ‘prevent and to punish … acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group’.
From an anthropological point of view, this noble attempt to criminalize acts of mass murder merely added a series of technical, legal terms to the comparative study of massive political violence. And, in some senses, it complicates the study of this phenomenon. The term ‘genocide’ (coined by "Rafael Lemkin from the ancient Greek ‘genos’ or ‘people/ethnic group’ and Latin ‘cide’ — ‘to kill’) grows out of a notion of ‘human group’ rooted in nationalist thinking and the institutional structures and politics of nation states.
It is now clear that Lemkin, an activist Czech legal scholar, had himself been motivated to try and prevent a broad range of acts of ‘barbarism’ that, he believed, have parallels in similar atrocities throughout human history. But, in his most influential work (1944), he articulated instead a particularly modern horror at the crime of destroying a community of fate – a ‘people as such,’ in the sense of a national or ethnic group, formed not by its own wishes and choices (like a political party or football club) but by ascription, whether through birth or the judgement of others. Moreover, even this restricted definition of mass murder was, in its final formulation in the Convention, constrained yet further by the demands of international politics and the fears of the various states that were signatories to the Convention that their leaders or agents might one day stand accused under its provisions. If we take the strict, legal understanding of the term then, there is no such thing as an ‘anthropology of genocide’ since the category should be the object of analysis, not a tool of analysis.
In this light it should be little surprise that a major contribution of anthropology to the study of mass slaughter has been the demonstration that a restrictive definition of genocide and a misleading model of how it occurs blocks both analysis and the transformation of academic understanding into policy. Thus, it was an anthropologist who pointed out that during the wars of Yugoslav dissolution (1992—5) commentators were hampered by a model of ‘genocide’ as the execution of ‘an overall plan’ (whether written or not) for the extermination of a people. This ‘holocaust’ model obscured the genocidal strategy pursued by Franjo Tudjman and Slobodan Milosevic against the Bosnian Muslim population. The ‘franchise organization’ adopted by Croat and Serb leaders looked so different from the procedures adopted after the Wannsee conference — slaughter on an industrial scale, pursued with bureaucratic regularity -that commentators were unable to see its true, genocidal, nature (Sorabji 1995).
It was only natural, in 1945, as the full extent of the criminality of the Nazi regime was revealed for the first time, that the scale and ferocity of the Jewish holocaust ensured that this became the genocide, the mass crime that must never be forgotten nor allowed to happen again. But, now that a broader range of cases can be considered (from the treatment of the peasantry of the Vendee during the French Revolution, through the massacres of the Armenians and on into our more recent past in Sudan) anthropologists would tend to argue that state policy can be radicalized towards mass or genocidal murder without the kind of pressing ideological fanaticism and bureaucratic central coordination found in the case of the Jewish holocaust.
Just as the International Criminal Tribunals for former Yugoslavia and Rwanda have enriched legal practice with notions of ‘complicity in’ or ‘aiding and abetting’ genocide, so analysts have attempted to get away from the restrictive understanding of criminal intention and plan. Lemkin argued that genocide signifies ‘a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups’ (Lemkin 1944: 79-95). But the notion of ‘intent’ is poorly framed for understanding a social practice that is always a collective endeavour requiring an elaborate division of labour. The de facto coordination of different institutions that is necessary for mass murder may arise under conditions quite other than a ‘coordinated plan’.
The chains of command and the ropes of bureaucratic coordination vary from case to case. The murder of millions of Jews was, at one analytic level, the playing out of the obsessions of a single man and his clique, aided by leading activists of a blindly loyal party. Without Hitler’s personal, obsessive anti-semitism (and all the institutional structures and patterns of behaviour that his personal, charismatic style of leadership called into being) it seems most unlikely that the German conquerors of eastern Europe would have slaughtered the Jews on the scale of the holocaust.
But, as the case of the German Roma and Gypsies demonstrates – for whom there was no Wannsee conference, and no special persecutory legislation – in the broader context of the Nazi social revolution you did not need a central plan and specifically targeted ideological programme in order to arrive at the wholesale redefinition of a social problem in murderous, racialist terms. In this case, the German criminal police arrived at a point where it worked, in Lemkin’s words, towards the ‘disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, … and the economic existence’ (1944: 79) of a problematic minority without being led or directed to that goal by some central intention. It was the initiatives of town hall genocidaires and racists in various positions of authority who provided the driving force for the segregation, exclusion, persecution and ultimately genocide of the Gypsies.
In this sense the sociology of genocide is part of the sociology of the state, bearing comparison with other extreme forms of political persecution, such as the adoption of segregatory ( Jim Crow) legislation in the USA as southern states forged a new social compromise in the years after the Civil War and Reconstruction.
A few things can be said with confidence to characterize all these instances of massive slaughter: the pretext and cover of war is invariably essential, for example. More interesting perhaps for anthropologists is that at the moment they take place the status of such killings as ‘genocide’ appears to outsiders to be uncertain and inherently implausible. It is only after the event that genocides appear with certainty and without ambiguity to have taken place. It is only in their aftermath that world leaders, and the peoples of the world behind them, vow that genocide must never happen again. This tendency to disbelief provides one more puzzle in the study of this kind of phenomenon. Whether rooted in the individual psyche, or not, it has certainly been a cornerstone of the present world order in which the rights of sovereign states to do with their citizens as they wish remain paramount.
