© Copyright 2015 by Social Theory and Practice, Vol. 41, No. 2 (April 2015): 328-356. DOI: 10.5840/soctheorpract201541218 

The Concept of Genocide Reconsidered

Mohammed Abed Abstract: Genocide is a violent process that aims at the liquidation of protected groups. Like individuals, groups can be killed in a variety of ways and for many different rea-sons. Only the intention of the perpetrator distinguishes genocide from other forms of mass violence. The implications of the account given are striking. Genocide is not in any sense distinctively heinous. Nor is it necessarily immoral. Under certain conditions, settler-colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and forced assimilation will count as instances of the phe-nomenon. While the argument undermines the orthodox view, it can accommodate the idea that the Holocaust was distinctively heinous. Keywords: genocide; Holocaust; Ottoman Armenians; imperialism; settler-colonialism; ethnic cleansing; slavery; assimilation Introduction Moral philosophers could be forgiven for thinking that the concept of genocide is unworthy of their attention. The systematic extermination of a group is a monstrous crime. What more is there to say? Further reflection reveals that there is a great deal more for the moral philosopher to contribute. There is now a voluminous literature on geno-cide. The overwhelming bulk of this work has been done by scholars from other disciplines, and yet a number of philosophical issues—many of which are linked to core debates in moral and political theory—run through it.1                                                          1The following philosophers have made valuable contributions to the debate about genocide: Paul Boghossian, “The Concept of Genocide,” Journal of Genocide Research 12 (2010): 69-80; Berel Lang, Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), “The Concept of Genocide,” The Philosophical Forum 16, nos. 1-2 (1984/1985): 1-18, and “The Evil in Genocide,” in John K. Roth (ed.), Genocide and Human Rights: A Philosophical Guide (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 5-17; Raimond Gaita, A Common Humanity: Thinking About Love and Truth and Justice (New York: Routledge, 2002), “Refocusing Genocide: A Philosophical Responsibility,” in Roth (ed.), Genocide and Human Rights, pp. 153-66, and “Sorry, But It’s No Time for Minds to Slam Shut,” The Australian, 7 May 2008; Emil L. Fackenheim, “The Holocaust and Philosophy,” Journal of Philosophy 82 (1985): 505-14, and To Mend the World: Founda-tions of Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994);

The Concept of Genocide Reconsidered 329 To begin with, there is widespread and vigorous disagreement regard-ing the content of the concept of genocide. As Martin Shaw points out, “few ideas are as important, but in few cases are the meaning and rele-vance of a key idea less clearly agreed.”2 This has led a number of schol-ars involved in these conceptual battles to suggest that genocide is an “essentially contested concept.”3 The analytic method—which empha-sizes careful conceptual analysis and rigorous argumentation—can help ease the semantic gridlock in other disciplines and push the debate about the concept of genocide in a positive direction. A number of interesting and substantive philosophical issues lurk be-hind this broad semantic question. In a recent paper, Paul Boghossian points out that genocide is supposed to be a distinctively heinous crime, one that is by definition morally wrong.4 It should not be intelligible to ask whether a specific instance of the phenomenon was justified, and it ought to go without saying that mass murder is an evil of greater magni-tude when the perpetrator’s objective is to annihilate the group to which targeted individuals belong. An account of genocide that on either of these issues implies otherwise is not to be taken seriously. The claim that genocide is distinctively heinous need not imply that the deliberate destruction of groups is worse than mass murder, terroristic

                                                                                                                            Michael Freeman, “Speaking About the Unspeakable: Genocide and Philosophy,” Jour-nal of Applied Philosophy 8 (1991): 3-17; Martin Shuster, “Genocide and Philosophy,” in A. Dirk Moses and Donald Bloxham (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 217-35; Larry May, Genocide: A Normative Account (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), Crimes Against Humanity: A Normative Account (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), and “How is Hu-manity Harmed by Genocide?” International Legal Theory 11 (2005): 1-23; John K. Roth, Ethics During and After the Holocaust: The Shadow of Birkenau (Palgrave Mac-millan, 2007); Mohammed Abed, “Clarifying the Concept of Genocide,” Metaphilosophy 37, nos. 3-4 (July 2006): 308-30 (and the rest of the articles in this special issue), and “Review of Genocide and Human Rights: A Philosophical Guide,” Journal of Genocide Research 11 (2009): 165-70; Claudia Card, “Genocide and Social Death,” Hypatia 18, no.1 (2003): 63-79, “The Paradox of Genocidal Rape Aimed at Enforced Pregnancy,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 46 (2008): 176-89, and Confronting Evils: Terror-ism, Torture, and Genocide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 2Martin Shaw, What is Genocide? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), p. 3. To get a sense of the debate on this issue, see Scott Straus, “Contested Meanings and Conflicting Imperatives: A Conceptual Analysis of Genocide,” Journal of Genocide Research 3 (2001): 349-75. 3W.B. Gallie, “Essentially Contested Concepts,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian So-ciety 56 (1955-1956): 167-98 (see especially the discussion on p. 169). Christopher Pow-ell is one example of a scholar who suggests that the concept of genocide is essentially contested. See “What Do Genocides Kill? A Relational Conception of Genocide,” Jour-nal of Genocide Research 9 (2007): 527-47. 4Boghossian, “The Concept of Genocide,” p. 73.

330 Mohammed Abed torture, slavery, mass rape in war, or any other form of violence.5 Geno-cide might be heinous in a different way than these other forms of vio-lence even if it does not come first in an overall ranking of evils, yet the view that genocide sits atop such a ranking has significant support in the literature. In his influential study of genocide in international law, Wil-liam Schabas argues that “in any hierarchy, something must sit at the top. The crime of genocide belongs at the apex of the pyramid. It is … the ‘crime of crimes’.”6 Defending the idea that genocide is distinctively heinous (in either of the senses outlined above) and necessarily immoral turns out, however, to be quite tricky. What exactly is it about genocide—considered as a human practice with a long and complex history—that makes it stand out in this way? One option would be to claim that genocide is worse than mass mur-der and other crimes against humanity by dint of the exceptionally grave harm it does to victims. The only account of this harm that will drive a normative wedge between genocide and mass murder is one that places heavy emphasis on the value of group membership. Working out what this value consists in is not, however, an easy task. One would also have to show that the harm in question is unique to genocide and that no other harm is equally or more heinous. The claim that genocide is necessarily immoral is no less fraught with difficulty. Any attempt to defend the thesis that genocide is distinctively heinous and necessarily immoral will give rise, in turn, to issues having to do with the existence and value of groups, motive and intention, collective agen-cy, and moral and legal responsibility in the context of mass violence. There is plenty, then, that moral philosophers can contribute to the debate about genocide. Giving an account of the concept is very clearly an important philosophical project. By addressing the issues identified above, philosophers can contribute a great deal to the genocide studies literature.7 Philosophical analysis of genocide must, however, have a solid em-pirical foundation. Genocide is a distinctively human practice with a long and complex history. If her aim is to gain normative and conceptual in-

                                                         5On terroristic torture, see Henry Shue, “Torture,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 7 (1978): 124-43. Claudia Card argues that mass rape can, under certain conditions, be genocidal (see “The Paradox of Genocidal Rape Aimed at Enforced Pregnancy”). The account of genocide I defend in this essay can accommodate this aspect of Card’s views. 6William Schabas, Genocide in International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge Universi-ty Press, 2000), p. 9. 7Shuster (“Genocide and Philosophy,” esp. pp. 217-19) and Fackenheim (“The Holo-caust and Philosophy”) explain why analytic philosophers have for the most part ignored genocide.

The Concept of Genocide Reconsidered 331 sight into this worldly phenomenon, the philosopher must pay careful attention to the historical record and be aware of the different positions that historians and scholars from other disciplines have taken on im-portant and vigorously contested issues. Consider, for instance, the claim that the destruction of the European Jews was motivated exclusively by extreme racial hatred and that a nar-row motive requirement must therefore be included in the definition of genocide. A significant number of historians have disputed this claim and offer competing accounts that situate the Holocaust in the broader context of the Nazi conquest and settlement of the East. In so doing, they provide evidence of other motives. Moral philosophers wishing to defend the inclusion of a narrow motive requirement must show that this and other competing analyses are incorrect. They must also explain why the motive of a single historical perpetrator is partly constitutive of the con-tent of the concept of genocide. Superficial discussion of historical events will not be sufficient if such issues are to be addressed in a satis-factory way. At the beginning of the chapter on genocide in Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, the Polish legal theorist Raphael Lemkin explains that “this new word, coined by the author to denote an old practice in its modern devel-opment, is made from the ancient Greek word genos (race, tribe) and the Latin cide (killing), thus corresponding in its formation to such words as tyrannicide, homocide, infanticide, etc.”8 The argument of this paper is that there are several surprising ways in which the concept of genocide “corresponds in its formation” to “homi-cide.” Just as premeditated murder is not the only form that homicide can take, the concept of genocide encompasses a great deal more than the Holocaust and other events with which it has features in common. Be-cause there is significant variation in the moral seriousness of the in-stances that fall under the concept, the view that genocide belongs “at the apex of the pyramid” can no longer be sustained. The idea that the phe-nomenon is distinctively heinous in the second sense outlined above is undermined by the fact that social alienation is its characteristic harm. Genocide is not the only violent practice that impacts victims in this way. The project of conceptual clarification undertaken in this essay will also show that like homicide, genocide is not necessarily immoral. Many will no doubt be shocked by these claims. Surely a view that has such unsavory implications should be rejected. In fact, it ought to be

                                                         8Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for Inter-national Peace, Division of International Law, 1944), p. 79. “Homocide” is the spelling in Axis Rule.

332 Mohammed Abed condemned in no uncertain terms. Reactions of this sort are overblown: while I dispute the idea that genocide is necessarily immoral—one can always concoct a bizarre hy-pothetical scenario in which the destruction of a way of life is a moral imperative—I do not think that any widely recognized historical instance of the phenomenon was morally excusable. In one sense, then, this par-ticular implication of my view does not amount to all that much. But in another, it does. If the argument of this paper is correct, then there may be a case for classifying as genocide campaigns of social destruction that are widely considered to be not only excusable but morally required. Eliminating the institution of slavery in the American South—which en-tailed the liquidation of a comprehensive way of life passed down from one slave-owning generation to the next—was certainly a moral and po-litical imperative.9 The argument of this paper is thus far from banal in its implications. Those who consider genocide to be a species of mass murder that in-volves the intentional destruction of national, ethnic, racial, and religious groups will vehemently disagree with my view. They will assert that members of targeted groups are killed because of who they are, rather than what they have done, and the groups themselves are annihilated on the basis of traits or conduct they are not in fact responsible for. How can it be justified to systematically murder the members of a group solely because of who they are? It is not justified, of course, to murder the members of a group for such reasons. But this is simply beside the point, because the view of genocide on which the objection is based is mistaken. There are, I will show, at least two reasons for this. The first is that genocide need not involve mass murder. The second is that the perpetrators of genocide can and have been moved to act by a wide variety of considerations. Extreme racial hatred is but one of these motives.10 These are, it seems to me, fairly uncontroversial claims. I am certainly                                                          9I discuss this point in more detail in section 2. I am grateful to my colleague David Pitt for encouraging me to think about this case. 10According to the definition in Article II of the United Nations Genocide Conven-tion, “national, ethnical, racial or religious” groups must be destroyed “as such.” As Schabas understands it, the “as such” clause implies that “[t]he organizers and planners must necessarily have a racist or discriminatory motive … The crime must, in other words, be motivated by hatred of the group” (Genocide in International Law, p. 255). He defends the inclusion of the clause even though a motive requirement would, under “or-dinary circumstances,” unnecessarily narrow the offense and allow “individuals who have intentionally committed the prohibited act to escape conviction” (p. 245). See Con-vention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted 9 Decem-ber 1948; entered into force 12 January 1951, 78 U.N.T.S. 277. The full text of the Con-vention is available at http://www.hrweb.org/legal/genocide.html.

The Concept of Genocide Reconsidered 333 not alone in endorsing them.11 But because they have been so influential-ly denied, and in light of their important implications for the scholarly debate about genocide, it is worth defending each claim in detail. If both are correct, then the essential foundations of the life of groups can be undermined for very worldly political reasons without group members being subjected to a policy of mass murder. A genocide that takes this form does great harm to individuals and is, all other things being equal, an unjustified criminal act. But I see no reason to think that it is worse than the systematic use of torture by an authoritarian regime or the mass rape of women in war. The characteristic harm of genocide, I will argue, consists in the fact that victims are stripped—either permanently or temporarily—of a social identity that gives meaning to their lives. Although this is a serious harm, it provides no support for the thesis that genocide is distinctively heinous. To begin with, social alienation is a feature of other human practices. Second, being stripped of a meaningful identity is not the worst harm a human being can suffer. We have no reason to think that social alienation is more heinous than the harms experienced by women raped in conflict zones.12 There are those who will be made uneasy by the decoupling of geno-cide and motive on the one hand, and genocide and mass murder on the other. The idea that genocide must, at a bare minimum, involve the inten-tional destruction of groups will likely give them some comfort. At least the intention requirement rules out categorizing as genocide settler-colonialism and other phenomena that involve the supposedly unintended liquidation of groups. In what follows, I will show that there is very little —if anything—to be said in favor of this claim. As I noted above, the argument of this paper will show that genocide is not an anomaly or singular evil that interrupts intermittently the nor-

                                                         11A number of philosophers have endorsed the idea that genocide need not involve mass murder. See Card, “Genocide and Social Death,” “The Paradox of Genocidal Rape Aimed at Enforced Pregnancy,” and Confronting Evils: Terrorism, Torture, and Genocide; Lang, “The Evil in Genocide”; Gaita, A Common Humanity, “Refocusing Genocide,” and “Sorry, But It’s No Time for Minds to Slam Shut”; May, Genocide: A Normative Ac-count. May—partly on the basis of his views about mass murder and genocide—argues that the latter is not the “crime of crimes.” The same view is implicit in Gaita’s work. 12Card argues that “social death is utterly central to the evil of genocide” (“Genocide and Social Death,” p. 63). Because social death is something that genocide and slavery have in common, Card’s view seems to imply that genocide is not distinctively heinous in either sense identified above. But she never discusses this issue explicitly and in detail. I attempt to build on her work in this essay by questioning the idea that moral evaluations of this sort should be recast as constitutive conditions of the phenomenon. That being said, I have worries about the social death hypothesis itself. I explain these concerns in the concluding section of this essay.

334 Mohammed Abed mal flow of human history. Lemkin tried to drive home the very same point: “The historical analysis is designed to prove that genocide is not an exceptional phenomenon, but that it occurs in intergroup relations with a certain regularity like homicide takes place in relations between individuals.”13 The thesis that genocide is widespread will no doubt in-spire the complaint that I am tarnishing the concept and diminishing its normative content.14 The view I am arguing for, moreover, is downright offensive because it implies that the Holocaust is morally equivalent to the conquest and settlement of territories on the European periphery or even the forced assimilation of a national minority. I will show that these objections fail. What tarnishes the concept is the use of one paradigmatic case, typically the Holocaust, as a conceptual litmus test. If an episode of mass violence closely resembles the para-digm, it counts as genocide. If it does not, then it must belong in some other category. The problem is that the Holocaust was in many ways atypical and the features that make it so are not relevant to its status as a paradigm of genocide. If such features are included as part of a concep-tual standard or test, the result will be an unreasonably narrow definition of genocide, one that excludes historical events that are themselves wide-ly considered to be paradigms of the phenomenon.15 A much more rea-sonable and epistemically fruitful approach is to use several historical paradigms as a starting point and reflect on what they do and do not have in common. The idea that a more inclusive account empties the concept of geno-cide of its normative content and implies all sorts of perverse moral equivalences is also mistaken. The deliberate liquidation of a people’s way of life results in serious harm, and it cannot be easily justified. If this is the case, then the charge of genocide is still normatively meaningful—just not in a way that suits the tastes of our detractor. And a more inclu-sive conception will imply perverse moral equivalences only on the im-plausible assumption that actions or events falling under the same con-cept must be reprehensible to the same or a very similar degree. Just as one homicide can be significantly more heinous than another, a genocide that has fanatical racial hatred as a motive and involves systematic mass murder is very clearly far worse than a policy of forced assimilation. But                                                          13Lemkin to Paul Fejos, Viking Fund, 22 July 1948, American Jewish Historical So-ciety, Lemkin Collection, P-154, Box 8, Folder 10; cited in A. Dirk Moses, “Genocide,” Australian Humanities Review 55 (2013): 23-44, p. 34. 14See Schabas (Genocide in International Law, p. 9) for a version of this complaint. 15David Moshman argues this point persuasively. See his “Conceptual Constraints on Thinking About Genocide,” Journal of Genocide Research 3 (2001): 431-50, p. 436. Martin Shaw is also wary of the use of the Holocaust as a “maximal standard”: see the discussion on pp. 44-45 of What is Genocide?

The Concept of Genocide Reconsidered 335 because both involve the intention to liquidate a group, they should be categorized together. 1. Decoupling Mass Murder and Genocide Many laypeople, political commentators, and scholars endorse the claim that genocide is a species of mass murder. One might even say that the idea is deeply ingrained in the public imagination, so much so that when-ever a significant number of people are killed in the course of political conflict, the event will invariably be described as “genocide.”16 On the scholarly front, Steven Katz claims that genocide occurs “only where there is an actualized intention, however successfully carried out, to physically destroy an entire group (as such group is defined by the perpetrators).”17 He explains that the “reason I give primacy to physical genocide is directly and unambiguously due to the fact that this is what one means, first and foremost, when one characterizes the Holocaust as an instance of genocide.”18 Katz is not alone in conceiving of genocide as a species of mass murder.19 Emphasizing the supposedly essential link between mass murder and genocide is one of the principal ways in which the definition of the phe-nomenon has been narrowed since Lemkin coined the term in Axis Rule in Occupied Europe.20 For Lemkin, mass killing was just one example of what he called the “physical techniques” of genocide. The German occu-pier undermined the existence of various national and ethnic groups us-ing a number of other techniques that had an impact on different “fields” of human activity.21

                                                         16For example, the 9/11 attacks have often been described as “genocidal terrorism.” See “From the Editors: Genocidal Terrorism? A Plea For Conceptual Clarity” Journal of Genocide Research 8 (2006): 379-81. 17See the discussion in Steven Katz, The Holocaust in Historical Context. Vol. 1: The Holocaust and Mass Death Before the Modern Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 127-29. 18Ibid., p. 129. 19See Israel W. Charny, “Toward a Generic Definition of Genocide,” in George J. Andreopoulos (ed.), Genocide: Conceptual and Historical Dimensions (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), pp. 64-94, at p. 75; Helen Fein, “Genocide, Terror, Life Integrity, and War Crimes,” in ibid., pp. 95-108, at p. 97; Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, “The Conceptual Framework,” in Chalk and Jonassohn (eds.), The His-tory and Sociology of Genocide (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 23. 20The other is the requirement that perpetrators have specific motives for destroying a group, an issue I discuss in the following section. 21Lemkin mentions the political, social, cultural, economic, biological, physical, reli-gious, and moral spheres of human life. See the preface of Axis Rule, pp. xi-xii; see also the discussion on pp. 82-90.

336 Mohammed Abed To understand more fully what Lemkin meant by this, one must keep in mind that he conceived of the Nazi assault on the East in light of Eu-rope’s imperial and colonial history. The German occupier was brutally enforcing policies—Lemkin’s “techniques”—calculated to destroy the “national pattern” of various subject peoples. This would facilitate the colonization of their land and the imposition of the German “national pattern” on conquered territories and on any non-Germans that had not been removed from the area. One such area was Western Poland.22 Although Lemkin acknowledged that the systematic mass murder of Jews and the Roma and Sinti peoples was based primarily on the extreme racist worldview of the Nazis, it was nevertheless the case that the “race theory served the purpose of consolidating internally the German peo-ple.”23 By this Lemkin meant that the members of groups perceived by the perpetrator to be suspect and dangerous were permanently removed from the German body politic and replaced by racially “authentic” mem-bers of the nation. Given how Lemkin conceived of the Nazi onslaught, it is not surpris-ing that he formally defined genocide in the following way: Genocide has two phases: one, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor. This imposition, in turn, may be made upon the oppressed population which is allowed to remain, or upon the territory alone, after removal of the population and the colonization of the area by the oppressor’s own nationals.24 This has led Dirk Moses to claim that for Lemkin, genocide is “a special form of foreign conquest and occupation. It was necessarily imperial and colonial in nature. In particular, genocide aimed to permanently tip the demographic balance in favor of the occupier.”25 Removing the members of an occupied people from conquered territory—which for Lemkin was key to the group’s destruction—facilitated the establishment of a “new colonial society on the expropriated land base … settler colonizers come

                                                         22See Lemkin, Axis Rule, p. 83. See also Raphael Lemkin, “Hitler Case-Outline,” unpubl. ms., The Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives, Collec-tion 60, Box 7, Folders 12 & 13. 23Lemkin, “Hitler Case-Outline.” 24Lemkin, Axis Rule, p. 79. When he says on the same page that genocide is “a coor-dinated plan of different actions,” Lemkin is referring to the various policies or “tech-niques” used by the Nazis to undermine the existence of groups in different spheres of human activity. 25A. Dirk Moses, “Empire, Colony, Genocide: Keywords and the Philosophy of His-tory,” in A. Dirk Moses (ed.), Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History (New York: Berghahn Publishers, 2009), chap. 1, p. 10.

The Concept of Genocide Reconsidered 337 to stay: invasion is a structure not an event.”26 Lemkin successfully identified key features of the phenomenon. He is certainly correct that genocide is a violent process that typically consists of a number of policies or what he called “techniques.” The industrial-ized clinical methods used by the Nazis to extinguish the biological life of their victims were the culmination of a process of destruction set in motion long before. In Germany and elsewhere in the Nazi occupied ter-ritories, Jewish social and cultural institutions were destroyed, private and collectively held property was systematically looted by non-Jews and by the Nazi state, Jews were prevented from practicing their religion, legal protections were removed and racist directives and laws enforced, Jews were forced to identify themselves in public, they were murdered in spontaneous and orchestrated pogroms, those living in large urban areas were concentrated in ghettos without adequate food, water, living space, heating, and sanitation, and they were deported in horrific conditions to concentration camps in the East where they were worked to death and systematically tortured. Finally, the Nazis attempted to stamp out the last glimmers of human solidarity by manipulatively co-opting the Jewish civic leadership and implicating in various other ways the victims of the genocide in the machinery of destruction. Recall that for Katz, the perpetrator must form an intention to physi-cally destroy an entire group and then act on that intention. But consider a hypothetical scenario in which the European Jews were subjected to everything they went through with the exception of the policy of mass murder (suppose the Nazis held them in captivity until the end of the war instead). Racial hatred is the primary motive in this scenario and the per-petrator still enacts various policies calculated to destroy the “essential foundations” of the life of a group, with the end result that the group no longer exists as a coherent social entity. Regardless, the defender of a narrow exterminatory conception such as Katz’s would have to say, when pressed, that it would be inappropriate to attach the label “geno-cide” to the actions of our hypothetical perpetrator. The cost of endorsing this claim is high: it is very difficult to reconcile with the idea that geno-cide must, at a bare minimum, involve the intentional destruction of na-tions and other such groups. Giving up on this idea would make it diffi-cult to distinguish between cases of genocide that involve mass murder and terrorist massacres such as the 9/11 attacks or the massacre of civil-ians in war. What else—if not the fact that only the former involves the deliberate liquidation of groups—would ground the distinction? Those who are not yet convinced should consider the following ques-                                                         26Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8 (2006): 387-409, p. 388.

338 Mohammed Abed tion: would the forcible sterilization of a group, carried out with the in-tent of destroying its members as a people, count as genocide? What if, for example, the Nazis had attempted to annihilate European Jewry by sterilizing each and every member of the community? Would that not count as genocide?27 Answering “no” implies that the deliberate annihila-tion of groups is not a core feature of the concept of genocide. An af-firmative response means there are good reasons to follow Lemkin in disentangling genocide and mass murder. Once the two are separated, it becomes more difficult to dismiss the idea that settler-colonialism—especially the variety involving a drive for homogeneous settlement and relative independence in the economic and other spheres of life—can be genocidal. In such cases, after all, the existing inhabitants of the con-quered territory were viewed as a demographic threat and mass expulsion was often the way in which the threat was permanently neutralized. Those who escaped deportation would be forcibly assimilated or com-pelled to live on the margins of the settler-society. Lemkin’s position becomes even more compelling once we get clear on what accounts for the existence and value of groups. A group exists and has value when human beings are attached to one another by a spe-cific kind of social relation. Individuals linked in this way will have a common interest in the survival and flourishing of the group. They have this interest because membership gives them a social identity that imbues their lives with meaning. The type of relation that distinguishes groups such as nations from short-lived and loosely structured collectives is not something that exists in its own right. In the end the term “relation” re-fers to the psychological states of group members.28 Giving a detailed account of this kind of social bond is crucial. Other-wise, the resulting model of group identification will be far too permis-sive: even fleeting, relatively unstructured collectives will be entitled to protected status under international law, thereby seriously diminishing the normative significance of the category.29

                                                         27The example is Gaita’s: see “Refocusing Genocide,” p. 157. 28I follow May in thinking this. See the discussion in Genocide: A Normative Ac-count, p. 31. 29May’s nominalist account of group identification suffers from this problem. His “publicity condition,” which he characterizes as a “reality check for group identification,” is suspect because a significant number of groups that satisfy the in-group and out-group requirements are transient, loosely structured collectives that tend to have normatively insignificant interests in common (e.g., the class of individuals who support a particular football club or the contemporary anti-vaccine movement). The destruction of such col-lectives would result in members being harmed as individuals. They would not experi-ence the group-based harm characteristic of genocide. See the discussion in Genocide: A Normative Account, pp. 47-49.

The Concept of Genocide Reconsidered 339 The members of groups entitled to protected status are bound together by stronger, more resilient social ties. This is due in large part to the fact that typically, such groups are intergenerational. They are the kind of collectives that individuals are born into and are often members of for a significant proportion—if not all—of their lives. Through their continued involvement with the group, individuals implicitly consent to member-ship. Consent can be withdrawn, although even public disavowal of one’s affiliation may not stop insiders and outsiders from continuing to view individuals as members.30 If their participation in the life of the group is a longstanding and settled aspect of their lives, outsiders can become members. The voluntary nature of such groups is normatively significant: if a person has chosen a community and its way of life, the destruction of the collective will matter to him. The harms he suffers will be group-based—not individual. Because they have “existed” for a significant period of time, intergen-erational groups tend to have elaborate and deeply entrenched value sys-tems and relatively inclusive cultures. Members are exposed to the group’s practices and traditions and inculcated with its norms in their formative years.31 In fact, the group’s norms will often coalesce into a model of the good life that members are encouraged to emulate. The re-sult is that the individual is shaped in several important spheres of life by her affiliation with the group. Being an insider is, for these reasons, cen-tral to an individual’s self-conception, and perhaps the most meaningful dimension of her social identity. In other words, the affiliation with the intergenerational group is one of the principal ways in which she will identify herself and be identified by others in the public domain.32 The account I have given is not so permissive as to count transient subcultures but it does suggest that groups not currently included in Arti-cle II of the Genocide Convention are entitled to protected status. I see no reason why the Genocide Convention should apply to religious groups and nations but not to LGBTQ communities and long-standing political parties that have rich sophisticated worldviews.33 The case for including LGBTQ communities is especially strong given that their members are

                                                         30I discuss this point in Abed, “Clarifying the Concept of Genocide,” pp. 318-20. 31They are also exposed to elaborate narratives about the group’s founding and other important events in its history. 32As Avishai Margalit and Joseph Raz say, group membership has a “high social profile.” See “National Self-Determination,” Journal of Philosophy 87 (1990): 439-61. 33I would argue that in place of the incomplete list included in Article II, there should be an abstract conception of protected groups. The relevant part of Article II could read “in whole or in part, an intergenerational group with a comprehensive worldview and way of life …” For May’s proposal, see Genocide: A Normative Account, p. 58.

340 Mohammed Abed systematically persecuted around the globe.34 A subculture will be enti-tled to protected status if it survives and its doctrines and way of life be-come more structured and inclusive. I have been arguing that protected groups are nothing more than a collection of individuals bound together by strong social ties or relations. The term “relation” refers, in the end, to the psychological states of group members. Groups such as nations, then, are not mind-independent features of the world. But now we can see that it was eminently sensible for Lemkin to claim that a group can be destroyed in the absence of mass killing. The destruction of a protected group requires only that the perpetrator sys-tematically undermine the social, political, economic, cultural, demo-graphic, and other conditions that make it possible for individuals to be linked together in the way I have described. Lemkin uses the term “es-sential foundations” to refer to these conditions. One can easily see how this can be done in the case of a collection of individuals who come together for a specific purpose. Larry May uses the example of a fan club for a sports team.35 If the team runs into serious financial difficulties and is forced out of business, the fan club will dis-appear without mass killing of its members. It certainly requires more to bring about the disappearance of a pro-tected group without resorting to mass murder, but it can be done. Con-sider, for example, the forced assimilation of an indigenous people by a settler-society that considers the group’s members to be backward and in need of “civilizing.” Children are taken from their parents and raised in state-run boarding schools and private homes. They grow up without any knowledge of their parent’s culture, religion, or language, or of the history of the group. Adults are forcibly removed from ancestral lands and dis-persed all over the colonized territory. There is a systematically enforced ban on the use of indigenous languages. The practice of any religion not sanctioned by the authorities becomes a punishable offense. There is no toleration of any display of native culture or move to organize the com-munity. Finally, the indigenous population is forcibly inculcated with the norms and culture of the settler population. If all of these policies were successfully enacted—that is, if we sup-pose that any resistance to their implementation was forcefully crushed and if the generations that had knowledge of the group’s way of life died out—then it would be very peculiar to say that the group still “exists.”

                                                         34See, for example, “Discriminatory Laws and Practices and Acts of Violence Against Individuals Based on their Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity,” Report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, 2011. 35May, Genocide: A Normative Account, p. 34.

The Concept of Genocide Reconsidered 341 Individuals descended from indigenous ancestors are now members of the group that waged the genocidal campaign. For a historical illustration of the claim, we can look to the “Absorp-tion Program” in Australia—a policy that involved state and federal au-thorities forcibly removing from Aboriginal homes so-called “mixed-blood” children in the period between the late nineteenth century and the late 1960s. As Raimond Gaita points out, “for some time, certainly in the thirties, and in some places, certainly in Western Australia and the Northern Territory, the absorption program expressed the horrifyingly arrogant belief that some peoples may eliminate from the earth peoples they believe to be less than fully human.”36 The problem, a critic might say, is that group killing is not a feature of these cases. Mass murder will lead to the total annihilation of a group. The most that other policies can do is destabilize a community and de-grade to a limited extent what Lemkin called its “national pattern.” After all, if a significant number of its members survive, they can piece togeth-er the life in common they once had. But then in what sense does the ab-sorption program and other such policies count as group destruction? The first thing to notice is that not even the Holocaust escapes this objection. One third of Europe’s Jews managed to survive the murderous Nazi campaign. But then the Holocaust does not count as genocide be-cause the targeted group was not completely annihilated. Survivors can come together and preserve the group’s values and way of life. I doubt our critic would be willing to endorse such a conclusion. Nor am I. Un-derlying the objection from survival is an unreasonable construal of what it means to destroy a group. We will have to allow that a group counts as being destroyed if the perpetrator intends to eliminate it and translates that intention into action by enacting policies that undermine to a signifi-cant degree what Lemkin called the “essential foundations” of its exist-ence. Otherwise, such paradigm cases as the Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide, and Rwanda will not be accommodated.37 Setting this aside, several of the examples discussed above show that a group can be, at least in principle, totally annihilated in the absence of mass murder. I have been arguing that Raphael Lemkin was absolutely right to re-ject the idea that genocide is a species of mass murder. The shortsighted-ness of narrowing in this way the definition of the phenomenon becomes readily apparent once we get clear on what “groups” are. I agree with Martin Shaw when he says that the shift away from Lemkin’s ideas has

                                                         36Gaita, A Common Humanity, p. 123. 37Another option is to allow partial destruction to count. This was the road taken by the drafters of the U.N. Genocide Convention, which makes reference to destruction “in whole or in part.”

342 Mohammed Abed ultimately been detrimental to our understanding of genocide.38 The roots of this shift, according to Shaw, are in the U.N. Genocide Convention. Over the years, the movement away from Lemkin’s ideas has also been spearheaded by a significant number of scholars. At least where the rela-tionship between mass murder and genocide is concerned, those scholars are mistaken. 2. Genocide and the Question of Motive Those still resistant to the likening of genocide to homicide can shift tack. They can (grudgingly) concede that a group—like a person—can be killed in all sorts of ways, and then argue that there are nevertheless normatively significant differences between group destruction and the killing of one human being by another. The motives of individuals who kill are often complex, and they vary significantly from case to case. This is in part why some homicides are worse than others and deserve to be punished accordingly. Genocide, on the other hand, is always motivated by extreme—typically racial—hatred of a group. Groups are annihilated on the basis of traits or conduct they are not in fact responsible for. Regardless of how the job gets done, it is surely a distinctively heinous thing and always immoral to destroy a people on the basis of nothing more than racial hatred. Genocide is akin to the racially motivated murder of an individual—it cannot ever be ex-cused. In contrast, homicide sometimes can. Berel Lang is one philosopher who seems to endorse this kind of mo-tive requirement. His claim is that perpetrators kill their victims on the basis of who they are, rather than what they have done. From the perpe-trator’s perspective, all that matters is the victim’s identity and various traits and dispositions she supposedly exemplifies. Furthermore, just as individuals are attacked “solely because of their identification as mem-bers of the group,” the targeted group itself is attacked because it is “held responsible for dispositions or conduct for which they are not in fact re-sponsible—in the sense that they were unable not to engage in the acts or conduct they are charged with.”39 Lang’s view implies that Lemkin was wrong to categorize as geno-cide Nazi Germany’s settler-colonial project in the East. It is true that the Nazi’s racial worldview also led them to despise the Poles and other Slavic peoples. Racial hatred was not, however, the main motive that drove the German occupier’s campaign of destruction in the East. The

                                                         38Shaw, What is Genocide? p. 4 and chap. 2. 39Lang, “The Evil in Genocide,” p. 12.

The Concept of Genocide Reconsidered 343 creation of new territories for racially homogeneous settlement was. Sim-ilarly, Lang’s account rules out revenge for actual—not perceived—wrongs as a motive, such as when two nations embroiled in a long-standing violent conflict trade atrocities until one goes overboard in its “punishment” of the other. Numerous other motives are ruled out. The most obvious problem with this approach is that it overlooks the complexity of motive when it is viewed in historical context. The evidence also shows, very clearly, that what motivates genocide tends to vary from case to case. In short, Lang’s motive requirement is stringent enough to exclude paradigms of the phenomenon and should therefore be rejected.40 One can point to, for example, the class of genocides that took place as various empires declined and retreated in an attempt to secure their borders and survive. As the integrity of such empires was being under-mined by tectonic shifts in the global balance of power, groups within them were responding to the rising tide of nationalist sentiment and seek-ing their independence and development in the modern nation-state. Such “modernizing state trajectories in all three imperial ranges seemed to of-fer only the choice between ‘voluntary’ extinction—in other words, cul-tural genocide—with the helping hand of the state, or, if the natives re-fused, then unremitting punitive war with the ongoing potential for actual genocide.”41 The Ottoman state, for example, was challenged both by the rise of Russia and the Western European powers and by struggles for national liberation waged by various groups within the empire. These struggles led to the loss of vast swaths of territory in the Balkans and the Caucasus, and to substantial demographic changes as Muslims living in these areas were expelled and streamed into Anatolia. Tensions between Muslim and Christian populations were exacerbated by the influx of refugees and by the granting of equal rights to Christians, one of a number of policies the Ottoman government pursued in an effort to modernize the empire and ensure its survival. As the empire continued to decline, suspicion of the Armenians was fueled by what Donald Bloxham calls “the international-ization of the Armenian question,” by which he means diplomatic and other forms of intervention on behalf of the Armenians by the European powers.42 Of particular importance was the 1878 Treaty of Berlin, which                                                          40Similarly, the “as such” clause in Article II of the Genocide Convention is far too stringent. 41Mark Levene, “Empires, Native Peoples, and Genocide,” in Moses (ed.), Empire, Colony, Genocide, chap. 8. I reject the idea that there is a distinction between genocide and “cultural genocide.” See Shaw’s arguments against “conceptual proliferation” in chapter 5 of What is Genocide? 42Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 15.

344 Mohammed Abed dragged the Armenian question “into international debate to the distress of the Ottomans who saw the stipulated reforms as a harbinger of future impositions leading to pressure for Armenian autonomy or even inde-pendence.”43 These fears about the security, territorial integrity, and con-tinued existence of the empire were amplified by the fact that nationalist factions were expressing Armenian grievances and aspirations that had previously been aired by the religious leadership. The activities of the nationalists, which Bloxham characterizes as “ostentatious,” were “influ-enced by the desire to regain the attention of external powers—notably Britain or Russia at different times, but also France—in the way that seemed to serve Bulgarians so well” in their successful uprising against Ottoman rule.44 But the harsh reality was that Russia and the Western European powers would act only if it was in their interests to do so. Brit-ish policy, for example, was not shaped by the desire to end the oppres-sion of the Armenians—the objective was to prevent the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the emergence from its ashes of a self-governing Armenian entity aligned with Russia, a state that competed with Britain for influence in the region. The priorities of the great powers became apparent on various occasions—their refusal to do anything to stop the massacre of Armenians in the 1890s being an especially stark illustration. Bloxham’s analysis, then, suggests that the Ottoman leadership’s estima-tion of the security threat posed by the Armenian nationalist movement was overblown. The assessment was based on a distortion of political re-ality that resulted from anxieties about the empire’s future, and an obses-sive focus on events that seemingly confirmed the regime’s worst fears. The Ottoman leadership became increasingly driven by a moderniza-tion agenda, central to which was the establishment of a nation-state with a Turkish-Muslim demographic majority out of what remained of the em-pire, a project that involved, amongst other things, strengthening the na-tionalist movement by creating a Muslim-Turkish middle class and expan-ding the national economy. The Armenian population in Anatolia—espe-cially the successful middle-class—stood in the way of these objectives. Taner Akçam points out that efforts were made to forcibly assimilate the Armenians. Younger children—under the age of ten—were taken away and placed in Muslim orphanages. Slightly older children were adopted and socialized as Muslims. Girls above thirteen years of age were married off or forced to be concubines. Adults were converted to Islam. Akçam argues that because it was one component of what Lemkin called “a coordinated plan of different actions” that aimed to destroy the “essential foundations” of the life of a group, the assimilation policy was                                                          43Ibid., p. 16. 44Ibid.

The Concept of Genocide Reconsidered 345 genocidal.45 The modernization agenda, then, was not only a way of adapting to the empire’s losses and to changes in the geopolitics of the region more generally, it was also shaped by the leadership’s paranoia about the supposed security threat posed by the Armenians. In the eyes of the regime, the homogenization and social and economic restructuring of Anatolia—which would eventually lead to the liquidation of the Ar-menians as a community—was the only way of neutralizing the threat. The destruction of the Ottoman Armenians was therefore an escalat-ing process that began before the mass deportations and killings took place. In explaining the radicalization of Ottoman policy, Akçam pays particular attention to the Armenian reform plan the Committee of Union and Progress leadership was effectively forced to sign by Russia in Feb-ruary of 1914. For the Unionists, “[t]he threat of Russian occupation and the existence of an international reform agreement cast Armenians as an existential danger.”46 The leadership feared that if the Armenians were to secede and establish their own independent state with Russian help, the dismemberment and total collapse of the empire would soon follow. The security rationale now led to even more radical genocidal policies: the preemptive mass deportation and murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians—children included.47 The objective, as Moses points out, was what the Nazi elites called “permanent security,” which signi-fies the “end of politics, namely the rupture of negotiation and compro-mise … the destruction or crippling of the perceived threatening other.”48 The view I am criticizing suggests that genocide is an enormous hate crime in which victims are killed simply for belonging to a detested group.49 This model—which postulates that the only source of the perpe-trator’s hatred is a fantastical racial ideology—is then taken to be partly constitutive of the content of the concept of genocide. Arguably, the hate-crime model is too simplistic and rigid to even make sense of the

                                                         45Taner Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity: The Armenian Geno-cide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), chap. 9, and “Let the Arguments Begin!” Journal of Genocide Research 15 (2013): 494-505, pp. 503-4. 46Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity, p. 450. 47Although Akçam does not explicitly endorse the figure of 800,000, he seems to lean in that direction. See Taner Akçam, A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2007), p. 183. 48A. Dirk Moses, “Genocide vs. Security: A False Opposition,” Journal of Genocide Research 15 (2013): 489-93, p. 493. 49Moses sees a connection between the kind of view Lang endorses and the concept of a hate crime. See A. Dirk Moses, “Paranoia and Partisanship: Genocide Studies, Holo-caust Historiography, and the ‘Apocalyptic Conjuncture’,” The Historical Journal 54 (2011): 553-83 (esp. p. 556), and “Genocide vs. Security,” p. 492.

346 Mohammed Abed Holocaust.50 As an account of what motivated the destruction of the Ot-toman Armenians, it is completely inadequate. I fail to see how one can understand what moved the perpetrators of the Armenian genocide to act without taking into account the wider context of inter-imperial rivalry and conflict, the Ottoman state’s decline, and the nationalist drive to homog-enize territories inhabited by diverse peoples. On the hate-crime model, none of this has anything to do with genocide, and so the idea that fears about the security of the Ottoman state became a rationale for genocide simply cannot be accommodated. More bluntly, according to this model, the destruction of the Ottoman Armenians does not count as genocide. If genocide is distinctively heinous and necessarily immoral, it is not because demonic perpetrators always destroy groups for the most wicked of reasons. The Armenian genocide was motivated by political paranoia and an obsessive focus on national security. More generally, genocide is typically a form of mass political violence connected to such worldly issues as disputes over territory and valuable natural resources, struggles for political power, anxieties about national security, and conflicts sus-tained by traumatic memories of historical injustice and atrocity. The widely endorsed view that the devastation of indigenous peoples by the Western European imperial powers does not count as genocide because the events in question did not involve racially motivated systematic mass murder is thus no longer sustainable. If the destruction of indigenous peoples on the European periphery was not genocide, it must have been for some other reason. As I noted in the Introduction, no widely recognized historical instance of genocide was, in my view, morally excusable. But the argument so far does show that genocide is not necessarily immoral. One can certainly concoct a hypothetical scenario in which the deliberate annihilation of a group’s way of life is a “moral and political imperative.”51 And there may be a case for classifying as genocide campaigns of social destruction that are widely considered to be not only excusable but morally required. The institution of slavery in the American South was, arguably, a comprehen-sive way of life and worldview to which many whites were profoundly attached. It would not be wildly implausible to say that their investment in the culture and norms of the slave-owning community rivaled in its social meaning and significance an individual’s affiliation with a national or religious group. But because the kidnapping, enslavement, and life-long exploitation of innocent human beings was a constitutive and thus

                                                         50For an account of what motivated the Nazis that highlights the importance of political paranoia and imagined security threats, see the following works by Moses: “Empire, Col-ony, Genocide” (esp. pp. 31, 37); “Paranoia and Partisanship”; “Genocide vs. Security.” 51Gaita sketches such a scenario: see Genocide and Human Rights, p. 158.

The Concept of Genocide Reconsidered 347 ineliminable feature of the life led by many Southern whites, annihilating their way of life was a moral imperative. The right course of action was to strip them of an identity that gave meaning to their lives. Many people will regard the idea that the North’s war on slavery was a morally required genocide as absurd. This implication of my view, they will say, is a reductio of the account of genocide given in this essay.52 The objection is a reasonable one, but I do think there is an adequate response. The conclusion I have drawn about the North’s war effort is absurd only if we assume that genocide is a racially motivated species of mass killing that aims at the annihilation of nations and other such groups. The argument so far has shown that this is not a safe assumption to make—the orthodox view of genocide is irredeemably flawed. It does not matter, for instance, that the destruction of slavery did not involve the systematic mass killing of group members. As Lemkin made clear, mass killing is not the only way of annihilating a group. Because specific mo-tives are not constitutive conditions of the phenomenon, the fact that the North’s war effort was not motivated by racial hatred is beside the point. The community that benefited from slavery was intergenerational, and it arguably had a comprehensive worldview and way of life. Although that worldview and way of life were despicable and thus of no benefit to hu-manity, they were cherished by members of the group. If this is the case, then these individuals were harmed by the destruction of slavery. Insofar as it diminished in a significant way their social lives, the North’s dis-mantling of the institution resulted in the group-based harm characteristic of genocide. That the North intended to eradicate slavery is beyond dis-pute. Once the spell of the orthodox view is broken, it quickly becomes apparent that there is nothing absurd about classifying the North’s war as a morally required genocide. In this section, I have shown that while understanding what moves perpetrators to act might be crucial to genocide prevention, prosecution, and the determination of appropriate punishment in legal contexts, it has no bearing on fundamental conceptual issues. If the motives of historical perpetrators are complex and vary significantly from case to case, then one motive cannot be even partly constitutive of the content of the con-cept of genocide. The inclusion of any motive requirement—let alone one as narrow as Lang’s—will result in a definition of genocide that can-not accommodate widely recognized instances of the phenomenon. Only the intention of the perpetrator matters to conceptual classification. If there is evidence of an intention to annihilate a group, the event counts as genocide. If no such evidence exists, then it must be something else.

                                                         52I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer who brought this issue to my attention.

348 Mohammed Abed 3. Intention in Genocide Cases “And therein lies the Achilles heel of your argument,” the critic will say. “You claim that genocide is far more widespread than is often assumed but the examples on which this assertion is based fail to satisfy the inten-tion requirement. In the case of settler-colonialism, the intention is to usurp territory for settlement. Ethnic cleansing involves removing the members of a group from land controlled by the perpetrator. Cultural assimilation is meant to promote national unity, and so on. None of these phenomena involves the deliberate annihilation of a group.” Settler-colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and forced assimilation are pro-cesses that unfold over a significant period of time. The perpetrator typi-cally knows that the means used in pursuit of the primary objective (ho-mogeneous settlement, for example) are also leading to the disintegration of a group as a coherent social entity. Regardless, the agent continues to pursue the primary objective using the same or similar means. The critic would have us believe that the destruction of the group, even in such cases, was not intended. Either the perpetrator acted recklessly or the group’s demise was a merely foreseen side effect of pursuing the pri-mary objective. This is not, however, the most plausible inference that can be drawn from the pattern of action outlined above. It fits better with the perpetrator’s actions to postulate that both outcomes were intended—the primary objective and the elimination of the targeted group. One (the primary objective) is used as a pretext for deliberately pursuing the other (group destruction), thereby making it more likely that the perpetrator can escape legal responsibility for genocide. Or it could be that both out-comes are intended because one (the primary objective) cannot be real-ized without the other (group destruction). In other words, the annihila-tion of the group is a means to the attainment of the primary objective. For an example of the latter scenario, we need only recall that accord-ing to Dirk Moses, Lemkin conceived of genocide as a “special form of foreign conquest and occupation.” What Moses seems to have in mind are groups that sought homogeneous settlement and independence in the political and other spheres of life. Such groups viewed the population of conquered territories as a demographic threat. Removal of this popula-tion—whether incrementally or in one fell swoop—was typically the way in which the threat was permanently neutralized. Individuals who managed to avoid deportation would then be forcibly assimilated or compelled to live on the margins of the settler-society. The primary objective—homogeneous settlement and independence—cannot be attained if there is a distinct group with its own political aspi-rations on the territory coveted by the settlers. The group must therefore be removed—which entails the destruction of its social and political in-

The Concept of Genocide Reconsidered 349 stitutions, its culture, and its way of life. But if the destruction of the group is a means to the attainment of the primary objective, then it is nei-ther merely foreseen nor is it a result of the perpetrator’s reckless pursuit of that goal. The annihilation of the group is intended. As an illustration of the former scenario—in which pursuit of the primary objective is used as the pretext for destroying a group—consider a case in which a national minority happens to live in an area rich with natural resources. A decision is made to secede and form an independent nation-state because the group has been severely mistreated for decades and it appears as if there is no end in sight. Knowing that secession would have negative economic consequences for the majority, the exist-ing government refuses to negotiate an equitable separation, and it sends troops to occupy the resource-rich area. These troops skirmish with armed resistance factions. The government announces to the world that it faces an existential threat and launches a full-scale counterinsurgency campaign with the declared goal of defeating the “terrorists.” It soon be-comes apparent that the campaign is a wildly disproportionate response. Widespread social devastation results and hundreds of thousands of peo-ple are displaced. The government ignores this and continues its scorched earth campaign for several years. When the policy comes to an end, it no longer has a minority “problem.” If the government were to respond to accusations of genocide by de-claring that it did not intend the destruction of the minority, we would—for very good reasons—refuse to take it seriously. Those reasons have to do with the nature of the policies that were enacted, their timing, and the wid-er social, political, and economic context in which the government acted. The history of tension and conflict between the two sides is also of rele-vance. Together, these facts suggest that the counterinsurgency campaign was a fig leaf for the deliberate decimation of the minority, an outcome that helped to consolidate the nation-state and assure its economic future. Though it clearly differs in many respects from the hypothetical case, the targeting of the Fur, Massalit, and Zaghawa tribes in the Darfur re-gion by Sudanese government forces and allied militias is a good histori-cal illustration of the idea that publicly stated goals are often a thin veil for more troubling objectives. I see no reason to doubt that the same pat-tern of agency is a feature of at least some historical instances of settler-colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and forced assimilation. The objection I have been addressing aims to show that the distinction between genocide and settler-colonialism (to take one example) has a normative dimension. In virtue of the fact that it involves intentional group destruction, genocide is deplorable in a way that settler-colonialism is not. I have shown that in a significant range of cases, this is simply beside the

350 Mohammed Abed point. Like “authentic” genocides, settler-colonialism can and has in-volved the deliberate annihilation of groups. There are other perhaps more serious issues. The objection involves numerous distortions of the doctrine of double effect (DDE).53 DDE tells us that it is justified for an agent to bring about some objectionable state of affairs if and only if that state of affairs is a merely foreseen side ef-fect of pursuing some morally worthy end. It must be the case that the intended means to the final end is morally permissible, and the end itself must be proportionate to the morally objectionable side effect. Most historical cases of settler-colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and forced assimilation fail to satisfy these conditions. To begin with, the agent’s intended final end is typically not morally worthy. The conquest and settlement of territory is not the kind of objective that can justify the destruction of a people. Nor is the goal of homogenizing a population—whether by forcibly assimilating or by driving out the members of dis-tinct groups. Second, the intended means to the final end are in most cases far from morally permissible. Rational persuasion is rarely what induces the existing population of lands coveted by settler-colonists to leave. The consolidation of one group is often achieved by expelling the members of another or by forcing them to adopt a different way of life. Finally, because the final end is typically far from morally worthy, the suggestion that it might be proportionate to the objectionable side effect can be easily dismissed. An objection worth considering is whether the preceding analysis commits me to the idea that capitalists are committing genocide. The primary objective is not morally worthy because what capitalists seek is the accumulation of wealth. They continue to pursue this objective re-gardless of the appalling effects on society and on the environment. Be-cause they are aware of these effects and understand the threat to human-ity that environmental catastrophe poses, capitalists intend to destroy the human species and are well on their way to doing so. An account that implies this is far too radical and should be rejected.54 I agree that there is nothing noble about the capitalist’s pursuit of

                                                         53For sustained criticism of the doctrine (or aspects of it), see Jonathan Bennett, Morali-ty and Consequences (The Tanner Lectures on Human Values II) (Salt Lake City: Uni-versity of Utah Press, 1981), pp. 95 ff.; Donald Davidson, “Actions, Reasons, and Causes,” in Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), Essay 1; Eliz-abeth Anscombe, “Action, Intention, and Double Effect,” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 56 (1982): 12-25, and Intention (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000) (esp. section 25, pp. 41-45). For a discussion of Ans-combe’s views on this issue, see Warren S. Quinn, “Actions, Intentions, and Consequences: The Doctrine of Double Effect,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 18 (1989): 334-51. 54I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer who drew my attention to this objection.

The Concept of Genocide Reconsidered 351 profit and wealth. Prioritizing wealth accumulation over the health of society and the environment is reckless and profoundly immoral. Regard-less, the preceding discussion does not imply that what capitalists are doing should be classified as genocide. There are at least two reasons for this. First, the human species is not the kind of group that is “eligible” for genocide. Regrettably—and despite all the talk of integration—human beings are still overwhelmingly tribal in their outlook. Not many of us identify as members of the species. Those that do tend to treat the affilia-tion as a subordinate feature of their identity. The destruction of the spe-cies would therefore harm us as individuals. We would not experience the group-based harm characteristic of genocide. Second, while I agree that the wealthiest and most powerful factions are ultimately responsible for the depredations of capitalism, the rest of us contribute in modest ways to the survival of the system, either by actively supporting it or by quietly acquiescing despite our reservations. But then the destruction of the species is analogous to a case in which the members of a minority group voluntarily set aside their traditional way of life and adopt the cul-ture and norms of the majority. A hallmark of genocide is that a commu-nity’s way of life is destroyed against the will of its members. The ab-sence of this feature suggests that voluntary cultural assimilation and the capitalist annihilation of humanity do not count as instances of the phe-nomenon. 4. Genocide as a Process of Social Group Destruction I have shown that genocide is not a species of mass murder that involves the intentional destruction of national, ethnic, racial, and religious groups. Members of targeted collectives are not always killed because of who they are rather than what they have done, and the groups themselves are not always annihilated on the basis of traits or conduct they are not in fact responsible for. Genocide is certainly distinctive in a purely conceptual sense. No other human practice involves the intentional elimination of stable—typically intergenerational—groups that have a comprehensive worldview and way of life. But there are very good reasons to dismiss the idea that gen-ocide is distinctively heinous and necessarily immoral and that these are “essential aspects of the ‘conceptual role’ of the concept of genocide.”55 More accurately, they are arbitrary conceptual standards born of a nar-row focus on one or two paradigm instances. The standards are shaped by the atypical characteristics of such cases while the features that make

                                                         55For Boghossian’s discussion of this issue, see “The Concept of Genocide,” p. 73.

352 Mohammed Abed the event a paradigm of the phenomenon are ignored. Martin Shaw—in the course of discussing how the use of the Holocaust as a “maximal standard” has led to a steady narrowing of the concept of genocide—gives a clear diagnosis of the problem. Comparison has misled precisely because it has substituted a Holocaust standard for a coherent conception of genocide. The problem is not too much but too little generaliza-tion … ad hoc comparisons of other cases with the Holocaust tend to reproduce a narrow exterminatory conception and get caught up in secondary features, so blurring core simi-larities … In order to understand other genocides, therefore, the imperative is not to com-pare them with the Holocaust—which as a specific episode was necessarily unique in many respects—but to interpret them in terms of a coherent general conception.56 The key elements of a coherent epistemically rich conception—one that, as Shaw points out, identifies “core similarities” in a wide range of para-digm (and borderline) cases—have already been outlined in the discus-sion. If an event does not involve the intentional destruction of stable—typically intergenerational—groups, it does not count as genocide. Thus it would be inappropriate to use the term “genocide” when a government incentivizes in various ways the assimilation of a national minority and most members of the group voluntarily adopt the majority’s norms and way of life. In this case, there is no intentional destruction. Requiring that groups have a comprehensive worldview and way of life rules out counting as genocide a scenario in which a perpetrator deliberately anni-hilates a loosely structured group such as the class of scholars who have published a paper about genocide. Lemkin identified another important element: genocide is typically a process that consists of a number of policies that undermine the existence of a group in different spheres of human activity. In the Holocaust and other paradigm cases, mass murder was the culmination of a steadily es-calating campaign of annihilation that aimed to turn into rubble the polit-ical, social, cultural, economic, and other foundations of the targeted group’s existence. The term “genocide” applies to this entire systematic coordinated enterprise—not just to its most shocking and heinous ele-ment. The content of the concept of genocide is not in any way tied to spe-cific “techniques” of annihilation. Similarly, the distinctive motives of particular historical perpetrators have nothing to do with the phenome-non itself. A group, like an individual, can be killed in many ways and for any number of reasons. It follows from this that the characteristic harm of genocide is not linked to the fact that victims can be and are at times murdered because they happen to be members of a hated group.

                                                         56Shaw, What is Genocide? pp. 44-45.

The Concept of Genocide Reconsidered 353 When a group is destroyed, its members are deprived of a social iden-tity that gives meaning to their lives. Individuals will no longer feel as if they “belong” and are accepted as they are in some corner of the world. They will be deprived of valued cultural and social activities. Many of the relationships they worked hard to cultivate will disappear. Institutions that played an important role in their lives might also vanish. Family life, a locus of socialization and cultural reproduction, will often be seriously disrupted. In some cases, families will be destroyed. The characteristic harm of genocide, then, is the social alienation experienced by individu-als deprived of such goods.57 Social alienation is clearly a serious harm. Membership in groups with a high social profile is, after all, an important aspect of the human condition. What cannot be sustained is the claim that social alienation makes genocide a distinctively heinous crime. As I have already pointed out, “distinctively heinous” might mean that harm X is the worst harm a person can experience. If X is not the worst harm, it may nevertheless be heinous in a way that all the other harms are not. Social alienation is cer-tainly not distinctively heinous in the first sense. There is no reason to believe, for example, that the harms experienced by torture victims are less severe. And even if we assume for the sake of argument that it is distinctively heinous in the second sense, we will not thereby have shown that genocide is too. Social alienation is a harm that genocide has in common with other human practices. It is, for example, one of the de-structive effects of long-term solitary confinement, a punitive measure that is widely used in the American prison system.58 But perhaps I have underestimated the gravity of the characteristic harm of genocide. Claudia Card, for instance, has consistently argued that “social death”—not social alienation—“is utterly central to the evil of genocide.” Survivors of genocide “lose their cultural heritage and may even lose their intergenerational connections … they may become ‘so-cially dead’ and their descendents ‘natally alienated’, no longer able to pass along and build upon the traditions, cultural developments (includ-ing languages), and projects of earlier generations.”59 Their lives can, under such conditions, become meaningless. In contrast, social alienation does not imply that the social dimension of an individual’s personality has been extinguished or that subsequent generations are natally alienat-                                                         57Membership—especially in minority and stateless communities—is often a liability rather than a blessing. This gives us reason to doubt May’s claim that one aspect of the harm of genocide is the loss of an effective barrier to rights violations and harsh political and economic conditions. For May’s discussion of the “status harm” thesis, see Geno-cide: A Normative Account, pp. 88-91. 58See Atul Gawande, “Hellhole,” The New Yorker, 30 March 2009. 59Card, “Genocide and Social Death,” p. 73.

354 Mohammed Abed ed. Survivors certainly live diminished lives, but those lives are not, in my view, meaningless. Social death and natal alienation were concepts used by Orlando Pat-terson in his analysis of slavery in the Confederate South. The slave, ac-cording to Patterson, was completely cut off from sources of social vitali-ty. He had no social existence outside of his relations with his master.60 This suggests that even if the social death hypothesis is correct, it will not vindicate the idea that genocide is distinctively heinous (in either sense). Card cannot claim that genocide is more heinous than slavery because mass killing leads to the social death of survivors in the former case but not the latter. The reason for this is that she rejects the claim that genocide is a special form of mass killing.61 If both genocide and slavery lead to social death, then the former is not heinous in a different way than the latter. The social death hypothesis, moreover, is compatible with the idea that genocide is not necessarily immoral. The goal of ending over two centuries of egregious institutionalized criminality is important enough to sanction the infliction of social death on the community that benefited from slavery. But then all that follows, if Card’s hypothesis is correct, is that I have failed to identify the characteristic harm of geno-cide. The claim that genocide is neither distinctively heinous nor neces-sarily immoral will still stand. One of the great virtues of the social death hypothesis is that it dis-credits orthodox ideas that have obstructed our view of the phenomenon. Card has made a very important contribution to the debate about geno-cide.62 But there are insurmountable difficulties that should lead us to prefer the social alienation account. To begin with, Card’s hypothesis is undermined by historical facts. Even paradigm cases of genocide—such as the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide—did not lead to the social death of survivors or the natal alienation of their offspring.63 Many sur-vivors, despite the horror of what they went through, continued to identi-fy as members and preserved their group’s practices and traditions for subsequent generations. Card suggests that what matters is not simply the survival of a group’s traditions, but the ability of its members to sustain a

                                                         60See Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cam-bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), chap. 2. 61See Card: “Genocide and Social Death”; “The Paradox of Genocidal Rape Aimed at Enforced Pregnancy”; Confronting Evils: Terrorism, Torture, and Genocide. 62I recognize the importance of the social death hypothesis in Abed, “Clarifying the Concept of Genocide.” But for the reasons I give above, I now have serious doubts about the hypothesis and think that the social alienation account is more plausible. 63For a defense of the claim that natal alienation is not a feature of paradigm cases of genocide, see Laurence M. Thomas, Vessels of Evil: American Slavery and the Holocaust (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), chap. 6.

The Concept of Genocide Reconsidered 355 meaningful connection to those traditions.64 There are, however, concep-tual considerations that show that being alienated from a group in this way will not lead to social death. The point is neatly summarized by May when he says that “the term ‘social death’ is too strong in that it implies that the entire social part of a person has died.”65 Social death is unlikely because people are typically members of more than one group. If geno-cide leads to the loss of a person’s primary identity, less important group affiliations may remain intact. Setting this aside, individuals can form new social attachments and integrate themselves into new social circles that substitute, at least in part, for the social roles and relationships that were destroyed by the genocidal campaign. The objection will be that I am tarnishing the concept of genocide and emptying it of normative content. It is no longer morally significant to attach the label “genocide” to an event if the term can be used to refer to such a wide range of phenomena. Worse still, my bizarre thesis implies that the Holocaust is morally equivalent to a policy of forced assimila-tion. Surely an account that implies this should be rejected. The critic is assuming that the concept will have normative content only if a definition satisfies the requirement that genocide be distinctive-ly heinous (in the first sense) and necessarily immoral. This is obviously not the case. Victims of genocide, I have argued, experience a profound loss. The fact that they are harmed in this way suggests that there ought to be a very strong moral presumption against the destruction of groups. The burden of explaining why a conception that implies this does not count as having normative content falls squarely on the shoulders of those who prefer narrower definitions. I very much doubt that a plausible explanation can be given. The secondary features of one or two arbitrarily chosen atypical his-torical cases typically fix the normative content of more restrictive defi-nitions. Such features can enrich our understanding of particular histori-cal events but they tell us very little—if anything at all—about the phe-nomenon of genocide itself. In contrast, the account I have given cuts through all the confusion by identifying the essential features that link together a wide range of historical and hypothetical cases. Rather than tarnishing the concept of genocide, it sheds badly needed light on its meaning and normative significance. The claim that the account implies a moral equivalence between the Holocaust and forced assimilation is hard to take seriously. Underlying it are yet more faulty assumptions and conceptual confusions. There would be an unseemly moral equivalence if even one case were considerably                                                          64Card, “Genocide and Social Death,” p. 75. 65See May, Genocide: A Normative Account, p. 88.

356 Mohammed Abed less reprehensible than the others. The critic is thus committed to the im-plausible assumption that all the actions that fall under a concept must be reprehensible to a very similar degree. But if they share key conceptual features, actions that are due significantly different measures of moral censure should be categorized together. There is no reason to think that doing so inevitably commits one to the moral equivalence thesis. Ac-knowledging that a person commits homicide regardless of whether he kills in self-defense or tortures a human being to death for the pleasure of it implies only that both acts involve the killing of one human being by another. Similarly, applying the term “genocide” to the Holocaust and a historical case of settler-colonialism suggests only that both are process-es the intended outcome of which is the destruction of a group with a comprehensive worldview and way of life. There is no sense, then, in which the account I have been arguing for implies anything offensive about the Holocaust. In fact, it can accommo-date the idea that the Holocaust was distinctively heinous in the second sense outlined above. Hannah Arendt pointed to the relevant feature when she suggested that Jewish victims of the Nazi campaign of destruc-tion were murdered twice over.66 First, the person was annihilated. Then, biological life was extinguished. What the account leaves no room for is the muddled idea that the features that make the Holocaust unique are partly constitutive of the content of the concept of genocide. 67 Department of Philosophy, California State University, Los Angeles mabed@calstatela.edu

                                                         66See the discussion in Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Schocken Books, 2004), pp. 565-92. Arendt’s civilizational ideal, the approval of empire-building, and her profound ignorance of indigenous political cultures in Africa, the Amer-icas, and elsewhere are all deeply problematic. See A. Dirk Moses, “Das römische Gesprach in a New Key: Hannah Arendt, Genocide, and the Defense of Republican Civi-lization,” The Journal of Modern History 85 (2013): 867-913. 67I would like to thank the following for their invaluable feedback on earlier drafts of this essay and for their tremendous support and encouragement throughout the process: Dirk Moses, David Pitt, Mark Balaguer, Ann Garry, Steven Salaita, Henry Mendell, Talia Bettcher, Kayley Vernallis, Alexander Klein, Joseph Levine, Terry Twyneham, Weronika Cwir, Philip Newman, and Shereen Newman.

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