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What Are We Preventing

The ethical and political commitments that underlie scholarship on the prevention of genocide are more obvious than in other fields. Indeed, the concept of genocide was invented as part of Raphael Lemkin’s ambitious project (1933 and 1944) to criminalise a general class of destructive actions against population groups. Since Lemkin’s campaign was extraordinarily successful, for over sixty years genocide has been defined as an international crime. The United Nations, together with the majority of the world’s states who have ratified the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, are legally bound to ‘prevent and punish’ the acts that have been defined as genocide. We know, however, that this obligation has hardly been fulfilled. Genocide has remained a huge problem of human society during the last sixty years, as the names of countries like Cambodia, Bosnia and Rwanda remind us. While the twentieth century has been called the ‘century of genocide’ (Weitz, 2005), there are those who foresee that the twenty-first century may be just as marred by it (Levene, 2010). In this chapter I discuss current debates about the ‘concept of genocide’. I shall address the discrepancy between the requirements of international law and the historical experience of millions of new sufferers from genocide, together with the question of how to overcome it, but in a somewhat indirect fashion. This chapter is divided in three parts. I start by discussing the idea of genocide, its meaning and coherence. Second, I discuss the political and cultural context of genocide studies, together with how this leads to simplistic ideas of prevention. Finally, I address how we might adequately locate contemporary dangers of genocide so as to realistically frame the problem of prevention. 1 Concept of Genocide: