How genocide came to be named and codified

According to the UN Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian occupied territories Francesca Albanese, “Israel’s genocide on the Palestinians is an escalatory stage of a longstanding settler colonial process of erasure”. Her latest report urges UN member states “to enforce the prohibition of genocide” in accordance with their obligations under international law. The debate is no longer about whether what Israel is doing in Gaza is genocide. It is about whether the international community, including private citizens, will uphold their moral obligation to oppose the genocide unfolding before them in full social media glare.

On naming evil

The term ‘genocide’ belongs to the language of transgression — words that describe the wilful violation of basic moral codes such as, for instance, the universal taboo on killing children. But there are gradations even in the forms of extreme violence that determine whether a given atrocity is to be deemed a war crime, a crime against humanity, or genocide — a category of evil so unspeakable that humanity hadn’t thought of a word for it.

It was a Jewish lawyer from Poland, Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term in his book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944). As a university student in the 1920s, Lemkin was horrified by the mass killing of Armenians during World War 1. He couldn’t believe there was no international law under which the Ottoman leaders could be tried. “Why was killing a million people a less serious crime than killing a single individual,” he wondered. Lemkin’s interest in the crime of mass murder took a different colour after World War 2, during which he lost 49 members of his own family in the Holocaust. He devoted the rest of his life to the mission of getting recognition in international law for what Winston Churchill called “a crime without a name”.

As Lemkin explains in his book, he formed the word from the Greek ‘genos’, meaning ‘race’ or ‘tribe’, and the Latin ‘cide’, meaning ‘killing’. He defined ‘genocide’ as “the destruction of a nation or an ethnic group”. Despite serving as advisor to Justice Robert H. Jackson, the lead prosecutor at the International Military Tribunal (IMT) that conducted the Nuremberg trials, he wasn’t happy with how it dealt with the Nazi leaders.

The IMT prosecuted them for ‘war crimes’ and ‘crimes against peace’. But how should they be prosecuted for crimes against civilians who were their own citizens — German Jews targeted for their ethnicity? British and French prosecutors sought to use Lemkin’s concept of genocide, but the Americans steered clear of it. Given their own (then prevalent) Jim Crow laws of racial segregation, they were anxious not to grant international court jurisdiction over how a government treated its own citizens, a sentiment that was shared by the Soviets as well.

Lemkin was disappointed as the IMT prosecuted the Nazis politicians only on charges of “crimes against humanity”, a juridical approach that failed to account for the criminal logic of the Holocaust, which picked out specific ethnic and political groups, including Jews, gypsies and communists. As Lemkin put it, “The Allies decided a case in Nuremberg against a past Hitler — but refused to envisage future Hitlers.” His fears have come true in Gaza, where the Israeli military continues to enjoy impunity for its mass murder of Palestinians even as Western governments seem unable or unwilling to acknowledge that these crimes have surpassed the threshold of genocide.

Codifying genocide

In the years following the Nuremberg trials, Lemkin worked relentlessly to get genocide codified in international law. His efforts bore fruit in 1948 with the United Nations adopting the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Although the Genocide Convention included much of Lemkin’s ideas, it did not accept all of them.

It had a rather narrow legal definition of genocide, with two main elements. It had a mental element, the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”, and a physical element, consisting of any of these five acts: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Initially, this definition was criticised on the grounds that “intent” is difficult to establish since no government publicises its intent to commit genocide. Also, it is tough to attribute genocidal intent to individuals who can claim to be merely carrying out orders in their official capacity. However, subsequent proceedings, including those of the tribunals set up to try the accused in the Rwanda genocide (1994) and the 1995 genocide of Bosnia Muslims in Srebenica have clarified that “a pattern of purposeful action” leading to the destruction of a significant section of the targeted group would suffice to establish genocidal intent.

While the 1948 Genocide Convention defines the crime and obligates the states that are parties to the Convention to prevent and punish it, the 2002 Rome Statute gives the International Criminal Court the jurisdiction to take up and try cases of genocide.

The Genocide Convention, however, still does not recognise mass murder of any social or political group — say, communists — as genocide, an aspect considered a major lacuna by genocide experts. The concept of genocide has also not been adequately applied to understand colonial mass murder, slavery, deportation and other atrocities inflicted upon native populations, including aboriginals by erstwhile coloniser nations and empires.

Away from the media spotlight, the egregious practice of forcefully transferring children away from their Aboriginal families — now seemingly benevolent in intent but barely distinguishable from genocide in practice — still goes on in Australia, according to a 2025 report by Human Rights Watch.

The importance of ‘thinking’

Mass murder is by no means a modern phenomenon. Even in ancient times, it was not uncommon for the victors in a war to massacre the entire male population of the conquered kingdom or state. Typically, however, genocides occurred against an enemy population, or in the context of a war. The phenomenon of a state conducting mass murder of a certain ethnic or national group among its own citizens is a more recent phenomenon — one that has raised fundamental philosophical questions about human nature and evil.

Some of the most profound engagement with these questions came from Hannah Arendt, a German American Jewish historian and philosopher who covered the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a key architect of the Holocaust. In her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), Arendt asks the question: does a person have to be evil in order to do evil? Her answer is ‘no’. All that is required for a person to do evil is to suspend thinking.

Arendt argued that it is the exercise of the capacity to think that connects one human with others. What gave Nazism its power was its all out assault on thinking, and on the very impulse to reflect. Eichmann’s crime, in this sense, was the banality of doing what seemed to be in the best interests of his career — to please his bosses. This is because for him, thinking had been outsourced to the Nazi bureaucracy and leadership. It is this failure to think — achieved on a mass scale through institutionalised assault on intellectual life, on the life of the mind — that is banal. This banality creates the space for evil to assume the garb of the routine, the normal, and the quotidian, all of which are in ample evidence in the routinised daily massacres of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.

As the philosopher Judith Butler observed in an essay on the banality of evil, “[Arendt’s] indictment of Eichmann reached beyond the man to the historical world in which true thinking was vanishing and, as a result, crimes against humanity became increasingly “thinkable”. The degradation of thinking worked hand in hand with the systematic destruction of populations.”

Published – July 17, 2025 08:30 am IST