What is genocide and how to prevent it? A Latin American Perspective

DANIEL FEIERSTEIN

Berna

Congreso; IIIrd Regional Forum on the Prevention of Genocide; 2011

Gobierno de la Confederación Suiza

The common view of atrocity crimes has led slowly to the current “binary model”, which reduces genocide social practices to an eternal struggle between good and evil in which the only problem is whether the “good-guys” have enough “political will” to neutralize and defeat the “bad-guys”. This perspective implies a Manichaeistic worldview, which makes too many assumptions that are never addressed. Such a simplistic view reflects the growing trivialization of genocide since the term was coined nearly seventy years ago. A simplistic model has emerged that requires each case of genocide to have one and only one victim and one and only one perpetrator. Victims, perpetrators and accomplices that do not fit the model are ignored or rendered invisible. Genocide Studies first emerged largely as a result of legal and sociological debates about the adequacy of the Genocide Convention adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948. Most early scholarly work highlighted the serious shortcomings in the legal definition of genocide (especially the exclusion of certain groups, in particular political and economic groups) and proposed new definitions. Disagreements over definitions led scholars to develop a rich variety of concepts based on alternative definitions of genocide.  However, there was no consensus about which of these definitions could replace the one contained in the Genocide Convention. Thus, it was not always clear whether different authors were talking about the same thing. During the negotiations leading up to the Rome Statute for an International Criminal Court in 1998, all attempts to introduce a broader definition of genocide failed and the formal definition of the Genocide Convention was adopted.  In contrast to the legal definition of genocide, the concept of genocide as a social practice allows historians and sociologists to adopt a broader and more flexible approach to the problems of causality and responsibility. It also helps to distinguish genocide from other social processes of mass destruction that have occurred at different periods of history. An important feature of genocide studies over the last twenty years has been an increased emphasis on applying academic theories to preventing genocide. However, the predominant thinking has tended to oversimplify the relationship between theory and prevention, which is tricky and dangerous.