From massacre to the genocidal

process

Jacques Sémelin

The term “genocide” was coined in 1944 by Beset by these moral and political issues,
Raphael Lemkin, an American legal expert of it is hard for the academic researcher to clear
Polish origin, and was given formal recognition an autonomous path. However important it may
at the international level by the Convention on be, social mobilisation, whether civic or
the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of judicial, is not really part of the job of the
Genocide, adopted by the United Nations. To researcher, whose primary role lies elsewhere. It
use that concept of “genocide” within a social is to conduct fieldwork, gather data and develop
science context is problematical owing to the analytical tools in order to interpret what is
moral and political issues involved, namely: termed “genocide” (which is not a straightfor-
ward task). More generally, the appropriate role
• Issues of memory: for the researcher is to try
Because of the existence Jacques Sémelin is Research Director at to understand how fraught
of that international con- the Centre National de la Recherche Sci- situations may collapse into
vention, instances of entifique and a professor at Sciences-Po, extreme violence and mass-
massacres and violence Paris. He holds a doctorate in contempor- acre. Such understanding
suffered in the past by a ary history (Sorbonne) and was a Harvard may, of course, sub-
post-doctoral fellow. Having worked on
particular group or state non-violent civil resistance, his research
sequently prove useful in
should, in the opinion of is now concerned with genocide and its remedial action and preven-
many people, be recog- prevention. His published works include tion.
nised as falling within Unarmed against Hitler (1994) and In My overall intention is
the category of genocide, consideration of massacres (2001). specifically to strive for a
Email: jsemelin@magic.fr.
the most symbolic strug- distinctive social science
gle in this respect being approach to genocide stud-
that of the Armenian ies, i.e., to achieve genuine
community. independence for the
• Immediate response researcher. To that end, I
issues: When a population group appears to propose three main lines of research.
be or actually is under threat of death, use of 1. To redefine the concepts by starting from a
the word “genocide” can serve as the ultimate critical approach to the concept of “geno-
signal to the world to prevent the imminent cide” (in order to move away from a legal
tragedy by jolting the conscience and approach).
prompting international action in support of 2. To distinguish between different destruction
the victims. processes in the perpetration of massacres
• Specifically legal issues: The prosecution of (on the basis of historical and political
those responsible for mass violence and mass- sociology).
acre (indictment of Pinochet and, more 3. To develop research frameworks that will
recently, of Milošević for “genocide”). help us understand how the potential for

ISSJ 174/2002  UNESCO 2002. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
434
violence becomes actualised in situations of
extreme violence: an enigmatic question that
is, in my view, the key issue in genocide
studies.
I intend to focus my future research
activity on this last point. However, given the
constraints of this article, only the first two
approaches will be outlined.
Redefining the concepts
The editor of the Journal of Genocide Research,
Henry Huttenbach, in the editorial to a recent
issue, wondered whether genocide studies were
already in a blind alley (Huttenbach 2001: 8).
Such an assessment is somewhat surprising. The
fact is that Huttenbach made that assertion
because of the lack of consensus among
researchers as to what actually counts as a geno-
cide. Between the historian Stephan Katz, who
believes in only one genocide, that of the Jews,
and the psychologist Israël Charny, who regards
every massacre as a genocide (including indus-
trial disasters such as Chernobyl), the range of
definitions is very broad. Of the most interesting
works in the area of genocide studies, mention
can be made of those of Helen Fein (1990),
Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn (1990), and
Mark Levene (2000). However, there is no
actual agreement even among these researchers
on a common definition of genocide, which
makes comparison very difficult.
It is to some extent understandable that
those wishing to claim the uniqueness of the
genocide of the Jews should have succeeded in
imposing other terms, i.e., Holocaust in the
United States and Shoah in France. That is a
somewhat paradoxical development given that
the United Nations’ adoption of the Genocide
Convention in 1948 took place precisely within
the post-Auschwitz context.
Nevertheless, I do not believe that geno-
cide studies have reached an impasse. One need
only look at the wealth of contributions pub-
lished in the Journal of Genocide Research.
There are, however, a number of crucial prob-
lems that we have to identify.
(1) The first has to do with the nature of the
subject-matter under consideration. We are
concerned here with “monstrous events”,
 UNESCO 2002.
Jacques Sémelin
which are in themselves very hard to ana-
lyse, particularly since records are often
defective. Some people even believe that
they cannot be understood. I certainly
would not go so far. Works of history, such
as those of Christopher Browning, author
of Ordinary Men (1992), or of social psy-
chology, such as those of Stanley Milgram
(1974), appear to me to provide valuable
and relevant pointers. Understanding geno-
cides, and more generally massacres, neces-
sarily entails the kind of cross-disciplinary
approach that this juxtaposition hints at. It
is true, nonetheless, that we must also show
modesty and humility in confronting the
enigma of our own barbarity.
(2) The second has to do with the fact that
this is a recent field of study that is still
establishing its vocabulary, methodology,
etc. Indeed, the last 30 years have witnessed
the invention of new terms. In addition to
the now long-standing term “ethnocide”, we
have seen the coinage of “politicide” by
Barbara Harff and Ted Gurr (1988) and
“democide” by Rudolf Rummel (1994), as
well as “femicide”, “culturicide”, “urbic-
ide”, etc. It is as though the effort had been
concentrated on how to name the phenom-
ena of civilian destruction in order to think
about them.
(3) A third difficulty has to do with the position
of the word “genocide” at the point where
international law and social science inter-
sect. This can be clearly seen in Lemkin’s
first text, his book of 1944, whose aims can
be summarised as follows. Here is a new
phenomenon that is taking place in Europe.
This new phenomenon requires a new term.
I am coining the term “genocide”. He con-
cludes his work by putting forward legal
recommendations for combating this new
form of crime on an international level.
Most genocide studies since Lemkin are
precisely the outcome of that original concep-
tion. The field of genocide studies was born of
law. For proof of this, one need only survey
the main books referred to above, almost all of
which begin with a presentation and discussion
of the United Nations Convention of 1948. It
is a known fact that the text of the Convention
contains deficiencies, even contradictions, which
I shall not reconsider here. That has led to
From massacre to the genocidal process
much debate and controversy among
researchers.
At a deeper level, there is an inherent dif-
ficulty in using a legal concept as a category
in social science analysis. The legal norm has,
by definition, a political content since the text
of the convention was clearly the outcome of
an international agreement reached by states in
1948 within the post-war context.
Such a situation is problematical. It recalls
the critical analysis developed by Durkheim in
the early twentieth century on the normative use
of the concept of “crime” in sociology. At the
start of this twenty-first century, we now need
to develop a critical analysis of the normative use
of the concept of “genocide” in social science.
From the viewpoint of the independence
of social science research, which was my start-
ing point here, the issue is primarily detachment
from the law and thus from politics. That is
not necessarily fashionable given that every-
thing tends to have a legal aspect nowadays.
Conversely, the law, which is itself political, is
employed in politics. In the area of international
law, excellent overviews are now beginning to
appear (Schabas 2000). Nevertheless, to move
away from a legal approach can be seen as a
necessary – not to say vital – stage in enabling
genocide studies to acquire their own maturity.
The first consequence of this quest for
independence is the adoption of non-normative
and non-legal vocabulary in framing the object
of this field of research. To that end, I would
first recommend the use of the term “massacre”
as a lexical unit of reference in this field of
study. Far less general than the concept of viol-
ence, a “massacre” denotes a form of action,
most frequently collective action, that destroys
defenceless individuals and which, since the
European Middle Ages, has been used also in
reference to animals. This direct historical and
semantic parallel between slaughtering of ani-
mals and of human beings is not insignificant.
That clearly still does not resolve the mat-
ter of a definition of genocide from a social
science perspective. However, before turning to
that issue, it is necessary to explore the notion
of massacre, since, while not every massacre
can be regarded as a genocide, a genocide is
primarily composed of one or more massacres.
It thus makes simple methodological good sense
to focus on “massacre” as a study topic, the
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435
main question being when and under what cir-
cumstances a massacre becomes a genocide.
My own research work thus prompts me
(In consideration of massacres; Sémelin 2001),
to attempt to start from a basic vocabulary sur-
rounding this concept, distinguishing, for
example, between:
• local massacres (such as face-to-face
encounters) and long-range massacres (such
as aerial bombings);
• bilateral massacres (as in civil wars) and uni-
lateral massacres (such as that of a state
against its people);
• the concept of “mass massacre” (as in
Indonesia in 1965 or Rwanda in 1994, where
between 500,000 and 800,000 people were
killed in just a few weeks) and much smaller-
scale massacres, as in Algeria or Colombia.
In the former case, it seems justified to refer
to a “mass massacre”, just as a demonstration
can be distinguished from a mass demon-
stration.
The concept of massacre does, however,
have one drawback: that of focusing the
researcher’s attention on the actual murderous
event to the point, perhaps, of disregarding the
process that led to the slaughter. In short, it
emphasises its physical outcome: the act of kill-
ing. This could greatly distort the way the
phenomenon is perceived since different forms
of violence occurring prior to a massacre might
simply be ignored or played down. The example
of Kosovo is particularly significant in this con-
nection. A debate arose in France as to the
number of deaths in the province following the
“ethnic cleansing” operations undertaken by the
Serb army and various militias. At the time of
NATO’s intervention in 1999, the official pur-
pose of which was to put an end to those
operations, widely varying fatality figures were
put forward: 3,000, 10,000, or 100,000? While
such reckoning, however macabre it may be, is
undoubtedly necessary, if only from a judicial
perspective, it is an oversimplification of the
actual destruction caused in Kosovo since 1998
(if not since 1990) in terms of missing persons,
displaced families, women raped, houses burnt
down, etc.
This shows the significance of perceiving
massacres as “merely” the most dramatic and
tragic form of an overall process of destruction.
436
A massacre can either “accompany” such a pro-
cess or be its outcome. In this respect, I agree
with the approach adopted by the psychosociol-
ogist Ervin Staub, who laid the foundations of
what is both a psychological and a political
theory of mass massacre (1989). However, he
puts forward the idea of a continuum rather
than a process of destruction. This “continuum”
idea would appear questionable insofar as it
might suggest an inescapable progression from
event a to event b, for example from increased
persecution of a minority to its slaughter. Such
a view was undoubtedly based on the history
of the Holocaust. However, it is now accepted
that this is a misleadingly retrospective
interpretation, over-determined by our knowl-
edge of how things turned out. In fact, the
persecution of the German Jews in the very
early stages of Nazi rule did not in any way
imply that the Auschwitz scenario was already
written. For that reason, the concept of a “pro-
cess” is preferable to that of a “continuum”
since the former implies the idea of a dynamic
of destruction that is liable to change, slow
down or speed up, in short a script that is not
pre-written but is shaped according to the will
of the perpetrators and to the circumstances.
To be even more precise, we should refer
rather to an organised process of civilian
destruction, targeting both people and their
property.
• Organised, because this is not “natural”
destruction (such as an earthquake) or acci-
dental destruction (such as the Chernobyl
nuclear disaster). Far from being anarchic,
this process of violence is channelled,
directed and even structured against a parti-
cular group. It takes the concrete form of
collective action, most often fostered by the
state (and its agents), who have the will to
organise such violence. That does not rule out
possible improvisation or even spontaneity on
the part of the perpetrators in ways of
inflicting suffering or of killing.
• Process, because the collective action of a
massacre can be regarded as the outcome of
a complex situation created primarily by the
combination of a particular long-term political
history, cultural environment, and inter-
national context;
• Destruction, because the term is broader than
“murder” and encompasses the possible
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Jacques Sémelin
demolishing or burning of houses or religious
or cultural buildings in order to wipe out the
presence of the inimical “other”. This may
also include the dehumanising of the victims
prior to their elimination. Forced marches and
other deportation techniques, which often
carry a high mortality rate, also form part of
these processes of population destruction. The
word “destruction” does not predetermine the
method of killing, be it by fire, water, gas,
starvation, cold or any other slow or quick
means of causing death.
• Civilian, because it has to be acknowledged
that, while such violence might initially be
directed towards military (or paramilitary) tar-
gets, it tends to move away from such targets
and be aimed primarily or even exclusively
at non-combatants and hence civilians. The
phrase “destruction of civilian populations” is
a familiar term found in strategic vocabulary.
However, it conveys too strongly the idea of
aerial bombing and hence the wiping-out of
an entire community (for example, the inhabi-
tants of a town). It is necessary to envisage
a more differentiated destruction process tar-
geting civilians who are “dispersed” within
the same society. The expression “civilian
destruction” is therefore preferable since it
encompasses both these dimensions, which
range from the elimination of dispersed indi-
viduals to that of established groups and even
entire populations.
These collective acts of destruction in all
cases entail a totally dissymmetrical relationship
between aggressor and victim. This is one-sided
destruction aimed at individuals and groups who
are not in a position to defend themselves. It
should, however, be noted that that does not in
any way predetermine the former or future
status of the victims, who may have been or
could become murderers in their turn.
Distinguishing between
different civilian destruction
processes
Alongside the establishment of a vocabulary
specific to this field of research, it is important
to differentiate the dynamics at work in these
processes of civilian destruction. When a mass-
From massacre to the genocidal process
Ugandan military officials fly over a mound of skulls in Kibuye province, Rwanda, April 1998.
acre is committed and is made known by the
press, journalists are inclined to stress its appar-
ent irrationality. Why attack children, women,
and the elderly? Details of atrocities are also
given in such reports. The appalling aspects of
massacres must not, however, prevent us from
examining the question of the perpetrators’
rationale, not only from the viewpoint of their
operating techniques but also from that of their
objectives and their perceptions of the enemy.
Beyond the horror, it has to be acknowledged
that they are pursuing very specific aims:
amassing wealth, controlling territory, gaining
power, destabilising a political system, etc.
Envisaging the notion of massacre thus
means attempting to understand both its ration-
ality and its irrationality: the way in which it
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437
AFP/WTN
combines hard-headed calculation and human
folly in what I would call delusional rationality
(rationalité délirante). The term “delusional”
relates to two psychiatric phenomena. The first
is that of a “psychotic” attitude towards another
person, who has to be destroyed and who is
not in fact “another” because he is perceived
by the person who is to annihilate him as “dis-
similar” to himself. It is in the denial of the
humanity of this “barbarian” that the psychotic
element of the aggressor’s relationship with his
future victim lies. However, “delusional” can
also signify a paranoid image of this other, who
is perceived as constituting a threat and even
the embodiment of evil. The particularity and
dangerousness of a paranoid syndrome and the
conviction that one is dealing with an evildoer
438
are so strong that a risk of acting out exists.
In a massacre, the “good-evil” and “friend-foe”
binary polarisation is thus at its peak, as in war.
Massacre therefore always gets on well with
war or, if there is no actual war, it is experi-
enced as an act of war.
Hence massacres are not “insane” in the
eyes of those who perpetrate them because they
are part of one or more dynamics of war. In
this respect, those who commit massacres attri-
bute to them specific political or strategic aims,
which can, however, change with the course of
the action, the international context, the victims’
reaction, etc. The diversity of historical situ-
ations thus leads us to distinguish at least two
fundamental types of objective linked to the
processes of partial and even total destruction
of a community, namely:
– its subjugation and
– its eradication.1
Destroy in order to subjugate
The aim here is to bring about the death of
civilians with a view to destroying a community
partially in order to subjugate what remains of
it totally. The destruction process is thus, by
definition, partial but it is intended to have an
overall impact, since those responsible for the
deed rely on the effect of terror in order to
impose their political domination on the sur-
vivors. That is why the act of massacre is parti-
cularly suited to such a strategy. Far from need-
ing to be hidden or disguised, it is precisely in
being visible that massacres can spread terror
through their target population.
Since the dawn of time, this form of mass-
acre has been associated with warfare. The civ-
ilian destruction/subjugation dynamic can in fact
be fully incorporated within a military operation
to precipitate an adversary’s surrender and
speed up the conquest of its territory and the
subjugation of its people. From ancient through
colonial to modern wars, a massacre is almost
always to be found, not as one of the “excesses”
of war, but as one of its dimensions to hasten
the capitulation of the enemy.
This is what Michael Walzer calls “war
against civilians”, with which he also ranks the
different forms of siege and blockade aimed at
forcing a city or country into submission
(Walzer 1992). Such destruction/subjugation
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Jacques Sémelin
methods can also be found in contemporary
civil warfare, where a distinction is no longer
made between combatants and non-combatants.
These destruction/subjugation practices can
also be extended to the governing of a people.
A war of conquest, which may have been con-
ducted by massacre, gives way to economic
exploitation of the conquered population, with
further recourse, where necessary, to the killing
of some of its members. That was, for example,
the essential attitude of the Conquistadors
towards the Indians, whom they perceived as
worthless beings, there to do their masters’ bid-
ding. History offers other, more “political” vari-
ants of the destruction/subjugation strategy that
shifts from warfare to governance. In this
instance, Clausewitz’s dictum could be reversed.
War is no longer the continuation of politics
by other means; politics is the means of pursu-
ing war . . . against civilians. Those who win a
civil war are also very logically drawn into this
power-building dynamic, as illustrated to some
extent by the example of revolutionary France
and even more so by that of the Bolsheviks in
Lenin’s Russia and the Khmers Rouges in Pol
Pot’s Cambodia. The perpetration of extreme
violence that builds up in the course of a civil
war tends to be transferred to the power-
building phase.
Whether in the case of civil wars or not,
the process dates back a long time. Torture and
killing to “set an example” constitute one of
the most standard techniques of the tyrant seek-
ing to quash an internal rebellion. Such was
the tactic employed in Europe by the Nazis
of executing hostages (one hundred civilians
executed for every German killed) to overcome
armed resistance groups. Some regimes sub-
sequently developed more sophisticated tech-
niques, such as the “disappearance” method
implemented by various Latin American dic-
tatorships in the 1970s. This is a “discreet”
form of civilian elimination, and also a “dis-
crete” one, since the number of people who
disappeared is in the last analysis fairly small,
as shown by recent studies (see the article by
Sandrine Lefranc in this issue).
Creating a climate of terror is in some
cases to be placed within the more general con-
text of the reshaping – if not total restructur-
ing – of society. Determination to destroy the
foundations of the former system (and conse-
From massacre to the genocidal process
quently the men and women who are its
embodiment) is rooted in the will to build a new
system by all possible means. The ideological
conviction of leaders who promote such a polit-
ical scheme is thus decisive here. To assume
that the sole purpose of the diverse forms of
violence perpetrated against civilians is to instil
a climate of terror in this “new society” would
thus be far too simplistic an interpretation.
According to Uwe Makino, those forms are part
of a broader whole and are only one of the
techniques of social engineering aimed at com-
pletely transforming a society (Makino 2001).
Since this truly revolutionary scheme affects all
of society, it has to be expected that it will
make victims in all strata of that society. This
concept of social engineering is also employed
by Nicolas Werth in his interpretation of the
1932–1933 famine in Ukraine and of Stalin’s
great terror of the period from 1937 to 1938
(Werth, forthcoming). Under very different con-
ditions, one cannot help thinking also of the
era of the Chinese cultural revolution from this
perspective (Domenach 1992). It was probably
the Khmers Rouges in Cambodia who went
furthest down that route. However, what was
extraordinary – although fully consistent – about
the multifaceted process of the Cambodian
society’s destruction/subjugation was that it
went hand in hand with the plan for re-educat-
ing the Cambodians, with the organising of eve-
ning sessions of ideological education. This
shows that, in what was probably its most rad-
ical form, the mass massacre in Cambodia is
not synonymous with total extermination, the
actual purpose of the Khmers Rouges’ undertak-
ing being to re-educate those who were to be
spared or managed to survive.
Destroy in order to eradicate
The destruction/eradication dynamic is quite dif-
ferent. Its aim is not actual subjugation but
rather the elimination of a fairly extensive terri-
tory or community which is controlled or
coveted by a power. This involves “cleansing”
or “purifying” the area of the presence of
another, who is deemed undesirable and/or
dangerous. For this reason, the concept of
“eradication” appears particularly relevant since
its etymology conveys the idea of “severing
roots” or “removing from the earth”, in short
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439
“uprooting”, as would be said of a harmful
plant or contagious disease, except that, in this
case, the vast uprooting operation is directed at
an entire human community.
This identity-based destruction/eradication
process can also be connected with wars of
conquest. It is the meaning behind the popular
expression “get out of my way!”. The massacre
process, combined with rape and pillage, is the
means by which one makes one’s intentions
clear and consequently hastens the departure of
the “other”, who is deemed undesirable. The
partial destruction of the group and the effect
of the resulting terror are thus able to bring
about and accelerate such departure. This was,
for example, the practice employed by the Euro-
pean settlers in North America against the
Indian peoples, who were driven increasingly
further west, beyond the Mississippi. In the Bal-
kans, this forced movement of populations out
of a territory has been termed “ethnic cleans-
ing”, in particular to describe the operations
conducted mainly by Serbia and Croatia in the
early 1990s. But the methods used (slaughtering
people, burning villages, destroying religious
buildings, etc.) can be linked to earlier practices
in that region, at least since the nineteenth cen-
tury, in the context of the rise of nationalism
and the decline of the Ottoman Empire.
Here again, the processes at work in war-
fare can be re-employed in the internal govern-
ance of peoples. This is so in the full range of
ethnic conflicts studied by Andrew Bell-Fialkoff
(1996), Donald Horowitz (2000) and Norman
Naimark (2001). Generally speaking, they
involve the instrumental use of ethnic criteria
to underwrite a group’s political domination
over an entire community. Recourse to killing is
thus justified in order to finally solve a problem
regarded as insoluble.
This process can, however, take on an even
more radical form in the case of the total elim-
ination of a targeted community whose mem-
bers are not even allowed the chance to flee.
In such circumstances, the aim is to capture all
the individuals belonging to the community with
a view to their disappearance. The notion of a
“territory to be cleansed” becomes secondary in
relation to that of actual extermination. Some
colonial massacres were probably perpetrated
with that in mind, such as the little-known
slaughter of the Herero population in 1904 by
440
the German settlers in Namibia. I confess ignor-
ance of other relevant examples. We still know
far too little about colonial massacres, including
those perpetrated by France in the conquest of
Algeria during the nineteenth century.
It was, however, the leaders of Nazi Ger-
many who went furthest in the planned total
destruction of a community. The extermination
of the European Jews between 1941 and 1945,
which followed the partial elimination of men-
tally ill Germans, is the prototypical example
of this eradication process taken to the extreme.
In very different historical contexts, the same
can be said of the extermination of the Armeni-
ans within the Ottoman Empire in 1915 and
1916 and that of the Rwandan Tutsis in 1994.
The aim here was not to disperse a people
across other territories. It was, in Hannah
Arendt’s words, to cause it to disappear not just
from its own land but from the earth.
It is at this final stage of the eradication
process that the concept of genocide can be
reintroduced, this time as a social science term.
In general, the public at large sees genocide as
a form of large-scale massacre. Whenever the
death toll reaches several hundred thousand or
more probably several million, it would be poss-
ible to refer to a genocide. Such an intuitive
conception, which takes the large number of
victims as its yardstick, is not, however, charac-
teristic of genocidal behaviour. Moreover, no
expert could today say from how many deaths
upwards a genocide begins. What offers a more
reliable definition of genocide is a qualitative
criterion combined with this quantitative cri-
terion, i.e., the desire for total eradication of a
community. In this way, genocide comes within
the same continuum of destructiveness as ethnic
cleansing but is essentially distinguishable from
it. Their respective dynamics are indeed both
aimed at eradication. However, as pointed out
by Helen Fein (2001), in the case of the former
(ethnic cleansing), the departure or flight of the
targeted population is still possible, while in
that of the latter (genocide), all ways out are
barred. I would therefore define genocide as
such a specific process of civilian destruction
with a view to the total eradication of a com-
munity identified by criteria determined by
the perpetrator.
It is true that some authors apply the con-
cept of “genocide” to the entire spectrum or
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Jacques Sémelin
range of the destruction/eradication process and
thus regard ethnic cleansing as one form of geno-
cide. However, that approach appears to raise
many problems. I am therefore personally in fav-
our of a more restrictive view of the concept.
Conclusion
Such a restrictive definition of genocide is thus
at variance with the far broader definition
appearing in the United Nations Convention.
However, the definition proposed here is still
to some extent based on Raphael Lemkin’s orig-
inal conception, at least on the “essence of his
definition”, to use Eric Markusen’s words, i.e.,
the annihilation of a group as such. It is never-
theless clear that such a definition marks two
departures from earlier works.
First, the law is clearly no longer taken as
a starting-point. The reverse approach prevails,
i.e. examining the nature of extreme violence
at work in a historical situation in order to
determine whether the process of destruction is
ultimately aimed at the total eradication of a
community. Put differently, the possible categ-
orisation of a set of events as a “genocide”
comes at the end of the researcher’s analysis;
it is then for the researcher to discuss his or
her evaluation with that of the legal expert.
The other change has to do with the way
in which the concept of genocide is defined.
To refer to a “process” or “progression” is to
perceive genocide as a particular dynamic of
violence. This therefore departs from descriptive
or quasi-static conceptions that have to date
largely predominated in this area of study.
Those evaluations classify an act or event as a
“genocide” by means of an array of items: a,
b, c, d, etc. They are precisely the outcome of
the law and specifically of the United Nations
Convention.2 It would thus be better in all cases
to refer to a genocidal process in order to
emphasise the specific destruction/eradication
dynamic.
However, such reasoning is necessarily
further complicated by the fact that the
destruction/subjugation and destruction/eradication
processes can co-exist and even overlap within
one and the same historical situation by tar-
geting different groups. In general, one domi-
nates and the other is secondary. In Rwanda,
From massacre to the genocidal process 441

for example, 1994 saw a process of eradication
of the Rwandan Tutsis (which can thus be
classified as a genocide) and at the same time
the slaughtering of Hutu opponents of the
government (which thus constitutes a
destruction/subjugation process). Conversely,
the mass massacres in Cambodia clearly consti-
tuted a destruction/subjugation process (it is a
well-known fact that Pol Pot never sought to
destroy all the Khmers) but that destruction pro-
cess included certain eradication offensives
directed at specific groups (particularly the
Cham Muslim minority). Our work as analysts
is precisely to identify these different dynamics
of violence, which is often a very complex task,
since they may not only overlap but also change
over time, shifting, for example, from subju-
gation to eradication.
Translated from French

Notes

1. It would be possible to develop
here the idea of a third type of
objective, that of destabilisation
sought by non-state groups
perpetrating massacres for the
purpose of opposing a state or
political system. This is what is
commonly referred to as
“terrorism” but that term, the use of
which in a social science context is
as problematical as that of
genocide, needs to be
“deconstructed”, as Isabelle
Sommier does in this issue.
Whatever the case, the suicide
attacks of 11 September 2001 in
the United States constitute such a
dynamic of destruction.
2. Article II of the Convention
states that: “[G]enocide means any
of the following acts committed
with intent to destroy, in whole or
in part, a national, ethnical, racial
or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or
mental harm to members of the
group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the
group conditions of life calculated
to bring about its physical
destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to
prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of
the group to another group.”

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