CIAO DATE: 06/2009
November 2008
The New School Graduate Program in International Affairs
Human rights observers have a tendency to look at humanitarian crises as if they were frozen in time. Many unfolding genocides have gone unrecognized and unprevented because each death, each massacre, was treated as if it were a photograph, a snapshot to be compared in that instance against the definition of genocide. Genocide, however, is not an event. This paper will argue that genocide can be waged with a wide array of methods beyond direct and violent murder. In fact, there are more protracted, more ambiguously lethal means of extermination than machetes, guns or gas chambers. Many victims of historical genocides die from slower indirect and less immediately deadly methods of annihilation than outright murder. Genocide is a process that can unfold over several years, even decades. This paper proposes a notion of genocide by attrition that takes the usual linear (causal) accounts of mass death as its starting point and expands on them to suggest a more complex picture of genocidal processes. More specifically, this study aims to illuminate the concept of genocide by attrition in its proper legal and historical contexts, and identify indicators thereof through the lens of existing international human rights laws and obligations so as to assist legal, humanitarian and political actors in the difficult task of genocide identification and prevention. The paper will draw on empirical evidence from various cases of genocide by attrition to identify a set of attributes that allow a fresh rethinking of the process of genocide.
Resource link: Genocide by Attrition [PDF] - 293K