In the Shadow of Genocide: Ethnocide, Ethnic Cleansing, and International Order

Abstract

Internationally regarded as “the crime of crimes” in both legal and moral terms, the concept of genocide has towered over discussions of ethnic conflict and mass violence since the Second World War. This article shifts the focus away from genocide and onto the neglected yet illuminating conceptual politics that have unfolded in the shadow of genocide. I begin by recasting the post-war criminalization of genocide as a “strategy of containment” that has deflected attention away from the constitutive contradictions of the international order, especially its long history of racial and colonial violence. The remainder of the article then explores how this strategy of containment has been both challenged and reinforced through the articulation of ethnocide and ethnic cleansing as supplementary categories. Since the late 1960s, the concept of ethnocide has been mobilized by the indigenous rights movement as a way of foregrounding the cultural destruction that has accompanied the onward march of modernity and development. In contrast, the concept of ethnic cleansing has been popularized by powerful members of the international community as a way of chastising particular “deviant” states without burdening themselves with the responsibility to intervene or calling into question the universalistic civilizational standards that underpin the international order. If the charge of ethnocide has sought to undo some of the containments and closures of genocide discourse, then the charge of ethnic cleansing has served to reinforce them. The article concludes by proposing the “ethnic century” as a world-historical lens for thinking about the post-war international order.