Beyond the Event: Challenging the Hegemonic Account of Genocide

Article 1 A Genealogy of Genocide: The Politics of Genocide in Canada The politics of genocide is comprised of the many discourses, contestations, rhetorical strategies and manoeuvres that shape how the concept of genocide is mobilized in the sphere of global governance. These political mobilizations establish the limits of the concept and dictates how genocide is defined deployed in global governance settings. Crucially, the politics of genocide determines the conditions of possibility through which violence may become intelligible as genocide. Over time, the politics of genocide has produced a hegemonic understanding of what can be understood and politicized as genocide. This account has been normalized, constructed as a common-sense interpretation of what constitutes genocide, and who is capable of perpetrating genocide. It rests on tacit assumptions that genocide is, and has always been, a self-evident concept that involves mass murder, static notions of identity, and a presumption that human action is driven by intent. This article outlines the development of the hegemonic account of genocide keyed to the Canadian experience and explores the particular role of Canada in the negotiations, ascendance and deployment of the hegemonic account of genocide. I argue that critical historical moments of discursive closure occurred during the development of the hegemonic account, and these closures have had an ongoing and stifling impact on our understanding of genocide, foreclosing any possibilities of genocide being understood otherwise. These closures have created the conditions by which certain experiences of genocide have been overlooked, excluded or even erased. The impacts of these exclusions are explored in the Canadian context as they pertain to wider issues of global governance. While the politics of genocide is often overshadowed in a field preoccupied by actual events of mass violence, or with preventing and responding to episodes of mass lethal violence, studying it is critically important because of the enduring power of this dominant account of genocide over political life. Article 2 Beyond the ‘Event’: A More Expansive Understanding of Genocide The customary understanding of genocide, as it has been applied both in international law and within the scholarly literature, generally pivots on hyper-visible events of mass physical destruction, frequently represented by reference to casualty figures. These events erupt with an identifiable beginning, proceed with a campaign of mass exterminatory violence against members of a specific group in substantial numbers, and terminate in a clear and decisive manner. This conventional understanding, however, is highly restrictive of who, and what, counts, and is inadequate to capture the plethora of experiences of genocide that exist beyond the scope of an event. Adherence to the hegemonic account has led to a particular understanding of how genocides are perpetrated, and further, how they end. However, genocidaires frequently rely on strategies of genocide that are often overlooked in the normative framing of the crime, and structural, slow, or indirect forms of genocide persist even in the absence of an easily identifiable perpetrator. This article offers a critique of the hegemonic account of genocide by highlighting these unconventional and/or unseen strategies of genocide and broadens understanding of the crime itself, and the many, nuanced ways that it can unfold. This critique further reveals alternative processes of destruction that challenge orthodox assumptions about how genocides ‘end’ as well. Article 3 Consistency and Change in Canada’s Official Narrative of Genocide States are perpetually constructing, and reconstructing, stories about their histories which they strategically use to build national identity and claims to political legitimacy. State narratives have an enduring impact on both domestic and international politics and inform how national communities understand themselves and their history. At times states harbour troubled histories in which large-scale or systematic human rights abuses have occurred for which the state bears complete or partial responsibility. Canada’s treatment of Indigenous peoples constitutes one such troubled past. In 2022, the House of Commons unanimously passed a motion recognizing the violence of Canada’s Indian Residential Schools as genocide. This was not the first time the term genocide had been deployed in Canada to describe violence against Indigenous peoples, however the bipartisan support for this motion appeared to mark a rhetorical reversal for many lawmakers. A similar motion was presented only one year prior but failed to pass, leading one to question: What provokes these narrative changes and how should they be interpreted? This article explores the evolution of Canada’s official narrative of genocide and tracks the political forces, both domestic and international, that have influenced it. The study is divided into two sections, first outlining a period of consistency between 1948-1990, during which the state narrative on genocide was characterized by disregard and avoidance. Next, the period between 1990-2022, marked by significant development and change in the official narrative of genocide. These narratives have been strategically deployed to banish perceptions of state complicity in criminal action, rationalize the seizure of Indigenous lands and children, and justify ongoing relations of discrimination and oppression. Tracing this narrative development will demonstrate that the motion does not signal a sudden reckoning with past wrongs. Rather, the content and context of Canada’s narrative suggests signs of consistency and continuity rather than transformation. Article 4 How do Genocides End?: Three Alternative Scenarios of Genocide Endings Genocides are commonly described with reference to casualty figures, often used to illustrate both the scale and scope of an atrocity. Measuring genocide in this manner is consistent with the hegemonic understanding of genocide which frames genocide as an event of mass, lethal violence. However, this preoccupation with casualty leaves much of the violence of genocide beyond recognition. Further, it implies that genocides are always terminal – not only in the sense that they must invariably result in wide-scale physical death, but also assuming the processes themselves necessarily do end. This article presents an alternative framing, instead proposing that not all cases conform to these assumptions. Using case studies, this article will present three alternative scenarios which are not necessarily conventionally recognized as genocide at all, but which nevertheless produce group destruction in a variety of complicated ways. Each of the scenarios occur outside the scope of a temporally bounded event of mass lethal group destruction, and do not necessarily require physical destruction as the exclusive endpoint, or goal. The scenarios explore persistent systems and structures of genocide, conditions of ‘long dyings’ and belated casualty, and conditions where genocides mutate or evolve in ways that victims of previous campaigns themselves become perpetrators, or whereby geopolitical circumstances created by one genocide generate a continuum of genocidal destruction in geographically distinct locales. Understanding these scenarios as processes of ongoing genocide requires us to complicate our accepted assumptions about genocide and denaturalize the dichotomy between fast and slow violence. In bringing these insights to the fore, this study will show that in some cases genocides do not end at all, but persist in often insidious ways that perpetuate group destruction, often long beyond the point where the killing stops, the bodies are counted, and the world has looked away.

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