The Devil in the Details: "Life Force Atrocities" and the Assault on the Family in Times of Conflict

This article introduces the idea of “life force atrocities” and investigates the role they have played in twentieth-century genocides, arguing that genocide is a gendered crime intimately associated with institutions of reproduction. Using examples from established cases of genocide, such as the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, Bosnia, and Rwanda, as well as from conflicts not generally understood as genocides, such as Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the article outlines two types of life force atrocities that have been common features of these conflicts: inversion rituals and ritual desecrations. Each of these instances of ritualized atrocity targets the family unit within victim groups and betrays a preoccupation with the group's life force in its physical and symbolic dimensions. Since life force atrocities play on gender roles and hierarchies to torture family members, this article focuses on the relational way in which genocidaires instrumentalize gendered violence to destro...