From massacre to the genocidal process

Since the time of Raphael Lemkin's work, genocide studies have been conducted primarily at the intersection of law and social science. As a result, the term ‘genocide’ has frequently been employed in a normative sense, leading to considerable conceptual difficulties and debate. How can such problems be overcome? This article comes down firmly in favour of moving away from a legal approach to genocide studies. It recommends the use of non‐normative vocabulary based on the concept of ‘massacre’, this term being suggested as a reference lexical unit. It also puts forward the more general expression ‘destruction process’, whose most dramatic form is massacre. Massacre is not an act of actual ‘madness’ but the response to what the author calls ‘delusional rationality’. In that respect, he distinguishes between two destruction strategies: one aimed at a group's subjugation and the other at its eradication. It is in the latter case that one can refer to a genocidal process. This article thus considers that genocide should not be defined as a static concept but viewed rather as a particular dynamic of civilian destruction, being the product of both its perpetrators' will and of favourable circumstances.