Raphaël Lemkin, Originator of the word “genocide” and leader of the global movement to outlaw genocide at the United Nations.
Raphaël Lemkin did not define genocide as an act of mass killing. He saw genocide as a type of conflict that sometimes escalated into direct violence, but not always. In Lemkin’s analysis of genocide, we find a theory of group destruction that involves systems of repression and oppression, direct and indirect violence, structural and cultural violence, a direct link between the economic destruction of targeted groups and their cultural suppression, and the denial of the victims’ right to exist because of their social identity—all in an effort to eradicate group identities from the fabric of society.
Yet, genocide was often committed by people who did not think they were committing genocide, and often held no hate in their hearts. For Lemkin, what made genocide so difficult to prevent was that it involved “countless small and different actions that, when taken separately, constituted different crimes, or sometimes did not constitute a crime at all, but when taken together constituted a type of atrocity that threatened the existence of social collectivities and threatened the peaceful social order of the world.”
genocide is a gradual process and may begin with political disenfranchisement, economic displacement, cultural undermining and control, the destruction of leadership, the break-up of families and the prevention of propagation. Each of these methods is a more or less effective means of destroying a group. Actual physical destruction is the last and most effective phase of genocide”
— Lemkin, Introduction to the Study of Genocide
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