Genocide – A Redeemable Concept? A Reply to Martin Shaw

Martin Shaw intends to solve the problems of genocide – to make it a ‘serious sociological and legal concept’ – by clarifying the war-genocide relationship that he sees muddied by its critics, including me in The Problems of Genocide. He agrees with my analysis that Raphael Lemkin introduced incoherence into his new concept of genocide by combining discrimination, persecution, ‘crippling’, and extermination. We also concur that the essence of genocide is the targeted destruction of an enemy civilian population as opposed to its armed forces. That is what genocide ‘adds’ to our conceptualization of criminality. It can be distinguished from war crimes and crimes against humanity thus: ‘when perpetrators see civilian populations as distinct enemies and direct violence against them for that reason, this is different from targeting civilians as a means of pressuring an armed enemy, let alone from what is often called “collateral damage.”