Genocide as Fact and Form

ABSTRACT

In June 2019 Canada's National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls released its final report. This short Reflection focuses on the National Inquiry's supplementary legal analysis, which concerns the law of genocide. I contend that this analysis is correct in holding that the murder and disappearance of large numbers of Indigenous women, girls, and other persons ought to be understood as an ongoing crime facilitated by specific policy choices, legal decisions, and socio-economic structures. I also contend that the systemic, recurrent, and large-scale nature of this crime is best captured by the term “genocide.” I argue that formal legal definitions of “genocide” such as the one offered in the 1948 Genocide Convention, though conceptually clunky, historically contingent, and politically inadequate, are key to illuminating some of the structural forces underlying and animating a range of events that may otherwise appear unrelated. Genocide, the ultimate collectivist crime, is a concept of preponderantly legal origin, which means that serious consideration must be given to its specifically legal definition when trying to determine whether it is justifiable or appropriate to apply it to a given social phenomenon. Its standard legal definition may be unable to do justice to the specificities of different modes of group violence, but its abstract generality is also what enables those who employ it to highlight the intrinsically systemic character of such destruction. Ultimately, I suggest that Canada's genocide “debate” turns on the relation between “law” and “society”—the question, that is, of how precisely a legal definition is to be interpreted and applied under different, and often rapidly changing, social conditions.