Escaping Genocide's Gravity

Genocide is a troubling candidate for apex crime in international criminal law. Genocide's shortcomings have long been noted: its problematic definition and its narrow focus, as well as its distorting effects on other crimes and on political responses to violent crises. Most critically, genocide invokes a moral grammar radically out of step with the individual logic of human rights and international criminal law. Genocide, first defined in the interwar period, presumes organic national identities and thereby essentialises victims while reifying culture, ethnicity, and race. In genocide's moral universe, individuals are not victims, but evidence of an abstract crime against a nation. Without genocide weighing atop it, the modern order might be more manageable and morally rational—or, at least, it might be clearer just how limited the prospects for a truly legal order are. While it seems hard to imagine escaping genocide's gravitational pull, recognising just how ill-fitting this crime is constitutes a pivotal first step towards confronting the real possibilities and limits of law.