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Volume 65, Issue 3
  • ISSN: 0043-5414
  • E-ISSN: 1875-709X

Abstract

Abstract

In this article, I discuss how the complicity of Western countries to the genocide in Gaza relates to conceptual, historical and legal problems surrounding the concept of genocide in relation to extreme acts of war against minorities and in particular violence against indigenous peoples. I reflect on the problems of the concept of genocide by discussing in detail in a 2021 book by Dirk Moses, entitled . Firstly, the article discusses the core problem that Moses identifies: the historically developed concept of genocide incompletely describes the context and motivation for large-scale violence against civilians in modernity, thereby obscuring atrocity crimes in colonial and broader imperial contexts. The second section traces a development in the work of Raphael Lemkin, who introduced the concept of genocide in 1944. His original concept, which focused on colonialism, was narrowed during the negotiations on the 1948 Genocide Convention, and even more so when the Holocaust increasingly became the model for genocide. In the third section, I discuss how awareness of this history can support the recognition of genocide in Gaza. I critique Moses' concepts of ‘permanent security’ and ‘genocide by the oppressed’ and briefly compare them with Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian's work on ‘security theology’.

© Yolande Jansen
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/content/journals/10.5117/WP2025.3.002.JANS
2025-07-01
2025-12-05
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/content/journals/10.5117/WP2025.3.002.JANS
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Keyword(s): Dirk Moses; genocide; omnicide; permanent security; Raphael Lemkin; security theology

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