Few concepts can match the emotive power of genocide. Considered as the “crime of crimes,” it has generated a plethora of highly contentious exchanges on its meaning and analytical relevance for understanding and addressing the worst forms of mass violence. According to many analysts, there is a considerable gap between its routine invocation and its ability to live up to expectations of prevention, suppression, and punishment. This gap has led to an ongoing quest to dissect the term, unpack its constitutive elements, and problematize existing and hidden assumptions that constrain its analytical reach.

Benjamin Meiches’s The Politics of Annihilation joins this ongoing debate by offering a critical look at the discursive transformation of the concept and the ensuing complex relationship between the changes in this discourse and their productive effects. The book is divided into two sections informed by a crucial distinction: the “distinction between the politics of genocide and genocide as politics” (p. 9). According to the author, the former refers to the historical shifts and the resulting multiplicity of discourses and dissimulations associated with the concept of genocide, and the latter “to a mode of political practice or activity that employs a variety of forms of mass violence to target and destroy groups” (p. 9). The key issues in his study relate to the discursive transformation of genocide from a complex/inclusive vision of emergent violence to a more exclusive/restrictive language privileging hegemonic standards of identity and intentionality, as well as the effects of the resulting/dominant understanding of genocide on contemporary practices of mass violence and atrocity prevention policy.

In his examination of discursive developments, the author draws on Michel Foucault’s concept of genealogy. Genealogy frames his main argument about the process by which the initial conceptual pluralism in genocide, manifested in the work of Raphael Lemkin, became gradually restricted as a result of historical forces that sought to assert dominance over the corresponding legal framework. His examination of the concept and its transformations also draws on Gilles Deleuze’s sense, which refers to an assemblage (a complex formation of concepts and various entities in a political system) that acts as a supplement and holds together what are in essence discrete processes. The latter concept is, in the author’s view, particularly important in explaining the creation, alteration, and contemporary appeal of the genocide discourse in politics. These lenses converge on his examination of the four key elements in genocide: groups, the whole/parts distinction, destruction, and desire. The process by which these elements were interpreted and brought together in an assemblage that produced exclusions led to the formation of a static taxonomy that the author terms “the hegemonic understanding of genocide” (p. 12).

Meiches goes to great lengths to demonstrate the troubling effects of the prevailing understanding of the concept. The problem emerged with the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention (UNGC), “which transformed Raphael Lemkin’s vision of genocide into a stable definition tied to specific acts and historical legacies” (p. 12). As a result, other forms of mass violence that do not involve the protected groups (national, ethnical, racial, or religious), do not meet the high bar set by the intentionality criterion (dolus specialis), and cannot be coded “as a kind of failure or breakdown of pluralist, liberal, or democratic structures” (p. 95), do not register on genocide’s radar screen. Although there are elements in the Convention that may provide openings for broader interpretations (for example, the forcible transfer of children from the targeted group to another group), these have been consigned to the periphery of or excluded from the dominant discourse, as have past extermination campaigns in settler colonial states such as Canada, the United States and Australia, as well as other forms of structural violence. These instances of structural violence have been well documented in a number of studies, most recently by Jeffrey Ostler in Surviving Genocide (2019).

The main contribution of Meiches’s study lies in the rich critical theoretical framework in which he situates his analysis of the conceptual tensions and politically vexing issues nested within the dominant paradigm of genocide. One of the most intriguing insights he offers relates to the manner in which “multiple forms of cruelty” appear during the unfolding of destructive processes—forms, whose “disorienting and horrifying effects” on the victims, including the victims’ own survival, constitute a manifestation of the “creative potential” inherent in these processes. As he aptly notes, the Women’s Orchestra in Auschwitz is not a peripheral but rather a key moment in the genocidal process and thus critical to our understanding of the Holocaust (pp. 134–136).

Although I agree with several of the author’s analytical insights, I would question certain aspects of this exercise in critical dissection and its ability to register its resistance to the prevailing dogma in a politically effective way.

First, even the existing definition of genocide, grounded in a rigid taxonomy of protected groups and dolus specialis, does not offer the promised protection. Nothing exemplifies this better than the Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Serbia and Montenegro case before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) (https://www.icj-cij.org/files/case-related/91/13687.pdf). Although this decision has been subjected to many criticisms, what stand out in the context of the current argument are the “isolation” of Srebrenica as the only place where genocide actually took place and the decision not to find Serbia responsible for complicity in genocide, despite the level of assistance/support it provided to Bosnian Serb forces. Apparently, for the majority of the Court, the available evidence on the relation between the Serbian government and the Bosnian Serb forces could support a finding of failure to prevent, but not a finding of complicity in genocide. It is hard to escape the conclusion that political considerations played a part in the court’s decision. It is also important to add here that much of the criticism of this decision has come from analysts who are conceptually situated within the parameters of the dominant understanding (see Susana SaCouto, “Reflections on the Judgment of the International Court of Justice in Bosnia’s Genocide Case against Serbia and Montenegro,” Human Rights Brief, 15(1), 2007).

A second concern relates to the fact that the silencing of certain forms of violence is not confined to genocide. Meiches cites Akhavan’s observation that the dominant framework is the result of a desire to reduce “genocide to the cage of legal terminology” (Payam Akhavan, Reducing Genocide to Law, 2014). This is absolutely correct, but it is a problem that afflicts the broader human rights discourse of which genocide is a part. After all, in strictly legal terms, genocide emerged from the persecution type of crimes against humanity as they were defined in article 6(c) of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal. The inability of a “legally caged” concept to register forms of slow and systemic violence is not alien to human rights. On the contrary, critical scholars examining the human rights discourse have noted the stranglehold exercised on it by international law. Tony Evans, for example, who draws, as does Meiches, heavily on Foucault’s work, has argued that the international legal discourse, with its emphasis on civil and political rights and reflecting “market discipline,” has displaced the philosophical and political discourses on human rights; it has managed to provide the “authentic” voice, “although this voice has little to say about power and interests associated with the dominant conception of human rights” (Tony Evans, “International Human Rights Law as Power/Knowledge,” Human Rights Quarterly, 27(3), 2005).

This brings me to my third point. The discourse on genocide and the concomitant patterns of inclusion and exclusion that it produces are embedded in existing institutional mechanisms and processes designed to address situations of mass violence. Although I agree with Meiches that the genocide discourse “plays an important role as a justification for the development of new mechanisms of intervention,” I would add that it also excludes a more comprehensive understanding of the role of other key actors, like international financial institutions, in generating violence. Contrary to the prevailing narrative that the Global North is reluctantly drawn to the killing fields of the Global South, a reluctance that stems in part from the fact that it is not responsible for the unfolding massacres, the work of analysts like Chossudovsky on the former Yugoslavia and of Uvin on Rwanda has shown that the Global North, through structural adjustment programs (International Monetary Fund) and program aid (World Bank and the African Development Bank), respectively, was very much “present at the creation” (Michel Chossudovsky, “Dismantling Former Yugoslavia; Recolonizing Bosnia,” Economic and Political Weekly, 2 March 1996; Peter Uvin, Aiding Violence: The Development Enterprise in Rwanda, 1998).

The key element that underscores all these points is that the prevailing discourse, constructed and advanced by considerations of power politics and “market discipline,” will most likely withstand the critical dissection of its exclusionary premises.

These concerns notwithstanding, this book is a welcome and timely contribution to the ongoing scholarly debate. It will reinforce those counter-hegemonic voices that seek to expose the deliberate exclusion of certain histories of violence from the dominant discourse and to alert us to both the political and moral implications of this exclusion, including the undermining of the concept’s capacity “to articulate the emergence of novel destructive processes” (p. 15).