In his influential essay, Maybury-Lewis (2000) contends that colonial encounters between the European and non-European world regularly descended into mass violence and campaigns of extermination. His analysis and use of the term “colonial genocide” (ibid., 47) is controversial within academia and has incited a debate over its appropriateness, usefulness, and existence (e.g., Schabas 2009; Moses 2021). This essay constitutes a decolonial intervention in the debate at hand. My contention is that, similar to the term ‘cultural genocide’, while ‘colonial genocide’ can be said to technically exist, it is a tautological denomination. Genocide, whether occurring in metropoles or in the periphery, is informed by an intrinsically colonial frame of knowledge and understanding. The implied distinction between genocide proper and colonial genocide is a modernist obfuscation, a subtle erasure of the phenomenon’s modernist/colonial origins.

In the first section, I critically assess the debate in the literature over whether genocide is an ancient or a modern phenomenon. I argue that the targets of genocide—‘national, ethnical, racial and religious groups’—are (or have become) denominations of essentialised difference, a modernist notion, and thereby concur with the latter camp that genocide is a child of modernity. In the second section, building on insights from decolonial scholars, I contend that the co-constitutive relationship between modernity and coloniality on a global scale has created an epistemic frame suffused with colonial assumptions. Thus, the mens rea of genocide must be understood as informed by a pensée unique, the modern/colonial mindset whose ‘irrational myths’ facilitate dehumanising discourses, marking genocide innately colonial. In the final section, I briefly summarise the scholarly debate around the appropriateness of the term ‘colonial genocide’ before critically applying my findings. I conclude that the term ‘colonial genocide’ is tautological since genocide is intrinsically colonial.

Genocide as a child of modernity

To demonstrate the intrinsically colonial character of genocide, I must begin by addressing and positioning myself within the scholarly debate over whether to characterise genocide as a crime of recurrent antiquity or a modern phenomenon. In this section, by arguing that modernist ideologies inform genocide of essentialised difference, I advance my argument as a resident of the latter camp. Having thus established its modernist character, the following section contends that the colonial undercurrents of modernity shape the mens rea of genocide, marking it not just modernist but innately colonial as well.

In his sociological account of genocide, Kuper (1981, 11) famously states that “the word is new, the crime ancient”. Thus understood, while the term ‘genocide’ is a recent innovation, the mens rea and actus reus—the mental and physical element—underwriting the intentional eradication of an entire people stretches back to antiquity. In a similar vein, Lemkin (as quoted in Moses 2010), who coined the term in 1944, vehemently argued that genocide is an ancient crime, a relapse into barbarity that recurs periodically throughout history. Thus, the destruction of Carthage in 146 BCE, the crusades of the 11th to 13th centuries, and the Holocaust constitute but a handful of examples of at least forty-one recorded genocides that Lemkin intended to chronicle in a book left unfinished by his death in 1959 (Meierhenrich 2014, 19-20). In arguing that genocide is an old crime with an extensive genealogy, Lemkin (and later Kuper) challenged the widespread assumption that the Holocaust, as the paradigmatic genocide, was a unique and aberrant phenomenon (ibid.). In accordance, Bauer (2001, 97) states that while the attempted destruction of the European Jewry was “unprecedented”, there was “little (…) unique about the Nazis except that they went further than their predecessors”. The thought of Lemkin, Kuper, and Bauer is representative of a wider camp within genocide studies, contending that genocide in the modern world (since the ‘discovery’ of the New World in 1492) may differ in scale, but not kind, from campaigns of systematic annihilation throughout human history.[1]

While the problematisation of the ‘unique’ status of the Holocaust has, in general, been academically appreciated and accepted (e.g., Rosenbaum 2009; Huttenbach 2017), the contention that modern-day genocide can be characterised as part of an ancient, recurring pattern has sparked fierce debate. Most notably, an influential branch of the literature argues that genocide, far from a reversion to barbarity, is a product of modernity. A notoriously fuzzy concept, I define modernity as a historical condition, brought about by the colonial encounter between Europeans and non-Europeans that began in the fifteenth century, emphasising the overarching notions of progress and civilisation (Mignolo 2007). Alongside ideals of secular government, capitalist expansion and scientific rationalism, modernity is informed by totalising ideologies (e.g., race, gender, nation) that reify essentialised difference as the central feature of modern society (Hinton 2002). Certain scholars thus argue that genocide is “the dark side of modernity”, occurring as the result of taking biologistic ideas of racialised difference and national purity to their logical conclusion (ibid., 1). Bauman (1989), for example, argues that while the Lemkian challenge to the ‘uniqueness’ thesis is a welcome one, the Holocaust was unique to modernity. Thus, the highly technological and bureaucratic nature of the killings and the pseudoscientific rationales of racial purity motivating them mark the Holocaust as not a reversion to “pre-modern barbarity” but a “legitimate resident in the house of modernity” (ibid., 134).

Similarly, Mann (2005) argues that modern notions of civilisation, progress and democracy are deeply implicated in the crime of ‘murderous ethnic cleansing’, of which genocide is a subset. In the context of modernity, democracy—rule by the people—has developed genocidal tendencies as the demos and dominant ethnos of a population become intertwined (ibid.). Organic conceptions of the nation predispose a people to conceive it as necessary to cleanse themselves of the ethnic Other, the uncivilised minority, in the name of progress (ibid., 168). The modernist concept of ‘essentialised difference’ has been taken as a key feature of virtually all modern genocides, see, for example, Weitz (2003), Mamdani (2001) and Banac (2006). These scholars thus represent an opposing camp in the genocide literature, considering modern genocide to be different in scale and kind from campaigns of annihilation that occurred before 1492.

In this regard, I broadly concur with this second camp that genocide is a child of modernity. Most problematically, the contention that genocides are lapses into barbarity lends credibility to culturalist explanations of their stemming from primordial nature, or ‘ancient ethnic hatreds’. These simplified descriptions have been repeatedly invoked by Western politicians and commentators to stress the inevitability of—and their lack of control over—genocides in supposedly underdeveloped regions, such as Bosnia-Herzegovina and Rwanda (Hinton 2002, 22-23; New York Times 1994). Such chauvinistic notions abrogate responsibility and obfuscate the fact that, as a deeply ideological crime, genocide cannot be understood without reference to the constitutive role played by modernist notions of essentialised difference. The legal definition, though rightly criticised for its shortcomings, has merit for stressing that genocide is carried out against a “national, ethnical, racial or religious group” (ICC 2000). Ethnicity, by definition, is immutable. The concepts of race and nation are intersubjective fantasies, social constructs which emerged out of 1700s Europe as the advance of modernity cast ideas of human kinship, difference and hierarchy into mutually exclusive, static containers (Weitz 2003, 71). The totalising effect of modernity has even seen the racialisation of religion, turning a fluid creed into an unconvertible matter of biology (Bartov and Mack 2001, 143). Thus, ethnicity, race, nation, and religion have all become denominations of essentialised difference. Genocide occurs after an outside force discursively constructs an existential threat as emanating from these (presumed) unchanging groups. This deeply modernist dynamic differentiates genocide from similar atrocities, such as campaigns of extermination in the pre-modern world. Here, Mettraux’s (2005) distinction between ‘extermination as a crime against humanity’ and ‘genocide’ helps shed explanatory light. Even when absolute, the systematic annihilation of a people—as occurred, for example, in ancient Carthage and was attempted against the European Jewry during the First Crusade—does not automatically constitute genocide (Chazan 1987). While the actus reus of genocide certainly has a long pedigree and is impacted by local particularities, it is not genocidal without the accompanying mens rea (and vice versa). The destruction of an ancient or medieval people may appear like genocide on paper, but this mistakes the presence of the actus reus for the presence of the actus reus and the mens rea. It is the mens rea of genocide, established above as informed by modernist ideologies of essentialised difference, which fundamentally sets it apart (Mettraux 2005, 342).

Moreover, this section established the modernist character of genocide by reference to the constitutive role played by ideologies of essentialised difference. In the following section, I argue that modernity is (re-)produced by its dialectical relation with the colonial alterity. As co-constitutive of modernity, ‘coloniality’ does not merely impact the mens rea of genocide but brings it into being. This marks genocide as an innately colonial phenomenon.

Modernity/coloniality: two sides of the same coin

In the aforementioned paragraphs, I situated my argument within the camp of literature that holds genocide to be a modernist phenomenon. While these authors make periodic reference to genocide in colonial settings and the role of racial ideology in core and periphery (e.g., Hinton 2002), the literature has largely neglected how the epistemic frame of modernity in toto is soaked in colonial assumptions. In this section, by arguing that the mens rea of genocide is shaped by ‘coloniality’, I demonstrate that ‘colonial genocide’ is not a subset of genocide proper, but archetypal of all genocide. The ensuing section thus argues that the term ‘colonial genocide’ is a modernist obfuscation, tautological and misleading.

Interestingly, Maybury-Lewis (2002, 43) contends that ‘colonial genocide’—a term he helped popularise—was not entirely new but rather “added a bloody chapter to the history of [a very old outrage]”. Similarly, Hinton (2002, 27)—though stating that genocide is ‘the dark side of modernity’—argues that genocidal behaviours “have an ancient pedigree”. While genocide is thus seen as a modernist phenomenon, part of its genealogy is traced beyond the colonial encounter between Europeans and non-Europeans, making it not uniquely novel. I argue that this is somewhat mistaken logic. It constitutes, first and foremost, another instance of the fallacious assumption that the pre-modern presence of the actus reus of genocide is automatically accompanied by its mens rea as well. This fallacy is a result of the genocide literature not fully considering that coloniality permeates the epistemic frame of modernity and thus the phenomenon of genocide. I define coloniality as a system of knowledge and understanding created and subsequently consolidated by the colonial encounter between Europeans and non-Europeans. As the constitutive side of modernity, colonial epistemology stresses organo-logical images of social totality and has, as its key element of social classification, the invented category of race (Quijano 2007).[2] Racism, as a cognitive operation of Othering, institutionalises the superiority of the European Subject as inextricably linked to the inferiority of the colonial Object (Mignolo 2007, 479). Differences between human beings thus become essentialised through the naturalisation of totalising ideologies which endure and proliferate beyond formal colonial rule (Quijano 2007, 170). It is this concept of essentialised difference—which Mignolo (2007, 454) labels an “irrational myth”—that becomes the justification for genocide.

Furthermore, decolonial scholarship stresses the co-constitutive relationship between modernity and coloniality (hereafter modernity/coloniality) and its effect on the cognition of people under its philosophy. Modernity/coloniality is a pensée unique, a totalitarian mindset that cannot fathom knowledge beyond its confines (Ramonet 1995). European philosophy is replete with the logic of thesis/antithesis—as evident in metaphors such as anarchy/hierarchy, war/peace, and public/private—reflecting a “deeply embedded dualistic way of thinking” (Qin 2016, 39). This inherent dualism featured heavily in the re-shaping of human kinship and difference at the onset of modernity/coloniality. Dussel (1993, 65) alerts us to the fact that modernity is a “European phenomenon but one constituted in a dialectical relation with a non-European alterity that is its ultimate content”.

Consequently, this ‘non-European alterity’ is not reducible to a matter of skin colour or origin but is an exogenously given denomination applied as a marker of essentialised difference to any group believed to be mutually exclusive of the Self. In other words, the modernist Self is constructed against the colonial Other. Crucially, modernity stresses humanity as a socially homogeneous totality, but coloniality categorically denies the admission of the ‘non-European alterity’ into this organic whole (Quijano 2007). Maybury-Lewis (2002, 51) reminds us that “genocide everywhere depends on the perpetrators’ dehumanizing their intended victims, establishing them as radically alien creatures who deserve to be eliminated”. The deeply colonial dynamic of denying the colonial Other the status of human proper—of casting groups of essentialised difference as simultaneously abject and object, inhuman and non-human—is central to this genocidal dehumanisation. The mens rea of genocide is thus revealed as brought into being by the epistemic frame, the pensée unique, of modernity/coloniality.

In this vein, I do not mean to suggest a total caesura between campaigns of extermination on either side of 1492. Genocidal mentalities and concomitant violence do have pre-modern antecedents, and Self-Other dialectics certainly existed before the colonial encounter. Rather, the specific Self-Other dialectics of coloniality epistemically reconfigured these mentalities, gradually creating specific cognitive patterns that make the mens rea of genocide discernibly modernist (Sabaratnam 2020, 21). In his aptly titled book The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, Todorov (1999) details how the encounter between the European Self and the colonial Other quickly descended into genocide. The indigenous American population was instantly demarcated as an exteriority to the organic whole of humanity, as to consider them remotely human was incompatible with the dualistic common sense of the European pensée unique. The non-humanity of the colonial Other affirmed the humanity of the Spaniards. Resultantly, there was “nothing atavistic or bestial” about the genocide carried out against the indigenous peoples of the New World (ibid., 183). Rather, it was the modernist/colonial epistemic frame, unleashed by the colonial encounter, which essentialised the difference between European Self and colonial Other and facilitated the dehumanising mens rea of genocide.

Thus interpreted, the genocide by the conquistadores “reveals not a primitive nature” but rather “heralds the advent of modern times” (ibid.). The colonial distinction between the European Self (human) and colonial Other (non-human) recurs throughout the subsequent history of genocide. During the 1904-08 Namaqua/Ovaherero genocide, for example, Imperial German delegate zu Reventlow (as cited in Madley 2005, 441) notoriously stated that “not every being with a human face is human”. But not only genocides in the obvious context of colonising perpetrator and colonised victim evince the logic of essentialised difference. The 1975–79 Cambodian genocide, the 1994 Rwandan genocide, and the 1995 Bosnian genocide all serve as illustrative examples. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge successfully blended communism and racism, turning class into an immutable racial category (Weitz 2003). In Rwanda, the Tutsi were rendered as racially different aliens to and by the ‘indigenous’ Hutu (Mamdani 2001). In Bosnia, the Serb leadership conceived of the Bosnian minority as a racial and national Other, threatening the identity and unity of ‘Greater Serbia’ (Banac 2006). Thus, all three genocides unfolded from mental and discursive terrain suffused by colonial legacies of essentialised identity and the non-human Other.

Perhaps the clearest example of the pervasive effect of modernity/coloniality is the racialisation of antisemitism in Europe. As mentioned above, the attempted destruction of the European Jewry during the First Crusade in the 11th century has been considered by some scholars an example of pre-modern genocide. Crucially, however, the crusaders placed heavy emphasis on the principle of conversion as the preferred solution to this medieval incarnation of the ‘Jewish Question’ (Chazan 1987, 219). Judaism had not been racialised; it was not yet a denomination of essentialised difference. Historiographical circles have long debated over where in German history one can locate the origins of the radical antisemitism which resulted in the Holocaust. Some scholars have pointed to individuals such as Adolf Stöcker and Heinrich von Treitschke, whose contributions to the 1879-1881 Berliner Antisemitismusstreit [Berlin antisemitism conflict] have been considered the “starting point of a maldevelopment (…) which ended in the ‘Third Reich’ and Auschwitz” (Hoffmann 2005, 63). But in the 19th century, German antisemitism was still, by and large, framed in civic terms, emphasising conversion to Christianity as the preferred way to liberate Jews and make them German (Geismann 1993, 10; Meyer 1966, 142).

Moreover, it was the colonial experience of Imperial Germany (in places like Namibia and Tanzania) in the larger context of the encounter with the colonial Other that saw the emergence of a gradual cognitive process in which ‘racial thinking’ became part of the commonsense of pre-existing structures of discrimination. Arguing against this, Meierhenrich (2014, 37) contends that in Nazi Germany “racial ideology was of considerably less significance to the development of genocidal violence than is commonly thought”. However, the impact of ‘racial thinking’ on antisemitism did not amount to an immediate equation between Black colonial subjects and European Jews. Rather, the epistemic frame of modernity/coloniality and its accompanying ideologies of essentialised difference exerted an implicit, but pervasive effect on the psyche of the European Self. References to the racial and thus unconvertible character of Jews increased exponentially in Germany throughout its participation in the scramble for Africa.[3] They further intensified following defeat in World War I, when the deprivation of the racialised Other abroad meant that common-sensical ‘racial thinking’ suddenly lacked its more natural forum of expression (Gerwarth and Malinowski 2009, 296). Therefore, the Holocaust was ideologically facilitated by a thoroughly colonial ideological background work, turning the Jewish creed into an archetypal marker of essentialised difference: a national, ethnical, racial, and religious Other.

The epistemic frame of modernity/coloniality is thus foundationally informative of the mens rea of genocide, while its actus rei remain dependent on local and temporal particularities. This makes genocide inherently colonial. In the following section, I apply my findings to the debate over the appropriateness and existence of the term ‘colonial genocide’. As all genocide is informed by intrinsic coloniality, I conclude that ‘colonial genocide’ is a tautological denomination qua being coterminous with genocide proper.

The debate over ‘colonial genocide’

The term ‘colonial genocide’, as used by, e.g., Maybury-Lewis (2002), Brantlinger (2003), and Zimmerer (2011), has been abstracted within genocide studies from a variety of angles. This final section briefly summarises the main points of contention and demonstrates that critics of the term evince misguided judgment stemming from a Eurocentric standpoint. I argue that while it technically exists, the term ‘colonial genocide’ is a semantic diversion, a tautology that misleadingly implies the existence of a genocide that is not colonial.

Levene (2005) cautions against thoughtlessly labelling any colonial atrocity a ‘genocide’, as this would amount to a conceptual inflation, turning a useful analytical concept into a political polemic. Similarly, Schabas (2009), a professor of international law, contends that the mens rea of genocide is not inherently present in the structural and somewhat impersonal violence of colonialism, and that applications of the term must therefore be undertaken mindfully. Moses (2021) concurs, arguing that the violence of colonialism is, in general, qualitatively different to genocide. The forms of systemic dispossession and structural oppression that characterise colonial rule—even if they periodically descend into campaigns of extermination—might, on balance, be worse than genocide, but genocide they are not (ibid.). These authors are right to point out that genocide is a highly specific term not to be applied recklessly; nevertheless, their critiques are misguided, stemming from a subtle but pervasive Eurocentric bias. They assume that ‘genocide in colonial settings’ is synonymous with ‘colonial genocide’ rather than a subcategory of it.

As argued above, however, the phenomenon of genocide is produced and sustained by an epistemic frame that is pervaded by colonial assumptions. The critical element of the mens rea of genocide—the dehumanisation of the essentially different colonial Other—is an integral part of the structure of colonialism and the wider context of modernity/coloniality in which it is situated (Quijano 2007). Levene, Schabas and Moses base their arguments on an analytically prior distinction between ‘colonial genocide’ and genocide proper. But all genocide, in core and periphery, is produced by the epistemological colonial undercurrents of modernity. Therefore, while colonialism is not inherently genocidal, genocide is inherently colonial. The term ‘colonial genocide’ is a tautology.

To illustrate my point, it is useful to call to mind the related scholarly debate around the term ‘cultural genocide’. A recurrent criticism of the legal definition of genocide is its emphasis on physical death at the expense of omitting mentions of other types of destruction. Nersessian (2005) argues that genocide is not just the annihilation of a group’s body, but also its culture, i.e., its linguistic, religious, historical, and social conventions. The term ‘cultural genocide’ is thus proposed to denote the destruction of the collective identity—the “soul”—of a group alongside its biological existence (ibid., 81). While an expanded focus beyond physical destruction has, in general, been academically appreciated, the term itself has proven contentious. Card (2003), for example, contends that the label ‘cultural genocide’ is problematic as ‘social/cultural death’ is already immanent within genocide proper. As “cultural genocide suggest[s] that some genocides do not include cultural death”, the term is Eurocentric and misleading (ibid., 302).

Thus, just as with ‘colonial genocide’, the well-intended denomination provides not conceptual clarity but causes analytical confusion. In both cases, the solution is not an amendment via an indeterminate adjective but an expanded understanding of the content of the term ‘genocide’ itself, i.e., an awareness that all genocide is cultural and all genocide is colonial. Woolford (2009, 184), writing on the ontological destruction of Canadian Aboriginal peoples, contends that the belief in the separation between physical and cultural destruction amounts to a “modernist contrivance that contends that such neat categories exist”. I argue that the separation between ‘colonial genocide’ and genocide proper—and its concomitant erasure of the foundational role of the epistemic frame of modernity/coloniality in all genocide—is a modernist obfuscation. While ‘colonial genocide’ therefore does technically exist, it is a tautological term that is misleading at best and semantically complicit in an act of wilful postcolonial amnesia at worst.

In this essay, I have argued that the debate around the term ‘colonial genocide’ is in need of a decolonial intervention. Genocide, as a deeply ideological crime, is composed of an actus reus and a mens rea, a physical and a mental element. In the first section, I established that the mens rea of genocide is informed by modernist ideologies of essentialised difference. The exogenous application of these essentialist identities to undesirable groups marks them as alien and immutable, creating an existential threat to which genocide appears as the only feasible solution. In the second section, I traced the origins of the notion of essentialised difference to the colonial encounter between Europeans and non-Europeans. I argued that the confrontation of the European Self with the colonial Other radically altered pre-existing understandings of human kinship, difference, and hierarchy. The incipient epistemic frame of modernity/coloniality categorically precluded the incorporation of the European Self and the colonial Other within the same organo-logical image of humanity. It is in this rendering of the colonial Other as an exteriority to humanity in which one can locate the cognitive origins of the dehumanisation element that is central to the mens rea of genocide. This colonial way of thinking, co-constituted in core and periphery, gradually transformed pre-existing discriminatory mentalities across the globe. Finally, by applying my findings to the debate around the term ‘colonial genocide’, I established its tautological nature. As it works to obscure the modernist/colonial origins of the mens rea of genocide, the term misleads and obfuscates more than it clarifies.

[1] See also, e.g., Chalk and Jonassohn (1990), Kiernan (2004), and Levene (2005).

[2] In this essay, I use ‘colonial’ as the adjectival form of both colonialism (as the physical act of colonisation) and coloniality (as the enduring epistemological undercurrent of modernity).

[3] See, e.g., Marr (1879), Erster Internationaler Antijüdischer Kongress (1882), Hitler (1998), and NSDAP Parteiprogramm (1943).

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Further Reading on E-International Relations

Decolonising World Politics: Anti-Colonial Movements Beyond the Nation-State

Shifting Constitution of Indigeneity in (Post-)Colonial Brazil

The Colonial Legacy of Climate Vulnerability: A Postcolonial Feminist Analysis

Accepting the Unacceptable: Christian Churches and the 1994 Rwandan Genocide

Multiple Worlds of Trauma: Methodology, Eurocentrism, and the Colonial Traumatic

Settler-Colonial Continuity and the Ongoing Suffering of Indigenous Australians

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