Top Photo: The defendants and their lawyers at the International Military Tribunal trial of war criminals at Nuremberg. November 20, 1945 - October 1, 1946. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration, College Park. 

In 1944, Polish Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin first coined the term “genocide.” Writing in response to what was happening to the Jews of Europe as World War II raged, Lemkin wrote in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, “This new word, coined by the author to denote an old practice in its modern development, is made from the ancient Greek word genos (race, tribe) and the Latin cide (killing), thus corresponding in its formation to such words as tyrannicide, homicide, infanticide, etc.” He went on to add that “genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.”1 

In penning these words, Lemkin ushered in a new era where a previously nameless crime could now be called what it was. Moreover, the concept of genocide has fundamentally altered international law, history, and global geopolitics forever, transforming the way we understand mass violence in the modern world. 

Origins of the term 'Genocide'

Lemkin became interested in mass atrocity at a young age while reading about historical events like the sack of Carthage and the Mongol invasions. He even lived during anti-Jewish pogroms in Poland, including a major one in 1906 near Bialystok that claimed 70 lives. However, his formal interest took off while he was a student in Lvov. The assassination of Talaat Pasha by Soghomon Tehlirian in Berlin caught Lemkin’s interest because he could not understand how someone like Pasha, who co-perpetrated the Armenian genocide and was in refuge in Berlin, could go unpunished. As Lemkin wrote, “Is it a crime for Tehlirian to kill a man, but killing more than a million people for a dictator is not considered to be one? … This is a most contradictory thing.”2

Raphael Lemkin. The Center for Jewish History. 

Later in life, reflecting on this moment, Lemkin added, “the Armenians created a terrorist organization that took justice into its own hands. The assassination of Talaat Pasha in Berlin is very instructive. A man (Soghomon Tehlirian), whose mother was killed during the genocide, killed Talaat Pasha. … As a lawyer, I thought that a crime should not be punished by its victims, but by a court under international law.”3 

These realizations altered Lemkin’s career trajectory. He went on to study law in Lvov and then at Heidelberg University before becoming a prosecutor in Warsaw in 1929. As early as 1933, Lemkin submitted a proposal to the 5th International Conference on Criminal Law in Madrid to create laws defining crimes of “barbarism” and “vandalism.” But these early attempts at defining mass atrocity fell on deaf ears. On August 24, 1941, around the same time that Lemkin himself was escaping war-torn Europe for the United States, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill called ongoing Nazi violence against Jews “an anonymous crime” in a speech. This again inspired Lemkin to finally define the crime that had once plagued the Armenians and was now rearing its ugly head again in Nazi-occupied Europe.4  

Raphael Lemkin’s Blueprint

Alongside coining and defining the word “genocide,” Lemkin used Axis Rule in Occupied Europe to further work through the parameters of the crime. Using the Nazi extermination of the Jews (later called the Holocaust) as an example, Lemkin argued that Germany’s attack had been carried out politically, socially, culturally, economically, biologically, physically, religiously, and morally. That genocide impacted so many facets of existence was exactly his point in coining the term in the first place. 

Unsurprisingly, physical attacks were first and foremost in his mind. Lemkin identified starvation (he called it “racial discrimination in feeding”), endangering of health (lack of heating/cooling, overcrowding, deprivation of fresh air), and mass killings as key pieces of a genocidal campaign.5 In a testament to what was actually known during the war, Lemkin explained that “the Jews for the most part are liquidated within the ghettos, or in special trains in which they are transported to a so-called ‘unknown’ destination. The number of Jews who have been killed by organized murder in all the occupied countries, according to the Institute of Jewish Affairs of the American Jewish Congress in New York, amounts to 1,702,500.”6

But beyond the physical, Lemkin concerned himself with the annihilatory scope of genocide. He wrote: 

“The world represents only so much culture and intellectual vigor as are created by its component national groups. Essentially the idea of a nation signifies constructive cooperation and original contributions, based upon genuine traditions, genuine culture, and a well-developed national psychology. The destruction of a nation, therefore, results in the loss of its future contributions to the world. Moreover, such destruction offends our feelings of morality and justice in much the same way as does the criminal killing of a human being: the crime in the one case as in the other is murder, though on a vastly greater scale.”7 

Lemkin’s intervention is to suggest that legal protections needed to be embedded in international law to prosecute those guilty of genocide and hopefully prevent its occurrence by providing frameworks by which to recognize the crime. Although World War II was clearly in its final stages by 1944, Lemkin keenly warned that “we should not overlook the fact that genocide is a problem not only of war but also of peace.”8  Others agreed, and it should not surprise us that Lemkin became integral to the postwar passage of the Genocide Convention by the newly formed United Nations through his tireless lobbying efforts.  

UN Convention on Genocide

Lemkin participated in the Nuremberg Trials after the war, which helped establish a precedent for holding perpetrators of mass violence accountable. Despite his participation, none of the Nuremberg defendants were tried for genocide. Instead, the tribunal tried and convicted  German defendants on charges of crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, the latter defined by the indictment as “murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation … or persecutions on political, racial, or religious grounds.”9 

Though the term “genocide” did not make its way into the judgments of Nuremberg, Lemkin made sure the term was included in as many places within the indictments as possible. As scholar Alexa Stiller writes, “the new concept of ‘genocide’ was used in the course of the IMT trial to describe a policy consisting of different crimes or ‘techniques’ and directed against different groups of victims. Defined in this way, the concept of ‘genocide’ was attributed to the motive of the conquest and colonization of ‘living space’ by the Germans rather than to the intention, later enshrined in the Genocide Convention, of destroying a national, ethnical or religious group per se. The prosecutors and judges had not seen the mass murder of the Jews as congruent with the concept of ‘genocide’ but as part of it.”10 Thus, Nuremberg became synonymous with genocide even though the term’s legal power was very much still in its infancy.

For his part, Lemkin continued the quest to get genocide recognized and codified in international law beyond the trials. He was successful in 1946 when genocide was recognized as a crime by the UN General Assembly. But the pinnacle was reached in 1948 with the passage of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, commonly referred to as the Genocide Convention. Article 2 of the Convention states: 

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

• a) Killing members of the group;
• b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
• c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
• d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
• e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

As of April 2022, 153 nations have ratified the convention, and the International Court of Justice has “stated that the Convention embodies principles that are part of general customary international law. This means that whether or not States have ratified the Genocide Convention, they are all bound as a matter of law by the principle that genocide is a crime prohibited under international law.”11

‘A Problem from Hell’

Sadly, despite the adoption of the Genocide Convention in international law, the crime of genocide has continued to occur throughout the post–World War II era into the present. The causes of genocide are those stubbornly rooted in our modern world. Ideas like nationalism, racism, imperialism, total war, and industrialization have become embedded in the fabric of in-group/out-group othering in society. Thus, we have not escaped genocidal violence because we have not escaped the dark sides of “Enlightenment” ideologies that have shaped the world we still inhabit in the 21st century. 

Another issue that remains and certainly contributes to genocide as an ongoing problem is the shortcomings of the Genocide Convention. While most scholars agree having genocide defined as a crime in international law is a good thing, the definition has also created various loopholes that some have exploited to evade justice. For instance, the Convention (listed above) is notable in that it has expanded Lemkin’s original concepts of “national” identity to include also “ethnical, racial, and religious” groups as protected. Yet, increasingly, accusations of genocide have been refuted on the technicalities that targeted groups not named by the Convention, such as groups defined by political leanings, gender, or sexual orientation, just to name a few, are not expressly covered. The exclusion of any additional categories was likely a conscious decision by the permanent members of the UN Security Council—the United States, Russia (originally the Soviet Union), the United Kingdom, France, and China. By limiting certain categories, these members, the “Allies of World War II,” hoped to avoid having accusations of genocide leveled at them.

Another major issue with the Convention has been proving intent. As today’s UN website even states, “The intent is the most difficult element to determine. To constitute genocide, there must be a proven intent on the part of the perpetrators to physically destroy a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. Cultural destruction does not suffice, nor does an intention to simply disperse a group…importantly, the victims of genocide are deliberately targeted – not randomly – because of their real or perceived membership of one of the four groups protected under the convention.”12 Therefore, attacks on individuals can only be defined as genocide if the intent of the attack was based on their perceived or real membership in a broader (protected) group.  

Despite these shortcomings and issues, the definition has successfully expanded the conception of genocide as something beyond mass killing. Specifically, actions   (d) and (e) in the aforementioned Genocide Convention both deal with measures intended to prevent births or separating children and can constitute genocide without the presence of mass killing alone. 

Historically, there has also been some successful international prosecution of genocide. Jean-Paul Akayesu was convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity for his actions during the Rwandan genocide of 1994. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda was established by the UN Security Council and has indicted 93 individuals, 63 of whom have been sentenced.13 

Additionally, in 1998, the International Criminal Court (ICC) was created under the Rome Statute, which was signed by 120 countries. By 2002, 60 countries had ratified the ICC, ushering it into existence. Under the Rome Statute, the ICC operates independently of the UN and is the only court that has the authority to prosecute genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes, collectively known as “atrocity crimes.” The court to date has issued 60 arrest warrants, tried 32 cases, and issued 11 convictions.14  The court remains limited, however, because it has no police force to make arrests and cannot retroactively try crimes occurring before its establishment on July 1, 2002, and countries that are not members of the ICC are not subject to its jurisdiction unless they accept it ad hoc or are referred to the ICC by the UN Security Council. This has become an issue specifically when a Security Council member is not a member of the ICC. Additionally, the United States signed the Rome Statute but has not ratified it. Consequently, they have observer status in the ICC, but without further American participation (and given their position on the Security Council),  the ICC remains limited. 15

Herein lies what Samantha Power famously called “The Problem from Hell.” Even with the term genocide accepted in international law and the existence of protections, courts, and tribunals, the crime itself has generally not been stopped. Instead, if anything, it has only become more common. Power shows that the United States, specifically in its position as a global leader, as well as the rest of the world more generally, have repeatedly failed to intervene to stop genocides that are in progress. Not only that, few  world leaders have even taken basic measures, like denouncing the violence or issuing sanctions, let alone sending in military force to intervene. She writes, “thanks to the existence of the convention and Lemkin’s proselytizing around it, the word ‘genocide’ … has acquired a potent moral stigma. The vows of US policymakers to never again allow the crime and the lengths to which they have gone, while allowing genocide, to deny its occurrence is in itself a testament to the stigma. Hope for the convention’s enforcement lies in this opprobrium and in the determination of those who helped push the United States to live up to its promise.”16 

Power’s research focus is on the United States primarily because of the postwar interest in the Holocaust, both in scholarship but also in public memorialization (such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which opened in 1993). However, her call to action is a global one. She ends her book, as I do this article, with the words of George Bernard Shaw: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”17  

• 1

  Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (Washington: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944),79.

• 2

  Narek M. Poghosyan, “Raphael Lemkin 120,” The Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute Foundation, accessed March 12, 2025, http://www.genocide-museum.am/eng/Lemkin120.php .

• 3

  Poghosyan.

• 4

  Poghosyan.

• 5

  Lemkin, 82-90.

• 6

  Lemkin, 89.

• 7

  Lemkin, 91.

• 8

  Lemkin, 93. 

• 9

  “The Nuremberg Trials,” The National World War II Museum, accessed March 12, 2025, https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/topics/nuremberg-trials. 

• 10

  Alexa Stiller, “The Mass Murder of the European Jews and the Concept of ‘Genocide’ in the Nuremberg Trials: Reassessing Raphael Lemkin’s Impact,” Genocide Studies and Prevention 13, no. 1 (2019): 161.

• 11

  Definitions of Genocide and Related Crimes,” United Nations, accessed March 12, 2025, https://www.un.org/en/genocide-prevention/definition. 

• 12

  “Definitions of Genocide and Related Crimes.”

• 13

  “The ICTR in Brief,” United Nations, accessed March 12, 2025, https://unictr.irmct.org/en/tribunal 

• 14

  “About the Court,” International Criminal Court, Accessed March 12, 2025, https://www.icc-cpi.int/about/the-court; Nicole Hassenstab, “Prosecuting Hate: Genoicde and the International Criminal Court,” American University School of International Service,” September 7, 2023,   https://www.american.edu/sis/news/20230907-prosecuting-hate-genocide-and-the-international-criminal-court.cfm.

• 15

  Hassenstab.

• 16

  Samantha Power, “A Problem from Hell”: American and the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2013), 514.

• 17

  Power, 516.