Genocidal massacre

The term genocidal massacre was introduced by South African sociologist Leo Kuper (1908–1994) to describe incidents which have a genocidal component but are committed on a smaller scale when they are compared to genocides such as the Rwandan genocide.

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Ben Kiernan

In his book Blood and Soil, Australian historian Ben Kiernan states that imperial powers have often committed genocidal massacres to tame difficult minorities within their empires. For instance, he describes the actions of two Roman legions sent to Egypt in 68 AD to quell the Jews rioting in Alexandria. The Roman governor Tiberius Julius Alexander ordered the legions to massacre the Jewish quarter's residents. 50,000 had been killed when Alexander, listening to the pleas of some yet to be killed, felt pity for them and ordered an end to the killings.

Kiernan says that the killings, just as genocide, do not have to be committed by the state, citing the following examples:

• The massacre in the Cave of Frances of all the inhabitants of the Isle of Eigg by members of the Clan MacLeod on a raiding party from the Isle of Skye in 1577 and a retaliatory raid the next year when members of the Clan MacDonald burnt a MacLeod congregation to death in Trumpan Church, which was almost immediately followed by the Battle of the Spoiling Dyke.
• On 27 February 2002, an argument on a train of Hindu pilgrims with Muslim vendors at the platform where it had stopped was followed by a suspected arson that killed 59 people. The next day, and for the following two days, riots in Gujarat killed 790 Muslim and 254 Hindu.

William Schabas

Canadian human rights expert William Schabas makes the point that genocidal massacres are criminal offences under international law as a crime against humanity, and during an armed conflict under the laws of war. However he points out that international prosecutions for individual acts are not covered by the Rome Statute, which created the International Court of Justice (ICC) because crimes against humanity must be "widespread or systematic" and war crimes usually have to have a threshold above the individual crime "in particular when committed as part of a plan or policy or as part of a large-scale commission of such crimes".

Irving Louis Horowitz

American sociologist Irving Louis Horowitz is critical of Kuper's approach. He cites Kuper's use of the term genocidal massacre to describe the inter-communal violence during the partition of India and during The Troubles in Northern Ireland. Hirsh states "to speak of [these] as genocidal in a context of religious competition and conflict risks diluting the notion of genocide and equating it with any conflict between national, religious, or racial groups".

Definitions

This is a list of academic definitions of genocidal massacre.

Date	Author	Definition
1982	Leo Kuper	genocidal massacres, expressed characteristically in the annihilation of a section of a group—men, women and children, as for example in the wiping out of whole villages.
1994	Israel Charny	Mass killing as defined [...] in the generic definition of genocide, but in which the mass murder is on a smaller scale, that is, smaller numbers of human beings are killed.
2007	Ben Kiernan	This seventh category, unspecified in the 1948 convention, comprises shorter, limited episodes of killing directed at specific local or regional community, targeted because of its membership in a larger group.

See also

• Jews
• Pogrom
• Genocide
• Adolf Hitler
• Mein Kampf
• Antisemitism
• Nazi Germany
• Ion Antonescu
• The Holocaust
• Hannah Arendt
• Raphael Lemkin
• Antisemitic trope
• Bosnian Genocide
• Rwandan Genocide
• Odessa massacre (1941)
• Jedwabne pogrom (1941)
• 7 October 2023 attack on Israel

References

• Andreopoulos, George J. (1997), Genocide: Conceptual and Historical Dimensions, University of Pennsylvania Press, ISBN 978-0-8122-1616-5
• Charny, Israel W. (1999), Encyclopedia of Genocide, ABC-CLIO, ISBN 978-0-87436-928-1
• Horowitz, Irving Louis (1989), Persuasions and Prejudices: An Informal Compendium of Modern Social Science, 1953–1988, Transaction Publishers, ISBN 978-0-88738-261-1
• Kiernan, Ben (2007), Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur, Yale University Press, ISBN 978-0-300-10098-3
• Kuper, Leo (1982), Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century, Yale University Press, ISBN 978-0-300-03120-1
• Melson, Robert (1992), Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust, University of Chicago Press, ISBN 978-0-226-51990-6
• Moses, A. Dirk (2004), Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History, Berghahn Books, ISBN 978-1-57181-410-4
• Schabas, William (2000), Genocide in International Law: The Crimes of Crimes, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0-521-78790-1