Genocide charges mobilize transnational audiences that human-rights rhetoric cannot

Evidence

These cases indicate a point of convergence between the way such events are discussed in transnational, elite forums, such as scholarly journals or international tribunals, and the rhetorical confrontations that are woven into situations of death and suffering. In both contexts, “genocide” and related concepts constitute powerful rhetorical devices for highlighting images of violence, drawing attention to questions of agency, requiring assessments of culpability, and occasioning debates regarding potential consequences. Charges of genocide thus create transnational audiences and invite international intervention aimed at stopping the violence and punishing its perpetrators to a much greater extent than do other rhetorical frameworks. They similarly avoid the individualization that often accompanies efforts to challenge violence through rhetorics of human rights. Accordingly, it seems inevitable that questions of genocide will be raised when pronounced social inequality is connected with widespread death and suffering. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 286

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: what exactly differentiates ‘genocide’ as a rhetorical frame from human-rights violations framing — the collective vs. individual axis claimed here has big analytic weight.
• XREF: Sharpens an implicit distinction between collective-harm framing (genocide) and individualized human-rights framing that could anchor a vault definition entry. — connects to: Exiled critics’ human-rights accounts transfer remedial authority from affected societies to Western audiences — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 717
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 286