Genocide scholarship is being stretched to cover youth-targeting violence beyond classical state mass murder

Evidence

Nancy Scheper-Hughes (1992) uses a notion of “small wars and invisible genocides” in focusing on the killing of older children and young adults. She argues that the targeting of “street children” in Brazil and the use of violence against - and by - politicized youth in South Africa are key features of emerging political and ideological orders. Her article poses a challenge to those who would use genocide, as does Rummel (1994), to extol the virtues of democracy over “totalitarian communist governments” and raises perplexing questions regarding the nature of both democracy and genocide. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 276

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• DEFINE: Introduces Scheper-Hughes’s term ‘small wars and invisible genocides’ as an expansion of genocide’s scope.
• XREF: Parallels the boundary-drawing disputes over what counts as genocide, similar to the definitional conflicts in the law-merchant and trust literature about institutional scope.

Related

• Genocide can occur as invisible everyday violence against children within democracies. (similarity 0.92)