Genocide targets a politically defined enemy distinct from the class enemy

Evidence

Though he does not take the term as a dominant marker of his inquiry, Mamdani does make clear that any answer to these queries has to engage the question-and the history-of the enemy: “Before you can try and eliminate an enemy,” Mamdani writes, “you must first define that enemy. The definition of the political self and the political other has varied throughout history. The history of that variation is the history of political identities, be these religious, national, racial or otherwise” (9). … And how did the killings in Rwanda “remain directed in the main at those identified as the political enemy, not the class enemy” (194)? What were the conditions that brought about a “truly disturbing aspect of the genocide,” namely, that “the definition of the enemy appeared credible to many ordinary Hutu” (202)? What is the history that led to the emergence of an “internal enemy,” an enemy who was quickly turned into an outsider to be fought with, expelled, and later exterminated? — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 51

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to scholarship on how regimes manufacture internal enemies, relevant to work on totalitarian ‘enemy of the people’ framing.
• DEFINE: Defines the ‘political enemy’ as opposed to the ‘class enemy’, key to Mamdani’s theory of collective violence.