Labels like ‘genocide’ actively shape perceptions and memory of violent events

Evidence

First, debates about genocide are themselves political events that bear powerfully on creating, legitimating, and challenging violence shaped by racial, sexual, and gender inequality. As LaCapra (1994) has pointed out, discourse about genocide provides a powerful example of the performativity of language. Actions generally come to be referred to as genocides - and as “events” - post facto. The labeling shapes how they are perceived and remembered and their implications for the future. Constructing an event as genocide places it in relationship to other acts and creates conduits for the circulation of accusations. The architects of genocide are often as concerned with suppressing discourse about the event as with the killing itself. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 281

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s broader theme of language performativity and to Hannah Arendt’s and Foucault’s discourse-as-power. — connects to: Genocide labelling of farm murders legitimizes extreme acts against out-groups; Uncounted slow-violence casualties skew how wars are remembered and planned — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 44; Historical events re-presented as genocide can reshape victim and perpetrator identity threats — Nurit Shnabel and Johannes Ullrich, Identity Needs in Intergroup Relations:…, 60
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that labeling events post facto constitutes them, and that perpetrators suppress discourse as intensely as the killing itself, is a genuinely paradigm-shifting lens on how violence becomes legible.