Narrow genocide definitions silence victims who need that rhetoric most

Evidence

By being excessively concerned with restricting the use of rhetorics of genocide, the arbiters of these discourses ironically thwart the ability of dominated communities not only to communicate with them but to have greater say in how their suffering is defined in public and institutional forums and what sorts of responses it evokes. At the same time that genocide scholars often proclaim the need to listen to the voices of “victims,” narrow definitions of genocide widen the gap between elite forums and those positioned within or fleeing from the sites of conflict. When the victims’ narratives are replayed in international discussions, they emerge as displaced fragments of “local” discourses or as anecdotes that exemplify the positions adopted by international authorities, rather than as substantive interventions into the process of deciding when and how discourses of genocide are to be deployed. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 290

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to work on epistemic injustice and to the political battles over the Armenian, Rwandan, and Darfur labels — who gets to name genocide.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that restricting genocide rhetoric — usually justified as protecting its gravity — actually thwarts dominated communities’ agency in defining their own suffering reverses the standard critical position and rewards sitting with it.