Restricting genocide discourse to legal elites reproduces the inequality that enables genocide

Evidence

When international authorities and activists on issues of genocide and human rights fail to recognize (in both senses of the term) the links between elite discussions of genocide and those that emerge in circumstances of suffering and violence, and when they decree that the deployment of genocide accusations must be contingent on the strict application of legalistic frameworks, they intervene profoundly in the discursive contestations that shape such situations and their effects. They require, in essence, that some of the most oppressed groups must exert the very sorts of symbolic capital from which they have been systematically deprived. Maintaining such a position amounts to asserting a monopoly over discourses of genocide by reserving the right to grant or deny access to them as modes of depicting particular cases of violence and death. … Such restrictions are proposed without examining the rights of members of affected communities to determine which modes of representation will be authorized, and without ascertaining what other discursive practices may be available to them. Withholding international recognition from attempts to invoke discourses of genocide reinforces the hegemonic position of elites in Europe and the United States; furthermore it can easily strengthen the hand of already powerful national and transnational institutions. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 289

Categorization

• DEFINE: Sharpens who gets to define ‘genocide’ — a definitional-power critique with direct bearing on CRT claims about who authorizes racial categorizations.
• XREF: Connects to vault-wide claims about definitional monopolies — who gets to name social harms — as in racial formation and ‘official’ classification discourse. — connects to: The Turkish state criminalizes discussion of the Armenian Genocide by statute — Gregory H. Stanton, Ten Stages of Genocide, 22
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 289