Strict legal definitions of genocide restrict the suffering people who need them most.

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. … Since the members of dominated communities suffer from inequalities in access to the educational opportunities that enable individuals to construct these sorts of arguments, as well as to publications and venues (such as international conferences) where these issues are discussed, “narrow” or “strict” definitions of genocide greatly restrict the ability of people suffering from violence to imbue their representations with authority. … The creation by international elites of monopolies over the circulation of legitimate discussions of genocide bears an uncanny resemblance to the centralization of the production and transmission of statistics on disease, poverty, and crime by nation-states and international agencies. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 289

Categorization

• SEED: Possible article: how definitional gatekeeping of a term of justice functions as a form of symbolic violence and monopoly, parallel to statistical centralization.
• DEFINE: Explains how discursive access to the category of genocide is itself a form of power.
• DEEPTHINKING: The argument that strict legalistic definitions of genocide paradoxically silence the oppressed who experience it is a paradigm-shifting inversion worth sitting with.