Watch: HGS annual lecture 2024

Eighty years ago, as the final winter of the Second World War began, the Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin introduced the idea of “genocide” to describe the deliberate destruction of population groups that he saw the Nazi occupiers committing in Europe. Four years later, his idea was enshrined in the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Today, the idea and the Convention are invoked to describe, and potentially criminalise, atrocities in the Ukraine, Gaza and other wars.

Yet there remain strong reservations about the genocide idea among lawyers and scholars of war and violence, leading some to call for replacing it with other descriptive and legal terms. In this lecture, Professor Martin Shaw outlined the debate and its relevance to current events, explaining what we should understand by “genocide” and why it is an essential idea for everyone concerned with mass atrocities. 

Read the full text here, or watch the lecture and the Q&A that followed below.