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Genocide was defined as a crime in international law by the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

Article 2 of the Convention sets out the basic legal definition of genocide.

"In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group,

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group,

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part,

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group,

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."

Critics point out that there are important instances that the above definition does not encompass (for instance, mass killing of political groups). However, though the world community has had ample opportunity to change the Genocide Convention, it has chosen not to. Since 1948, the only major change has been to add sexual violence to the list of potentially genocidal acts.

It Is Unclear What Counts as Genocide

However, the definition is less clear than it might seem at first. Outside a few cases (the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide and the Rwandan genocide) people disagree on just when and whether the term applies. For instance,

• A number of scholars have compiled lists of the genocides or genocides and politicides committed during the in the 20^th century. Even taking into consideration the difference in time periods, the lists are different.

• Scholars and politicians disagree about whether or not to use the word genocide to describe the deaths and destruction of the societies of indigenous peoples during the colonial periods,

• Even in the current context, scholars and policy makers cannot agree on whether the violence in Darfur counts as a genocide. While there is compelling evidence that attacks against the Darfurian people is both directed by the Sudanese government and has a racial basis, people from Darfurian tribes live in peace (and even taking government posts) in areas of Sudan outside Darfur. So, is the current conflict in Darfur a genocide and how is it different than previous violent government actions in Sudan?

Scholars have tried to remedy this problem by identifying common features of genocides, differentiating genocides from other types of mass killing and war, listing criteria to help identify genocides in progress, specifying different types of genocides (for instance, colonial genocides or counterinsurgency genocides) and distinguishing modern and ancient mass killing. Still, policy makers, advocates and scholars disagree.

Political Nature of the Definition

Part of the problem is that the definition of genocide spelled out in the Convention has an undeniably political cast. One of the main concerns of the major powers that helped shape the Convention was that the definition not include targeting political groups. They saw that there own policies might get them into trouble on that count. So, genocide was limited to racial, ethnic, national and religious groups. The problem is that the number of people murdered because of political affiliation since World War II far out numbers those killed when racial, ethnic, national or religious groups are targeted, and sometimes mass killing of political groups can shade off into genocide so it is not always clear whether a situation is a genocide.

The challenge is to formulate an understanding of genocide that is neither too narrow (so that major episodes of mass killing are ignored) nor too broad (so that almost anything can be described as a genocide). Researchers and policy makers have worked to clarify the notion of genocide in order to make it a legally and conceptually useful term.

Efforts to Clarify Genocide and Other Types of Mass Killing

While some recommend an expanded notion of genocide, other scholars and policy makers have tried to bring some clarity to the situation is by coining a set of terms to help us think about other types of mass killing and how they relate to the crime of genocide. Some terms that have become common are:

Democide: All types of government or regime sponsored, facilitated or allowed mass killings of noncombatants (not including judicial executions),

Politicide: Mass killing of groups identified primarily in terms of their political opposition to the regime and dominant groups or in terms of their position within the society (for example, peasants, intellectuals, etc),

Ethnic Cleansing: A purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas,

Genocidal Massacres: Shorter, more limited episodes of killing directed at racial, ethnic and religious groups in a region or community where it is not clear that the intent was to destroy the larger group even “in part,”

Ethnocide: Destroying a culture or the language of a group without the intent to physically destroy the group,

Gendercide: The systematic killing of members of a specific sex—with recent research focusing on how sexual violence targeting women accomplishes the goals of genocide.

Work still needs to be done to clarify how these different terms relate to each other and how they relate to genocide in concrete circumstances.

Identifying Causes and Conditions of Genocide

Another way scholars work to clarify our understanding of genocide is by identifying the causes and conditions behind genocide. Because genocide is complex, the research focuses on a wide range of issues including:

• The motivations behind mass killing,

• The role of the state and type of governments,

• Ideologies and culture,
• Modernity and nationalism (and "tribal" thinking in general),
• Aspects of human psychology that have evolved over millenia.

Though scholars and policy makers have worked to shed light on how these terms relate to each other the conversation is far from finished.