Rethinking the Protected Object of Genocide: From Demographic Groups to Forms of Life

Abstract

The Genocide Convention protects national, ethnical, racial, and religious groups defined in demographic terms. Yet Raphael Lemkin’s original concept of genocide referred to a broader object: the destruction of a people’s “national pattern,” including the cultural and intergenerational forms through which collective existence is sustained. This article argues that the Convention’s narrowing of the protected object produced a lasting mismatch between legal category and social phenomenon. That mismatch helps explain two persistent problems: the complaint that the Convention is too narrow to capture real cases of collective destruction, and the complaint that “genocide” has been rhetorically inflated in political usage. To address this, the article reconceives the protected object through the philosophical category of form of life, understood as an inherited, plural, and non-totalizable way of being together. Applied to Ukraine, Nagorno-Karabakh, and the Indigenous peoples of the United States, this reconception yields more determinate and symmetrical results. The article concludes that this recovery can be achieved through interpretation rather than treaty amendment.