Democide is a term proposed by R. J. Rummel since at least 1994 who defined it as "the intentional killing of an unarmed or disarmed person by government agents acting in their authoritative capacity and pursuant to government policy or high command". According to him, this definition covers a wide range of deaths, including forced labor and concentration camp victims; killings by "unofficial" private groups; extrajudicial summary killings; and mass deaths due to the governmental acts of criminal omission and neglect, such as in deliberate famines, as well as killings by de facto governments, i.e. civil war killings. This definition covers any murder of any number of persons by any government.
Genocide is intentional action to destroy a people in whole or in part. The hybrid word "genocide" is a combination of the Greek word γένος and the Latin suffix -caedo. The term genocide was coined by Raphael Lemkin in his 1944 book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe.
Ethnic cleansing is the systematic forced removal of ethnic, racial and/or religious groups from a given territory by a more powerful ethnic group, often with the intent of making it ethnically homogeneous. The forces applied may be various forms of forced migration, intimidation, as well as genocide and genocidal rape.
A mass killing, as defined by a genocide scholar Ervin Staub, is "killing members of a group without the intention to eliminate the whole group or killing large numbers of people without a precise definition of group membership". This term is used by a number of genocide scholars because the term "genocide" does not cover mass killing events when no specific ethnic or religious group is targeted, and when perpetrators are not intended to eliminate of the whole group or its significant part. This article primarily discusses different models used by genocide scholars to explain and predict the onset of mass killing events.
The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was unanimously adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 9 December 1948 as General Assembly Resolution 260. The Convention entered into force on 12 January 1951. It defines genocide in legal terms, and is the culmination of years of campaigning by lawyer Raphael Lemkin. All participating countries are advised to prevent and punish actions of genocide in war and in peacetime. As of May 2019, 152 states have ratified or acceded to the treaty, most recently Mauritius on 8 July 2019. One state, the Dominican Republic, has signed but not ratified the treaty.
Ethnocide refers to extermination of national culture as a genocide component.
Mass operations of the NKVD were carried out during the Great Purge and targeted specific categories of people. As a rule, they were carried out according to the corresponding order of the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs Nikolai Yezhov.
The Sétif and Guelma massacre was a series of terrorist attacks by French colonial authorities and Pied-noir settler militias on Algerian civilians in 1945 around the French Algerian market town of Sétif, west of Constantine, Algeria. French police fired on demonstrators at a protest on 8 May 1945. Riots in the town were followed by attacks on French colons (colonizers) in the surrounding countryside, resulting in 102 deaths. Subsequent attacks by the French Colonial authorities and European settlers caused deaths among the Muslim population of the region; estimates ranged between 1,020 and 45,000 people killed. Both the outbreak and the indiscriminate nature of its repression are thought to have marked a turning point in Franco-Algerian relations, leading to the Algerian War of 1954–1962.
The Political Instability Task Force (PITF), formerly known as State Failure Task Force, is a U.S. government-sponsored research project to build a database on major domestic political conflicts leading to state failures. The study analyzed factors to denote the effectiveness of state institutions, population well-being, and found that partial democracies with low involvement in international trade and with high infant mortality are most prone to revolutions. One of the members of the task force resigned on January 20, 2017 in protest of the Trump administration.
Qey Shibir or Key Shibbir, also known as the Ethiopian Red Terror, was a violent political repression campaign of the Derg against other competing Marxist-Leninist groups in Ethiopia and Eritrea from 1976 to 1977. The Qey Shibir was an attempt to consolidate Derg rule during the political instability after their overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974 and the subsequent Ethiopian Civil War. The Qey Shibir was based on the Red Terror of the Russian Civil War, and most visibly took place after Mengistu Haile Mariam became Chairman of the Derg on 3 February 1977. It is estimated that 30,000 to 750,000 people were killed over the course of the Qey Shibir.
Ted Robert Gurr (1936–2017) was an authority on political conflict and instability. His book Why Men Rebel (1970) emphasized the importance of social psychological factors and ideology as root sources of political violence. It has been widely translated, most recently into Arabic and Russian. He was Distinguished University Professor emeritus at the University of Maryland and consulted on projects he established there. He died in November 2017.
The Indonesian mass killings of 1965–66 were large-scale killings and civil unrest that occurred in Indonesia over several months, targeting Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) party members, Communist sympathisers, Gerwani women, ethnic Abangan Javanese, ethnic Chinese and alleged leftists, often at the instigation of the armed forces and government. It began as an anti-communist purge following a controversial attempted coup d'état by the 30 September Movement. The most widely published estimates were that 500,000 to more than one million people were killed, with some more recent estimates going as high as two to three million. The purge was a pivotal event in the transition to the "New Order" and the elimination of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) as a political force, with impacts on the global Cold War. The upheavals led to the fall of President Sukarno and the commencement of Suharto's three-decade authoritarian presidency.
Several mass killings occurred under 20th-century communist regimes. Death estimates vary widely, depending on the definitions of deaths included. The higher estimates of mass killings account for crimes against civilians by governments, including executions, destruction of population through man-made hunger and deaths during forced deportations, imprisonment and through forced labor. Terms used to define these killings include "mass killing", "democide", "politicide", "classicide" and a broad definition of "genocide".
Barbara Harff is Professor of Political Science Emerita at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. In 2003 and again in 2005 she was a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University. Her research focuses on the causes, risks, and prevention of genocidal violence.
Political violence is violence perpetrated by people or governments to achieve political goals. It can describe violence used by a state against other states (war) or against non-state actors. It can also describe politically-motivated violence by non-state actors against a state or against other non-state actors. Non-action on the part of a government can also be characterized as a form of political violence, such as refusing to alleviate famine or otherwise denying resources to politically identifiable groups within their territory.
Classicide is the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of a social class through persecution and violence. The term "classicide" was termed by sociologist Michael Mann as a term that is similar but distinct from the term genocide. Examples includes Joseph Stalin's mass killing of the affluent middle-class peasant Kulaks who were identified as "class enemies" by the Soviet Union. Similar classicide has been committed by China during the Great Leap Forward, by North Vietnam as part of the Land Reform, and by the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia.
There are 17 indigenous tribes in Paraguay with the majority having their territories in the Chaco region. Tribes in this region include the Guaraní, Ayoreo, Toba-Maskoy, Aché and Sanapan which according to the census from 2002 number an estimated 86,000 or roughly around 2 per cent of the total population. These peoples have faced persecution particularly under the dictator Alfredo Strossner that some observers call a Genocide of indigenous peoples in Paraguay.
The Cambodian genocide was carried out by Khmer Rouge under the leadership of Pol Pot, who radically pushed Cambodia towards communism. The movement resulted in the deaths of approximately 1.5 to 2 million people from 1975 to 1979, nearly a quarter of Cambodia's 1975 population.
In 1996 Gregory Stanton, the founding president of Genocide Watch, presented a briefing paper called "The 8 Stages of Genocide" at the United States Department of State. In it he suggested that genocide develops in eight stages that are "predictable but not inexorable". Stanton first conceived and published his stages of genocide model in the 1987 Faulds Lecture at Warren Wilson College, also presented to the American Anthropological Association in 1987. In 2012, Stanton added two additional stages, Discrimination and Persecution, to his model, which resulted in a 10-stage model of genocide. The stages are not linear, and usually several occur simultaneously. Stanton's model is a logical model for analyzing the processes of genocide, and for determining preventive measures that might be taken to combat or stop each process.
The assessment of risk factors for genocide is an upstream prevention mechanism for genocide. This means that, if used correctly, the international community would be able to foresee a genocide before the killing took place, and prevent it. Countries can have many warning signs that it may be leaning in the direction of a future genocide. If signs are presented the international community takes notes of them and watches over the countries that have a higher risk. Many different scholars, and international groups, have come up with different factors that they think should be considered while examining whether a nation is at risk or not. One predominant scholar in the field James Waller came up with his own four categories of risk factors: governance, conflict history, economic conditions, and social fragmentation.