THE POLITICS OF NAMING: EXPLORING THE IMPORTANCE OF RECOGNITION IN APPREHENDING GENOCIDE

BY WENDY LAM

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In maintaining international peace and security, significant assumptions must be made about which lives are deemed worthy of protection under international law. This hierarchy of lives is implicit to the politics of the international forum, and can create considerable difficulty in ensuring that states are adequately accountable for their actions. With specific reference to genocide, the process of recognition within the narrow schema of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (‘Genocide Convention’) is often a ‘paralysing force’ in responding to breaches of human rights.² In this, it is argued that genocide ‘facilitates empathy and intervention’ in a way that other violence does not.³