Debates on the Criminology of Genocide: Genocide as a Technology for Destroying Identities

Abstract

This article analyses different criminological approaches to modern genocide. It starts from a critical review of authors (René Girard, Eugenio Raúl Zaffaroni, and Alejandro Alagia) who explain genocide in terms of sacrificial violence; it contrasts these perspectives with Jean Piaget’s empirically based distinction between two kinds of social relations: relations of constraint and relations of cooperation, and the different sanctions pertaining to each, developing tools to understand more complex ways of causality. Next, it reviews comparative studies of genocide, ignored in the works of the previous authors. The objective for doing it is to compare different causal explanations of genocide to add complexity to the previous analysis. Finally, it revisits Raphael Lemkin’s pioneering vision of the role of annihilation in destroying identity. It argues that Lemkin provided some insights for a new criminological approach to genocide seen as a technology of power seeking to transform the social fabric with the terror of concentration camps.