• The term genocide was coined in 1943 by the Jewish-Polish lawyer

Raphael Lemkin, who combined the Greek word "genos" (race or tribe)
with the Latin word "cide" (to kill).
• After witnessing the horrors of the Holocaust, in which every member of
his family except his brother was killed, Dr Lemkin campaigned to have
genocide recognised as a crime under international law.
Topology of mass killings as defined by Valentino, 2003[29]
Type Scenario Examples[nb 2]
Dispossessive mass killing

Soviet Union (1917–1953)

Communist Agricultural collectivization and political terror China (1950–1976)
Cambodia (1975–1979)

Turkish Armenia (1915–1918)

Ethnic Ethnic cleansing The Holocaust (1939–1945)
Rwanda (1994)

European colonies in North and South America

Colonial enlargement (15th–19th centuries)
Genocide of the Herero in German South-West
Territorial Africa (1904–1907)

Expansionist wars German annexation of western Poland (1939–

1945)
Coercive mass killing

Algerian war of independence from France (1954–

Counterguerrilla Guerrilla wars 1962)
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (1979–1989)
Ethiopian civil war (1970s–1980s)

Allied bombings of Germany and Japan (1940–

Terror bombing 1945)

Allied naval blockade of Germany (1914–1919)

Starvation blockades/siege warfare Nigerian land blockade Biafra (1967–1970)

Terrorist

FLN terrorism in Algerian war of independence

Sub-state/insurgent terrorism against France (1954–1962)
Viet Cong terrorism in South Vietnam (1957–1975)
RENAMO terrorism in Mozambique (1976–1992)

German occupation of Western Europe (1940–

Imperialist Imperial conquests and rebellions 1945)
Japan's empire in East Asia (1910–1945)
• The Conclusion
• Genocide's “intent to destroy” separates it from other crimes of
humanity such as ethnic cleansing, which aims at forcibly
expelling a group from a geographic area (by killing, forced
deportation and other methods