The Functional Utility of Genocide: Towards a Framework for Understanding the Connection Between Genocide and Regime Consolidation, Expansion and Maintenance

By definition, genocide is an intentional act. It is not an “accidental by-product” of other policies, even if some leaders try to pretend it is. Inherent in this criterion is the existence of more or less conscious agency on the part of the organizers. The subtext of genocide is that it is functionally useful for the organizers' power and control over their domain. Their “followers,” however, may be only marginally aware of the implications or scope of the genocidal plan undertaken by the leaders and less clear about its functional utility. An understanding of who benefits from genocide and how they derive those benefits is not sufficient to explain why genocide occurs. Yet analyzing the utility of this mass destruction provides clues as to the interests that are served by it and thus the incentives for committing it.

This article explores and categorizes some of the ways in which genocide is functionally useful for its organizers and, in particular, examines how it helps a regime to consolidate, expand or maintain its control over a domain. In examining the reasons for organizing genocide, an effort is made to differentiate between categories of intent—drawing out the distinctions between organizers who use it as a predominantly instrumental tactic versus those for whom genocide is an integral goal—and the motives that give rise to this intent, whether predominantly political, economic or strategic or a hybrid. It is argued that the organizers assume the power to define the “victim” group on the basis of characteristics relevant to the organizers' ideological framework and that the targeted population is generally portrayed as either an existential threat or as a strategic obstacle to achieving a transcendent goal. Either way, the organizers seek to eliminate the designated group because of their active or implicit resistance to the control of the genocidal regime and thus creating an intolerable challenge to the regime leaders that, in their view, must be eliminated. The elimination of the targeted group seems to be only one facet of genocidal regimes' aspiration to exert complete control over their domain; it seems that, over time, the general population as a whole faces the threat of being transformed from citizens to functionaries of the regime. Thus a regime that may once have appeared to offer the prospects of stability—and thus been appealing to supporters—soon becomes a tyrannical force from which few are free.