Redefining Genocide: Settler Colonialism, Social Death and Ecocide

by Damien Short

In this highly controversial and original work, Damien Short systematically rethinks how genocide is and should be defined.

Rather than focusing solely on a narrow conception of genocide as direct mass-killing, through close empirical analysis of a number of under-discussed case studies – including Palestine, Sri Lanka, Australia and Alberta, Canada – the book reveals the key role played by settler colonialism, capitalism, finite resources and the ecological crisis in driving genocidal social death on a global scale.

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, Ecology, Race, Indigenous

272 pages, Paperback

First published June 15, 2016

Reviews

[Randall Wallace · Rating 5 out of 5]

As Patrick Wolfe writes, “So far as Indigenous people are concerned, where they are is who they are, and …to get in the way of settler colonization, all the native has to do is stay home.” It’s not about race, it’s about territory. This book gives you a wide view, by showing the links between genocide, settler-colonialism and ecocide. Damien wants us to go back to Raphael Lemkin’s original definition of Genocide which included cultural and social death. French philosopher Alain Badiou noticed the inversion of meaning in the large Palestinian diaspora today caused by the once wandering Jews and wondered now the Palestinians have been forced to wander, “Ought ‘Palestinian” become the new name of the true Jews?” The author explains the Nakba of 1948 when “half of the indigenous people living in Palestine were driven out.” He explains factually how the cleansing was not a defense against an Arab invasion as often said. Living in Palestine today is a slow death. You can live there with no leisure, no travel and nothing to do for a while but in time anyone would deeply psychologically affected.

Palestinians do not have the same rights as Israelis in their own country. “Around 1.5 million trees are estimated to have been uprooted by the Israeli occupation forces between 2000 and 2007 in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.” To the author, this all amounts to genocide according to Lemkin’s understanding and Article 2(c) of the UN Genocide Convention. To make matters worse, in 2009, the Israeli Ministry of Education forced Palestinian textbooks to remove “Nakba” references. That’s like the US ordering the removal of the word Jim Crow from Black textbooks and the word genocide from Native American history textbooks! Then the author goes into the genocide of the Tamils in Sri Lanka and why it qualifies as such. Then he focuses on settler-colonial Australia where the Aboriginal land sits on the world’s largest reserves of uranium, lead, silver, zinc, titanium and tantalum. There, as in the U.S., the indigenous still exhibit a responsibility to protect their lands while the white invaders still do not. What is happening in Australia is genocide, but it is not legally so, “since the cultural methods of genocide were largely removed from the final convention.”

Australia offers a close-up view of the “nexus between genocide and ecocide: from settler colonial land grabs that fuel the continued ‘mining’ of Australia.” Next the Author goes to Alberta where “the literal sacrifice of Native North American peoples was yet again deemed necessary, useful or at least acceptable” in the state grab of energy from native lands. The Mainstream Media never mentions the destruction of the boreal forest, the destruction of “one of Canada’s best heatsinks and weather stabilizers to produce a product with three times the carbon footprint of conventional oil.” “We do not err because truth is difficult to see. It is visible at a glance. We err because this is more comfortable.” – Alexander Solzhenitsyn– Clearly the problem is capitalism which is “antithetical to a physical reality of finite resources.” The author, in fact, refers to capitalism “as a form of ecological imperialism”. “In the dominant culture, ‘less’ is a four-letter word.” So far, western civilization’s idea of progress has been “ecocidal and genocidal”.

As the effects of climate change hits hard, environmental violence will have to become increasingly part of the genocide debate. The book then fittingly ends with a great quote by Derrick Jensen.

[Muhammed Nijim · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great book that looks at genocide from a sociology perspective. Short gives many case studies in his book and analyzes them through the Lemkinian lens. The author concludes the book by urging genocide scholars to focus more on the ecological crimes of big corporations that will eventually destroy our biosphere and nature. A shift should be made from focusing on the victim to a new genocide model that looks deeper into cases of genocide with a focus on ecology and the great harm inflicted by governments as well as corporations.

[Mateo · Rating 5 out of 5]

My god what a read, amazing book, review coming tomorrow… hopefully

[Phasmid · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read it 10 years later. It feels the same as what is happening today.

[Luna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Short skillfully uses Redefining Genocide: Settler Colonialism, Social Death and Ecocide to argue that the genocides of indigenous people throughout the world, and the settler colonial structures responsible for those genocides, are not past events to be reflected upon as historical but rather as continuous and currently occurring genocides which we perpetuate daily. Short does this by exploring the research of Raphael Lemkin, the creator of the term genocide; Lemkin's definition prior to codification by the U.N. argued that genocide is not synonymous to mass killings or defined by mass killing, but rather can and is often executed through the mass social death of a "nation," through the elimination of their ways of life, culture, social structures, and subsistence so that they become dependent upon assimilation or suppressed by the dominant settler society. Therefore, the continued existence of indigenous people does not disqualify their elimination as genocide, rather their continued existence is within an ongoing process of social death. Short argues that this process of genocide is also perpetrated consistently though ecocide, in the exploitation and destruction of indigenous land for development and resource extraction. Short argues that indigenous nations' existence was heavily dependent on the land as the self and as the way of life (and continues to be), and destruction of that land is a means of both mass killing and social death. Short presents four modern case studies (Palestine, Sri Lanka, Australia, and Alberta) which illustrate how the continued genocide of indigenous people is occurring through and as ecocide. This work is extremely relevant to current events in North Dakota at the site of Standing Rock and the Dakota Access Pipeline struggle.