I think a lot of people might think…well why does it matter anyway if the words aren’t being used right as long as it gets through to people? But I think from a social-scientific perspective, and from the PoV of actually wanting to eliminate genocide as a practice, it is important.

Let’s use a medical analogy. You cannot treat cancer without knowing exactly what cancer is-when something is cancer and when it’s something else, and the specific mechanisms through which cancer occurs and becomes fatal. If you are an activist and you see every serious ailment as cancer and go “we need to treat this cancer, now!” and people take you seriously, then you will not understand the cancer, nor know how to prevent/cure it.

It’s the same with genocide. You cannot have a “cure” or a “preventative technique” for genocide unless you study it. Study how it occurs, why it occurs-the specific causal factors that lead to political elites making the decision to commit genocide. For this-because we never have experimental conditions in the social sciences-we need to use comparison. We need to compare between cases to determine common factors that are specific (probabilistically rather than deterministically, in reality) to genocide. You need to be able to have a list of cases you can compare between to do this, and you need to be able to have a boundary within which these cases exist, and outside of which you can put everything as “not genocide”. If this boundary is wrong (e.g., if you put every case of persecution in the ‘genocide’ case list) then you’re going to end up msunderstanding every little thing about genocide, and you’ll never get any closer to figuring out how to stop it or prevent it.

Thus ipso facto making a political/activist call of ‘genocide!’ to get attention is actually extremely harmful, and it is a key part of the social scientist’s job to determine whether X or Y case can be considered genocide because, if we consider genocide an ontologically specific phenomenon (e.g., it has its own mechanisms and processes separate to that of, say, general repression), we need to keep false positives outside of our case list which will make it harder to uncover the causal logics of genocide in the first place.