The Role of Globalization in the Causes, Consequences, Prevention, and Punishment of Genocide

Abstract

Humanitarian intervention aside, genocide is usually identified with the internal dynamics of a society rather than globalization. Most studies on the causes and processes of genocide link the outbreak of genocidal violence to domestic factors such as a history of ethnic, racial, or class divisions between groups in society, radical exclusionary ideology, instability (political, social, and/or economic), and the dehumanization and demonization of the victim group as a dangerous “enemy within.” These factors and processes, however, are not strictly endogenous to societies. At least some factors such as societal divisions, radical ideology, and instability often find their origins in the wider global context, particularly in the case of genocides in the developing world. Colonialism brought to many parts of the Global South exclusionary conceptions of race, nationalism, political ideologies such as Marxism, economic exploitation, and various policies that pitted different societal groups against each other. In the post-colonial period many of these legacies of colonialism set the stage for state-directed attempts to exterminate entire groups of people. The more recent and more thoroughly globalized era has seen globalization contribute to the perpetration of genocide through an easily accessible arms trade in full view of a well informed but seemingly indifferent interconnected world.