The Futility of “Genocide” in Ending a Genocide

Authors

• Shannon Fyfe, Washington and Lee University School of LawFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Loyola University Chicago Law Journal

Publication Date

2026

Abstract

After the horrors of World War II, the Genocide Convention of 1948 sought to invest the international community in creating legal obligations that “sovereign” states commit to preventing and punishing future genocides. Unfortunately, this has not succeeded. International legal jurisprudence pertaining to identifying and punishing genocide has developed at the International Court of Justice and at other international criminal courts and tribunals. Yet the invocation of the term “genocide” in public, academic, or legal discourse has generally failed to ensure the participation of the international community in stopping a genocide. The United States, for instance, has failed to play the role it may have hoped to play immediately in the wake of World War II, that of a human rights champion all over the world.

Following the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, there have been new claims, at various points, that a genocide is occurring in the Gaza Strip (hereinafter “Gaza”). The United States has been actively supporting the government of Israel in its response to the Hamas attacks, thereby implicating the interests of the country and public more directly. In July 2025, in the wake of severe starvation reports from Gaza, debates over the genocide claim accelerated, as genocide scholars, legal scholars, oped columnists, and the public all entered the public debate about whether genocide was, or was not, happening in Gaza.

In this Article, I engage with both international law and genocide studies scholarship to argue that the “is it genocide” question is much less relevant than it seems, despite the widely held intuition that genocide sits at the top of a hierarchy of crimes (the “crime of crimes”) and moral wrongs. Both the phenomenon of genocide, an instance of genocide in which a protected group is targeted for destruction, and the crime of genocide, where an individual perpetrator acts with the requisite intent to meet the elements of the crime, involve the idea that the atrocities and the perpetrators are “the worst of the worst.” However, as I claim, the hierarchical intuition is unjustified, and it has not led legal and political institutions tasked with assessing genocide claims to inspire the international community to stop an ongoing genocide. Further, I argue that we should not rely on these legal institutions, especially not criminal legal systems, to prevent and punish the grave suffering and wrongdoing of a genocide.

Recommended Citation

Shannon Fyfe, The Futility of “Genocide” in Ending a Genocide, 57 Loy. U. Chi. L.J. 1 (2026).