The United Nations adopted a Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948. Under this Convention, genocide consists of certain enumerated act that, when committed, have the intent of destroying a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group as such, in whole or in part. Of the enumerated acts that appear under Article II, (a) Killing members of the group can include the committal of murder or its equivalent; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group can include mutilation, torture or other forms of violence which might lead to death, as well as the intentional causing of mental suffering by methods that do not impair physical health, whether through narcotics or other means; (c) Deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of a group, in whole or in part; prohibits the imposition of conditions which are likely to result in death; (d) Imposing measures to prevent births within the group encompasses castration, compulsory abortion, sterilization and the segregation of sexes; and (e) Forcibly transferring children from one group to another where they might be instilled with alien customs, languages, religions and values is considered the corollary to the prevention of births, and is tantamount to the eradication of the next generation. To carry out practices that fall under one or all of these enumerated acts can constitute genocide under international law. While not necessary to its occurrence, the willingness of a society to entertain eugenic notions can increase the likelihood of genocide occurring, and racism is sometimes used as justification for acts of genocide.

The most commonly recognized example of genocide is the Holocaust carried out under Adolph Hitler, and his Nazi program to purify the “Aryan race” by exterminating millions of Jews and other undesirables, while segregating some in concentration camps and sterilizing, euthanizing or forcibly transferring others. Here, explicit eugenic arguments were used as justification for these mass crimes. The Rwandan genocide in 1994, which saw approximately eight hundred thousand ethnic Tutsi killed by ethnic Hutus was rooted in ideas of racial difference between peoples, ideas cultivated through historical relations of colonialism and exploitation. The mass killing of an estimated one and a half million Armenians in their historic homeland between 1915 and 1923 by the Ottoman Empire is also often considered to be an instance of genocide under international law.

Claims of genocide have been made by other groups who have been described as racially inferior and subject to violence and/or coercive interventions because of their group membership. However, because these instances are not always accompanied by the killing of large numbers of civilians, or because the intent to destroy the group as such is sometimes difficult to prove, they are not necessarily acknowledged as instances of genocide. For example, an element of the Black population in the United States has alleged genocide in response to state and other attempts at regulating the reproduction of African American women (see Weisborg 1975), attempts which were legitimized by the eugenics movement. For instance, out of approximately 7000 sterilizations performed under the eugenic sterilization policies enacted in North Carolina between the 1930s to the 1970s, about 5000 of these were performed on Black women. Other initiatives, like the Negro Project, which sought specifically to distribute birth control in African American communities, are often said to have been motivated by eugenic concerns or efforts to control the population of those considered a burden to the state. Policies like these are viewed as attempts to impose measures to prevent births within the group. During much of this same time, Native American women were also subject to coerced sterilization, and it has since become clear that the federal agency responsible for the health of Native Americans used sterilization as a family planning measure in the face of the high birth rate of Indian children. This practice is now linked to the continued history of colonialism in the United States and the quest to acquire Indian lands and resources, and when considered within this context, it is said to constitute part of a larger genocide against Native American peoples.

A similar argument is being made regarding the treatment of Aboriginal women in Canada. That is, the coerced sterilization of Aboriginal women has worked in conjunction with other assimilative policies and practices pursued through colonization in order to undermine Indigenous connections to the land and to reduce the number of those considered Aboriginal. In addition to the disproportionate targeting of Aboriginal peoples for sterilization under eugenic legislation in the province of Alberta, there is increasing evidence that Aboriginal women, often from remote and northern settlements, were subject to coercive sterilizations during the late 1960s and the 1970s, and this was sometimes also coupled with efforts by federally employed health workers to disseminate birth control in order to reduce the birth rate. Policies such as these, when understood as attempts to impose measures to reduce the number of births within a group, and in conjunction with other policies like residential schools or the sixties scoop (as instances of forcibly transferring children from one group to another), or the creation of conditions of poverty and desperation on reserves (as instances of causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group and deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part), can also be understood as genocide.

Especially with respect to Indigenous peoples, these instances do not commonly register as genocide in our consciousness. However Raphaël Lemkin, a Polish lawyer of Jewish descent who coined the term, confirmed that generally speaking, genocide did not mean the immediate destruction of a nation except when accomplished by mass killings of all of its members. He intended for it to signify “a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.” Lemkin also viewed genocide as having two phases: the first, the destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; and the second, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor. This imposition, in turn, may be made upon the oppressed population which is allowed to remain or upon the territory alone, after removal of the population and the colonization by the oppressor's own nationals. Implicit in this formulation is the potentially genocidal nature of colonialism and its assimilative ends, and despite its controversial nature, many are now uncovering how centrally important this point was to Lemkin’s conception of the term.

While not always explicitly motivated by eugenic goals or accompanied by eugenic rhetoric on the part of the perpetrators, the genocidal acts carried out by a state or dominating group are sometimes legitimated or advanced by eugenic ideology. These destructive acts, whether meant to address political, economic or other concerns, are justified by ideas of racial superiority held by the dominating group, and a consequent racism directed toward those victimized.

-Karen Stote

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• Wolfe, Patrick, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, 4 (2006): 387-409.