Full article at Journal of Genocide Research

ABSTRACT

Current global debates have brought questions of genocide to the legal and political forefront. Yet prevailing interpretations of the intent requirement under the Genocide Convention remain grounded in patriarchal assumptions that largely overlook attacks on a group’s reproductive capacity as evidence of genocidal intent. This article addresses that gap and advances a gender-competent interpretation of the Convention’s special intent requirement. It does so doctrinally, by examining how the “substantial part” requirement may be satisfied through the prominence of those targeted. Specifically, by relying on genocide jurisprudence, the authors argue that the systematic sexual and gender-based violence inflicted upon Rohingya women and girls of reproductive age demonstrates an intent to destroy the Rohingya as a group and therefore satisfies the intent threshold for genocide. Contemporary legal understandings of genocide privileged physical destruction as the paradigmatic form of genocidal violence. By treating mass killing as the quintessential genocidal act, these interpretations marginalize other forms of destruction and reproduce patriarchal assumptions about how groups are targeted and eliminated. In contrast, placing a population’s reproductive capacity at the centre of the genocidal intent analysis illuminates the ways in which violence against women – and, more specifically, attacks on reproductive capacity – can function as mechanisms of group destruction. Such forms of violence may be no less destructive because they do not manifest primarily through mass killing. Through an examination of the sexual and gender-based violence perpetrated against Rohingya women and girls in Myanmar, this article calls for interpreting genocidal intent through a gender-competent lens and offers a more complete account of the concept of “destruction” under the Genocide Convention.