Beyond the Political: Treating Genocide as Disaster

This article will argue that genocide fits the description ‘disaster’. It will argue that viewing genocide as disaster and analysing genocide through the framework of disaster studies come with benefits, most prominent of which is that such an approach removes some of the technical legal obstacles to recognising and prosecuting instances of genocide. Treating genocide as disaster also expands the scope of mechanisms that can be applied to anticipate, resist and prevent genocide. It will be argued that a strict legalistic treatment and response to genocide, centring on the international criminal law demands of prosecution and legal accountability, misses the multiplicity of ways in which genocide can be anticipated, prevented and recovered from. The keys to that multiplicity of approaches lie in borrowing from and associating with disaster management studies.