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This paper deconstructs the definition of genocide provided for by Article II of the Genocide Convention with a view to assessing whether an expanding scope of the crime is possible. The current definition of genocide does not seem to correspond with the original conception of the term, which finds its roots in Raphael Lemkin’s writings, the “father” of the Genocide Convention. Lemkin envisaged three forms of genocide, namely physical, biological, and cultural, so as to convey a concrete idea of the number of faces that genocide could show over time. The drafters of the Genocide Convention largely discussed the three-dimensional structure of genocide, which, in the end, did not reach a consensus when pondering the inclusion of a cultural component within the so-called crime of crimes. This notwithstanding, there are still some remnants of the cultural dimension within the current definition of genocide, although it reads differently as initially envisioned. In addition, this paper introduces the reader to some of the examples that in recent years have dealt explicitly or implicitly with the question of ‘cultural genocide’, whose definition has never been clearly determined. This is certainly problematic inasmuch as there is no unanimity in the scope of the term, as was evidenced throughout the discussions which preceded the adoption of the Genocide Convention. Broadly speaking, the notion of ‘cultural genocide’ appears to refer to an intent to destroy, entirely, or partially, the cultural traits which characterise the modus vivendi of a certain group, encompassing both tangible and intangible attributes. In this regard, this article also considers different alternatives which might circumvent the strict definition of genocide in order to subsume similar offences against the cultural characteristics of a group within other serious crimes under international law.

In the digital age, the preservation of digital cultural heritage faces unforeseen vulnerabilities during conflicts. This article dismantles the illusion of invulnerability in digital repositories and digital archives, revealing their susceptibility to warfare through historical examples and contemporary challenges. The Second World War serves as an example of physical assault on cultural heritage, prompting concerns about potential digital cultural genocide. The recent digital attacks on St. Louis Public Library and France's TV5MONDE serve as examples of malicious assaults on digital cultural heritage. Information warfare, nation-state conflicts, ethnic and cultural suppression and other reasons emerge as potential threats to these digital infrastructures and resources. Beyond vulnerabilities, cybersecurity threats and digital inequality pose significant challenges. Conflict zones also face their own infrastructural challenges. Strategies for resilience are reviewed and suggestions for amendments follow, advocating for a holistic approach that integrates digital and tangible preservation methods, responsible technological advancements, community involvement and international collaboration. The article concludes by emphasizing that a nuanced and comprehensive approach to cultural heritage preservation is required during conflicts. Libraries are positioned as stewards of knowledge, advocating for the protection of our shared cultural legacy amidst fragility and times of conflict.

Debates continue as to whether crimes committed against the Rohingya in Myanmar amount to genocide. This article will address this question, framed in the broad context of the Rohingya victimisation in Myanmar, but also the narrow context of the Rohingya refugee lived experience in Malaysia. The authors contend that the Rohingya are victims of genocide, and this is in part evidenced by the destruction of the Rohingya culture, including through assimilation (and therefore loss of group identity) in refugee destination countries, such as Malaysia. This analysis is based on the consideration of theories of genocide process and definition, international law, and qualitative data collected during extensive anthropological fieldwork by one of the authors with urban refugees in peninsular Malaysia.

During the last century, the Armenian Church and nation have lost most of their sacred spaces. One of the most peculiar cases is the history and afterlife of the khachkars (crossstones) of Julfa. The cemetery of Julfa was known for its endless unique khachkars and other monuments, constituting an exceptional sacred space in terms of spirituality and art history. The area was systematically and entirely destroyed by Azerbaijan in 2005. In the 2010s, Armenians reacted to the destruction by reviving the memory of Julfan khachkars by erecting their replicas to various locations in Armenia and other countries. As khachkars are supposed to be unique and unrepeatable, this struggle for memory requires an interpretative analysis. The problematics became urgent after the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war when hundreds of Armenian monasteries, churches and sacred monuments were left under the control of Azerbaijan. There is no reason to assume that their fate in the long run will be any better than the hundreds of already demolished Armenian churches and monasteries in Azerbaijan.

The Russian–Ukrainian conflict, in addition to causing an unacceptable loss of human life, is straining the integrity of Ukraine’s cultural heritage, despite the fact that both countries involved are parties to the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict and its First Protocol. Churches are one of Ukraine’s most important historical assets, as well as symbolic places of Orthodox religious identity common to both the invaders and the invaded. The destruction of these places and their deliberate damage on the part of both sides appear to be part of a more general conflict concerning internal disagreements between Russian and Ukrainian Orthodoxy, which, in turn, reflect two different historical views of the Russian–Ukrainian relationship. A brief reconstruction of relations between the Orthodox Churches operating on the territory of Ukraine demonstrates how religious affiliation has affected the conflict, causing it to become decisive and deeply divisive, so much so that the Patriarchate of Moscow has become an active part of the conflict. This circumstance favours the hypothesis that it is precisely the religious cultural heritage that is most at risk of deliberate destruction. The Russians, by destroying the symbolic places of Ukrainian religious identity (urbicide), affirm the spiritual unity of the Russian and Ukrainian peoples. For their part, the Ukrainians attempt to erase the Russian presence and the common religious cultural roots by destroying buildings of worship dear to the tradition of the Moscow Patriarchate (cancel culture). They reject the imperial traditions of Russia and, at the same time, claim an independent Church. The question arises as to whether the reconstruction process following the war will take into account the original cultural–religious identities, or whether it will take the opportunity to adopt a new (also) religious identity instead, and whether the old and new instruments offered by law are adequate.

This paper will examine the ways in which the prevailing representation of the legal practices and institutions related to the management and control of Indigenous families and children in Australia shifted over time from “welfare” to “cultural genocide,” and how that shift can be better understood by drawing on Norbert Elias’s understanding of civilizing and decivilizing processes. Policies and practices which were understood from the 19th century onwards to be aimed at promoting the welfare of Indigenous children in the interests of increasing civilization came to be regarded from the 1980s onwards as essentially violent and indeed barbaric. This was due to them being a social engineering project for the gradual and systematic annihilation of Aboriginal cultural identity, to the point of being consistent with the definition of genocide in the UN Genocide Convention, albeit as “cultural genocide.” However, the term remains heavily contested, with views divided between those who think genocide should be restricted to deliberate physical killing, and those arguing for a more expansive conception of what constitutes the destruction of human life. I will argue that a turn to Elias’s conception of civilizing and decivilizing processes helps to clarify what underpins the opposition between these two approaches. After examining the concepts underpinning the legal mechanisms used first to intervene into Australian Indigenous family life and then to pursue holding the responsible authorities to account through “Stolen Generations” litigation, the paper argues for a more nuanced conception of the ways in which civilizing and decivilizing processes interweave with each other in changing ways over time, generating a need to engage with the concept of a “meta-civilizing process.”

In this article, I argue that Eurafricans’ invisibility in Zambia’s national census, history, and social framework is an echo of colonial whiteness stemming from the destructive legacy of illegitimacy perpetuated by British officials in Northern Rhodesia (present-day Zambia) during the colonial era (1924–64), which continues to the present day. This is evidenced by the absence of Eurafricans in the Zambia national censuses. This contribution calls for the British government to apologise to the Eurafrican community for the legacy of illegitimacy and intergenerational racial trauma it bestowed on the community. Zambia’s tribal ‘ethnic’ and ‘linguistics’ census classification options prevent a comprehensive understanding of Zambia’s multi-racial history and the development of a hybrid space that embraces a ‘mixed-race’ Eurafrican (of European and African heritage) Zambian identity. Through an autoethnographic account of my Eurafrican uncle Aaron Milner, I reflect on Zambian Eurafricans’ historical racial positioning as ‘inferior interlopers’, which has contributed to their obscurity in Zambia’s national history and census. However, my reflection goes beyond Milner’s story in Zambia. It is my entryway to highlight how race and colonial whiteness interconnected and underpinned racial ideology in the wider British Empire, and to draw attention to its echoes in various contemporary sociopolitical contexts, including census terminology in Australia and Zambia and Western nations’ anti-Black immigration policies.

Between 1871 and 1969, Native Americans (American Indians) endured the U.S. Federal Indian Boarding School system, while Chinese Americans faced enduring impacts from the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882–1943). Drawing on historical sources, this paper examines literary works by and about Native Americans and Chinese Americans, focusing on their sufferings under forced isolation policies. Through works like Ceremony and Gardens in the Dunes by Leslie Marmon Silko and Eat a Bowl of Tea by Louis Chu, this study illustrates how systematic oppression, characterized by erasure of cultural identity, manifested through institutions such as “boarding school” and “bachelor society”. It explores how forced policies (like assimilation and isolation) and institutional oppression, through cultural erasure and the severing of family ties, dismantled family structures, weakened cultural transmission, and led to identity crises, inter-generational alienation, and psychological trauma in marginalized communities. These ethnic narratives not only document histories of oppression but also highlight the ethnic groups’ resilience and their efforts to reconstruct multicultural identity through cultural heritage and community ties under multifaceted pressures.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission has been investigating the array of crimes committed in Canada's Indian Residential Schools. Genocide is being invoked with increasing regularity to describe the crimes inflicted within the IRS system, the intent behind those crimes, and the legacies that have flowed from them. We ask the following questions. Did Canada commit genocide against Aboriginal peoples by attempting to forcibly assimilate them in residential schools? How does the UN Genocide Convention help interpret genocide claims? If not genocide, what other descriptors are more appropriate? Our position might be described as “fence sitting”: whether genocide was committed cannot be definitively settled at this time. This has to do with polyvalent interpretations of the term, coupled with the growing body of evidence the TRC is building up. We favour using the term cultural genocide as a “ground floor” and a means to legally and morally interpret the IRS system. Résumé. La Commission de vérité et réconciliation a enquêté sur la matrice de crimes commis dans les pensionnats indiens au Canada. Le mot génocide est invoqué avec une régularité croissante pour décrire les crimes infligés au sein du système des pensionnats, l'intention derrière ces crimes, et l'héritage qui s'en est ensuivie. Nous posons les questions suivantes: le Canada a-t-il commis le génocide contre les élèves Aborigènes en essayant de les assimiler de force dans des pensionnats indiens? Comment la Convention des Nations Unies sur la prévention de génocide peut-elle aider interprétations des revendications de génocide ? Si ce pas de génocide, quel autre descripteur est plus approprié ? Notre position pourrait être décrite comme « séance de clôture »: la question de génocide ne peut être réglée définitivement en ce moment. Cela concerne les interprétations polyvalentes du terme, couplé avec le corps grandissant d'évidence que le CVR accumule. Nous préférons le terme génocide culturel comme « un rez-de-chaussée » et comme un moyen de légalement et moralement interpréter le système IRS.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission has called upon Canada to engage in a process of reconciliation with the Indigenous peoples of Canada. Child Welfare is a specific focus of their Calls to Action. In this article, we look at the methods in which discontinuing colonization means challenging legal precedents as well as the types of evidence presented. A prime example is the ongoing deference to the Supreme Court of Canada decision in Racine v Woods which imposes Euro-centric understandings of attachment theory, which is further entrenched through the neurobiological view of raising children. There are competing forces observed in the Ontario decision on the Sixties Scoop, Brown v Canada, which has detailed the harm inflicted when colonial focused assimilation is at the heart of child welfare practice. The carillon of change is also heard in a series of decisions from the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal in response to complaints from the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada and the Assembly of First Nations regarding systemic bias in child welfare services for First Nations children living on reserves. Canadian federal legislation Bill C-92, “An Act respecting First Nations, Inuit and Métis children, youth and families”, brings in other possible avenues of change. We offer thoughts on manners decolonization might be approached while emphasizing that there is no pan-Indigenous solution. This article has implications for other former colonial countries and their child protection systems.