When Genocide Isn’t Enough
Why the World Needs a New Crime - Annihilationism
There are moments in history when the vocabulary of justice fails us. The world thought it had found its ultimate legal and moral line in 1948, when the Genocide Convention declared that the destruction of a people, in whole or in part, was a crime that could never be excused. But history has a way of finding the cracks in our definitions. The 20th century did not end with “never again.” It ended with Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur, each atrocity stretching the legal definition until it frayed. Now, in the 21st century, we are witnessing a crime that exceeds even that grim threshold: Annihilationism.
Proposed Definition:
Annihilationism is the deliberate, coordinated policy of physically, culturally, and historically erasing a people, their land, and their identity, combining mass killing, destruction of civilian infrastructure, and obliteration of cultural heritage, thereby committing, in concert, the crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes as codified under international law.
Gaza’s aerial footage does not show a battlefield. It shows the deliberate removal of an entire urban reality. This is not merely about killing civilians, as terrible as that is. It is about ensuring there is nothing left to rebuild, nothing left to remember, nothing left to return to. Hospitals are gone. Schools are rubble. Archives, religious sites, neighbourhoods, all obliterated. The air itself is poisoned, the water undrinkable, the soil unusable. This is the systematic destruction of life, land, and memory all at once. Here lies the problem: international law has no single crime for this total erasure.
Genocide law, shaped in the shadow of the Holocaust, focuses on people. It asks whether a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group was targeted for destruction “in whole or in part.” But its scope is narrow: destroy the people, and you have committed genocide. Destroy their homes, history, culture, and environment, and those acts are separate war crimes, crimes against humanity, cultural destruction, each prosecuted under different articles, each carrying its own evidentiary burden.
This fragmentation is why states can commit what is, in effect, total annihilation and still argue they are not committing genocide. They can hide behind the legal siloing of offences, insisting that the starvation, the cultural erasure, the environmental destruction are “secondary” crimes, not the core of the act. The law allows them to choose their defence from a menu.
History has seen crimes like this before; the Mongol razing of Baghdad in 1258 obliterated not just the city’s population but its libraries, irrigation systems, and centuries of scientific and cultural heritage. In the 20th century, the Nazi plan for Eastern Europe, Generalplan Ost, aimed not just to kill but to wipe out the physical and cultural presence of Slavs, replacing them with German settlers. The Khmer Rouge didn’t simply execute Cambodians; they dismantled the cultural, educational, and agricultural structures that sustained them. The Siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s gave us “urbicide”, the destruction of a city as a living organism, but even that term couldn’t capture the full erasure of identity, heritage, and survivability.
Every one of these crimes shares a common DNA: they sought to make the victim group unrecoverable in every sense, physically, culturally, historically, even environmentally. That is Annihilationism.
Annihilationism is not just genocide-plus. It is the integration of genocide, urbicide, memoricide, and ecocide into a single criminal purpose. This integration matters because, in law, intention is everything. Right now, international law treats these acts as separate offences, allowing perpetrators to argue that each one was incidental, unintended, or collateral. A unified charge removes that escape hatch: the pattern itself becomes the crime.
By naming and codifying Annihilationism, we close a loophole that has allowed states to destroy entire societies while claiming plausible deniability. We also send a message that the erasure of a people’s existence, not just their lives, is as intolerable to the international community as genocide was meant to be.
The images from Gaza are not an anomaly; they are a warning shot to the 21st century. If this scale of destruction can occur under the current legal regime without a singular charge to capture its totality, then every future war will inherit this playbook. Cities will be levelled not just to win battles, but to remove the possibility of a people’s return. Archives will be burned, water poisoned, farmland salted, not as excesses, but as strategy.
When the Nuremberg Trials ended, the world didn’t stop at “crimes against humanity.” It added genocide, it refined war crimes, it sought to close the gaps that the Holocaust had exposed. We are in that moment again. Gaza, like Guernica before it, is a bellwether: ignore it, and the tactic will spread. Codify it, and we might still draw a line.
Annihilationism is that line. It says to the world: You may win territory, you may depose governments, but you may not erase a people from existence in every dimension. To do so is to commit the highest crime we can conceive, a crime not just against humanity, but against history itself.