Political and social conflicts among groups exist in all human societies. In many societies, groups come to be seen as deleterious to the well-being of the majority or, sometimes, a powerful minority. How this happens and the character of the pernicious qualities projected onto such groups vary enormously. When it does, people can deem the perniciousness of such populaces to be so great that they want to neutralize them by eliminating the group or by destroying its capacity to inflict putative harm. So they employ any of the five principal means of elimination: forced transformation, repression, expulsion, prevention of reproduction, or extermination. But, whatever means they choose, the desire and the attempt to eliminate peoples or groups should be understood as the core problem.

Precisely because these eliminationist means are functional equivalents, perpetrators typically use several of them simultaneously. The Turks did so for the Armenians. The Germans did so for the Jews. The Sudanese have done so for their victims, and so did the Serbs. Alisa Muratčauš, former president of the Association of Concentration Camp Torture Survivors in Sarajevo, explains that the Serbs "aimed to eliminate all Bosnian people." Yet they used a variety of means: "Some people will be expelled to another country, a Western country. Some people would be killed. Some people will be [kept] alive for maybe [the Serbs'] personal needs. Who knows? Maybe like slavery."

Whenever we see these large-scale violent assaults, such as expulsions or incarcerations mixed together with killing, we should immediately recognize them as being eliminationist assaults (which could also expand into much larger-scale killing) and respond to them with all the vigor that we ought to apply to genocides. And we should certainly not sit on our hands with pointless debates about definitions--does it qualify as genocide?--as we have done with the former Yugoslavia and Darfur. We should realize that the non-lethal aspects of eliminationist assaults are as critical to combat as the killing itself. Appreciating this helps to make clear that the problem we are confronting is even more vast and more urgent. Genocide and eliminationism should no longer receive the third-rate treatment that they currently do from our politicians: They should be at the core of present and future international policy-making.

Beyond appreciating its breadth, there are two other crucial facts we need to recognize about eliminationism. First, it is a form of politics. Like war, eliminationism is the extension of politics by other means. Political leaders use eliminationist measures to maintain or further power, socially and politically transform a country, defuse a real or putative threat, purify a society according to some ideological blueprint, or achieve any of many other aspirations. Mass murder and elimination are thus politics not in a superficial sense, but at their core, because they are purposeful, calculated acts of leaders meant to achieve political goals. They are an integral part of the repertoire of political leaders, always in principle available, and, in our time, frequently used. It is precisely because eliminationism is such a successful form of politics--those employing it almost always effectively carry out the eliminationist task--that political leaders have adopted it so often during the last century and this one.