(iPoster) Accidental Atrocities? On Genocide Denial and Weaponized Ignorance

• In Event: Poster Sessions: Foundations of Political Theory II & Autocratic Politics and Democracy
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Foundations of Political Theory II

Abstract

This paper argues that genocide is often made possible not only by violence and policy, but by denial as an active political practice. Building on the concept of an “accidental” genocide, it develops an account of how weaponized denial allows mass destruction to proceed without explicit exterminatory intent, while insulating perpetrators and bystanders from moral, legal, and democratic accountability. Drawing on Stanley Cohen’s analysis of denial and Charles Mills’s notion of white ignorance, the paper shows how ignorance is not merely a cognitive failure but a political achievement, one that organizes institutions, structures public reason, and actively resists recognition. On this view, genocide is not simply denied after the fact; denial is a constitutive condition of its possibility.
The paper begins from dissatisfaction with the dominant legal definition of genocide, which hinges on demonstrable intent to destroy a protected group “as such.” While this requirement promises moral clarity, it is increasingly mismatched with how contemporary mass harm is produced. As Dirk Moses has argued, modern genocide often unfolds through logics of permanent security, in which civilian destruction is justified as defensive, humanitarian, or temporary. In bureaucratic and technocratic states, group destruction is more often the foreseeable outcome of policy routines than the expression of explicit annihilatory will. The insistence on proving intent thus sustains a dangerous fiction: that absent an openly declared will to exterminate, no genocide is occurring. This fiction is maintained through organized denial, which allows actors to disavow intent while persisting in conduct whose destructive consequences are repeatedly forewarned.
The notion of “accidental” genocide does critical work here. It does not imply randomness or misfortune, but names a political formation in which large-scale destruction emerges from policies publicly framed as legitimate (security, stability, development, humanitarian) even as they predictably destroy the conditions of life for a targeted population. What renders such genocides “accidental” is not ignorance of consequences, but the refusal to integrate available knowledge into political judgment. Denial transforms foreseeability into deniability, and deniability into impunity.
Cohen’s typology of denial (literal, interpretive, and implicatory) provides the paper’s first theoretical pillar. Contemporary genocidal contexts, the paper argues, are sustained by all three forms simultaneously. Atrocious conditions are minimized or reframed; deaths are redescribed as collateral damage or tragic inevitabilities; and responsibility is displaced onto victims, enemies, or abstract forces. Crucially, denial is not reducible to individual bad faith. It is institutionalized through official language, media framing, legal argumentation, and bureaucratic procedure, becoming a background condition of governance that structures what can be seen, said, and acted upon within democratic publics.
Mills’s concept of white ignorance deepens this account by explaining how denial persists despite overwhelming evidence. White ignorance is not a passive lack of knowledge but an actively produced and socially functional form of mis-knowing, embedded in epistemic norms and political institutions that regulate credibility and authority. The paper extends this framework to what it terms Zionist ignorance, understood not as a claim about individual belief or Jewish identity, but as a political-epistemic formation structurally analogous to white ignorance. Within this formation, Palestinian life is rendered epistemically disposable: testimony is discounted, deaths are abstracted, and suffering is reframed as tragic but politically irrelevant or self-inflicted. This ignorance “fights back” by discrediting journalists, attacking human rights organizations, accusing critics of antisemitism, and reframing critique as a threat to security or democratic values themselves.
Together, Cohen and Mills reveal how genocide is not merely obscured after the fact but enabled in real time through organized ignorance. The intent requirement in genocide law unintentionally collaborates with this process by privileging interior motive over observable consequence, aligning legal judgment with the very structures of denial perpetrators have learned to exploit. As long as intent remains rhetorically contested, mass destruction can be narrated as tragic necessity rather than criminal atrocity.

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