Drawing the Line Between War Crimes and Genocide

The words war crime and genocide often appear side by side in news reports, tribunal summaries, and political speeches, as if they were twins born of the same moral catastrophe. But these terms, while orbiting a similar ethical space, have distinct legal contours and philosophical implications. Their difference isn’t just legal taxonomy—it is about the way humanity tries to articulate the hierarchy of evil, to sort the chaos of atrocity into categories that allow for justice, however fragile.

War crimes, in the most stripped-down sense, are violations of the laws and customs of war. These include things like targeting civilians, using prohibited weapons, or mistreating prisoners of war. War itself, gruesome though it may be, has rules. The Geneva Conventions and the statutes of international courts enshrine them. When soldiers or commanders break these rules, they commit war crimes. There is a strange civility embedded in this logic—a nod to the idea that even in slaughter, there must be lines that must not be crossed.

Genocide, on the other hand, has a chillingly different emphasis. It is not about the method, but the intent. Genocide, as defined by the 1948 UN Convention, is the deliberate attempt to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. The actions involved—killing, torture, forced sterilizations, and so on—may overlap with war crimes. But what elevates them to genocide is not the brutality itself, but the motive behind it: the desire to erase an identity.

This is where the scholarly and ethical distinction grows sharp. A massacre can be a war crime if it happens in the fog of combat, a decision made in panic or revenge. But to call it genocide requires a specific, premeditated hatred—a bureaucracy of death engineered toward obliteration. That’s why the word genocide, though rarely used legally, carries such moral weight. It doesn’t just indict the act, it indicts the idea that some people must not exist.

Legally, the challenge lies in proving intent. In war crime prosecutions, the burden is often factual: what happened, who ordered it, who executed it. In genocide cases, courts must delve into the minds of perpetrators, looking for speeches, policies, patterns of behavior that signal the will to annihilate a group. That’s why even in cases where genocide is suspected—say, in Darfur, Myanmar, or Xinjiang—governments and courts tread cautiously. The word is radioactive. Once you declare it, you have a duty to act. And the world, historically, has been reluctant to take on that burden.

Ethically, the distinction also forces us to wrestle with uncomfortable gradations of evil. War crimes are terrible, yes, but is genocide somehow worse? The law says so. But emotionally, morally, many might ask: is the victim of an indiscriminate bombing less worthy of outrage than the victim of an ethnic purge? The law, in trying to be precise, sometimes feels cold. It has to categorize suffering in order to respond to it, but in doing so, it risks flattening the human cost behind legal definitions.

There’s also a political dimension. Genocide is often used as a weaponized term—accusations thrown to shame, to isolate, to justify intervention or, just as often, to deflect it. Governments are quick to label others’ actions as genocide, but slow to acknowledge it when they might be complicit. The term becomes less about justice and more about power.

Ultimately, war crimes and genocide exist on a spectrum of atrocity, but their distinction lies in the human mind—the difference between destruction for advantage, and destruction for ideology. One breaks the rules of war. The other tries to erase the existence of a people. In that difference lies our most fragile ethical line: between the tragedy of war and the horror of extermination. Understanding that line doesn’t just help courts assign guilt—it helps societies understand how close they are, or are not, to repeating history.

Boycotts, Academia, and the Ethics of Solidarity

There’s something performatively clean about a boycott. You refuse to show up, you make a statement, you symbolically withdraw your presence and support. And in many spheres—consumer activism, corporate accountability, fossil fuels—this tactic has teeth. But when it comes to academia, boycotts get ethically muddy in ways that few seem eager to acknowledge. They are as much about optics as they are about outcomes, and the line between solidarity and symbolic self-sabotage is perilously thin.

The idea of collective punishment dressed up as moral clarity is not new. When scholars boycott institutions in the United States because of its government’s actions—wars, policies, presidents—they often do so out of principled objection. But those objections land not on policymakers, who rarely notice, but on fellow scholars—those whose classrooms are full of dissent, whose lectures critique empire, whose grant applications are rejected for being “too political.” In the age of MAGA, where universities are painted as hotbeds of Leftist subversion, academic boycotts of American institutions perversely serve the narrative of the far right. If universities are the “enemy of the people,” as Trump claims, then fewer international scholars coming to conferences is not a wound—it’s a win. 

The same contradiction emerges in discussions of boycotting Israeli academia. Israel’s government is deeply entangled in policies that have rightly drawn global condemnation. And yet, the academic world within Israel is disproportionately populated by critics of those policies—many of whom have been publicly vilified by their own state for their views. Calls to boycott these institutions often assume that academia is an extension of state power. But in practice, it is more often a site of resistance, a fragile one, barely holding out against the encroachments of nationalism and militarization. When scholars in Tel Aviv or Haifa or Jerusalem lose access to international colleagues, they don’t become more powerful—they become more isolated.

The Russian case sharpens the dilemma. Since 2022, Russian state aggression has prompted sweeping cultural and institutional ostracism. But to cut ties with Russian academics because of their passport—especially those who have spoken out, resisted, or fled—is to abandon the very principle of intellectual solidarity. It reduces individuals to representatives of regimes they neither voted for nor benefit from. And worse, it reinforces a notion that nationality equals complicity, erasing the moral agency of people struggling under authoritarianism. That’s not ethics. That’s convenience masquerading as principle.

What all these cases have in common is the presumption that institutions can be cleanly separated from the people within them, and that withdrawing engagement is a morally upright act. But ethics, especially academic ethics, rarely benefits from such abstraction. To pretend that boycotting a university is merely a gesture against a government is to ignore the human cost—the junior scholar whose career is derailed, the student who loses a mentor, the grassroots movement that loses allies.

True solidarity, the kind that changes things, is relational. It requires presence, dialogue, and the difficult labor of distinguishing friend from foe, even when they occupy the same institutional space. It’s messier than a boycott. It looks less like absence and more like engagement with boundaries. It’s attending the conference in Texas and using your keynote to decry state policies. It’s co-authoring with an Israeli scholar who’s under attack for opposing the occupation. It’s mentoring a Russian postdoc in exile. It is going to a US-based conference out of solidarity with the American scholars under siege. 

Fear of harassment at the border is a different matter. While the actual risks are astronomically low, they are not zero. No one should be pressured into travel that they find frightening or demeaning. But let’s be clear: personal safety decisions are not political acts of protest. Declining to attend is a valid choice. Just don’t conflate fear with boycott. They’re not the same thing. 

Boycotts can have their place. But they are not ethical in and of themselves. Their morality lies in their effect, and when that effect is to harm those trying to do good in dark times, it’s time to reassess. Blanket withdrawal may feel like justice. But justice, like scholarship, demands more than feeling. It demands thinking—especially about who we hurt when we don’t show up.