Dolus Perdere: the 'specific intent' to destroy a people as such
ICGC Commons for Critical Inquiry (537 Heller Hall) and livestream .
In contemporary social and political discourse, there is a seemingly universal belief that the crime of genocide requires ’specific intent’. In virtually all spaces where the concept of genocide is discussed, it is characterized by the idea that in order to become criminally responsibly for the culpable act, a perpetrator must be proven to possess genocidal intent, which conventional wisdom defines as the ’specific intent’ to destroy a people, as such. This chapter shows how this hegemonic understanding of genocide (Meiches 2019) misapprehends what it means to be responsible for genocide because it superimposes a designation of liability over the definition. The chapter offers instead the concept of dolus perdere—translated literally as intent to destroy—as a corrective concept and argues that genocide does not, contrary to conventional wisdom, require ’specific intent’.
About the Speaker
Megan is a doctoral candidate in Political Science and an ICGC Fellow at the University of Minnesota. She is interested in the politics of thoughts and feelings, especially as they relate to atrocity and inform practices of global solidarity. Her work thinks with pain, insisting on a practice of taking care for a collective inheritance of U.S. annihilatory violence, settler coloniality, and its global imperial project. Megan's dissertation investigates how a distinctly colonial politics of responsibility manifests in international criminal trials, comparing prosecutions of genocide in courts organized by the United Nations and at the People’s Permanent Tribunal.