Neuroscience and Non-Lethal Violence in Genocide: Exploring Scope and Constraints

Beyond findings in psychiatry and psychology, in the last two decades, the novel field of neuroscience has expanded our purview of brain injury, pain, and trauma—basically, non-lethal forms of violence. Peeking into the brain using state-of-the-art neuroimaging enables us to discern anomalies such as brain lesions, cysts, enlarged sulci, and regions of hypoperfusion (reduced blood flow), among other things, thereby allowing us to infer connections between brain anomalies and behavior. These findings, this paper posits, are highly relevant to genocide scholarship. Scholars have suggested that “mental harm” in Article II(b) of the Genocide Convention be extended to include neuroscientific findings; the most common in the literature being Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), and Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE). Including these in determining short- and long-term, visible and non-visible effects of exposure to mass atrocity and genocide would allow for a more accurate assessment of non-lethal violence on survivors and their families. Moreover, sufferers would be in a stronger position to employ restorative justice comprising legal, medical, and pecuniary means. Despite the excitement over these revelations, a question to ponder are the challenges individuals and institutions would face before they incorporate non-lethal violence derived from neuroscientific findings into genocide scholarship. This paper explores practical, technical, ideological, and legal arguments: (1) neurohype, (2) limitations of neuroimaging, (3) ideological battles, (4) gatekeeping the definition of genocide.