Slow-Burn Destruction: Reading “Conditions of Life” into Twenty-First Century Genocide

Abstract

This article addresses a persistent gap in genocide law: the under-utilization of Article II(c) of the Genocide Convention (“conditions of life”) to prosecute and prevent deliberate deprivation strategies that destroy protected groups over time. When states or armed actors intentionally sever civilian access to life-sustaining resources, through blockades, sieges, or other forms of isolation, the resulting attrition operates as a form of slow-burn genocide. Yet such “slow-motion” atrocities frequently evade timely legal and political recognition because their harm unfolds gradually, lacks the immediacy of mass executions, and presents greater evidentiary challenges for proving dolus specialis. Consequently, Article II(c) remains under-enforced: starvation, medical blockades, and other deprivation-based measures are too often framed solely as humanitarian crises or war crimes, rather than as genocidal acts triggering the Convention’s obligations of prevention and accountability.
The article advances three contributions. First, it clarifies the doctrinal scope of Article II(c), synthesizing relevant jurisprudence on actus reus and genocidal intent in deprivation-based strategies, and identifying evidentiary approaches that do not require a “body-count” threshold. Second, it operationalizes the provision into a measurable early-warning and charging framework by proposing objective triggers, such as sustained supply shortfalls, health-system collapse, and repeated obstruction of humanitarian access, to inform provisional measures, prosecutorial strategies, and domestic legal incorporation. Third, it illustrates the framework’s feasibility through a proof-of-concept analysis of the Lachin Corridor blockade, contextualized through historical and contemporary comparators.
The proposed approach shifts the focus from retrospective recognition to prospective prevention, offering a doctrinally grounded tool that enables scholars, courts, and practitioners to identify, prosecute, and interrupt genocide-by-attrition before attrition becomes annihilation.