AND ITS GENOCIDAL CONSEQUENCES By Simona Maria Ciot

The term Other is conceptualized by Hegel in The Phenomenology of Spirit as opposed to Self. Other becomes an ethical entity in Levinas` phenomenology, being connected to infinity and the scriptural God, “ The Infinite Other ”.

“ All societies create the self and the other with their own set of categories ” (Helen Fein) Each and every individual or group is at the same time excluded and included, outsider and insider.

“ The relation with the Other, or Conversation, is a non- allergic relation, an ethical relation; but inasmuch as it is welcomed this conversation is a teaching. ” (Emmanuel Levinas) Social sciences display limited assertion of othering as a positive and inclusive process, one that implies dialogue, seeing the world from the perspective of another and erasing dividing lines in an attempt to accomplish a sense of community.

Ever since Raphael Lemkin invented the term genocide and defined it, othering as a process was gradually used more in terms of defining exclusion than inclusion. In Axis Rule On Occupied Europe (1944), the term genocide is first used, a combination between the Greek genos I (people, race) and the Latin cidere (to kill).

The legal definition of genocide is found in the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG).

Article 2 of the Convention defines genocide as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."

Case Study: Rwandan Genocide (1994). Death toll: almost people. Duration: 100 days, from April until July 1994.

Inclusionary Othering is the power within the relationship, not from outside, that aspires to connect through difference. Defining Self through difference from the Other in an inclusive, empathic and empowering relationship that cannot contend annihilation and destruction.