The word \u201cgenocide\u201d did not exist before the Second World War. It was coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jewish lawyer. In Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, he was trying to name something the vocabulary of the time failed to describe properly: not the massacre of individuals, but the organized destruction of a human group. Lemkin built the term from the Greek genos (group, people) and the Latin suffix -cide (to kill). In his conception, this destruction could target the political, social, cultural, economic, biological, and physical foundations of a group.<\/p>\n\n
Only four years later, on December 9, 1948, did the United Nations adopt the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The legal definition that followed was narrower than Lemkin\u2019s, but it retained his central idea: the immediate victim is an individual, while the real target is the group to which that person belongs.<\/p>\n\n
For an act to qualify as genocide in legal terms, a specific intent must therefore be established: the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group as such.<\/p>\n\n
It may seem strange, but two massacres can produce the same number of deaths while following radically different logics. In one case, people may be killed in a campaign of terror, in war, because of their political views, or simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. In the other, they are attacked because belonging to a particular group is enough to mark them as people whose disappearance is desired.<\/p>\n\n
The death toll may therefore be identical, and the horror just as great, while the project behind those deaths is fundamentally different.
Genocide does not necessarily mean killing Why do these distinctions matter? Because each term corresponds to a different legal and historical reality:<\/p>\n\n These distinctions can seem abstract, but two historical examples make them concrete: Srebrenica and Cambodia.<\/p>\n\n In July 1995, Bosnian Serb forces captured Srebrenica, which had been declared a United Nations \u201csafe area.\u201d More than 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys were killed or went missing. During the same period, tens of thousands of women, children, and elderly people were expelled from the enclave.<\/p>\n\n Here, the number of deaths is not the decisive point. What matters is the purpose behind the killings. International courts recognized Bosnian Muslims as a protected group, with the Muslims of Srebrenica constituting a significant part of that group. Men and boys were systematically separated, detained, and then executed, while the rest of the population was expelled.<\/p>\n\n The destruction of the men of this community was not simply a consequence of war: it formed part of a deliberate effort to make the Srebrenica community disappear. That is why the massacre was legally recognized as genocide (International Court of Justice, judgment of February 26, 2007).<\/p>\n\n Ce que nous devons en retenir ici est qu\u2019il n\u2019est pas n\u00e9cessaire de vouloir tuer chaque membre d\u2019un peuple dans le monde entier. D\u00e9truire une partie cons\u00e9quente du groupe peut suffire.<\/p>\n\n Between April 1975 and January 1979, the Khmer Rouge regime imposed forced evacuations, exhausting labor, famine, detention, persecution, and executions. Widely cited estimates put the death toll at close to two million. Yet not all of these victims are legally considered victims of genocide. Much of the population was persecuted according to political, social, or ideological criteria that do not correspond to the four groups protected by the 1948 Convention (national, ethnic, racial, or religious).<\/p>\n\n However, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia did classify certain acts of violence directed at specific groups as genocide, notably those targeting Vietnamese people and Cham Muslims.<\/p>\n\n This example shows that the same criminal system can produce genocide, crimes against humanity, and extermination without every victim falling under the same legal classification.<\/p>\n\n Both cases point to the same lesson: the intent behind the violence is crucial. And it is precisely this question of intent that makes Attack on Titan (Shingeki no Kyojin) so difficult to classify.<\/p>\n\n Genocides recognized since 1948 By the time Attack on Titan (Shingeki no Kyojin) introduces Marley, the idea of treating an entire population as a problem has existed for a long time.<\/p>\n\n Eldians living on the continent are confined to internment zones such as Liberio. They wear armbands that identify them, carry the burden of crimes attributed to their ancestors, and are constantly expected to prove that they are not like the \u201cdevils\u201d of Paradis Island.<\/p>\n\n Marley\u2019s relationship with them is deeply contradictory. On the one hand, Eldians are presented as dangerous because they can become Titans. On the other, that very ability makes them indispensable to Marley\u2019s military power. <\/p>\n\n This is the paradox faced by Warrior candidates such as Gabi and Falco, and by Warriors such as Reiner and Zeke: becoming a \u201cgood Eldian\u201d means serving a system that still treats their people as guilty for a past they themselves never knew.<\/p>\n\n It is important to stress that Marley is not trying to make every Eldian disappear. On the contrary, the system needs them, their Titans, and their military strength. But Attack on Titan (Shingeki no Kyojin) already makes one essential point clear: a population can begin to be treated as a collective problem long before any project of extermination emerges.<\/p>\n\n Individuals are no longer judged only by what they have done. Birth alone is enough to assign them a place, a guilt, and sometimes even the status of a threat. This logic becomes even more visible when Willy Tybur presents Paradis as a global danger: the entire island becomes the threat around which Marley seeks to unite the rest of the world.<\/p>\n\n And it is within that environment that Eren ultimately unleashes the Rumbling.<\/p>\n\n For much of Attack on Titan (Shingeki no Kyojin), the threat appears to come from Marley. Marley uses Titans as weapons, keeps Eldians in internment zones, and takes a direct part in the war against Paradis. It would therefore be natural to assume that Eren\u2019s primary aim is to destroy this specific enemy. Yet that is not what he announces.<\/p>\n\n When he addresses the Subjects of Ymir in Chapter 123, his objective goes far beyond Marley: \u201cThe Titans of the Walls will advance beyond this island and crush the lands outside it until all life there is gone.\u201d<\/p>\n\n Kodansha, the series\u2019 Japanese publisher, summarizes this part of the story with striking clarity:<\/p>\n\n Eren\u2019s target is no longer just an army, or even a nation. It becomes almost everything on the other side of the sea: Marleyans, of course, but also Eldians, refugees, children, people from nations hostile to Marley\u2014and probably peoples about whom Eren knows almost nothing.<\/p>\n\n Ramzi embodies the absurdity of this in the most brutal way. Eren meets him during his stay in Marley. He sees him being assaulted, steps in to protect him, understands his poverty, and even spends time with his family while already knowing what is going to happen.<\/p>\n\n Eren knows perfectly well that Ramzi will be killed by the Rumbling. He is ashamed, cries in front of him, and even asks for his forgiveness. Yet he continues with the plan anyway. Ramzi poses no threat to Paradis. He bears no responsibility for the conflict between the Eldians and the rest of the world. He will die simply because he lives on the wrong side of the sea. Collateral damage…<\/p>\n\n And it is this part of Eren\u2019s plan that makes the Rumbling so difficult to characterize.<\/p>\n\n Eren wants almost all of humanity outside Paradis to disappear. In doing so, he crushes Marleyans, Eldians, refugees, and peoples whose names he probably does not even know, without distinction.<\/p>\n\n Yet, as explained above, for an act to qualify as genocide it must target a protected group (national, ethnic, racial, or religious) as a group. As Abhijeet Shrivastava and Anujay Shrivastava (2022) point out, the Rumbling poses a challenge to the Genocide Convention because its target is primarily geographic (\u201ceveryone living outside Paradis\u201d) rather than a specific group.<\/p>\n\n The Rumbling, then, despite its unimaginable violence, does not fit the definition of genocide exactly. It is closer to a crime against humanity involving mass extermination, or to a project of mass destruction, but without the targeted intent required by the 1948 Convention.<\/p>\n\n Zeke\u2019s project is far more precise and personal: he does not want to massacre the Eldians. In his own logic, he is instead trying to spare them a violent extermination. His plan is simple: use the power of the Founding Titan to make every Subject of Ymir unable to have children. Eldians already alive could continue living. They would grow old and eventually die naturally. No new Eldians would be born after them. The disappearance of the people would be slow, but final.<\/p>\n\n Zeke even imagines a temporary military deterrent to prevent the rest of the world from exterminating the generations still alive. His goal is therefore not to kill every Eldian, but to ensure that one day none remain.<\/p>\n\n This distinction also explains why Zeke sees his plan as a form of salvation. To him, being Eldian means carrying the burden of the Titans, Marley\u2019s hatred, historical guilt, and an endless conflict. From his perspective, the question becomes almost logical: \u201cWhy keep bringing children into the world only to condemn them to the same suffering?\u201d His answer is radical: better to prevent those lives from existing at all.<\/p>\n\n This is where the 1948 Convention becomes crucial again. One of the five acts explicitly listed as genocide is \u201cimposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.\u201d<\/p>\n\n As the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda established in the Akayesu case (1998), such measures can constitute genocide when the intent is to destroy the group. In Zeke\u2019s case, that intent is difficult to dispute, or even deny: he is not simply trying to reduce the birth rate among the Subjects of Ymir. He wants the last of them to die without descendants so that their people will cease to exist permanently.<\/p>\n\n Aussi dingue que cela puisse para\u00eetre, le projet de Zeke remplit les crit\u00e8res du g\u00e9nocide et, assez ironiquement, c\u2019est donc lui, dont le plan ne produit aucun massacre imm\u00e9diat, qui se rapproche le plus de la d\u00e9finition juridique du g\u00e9nocide.<\/p>\n\n Eren and Zeke do not want the same thing, but their personal projects lead to a similarly brutal dead end: coexistence is no longer an option.<\/p>\n\n Zeke believes the existence of the Subjects of Ymir creates too much suffering, both for them and for the rest of the world. His solution? Gradually eliminate the possibility of their being born at all.<\/p>\n\n Eren begins from the opposite principle: being born is enough to establish a right to exist. He rejects Zeke\u2019s idea because he believes no Eldian should have to disappear simply because the world rejects them. But when he applies that conviction to Paradis, a problem emerges: to guarantee his own people\u2019s right to exist, Eren ultimately removes that right from almost everyone else.<\/p>\n\n The two brothers therefore reach the same point by opposite routes: they stop seeing coexistence as a possible solution.<\/p>\n\n Zeke imagines a world with no future Eldians, while Eren imagines a world in which almost all humanity outside Paradis has disappeared. The first turns extinction into an act of compassion; the second turns annihilation into a condition of freedom.<\/p>\n\n Worse still, neither of them needs to believe that the people they condemn are completely inhuman in order to carry out the plan.<\/p>\n\n Other works of fiction confronting genocide The purpose of this article was never to reduce the projects of annihilation in Attack on Titan (Shingeki no Kyojin) to a simple legal label. Above all, I wanted to understand how this universe makes us grasp and feel things that resonate with us even when we struggle to explain them. Details may evoke memories from our own history (the yellow star, camps, and so on) but we do not always have the right words to describe what we are seeing.<\/p>\n\n What Attack on Titan (Shingeki no Kyojin) does above all is build an entire ecosystem:<\/p>\n\n Added to this are wars, reprisals, conflicting historical narratives, fear, humiliation, and memories passed down from generation to generation.<\/p>\n\n Marley is essential to this mechanism. The story shows that before a people is targeted for disappearance, it can first be separated, identified, assigned collective guilt, and taught to be seen as a threat by definition.<\/p>\n\n Yes, at times it resembles our own world. And yet it remains profoundly different.<\/p>\n\n The Rumbling and Zeke\u2019s plan are the spectacular culmination of this process. But neither is its beginning. And this is probably where the word \u201cgenocide\u201d becomes genuinely useful for reading and understanding Attack on Titan (Shingeki no Kyojin).<\/p>\n\n Before a group can be massacred, sterilized, or condemned to disappear, a deeper idea must already have taken hold: that perhaps the world would be better without it. That is the transformation we now need to understand. How does a population gradually become an enemy? How do propaganda, fear, memory, and education make acceptable what would have seemed unthinkable only a few years earlier?<\/p>\n\n Autrement dit : comment en arrive-t-on \u00e0 penser que l\u2019autre doit dispara\u00eetre ? C\u2019est bien cette question que la suite de ce dossier va tenter d\u2019explorer.<\/p>\n\n Hajime Isayama \u2014 Attack on Titan – Shingeki no Kyojin, Kodansha, volumes 22 \u00e0 34<\/strong> : source primaire pour Mahr, Revelio, le Grand Terrassement, les intentions d\u2019Eren, le projet de Zeke et Ramzi.<\/p>\n\n Nations unies \u2014<\/strong>Convention pour la pr\u00e9vention et la r\u00e9pression du crime de g\u00e9nocide (1948)<\/strong><\/strong> : D\u00e9finition internationale du g\u00e9nocide, groupes prot\u00e9g\u00e9s, intention de destruction et cinq actes pr\u00e9vus par l\u2019article II.<\/a><\/p>\n\n Nations unies \u2014<\/strong>Definitions of Genocide and Related Crimes<\/strong><\/a> : D\u00e9finition du g\u00e9nocide et distinctions avec les autres crimes internationaux.<\/p>\n\n Rapha\u00ebl Lemkin \u2014<\/strong>Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944)<\/strong><\/a> : Origine du mot \u00ab g\u00e9nocide \u00bb et premi\u00e8re conceptualisation de la destruction d\u2019un groupe. La page des Nations unies consacr\u00e9e \u00e0 la d\u00e9finition du g\u00e9nocide pr\u00e9sente \u00e9galement l\u2019origine du terme.<\/p>\n\n Cour internationale de Justice \u2014<\/strong>Bosnie-Herz\u00e9govine c. Serbie-et-Mont\u00e9n\u00e9gro, arr\u00eat du 26 f\u00e9vrier 2007<\/strong><\/a> : Reconnaissance du g\u00e9nocide de Srebrenica et analyse de l\u2019intention g\u00e9nocidaire.<\/p>\n\n TPIY \/ M\u00e9canisme international r\u00e9siduel \u2014<\/strong>Affaire Radislav Krsti\u0107<\/strong><\/a> : Notion de \u00ab partie substantielle \u00bb d\u2019un groupe dans le cas de Srebrenica.<\/p>\n\n Chambres extraordinaires au sein des tribunaux cambodgiens \u2014<\/strong>Dossier 002\/02<\/strong><\/a> : Crimes commis sous les Khmers rouges et qualification de g\u00e9nocide concernant les groupes vietnamien et cham.<\/p>\n\n United States Holocaust Memorial Museum \u2014<\/strong>Cambodia 1975\u20131979<\/strong><\/a> : Contexte et ampleur des violences commises sous les Khmers rouges.<\/p>\n\n Abhijeet Shrivastava & Anujay Shrivastava \u2014<\/strong>\u00ab How \u2018Attack on Titan\u2019 Complicates the Genocide Convention \u00bb (2022)<\/strong><\/a> : Analyse de la difficult\u00e9 \u00e0 appliquer strictement la d\u00e9finition juridique du g\u00e9nocide au Grand Terrassement.<\/p>\n\n Tribunal p\u00e9nal international pour le Rwanda \u2014<\/strong>Procureur c. Jean-Paul Akayesu, jugement du 2 septembre 1998<\/strong><\/a> : Jurisprudence fondamentale sur le g\u00e9nocide et les mesures visant \u00e0 emp\u00eacher les naissances au sein d\u2019un groupe, utilis\u00e9e dans l\u2019analyse du projet de Zeke.<\/p>\n\n Cour internationale de Justice \u2014<\/strong>Gambie c. Myanmar<\/strong><\/a> : Proc\u00e9dure concernant l\u2019application de la Convention sur le g\u00e9nocide aux Rohingyas.<\/p>\n\n U.S. Department of State \u2014<\/strong>Atrocities in Xinjiang<\/strong><\/a> : Qualification de g\u00e9nocide concernant les Ou\u00efghours.<\/p>\n\n Nations unies \u2014<\/strong>Commission internationale d\u2019enqu\u00eate sur le territoire palestinien occup\u00e9, y compris J\u00e9rusalem-Est, et Isra\u00ebl<\/strong><\/a> : Travaux de la Commission concernant Gaza.<\/p>\n\n![\"Faye](\"https:\/\/im-a-collector.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/imacollector-dossier-attack-on-titan-genocide-faye-yeager-jader-death-OK-1024x597.jpg\")
Genocide, massacre, extermination, crimes against humanity: why the words matter<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n
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Srebrenica and Cambodia: two cases that complicate the picture<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n
Srebrenica (1995): a recognized genocide<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n
![\"Srebrenica](\"https:\/\/im-a-collector.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/imacollector-dossier-attack-on-titan-genocide-bosnie-srebrenica-1995-OK-1024x597.jpg\")
Cambodia (1975\u20131979): a complex case<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n
![\"Meo](\"https:\/\/im-a-collector.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/imacollector-dossier-attack-on-titan-genocide-cambodge-khmer-rouge-OK-1024x597.jpg\")
Before Eren and Zeke, there was already Marley<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n
![\"Eldians](\"https:\/\/im-a-collector.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/imacollector-dossier-attack-on-titan-genocide-mahr-eldiens-camps-OK-1024x597.jpg\")
What is Eren actually trying to do?<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n
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Is the Rumbling a genocide?<\/h2>\n\n
![\"The](\"https:\/\/im-a-collector.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/imacollector-dossier-attack-on-titan-genocide-rumbling-grand-terrassement-OK-1024x597.jpg\")
Zeke\u2019s plan: a textbook case of genocide<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n
![\"Zeke](\"https:\/\/im-a-collector.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/imacollector-dossier-attack-on-titan-genocide-zeke-plan-OK-1024x597.jpg\")
Eren and Zeke: two visions of a world without the other<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n
Genocide begins long before the massacres<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n
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