Ethnocide
Ethnocide is a concept related to genocide; unlike genocide, which has entered into international law, ethnocide remains primarily the province of sociologists, who have not yet settled on a single cohesive meaning for the term.
Raphael Lemkin, the linguist and lawyer who coined genocide as the union of "the Greek word genos (race, tribe) and the Latin cide (killing)", also suggested ethnocide as an alternative form representing the same concept, using the Greek ethnos (nation) in place of genos. It does not appear to have entered into wide usage at the time.
Subsequently, ethnocide has been used by some sociologists to refer to a sub-type of genocide, namely: while the United Nations' 1951 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines genocide as acts committed against "national, ethnical, racial or religious" groups, ethnocide in this context would refer only to crimes motivated by ethnicity.
Another definition in use in some writings suggests that ethnocide could refer to actions which, while not leading directly to death or harm of living members of a group, have the long-term effect of, e.g., reducing birthrates, interfering with education or transmission of culture to future generations of a group, or erasing the group's existence or practices from the historical record. This usage is commonly found in discussions of oppressed indigenous peoples and is sometimes referred to as culturecide. Under the UN Convention, some of these practices could also overlap with legal definitions of genocide, e.g., prevention of births within a group, or forcibly transferring the children of a group to another group.
Although international genocide law focuses primarily on direct violent and repressive actions, it is worth noting that Lemkin, in his writings, considered genocide to be a crime above all others not solely because of the numbers of persons killed or injured, but because genocide carried with it the intent to render entire, irreplaceable cultures extinct. The broader definition of ethnocide may be useful in addressing perceived shortcomings and restrictions of genocide law and in identifying cultural destruction when it occurs by less violent and less visible means.
Like its related term cultural genocide, the etymology of ethnocide is seen by some as inflammatory; those who believe that directly killing, intentionally causing the death of, or physically harming members of a group make genocide unique among crimes may see parallel use of language as an attempt to equate what they consider to be lesser offenses, thereby watering down the particular horrors invoked by the term genocide.