Over 200,000 people have died in the violence in Sudan’s Darfur provinces. And as the bloodshed continues, genocide scholar Ben Kiernan writes, members of the international community – who may actually have the influence to halt the killings and prosecute the perpetrators – have been preoccupied with semantic and jurisdictional wrangling. Kiernan provides an historical background to the legal definition of “genocide,” noting that the concept pre-dated the term. He writes, “After a century of genocide, resistance, and research on the phenomenon, the world community has a legal definition, an international statute outlawing the crime, and a court asserting jurisdiction over it,” And now, in order to halt the massacres in Sudan, punish those responsible, deter such crimes elsewhere, Kiernan concludes that the next step must be for the International Criminal Court to hear the Darfur case. – YaleGlobal