✶ The Manufacture of Genocide - Semantic Creep Institutional Legitimation and the Politics of the Ultimate Crime

Contemporary genocide claims move among law, scholarship, advocacy, investigation, journalism, and political mobilization. The same word can name a treaty crime, a historical category, an early-warning judgment, or a maximal moral accusation. As a claim travels, its public force can grow even when its evidence and legal effect do not. This paper calls that recurrent conversion status manufacture; the term does not imply fabrication or decide whether the underlying allegation is true. The paper first separates legal, historical or sociological, and rhetorical uses of genocide. It then distinguishes three axes that public discussion often collapses: epistemic warrant (how well the claim is supported), legal status (what a competent body has formally decided), and social salience (how visible and publicly accepted the claim has become). Institutional agreement can strengthen warrant when bodies add independent evidence, genuinely separate evaluation, relevant expertise, or adversarial testing. Repetition of a common record can instead increase salience while leaving warrant and legal status unchanged. A nine-stage pipeline explains how element, intent, register, procedural, moral, and collective creep can end in semantic ownership, where the label's inherited force travels without its original qualifications. Comparisons with terrorism, apartheid, and disinformation show why other high-prestige condemnation terms face related pressures. The model also distinguishes four decision thresholds: prevention under serious risk, investigative or public classification, state responsibility, and individual criminal guilt. Gaza is the central stress test because the catastrophe, contested intent evidence, official rhetoric, documentary record, and institutional activity are all substantial. As of 1 September 2026, the International Court of Justice has issued binding provisional measures but no merits judgment; other bodies have acted under different mandates and proof standards. Comparative treatment of Bosnia and Darfur shows why both inflation and exonerative deflation are mistakes. The bounded conclusion is that communicators should preserve each claim's register, evidence, legal effect, threshold, and responsible actor while taking proportionate protective action before final adjudication when delay is dangerous.