The Ten Stages of Genocide — Gregory H. Stanton
Gregory Stanton's model of the processes by which genocides develop, in which dehumanisation is identified as the fourth stage — the point at which a group is denied membership of humanity and killing ceases to be experienced as murder.
Gregory H. Stanton, founding president of Genocide Watch, developed a stage model of genocide from a comparative study of the Cambodian, Armenian and Nazi genocides, first presented in 1987 as the Faulds Lecture at Warren Wilson College under the title “Blue Scarves and Yellow Stars: Classification and Symbolization in the Cambodian Genocide,” and later presented to the United States State Department as an eight-stage model. Two further stages were added in 2012, producing the model now published as the Ten Stages of Genocide: classification, symbolization, discrimination, dehumanization, organization, polarization, preparation, persecution, extermination and denial.
The stages are not a timetable and Stanton does not claim they occur strictly in sequence; they describe processes that operate simultaneously and that may be interrupted at any point, which is the model’s purpose — it exists for prevention. Its fourth stage is dehumanization, which Stanton describes as occurring when perpetrators call their victims rats, or cockroaches, cancer, or disease. Denying a group its membership of humanity is what allows killing to be experienced by the killers as something other than murder, and it is why the model treats language as an early-warning indicator rather than as mere offensiveness.
The model is a framework used in atrocity prevention, not a legal test. The crime of genocide is defined by Article II of the 1948 Convention and requires proof of specific acts committed with intent to destroy a protected group as such; Stanton’s stages describe how societies arrive at that point. Both matter to reading the record of Gaza, and they should not be confused with one another.
Why it matters
- The most widely taught framework in atrocity prevention for reading dehumanising speech as a warning signal rather than as rhetoric.
- It establishes why documenting what was said, by whom and when is itself a form of prevention work.
- It is explicitly a preventive model, not a legal standard — a distinction that matters when citing it alongside court findings.
Key resources
Cited work
The summary above is written by FALASTEEN.AI. The document itself is published by Genocide Watch and is linked here in full.
Cite this page
Every claim above carries its sources — citation is the point.
- Chicago
“The Ten Stages of Genocide — Gregory H. Stanton.” Research Library, FALASTEEN.AI. Accessed 22 August 2026. https://falasteen.ai/research/genocide-watch-ten-stages.- MLA
“The Ten Stages of Genocide — Gregory H. Stanton.” Research Library, FALASTEEN.AI, 2026, https://falasteen.ai/research/genocide-watch-ten-stages. Accessed 22 August 2026.- BibTeX
@misc{falasteen-genocide-watch-ten-stages, title = {The Ten Stages of Genocide — Gregory H. Stanton}, howpublished = {\url{https://falasteen.ai/research/genocide-watch-ten-stages}}, organization = {FALASTEEN.AI — A Living Archive for Palestine}, year = {2026}, note = {Accessed 2026-08-22} }