Ahh, the old genocide debate. People seem to forget some interesting things about what constitutes genocide. Including:
1. Exterminating all the members of a particular religion is counted under the UN definition of genocide. Yet religion is not a racial, ethnic, or genetic characteristic, it is generally a combination of upbringing, social norms, and personal beliefs. Some religions exist primarily amongst specific ethnic groups, but the majority don't, and have members of various races, ethnic, and cultural groups.
And if a leader were to exterminate all the members of a particular religion within their jurisdiction, that would definitely be classed as genocide, despite those people having no racial or necessarily ethnic relation to one another. So genocide is not limited to racial groups.
2. Exterminating all people of one particular group within a country, city state, or other political entity is genocide, even if members of the victim group live freely in other countries. Genocide involves political entities who target and try to wipe out members within their jurisadiction. To use the best known example, the Na zis, when they targeted certain groups for elimination, they only had authority to do so in places they had authority in, including conquored countries. But they were unable to do anything about Jews/Slavs/Gypsies that lived outside of their jurisdiction (Like britian, US, ect). So while Hitler managed to nearly wipe out Europe's jewish population, the jewish communities outside of Na zi jurisdiction were untouched.
yet no one would call what the Na zis did anything but genocide, even if they did not exterminate the entire Jewish population of the planet. They tried to exterminate those people they found subhuman wherever they held rule.
3. genocide is not even limited to direct killing or extermination. other activities that are considered by the UN to be genocide include:
A. Controlling or preventing reporduction in the targeted group to keep their numbers down and limited. Systematically reducing the ability of the target population to reproduce, and removing children/breaking up families to keep the target population under control, with the explicit purpose of reducing and lessesning numbers of the target group. And of course, we know this happens alot even during the best of times, in the Chantry system.
B. Denial of basic social, cultural, and political protection from abuse, harrassment, and physical violence, when such protections are provided for the population in general.. In other words, making it perfectly legal to abuse, torture, or deprive of basic necessities, a particular group, with the purpose of keeping them in a limited, deprived state.
C. Segregating and locking up a particular group, away from society, and inflicting a seperate set of standards on a group, with the intention of destroying the collective unit, or wiping out/limiting their ability to maintain a specific social/cultural norm that the group has survived with.
Given the fact that genocide often legally applies to groups with no genetic relation to each other whatsoever, and given that Circles seem to exist in a seperate culture outside of the social norms, and given that mages everywhere in Andrastian Thedas are targets for assault or murder when they live outside of the Circles, then yeah, I think it does constitute as genocide, the annulment. But thats not the only thing, as I pointed out, the Chantry's policies and rules regarding mages in general do fit several definitions of genocide, and can be reasonably considered as such. That mages aren't a "race" as people think of such things doesn't really matter. They are a genetically similar group, and due to their ostracism and imprisonment from society, seem to form a sort of culture of their own outside social norms.
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