This chapter focuses on the particular and unique links between the crime of genocide and ethnicity, nationality, and race. It demonstrates these links first in the legal histories of the crime of genocide. The chapter presents contemporary understandings of genocide that move out of the shadow of the Holocaust and into the landscape of ethnopolitical warfare and conflict. It explores links between ethnicity, ideology, and motivation of perpetrator groups and discusses efforts at prevention and intervention. The contemporary understanding of genocide is inexorably linked to and shaped bythe Holocaust, the murder of the European Jews by the German Nazi-regime between 1939 and 1945. Raphael Lemkin, a Polish–Jewish refugee is credited with coining the term “genocide”, and he conceived of it explicitly as a crime against an ethnic, national, or religious group.