At the heart of the field of Genocide Studies lies an active core of vigorous debate that has led to both heated disagreements and productive disputes. This new volume in the Genocide: A Critical Bibliographic Review series focuses on these, as well as other significant issues. Chapters in this volume focus on a number of issues: Did Peru’s Aché suffer genocide? What was the role of media propaganda in the Rwandan Genocide, and what more, if anything, could have been done about it? Have Rwanda’s post-genocide gacaca courts successfully promoted reconciliation? How has denial affected governmental recognition around the world of the Armenian, Hellenic, and Assyrian genocides? Why have some left-wing “progressives” engaged in denial of the Rwandan Genocide? Has anti-genocide activism had a meaningful effect in prevention of or intervention against genocide? In the pages of this book, readers can explore the various debates that have defined the study of genocide and that are redefining it today. This insightful and provocative volume will entice further discussion on the concept of genocide and will be a must-read for the field of genocide studies.

An indispensable resource for those interested in the scourge of mass murder and genocide in the 20th and 21st centuries, this book analyzes modern and contemporary controversies and issues to help readers to understand genocide in all its complexity. This vital reference work looks at current areas of debate in genocide studies to provide insights into what a genocide is, why genocides occur, and what the consequences are once a genocide is recognized as such. It also illuminates how and why rational people can view the same set of circumstances as genocide or not, and how it might be possible in the future to alleviate or even prevent genocide. Dozens of accomplished scholars provide perceptive insights into the controversies and issues that dominate genocide discussions. The book is organized into five parts. The first considers how genocide is defined, while the second covers the pre-1945 period as it includes such controversial topics as the American Indian Wars, Australian Aborigines, Irish Potato Famine, Armenian Genocide, Ukrainian Starvation, and Holocaust. A Cold War section examines genocidal violence in Cambodia, East Timor, and Guatemala and against the Kurds; a post-Cold War period section covers Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur, and the Rohingya in Myanmar. The final part concerns such issues as genocide prevention, humanitarian intervention, and the role of military personnel as perpetrators of genocide.

Genocide has scarred human societies since Antiquity. In the modern era, genocide has been a global phenomenon: from massacres in colonial America, Africa, and Australia to the Holocaust of European Jewry and mass death in Maoist China. In recent years, the discipline of 'genocide studies' has developed to offer analysis and comprehension. The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies is the first book to subject both genocide and the young discipline it has spawned to systematic, in-depth investigation. Thirty-four renowned experts study genocide through the ages by taking regional, thematic, and disciplinary-specific approaches. Chapters examine secessionist and political genocides in modern Asia. Others treat the violent dynamics of European colonialism in Africa, the complex ethnic geography of the Great Lakes region, and the structural instability of the continent's northern horn. South and North America receive detailed coverage, as do the Ottoman Empire, Nazi-occupied Europe, and post-communist Eastern Europe. Sustained attention is paid to themes like gender, memory, the state, culture, ethnic cleansing, military intervention, the United Nations, and prosecutions. The work is multi-disciplinary, featuring the work of historians, anthropologists, lawyers, political scientists, sociologists, and philosophers. Uniquely combining empirical reconstruction and conceptual analysis, this Handbook presents and analyses regions of genocide and the entire field of 'genocide studies' in one substantial volume.

"At the heart of the field of Genocide Studies lies an active core of vigorous debate that has led to both heated disagreements and productive disputes. This new volume in the Genocide: A Critical Bibliographic Review series focuses on these, as well as other significant issues.Chapters in this volume focus on a number of issues: Did Peru's Aché suffer genocide? What was the role of media propaganda in the Rwandan Genocide, and what more, if anything, could have been done about it? Have Rwanda's post-genocide gacaca courts successfully promoted reconciliation? How has denial affected governmental recognition around the world of the Armenian, Hellenic, and Assyrian genocides? Why have some left-wing ‵‵progressives" engaged in denial of the Rwandan Genocide? Has anti-genocide activism had a meaningful effect in prevention of or intervention against genocide?In the pages of this book, readers can explore the various debates that have defined the study of genocide and that are redefining it today. This insightful and provocative volume will entice further discussion on the concept of genocide and will be a must-read for the field of genocide studies. "--Provided by publisher.

Winner of the Grawmeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order, 2018 Winner of the Joseph Lepgold Prize Winner of the Best Books in Conflict Studies (APSA) Winner of the Best Book in Human Rights (ISA) In Making and Unmaking Nations, Scott Straus seeks to explain why and how genocide takes place—and, perhaps more important, how it has been avoided in places where it may have seemed likely or even inevitable. To solve that puzzle, he examines postcolonial Africa, analyzing countries in which genocide occurred and where it could have but did not. Why have there not been other Rwandas? Straus finds that deep-rooted ideologies—how leaders make their nations—shape strategies of violence and are central to what leads to or away from genocide. Other critical factors include the dynamics of war, the role of restraint, and the interaction between national and local actors in the staging of campaigns of large-scale violence. Grounded in Straus's extensive fieldwork in contemporary Africa, the study of major twentieth-century cases of genocide, and the literature on genocide and political violence, Making and Unmaking Nations centers on cogent analyses of three nongenocide cases (Côte d'Ivoire, Mali, and Senegal) and two in which genocide took place (Rwanda and Sudan). Straus's empirical analysis is based in part on an original database of presidential speeches from 1960 to 2005. The book also includes a broad-gauge analysis of all major cases of large-scale violence in Africa since decolonization. Straus's insights into the causes of genocide will inform the study of political violence as well as giving policymakers and nongovernmental organizations valuable tools for the future.

Cambodia. Rwanda. Armenia. Nazi Germany. History remembers these places as the sites of unspeakable crimes against humanity, and indisputably, of genocide. Yet, throughout the twentieth century, the world has seen many instances of violence committed by states against certain groups within their borders—from the colonial ethnic cleansing the Germans committed against the Herero tribe in Africa, to the Katyn Forest Massacre, in which the Soviets shot over 20,000 Poles, to anti-communist mass murders in 1960s Indonesia. Are mass crimes against humanity like these still genocide? And how can an understanding of crime and criminals shed new light on how genocide—the “crime of all crimes”—transpires? In The Crime of All Crimes, criminologist Nicole Rafter takes an innovative approach to the study of genocide by comparing eight diverse genocides--large-scale and small; well-known and obscure—through the lens of criminal behavior. Rafter explores different models of genocidal activity, reflecting on the popular use of the Holocaust as a model for genocide and ways in which other genocides conform to different patterns. For instance, Rafter questions the assumption that only ethnic groups are targeted for genocidal “cleansing," and she also urges that actions such as genocidal rape be considered alongside traditional instances of genocidal violence. Further, by examining the causes of genocide on different levels, Rafter is able to construct profiles of typical victims and perpetrators and discuss means of preventing genocide, in addition to delving into the social psychology of genocidal behavior and the ways in which genocides are brought to an end. A sweeping and innovative investigation into the most tragic of events in the modern world, The Crime of All Crimes will fundamentally change how we think about genocide in the present day.

The chilling story of Stalin’s crimes against humanity Between the early 1930s and his death in 1953, Joseph Stalin had more than a million of his own citizens executed. Millions more fell victim to forced labor, deportation, famine, bloody massacres, and detention and interrogation by Stalin's henchmen. Stalin's Genocides is the chilling story of these crimes. The book puts forward the important argument that brutal mass killings under Stalin in the 1930s were indeed acts of genocide and that the Soviet dictator himself was behind them. Norman Naimark, one of our most respected authorities on the Soviet era, challenges the widely held notion that Stalin's crimes do not constitute genocide, which the United Nations defines as the premeditated killing of a group of people because of their race, religion, or inherent national qualities. In this gripping book, Naimark explains how Stalin became a pitiless mass killer. He looks at the most consequential and harrowing episodes of Stalin's systematic destruction of his own populace—the liquidation and repression of the so-called kulaks, the Ukrainian famine, the purge of nationalities, and the Great Terror—and examines them in light of other genocides in history. In addition, Naimark compares Stalin's crimes with those of the most notorious genocidal killer of them all, Adolf Hitler.

Historically delineates the problems of genocide as a concept in relation to rival categories of mass violence.

The most wide-ranging book ever published on gender-selective mass killing, or "gendercide," this collection of essays is also the first to explore systematically the targeting of non-combatant "battle-age" males in various wartime and peacetime contexts. Representing such fields as sociology, political science, psychology, queer studies, and human-rights activism, the contributors explore themes and issues outlined by editor Adam Jones in the book's opening essay. In that article, which provoked considerable debate when it was first published in 2000, Jones argues that throughout history and around the world, the population group most consistently targeted for mass killing and state-backed oppression are non-combatant men of roughly fifteen to fifty-five years of age. Such males, Jones contends, are typically seen as "the group posing the greatest danger to the conquering force." Jones's article also examines the use of "gendercidal institutions"--such as female infanticide, witch-hunts, military conscription, and forced labor--against both women and men. The subsequent essays--some original, some drawn from a special issue of the Journal of Genocide Research and other sources--expand, diversify, and criticize this framing of gendercide. They range from a sophisticated theoretical analysis of gendercide to in-depth treatments of such topics as the Rwandan genocide of 1994, the gendercidal oppression of young African American males, the predicament of gays and lesbians in the face of increasing biotechnological manipulation of human behavior, and the psychology of shame and humiliation underlying generdercides against both sexes. Still other articles take issue with Jones's theories of gendercide, or explore how human-rights organizations have defined, documented, and responded to gendercide and other sex-specific atrocities. A closing essay considers the relevance of feminist and men's studies literatures for the study of gendercide.