In 2004, the State Department gathered more than a thousand interviews from refugees in Chad that verified Colin Powell's UN and congressional testimonies about the Darfur genocide. The survey cost nearly a million dollars to conduct and yet it languished in the archives as the killing continued, claiming hundreds of thousands of murder and rape victims and restricting several million survivors to camps. This book fully examines that survey and its heartbreaking accounts. It documents the Sudanese government's enlistment of Arab Janjaweed militias in destroying black African communities. The central questions are: why is the United States so ambivalent to genocide? Why do so many scholars deemphasize racial aspects of genocide? How can the science of criminology advance understanding and protection against genocide? This book gives a vivid firsthand account and voice to the survivors of genocide in Darfur.

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.

From the author of Good Muslim, Bad Muslim comes an important book, unlike any other, that looks at the crisis in Darfur within the context of the history of Sudan and examines the world’s response to that crisis. In Saviors and Survivors, Mahmood Mamdani explains how the conflict in Darfur began as a civil war (1987—89) between nomadic and peasant tribes over fertile land in the south, triggered by a severe drought that had expanded the Sahara Desert by more than sixty miles in forty years; how British colonial officials had artificially tribalized Darfur, dividing its population into “native” and “settler” tribes and creating homelands for the former at the expense of the latter; how the war intensified in the 1990s when the Sudanese government tried unsuccessfully to address the problem by creating homelands for tribes without any. The involvement of opposition parties gave rise in 2003 to two rebel movements, leading to a brutal insurgency and a horrific counterinsurgency–but not to genocide, as the West has declared. Mamdani also explains how the Cold War exacerbated the twenty-year civil war in neighboring Chad, creating a confrontation between Libya’s Muammar al-Qaddafi (with Soviet support) and the Reagan administration (allied with France and Israel) that spilled over into Darfur and militarized the fighting. By 2003, the war involved national, regional, and global forces, including the powerful Western lobby, who now saw it as part of the War on Terror and called for a military invasion dressed up as “humanitarian intervention.” Incisive and authoritative, Saviors and Survivors will radically alter our understanding of the crisis in Darfur.

Crimes against humanity are amongst the most shocking violations imaginable. Savelsberg′s text provides a much-needed criminological insight to the topic, exploring explanations of and responses to human rights abuses. Linking human rights scholarship with criminological theory, the book is divided into three parts: Part 1: Examines the legal and historical approach to the topic within a criminological framework Part 2: Unpicks the aetiology of human rights offending with real and detailed case studies Part 3: Explores institutional responses to crimes and uses criminological theory to offer solutions. Seminal yet concise, Crime and Human Rights is written for advanced students, postgraduates and scholars of crime, crime control and human rights. With its fresh and original approach to a complex topic, the book′s appeal will span across disciplines from politics and sociology to development studies, law, and philosophy. Compact Criminology is an exciting series that invigorates and challenges the international field of criminology. Books in the series are short, authoritative, innovative assessments of emerging issues in criminology and criminal justice – offering critical, accessible introductions to important topics. They take a global rather than a narrowly national approach. Eminently readable and first-rate in quality, each book is written by a leading specialist. Compact Criminology provides a new type of tool for teaching, learning and research, one that is flexible and light on its feet. The series addresses fundamental needs in the growing and increasingly differentiated field of criminology.

At the end of World War II, the international community deemed genocide a crime against humanity. Yet, at the dawn of the twenty-first century it has occurred repeatedly. This book explains why genocide began to occur in the twenty-first century and why the United States has been ineffective at preventing it and stopping it once it occurs.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s new open access publishing program for monographs. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. How do interventions by the UN Security Council and the International Criminal Court influence representations of mass violence? What images arise instead from the humanitarianism and diplomacy fields? How are these competing perspectives communicated to the public via mass media? Zooming in on the case of Darfur, Joachim J. Savelsberg analyzes more than three thousand news reports and opinion pieces and interviews leading newspaper correspondents, NGO experts, and foreign ministry officials from eight countries to show the dramatic differences in the framing of mass violence around the world and across social fields. Representing Mass Violence contributes to our understanding of how the world acknowledges and responds to violence in the Global South.

Looks at genocides of six different peoples--the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire, the Jews of Europe, the Cambodians, the Tutsis of Rwanda, the Muslims of Bosnia, and Darfur tribes of Sudan.

At the time of drafting the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Genocide Convention), the drafters were hopeful that the document will be the response needed to ensure that the world would never again witness such atrocities as committed by the Nazi regime. While, arguably, there has been no such great loss of human lives as during WWII, genocidal incidents have and still take place. After WWII, we have witnessed the genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur, to name only a few. The responses to these atrocities have always been inadequate. Every time the world leaders would come together to renew their promise of ‘Never Again’. However, the promise has never materialised. In 2014, Daesh unleashed genocide against religious minorities in Syria and Iraq. Before the world managed to shake off from the atrocities, in 2016, the Burmese military launched a genocidal campaign against the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar. This was followed by reports of ever-growing atrocities against Christian minorities in Nigeria. Without waiting too long, in 2018, China proceeded with its genocidal campaign against the Uyghur Muslims. In 2020, the Tigrayans became the victims of ethnic targeting. Five cases of mass atrocities that, in the space of just five years, all easily meet the legal definition of genocide. Again, the response that followed each case has been inadequate and unable to make a difference to the targeted communities. This legacy does not give much hope for the future. The question that this books hopes to address is what needs to change to ensure that we are better equipped to address genocide and prevent the crime in the future.

The Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 9 December 1948, is one of the most important instruments of contemporary international law. It was drafted in the aftermath of the Nuremberg trial to give flesh and blood to the well-known dictum of the International Military Tribunal, according to which 'Crimes against international law are committed by men, not by abstract entities, and only by punishing individuals who commit such crimes can the provisions of international law be enforced'. At Nuremberg, senior state officials who had committed heinous crimes on behalf or with the protection of their state were brought to trial for the first time in history and were held personally accountable regardless of whether they acted in their official capacity. The drafters of the Convention on Genocide crystallized the results of the Nuremberg trial and thus ensured its legacy. The Convention established a mechanism to hold those who committed or participated in the commission of genocide, the crime of crimes, criminally responsible. Almost fifty years before the adoption of the Rome Statute, the Convention laid the foundations for the establishment of the International Criminal Court. It also obliged its Contracting Parties to criminalize and punish genocide. This book is a much-needed Commentary on the Genocide Convention. It analyzes and interprets the Convention thematically, thoroughly covering every article, drawing on the Convention's travaux preparatoires and subsequent developments in international law. The most complex and important provisions of the Convention, including the definitions of genocide and genocidal acts, have more than one contribution dedicated to them, allowing the Commentary to explore all aspects of these concepts. The Commentary also goes beyond the explicit provisions of the Convention to discuss topics such as the retroactive application of the Convention, its status in customary international law and its future. "

State crimes are historically and contemporarily ubiquitous and result in more injury and death than traditional street crimes such as robbery, theft, and assault. Consider that genocide during the 20th century in Germany, Rwanda, Darfur, Albania, Turkey, Ukraine, Cambodia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and other regions claimed the lives of tens of millions and rendered many more homeless, imprisoned, and psychologically and physically damaged. Despite the gravity of crimes committed by states and political leaders, until recently these harms have been understudied relative to conventional street crimes in the field of criminology. Over the past two decades, a growing number of criminologists have conducted rigorous research on state crime and have tried to disseminate it widely including attempts to develop courses that specifically address crimes of the state. Referencing a broad range of cases of state crime and international institutions of control, State Criminality provides a general framework and survey-style discussion of the field for teaching undergraduate and graduate students, and serves as a useful general reference point for scholars of state crime.