Genocide not only annihilates people but also destroys and reorganizes social relations, using terror as a method. In Genocide as Social Practice, social scientist Daniel Feierstein looks at the policies of state-sponsored repression pursued by the Argentine military dictatorship against political opponents between 1976 and 1983 and those pursued by the Third Reich between 1933 and 1945. He finds similarities, not in the extent of the horror but in terms of the goals of the perpetrators. The Nazis resorted to ruthless methods in part to stifle dissent but even more importantly to reorganize German society into a Volksgemeinschaft, or people’s community, in which racial solidarity would supposedly replace class struggle. The situation in Argentina echoes this. After seizing power in 1976, the Argentine military described its own program of forced disappearances, torture, and murder as a “process of national reorganization” aimed at remodeling society on “Western and Christian” lines. For Feierstein, genocide can be considered a technology of power—a form of social engineering—that creates, destroys, or reorganizes relationships within a given society. It influences the ways in which different social groups construct their identity and the identity of others, thus shaping the way that groups interrelate. Feierstein establishes continuity between the “reorganizing genocide” first practiced by the Nazis in concentration camps and the more complex version—complex in terms of the symbolic and material closure of social relationships —later applied in Argentina. In conclusion, he speculates on how to construct a political culture capable of confronting and resisting these trends. First published in Argentina, in Spanish, Genocide as Social Practice has since been translated into many languages, now including this English edition. The book provides a distinctive and valuable look at genocide through the lens of Latin America as well as Europe.

The growth of scholarship on the pressing problem of genocide shows no sign of abating. This volume takes stock of Genocide Studies in all its multi-disciplinary diversity by adopting a thematic rather than case-study approach. Each chapter is by an expert in the field and comprises an up-to-date survey of emerging and established areas of enquiry while highlighting problems and making suggestions about avenues for future research. Each essay also has a select bibliography to facilitate further reading. Key themes include imperial violence and military contexts for genocide, predicting, preventing, and prosecuting genocide, gender, ideology, the state, memory, transitional justice, and ecocide. The volume also scrutinises the concept of genocide - its elasticity, limits, and problems. It does not provide a definition of genocide but rather encourages the reader to think critically about genocide as a conceptual and legal category concerned with identity-based violence against civilians.

In the last two decades, the field of comparative genocide studies has produced an increasingly rich literature on the targeting of various groups for extermination and other atrocities, throughout history and around the contemporary world. However, the phenomenon of "genocides by the oppressed," that is, retributive genocidal actions carried out by subaltern actors, has received almost no attention. The prominence in such genocides of non-state actors, combined with the perceived moral ambiguities of retributive genocide that arise in analyzing genocidal acts "from below," have so far eluded serious investigation. Genocides by the Oppressed addresses this oversight, opening the subject of subaltern genocide for exploration by scholars of genocide, ethnic conflict, and human rights. Focusing on case studies of such genocide, the contributors explore its sociological, anthropological, psychological, symbolic, and normative dimensions.

Cultural Genocide and the Protection of Cultural Heritage examines the various lenses through which the international community defines attacks on cultural heritage—legal, accountability, security, counterterrorism, and atrocity prevention—and proposes a sixth, cultural genocide, that can be used to recast the debate over how to best protect the world’s cultural heritage.

This book subjects both genocide and genocide studies to systematic, in-depth analysis. 34 renowned experts study genocide world-wide through the ages by taking regional thematic, and interdisciplinary approaches.

Why did the twentieth century witness unprecedented organized genocide? Can we learn why genocide is perpetrated by comparing different cases of genocide? Is the Holocaust unique, or does it share causes and features with other cases of state-sponsored mass murder? Can genocide be prevented? Blending gripping narrative with trenchant analysis, Eric Weitz investigates four of the twentieth century's major eruptions of genocide: the Soviet Union under Stalin, Nazi Germany, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, and the former Yugoslavia. Drawing on historical sources as well as trial records, memoirs, novels, and poems, Weitz explains the prevalence of genocide in the twentieth century--and shows how and why it became so systematic and deadly. Weitz depicts the searing brutality of each genocide and traces its origins back to those most powerful categories of the modern world: race and nation. He demonstrates how, in each of the cases, a strong state pursuing utopia promoted a particular mix of extreme national and racial ideologies. In moments of intense crisis, these states targeted certain national and racial groups, believing that only the annihilation of these "enemies" would enable the dominant group to flourish. And in each instance, large segments of the population were enticed to join in the often ritualistic actions that destroyed their neighbors. This book offers some of the most absorbing accounts ever written of the population purges forever associated with the names Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, and Milosevic. A controversial and richly textured comparison of these four modern cases, it identifies the social and political forces that produce genocide.

In Drunk on Genocide, Edward B. Westermann reveals how, over the course of the Third Reich, scenes involving alcohol consumption and revelry among the SS and police became a routine part of rituals of humiliation in the camps, ghettos, and killing fields of Eastern Europe. Westermann draws on a vast range of newly unearthed material to explore how alcohol consumption served as a literal and metaphorical lubricant for mass murder. It facilitated "performative masculinity," expressly linked to physical or sexual violence. Such inebriated exhibitions extended from meetings of top Nazi officials to the rank and file, celebrating at the grave sites of their victims. Westermann argues that, contrary to the common misconception of the SS and police as stone-cold killers, they were, in fact, intoxicated with the act of murder itself. Drunk on Genocide highlights the intersections of masculinity, drinking ritual, sexual violence, and mass murder to expose the role of alcohol and celebratory ritual in the Nazi genocide of European Jews. Its surprising and disturbing findings offer a new perspective on the mindset, motivation, and mentality of killers as they prepared for, and participated in, mass extermination. Published in Association with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Using more than a decade's worth of fieldwork in South Sudan, Clémence Pinaud here explores the relationship between predatory wealth accumulation, state formation, and a form of racism—extreme ethnic group entitlement—that has the potential to result in genocide. War and Genocide in South Sudan traces the rise of a predatory state during civil war in southern Sudan and its transformation into a violent Dinka ethnocracy after the region's formal independence. That new state, Pinaud argues, waged genocide against non-Dinka civilians in 2013-2017. During a civil war that wrecked the region between 1983 and 2005, the predominantly Dinka Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) practiced ethnically exclusive and predatory wealth accumulation. Its actions fostered extreme group entitlement and profoundly shaped the rebel state. Ethnic group entitlement eventually grew into an ideology of ethnic supremacy. After that war ended, the semi-autonomous state turned into a violent and predatory ethnocracy—a process accelerated by independence in 2011. The rise of exclusionary nationalism, a new security landscape, and inter-ethnic political competition contributed to the start of a new round of civil war in 2013, in which the recently founded state unleashed violence against nearly all non-Dinka ethnic groups. Pinaud investigates three campaigns waged by the South Sudan government in 2013–2017 and concludes they were genocidal—they sought to destroy non-Dinka target groups. She demonstrates how the perpetrators' sense of group entitlement culminated in land-grabs that amounted to a genocidal conquest echoing the imperialist origins of modern genocides. Thanks to generous funding from TOME, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.

Genocide has become a part of the contemporary global expression of political violence. After all, every continent has had its genocide, but genocide in Africa and the African diaspora is distinctly different from those in Europe or the West. This text approaches genocide from within the context of Africa and the African diaspora to examine political and philosophical after-effects of global colonialism. As genocidal state violence has become prominent through colonialism, its appearance in Europe and the West have developed sharply against how it appears in colonized spaces within the African diaspora. This text argues that such a difference in orientation is needed to develop new concepts, critical approaches, and perspectives on the intersections between colonialism, political violence, and anti-black politics as a way of critically understanding global genocide and the presence of continual genocidal violence.

The Scourge of Genocide collects essays, reviews, and reportage on the subjects of genocide and crimes against humanity by Adam Jones, recently selected as one of "Fifty Key Thinkers on the Holocaust and Genocide." The volume includes a number of previously-unpublished essays, and explores a range of debates and approaches in comparative genocide studies, such as: Genocide, pedagogy, and visual representation. Gender and "gendercide." The role of media and communications in genocide. The historiography of genocide studies. "Subaltern genocide," or genocides by the oppressed. Strategies of genocide prevention and intervention. Covering a broad spectrum of theoretical perspectives, as well as case studies from the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Guatemala, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Israel/Palestine, this book is essential reading for all scholars and students of genocide studies, political violence, and international relations.