This book examines the insurgency and flight of the Armenian communities in Musa Dagh between 1915 and 1939. It analyzes the narratives surrounding the Armenian rebellion against the Ottoman Empire, including the community’s resistance against the imperial order for relocation and the flight to the Musa Mountain.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction 'A devastating indictment' SUNDAY TIMES 'An important book, a superb piece of reporting' OBSERVER 'With great narrative verve, and a sober and subtle intelligence, she carries us deep behind the scenes of history-in-the-making' PHILIP GOUREVITCH Why do leaders who vow 'never again' repeatedly fail to prevent genocide? In her award-winning modern classic, Samantha Power presents a deeply researched and powerfully argued answer to this haunting question. Disproving claims that successive American leaders were unaware of genocidal horrors occurring around the world, Power tells the stories of courageous individuals who risked their careers and lives in an effort to save others, revealing how policy makers and outsiders alike ignored chilling warnings and rationalised inaction. A riveting account, A Problem From Hell has forever reshaped debates about foreign policy, while inspiring a new generation to raise their voices in the face of contemporary injustice.

The Oscar-winning movie 'Bridge Over the River Kwai' dramatized to millions the building of the infamous Japanese 'Death Railway' - the supply line for Japan's planned invasion of India during World War II. But the movie told only part of the story, giving the impression that all men working on the line were British. In fact, 668 Americans - serving on the USS Houston and with the Texas National Guard's Second Battalion - worked alongside the other Allied troops in the jungle camps. In 'Building the Death Railway', their story is told for the first time. In 22 interviews with American survivors, we learn the details of their lengthy ordeal. Disease, punishment, camaraderie, work conditions and attempts to escape are described by the men who were there. The story begins with their capture and ends with their liberation 42 months later. The Burma-Thailand 'Death Railway' was one of the most horrible sentences a prisoner of war could endure. Thousands died in the jungles of Burma. More than 130 Americans - one man in five - never returned home, victims of neglect, abuse, starvation and disease. 'Building the Death Railway' gives the American perspective on events that shocked the world.

Criminal punishment is increasingly seen as a necessary element of human rights protection. There is a growing conviction at the international level that those responsible for the most serious crimes should not go unpunished. Although there is a wealth of legal writing on international criminal law, an extensive analysis is still needed of the questions why and to what extent criminal prosecution is a necessary means of human rights protection at the domestic level. This book is the first to examine comprehensively the duty to prosecute serious human rights violations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the American and European Conventions on Human Rights, and customary international law. It does so by exploring the phenomena of impunity and amnesties. These issues are particularly relevant for post-conflict situations in which it is often argued that criminal punishment threatens peace and reconciliation. The question of how to deal with post-conflict justice under international human rights law is therefore a continuing theme throughout the book. Apart from post-conflict justice the text also considers the relevance of criminal measures in times of peace by exposing flaws in the criminal legislation and in the conduct of criminal procedure. With its survey of the relevant human rights instruments and jurisprudence, Prosecuting Serious Human Rights Violations is placed at the interface of international criminal law and international human rights. The book analyses the rapidly growing body of human rights case law, dealing with criminalization, prosecution and punishment of serious human rights violations. It identifies and critically examines the standards for the conduct of criminal proceedings developed by the European and Inter-American Courts of Human Rights and the UN Human Rights Committee, providing a unique reference tool for scholars and practitioners working in this area of law. It also describes the standards for criminal law under the Conventions Against Genocide, Torture, and Enforced Disappearances. As the analysis of pertinent case law reveals shortcomings in the current conceptualization of the prosecution of human rights violations, the author develops a solid theoretical framework for future jurisprudence. By evaluating the relationship between criminal law and the protection of human rights, the book elucidates not only the potential but also the limits of the role human rights law can play in the emerging concept of international criminal justice.

IBPA Benjamin Franklin Award™ gold winner, poetry category Sierra Leone’s devastating civil war barely caught the attention of Western media, but it raged on for over a decade, bringing misery to millions of people in West Africa from 1991 to 2002. The atrocities committed in this war and the accounts of its survivors were duly recorded by international organizations, but they run the risk of being consigned to dusty historical archives.    Derived from public testimonies at a UN-backed war crimes tribunal in Freetown, this remarkable poetry collection aims to breathe new life into the records of Sierra Leone’s civil war, delicately extracting heartbreaking human stories from the morass of legal jargon. By rendering selected trial transcripts in poetic form, Shanee Stepakoff finds a novel way to communicate not only the suffering of Sierra Leone’s people, but also their courage, dignity, and resilience. Her use of innovative literary techniques helps to ensure that the voices of survivors are not forgotten, but rather heard across the world.    This volume also includes an introduction that explores how the genre of “found poetry� can serve as a uniquely powerful means through which writers may bear witness to atrocity. This book’s unforgettable excavation and shaping of survivor testimonies opens new possibilities for speaking about the unspeakable.

The open access book examines the consequences of the Italian Constitutional Court's Judgment 238/2014 which denied the German Republic's immunity from civil jurisdiction over claims to reparations for Nazi crimes committed during World War II. This landmark decision created a range of currently unresolved legal problems and controversies which continue to burden the political and diplomatic relationship between Germany and Italy. The judgment has wide repercussions for core concepts of international law and for the relationship between different legal orders. The book's three interlinked legal themes are state immunity, reparation for serious human rights violations and war crimes (including historical ones), and the interaction between international and domestic institutions, notably courts. Besides a meticulous legal analysis of these themes from the perspectives of international law, European law, and domestic law, the book contributes to the civic debate on the issue of war crimes and reparation for the victims of armed conflict. It proposes concrete legal and political solutions to the parties involved for overcoming the present paralysis with a view to a sustainable interstate conflict solution and helps judges directly involved in the pending post-Sentenza reparation cases. After an Introduction (Part I), Part II, Immunity, investigates core international law concepts such as those of pre/post-judgment immunity and international state responsibility. Part III, Remedies, examines the tension between state immunity and the right to remedy and suggests original schemes for solving the conundrum under international law. Part IV adds European Perspectives by showcasing relevant regional examples of legal cooperation and judicial dialogue. Part V, Courts, addresses questions on the role of judges in the areas of immunity and human rights at both the national and international level. Part VI, Negotiations, suggests concrete ways out of the impasse with a forward-looking aspiration. In Part VII, The Past and Future of Remedies, a sitting judge in the Court that decided Sentenza 238/2014 adds some critical reflections on the Judgment. Joseph H. H. Weiler's Dialogical Epilogue concludes the volume by placing the main findings of the book in a wider European and international law perspective.

Presented with accounts of genocide and torture, we ask how people could bring themselves to commit such horrendous acts. A searching meditation on our all-too-human capacity for inhumanity, "Evil Men" confronts atrocity head-on how it looks and feels, what motivates it, how it can be stopped.

Drawing on firsthand interviews with convicted war criminals from the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937 1945), James Dawes leads us into the frightening territory where soldiers perpetrated some of the worst crimes imaginable: murder, torture, rape, medical experimentation on living subjects. Transcending conventional reporting and commentary, Dawes s narrative weaves together unforgettable segments from the interviews with consideration of the troubling issues they raise. Telling the personal story of his journey to Japan, Dawes also lays bare the cultural misunderstandings and ethical compromises that at times called the legitimacy of his entire project into question. For this book is not just about the things war criminals do. It is about what it is like, and what it means, to befriend them.

Do our stories of evil deeds make a difference? Can we depict atrocity without sensational curiosity? Anguished and unflinchingly honest, as eloquent as it is raw and painful, "Evil Men" asks hard questions about the most disturbing capabilities human beings possess, and acknowledges that these questions may have no comforting answers."

IBPA Benjamin Franklin Award™ gold winner, poetry category Sierra Leone’s devastating civil war barely caught the attention of Western media, but it raged on for over a decade, bringing misery to millions of people in West Africa from 1991 to 2002. The atrocities committed in this war and the accounts of its survivors were duly recorded by international organizations, but they run the risk of being consigned to dusty historical archives.    Derived from public testimonies at a UN-backed war crimes tribunal in Freetown, this remarkable poetry collection aims to breathe new life into the records of Sierra Leone’s civil war, delicately extracting heartbreaking human stories from the morass of legal jargon. By rendering selected trial transcripts in poetic form, Shanee Stepakoff finds a novel way to communicate not only the suffering of Sierra Leone’s people, but also their courage, dignity, and resilience. Her use of innovative literary techniques helps to ensure that the voices of survivors are not forgotten, but rather heard across the world.    This volume also includes an introduction that explores how the genre of “found poetry� can serve as a uniquely powerful means through which writers may bear witness to atrocity. This book’s unforgettable excavation and shaping of survivor testimonies opens new possibilities for speaking about the unspeakable.

This book offers a unique and powerful critique of the quest for international criminal justice. It explores the efforts of three successive generations of international prosecutors, recognising the vital roles they play in the enforcement of international criminal law. By critically examining prosecutorial performance during the pre-trial and trial phases, the volume argues that these prosecutors are simultaneously political actors serving in the interests of economic liberalisation. It also posits that international prosecutors help wage a mostly silent and largely unacknowledged politico-cultural war fought for control over the institutions governing modernist international affairs. As the author contends, international prosecutors are thus best understood as agents not only of the law and politics, but also of a war fought by proponents of various utopian projects.

This book provides a critical analysis of how the "war on terror" affected the civilian population in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This "forgotten war," which started in 2001 with the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, has seen more than 212,000 people killed in war-related incidents. Whilst most of the news media shifted their attention to other conflict zones, this war rages on. Badalic has amassed a vast amount of data on the civilian victims of war from both sides of the Durand line, the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. He conducted interviews in Peshawar, Quetta, Islamabad, Kabul, Jalalabad, and many other cities and villages from 2008 to 2017. His data is mostly drawn from those extensive conversations held with civilian victims of war, Afghan and Pakistani officials, human-rights activists and members of the insurgency. The book is divided into three parts. The first examines the impact the US-led coalition, Afghan security forces and paramilitary groups had on civilians, with methods of combat such as drone strikes and kill-or-capture missions. The second part focuses on civilian victims of abuses of power by Pakistani security forces, including arbitrary detentions and forced disappearances. In the final part, Badalic explores the impact of unlawful practices used by the armed insurgency - the Afghan Taliban. Overall, the book seeks to tell the story of the civilian victims of the "War on Terror".

Fully utilizing the latest archival material, this book provides a comprehensive, multi-dimensional and nuanced understanding of the Tokyo Tribunal by delving into the temporal aspects that extended the relevance and reverberations of the Tribunal beyond its end in 1948. With this as a backdrop, this book contributes to the study of Japanese postwar diplomacy. It shows the Tokyo Tribunal is still very much an experiment in progress, and how the process itself has helped Japan to quickly shed its imperial past and remain ambiguous as to its war responsibilities. From a wider vantage point, this book augments the existing scholarship of international criminal law and justice, offering a clear framework as to the limits of what international criminal tribunals can accomplish and offers a must-read for academics and students as well as for practitioners, journalists and policymakers interested in international criminal law and US-Japanese diplomatic history,

This book offers a different approach to the structural prevention of mass atrocities. It investigates the conditions that enable vulnerable countries to prevent the perpetration of such violence. Structural prevention is commonly framed as the identifying and ameliorating of the 'root causes' of violent conflict, a process which typically involves international actors determining what these root causes are, and what the best courses of action are to deal with them. This overlooks why mass atrocities do not occur in countries that contain the presence of root causes. In fact, very little research has been conducted on what the causes of peace and stability are, particularly in relatively countries located in regions marred by civil war and mass atrocities. To better understand how such vulnerable countries prevent the commission of mass atrocities, this book proposes an analytical framework which enables not only an understanding of risk which arises from the presence of root causes, but also of the factors that build resilience in countries, and consequently mitigate and manage such risk. Using this framework, three countries - Botswana, Zambia and Tanzania, are analysed to account for their long term stability despite their location in neighbourhoods characterised by decades of civil war, ethnic repression and mass atrocities. This work is a significant contribution to the field of genocide studies and crimes against humanity and will be of interest to students and scholars alike.

The Introduction of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781315584225 The twentieth century has been a century of wars, genocides and violent political conflict; a century of militarization and massive destruction. It has simultaneously been a century of feminist creativity and struggle worldwide, witnessing fundamental changes in the conceptions and everyday practices of gender and sexuality. What are some of the connections between these two seemingly disparate characteristics of the past century? And how do collective memories figure into these connections? Exploring the ways in which wars and their memories are gendered, this book contributes to the feminist search for new words and new methods in understanding the intricacies of war and memory. From the Italian and Spanish Civil Wars to military regimes in Turkey and Greece, from the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust to the wars in Abhazia, East Asia, Iraq, Afghanistan, former Yugoslavia, Israel and Palestine, the chapters in this book address a rare selection of contexts and geographies from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives. In recent years, feminist scholarship has fundamentally changed the ways in which pasts, particularly violent pasts, have been conceptualized and narrated. Discussing the participation of women in war, sexual violence in times of conflict, the use of visual and dramatic representations in memory research, and the creative challenges to research and writing posed by feminist scholarship, Gendered Wars, Gendered Memories will appeal to scholars working at the intersection of military/war, memory, and gender studies, seeking to chart this emerging territory with 'feminist curiosity'.

Diaries, testimonies and memoirs of the Holocaust often include at least as much on the family as on the individual. Victims of the Nazi regime experienced oppression and made decisions embedded within families. Even after the war, sole survivors often described their losses and rebuilt their lives with a distinct focus on family. Yet this perspective is lacking in academic analyses.   In this work, scholars from the United States, Israel, and across Europe bring a variety of backgrounds and disciplines to their study of the Holocaust and its aftermath from the family perspective. Drawing on research from Belarus to Great Britain, and examining both Jewish and Romani families, they demonstrate the importance of recognizing how people continued to function within family units—broadly defined—throughout the war and afterward.

The post-war Federal Republic of Germany faced the task of addressing the plight of the victims of state socialism under the Soviet occupation of eastern Germany and in the German Democratic Republic, many of whom fled to the west. These victims were not passive objects of the West German state's policy, but organized themselves into associations that fought for recognition of their contribution to the fight against communism. After German unification, the task of commemorating and compensating these victims continued under entirely new political circumstances, yet also in the context of global trends in memory politics and transitional justice that give priority to addressing the fate of victims of non-democratic regimes. Constructions of Victimhood: Remembering the Victims of State Socialism in Germany draws on the constructivist systems theory of Niklas Luhmann to analyze the role of victims organizations, the political system, and historians and heritage professionals in the struggle over the memory of suffering under state socialism, from the Cold War to the present day. The book argues that the identity and social role of victims has undergone a process of constant renegotiation in this period, offering an innovative theoretical framework for understanding how restorative measures are formulated to address the situation of victims. As such, it offers not only insights into a neglected aspect of post-war German history, but also contributes to the ongoing academic debate about the role of victims in process of transitional justice and the politics of memory.

The thirst for post-World War II justice transcended the Cold War and mobilized diverse social groups. This is a story of their multilayered and at times conflictual interactions. In this edited collection, sixteen historians develop a new approach to the trials against persons accused of war crimes and mass murder in Europe during the ascendancy of Nazism and the Second World War (1933-1945). Focusing on the social aspects of the demand for justice and making use of previously underexploited local and international sources, contributors put to the test the notion of "show trials" and explore a range of judicial and political cultures from Germany to the Soviet Union. Essays uncover the expectations around accountability and forms of mobilization on the part of a range of citizens involved in the trials: survivors, witnesses, perpetrators, Nazi hunters, and civic activists. In addition to the perspective of these citizens, contributors invoke the expertise of reporters, filmmakers, historians, investigators, and prosecutors who shaped public representations of justice. These shaping efforts, the authors show, often supported the desire of political authorities to benefit from the publicity of the trials and to contain the spontaneous dissemination of information. The book's close examination of interactions between citizens and authorities thus demonstrates the extent and limits of what might be called a "coproduction" of justice, in the process shedding light on the interdependence between historical knowledge and legal prosecution of mass crimes.

Rudolf Hoss has been called the greatest mass murderer in history. As the longest-serving commandant of Auschwitz, he supervised the killing of more than 1.1 million people. Unlike many of his Nazi colleagues who denied either knowing about or participating in the Holocaust, Hoss remorselessly admitted, both at the Nuremberg war crimes trial and in his memoirs, that he sent hundreds of thousands of Jews to their deaths in the gas chambers, frankly describing the killing process. His "innovations" included the use of hydrogen cyanide (derived from the pesticide Zyklon B) in the camp's gas chambers. Hoss lent his name to the 1944 operation that gassed 430,000 Hungarian Jews in 56 days, exceeding the capacity of the Auschwitz's crematoria. This biography follows Hoss throughout his life, from his childhood through his Nazi command and eventual reckoning at Nuremberg. Using historical records and Hoss' autobiography, it explores the life and mind of one of history's most notorious and sadistic individuals.

This book offers a different approach to the structural prevention of mass atrocities. It investigates the conditions that enable vulnerable countries to prevent the perpetration of such violence. Structural prevention is commonly framed as the identifying and ameliorating of the 'root causes' of violent conflict, a process which typically involves international actors determining what these root causes are, and what the best courses of action are to deal with them. This overlooks why mass atrocities do not occur in countries that contain the presence of root causes. In fact, very little research has been conducted on what the causes of peace and stability are, particularly in relatively countries located in regions marred by civil war and mass atrocities. To better understand how such vulnerable countries prevent the commission of mass atrocities, this book proposes an analytical framework which enables not only an understanding of risk which arises from the presence of root causes, but also of the factors that build resilience in countries, and consequently mitigate and manage such risk. Using this framework, three countries - Botswana, Zambia and Tanzania, are analysed to account for their long term stability despite their location in neighbourhoods characterised by decades of civil war, ethnic repression and mass atrocities. This work is a significant contribution to the field of genocide studies and crimes against humanity and will be of interest to students and scholars alike.

A powerful examination of soulful journeys made to recover memory and recuperate stolen pasts in the face of unspeakable histories. Survivors of the Armenian Genocide of 1915 took refuge across the globe. Traumatized by unspeakable brutalities, the idea of returning to their homeland was unthinkable. But decades later, some children and grandchildren felt compelled to travel back, having heard stories of family wholeness in beloved homes and of cherished ancestral towns and villages once in Ottoman Armenia, today in the Republic of Turkey. Hoping to satisfy spiritual yearnings, this new generation called themselves pilgrims—and their journeys, pilgrimages. Carel Bertram joined scores of these pilgrims on over a dozen pilgrimages, and amassed accounts from hundreds more who made these journeys. In telling their stories, A House in the Homeland documents how pilgrims encountered the ancestral house, village, or town as both real and metaphorical centerpieces of family history. Bertram recounts the moving, restorative connections pilgrims made, and illuminates how the ancestral house, as a spiritual place, offers an opening to a wellspring of humanity in sites that might otherwise be defined solely by tragic loss. As an exploration of the powerful links between memory and place, house and homeland, rupture and continuity, these Armenian stories reflect the resilience of diaspora in the face of the savage reaches of trauma, separation, and exile in ways that each of us, whatever our history, can recognize.

A single word - Auschwitz - is often used to encapsulate the totality of persecution and suffering involved in what we call the Holocaust. Yet a focus on a single concentration camp - however horrific what happened there, however massively catastrophic its scale - leaves an incomplete story, a truncated history. It cannot fully communicate the myriad ways in which individuals became tangled up on the side of the perpetrators, and obscures the diversity of experiences among a wide range of victims as they struggled and died, or managed, against all odds, to survive. In the process, we also miss the continuing legacy of Nazi persecution across generations, and across continents. Mary Fulbrook's encompassing book attempts to expand our understanding, exploring the lives of individuals across a full spectrum of suffering and guilt, each one capturing one small part of the greater story. At its heart, Reckonings seeks to expose the disjuncture between official myths about "dealing with the past," on the one hand, and the extent to which the vast majority of Nazi perpetrators evaded justice, on the other. In the successor states to the Third Reich-East Germany, West Germany, and Austria - the attempts at justice varied widely in the years and decades after 1945. The Communist East German state pursued Nazi criminals and handed down severe sentences; West Germany, seeking to draw a line under the past, tended toward leniency and tolerance. Austria made nearly no reckoning at all until the 1980s, when news broke about UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim's past. Following the various periods of trials and testimonials after the war, the shifting attitudes toward both perpetrators and survivors, this major book weighs heavily down on the scales of justice. The Holocaust is not mere "history," and the memorial landscape covering it barely touches the surface; beneath it churns the maelstrom of reverberations of the Nazi era. Reckonings uses the stories of those who remained below the radar of public representations, outside the media spotlight, while also situating their experiences in the changing wider contexts and settings in which they sought to make sense of unprecedented suffering. Fulbrook uses the word "reckoning" in the widest possible sense, to evoke the consequences of violence on those directly involved, but also on those affected indirectly, and how its effects have expanded almost infinitely across place and time.

A multifaceted look at historian Raul Hilberg, tracing the evolution of Holocaust research from a marginal subdiscipline into a vital intellectual project. "I would recommend this book to both Holocaust historians and general readers alike. The breadth and depth of Hilberg's research and his particular insights have not yet been surpassed by any other Holocaust scholar."-Jewish Libraries News & Reviews Though best known as the author of the landmark 1961 work The Destruction of the European Jews, the historian Raul Hilberg produced a variety of archival research, personal essays, and other works over a career that spanned half a century. The Anatomy of the Holocaust collects some of Hilberg's most essential and groundbreaking writings many of them published in obscure journals or otherwise inaccessible to nonspecialists in a single volume. Supplemented with commentary and notes from Hilberg's longtime German editor and his biographer. From the Introduction: This selection by the editors from the multitude of his published texts focuses on Hilberg's intellectual interests as a Holocaust researcher. Among other topics, they deal with the bureaucracy of the Holocaust, the number of victims, the role of the Judenrate(Jewish councils), and the function of the railway and the police in the extermination process. The scholarly impulses extending from Hilberg's work remain remarkable and virulent almost a decade after his death.2 They deserve to be readily accessible in one place to historians and the interested public in the new compilation offered here. Many of the debates influenced by Hilberg are not yet resolved. The texts presented can be quite revealing in light of these controversies.

In recent years, the academic study of 'war' has gained renewed popularity in criminology. This book illustrates its long-standing engagement with this social phenomenon within the discipline. Foregrounding established criminological work addressing war and connecting it to a wide range of extant sociological literature, the authors present and further develop theoretical and conceptual ways of thinking critically about war. Providing a critique of mainstream criminology, the authors question whether a 'criminology of war' is possible, and if so, how this seemingly 'new horizon' of the discipline might be usefully informed by sociology.