Unstable Ground looks at the human impact of climate change and its potential to provoke some of the most troubling crimes against humanity-ethnic conflict, war, and genocide. Alex Alvarez provides an essential overview of what science has shown to be true about climate change and examines how our warming world will challenge and stress societies and heighten the risk of mass violence. Drawing on a number of recent and historic examples, including Darfur, Syria, and the current migration crisis, this book illustrates the thorny intersections of climate change and violence. The author doesn't claim causation but makes a compelling case that changing environmental circumstances can be a critical factor in facilitating violent conflict. As research suggests climate change will continue and accelerate, understanding how it might contribute to violence is essential in understanding how to prevent it.

Uyghurs are descendents of Turkic peoples, currently facing genocide committed against them in their homeland, East Turkistan. This land has been colonized by the Chinese Communist Party in 1949, creating a police state and renamed Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). This book explains how Uyghur rights have been diminishing under the authoritarian rule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which has recently escalated into the cultural genocide of Uyghurs. Since Xi Jinping became president of the People's Republic of China in 2012, he has clearly defined his political agenda towards Uyghurs of implementing the Four Breaks intended to "break their lineage, break their roots, break their connections, and break their origins." The situation has now rapidly deteriorated. Millions of Uyghur families have been separated with an estimated 1 million Uyghurs being indiscriminately placed in concentration camps, under the guise of "re-education". Xi has justified this as a fight against the Three Evils (terrorism, separatism and religious extremism). Uyghurs are subject to forced thought reform, torture, rape, organ harvesting, slave labor, and ultimately death in the shrouded secrecy of the camps. For Uyghurs in exile, they face an endless uncertainty, cut off from their families back home, and are harassed by Chinese security agents with threats against their family back home if they speak out against these atrocities. The world has to date largely remained silent over this genocide due to economic ties with China. In reflecting upon this situation the question remains: Who amongst you has the courage to speak up and act against this totalitarian regime of the Chinese Communist Party, committing one of the worst genocides and human rights atrocities of the 21st Century?

The current refugee crisis is unparalleled in history in its size and severity. According to the UNHCR, there are roughly 67 million refugees worldwide, the vast majority of whom are refugees as the result of wars and other military actions. This social and political crisis cries out for normative explanation and analysis. Morally and politically, how should we understand the fact that 1 in every 122 humans is a refugee? How should we respond to it, and why? Jennifer Kling argues that war refugees have suffered, and continue to suffer, a series of harms, wrongs, and oppressions, and so are owed recompense, restitution, and aid-as a matter of justice-by sociopolitical institutions around the world. She makes the case that war refugees should be viewed and treated differently than migrants, due to their particular circumstances, but that their circumstances do not wholly alleviate their own moral responsibilities. We must stop treating refugees as objects to be moved around on the global stage, Kling contends, and instead see them as people, with their own subjective experiences of the world, who might surprise us with their words and works. While targeted toward students and scholars of philosophy, War Refugees: Risk, Justice, and Moral Responsibility will also be of interest to those working in political science, international relations, and foreign policy analysis, and, more broadly, to anyone who is interested in thinking critically about the ongoing refugee crisis.

As the Second World War drew to a close, European borders were being redrawn. The regions of Istria, Dalmatia, and Venezia Giulia, nominally Italian but at various times also belonging to Austria and Germany, fell under the rule of Yugoslavia and its dictator Marshal Tito. The ensuing removal and genocide of Italians from these regions had been little explored or even discussed until 1999, when the esteemed Italian journalist Arrigo Petacco wrote L'esodo: La tragedia negata degli italiani d'Istria, Dalmazia e Venezia Giulia. Now this story is available in English as A Tragedy Revealed.Petacco explains the history of the regions and how they were shifted between empires for centuries. The greater part of the story however details the genocidal program of the Yugoslav Communist government toward the native Italians in the regions. Based on previously unavailable archival documents and oral accounts from people who were there, Petacco reveals the events and exposes the Italian government's mishandling - and then official silence on - the situation. This is a riveting work on a little-known, tragic event written by one of Italy's most highly regarded journalists.

This book provides a juridical, sociopolitical history of the evolution of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Over one million citizens were massacred in less than 100 days via a highly organized, efficiently executed genocide throughout the tiny country of Rwanda. While genocide is not a unique phenomenon in modern times, a genocide like Rwanda's is unique. Unlike most genocides, wherein a government plans and executes mass murder of a targeted portion of its population, asking merely that the majority population look the other way, or at most, provide no harbor to the targeted population (ex: Germany), the Rwandan government relied heavily on the civilian population to not only politically support, but actively engage in the acts of genocide committed over the 100 days throughout the spring of 1994. This book seeks to understand why and how the Rwandan genocide occurred. It analyzes the colonial roots of modern Rwandan government and the development of the political "state of exception" created in Rwanda that ultimately allowed the sovereign to dehumanize the minority Tutsi population and execute the most efficient genocide in modern history.

Despite considerable progress in research and practice in the constructive transformation of intractable conflicts beginning in the 1970s, many terribly destructive conflicts have recently erupted. New circumstances have emerged that have resulted in regressions. The contributions in this book examine many of the new challenges and obstacles to the transformation of intractable conflicts. It also offers an array of new and promising opportunities for constructive transformations. The book brings together analyses of U.S.-based conflicts with those from many regions of the world. International, intra-state, and local conflicts are explored, along with those that have been violent and non-violent. The diversity in disciplines among the authors provides a wide range of theoretical approaches to explaining how a variety of intractable conflicts can be transformed. Case studies of local, national, and transnational conflicts serve to illustrate this new landscape. These analyses are complemented by conceptual discussions relating to new conflict systems, actors, dynamics and strategies. Policy implications of findings are also presented.

The Moral Witness is the first cultural history of the "witness to genocide" in the West. Carolyn J. Dean shows how the witness became a protagonist of twentieth-century moral culture by tracing the emergence of this figure in courtroom battles from the 1920s to the 1960s-covering the Armenian genocide, the Ukrainian pogroms, the Soviet Gulag, and the trial of Adolf Eichmann. In these trials, witness testimonies differentiated the crime of genocide from war crimes and began to form our understanding of modern political and cultural murder. By the turn of the twentieth century, the "witness to genocide" became a pervasive icon of suffering humanity and a symbol of western moral conscience. Dean sheds new light on the recent global focus on survivors' trauma. Only by placing the moral witness in a longer historical trajectory, she demonstrates, can we understand how the stories we tell about survivor testimony have shaped both our past and contemporary moral culture.

Teaching and Learning About Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity: Fundamental Issues and Pedagogical Approaches by Samuel Totten, a renowned scholar of genocide studies and Professor Emeritus, College of Education and Health Professions, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, is a culmination of 30 years in the field of genocide studies and education. In writing this book, Totten reports that he "crafted this book along the lines of what he wished had been available to him when he first began teaching about genocide back in the mid-1980s. That is, a book that combines the best of genocide theory, the realities of the genocidal process, and how to teach about such complex and often terrible and difficult issues and facts in a theoretically, historically and pedagogically sound manner." As the last book he will ever write on education and educating about genocide, he perceives the book as his gift to those educators who have the heart and grit to tackle such an important issue in their classrooms.

Since the 1980s, transitional justice mechanisms have been increasingly applied to account for mass atrocities and grave human rights violations throughout the world. Over time, post-conflict justice practices have expanded across continents and state borders and have fueled the creation of new ideas that go beyond traditional notions of amnesty, retribution, and reconciliation. Gathering work from contributors in international law, political science, sociology, and history, New Critical Spaces in Transitional Justice addresses issues of space and time in transitional justice studies. It explains new trends in responses to post-conflict and post-authoritarian nations and offers original empirical research to help define the field for the future.