This important collection of essays expands the geographic, demographic, and analytic scope of the term genocide to encompass the effects of colonialism and settler colonialism in North America. Colonists made multiple and interconnected attempts to destroy Indigenous peoples as groups. The contributors examine these efforts through the lens of genocide. Considering some of the most destructive aspects of the colonization and subsequent settlement of North America, several essays address Indigenous boarding school systems imposed by both the Canadian and U.S. governments in attempts to "civilize" or "assimilate" Indigenous children. Contributors examine some of the most egregious assaults on Indigenous peoples and the natural environment, including massacres, land appropriation, the spread of disease, the near-extinction of the buffalo, and forced political restructuring of Indigenous communities. Assessing the record of these appalling events, the contributors maintain that North Americans must reckon with colonial and settler colonial attempts to annihilate Indigenous peoples. Contributors. Jeff Benvenuto, Robbie Ethridge, Theodore Fontaine, Joseph P. Gone, Alexander Laban Hinton, Tasha Hubbard, Margaret D. Jabobs, Kiera L. Ladner, Tricia E. Logan, David B. MacDonald, Benjamin Madley, Jeremy Patzer, Julia Peristerakis, Christopher Powell, Colin Samson, Gray H. Whaley, Andrew Woolford

Genocide occurs when a government attempts to exterminate systematically a large percentage of its own citizens or subjects, simply because they fall into a particular group defined by religion, ethnicity, political affiliation, or (rarely) other group identification ranging from occupation to gender status. Genocide has been a major cause of death worldwide over the last 100 years or more, and is far from being eliminated. Through examining available cases, Warning Signs of Genocide: An Anthropological Perspective shows that genocide becomes a live danger when group hatreds-especially religious, ethnic, and political-are exploited by political regimes as major ways of seizing and maintaining power. Genocide is actually invoked, however, only when such regimes feel they are threatened, usually either because they are new and not consolidated in power or because they are challenged by local rebellions, civil war, or (less often) international war or major economic decline. Knowing these warning signs should make the international community take note that genocide is virtually certain to occur, and take action to stop it. This book joins others in noting that the international community has rarely intervened in time, and in the hope that these findings will encourage more prompt action.

""Ravished Armenia"" and the Story of Aurora Mardiganian is the real-life tale of a teenage Armenian girl who was caught up in the 1915 Armenian genocide, the first genocide in modern history. Mardiganian (1901-1994) witnessed the murder of her family and the suffering of her people at the hands of the Ottoman Empire. Forced to march over fourteen hundred miles, she was sold into slavery. When she escaped to the United States, Mardiganian was then exploited by the very individuals whom she believed might help. Her story was published in book form and then used as the basis for a 1918 feature film, in which she herself starred. The film Ravished Armenia, also known as Auction of Souls, is a graphic retelling of Aurora Mardiganian's story, with the teenager in the central role, supported by Anna Q. Nilsson and Irving Cummings and directed by Oscar Apfel. Only twenty minutes of the film--the first to deal with the Armenian genocide--is known to survive, but it proves to be a stunning production, presenting its story in newsreel style. This revised edition of Anthony Slide's ""Ravished Armenia"" and the Story of Aurora Mardiganian also contains an annotated reprint of Mardiganian's original narrative and, for the first time, the full screenplay. In his introduction, Slide recounts the making of the film and Mardiganian's life in the United States, involving a cast of characters including Henry Morgenthau, Mrs. George W. Vanderbilt, Mrs. Oliver Harriman, and film pioneer William Selig. The introduction also includes original comments by Aurora Mardiganian, whom Slide interviewed before her death. Acclaimed Armenian Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan, who created a video art installation about Mardiganian in 2007, provides a foreword.

Since the mid-nineteenth-century abolition of slavery, the call for reparations for the crime of African enslavement and native genocide has been growing. In the Caribbean, grassroots and official voices now constitute a regional reparations movement. While it remains a fractured, contentious and divisive call, it generates considerable public interest, especially within sections of the community that are concerned with issues of social justice, equity, civil and human rights, education, and cultural identity. The reparations discourse has been shaped by the voices from these fields as they seek to build a future upon the settlement of historical crimes. This is the first scholarly work that looks comprehensively at the reparations discussion in the Caribbean. Written by a leading economic historian of the region, a seasoned activist in the wider movement for social justice and advocacy of historical truth, Britain's Black Debt looks at the origins and development of reparations as a regional and international process. Weaving together detailed historical data on Caribbean slavery and the transatlantic slave trade with legal principles and the politics of postcolonialism, the author sets out a solid academic analysis of the evidence. He concludes that Britain has a case of reparations to answer which the Caribbean should litigate. The presentation of rich empirical historical data on Britain's transatlantic slave economy and society supports the legal claim that chattel slavery as established by the British state and sustained by citizens and governments was understood then as a crime, but political and moral outrage were silenced by the argument that the enslavement of black people was in Britain's national interest. International law provides that chattel slavery as practised by Britain was a crime against humanity. Slavery was invested in by the royal family, the government, the established church, most elite families, and large public institutions in the private and public sector. Citing the legal principles of unjust and criminal enrichment, the author presents a compelling argument for Britain's payment of its black debt, a debt that it continues to deny in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Britain's Black Debt brings together the evidence and arguments that the general public and expert policymakers have long called for. It is at once an exciting narration of Britain's dominance of the slave markets that enriched the economy and a seminal conceptual journey into the hidden politics and public posturing of leaders on both sides of the Atlantic. No work of this kind has ever been attempted. No author has had the diversity of historical research skills, national and international political involvement, and personal engagement as an activist to present such a complex yet accessible work of scholarship for both activists and academics.

Growing up in the small town of Maden in Turkey, Fethiye Cetin knew her grandmother as a happy and respected Muslim housewife called Seher. Only decades later did she discover the truth. Her grandmother's name was not Seher but Heranus. She was born a Christian Armenian. Most of the men in her village had been slaughtered in 1915. A Turkish gendarme had stolen her from her mother and adopted her. Cetin's family history tied her directly to the terrible origins of modern Turkey and the organized denial of its Ottoman past as the shared home of many faiths and ways of life. A deeply affecting memoir, My Grandmother is also a step towards another kind of Turkey, one that is finally at peace with its past.

This comprehensive introduction to the study of war and genocide presents a disturbing case that the potential for slaughter is deeply rooted in the political, economic, social and ideological relations of the modern world.

Most accounts of war and genocide treat them as separate phenomena. This book thoroughly examines the links between these two most inhuman of human activities. It shows that the generally legitimate business of war and the monstrous crime of genocide are closely related. This is not just because genocide usually occurs in the midst of war, but because genocide is a form of war directed against civilian populations. The book shows how fine the line has been, in modern history, between 'degenerate war' involving the mass destruction of civilian populations, and 'genocide', the deliberate destruction of civilian groups as such.

Written by one of the foremost sociological writers on war, "War and Genocide" has four main features:

- an original argument about the meaning and causes of mass killing in the modern world;

- a guide to the main intellectual resources - military, political and social theories - necessary to understand war and genocide;

- summaries of the main historical episodes of slaughter, from the trenches of the First World War to the Nazi Holocaust and the killing fields of Cambodia, Bosnia and Rwanda;

- practical guides to further reading, courses and websites.

This book examines war and genocide together with their opposites, peace and justice. It looks at them from the standpoint of victims as well as perpetrators. It is an important book for anyone wanting to understand - and overcome - thecontinuing salience of destructive forces in modern society.

Writing and Filming the Genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda: Dismembering and Remembering Traumatic History is an innovative work in Francophone and African studies that examines a wide range of responses to the 1994 genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda. From survivor testimonies, to novels by African authors, to films such as Hotel Rwanda and Sometimes in April, the arts of witnessing are varied, comprehensive, and compelling. Alexandre Dauge-Roth compares the specific potential and the limits of each medium to craft unique responses to the genocide and instill in us its haunting legacy. In the wake of genocide, urgent questions arise: How do survivors both claim their shared humanity and speak the radically personal and violent experience of their past? How do authors and filmmakers make inconceivable trauma accessible to a society that will always remain foreign to their experience? How are we transformed by the genocide through these various modes of listening, viewing, and reading?

During a one-hundred-day period in 1994, Hutus murdered between half a million and a million Tutsi in Rwanda. The numbers are staggering; the methods of killing were unspeakable. Utilizing personal interviews with trauma survivors living in Rwandan cities, towns, and dusty villages, We Cannot Forget relates what happened during this period and what their lives were like both prior to and following the genocide.

Through powerful stories that are at once memorable, disturbing, and informative, readers gain a critical sense of the tensions and violence that preceded the genocide, how it erupted and was carried out, and what these people faced in the first sixteen years following the genocide.

This book examines the relationship between jihad and genocide, past and present. Richard L. Rubenstein, a respected scholar in the field of genocide studies, takes a close look at the violent interpretations of jihad and how they have played out in the past hundred years, from the Armenian genocide through current threats to Israel. Rubenstein's unflinching study of the potential for fundamentalist jihad to initiate targeted violence raises pressing questions in a time when questions of religious co-existence, particularly in the Middle East, are discussed urgently each day.

Genocide is one of the most heinous abuses of human rights imaginable, yet reaction to it by European governments in the post-Cold War world has been criticised for not matching the severity of the crime. European governments rarely agree on whether to call a situation genocide, and their responses to purported genocides have often been limited to delivering humanitarian aid to victims and supporting prosecution of perpetrators in international criminal tribunals. More coercive measures - including sanctions or military intervention - are usually rejected as infeasible or unnecessary. This book explores the European approach to genocide, reviewing government attitudes towards the negotiation and ratification of the 1948 Genocide Convention and analysing responses to purported genocides since the end of the Second World War. Karen E. Smith considers why some European governments were hostile to the Genocide Convention and why European governments have been reluctant to use the term genocide to describe atrocities ever since.

Though the world was stunned by the horrific massacres of Tutsi by the Hutu majority in Rwanda beginning in April 1994, there has been little coverage of the reprisals that occurred after the Tutsi gained political power. During this time hundreds of thousands of Hutu were systematically hunted and killed.
"Surviving the Slaughter: The Ordeal of a Rwandan Refugee" in Zaire is the eyewitness account of Marie Beatrice Umutesi. She tells of life in the refugee camps in Zaire and her flight across 2000 kilometers on foot. During this forced march, far from the world's cameras, many Hutu refugees were trampled and murdered. Others died from hunger, exhaustion, and sickness, or simply vanished, ignored by the international community and betrayed by humanitarian organizations. Amidst this brutality, day-to-day suffering, and desperate survival, Umutesi managed to organize the camps to improve the quality of life for women and children.
In this first-hand account of inexplicable brutality, day-to-day suffering, and survival, Marie Beatrice Umutesi sheds light on a backlash of violence that targeted the Hutu refugees of Rwanda after the victory of the Rwandan Patriotic Front in 1994. Umutesi's documentation of the flight and terror of these years provides the world a veritable account of a history that is still widely unknown. After translations from its original French into three other languages, this important book is available in English for the first time. It is more than a testimony to the lives and humanity lost; it is a call for those politicians, military personnel, and humanitarian organizations responsible for the atrocious crimes--and the devastating silence--to be heldaccountable.

Genocide is commonly understood to be a terrible aberration in human behaviour, performed by evil, murderous regimes such as the Nazis and dictators like Suharto and Pinochet. John Docker argues that the roots of genocide go far deeper into human nature than most people realise. Genocide features widely in the Bible, the literature of ancient Greece and Rome, and debates about the Enlightenment. These texts are studied in depth to trace the origins of violence through time and across civilisations. Developing the groundbreaking work of Raphael Lemkin, who invented the term 'genocide', Docker guides us from the dawn of agricultural society, through classical civilisation to the present, showing that violence between groups has been integral to all periods of history. This revealing book will be of great interest to those wishing to understand the roots of genocide and why it persists in the modern age.

The Rwandan genocide has become a touchstone for debates about the causes of mass violence and the responsibilities of the international community. Yet a number of key questions about this tragedy remain unanswered: How did the violence spread from community to community and so rapidly engulf the nation? Why did individuals make decisions that led them to take up machetes against their neighbors? And what was the logic that drove the campaign of extermination?

According to Scott Straus, a social scientist and former journalist in East Africa for several years (who received a Pulitzer Prize nomination for his reporting for the Houston Chronicle), many of the widely held beliefs about the causes and course of genocide in Rwanda are incomplete. They focus largely on the actions of the ruling elite or the inaction of the international community. Considerably less is known about how and why elite decisions became widespread exterminatory violence.

Challenging the prevailing wisdom, Straus provides substantial new evidence about local patterns of violence, using original research including the most comprehensive surveys yet undertaken among convicted perpetrators to assess competing theories about the causes and dynamics of the genocide. Current interpretations stress three main causes for the genocide: ethnic identity, ideology, and mass-media indoctrination (in particular the influence of hate radio). Straus's research does not deny the importance of ethnicity, but he finds that it operated more as a background condition. Instead, Straus emphasizes fear and intra-ethnic intimidation as the primary drivers of the violence. A defensive civil war and the assassination of a president created a feeling of acute insecurity. Rwanda's unusually effective state was also central, as was the country's geography and population density, which limited the number of exit options for both victims and perpetrators.

In conclusion, Straus steps back from the particulars of the Rwandan genocide to offer a new, dynamic model for understanding other instances of genocide in recent history the Holocaust, Armenia, Cambodia, the Balkans and assessing the future likelihood of such events."

The humanitarian tragedy in Darfur has stirred politicians, Hollywood celebrities and students to appeal for a peaceful resolution to the crisis. Beyond the horrific pictures of sprawling refugee camps and lurid accounts of rape and murder lies a complex history steeped in religion, politics, and decades of internal unrest.
"Darfur" traces the origins, organization and ideology of the infamous Janjawiid and other rebel groups, including the Sudan Liberation Army and the Justice and Equality Movement. It also analyzes the confused responses of the Sudanese government and African Union. This thoroughly updated edition also features a powerful analysis of how the conflict has been received in the international community and the varied attempts at peacekeeping.

A seasoned foreign correspondent shows how the UN privileges its own neutrality and interests above its founding mission of protecting humanity, with predictably tragic consequences From the killing fields of Rwanda and Srebrenica a decade ago to those of Darfur today, the United Nations has repeatedly failed to confront genocide. This is evinced, author and journalist Adam LeBor maintains, in a May 1995 document from Yasushi Akashi, the most senior UN official in the field during the Yugoslav wars, in which he refused to authorize air strikes against the Serbs for fear they would "weaken" Milosevic. More recently, in 2003, urgent reports from UN officials in the Sudan detailing atrocities from Darfur were ignored for a year because they were politically inconvenient. This book is the first to examine in detail the crucial role of the Secretariat, its relationship with the Security Council, and the failure of UN officials themselves to confront genocide. LeBor argues the UN must return to its founding principles, take a moral stand and set the agenda of the Security Council instead of merely following the lead of the great powers. LeBor draws on dozens of firsthand interviews with UN officials, current and former, and such international diplomats as Madeleine Albright, Richard Holbrooke, Douglas Hurd, and David Owen. This book will set the terms for discussion when UN Secretary General Kofi Annan steps down to make room for a new head of the world body, and political observers assess Annan's legacy and look to the future of the world organization.

One Hundred Days of Silence is an important investigation into the 1994 Rwandan genocide and American foreign policy. During one hundred days of spring, eight-hundred thousand Rwandan Tutsis and sympathetic Hutus were slaughtered in one of the most atrocious events of the twentieth century. Drawing on declassified documents and testimony of policy makers, Jared Cohen critically reconstructs the historical account of tacit policy that led to nonintervention. His analysis examines the questions of what the United States knew about the genocide and how the world's most powerful nation turned a blind eye. The study reveals the ease at which an administration can not only fail to intervene but also silence discussion of the crisis. The book argues that despite the extent of the genocide the American government was not motivated to act due to a lack of economic interest. With precision and passion, One Hundred Days of Silence frames the debate surrounding this controversial history.

Scott Straus steps back from the particulars of the Rwandan genocide to offer a dynamic model for understanding other instances of genocide in history - the Holocaust, Armenia, Cambodia, the Balkans - and assessing the future likelihood of such events.

Conspiracy to Murder is a gripping account of the Rwandan genocide, one of the most appalling events of the twentieth century. Linda Melvern's damning indictment of almost all the key figures and institutions involved amounts to a catalogue of failures that only serves to sharpen the horror of a tragedy that could have been avoided.

Revolution and Genocide in Ethiopia and Cambodia is the first comparative study of the Ethiopian and Cambodian revolutions of the early 1970s. One of the few comparative studies of genocide in the developing world, this book presents some of the key arguments in traditional genocide scholarship, but the book's author, Edward Kissi, takes a different position, arguing that the Cambodian genocide and the atrocious crimes in Ethiopia had very different motives. Kissi's findings reveal that genocide was a tactic specifically chosen by Cambodia's Khmer Rouge to intentionally and systematically annihilate certain ethnic and religious groups, whereas Ethiopia's Dergue resorted to terror and political killing in the effort to retain power. Revolution and Genocide in Ethiopia and Cambodia demonstrates that the extent to which revolutionary states turn to policies of genocide depends greatly on how they acquire their power and what domestic and international opposition they face. This is an important and intriguing book for students of African and Asian history and those interested in the study of genocide.

Benjamin A. Valentino finds that ethnic hatreds or discrimination, undemocratic systems of government, and dysfunctions in society play a much smaller role in mass killing and genocide than is commonly assumed. He shows that the impetus for mass killing usually originates from a relatively small group of powerful leaders and is often carried out without the active support of broader society. Mass killing, in his view, is a brutal political or military strategy designed to accomplish leaders' most important objectives, counter threats to their power, and solve their most difficult problems.

In order to capture the full scope of mass killing during the twentieth century, Valentino does not limit his analysis to violence directed against ethnic groups, or to the attempt to destroy victim groups as such, as do most previous studies of genocide. Rather, he defines mass killing broadly as the intentional killing of a massive number of noncombatants, using the criteria of 50,000 or more deaths within five years as a quantitative standard. Final Solutions focuses on three types of mass killing: communist mass killings like the ones carried out in the Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia; ethnic genocides as in Armenia, Nazi Germany, and Rwanda; and "counter-guerrilla" campaigns including the brutal civil war in Guatemala and the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

Valentino closes the book by arguing that attempts to prevent mass killing should focus on disarming and removing from power the leaders and small groups responsible for instigating and organizing the killing.