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.

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.

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.

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.

The fact that Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and Rwanda cast ominous shadows forward into the future compels us to confront these horrific results of the human head, heart, and hand. In Genocidal Temptation, Robert Frey presents a compelling, integrated focus directed toward the Nazi killing programs, American atomic bombings in Japan, Tutsi massacres in Rwanda, Soviet genocide in Lithuania, and other mass killing and repression programs.

The murder of more than one million Armenians by the Ottoman Turkish government in 1915 has been acknowledged as genocide. Yet almost 100 years later, these crimes remain unrecognized by the Turkish state. This book is the first attempt by a Turk to understand the genocide from a perpetrator's, rather than victim's, perspective, and to contextualize the events of 1915 within Turkey's political history and western regional policies. Turkey today is in the midst of a tumultuous transition. It is emerging from its Ottoman legacy and on its way to recognition by the west as a normal nation state. But until it confronts its past and present violations of human rights, it will never be a truly democratic nation. This book explores the sources of the Armenian genocide, how Turks today view it, the meanings of Turkish and Armenian identity, and how the long legacy of western intervention in the region has suppressed reform, rather than promoted democracy.

In the preparations for the German invasion of the Soviet Union, special units known as the Einsatzgruppen were formed with the special charge of executing Jews, communists and members of other targeted groups. Drawn from the SS, the SD and the Gestapo, members of the Einsatzgruppen had the reputation of being the most cold-blooded of all Nazi killers. After the war, the German government investigated 1770 former Einsatzgruppen members and brought 136 of these men to trial. Helmut Langerbein has systematically examined the trial evidence in search of characteristics shared by these mass murderers. Using a much broader data base than earlier studies, Langerbein identifies a number of factors that could explain their actions, illustrating each with a particular person or group of officers. Particular traits and degrees of anti-Semitism, self-aggrandizement, sense of duty to obey superiors and peer pressure may each have played a role in the cases of individual officers, but Langerbein concludes that the only characteristic common to all his subjects was the war itself. It was above all the extraordinary circumstances and brutality of the Eastern Front that shaped their behaviour. Given the extent of its data, its detailed analysis and its careful conclusions, ""Hitler's Death Squads"" will push historians and psychologists toward a reappraisal of the Nazi killing machine, the behaviour of the men behind the battle lines, and the overwhelming power of circumstance. Langerbein's chilling conclusions, which challenge the leading theories explaining why people commit mass murder, should be of interest to those concerned with World War II, the Holocaust, Eastern Europe, warfare, war crimes, genocide and human behaviour.

France is the only Western European nation home to substantial numbers of survivors of the World War I and World War II genocides. "In the Aftermath of Genocide" offers a unique comparison of the country's Armenian and Jewish survivor communities. By demonstrating how--in spite of significant differences between these two populations--striking similarities emerge in the ways each responded to genocide, Maud S. Mandel illuminates the impact of the nation-state on ethnic and religious minorities in twentieth-century Europe and provides a valuable theoretical framework for considering issues of transnational identity. Investigating each community's response to its violent past, Mandel reflects on how shifts in ethnic, religious, and national affiliations were influenced by that group's recent history. The book examines these issues in the context of France's long commitment to a politics of integration and homogenization--a politics geared toward the establishment of equal rights and legal status for all citizens, but not toward the accommodation of cultural diversity.

"In the Aftermath of Genocide" reveals that Armenian and Jewish survivors rarely sought to shed the obvious symbols of their ethnic and religious identities. Mandel shows that following the 1915 genocide and the Holocaust, these communities, if anything, seemed increasingly willing to mobilize in their own self-defense and thereby call attention to their distinctiveness. Most Armenian and Jewish survivors were neither prepared to give up their minority status nor willing to migrate to their national homelands of Armenia and Israel."In the Aftermath of Genocide" suggests that the consolidation of the nation-state system in twentieth-century Europe led survivors of genocide to fashion identities for themselves as ethnic minorities despite the dangers implicit in that status.

"Fresh, useful, and engaging. This timely book reflects new research and important critical perspectives on the role of social science and the response of anthropology to human suffering."--Richard Pierre Claude, Founding Editor of "Human Rights Quarterly

"Many peoples of the world, including the Mayans in Guatemala, have been devastated and destroyed by genocide. Over many years these horrors remained only in the hearts and memory of the victims. The testimonies of the survivors who had the courage to denounce these crimes are making a contribution to scientific research. In "Annihilating Difference, anthropologists grapple with an urgent public issue, taking new points of view that could help understand the magnitude of past atrocities and develop strategies to prevent future massacres in the heart of humanity."--Rigoberta Menchu Tum, 1992 Nobel Peace Prize laureate

"This volume--a collection of writings on genocide from the perspective of anthropology-seeks a deeper understanding of our era's most heinous crime. It asks not only what happened but why it happened. It seeks not simply to describe but to explain. And in offering an explanation of this horrendous social malady, it points the direction for a possible cure."--Kenneth Roth, Executive Director, Human Rights Watch, from the Foreword

"This volume ranges far and wide across centuries and cultures to present fascinating perspectives on the phenomenon of genocide. It is a new venture for anthropologists, whose insights will be useful to us all and who connect their scholarship to profound moral concerns."--Howard Zinn, author of "You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train

""Annihilating Difference is an anthropologicalcollection that warrants the attention of non-anthropologists. It simultaneously adds to the growing body of knowledge about genocide and provides a revealing glimpse into what anthropologists are studying and how they are studying it."--Donald L. Horowitz, author of "The Deadly Ethnic Riot

Peter Ronayne's Never Again? provides the reader with a provocative and comprehensive first look at American foreign policy as it relates to the prevention and punishment of genocide since the Holocaust. In the aftermath of World War II the United States and the world pledged to "never again" allow genocidal atrocities. Never Again? reveals that too often this bold promise has been a failed promise. The book chronicles how the United States has repeatedly missed opportunities or "ethical leadership moments" to stand up for human rights and save hundreds of thousands of lives when faced with genocide in Cambodia, Bosnia and Rwanda. At the same time, Ronayne explores how the U.S. has taken important action to bring about justice in the aftermath of genocidal crimes, despite its initial reluctance to even ratify the Genocide Convention. From this dual record of striking failures and important accomplishments emerge provocative questions about the United States' leadership on the world stage, global ethics and morality, and America's commitment to genocide prevention and punishment in the 21st century.

In a book certain to generate controversy and debate, Idith Zertal boldly interprets a much revered chapter in contemporary Jewish and Zionist history: the clandestine immigration to Palestine of Jewish refugees, most of them Holocaust survivors, that was organized by Palestinian Zionists just after World War II. Events that captured the attention of the world, such as the Exodus affair in the summer 1947, are seen here in a strikingly new light. At the center of Zertal's book is the Mossad, a small, unorthodox Zionist organization whose mission beginning in 1938 was to bring Jews to Palestine in order to subvert the British quotas on Jewish immigration. "From Catastrophe to Power" scrutinizes the Mossad's mode of operation, its ideology and politics, its structure and history, and its collective human profile as never before. Zertal's moving story sweeps across four continents and encompasses a range of political cultures and international forces. But underneath this story another darker and more complex plot unfolds: the special encounter between the Zionist revolutionary collective and the mass of Jewish remnant after the Holocaust. According to Zertal, this psychologically painful yet politically powerful encounter was the Zionists' most effective weapon in their struggle for a sovereign Jewish state. Drawing on primary archival documents and new readings of canonical texts of the period, she analyzes this encounter from all angles - political, social, cultural, and psychological. The outcome is a gripping and troubling human story of a crucial period in Jewish and Israeli history, one that also provides a key to understanding the fundamental tensions between Israel and the Jewish communities and Israel and the world today.

In this pioneering volume, Robert Skloot brings together four plays - three of which are published here for the first time - that fearlessly explore the face of modern genocide. The scripts deal with the destruction of four targeted populations: Armenians in Lorne Shirinian's ""Exile in the Cradle"", Cambodians in Catherine Filloux's ""Silence of God"", Bosnian Muslims in Kitty Felde's ""A Patch of Earth"", and Rwandan Tutsis in Erik Ehn's ""Maria Kizito"". Taken together, these four plays erase the boundaries of theatrical realism to present stories that probe the actions of the perpetrators and the suffering of their victims. A major artistic contribution to the study of the history and effects of genocide, this collection carries on the important journey toward understanding the terror and trauma to which the modern world has so often been witness.

In 2018, Palestinians mark the 70th anniversary of the Nakba, when over 750,000 people were uprooted and forced to flee their homes in the early days of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Even today, the bitterness and trauma of the Nakba remains raw, and it has become the pivotal event both in the shaping of Palestinian identity and in galvanising the resistance to occupation. Unearthing an unparalleled body of rich oral testimony, An Oral History of the Palestinian Nakba tells the story of this epochal event through the voices of the Palestinians who lived it, uncovering remarkable new insights both into Palestinian experiences of the Nakba and into the wider dynamics of the ongoing conflict. Drawing together Palestinian accounts from 1948 with those of the present day, the book confronts the idea of the Nakba as an event consigned to the past, instead revealing it to be an ongoing process aimed at the erasure of Palestinian memory and history. In the process, each unique and wide-ranging contribution leads the way for new directions in Palestinian scholarship.

How do societies come to terms with the aftermath of genocide and mass violence, and how might the international community contribute to this process? Recently, transitional justice mechanisms such as tribunals and truth commissions have emerged as a favored means of redress. Transitional Justice, the first edited collection in anthropology focused directly on this issue, argues that, however well-intentioned, transitional justice needs to more deeply grapple with the complexities of global and transnational involvements and the local on-the-ground realities with which they intersect.Contributors consider what justice means and how it is negotiated in different localities where transitional justice efforts are underway after genocide and mass atrocity. They address a variety of mechanisms, among them, a memorial site in Bali, truth commissions in Argentina and Chile, First Nations treaty negotiations in Canada, violent youth groups in northern Nigeria, the murder of young women in post-conflict Guatemala, and the gacaca courts in Rwanda.

Since the 1980s the study of genocide has exploded, both historically and geographically, to encompass earlier epochs, other continents, and new cases. The concept of genocide has proved its worth, but that expansion has also compounded the tensions between a rigid legal concept and the manifold realities researchers have discovered. The legal and political benefits that accompany genocide status have also reduced complex discussions of historical events to a simplistic binary - is it genocide or not? - a situation often influenced by powerful political pressures. Genocide addresses these tensions and tests the limits of the concept in cases ranging from the role of sexual violence during the Holocaust to state-induced mass starvation in Kazakh and Ukrainian history, while considering what the Armenian, Rwandan, and Burundi experiences reveal about the uses and pitfalls of reading history and conducting politics through the lens of genocide. Contributors examine the pressures that great powers have exerted in shaping the concept; the reaction Raphael Lemkin, originator of the word "genocide," had to the United Nations' final resolution on the subject; France's long-held choice not to use the concept of genocide in its courtrooms; the role of transformative social projects and use of genocide memory in politics; and the relation of genocide to mass violence targeting specific groups. Throughout, this comprehensive text offers innovative solutions to address the limitations of the genocide concept, while preserving its usefulness as an analytical framework.

Crimes in Archival Form explores the many ways in which human rights "facts" are produced rather than found. Using Myanmar as his case study, Ken MacLean examines the fact-finding practices of a human rights group, two cross-border humanitarian agencies, an international law clinic, and a global NGO-led campaign. Foregrounding fact-finding, in critical yet constructive ways, prompts long overdue conversations about the possibilities and limits of human rights documentation as a mode of truth-seeking. Such conversations are particularly urgent in an era when the perpetrators of large-scale human rights violations exploit misinformation, weaponize disinformation, and employ outright falsehoods, including deepfakes, to undermine the credibility of those who document abuses and demand accountability in the court of public opinion and in courts of law. MacLean compels practitioners and scholars alike to be more transparent about how human rights "fact" production works, why it is important, and when its use should prompt concern.

In 2018, Palestinians mark the 70th anniversary of the Nakba, when over 750,000 people were uprooted and forced to flee their homes in the early days of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Even today, the bitterness and trauma of the Nakba remains raw, and it has become the pivotal event both in the shaping of Palestinian identity and in galvanising the resistance to occupation. Unearthing an unparalleled body of rich oral testimony, An Oral History of the Palestinian Nakba tells the story of this epochal event through the voices of the Palestinians who lived it, uncovering remarkable new insights both into Palestinian experiences of the Nakba and into the wider dynamics of the ongoing conflict. Drawing together Palestinian accounts from 1948 with those of the present day, the book confronts the idea of the Nakba as an event consigned to the past, instead revealing it to be an ongoing process aimed at the erasure of Palestinian memory and history. In the process, each unique and wide-ranging contribution leads the way for new directions in Palestinian scholarship.

Mass killing through genocide haunts humanity as one of the most horrific forms of warfare. Scholars seek to understand what causes such violence, but it is still difficult to predict the onset of genocide. Why does violence sometime stop short of the genocide threshold, whilst others cross the threshold? Why do some genocides escalate to the point of triggering the state's collapse? Finally, why are some groups targeted and others spared? Examining Genocide considers these questions by interrogating the interaction of three sets of conditions. These are: a societal crisis that creates a need for mass mobilization to "heal" the fractured public and address its material concerns; the stereotype associated with an "eligible target" for scapegoating; and the leadership preferences and skills of the chief executive of an authoritarian or poorly institutionalized state in question. Exploring case studies that cover various levels and instances of genocide, this book offers new insights to this highly researched field for scholars and students alike.

World War II reached into the homes and lives of ordinary people in an unprecedented way. Civilian men, women, and children made up the vast majority of those killed by the war, and the conflict displaced millions more. On Europe's home fronts, the war brought the German blitzkrieg, followed by long occupations and the racial genocide of the Holocaust. In An Iron Wind , historian Peter Fritzsche draws on diaries, letters, and other first-person accounts to show how civilians in occupied Europe struggled to understand this terrifying chaos. As the Third Reich targeted Europe's Jews for deportation and death, confusion and mistrust reigned. What were Hitler's aims? Did Germany's rapid early victories mark the start of an enduring new era? Was collaboration or resistance the wisest response to occupation? How far should solidarity and empathy extend? And where was God? People tried desperately to answer such questions and make sense of the horrors around them, but the stories they told themselves often justified a selfish indifference to their neighbours' fates.Piecing together the broken words of World War II's witnesses and victims,probing what they saw and what they failed to see,Fritzsche offers a haunting picture of the most violent conflict in modern history.