The situation in the Balkans, such as the solution to the status of Kosovo, is currently the largest international political problem in Europe, with the potential to burst into a world crisis regarding the Eastern - Western relations. On the other hand, a successful solution to the problem in the Balkans could serve as a model for solving the Muslim - Christian tensions elsewhere in the world. It is the intention of this book to contribute proposals for solutions to the problems of Balkans. The starting principle for the solutions to be effective is that they should come in a natural way from the people below and should not be enforced by the political elites from above. Based on self-determination of nations as a starting principle, they should encourage intra-regional cooperation among the regional entities (economic, cultural, sport, as a basis for political, social understanding and cooperation); secondly, accelerate their economic, political and social development and thirdly, as a final step enable the inclusion of the Balkan countries into the European Union.

A powerful and revelatory history book about the bloodlands - the lands that lie between Stalin's Russia and Hitler's Germany - where 14 million people were killed during the years 1933 - 1944. In the middle of Europe, in the middle of the twentieth century, the Nazi and Soviet regimes murdered fourteen million people in the bloodlands between Berlin and Moscow. In a twelve-year-period, in these killing fields - today's Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Western Russia and the eastern Baltic coast - an average of more than one million citizens were slaughtered every year, as a result of deliberate policies unrelated to combat. In this book Timothy Snyder offers a ground-breaking investigation into the motives and methods of Stalin and Hitler and, using scholarly literature and primary sources, pays special attention to the testimony of the victims, including the letters home, the notes flung from trains, the diaries on corpses. The result is a brilliantly researched, profoundly humane, authoritative and original book that forces us to re-examine one of the greatest tragedies in European history and re-think our past.

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.

The question of 'humanitarian intervention' has been a staple of international law for around 200 years, with a renewed interest in the history of the subject emerging in the last twenty years. This book provides a chronological account of the evolution of the discussion and uncovers the fictional narrative provided by international lawyers to support their conclusions on the subject, from justifications and arguments for 'humanitarian intervention', the misrepresentation of great power involvement in the Greek War of Independence in 1827, to the 'humanitarian intervention that never was', India's war with Pakistan in 1971. Relying on a variety of sources, some of them made available in English for the first time, the book provides an undogmatic, alternative history of the fight for the protection of human rights in international law.

The "ethnic cleansing" that has gripped the Balkans for much of this decade is but another chapter in the long history of man's inhumanity to man. Hopeful but unflinching in the face of such realities, Howard Ball's book focuses on international efforts to punish perpetrators of genocide and other war crimes. Combining history, politics, and critical analysis, he revisits the killing fields of Cambodia, documents the three-month Hutu "machete genocide" of about 800,000 Tutsi villagers in Rwanda, and casts recent headlines from Kosovo in the light of these other conflicts.

Beginning with the 1899 Geneva Accords and the Armenian genocide of World War I, Ball traces efforts to create an institution to judge, punish, and ultimately deter such atrocities-particularly since World War II, since which there have been fourteen cases of genocide. He shows how international military tribunals in Nuremberg and Tokyo set important precedents for international criminal justice, tells what the international community learned from its failure to stop Pol Pot in Cambodia, and describes the ad hoc tribunals convened to address genocide in the Balkans and Rwanda. He then focuses on the establishment of the International Criminal Court with the Treaty of Rome in 1998 and assesses its probable future.

The book also analyzes the reluctance of the United States to sanction the ICC, tracing longstanding U.S. reluctance to grant criminal justice jurisdiction to an international prosecutor. Ball examines questions of national sovereignty versus international law and reminds us that although most Americans consider such horrors to be problems of other countries, these are in fact countries in which many of our own citizens have their roots.

With its unique focus on the ICC, "Prosecuting War Crimes and Genocide" is a work of both synthesis and advocacy that combines history and current events to make us more aware of the racist fervor with which these brutalities are carried out, more alert to the euphemisms in which they are cloaked. It forces us to ask not only whether the killing will stop, but whether humanity can prevent future genocides.

For the past half century, the Indonesian military has depicted the 1965-66 killings, which resulted in the murder of approximately one million unarmed civilians, as the outcome of a spontaneous uprising. This formulation not only denied military agency behind the killings, it also denied that the killings could ever be understood as a centralised, nation-wide campaign. Using documents from the former Indonesian Intelligence Agency's archives in Banda Aceh this book shatters the Indonesian government's official propaganda account of the mass killings and proves the military's agency behind those events. This book tells the story of the 3,000 pages of top-secret documents that comprise the Indonesian genocide files. Drawing upon these orders and records, along with the previously unheard stories of 70 survivors, perpetrators, and other eyewitness of the genocide in Aceh province it reconstructs, for the first time, a detailed narrative of the killings using the military's own accounts of these events. This book makes the case that the 1965-66 killings can be understood as a case of genocide, as defined by the 1948 Genocide Convention. The first book to reconstruct a detailed narrative of the genocide using the army's own records of these events, it will be of interest to students and academics in the field of Southeast Asian Studies, History, Politics, the Cold War, Political Violence and Comparative Genocide.

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.

Seventy-five years after the Holocaust, Poland's approach to its murdered Jewish community still remains a highly debated and often politicized issue. This book addresses this contested topic in an interdisciplinary way, integrating the approaches of memory studies, social anthropology and sociology. The authors revisited the material from the fieldwork carried out 25 years ago and compared it with the interviews collected recently with the younger generation of Poles. The result is a fascinating account of the process of collective forgetting that offers not only an original insight into Christian-Jewish relations after the Holocaust, but also a significant contribution to the reflection on the social mechanisms of remembrance and identity-building.

Elements of Genocide provides an authoritative evaluation of the current perception of the crime, as it appears in the decisions of judicial authorities, the writings of the foremost academic experts in the field, and in the texts of Commission Reports. Genocide constitutes one of the most significant problems in contemporary international law. Within the last fifteen years, the world has witnessed genocidal conduct in Rwanda and Bosnia and Herzegovina, while the debate on the commission of genocide in Darfur and the DR Congo is ongoing. Within the same period, the prosecution of suspected genocidaires has taken place in international tribunals, internationalised tribunals and domestic courts; and the names of Slobodan Milosevic, Radovan Karadzic and Saddam Hussein feature among those against whom charges of genocide were brought. Pursuing an interdisciplinary examination of the existing case law on genocide in international and domestic courts, Elements of Genocide comprehensive and accessible reflection on the crime of genocide, and its inherent complexities.

Genocide is not only a problem of mass death, but also of how, as a relatively new idea and law, it organizes and distorts thinking about civilian destruction. Taking the normative perspective of civilian immunity from military attack, A. Dirk Moses argues that the implicit hierarchy of international criminal law, atop which sits genocide as the 'crime of crimes', blinds us to other types of humanly caused civilian death, like bombing cities, and the 'collateral damage' of missile and drone strikes. Talk of genocide, then, can function ideologically to detract from systematic violence against civilians perpetrated by governments of all types. The Problems of Genocide contends that this violence is the consequence of 'permanent security' imperatives: the striving of states, and armed groups seeking to found states, to make themselves invulnerable to threats.

This 2nd edition of Reparations for Victims of Genocide, War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity provides a rich tapestry of practice in the evolving field of reparations. It provides new chapters and expert reflections on developments in all parts of the world. First published in a hardbound edition, this second, fully revised and updated edition, is now available in paperback.

In 1948 the United Nations passed the Genocide Convention. The international community was now obligated to prevent or halt what had hitherto, in Winston Churchill s words, been a "crime without a name," and to punish the perpetrators. Since then, however, genocide has recurred repeatedly. Millions of people have been murdered by sovereign nation states, confident in their ability to act with impunity within their own borders.

Tracing the history of genocide since 1945, and looking at a number of cases across continents and decades, this book discusses a range of critical and inter-connected issues such as:

• why this crime is different, why exactly it is said to be "the crime of crimes"
• how each genocide involves a deadly triangle of perpetrators (with their collaborators), victims and bystanders as well as rescuers
• the different stages that genocides go through, from conception to denial
• the different explanations that have been put forward for why genocide takes place
• and the question of humanitarian intervention.

Genocide since 1945 aims to help the reader understand how, when, where and why this crime has been committed since 1945, why it has proven so difficult to halt or prevent its recurrence, and what now might be done about it. It is essential reading for all those interested in the contemporary world.

The mass killing of Ottoman Armenians is today widely recognized, both within and outside scholarly circles, as an act of genocide. What is less well known, however, is that it took place within a broader context of Ottoman violence against minority groups during and after the First World War. Among those populations decimated were the indigenous Christian Assyrians (also known as Syriacs or Chaldeans) who lived in the borderlands of present-day Turkey, Iran, and Iraq. This volume is the first scholarly edited collection focused on the Assyrian genocide, or "Sayfo" (literally, "sword" in Aramaic), presenting historical, psychological, anthropological, and political perspectives that shed much-needed light on a neglected historical atrocity.

A great deal of contemporary law has a direct connection to the Holocaust. That connection, however, is seldom acknowledged in legal texts and has never been the subject of a full-length scholarly work. This book examines the background of the Holocaust and genocide through the prism of the law; the criminal and civil prosecution of the Nazis and their collaborators for Holocaust-era crimes; and contemporary attempts to criminally prosecute perpetrators for the crime of genocide. It provides the history of the Holocaust as a legal event, and sets out how genocide has become known as the "crime of crimes" under both international law and in popular discourse. It goes on to discuss specific post-Holocaust legal topics, and examines the Holocaust as a catalyst for post-Holocaust international justice. Together, this collection of subjects establishes a new legal discipline, which the author Michael Bazyler labels "Post-Holocaust Law."

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction.

In April 1994, the Rwandan government called upon everyone in the Hutu majority to kill each member of the Tutsi minority, and over the next three months 800,000 Tutsis perished in the most unambiguous case of genocide since Hitler's war against the Jews. Philip Gourevitch's haunting work is an anatomy of the war in Rwanda, a vivid history of the tragedy's background, and an unforgettable account of its aftermath. One of the most acclaimed books of the year, this account will endure as a chilling document of our time.

The study of genocide and mass atrocity abounds with references to emotions: fear, anger, horror, shame and hatred. Yet we don't understand enough about how 'ordinary' emotions behave in such extreme contexts. Emotions are not merely subjective and interpersonal phenomena; they are also powerful social and political forces, deeply involved in the history of mass violence. Drawing on recent insights from philosophy, psychology, history, and the social sciences, this volume examines the emotions of perpetrators, victims, and bystanders. Editors Thomas Brudholm and Johannes Lang have brought together an interdisciplinary group of prominent scholars to provide an in-depth analysis of the nature, value, and role of emotions as they relate to the causes and dynamics of mass atrocities. The result is a new perspective on the social, political, and moral dimensions of emotions in the history of collective violence and its aftermath.

In myriad ways, each narrator's life has been shaped by loss, injustice, and resilience-and by the struggle of how to share space with settler nations whose essential aim is to take all that is Indigenous. Hear from Jasilyn Charger, one of the first five people to set up camp at Standing Rock, which kickstarted a movement of Water Protectors that roused the world; Gladys Radek, a survivor of sexual violence whose niece disappeared along Canada's Highway of Tears, who became a family advocate for the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls; and Marian Naranjo, herself the subject of a secret radiation test while in high school, who went on to drive Santa Clara Pueblo toward compiling an environmental impact statement on the consequences of living next to Los Alamos National Laboratory. Theirs are stories among many of the ongoing contemporary struggles to preserve Native lands and lives-and of how we go home.

In the wake of World War II the Sudetenland became the scene of ethnic cleansing, witnessing not only the expulsion of nearly three million German speakers, but also the influx of nearly two million resettlers. Yet mob violence and nationalist hatred were not the driving forces of ethnic cleansing; instead, greed, the search for power and property, and the general dislocation of post-war Central and Eastern Europe facilitated these expulsions and the transformation of the German-Czech borderlands. These overlapping migrations produced conflict among Czechs, hardship for Germans, and facilitated the Communist Party's rise to power. Drawing on a wide range of materials from local and central archives, as well as expellee accounts, David Gerlach demonstrates how the lure of property and social mobility, as well as economic necessities, shaped the course and consequences of ethnic cleansing.

Bloomberg's Best Books of 2017 "Since the start of the Syrian uprising, Saleh's influence and his role as an incisive critic of extremism, dictatorship, and the effects of mass violence on Syrian society have offered powerful and compelling responses to the traumas that define the contemporary Syrian experience."--Steven Heydemann, author of Authoritarianism in Syria: Institutions and Social Conflict, 1946-1970 This first book in English by Yassin Al-Haj Saleh, the intellectual voice of the Syrian revolution, describes with precision and fervor the events that led to the Syrian uprising of 2011--the metamorphosis of the popular revolution into a regional war and the "three monsters" Saleh sees "treading on Syria's corpse" the Assad regime and its allies, ISIS and other jihadists, and the West. Where conventional wisdom has it that Assad's army is now battling against religious fanatics for control of the country, Saleh argues that the emancipatory, democratic mass movement that ignited the revolution still exists, though it is beset on all sides. Saleh offers incisive critiques of the impact of the revolution and war on Syrian governance, identity, and society to produce a powerful and compelling response to the traumas that define the contemporary Syrian experience. All those concerned with the conflict should take note. Yassin al-Haj Saleh is widely regarded as Syria's foremost thinker and the intellectual authority of the Syrian uprising. Born in Raqqa, he spent sixteen years as a political prisoner in Syria (1980-1996) and has been living in exile in Turkey since 2013. He is the author of six books.

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 largely within the African diaspora. This text argues that such a difference needs to develop new concepts, critical approaches, and perspectives on the intersections between colonialism, political violence, and environmentalism that develops the significance framing political violence as genocidal for the development of a global understanding of genocide and genocidal violence.

During the 20th century tens of millions of people were annihilated by genocidal regimes. As we enter the 21st century, we must look back and attempt to comprehend what has been aptly termed the "century of genocide." It is only through such understanding that we can begin to imagine ways of preventing or minimizing future atrocities. "

Genocide: An Anthropological Reader" lays the foundation for a ground-breaking "anthropology of genocide" by gathering together for the first time the seminal texts for learning about and understanding this phenomenon. While scholars in other fields have conducted excellent analyses of the macrolevel factors facilitating genocide, few have been able to approach genocide from the local perspective. By filling this important niche-pulling together key anthropological and interdisciplinary sources on genocide - "Genocide: An Anthropological Reader" stands both to make an important contribution to our understanding of genocide and to serve as a valuable resource for readers across a wide variety of fields.

Since the Genocide against the Tutsi, when up to one million Rwandan people were brutally killed, Rwanda has undergone a remarkable period of reconstruction. Driven by a governmental programme of unity and reconciliation, the last 25 years have seen significant changes at national, community, and individual levels. This book gathers previously unpublished testimonies from individuals who lived through the genocide. These are the voices of those who experienced one of the most horrific events of the 20th Century. Yet, their stories do not simply paint a picture of lives left destroyed and damaged; they also demonstrate healing relationships, personal growth, forgiveness and reconciliation. Through the lens of positive psychology, the book presents a range of perspectives on what happened in Rwanda in 1994, and shows how people have been changed by their experience of genocide.