This book explores the genealogy of the concept of 'Medz Yeghern' ('Great Crime'), the Armenian term for the mass murder and ethnic cleansing of the Armenian ethno-religious group in the Ottoman Empire between the years 1915-1923. Widely accepted by historians as one of the classical cases of genocide in the 20th century, ascribing the right definition to the crime has been a source of contention and controversy in international politics. Vartan Matiossian here draws upon extensive research based on Armenian sources, neglected in much of the current historiography, as well as other European languages in order to trace the development of the concepts pertaining to mass killing and genocide of Armenians from the ancient to the modern periods. Beginning with an analysis of the term itself, he shows how the politics of its use evolved as Armenians struggled for international recognition of the crime after 1945, in the face of Turkish protest. Taking a combined historical, philological, literary and political perspective, the book is an insightful exploration of the politics of naming a catastrophic historical event, and the competitive nature of national collective memories.

***Winner of an English PEN Award 2021*** During the 1948 war more than 750,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were violently expelled from their homes by Zionist militias. The legacy of the Nakba - which translates to 'disaster' or 'catastrophe' - lays bare the violence of the ongoing Palestinian plight. Voices of the Nakba collects the stories of first-generation Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, documenting a watershed moment in the history of the modern Middle East through the voices of the people who lived through it. The interviews, with commentary from leading scholars of Palestine and the Middle East, offer a vivid journey into the history, politics and culture of Palestine, defining Palestinian popular memory on its own terms in all its plurality and complexity.

"In this rich and resonant study, Joanna Newman recounts the little-known story of this Jewish exodus to the British West Indies..."-Times Higher Education In the years leading up to the Second World War, increasingly desperate European Jews looked to far-flung destinations such as Barbados, Trinidad, and Jamaica in search of refuge from the horrors of Hitler's Europe. Nearly the New World tells the extraordinary story of Jewish refugees who overcame persecution and sought safety in the West Indies from the 1930s through the end of the war. At the same time, it gives an unsparing account of the xenophobia and bureaucratic infighting that nearly prevented their rescue-and that helped to seal the fate of countless other European Jews for whom escape was never an option. From the introduction: This book is called Nearly the New World because for most refugees who found sanctuary, it was nearly, but not quite, the New World that they had hoped for. The British West Indies were a way station, a temporary destination that allowed them entry when the United States, much of South and Central America, the United Kingdom and Palestine had all become closed. For a small number, it became their home. This is the first comprehensive study of modern Jewish emigration to the British West Indies. It reveals how the histories of the Caribbean, of refugees, and of the Holocaust connect through the potential and actual involvement of the British West Indies as a refuge during the 1930s and the Second World War.

During the twentieth century, witnessing grew to be not just a widespread solution for coping with political atrocities but also an intricate problem. As the personal experience of victims, soldiers, and aid workers acquired unparalleled authority as a source of moral and political truth, the capacity to generate adequate testimonies based on this experience was repeatedly called into question. Michal Givoni's book follows the trail of the problems, torments, and crises that became commingled with witnessing to genocide, disaster, and war over the course of the twentieth century. By juxtaposing episodes of reflexive witnessing to the Great War, the Jewish Holocaust, and third world emergencies, The Care of the Witness explores the shifting roles and responsibilities of witnesses in history and the contribution that the troubles of witnessing made to the ethical consolidation of the witness as the leading figure of nongovernmental politics.

Politics, Violence, Memory highlights important new social scientific research on the Holocaust and initiates the integration of the Holocaust into mainstream social scientific research in a way that will be useful both for social scientists and historians. Until recently social scientists largely ignored the Holocaust despite the centrality of these tragic events to many of their own concepts and theories. In Politics, Violence, Memory the editors bring together contributions to understanding the Holocaust from a variety of disciplines, including political science, sociology, demography, and public health. The chapters examine the sources and measurement of antisemitism; explanations for collaboration, rescue, and survival; competing accounts of neighbor-on-neighbor violence; and the legacies of the Holocaust in contemporary Europe. Politics, Violence, Memory brings new data to bear on these important concerns and shows how older data can be deployed in new ways to understand the "index case" of violence in the modern world. -- Cornell University Press

Genocide occurs in every time period and on every continent. Using the 1948 U.N. definition of genocide as its departure point, this book examines the main episodes in the history of genocide from the beginning of human history to the present. Norman M. Naimark lucidly shows that genocide both changes over time, depending on the character of major historical periods, and remains the same in many of its murderous dynamics. He examines cases of genocide as distinct episodes of mass violence, but also in historical connection with earlier episodes. Unlike much of the literature in genocide studies, Naimark argues that genocide can also involve the elimination of targeted social and political groups, providing an insightful analysis of communist and anti-communist genocide. He pays special attention to settler (sometimes colonial) genocide as a subject of major concern, illuminating how deeply the elimination of indigenous peoples, especially in Africa, South America, and North America, influenced recent historical developments. At the same time, the "classic" cases of genocide in the twentieth Century - the Armenian Genocide, the Holocaust, Rwanda, and Bosnia - are discussed, together with recent episodes in Darfur and Congo.

Using a new approach to ethnicity that underscores its relative territoriality, H. Zeynep Bulutgil brings together previously separate arguments that focus on domestic and international factors to offer a coherent theory of what causes ethnic cleansing. The author argues that domestic obstacles based on non-ethnic cleavages usually prevent ethnic cleansing whereas territorial conflict triggers this policy by undermining such obstacles. The empirical analysis combines statistical evaluation based on original data with comprehensive studies of historical cases in Central and Eastern Europe, as well as Bosnia, in the 1990s. The findings demonstrate how socio-economic cleavages curb radical factions within dominant groups whereas territorial wars strengthen these factions and pave the way for ethnic cleansing. The author further explores the theoretical and empirical extensions in the context of Africa. Its theoretical novelty and broad empirical scope make this book highly valuable to scholars of comparative and international politics alike.

The Balkans has long been a place of encounter among different peoples, religions, and civilizations, resulting in a rich cultural tapestry and mosaic of nationalities. But it has also been burdened by a traumatic post-colonial experience. The transition from traditional multinational empires to modern nation-states has been accompanied by large-scale political violence that has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands and the permanent displacement of millions more.
Mark Biondich examines the origins of these conflicts, while treating the region as an integral part of modern European history, shaped by much the same forces and intellectual impulses. It reminds us that political violence and ethnic cleansing have scarcely been unique to the Balkans.
As Biondich shows, the political violence that has bedevilled the region since the late nineteenth century stemmed from modernity and the ideology of integral nationalism, employed by states that were dominated by democratizing or authoritarian nationalizing elites committed to national homogeneity. Throughout this period, the Balkan proponents of democratic governance, civil society, and multiculturalism were progressively marginalized. The history of revolution, war, political violence, and ethnic cleansing in the modern Balkans is above all the story of this tragic marginalization.

Alongside other types of mass atrocities, genocide has received extensive scholarly, policy, and practitioner attention. Missing, however, is the contribution of economists to better understand and prevent such crimes. This edited collection by 41 accomplished scholars examines economic aspects of genocides, other mass atrocities, and their prevention. Chapters include numerous case studies (e.g., California's Yana people, Australia's Aborigines peoples, Stalin's killing of Ukrainians, Belarus, the Holocaust, Rwanda, DR Congo, Indonesia, Pakistan, Colombia, Mexico's drug wars, and the targeting of suspects during the Vietnam war), probing literature reviews, and completely novel work based on extraordinary country-specific datasets. Also included are chapters on the demographic, gendered, and economic class nature of genocide. Replete with research- and policy-relevant findings, new insights are derived from behavioral economics, law and economics, political economy, macroeconomic modeling, microeconomics, development economics, industrial organization, identity economics, and other fields. Analytical approaches include constrained optimization theory, game theory, and sophisticated statistical work in data-mining, econometrics, and forecasting. A foremost finding of the book concerns atrocity architects' purposeful, strategic use of violence, often manipulating nonrational proclivities among ordinary people to sway their participation in mass murder. Relatively understudied in the literature, the book also analyzes the options of victims before, during, and after mass violence. Further, the book shows how well-intended prevention efforts can backfire and increase violence, how wrong post-genocide design can entrench vested interests to reinforce exclusion of vulnerable peoples, and how businesses can become complicit in genocide. In addition to the necessity of healthy opportunities in employment, education, and key sectors in prevention work, the book shows why new genocide prevention laws and institutions must be based on reformulated incentives that consider insights from law and economics, behavioral economics, and collective action economics.

Racism, race hygiene, eugenics, and their histories have for a long time been studied in terms of individual countries, whether genocidal ideology in Nazi Germany or scientific racial theories in the United States. As this study demonstrates, however, eugenic racial policy and scientific racism alike had a strongly international dimension. Concepts such as a 'Racial Confederation of European Peoples' or a 'blonde internationalism' marked the thinking and the actions of many eugenicists, undergirding transnational networks that persist even today. Author Stefan Kuhl provides here a historical foundation for this phenomenon, contextualizing the international eugenics movement in relation to National Socialist race policies and showing how intensively eugenicists worked to disseminate their beliefs throughout the world.

This book provides an indispensable resource for anyone researching the scourge of mass murder in the 20th and 21st centuries, effectively using primary source documents to help them understand all aspects of genocide. This illuminating primary source collection closely examines and analyzes primary documents related to genocides, focusing on genocidal events from the beginning of the 20th century to the present. Thematically organized into eight sections, each document comes with an introduction and analysis written by the author that helps provide the crucial historical background for the users of this title to learn about the complexities of genocide. The first section considers a range of definitional matters relating to genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes; the second section relates to warnings of impending genocide, and how they have been received; the third considers atrocities and how they have been perpetrated; the fourth is an examination ofexamines a range of resistance initiatives that have been taken in response to genocide; the fifth looks at reactions to genocide from outside actors; the sixth considers the ways in which states have intervened to stop genocide; the seventh relates to post-genocide justice measures; and the eighth section relates to how states and NGOs have sought to prevent genocide. Offers a large number of documents relating to various genocides, demonstrating the multifaceted nature of this crime in various settings Presents the reader with an analysis of each document to help contextualize and explain it Allows documents to "speak for themselves," setting out the parameters of genocide, what events actually occurred, and what was done afterwards Provides a short list of further reading at the conclusion of each document to assist readers looking to further research the topic

The first account of one of the world's most pressing humanitarian catastrophes. This eye-opening book reveals how China has used the US-led Global War on Terror as cover for its increasingly brutal suppression of the Uyghur people. China's actions, it argues, have emboldened states around the globe to persecute ethnic minorities and severely repress domestic opposition in the name of combatting terrorism. Within weeks of the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, the Chinese government announced that it faced a serious terrorist threat from its largely Muslim Uyghur ethnic minority. Nearly two decades later, of the 11 million Uyghurs living in China today, more than 1 million have been detained in so-called re-education camps, victims of what has become the largest program of mass incarceration and surveillance in the world. Drawing on extensive interviews with Uyghurs in Xinjiang, as well as refugee communities and exiles, Sean Roberts tells a story that is not just about state policies, but about Uyghur responses to these devastating government programs. Providing a lucid and far-reaching analysis of China's cultural genocide, The War on the Uyghurs allows the voices of those caught up in the human tragedy to be heard for the first time. -- .

Only in recent years has the history of European colonial concentration camps in Africa-in which thousands of prisoners died in appalling conditions-become widely known beyond a handful of specialists. Although they preceded the Third Reich by many decades, the camps' newfound notoriety has led many to ask to what extent they anticipated the horrors of the Holocaust. Were they designed for mass killing, a misbegotten attempt at modernization, or something else entirely? A Sad Fiasco confronts this difficult question head-on, reconstructing the actions of colonial officials in both British South Africa and German South-West Africa as well as the experiences of internees to explore both the similarities and the divergences between the African camps and their Nazi-era successors.

In this up-to-date, succinct, and highly readable volume, Alan E. Steinweis presents a new synthesis of the origins, development, and downfall of Nazi Germany. After tracing the intellectual and cultural origins of Nazi ideology, the book recounts the rise and eventual victory of the Nazi movement against the background of the struggling Weimar Republic. The book details the rapid transformation of Germany into a dictatorship, focusing on the interplay of Nazi violence and the readiness of Germans to accommodate themselves to the new regime. Steinweis chronicles Nazi efforts to transform German society into a so-called People's Community, imbued with hyper-nationalism, an authoritarian spirit, Nazi racial doctrine, and antisemitism. The result was less a People's Community than what Steinweis calls a People's Dictatorship - a repressive regime that acted brutally toward the targets of its persecution, its internal opponents, and its foreign enemies even as it enjoyed support across much of German society.

Overcoming Evil describes the origins or influences leading to genocide, violent conflict and terrorism. It identifies principles and practices of prevention, and of reconciliation between groups after violence, or before violence thereby to prevent violence. It uses both past cases such as the Holocaust, and contemporary ones such as Rwanda, the Congo, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, contemporary terrorism, and the relations between the Dutch and Muslim minorities, which also has relevance to other European countries, as examples. The book draws on the author's previous work on all these issues, as well as on research in genocide studies, the study of conflict and of terrorism, and psychological research on group relations. It also describes the work of the author and his associates in real world settings, such as promoting reconciliation in Rwanda, Burundi and the Congo. The book considers what needs to be done to prevent impending or stop ongoing violence. It emphasizes early prevention, when violence generating conditions are present and a psychological and social evolution toward violence has begun, but not yet immediate danger of intense violence. The book considers the role of difficult social or life conditions, repression, culture, the institutions or structure of society, the psychology of individuals and groups, and the behavior of witnesses or bystanders within and outside societies. It emphasizes psychological processes, such as differentiation between us and them and devaluation of the "other," past victimization and psychological woundedness, the power of ideas and people's commitment to destructive ideologies. It considers humanizing the other, healing from past victimization, the creation of constructive ideologies and groups and how these help people develop cultures and institutions that make violence less likely. The book asks what needs to be accomplished to prevent violence, how it can be done, and who can do it. It aims to promote knowledge, understanding, and "active bystandership" by leaders and government officials, members of the media and citizens to prevent violence and create harmonious societies.

The 1904 war that broke out in present day Namibia after the Herero tribe rose against an oppressive colonial regime--and the German army's brutal suppression of that uprising--are the focus of this collection of essays. Exploring the annihilation of both the Herero and Nama people, this selection from prominent researchers of German imperialism considers many aspects of the war and shows how racism, concentration camps, and genocide in the German colony foreshadow Hitler's Third Reich war crimes.

It is common for survivors of ethnic cleansing and even genocide to speak nostalgically about earlier times of intercommunal harmony and brotherhood. After being driven from their Anatolian homelands, Greek Orthodox refugees insisted that they 'lived well with the Turks', and yearned for the days when they worked and drank coffee together, participated in each other's festivals, and even prayed to the same saints. Historians have never showed serious regard to these memories, given the refugees had fled from horrific 'ethnic' violence that appeared to reflect deep-seated and pre-existing animosities. Refugee nostalgia seemed pure fantasy; perhaps contrived to lessen the pain and humiliations of displacement.
Before the Nation argues that there is more than a grain of truth to these nostalgic traditions. It points to the fact that intercommunality, a mode of everyday living based on the accommodation of cultural difference, was a normal and stabilizing feature of multi-ethnic societies. Refugee memory and other ethnographic sources provide ample illustration of the beliefs and practices associated with intercommunal living, which local Muslims and Christian communities likened to a common moral environment.
Drawing largely from an oral archive containing interviews with over 5000 refugees, Nicholas Doumanis examines the mentalities, cosmologies, and value systems as they relate to cultures of coexistence. He furthermore rejects the commonplace assumption that the empire was destroyed by intercommunal hatreds. Doumanis emphasizes the role of state-perpetrated political violence which aimed to create ethnically homogenous spaces, and which went some way in transforming these Anatolians into Greeks and Turks.

Starting in early 1915, the Ottoman Turks began deporting and killing hundreds of thousands of Armenians in the first major genocide of the twentieth century. By the end of the First World War, the number of Armenians in what would become Turkey had been reduced by 90 percent--more than a million people. A century later, the Armenian Genocide remains controversial but relatively unknown, overshadowed by later slaughters and the chasm separating Turkish and Armenian interpretations of events. In this definitive narrative history, Ronald Suny cuts through nationalist myths, propaganda, and denial to provide an unmatched account of when, how, and why the atrocities of 1915-16 were committed. Drawing on archival documents and eyewitness accounts, this is an unforgettable chronicle of a cataclysm that set a tragic pattern for a century of genocide and crimes against humanity.

The Scourge of Genocide collects essays, reviews, and reportage on the subjects of genocide and crimes against humanity by Adam Jones, recently selected as one of Fifty Key Thinkers on the Holocaust and Genocide. The volume includes a number of previously-unpublished essays, and explores a range of debates and approaches in comparative genocide studies, such as:

• Genocide, pedagogy, and visual representation.
• Gender and gendercide.
• The role of media and communications in genocide.
• The historiography of genocide studies.
• Subaltern genocide, or genocides by the oppressed.
• Strategies of genocide prevention and intervention.

Covering a broad spectrum of theoretical perspectives, as well as case studies from the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Guatemala, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Israel/Palestine, this book is essential reading for all scholars and students of genocide studies, political violence, and international relations.

Covering the period from 1878-1915, Ottomans and Armenians is a military history of the Ottoman army and the counterinsurgency campaigns it waged in the last days of the Ottoman empire. Although Ottomans were among the most active practitioners of counterinsurgency campaigning in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, in the vast literature available on counterinsurgency in the early twenty-first century, there is very little scholarly analysis of how Ottomans reacted to insurgency and then went about counterinsurgency. This book presents the thesis that the Ottoman government developed an evolving, 35-year, empire-wide array of counterinsurgency practices that varied in scope and execution depending on the strategic importance of the affected provinces.

This book is devoted to the issue of nationalism in the latest Polish history and presents the subject on the basis of an enormous amount of source files left by the Polish United Workers Party. The work is a substantial input into the knowledge on People's Poland which shows with precision how the Polish communists used nationalistic arguments to legitimize and validate the system of power introduced by them. The author researches the fascinating source material with the help of a new and innovative concept.

The Scourge of Genocide collects essays, reviews, and reportage on the subjects of genocide and crimes against humanity by Adam Jones, recently selected as one of "Fifty Key Thinkers on the Holocaust and Genocide." The volume includes a number of previously-unpublished essays, and explores a range of debates and approaches in comparative genocide studies, such as:

• Genocide, pedagogy, and visual representation.
• Gender and "gendercide."
• The role of media and communications in genocide.
• The historiography of genocide studies.
• "Subaltern genocide," or genocides by the oppressed.
• Strategies of genocide prevention and intervention.

Covering a broad spectrum of theoretical perspectives, as well as case studies from the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Guatemala, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Israel/Palestine, this book is essential reading for all scholars and students of genocide studies, political violence, and international relations.

One hundred years after the deportations and mass murder of Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians, and other peoples in the final years of the Ottoman Empire, the history of the Armenian genocide is a victim of historical distortion, state-sponsored falsification, and deep divisions between Armenians and Turks. Working together for the first time, Turkish, Armenian, and other scholars present here a compelling reconstruction of what happened and why. This volume gathers the most up-to-date scholarship on Armenian genocide, looking at how the event has been written about in Western and Turkish historiographies; what was happening on the eve of the catastrophe; portraits of the perpetrators; detailed accounts of the massacres; how the event has been perceived in both local and international contexts, including World War I; and reflections on the broader implications of what happened then. The result is a comprehensive work that moves beyond nationalist master narratives and offers a more complete understanding of this tragic event.

Genocide, Ethnonationalism, and the United Nations examines a series of related crises in human civilization growing out of conflicts between powerful states or empires and indigenous or stateless peoples. This is the first book to attempt to explore the causes of genocide and other mass killing by a detailed exploration of UN archives covering the period spanning from 1945 through 2011. Hannibal Travis argues that large states and empires disproportionately committed or facilitated genocide and other mass killings between 1945 and 2011. His research incorporates data concerning factors linked to the scale of mass killing, and recent findings in human rights, political science, and legal theory. Turning to potential solutions, he argues that the concept of genocide imagines a future system of global governance under which the nation-state itself is made subject to law. The United Nations, however, has deflected the possibility of such a cosmopolitical law. It selectively condemns genocide and has established an institutional structure that denies most peoples subjected to genocide of a realistic possibility of global justice, lacks a robust international criminal tribunal or UN army, and even encourages "security" cooperation among states that have proven to be destructive of peoples in the past. Questions raised include: What have been the causes of mass killing during the period since the United Nations Charter entered into force in 1945? How does mass killing spread across international borders, and what is the role of resource wealth, the arms trade, and external interference in this process? Have the United Nations or the International Criminal Court faced up to the problem of genocide and other forms of mass killing, as is their mandate?

Waging a counterinsurgency war and justified by claims of 'an agreement between Guatemala and God,' Guatemala's Evangelical Protestant military dictator General Rios Montt incited a Mayan holocaust: over just 17 months, some 86,000 mostly Mayan civilians were murdered. Virginia Garrard-Burnett dives into the horrifying, bewildering murk of this episode, the Western hemisphere's worst twentieth-century human rights atrocity. She has delivered the most lucid historical account and analysis we yet possess of what happened and how, of the cultural complexities, personalities, and local and international politics that made this tragedy. Garrard-Burnett asks the hard questions and never flinches from the least comforting answers. Beautifully, movingly, and clearly written and argued, this is a necessary and indispensable book. - Francisco Goldman, author of The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop? "Virginia Garrard-Burnett's Terror in the Land of the Holy Spirit is impressively researched and argued, providing the first full examination of the religious dimensions of la violencia - a period of extreme political repression that overwhelmed Guatemala in the 1980s. Garrard-Burnett excavates the myriad ways Christian evangelical imagery and ideals saturated political and ethical discourse that scholars usually treat as secular. This book is one of the finest contributions to our understanding of the violence of the late Cold War period, not just in Guatemala but throughout Latin America." -Greg Grandin, Professor of History, New York University Drawing on newly-available primary sources including guerrilla documents, evangelical pamphlets, speech transcripts, and declassified US government records, Virginia Garrard-Burnett provides aa fine-grained picture of what happened during the rule of Guatelaman president-by-coup Efrain Rios Montt. She suggests that three decades of war engendered an ideology of violence that cut not only vertically, but also horizontally, across class, cultures, communities, religions, and even families. The book examines the causality and effects of the ideology of violence, but it also explores the long duree of Guatemalan history between 1954 and the late 1970s that made such an ideology possible. More significantly, she contends that self-interest, willful ignorance, and distraction permitted the human rights tragedies within Guatemala to take place without challenge from the outside world.