This collection of essays presents a contextual view of genocide. The authors, who are academic authorities and practitioners in the field, explore the legal treatment, but also the social and political concepts and historical dimensions of the crime. They also suggest alternative justice solutions to the phenomenon of genocide. Divided into five parts, the first section offers an historical perspective of genocide. The second consists of case studies examining recent atrocities. The third section examines differences between legal and social concepts of genocide. Part four discusses the treatment of genocide in courts and tribunals throughout the world. The final section covers alternatives to trial justice and questions of prevention and sentencing.

Genocide has emerged as one of the leading problems of the twentieth century. No corner of the world seems immune from this form of collective violence. While many individuals are familiar with the term, few people have a clear understanding of what genocide is and how it is carried out. This book clearly discusses the concept of genocide and dispels the widely held misconceptions about how these crimes occur and the mechanisms necessary for its perpetration.

Genocidal Crimes differs from much of the writing on the subject in that it explicitly relies upon the criminological literature to explain the nature and functioning of genocide. Criminology, with its focus on various types of criminality and violence, has much to offer in terms of explaining the origins, dynamics, and facilitators of this particular form of collective violence. Through application of a number of criminological theories to various elements of genocide Alex Alvarez presents a comprehensive analysis of this particular crime. These criminological perspectives are underpinned by a variety of psychological, sociological, and political science based insights in order to present a more complete discussion of the nature and functioning of genocide.

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 shaped by loss, injustice, resilience, and the struggle to share space with settler nations.

Quiet Genocide reviews the legal and historical case that genocide occurred in Guatemala in 1981-1983. It includes the full text of the genocide section of a United Nations sponsored Commission on Historical Clarification in Guatemala (CEH), brokered by the UN. In its final report, the CEH's rigorously reviewed abuses throughout the whole country. However, the memory of the Guatemalan dirty war, which predated the genocide and continued for over a decade of the heightened killing, has rapidly faded from international awareness.

The book renders a historical picture of the 1948 Genocide Convention and its unique status in international law. It reminds readers of the difficulty of preventing and punishing genocide as illustrated by the ongoing tragedy of Darfur; anddiscusses the evolution of international and hybrid tribunals to prosecute genocide along with war crimes and crimes against humanity. Then, it sketches a brief history of Guatemala with a focus on genocide It explores how internal and global politics were an expression of structural violence, designed to ensure cheap, abundant, and quiescent Indian labor for coffee planters.a The volume provides the commission's general considerations, legal definitions, methodology, period of analysis, and victim groups, and finds that genocide had been perpetrated against five indigenous Guatemalan groups.

By translating the genocide argument of the CEH into English and framing it in a lively, accessible way, this volume recovers the past, sets the record straight, and promotes accountability. This exploratory effort provides insight into the world of transitional justice and truth commissions, and valuable insights about how to engage with the question of genocide in the future. These findings shed light on a crucial and dark chapter of trans-American Cold War history, and will thus be of interest not only to scholars focused on Guatemala, but also on Central America and even more broadly, on the Cold War.

Armenian national identity has long been associated with what has come to be known as the Armenian Genocide of 1915. Immersing the reader in the history, culture and politics of Armenia - from its foundations as the ancient kingdom of Urartu to the modern-day Republic - Gaidz Minassian moves past the massacres embedded in the Armenian psyche to position the nation within contemporary global politics. An in-depth study of history and memory, The Armenian Experience examines the characteristics and sentiments of a national identity that spans the globe. Armenia lies in the heart of the Caucasus and once had an empire - under the rule of Tigranes the Great in the first century BC - that stretched from the Caspian to the Mediterranean seas. Beginning with an overview of Armenia's historic position at the crossroads between Rome and Persia, Minassian details invasions from antiquity to modern times by Arabs, Mongols, Ottomans, Persians and Russians right up to its Soviet experience, and drawing on Armenia's post-Soviet conflict with Azerbaijan in its attempts to reunify with the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh. This book questions an Armenian self-identity dominated by its past and instead looks towards the future. Gaidz Minassian emphasises the need to recognise that the Armenian story began well before the Genocide 1915, and continues as an on-going modern narrative.

Using interviews as primary sources this book shines a light on the infamous Portuguese massacre of Wiriyamu in colonial Mozambique in 1972. Twenty-four carefully curated testimonies are presented, covering Portugal's last colonial war in Mozambique, and the nationalist response that led to the massacre. Survivors share with you their escape from Wiriyamu, while data collectors, priests and journalists tell of their struggle to collect evidence and defend the truth about the killings in the international press. The Wiriyamu Massacre contextualizes the unique importance of the oral evidence it contains and reveals the in-depth interview methods used to gather the oral testimonies, and subsequently curate the transcript into readable texts. This is the horrific story of Wiriyamu, and what it can tell you about European colonialism, genocide and the darkness in humanity, spoken by the people who were there and who tried to tell the world.

The Darfur conflict began in February 2003 and became the 'World's Worst Humanitarian Crisis' according to the U.N. records. The international community has been slow to respond to the crisis in Darfur. The U.N. Commission of Inquiry in Darfur concluded that the atrocities amounted to 'war crimes' and 'crimes against humanity' and the Human Rights Watch supported this. Conversely, the U.S. government declared that 'genocide' was indeed committed in Darfur. This sentiment was supported by the European Union, Germany and Canada. The role of the international community in Darfur is of great significance because, as the twentieth century proves, the absence of punitive measures against the perpetrators, the ignorance of victims and the forgetfulness of such crimes facilitate the path for genocides to happen again.

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.

The current refugee crisis is unparalleled in history in its size and severity. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), there are roughly 67 million refugees worldwide, the vast majority of whom are refugees as the result of wars and other military actions. This social and political crisis-1 in every 122 humans is a refugee-cries out for normative explanation and analysis. Morally and politically, how should we understand this crisis? How should we respond to it, and why? Jennifer Kling argues that war refugees have suffered, and continue to suffer, a series of harms, wrongs, and oppressions, and so are owed recompense, restitution, and aid-as a matter of justice-by socio-political institutions around the world. She makes the case that war refugees should be viewed and treated differently than migrants, due to their particular circumstances, but that their circumstances do not wholly alleviate their own moral responsibilities. We must stop treating refugees as objects to be moved around on the global stage, Kling contends, and instead see them as people, with their own subjective experiences of the world, who might surprise us with their words and works.

In this groundbreaking book, leading Arab and Jewish intellectuals examine how and why the Holocaust and the Nakba are interlinked without blurring fundamental differences between them. While these two foundational tragedies are often discussed separately and in abstraction from the constitutive historical global contexts of nationalism and colonialism, The Holocaust and the Nakba explores the historical, political, and cultural intersections between them. The majority of the contributors argue that these intersections are embedded in cultural imaginations, colonial and asymmetrical power relations, realities, and structures. Focusing on them paves the way for a new political, historical, and moral grammar that enables a joint Arab-Jewish dwelling and supports historical reconciliation in Israel/Palestine. This book does not seek to draw a parallel or comparison between the Holocaust and Nakba or to merely inaugurate a "dialogue" between them. Instead, it searches for a new historical and political grammar for relating and narrating their complicated intersections. The book features prominent international contributors, including a foreword by Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury on the centrality of the Holocaust and Nakba in the essential struggle of humanity against racism, and an afterword by literary scholar Jacqueline Rose on the challenges and contributions of the linkage between the Holocaust and Nakba for power to shift and a world of justice and equality to be created between the two peoples. The Holocaust and the Nakba is the first extended and collective scholarly treatment in English of these two constitutive traumas together.

"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.

Genocide involves significant death and trauma. Yet the enormous scope of genocide comes into view when one looks at the factors that lead to mass killing, the struggle for survival during genocide, and the ways survivors reconstruct their lives after the violence ends. Over a one hundred day period in 1994, the country of Rwanda saw the genocidal slaughter of at least 800,000 Tutsi at the hands of members of the Hutu majority government. This book is a powerful oral history of the tragedy and its aftermath from the perspective of its survivors. Based on in-depth interviews conducted over the course of fifteen years, the authors take a holistic approach by tracing how victims experienced the horrific events, as well as how they have coped with the aftermath as they struggled to resume their lives. The Rwanda genocide deserves study and documentation not only because of the failure of the Western world to intervene, but also because it raises profound questions about the ways survivors create a new life out of the ashes of all that was destroyed. How do they deal with the all-encompassing traumas of genocide? Is forgiveness possible? And what does the process of rebuilding teach us about genocide, trauma, and human life?

A Group Analytic Approach to Understanding Mass Violence makes an analytic examination of the enactment of genocide by Nazi Germany during World War II to explore how mass and state-sponsored violence can arise within societies and how the false beliefs that are used to justify such actions are propagated within society. Bennett Roth makes use of Bion's concept of 'Hallucinosis' to describe the formation of false group beliefs that lead to murderous violence. Drawing on both group analysis and psychoanalysis, Roth explores in relation to genocide: how people form and identify with groups the role of family groups how conflict can arise and be managed how violence can arise and be justified by false beliefs how we can best understand these dysfunctional group dynamics to avoid such violence. A Group Analytic Approach to Understanding Mass Violence will be of great interest to all psychoanalysts and group analysts seeking to understand the role of false beliefs in their patients and society more generally. It will also be of interest to students and scholars of Holocaust studies programs or anyone seeking to understand the perpetration of genocide in the past and present.

Out of My Great Sorrows is the story of Philadelphia artist Mary Zakarian, whose life and work were shaped by the experiences of her mother, a survivor of the 1915 Armenian Genocide. Written by Mary Zakarian's niece and nephew, the narrative examines the complexities of the artist's life as they relate to many issues, including ethnicity, gender, immigration, and assimilation. Above all this is a story of trauma - its effects on the survivor, its transmission through the generations, and its role in the artistic experience. Zakarian painted obsessively throughout her life. As she gained recognition for her artwork, she became increasingly haunted by her mother's untold story and was driven to express the tragedy of the Armenian Genocide in her art. Zakarian's attempt to deal openly with the issues of trauma and guilt caused conflicts in her relationship with her mother. These emotions became a driving force behind her art as well as the basis for her personal difficulties. By examining Mary Zakarian's life and art, the authors bring new insights to the study of the Armenian experience. This moving story will inspire all those who have struggled to express themselves in the face of injustice and oppression.

Winner, Prix Litteraire Paris-Liege 2021 Winner, French Voices Award for Excellence in Publication and Translation When we speak of mass killers, we may speak of radicalized ideologues, mediocrities who only obey orders, or bloodthirsty monsters. Who are these men who kill on a mass scale? What is their consciousness? Do they not feel horror or compassion? Richard Rechtman's Living in Death offers new answers to a question that has haunted us at least since the Holocaust. For Rechtman, it is not ideologies that kill, but people. This book descends into the ordinary life of people who execute hundreds every day, the same way others go to the office. Bringing philosophical sophistication to the ordinary, the book constitutes an anthropology of mass killers. Turning away from existing psychological and philosophical accounts of genocide's perpetrators, Rechtman instead explores the conditions under which administering death becomes a job like any other. Considering Cambodia, Rwanda, and other mass killings, Living in Death draws on a vast array of archival research, psychological theory, and anecdotes from the author's clinical work with refugees and former participants in genocide. Rechtman mounts a compelling case for reframing and refocusing our attempts to explain-and preempt-acts of mass torture, rape, killing, and extermination. What we must see, Rechtman argues, is that for genocidaires (those who carry out acts that are or approach genocide), there is nothing extraordinary, unusual, or world-historical about their actions. On the contrary, they are preoccupied with the same mundane things that characterize any other job: interactions with colleagues, living conditions, a drink and a laugh at the end of the day. To understand this is to understand how things came to be the way they are-and how they might be different.

In the 1994 Rwanda genocide, around 1 million people were brutally murdered in just thirteen weeks. This book offers an in-depth study of posttraumatic growth in the testimonies of the men and women who survived, highlighting the ways in which they were able to build a new, and often enhanced, way of life. In so doing, Caroline Williamson Sinalo advocates a new reading of trauma: one that recognises not just the negative, but also the positive responses to traumatic experiences. Through an analysis of testimonies recorded in Kinyarwanda by the Genocide Archive of Rwanda, the book focuses particularly on the relationship between posttraumatic growth and gender and examines it within the wider frames of colonialism and traditional cultural practices. Offering a striking alternative to dominant paradigms on trauma, the book reveals that, notwithstanding the countless tales of horror, pain, and loss in Rwanda, there are also stories of strength, recovery, and growth.

This is the first book to focus on the two different but very similar campaigns of state-sponsored violence that have engulfed the people of the Nuba Mountains in Sudan. First, between late 1989 and the mid 1990s, the Government of Sudan, under President Omar al Bashir, carried out what some have deemed genocide by attrition against the people of the Nuba Mountains. The second crisis in the Nuba Mountains has been unfolding since July 2011 as the result of continued strife after the civil war in Sudan and the secession of South Sudan.

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Perspectives on the Nuba Mountains Crises "examines the two crises in detail and provides a comparative analysis of the conditions and government tactics in both cases. Contributing authors address the issue of impunity, the relation to subsequent genocidal actions in Darfur, and renewed violence in the Nuba Mountains today. Contributors also examine the issues of humanitarian aid, the relatively new mandate of Responsibility to Protect, and the various factors influencing international attention to the current Nuba Mountains crisis.

This much-needed volume brings attention to two under-researched conflicts and raises questions of what it means when a government is allowed complete impunity in attacking its own peoples. This book is a significant contribution to our understanding of the prevention and intervention of genocide and ethnic conflict.

Terezin, as it was known in Czech, or Theresienstadt as it was known in German, was operated by the Nazis between November 1941 and May 1945 as a transit ghetto for Central and Western European Jews before their deportation for murder in the East. Terezin was the last ghetto to be liberated, one day after the end of World War II. The Last Ghetto is the first in-depth analytical history of a prison society during the Holocaust. Rather than depict the prison society which existed within the ghetto as an exceptional one, unique in kind and not understandable by normal analytical methods, Anna Hajkova argues that such prison societies that developed during the Holocaust are best understood as simply other instances of the societies human beings create under normal circumstances. Challenging conventional claims of Holocaust exceptionalism, Hajkova insists instead that we ought to view the Holocaust with the same analytical tools as other historical events. The prison society of Terezin produced its own social hierarchies under which seemingly small differences among prisoners (of age, ethnicity, or previous occupation) could determine whether one ultimately lived or died. During the three and a half years of the camp's existence, prisoners created their own culture and habits, bonded, fell in love, and forged new families. Based on extensive archival research in nine languages and on empathetic reading of victim testimonies, The Last Ghetto is a transnational, cultural, social, gender, and organizational history of Terezin, revealing how human society works in extremis and highlighting the key issues of responsibility, agency and its boundaries, and belonging.

Rwanda's Gacaca Courts provide an innovative response to the genocide of 1994. Incorporating elements of both African dispute resolution and of Western-style criminal courts, Gacaca courts are in line with recent trends to revive traditional grassroots mechanisms as a way of addressing a violent past. Having been devised as a holistic approach to prosecution and punishment as well as to healing and repairing, they also reflect the increasing importance of victim participation in international criminal justice.
This book critically examines the Gacaca courts' achievements as a mechanism of criminal justice and as a tool for healing, repairing, and reconciling the shattered communities. Having prosecuted over one million people suspected of crimes during the 1994 genocide, the courts have been both praised for their efficiency and condemned for their lack of due process. Drawing upon extensive observations of trial proceedings, this book is the first to provide a detailed analysis of the Gacaca legislation and its practical implementation. It discusses the Gacaca courts within the framework of transitional and international criminal justice and argues that, despite the trend towards local, tailor-made solutions to the challenges of political transition, there is a common set of principles to be respected in addressing the past. Evaluating the Gacaca courts against the backdrop of existing or emerging principles, such as the duties to investigate and prosecute, and the right to the truth, the book provides a sophisticated critique of Rwanda's reconciliation policy. In doing so, it contributes to the development and the clarification of these principles. It concludes that Gacaca courts have achieved a great deal in stimulating a basic discourse on the genocide, but they have also contributed to assigning collective responsibility and may thus end up deepening the divides within Rwandan society.

The Turkish Republic was formed out of immense bloodshed and carnage. During the decade leading up to the end of the Ottoman Empire and the ascendancy of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, virtually every town and village throughout Anatolia was wracked by intercommunal violence. Sorrowful Shores presents a unique, on-the-ground history of these bloody years of social and political transformation.
Challenging the determinism associated with nationalist interpretations of Turkish history between 1912 and 1923, Ryan Gingeras delves deeper into this period of transition between empire and nation-state. Looking closely at a corner of territory immediately south of the old Ottoman capital of Istanbul, he traces the evolution of various communities of native Christians and immigrant Muslims against the backdrop of the Balkan Wars, the First World War, the Armenian Genocide, the Turkish War of Independence, and the Greek occupation of the region.
Drawing on new sources from the Ottoman archives, Gingeras demonstrates how violence was organised at the local level. Arguing against the prevailing view of the conflict as a war between monolithic ethnic groups driven by fanaticism and ancient hatreds, he reveals instead the culpability of several competing states in fanning successive waves of bloodshed.

The book represents an earthquake in genocide studies, particularly in the field of Armenian Genocide research. A unique feature of the Armenian Genocide has been the long-standing efforts of successive Turkish governments to deny its historicity and to hide the documentary evidencesurrounding it. This book provides a major clarification of the often blurred lines between facts and truth in regard to these events. The authenticity of the killing orders signed by Ottoman Interior Minister Talat Pasha and the memoirs of the Ottoman bureaucrat Naim Efendi have been two of the most contested topics in this regard. The denialist school has long argued that these documents and memoirs were all forgeries, produced by Armenians to further their claims. Taner Akcam provides the evidence to refute the basis of these claims and demonstrates clearly why the documents can be trusted as authentic, revealing the genocidal intent of the Ottoman-Turkish government towards its Armenian population. As such, this work removes a cornerstone from the denialist edifice, and further establishes the historicity of the Armenian Genocide.

An Academy Award-nominated actor and a renowned human rights activist team up to change the tragic course of history in the Sudan -- with readers' help. While Don Cheadle was filming Hotel Rwanda, a new crisis had already erupted in Darfur, in nearby Sudan. In September 2004, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell termed the atrocities being committed there "genocide" -- and yet two years later things have only gotten worse. 3.5 million Sudanese are going hungry, 2.5 million have been displaced by violence, and 400,000 have died in Darfur to date. Both shocked and energized by this ongoing tragedy, Cheadle teamed up with leading activist John Prendergast to focus the world's attention. Not on Our Watch, their empowering book, offers six strategies readers themselves can implement: Raise Awareness, Raise Funds, Write a Letter, Call for Divestment, Start an Organization, and Lobby the Government. Each of these small actions can make a huge difference in the fate of a nation, and a people--not only in Darfur, but in other crisis zones such as Somalia, Congo, and northern Uganda.

How do otherwise ordinary people become perpetrators of genocide? Why are groups targeted for mass killing? How do groups justify these terrible acts? While there are no easy answers to these questions, social psychologists are especially well positioned to contribute to our understanding of genocide and mass killing. With research targeting key questions -such as how negative impressions of outgroups develop and how social influence can lead people to violate their moral principles and other norms - social psychologists have much to teach us about why groups of people attempt to exterminate other groups, why people participate in such atrocious projects, and how they live with themselves afterwards. By bringing together research previously available only to readers of academic journals, this volume sheds crucial light on human behavior at the extremes and in doing so, helps us take one more step towards preventing future tragedies.

Perpetrator Cinema explores a new trend in the cinematic depiction of genocide that has emerged in Cambodian documentary in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries. While past films documenting the Holocaust and genocides in Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and elsewhere have focused on collecting and foregrounding the testimony of survivors and victims, the intimate horror of the autogenocide enables post-Khmer Rouge Cambodian documentarians to propose a direct confrontation between the first-generation survivor and the perpetrator of genocide. These films break with Western tradition and disrupt the political view that reconciliation is the only legitimate response to atrocities of the past. Rather, transcending the perpetrator's typical denial or partial confession, this extraordinary form of "duel" documentary creates confrontational tension and opens up the possibility of a transformation in power relations, allowing viewers to access feelings of moral resentment. Raya Morag examines works by Rithy Panh, Rob Lemkin and Thet Sambath, and Lida Chan and Guillaume Suon, among others, to uncover the ways in which filmmakers endeavor to allow the survivors' moral status and courage to guide viewers to a new, more complete understanding of the processes of coming to terms with the past. These documentaries show how moral resentment becomes a way to experience, symbolize, judge, and finally incorporate evil into a system of ethics. Morag's analysis reveals how perpetrator cinema provides new epistemic tools and propels the recent social-cultural-psychological shift from the era of the witness to the era of the perpetrator.

What are the legacies of genocide and mass violence for individuals and the social worlds in which they live, and what are the local processes of recovery? Genocide and Mass Violence aims to examine, from a cross-cultural perspective, the effects of mass trauma on multiple levels of a group or society and the recovery processes and sources of resilience. How do particular individuals recall the trauma? How do ongoing reconciliation processes and collective representations of the trauma impact the group? How does the trauma persist in symptoms ? How are the effects of trauma transmitted across generations in memories, rituals, symptoms, and interpersonal processes? What are local healing resources that aid recovery? To address these issues, this book brings into conversation psychological and medical anthropologists, psychiatrists, psychologists, and historians. The theoretical implications of the chapters are examined in detail using several analytic frameworks."