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Books > Social sciences > Warfare & defence > Other warfare & defence issues > War crimes > Genocide
Terrortimes, Terrorscapes: Continuities of Space, Time, and Memory
in Twentieth-Century War and Genocide investigates interconnections
between space and violence throughout the twentieth century, and
how such connections informed collective memory. The
interdisciplinary volume shows how entangled notions of time and
space amplified by memory narratives led to continuities of
violence across different conflicts creating "terrortimes" and
"terrorscapes" in their wake. The volume examines such continuities
of violence with the help of an analytical framework built around
different themes. Its first part, spatial and temporal continuities
of violence, looks at contested spaces and ideas of national,
ethnic, or religious homogeneity that are often at the heart of
prolonged conflicts. The second part, on states and actors,
addresses the role of states as enablers of violence, asymmetric
power dynamics, and the connection between imperialism and genocide
in Africa. Imagination and emotion-the focus of the third
part-explores utopian visions and their limits that instigate or
hinder, and the mobilization of emotion through propaganda.
Finally, the fourth part shows how the recollection of the past
sometimes triggers new terrortimes. Departing from an understanding
of violence limited to certain areas and time frames, this volume
describes continuities of violence as overlapping fabrics woven
together from notions of space, time, and memory.
Terrortimes, Terrorscapes: Continuities of Space, Time, and Memory
in Twentieth-Century War and Genocide investigates interconnections
between space and violence throughout the twentieth century, and
how such connections informed collective memory. The
interdisciplinary volume shows how entangled notions of time and
space amplified by memory narratives led to continuities of
violence across different conflicts creating "terrortimes" and
"terrorscapes" in their wake. The volume examines such continuities
of violence with the help of an analytical framework built around
different themes. Its first part, spatial and temporal continuities
of violence, looks at contested spaces and ideas of national,
ethnic, or religious homogeneity that are often at the heart of
prolonged conflicts. The second part, on states and actors,
addresses the role of states as enablers of violence, asymmetric
power dynamics, and the connection between imperialism and genocide
in Africa. Imagination and emotion-the focus of the third
part-explores utopian visions and their limits that instigate or
hinder, and the mobilization of emotion through propaganda.
Finally, the fourth part shows how the recollection of the past
sometimes triggers new terrortimes. Departing from an understanding
of violence limited to certain areas and time frames, this volume
describes continuities of violence as overlapping fabrics woven
together from notions of space, time, and memory.
Of all the horrors of the last century--perhaps the bloodiest
century of the past millennium--ethnic cleansing ranks among the
worst. The term burst forth in public discourse in the spring of
1992 as a way to describe Serbian attacks on the Muslims of
Bosnia-Herzegovina, but as this landmark book attests, ethnic
cleansing is neither new nor likely to cease in our time.
Norman Naimark, distinguished historian of Europe and Russia,
provides an insightful history of ethnic cleansing and its
relationship to genocide and population transfer. Focusing on five
specific cases, he exposes the myths about ethnic cleansing, in
particular the commonly held belief that the practice stems from
ancient hatreds. Naimark shows that this face of genocide had its
roots in the European nationalism of the late nineteenth century
but found its most virulent expression in the twentieth century as
modern states and societies began to organize themselves by ethnic
criteria. The most obvious example, and one of Naimark's cases, is
the Nazi attack on the Jews that culminated in the Holocaust.
Naimark also discusses the Armenian genocide of 1915 and the
expulsion of Greeks from Anatolia during the Greco-Turkish War of
1921-22; the Soviet forced deportation of the Chechens-Ingush and
the Crimean Tatars in 1944; the Polish and Czechoslovak expulsion
of the Germans in 1944-47; and Bosnia and Kosovo.
In this harrowing history, Naimark reveals how over and over,
as racism and religious hatreds picked up an ethnic name tag, war
provided a cover for violence and mayhem, an evil tapestry behind
which nations acted with impunity.
In the aftermath of the 1992-1995 Bosnian war, the discovery of
unmarked mass graves revealed Europe's worst atrocity since World
War II: the genocide in the UN "safe area" of Srebrenica. "To Know
Where He Lies" provides a powerful account of the innovative
genetic technology developed to identify the eight thousand Bosnian
Muslim (Bosniak) men and boys found in those graves and elsewhere,
demonstrating how memory, imagination, and science come together to
recover identities lost to genocide. Sarah E. Wagner explores
technology's import across several areas of postwar Bosnian society
- for families of the missing, the Srebrenica community, the
Bosnian political leadership (including Serb and Muslim), and
international aims of social repair - probing the meaning of
absence itself.
Between 1929 and 1942, Hungary's motion picture industry
experienced meteoric growth. It leapt into Europe's top echelon,
trailing only Nazi Germany and Italy in feature output. Yet by
1944, Hungary's cinema was in shambles, internal and external
forces having destroyed its unification experiments and productive
capacity. This original cultural and political history examines the
birth, unexpected ascendance, and wartime collapse of Hungary's
early sound cinema by placing it within a complex international
nexus. Detailing the interplay of Hungarian cultural and political
elites, Jewish film professionals and financiers, Nazi officials,
and global film moguls, David Frey demonstrates how the
transnational process of forging an industry designed to define a
national culture proved particularly contentious and surprisingly
contradictory in the heyday of racial nationalism and antisemitism.
Over the past 25 years, Rwanda has undergone remarkable shifts and
transitions: culturally, economically, and educationally the
country has gone from strength to strength. While much scholarship
has understandably been retrospective, seeking to understand,
document and commemorate the Genocide against the Tutsi, this
volume gathers diverse perspectives on the changing social and
cultural fabric of Rwanda since 1994. Rwanda Since 1994 considers
the context of these changes, particularly in relation to the
ongoing importance of remembering and in wider developments in the
Great Lakes and East Africa regions. Equally it explores what
stories of change are emerging from Rwanda: creative writing and
testimonies, as well as national, regional, and international
political narratives. The contributors interrogate which frameworks
and narratives might be most useful for understanding different
kinds of change, what new directions are emerging, and how Rwanda's
trajectory is shaped by other global factors. The international set
of contributors includes creative writers, practitioners,
activists, and scholars from African studies, history,
anthropology, education, international relations, modern languages,
law and politics. As well as delving into the shifting dynamics of
religion and gender in Rwanda today, the book brings to light the
experiences of lesser-discussed groups of people such as the Twa
and the children of perpetrators.
Of all the horrors human beings perpetrate, genocide stands near
the top of the list. Its toll is staggering: well over 100 million
dead worldwide. "Why Did They Kill? "is one of the first
anthropological attempts to analyze the origins of genocide. In it,
Alexander Hinton focuses on the devastation that took place in
Cambodia from April 1975 to January 1979 under the Khmer Rouge in
order to explore why mass murder happens and what motivates
perpetrators to kill. Basing his analysis on years of investigative
work in Cambodia, Hinton finds parallels between the Khmer Rouge
and the Nazi regimes. Policies in Cambodia resulted in the deaths
of over 1.7 million of that country's 8 million
inhabitantsOCoalmost a quarter of the population--who perished from
starvation, overwork, illness, malnutrition, and execution. Hinton
considers this violence in light of a number of dynamics, including
the ways in which difference is manufactured, how identity and
meaning are constructed, and how emotionally resonant forms of
cultural knowledge are incorporated into genocidal ideologies."
In just a few short years, the Khmer Rouge presided over one of the
twentieth century's cruelest reigns of terror. Since its 1979
overthrow, there have been several attempts to hold the
perpetrators accountable, from a People's Revolutionary Tribunal
shortly afterward through the early 2000s Extraordinary Chambers in
the Courts of Cambodia, also known as the Khmer Rouge Tribunal.
Extraordinary Justice offers a definitive account of the quest for
justice in Cambodia that uses this history to develop a theoretical
framework for understanding the interaction between law and
politics in war crimes tribunals. Craig Etcheson, one of the
world's foremost experts on the Cambodian genocide and its
aftermath, draws on decades of experience to trace the evolution of
transitional justice in the country from the late 1970s to the
present. He considers how war crimes tribunals come into existence,
how they operate and unfold, and what happens in their wake.
Etcheson argues that the concepts of legality that hold sway in
such tribunals should be understood in terms of their orientation
toward politics, both in the Khmer Rouge Tribunal and generally. A
magisterial chronicle of the inner workings of postconflict
justice, Extraordinary Justice challenges understandings of the
relationship between politics and the law, with important
implications for the future of attempts to seek accountability for
crimes against humanity.
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.
In 1963, West Germany was gripped by a dramatic trial of former
guards who had worked at the Nazi death camp Auschwitz. It was the
largest and most public trial to take place in the country and
attracted international attention. Using the pretrial files and
extensive trial audiotapes, Rebecca Wittmann offers a fascinating
reinterpretation of Germany's first major attempt to confront its
past. Evoking the courtroom atmosphere, Wittmann vividly recounts
the testimony of survivors, former SS officers, and defendants-a
cross-section of the camp population. Attorney General Fritz Bauer
made an extraordinary effort to put the entire Auschwitz complex on
trial, but constrained by West German murder laws, the prosecution
had to resort to standards for illegal behavior that echoed the
laws of the Third Reich. This provided a legitimacy to the Nazi
state. Only those who exceeded direct orders were convicted of
murder. This shocking ruling was reflected in the press coverage,
which focused on only the most sadistic and brutal crimes, allowing
the real atrocity at Auschwitz-mass murder in the gas chambers-to
be relegated to the background. The Auschwitz trial had a
paradoxical result. Although the prosecution succeeded in exposing
SS crimes at the camp for the first time, the public absorbed a
distorted representation of the criminality of the camp system. The
Auschwitz trial ensured that rather than coming to terms with their
Nazi past, Germans managed to delay a true reckoning with the
horror of the Holocaust.
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