After the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, victims, perpetrators, and the country as a whole struggled to deal with the legacy of the mass violence. The government responded by creating a new version of a traditional grassroots justice system called gacaca. Bert Ingelaere, based on his observation of two thousand gacaca trials, offers a comprehensive assessment of what these courts set out to do, how they worked, what they achieved, what they did not achieve, and how they affected Rwandan society. Weaving together vivid firsthand recollections, interviews, and trial testimony with systematic analysis, Ingelaere documents how the gacaca shifted over time from confession to accusation, from restoration to retribution. He precisely articulates the importance of popular conceptions of what is true and just. Marked by methodological sophistication, extraordinary evidence, and deep knowledge of Rwanda, this is an authoritative, nuanced, and bittersweet account of one of the most important experiments in transitional justice after mass violence.

This memoir recalls Yervant Alexanian's death-defying experiences in the center of the Armenian Genocide. Like other Armenians of his generation, he was an eyewitness to the massacre and dislocation of his family and fellow countrymen in Ottoman Turkey during World War I. Alexanian was conscripted into the Turkish army-but unlike others so conscripted, he survived. Alexanian was forced to become an onlooker while he watched the atrocities unfold. His story of resourceful action and fateful turns is a suspenseful "insider's account" of a Genocide survivor. From his singular position, Alexanian was able to document the tragedy of his people in his journals and diaries, but he also offers us a behind-the-scenes look into the motivations and actions of Turkish military officials as they committed the atrocities. His story continues after the war as we follow the trail of his journey through Europe and finally to America, where he found solace and was able to start anew with fellow survivors. No comparable account exists in the literature of the Armenian Genocide. This edition, translated from Alexanian's hand-written Armenian-language chronicle, includes never-before-seen documents and photos that the author preserved. Through his eyes we relive the astonishing cruelty of the Genocide's perpetrators-but also rare, unexpected acts of humanity between victim and oppressor.

The Japanese Army committed numerous atrocities during its pitiless campaigns in China from 1931 to 1945. When the Chinese emerged victorious with the Allies at the end of World War II, many seemed ready to exact retribution for these crimes. Rather than resort to violence, however, they chose to deal with their former enemy through legal and diplomatic means. Focusing on the trials of, and policies toward, Japanese war criminals in the postwar period, Men to Devils, Devils to Men "analyzes the complex political maneuvering between China and Japan that shaped East Asian realpolitik during the Cold War.

Barak Kushner examines how factions of Nationalists and Communists within China structured the war crimes trials in ways meant to strengthen their competing claims to political rule. On the international stage, both China and Japan propagandized the tribunals, promoting or blocking them for their own advantage. Both nations vied to prove their justness to the world: competing groups in China by emphasizing their magnanimous policy toward the Japanese; Japan by openly cooperating with postwar democratization initiatives. At home, however, Japan allowed the legitimacy of the war crimes trials to be questioned in intense debates that became a formidable force in postwar Japanese politics.

In uncovering the different ways the pursuit of justice for Japanese war crimes influenced Sino-Japanese relations in the postwar years, Men to Devils, Devils to Men "reveals a Cold War dynamic that still roils East Asian relations today.

In Justice behind the Iron Curtain, Gabriel N. Finder and Alexander V. Prusin examine Poland's role in prosecuting Nazi German criminals during the first decade and a half of the postwar era. Finder and Prusin contend that the Polish trials of Nazi war criminals were a pragmatic political response to postwar Polish society and Poles' cravings for vengeance against German Nazis. Although characterized by numerous inconsistencies, Poland's prosecutions of Nazis exhibited a fair degree of due process and resembled similar proceedings in Western democratic counties. The authors examine reactions to the trials among Poles and Jews. Although Polish-Jewish relations were uneasy in the wake of the extremely brutal German wartime occupation of Poland, postwar Polish prosecutions of German Nazis placed emphasis on the fate of Jews during the Holocaust. Justice behind the Iron Curtain is the first work to approach communist Poland's judicial postwar confrontation with the legacy of the Nazi occupation.

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.

Much is at stake when we choose a word for a form of violence: whether a conflict is labeled civil war or genocide, whether we refer to "enhanced interrogation techniques" or to "torture," whether a person is called a "terrorist" or a "patriot." Do these decisions reflect the rigorous application of commonly accepted criteria, or are they determined by power structures and partisanship? How is the language we use for violence entangled with the fight against it? In Naming Violence, Mathias Thaler articulates a novel perspective on the study of violence that demonstrates why the imagination matters for political theory. His analysis of the politics of naming charts a middle ground between moralism and realism, arguing that political theory ought to question whether our existing vocabulary enables us to properly identify, understand, and respond to violence. He explores how narrative art, thought experiments, and historical events can challenge and enlarge our existing ways of thinking about violence. Through storytelling, hypothetical situations, and genealogies, the imagination can help us see when definitions of violence need to be revisited by shedding new light on prevalent norms and uncovering the contingent history of ostensibly self-evident beliefs. Naming Violence demonstrates the importance of political theory to debates about violence across a number of different disciplines from film studies to history.

Using more than a decade's worth of fieldwork in South Sudan, Clémence Pinaud here explores the relationship between predatory wealth accumulation, state formation, and a form of racism—extreme ethnic group entitlement—that has the potential to result in genocide.  War and Genocide in South Sudan traces the rise of a predatory state during civil war in southern Sudan and its transformation into a violent Dinka ethnocracy after the region's formal independence. That new state, Pinaud argues, waged genocide against non-Dinka civilians in 2013-2017. During a civil war that wrecked the region between 1983 and 2005, the predominantly Dinka Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) practiced ethnically exclusive and predatory wealth accumulation. Its actions fostered extreme group entitlement and profoundly shaped the rebel state. Ethnic group entitlement eventually grew into an ideology of ethnic supremacy.  After that war ended, the semi-autonomous state turned into a violent and predatory ethnocracy—a process accelerated by independence in 2011. The rise of exclusionary nationalism, a new security landscape, and inter-ethnic political competition contributed to the start of a new round of civil war in 2013, in which the recently founded state unleashed violence against nearly all non-Dinka ethnic groups. Pinaud investigates three campaigns waged by the South Sudan government in 2013–2017 and concludes they were genocidal—they sought to destroy non-Dinka target groups. She demonstrates how the perpetrators' sense of group entitlement culminated in land-grabs that amounted to a genocidal conquest echoing the imperialist origins of modern genocides. Thanks to generous funding from TOME, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.

Literature and Justice in Mid Twentieth Century Britain: Crime and War Crimes examines how ideas about crime, criminality, and judicial procedure that had developed in a domestic context influenced the representation and understanding of war crimes trials, victims of war crimes, and war criminals in post-Second World War Britain. The representation of Belsen concentration camp and the subsequent British-run trial of its personnel are a particular focal point. Drawing on a range of source material including life-writing, journalism, and detective fiction, as well as criminological and sociological works from this period, this book explains why the fate of the Jews and other victims of the Nazis was sometimes brought starkly into focus and sometimes marginalised in public discourse at this period. What remain are glimpses of the events now called the Holocaust, but glimpses that can be as powerful and as meaningful as more direct or explicit representations.

Judge Mettraux's four-volume compendium, International Crimes: Law and Practice, will provide the most detailed and authoritative account to-date of the law of international crimes. It is a scholarly tour de force providing a unique blend of academic rigour and an insight into the practice of international criminal law. The compendium is un-rivalled in its breadth and depth, covering almost a century of legal practice, dozens of jurisdictions (national and international), thousands of decisions and judgments and hundreds of cases. This second volume discusses in detail crimes against humanity.

Principles of International Criminal Law is one of the most influential textbooks in the field of international criminal justice. This fourth edition builds on the highly-successful work of the previous editions, setting out the general principles governing international crimes as well as the fundamentals of both substantive and procedural international criminal law. It provides a detailed understanding of the sources and evolution of international criminal law, demonstrating how it has developed, and how its application has changed. The book assesses in detail the four key international crimes as defined by the statute of the International Criminal Court: genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression. The new edition revises and updates the work with developments in international criminal justice since 2014. It includes substantial new material on critical perspectives on international criminal justice, the fragmentation of international criminal law, new war crimes of prohibited means of warfare, and the prosecution of crimes committed in Syria and Northern Iraq.The book retains its highly-acclaimed systematic approach and consistent methodology, making it essential reading for both students and scholars of international criminal law, as well as practitioners and judges working in the field.

Focusing on events in Rwanda, Armenia, and the former Yugoslavia as well as the Holocaust, Genocide and Gender in the Twentieth Century investigates how historically- and culturally-specific ideas led to genocidal sexual violence. Expert contributors also consider how these ideas, in conjunction with issues relating to femininity, masculinity and understandings of gendered identities, contributed to perpetrators' tools and strategies for ethnic cleansing and genocide. The 2nd edition features: * Five brand new chapters which explore: imperialism, race, gender and genocide; the Cambodian genocide; memory and intergenerational transmission of Holocaust trauma; and genocide, gender and memory in the Armenian case. * An extended and enhanced introduction which makes use of recent scholarship on gender and violence. * Historiographical and bibliographical updates throughout. * Key primary document - excerpt from the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. Updated and revised in its second edition, Genocide and Gender in the Twentieth Century is the authoritative study on the complex gender dimensions of ethnic cleansing and genocide in the 20th century.

Between 1944 and 1949 the United States Navy held a war crimes tribunal that tried Japanese nationals and members of Guam's indigenous Chamorro population who had worked for Japan's military government. In Sacred Men Keith L. Camacho traces the tribunal's legacy and its role in shaping contemporary domestic and international laws regarding combatants, jurisdiction, and property. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben's notions of bare life and Chamorro concepts of retribution, Camacho demonstrates how the U.S. tribunal used and justified the imprisonment, torture, murder, and exiling of accused Japanese and Chamorro war criminals in order to institute a new American political order. This U.S. disciplinary logic in Guam, Camacho argues, continues to directly inform the ideology used to justify the Guantanamo Bay detention center, the torture and enhanced interrogation of enemy combatants, and the American carceral state.

Examining how international criminal law has-and hasn't-brought justice following war crimes in Africa.Ever since World War II, the United Nations and other international actors have created laws, treaties, and institutions to punish perpetrators of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. These efforts have established universally recognized norms and have resulted in several high-profile convictions in egregious cases. But international criminal justice now seems to be a declining force - its energy sapped by long delays in prosecutions, lagging public attention, and a globally rising authoritarianism that disregards legal niceties. This book reviews five examples of international criminal justice as they have been applied across Africa, where brutal civil conflicts in recent decades resulted in varying degrees of global attention and action. The first three chapters examine key international mechanisms: the International Criminal Court, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and the hybrid tribunal established in Senegal to try state crimes committed in Chad. These chapters illustrate how the design and practice of the institutions led to similarly unexpected and unsatisfying outcomes. The final two chapters examine emerging and proposed international criminal justice mechanisms. One is a tribunal intended to facilitate peace in the new but war-torn country of South Sudan, not yet operational and unlikely to perform better than its predecessors. Finally, the book considers the developing human rights practice of the little-studied East African Court, a regional commercial court in Arusha, Tanzania, to show how local judicial creativity can win a role for courts in facilitating good governance. Written in an accessible style, this book explores the connections between politics and the doctrine of international criminal law. Highlighting little-known institutional examples and under-discussed political situations, the book contributes to a broader international understanding of African politics and international criminal justice, as well as the lessons the African experiences offer for other regions.

A global history of environmental warfare and the case for why it should be a crime The environmental infrastructure that sustains human societies has been a target and instrument of war for centuries, resulting in famine and disease, displaced populations, and the devastation of people's livelihoods and ways of life. Scorched Earth traces the history of scorched earth, military inundations, and armies living off the land from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, arguing that the resulting deliberate destruction of the environment-"environcide"-constitutes total war and is a crime against humanity and nature. In this sweeping global history, Emmanuel Kreike shows how religious war in Europe transformed Holland into a desolate swamp where hunger and the black death ruled. He describes how Spanish conquistadores exploited the irrigation works and expansive agricultural terraces of the Aztecs and Incas, triggering a humanitarian crisis of catastrophic proportions. Kreike demonstrates how environmental warfare has continued unabated into the modern era. His panoramic narrative takes readers from the Thirty Years' War to the wars of France's Sun King, and from the Dutch colonial wars in North America and Indonesia to the early twentieth century colonial conquest of southwestern Africa. Shedding light on the premodern origins and the lasting consequences of total war, Scorched Earth explains why ecocide and genocide are not separate phenomena, and why international law must recognize environmental warfare as a violation of human rights.

Describes the effect on young Jews of Hitler's rise to power and recounts the experiences of those who attended an agricultural emigration training farm.

Although acknowledged as a highly professional military organization, the Wehrmacht has been traditionally exonerated from the crimes attributed to the SS during the Second World War. However, in this radical new study, Omer Bartov shows how the relentless Nazi propaganda machine produced conscripts for Hitler's army who were fully convinced of his horrific views on `inferior peoples', and that it was these ideas, and not the exigencies of war, that motivated their atrocities, particularly those committed against Communist officials and Jews in the Soviet Union.

The genocide in Myanmar has drawn global attention as Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi appears to be presiding over human rights violations, forced migrations and extra-judicial killings on an enormous scale. This unique study draws on thousands of hours of interviews and testimony from the Rohingya themselves to assess and outline the full scale of the disaster. Casting new light on Rohingya identity, history and culture, this will be an essential contribution to the study of the Rohingya people and to the study of the early stages of genocide. This book adds convincingly to the body of evidence that the government of Myanmar has enabled a genocide in Rakhine State and the surrounding areas.

On April 25th 1915, during the First World War, the famous Anzacs landed ashore at Gallipoli. At the exact same moment, leading figures of Armenian life in the Ottoman Empire were being arrested in vast numbers. That dark day marks the simultaneous birth of a national story - and the beginning of a genocide. When We Dead Awaken - the first narrative history of the Armenian Genocide in decades - draws these two landmark historical events together. James Robins explores the accounts of Anzac Prisoners of War who witnessed the genocide, the experiences of soldiers who risked their lives to defend refugees, and Australia and New Zealand's participation in the enormous post-war Armenian relief movement. By exploring the vital political implications of this unexplored history, When We Dead Awaken questions the national folklore of Australia, New Zealand, and Turkey - and the mythology of Anzac Day itself.

In research on 'mass killings' such as genocides and campaigns of state terror, the role of ideology is hotly debated. For some scholars, ideologies are crucial in providing the extremist goals and hatreds that motivate ideologically committed people to kill. But many other scholars are sceptical: contending that perpetrators of mass killing rarely seem ideologically committed, and that rational self-interest or powerful forms of social pressure are more important drivers of violence than ideology. In Ideology and Mass Killing, Jonathan Leader Maynard challenges both these prevailing views, advancing an alternative 'neo-ideological' perspective which systematically retheorises the key ideological foundations of large-scale violence against civilians. Integrating cutting-edge research from multiple disciplines, including political science, political psychology, history and sociology, Ideology and Mass Killing demonstrates that ideological justifications vitally shape such violence in ways that go beyond deep ideological commitment. Most disturbingly of all, the key ideological foundations of mass killings are found to lie, not in extraordinary political goals or hatreds, but in radicalised versions of those conventional, widely accepted ideas that underpin the politics of security in ordinary societies across the world. This study then substantiates this account by a detailed examination of four contrasting cases of mass killing - Stalinist Repression in the Soviet Union between 1930 and 1938, the Allied Bombing Campaign against Germany and Japan in World War II from 1940 to 1945, mass atrocities in the Guatemalan Civil War between 1978 and 1983, and the Rwandan Genocide in 1994. This represents the first volume to offer a dedicated, comparative theory of ideology's role in mass killing, while also developing a powerful new account of how ideology affects violence and politics more generally.

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."

After 1948, the 370,000 Jews of Romania who survived the Holocaust became one of the main sources of immigration for the new state of Israel as almost all left their homeland to settle in Palestine and Israel. Romania's decision to allow its Jews to leave was baldly practical: Israel paid for them, and Romania wanted influence in the Middle East. For its part, Israel was rescuing a community threatened by economic and cultural extinction and at the same time strengthening itself with a massive infusion of new immigrants. In this thoroughly updated edition, Radu Ioanid traces the secret history of the longest and most expensive ransom arrangement in recent times, a hidden exchange that lasted until the fall of the Communist regime. Drawing on a wealth of oral testimonies, recently declassified documents from the archives of the Romanian secret police, and newly available material from the government archives of Ukraine, Moldova, Russia, and Germany, Ioanid follows Israel's long and expensive ransom arrangement with Communist Romania. He uncovers the elaborate mechanisms that made it successful for decades, the shadowy figures responsible, and the secret channels of communication and payment. The book sheds new light on Romania's pre-fascist and fascist antisemitic legislation and its implementation. Ioanid explores in greater detail the physical destruction of Romania's Jewish and Roma communities, including the pogroms of Bucharest and Iasi as well as the deportations and the massacres from Bessarabia, Bukovina, and Transnistria. New chapters consider the forced labor of the Jews, persecution by the Protestant churches, and the decision-making process of the Antonescu government in its treatment of Jews and Roma. As suspenseful as a Cold-War thriller, his book tells the full, startling story of an unprecedented slave trade and its origins.

Powerful accounts by genocide survivors, a journalist seeking to bear witness to their pain. Darfuri refugee camps in Chad, Kigali in Rwanda, and the ruins of ancient villages in Turkey - all visited by genocide, all still reeling in its wake. In Journey through Genocide, Raffy Boudjikanian travels to communities that have survived genocide to understand the legacy of this most terrible of crimes against humanity. In this era of ethnic and religious wars, mass displacements, and forced migrations, Boudjikanian looks back at three humanitarian crises. In Chad, meet families displaced by massacres in the Darfur region of neighbouring Sudan, their ordeal still raw. In Rwanda, meet a people struggling with justice and reconciliation. And in Turkey, explore what it means to still be afraid a century after the author's own ancestors were caught in the Armenian Genocide of 1915. Clear-eyed and compassionate, Boudjikanian breathes life into horrors that too often seem remote.

Defined by deliberation about the difference between right and wrong, encouragement not to be indifferent toward that difference, resistance against what is wrong, and action in support of what is right, ethics is civilization's keystone. The Failures of Ethics concentrates on the multiple shortfalls and shortcomings of thought, decision, and action that tempt and incite us human beings to inflict incalculable harm. Absent the overriding of moral sensibilities, if not the collapse or collaboration of ethical traditions, the Holocaust, genocide, and other mass atrocities could not have happened. Although these catastrophes do not pronounce the death of ethics, they show that ethics is vulnerable, subject to misuse and perversion, and that no simple reaffirmation of ethics, as if nothing disastrous had happened, will do. Moral and religious authority has been fragmented and weakened by the accumulated ruins of history and the depersonalized advances of civilization that have taken us from a bloody twentieth century into an immensely problematic twenty-first. What nevertheless remain essential are spirited commitment and political will that embody the courage not to let go of the ethical but to persist for it in spite of humankind's self-inflicted destructiveness. Salvaging the fragmented condition of ethics, this book shows how respect and honor for those who save lives and resist atrocity, deepened attention to the dead and to death itself, and appeals for human rights and renewed spiritual sensitivity confirm that ethics contains and remains an irreplaceable safeguard against its own failures.

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.