Studies of genocide and mass atrocity most often focus on their causes and consequences, their aims and effects, and the number of people killed. But the question remains, if the main goal is death, then why is torture necessary? This book argues that genocide and mass atrocity are committed not as an end in themselves but as a means to pursue sustained and systemic torture - the spectacle of violence - against its victims. Extermination is not the only, or even the primary, goal of genocidal campaigns. In The Macabresque, Edward Weisband looks at different episodes of mass violence (Chinese Cultural Revolution, the Holocaust, post-Ottoman Turkey, Cambodia, Rwanda, and Bosnia, among other instances) to consider why different methods of violence were used in each and how they related to the particular cultural milieu in which they were perpetrated. He asserts that it is not accidental that certain images capture our memory as emblematic of specific genocides or mass atrocities (the death marches of the Armenian genocide, mass starvation in the Ukraine, the killing apparatus and laboratories of the Holocaust, the killing fields of Cambodia) because such violence assumes a kind of style each time and place it arises. Weisband looks at these variations in terms of their aesthetic or dramaturgical style, or what he calls the macabresque. The macabresque is ever present in genocide and mass atrocity across time, place and episode. Beyond the horrors of lethality, it is the defining feature of concentration and/or death camps, detention centers, prisons, ghettos, killing fields, and the houses, schools and hospitals converted into hubs for torture. Macabresque dramaturgy also assumes many aesthetic forms, all designed to inflict hideous pain and humiliating punishments, sometimes in controlled environments, but also during frenzied moments of staged public horror. These kinds of performative violations permit perpetrators to revel in their absolute power but simultaneously to project hatred, revenge and revulsion onto victims, who embody the shame, humiliation and loss felt by their torturers. By understanding how and why mass violence occurs and the reasons for its variations, The Macabresque aims to explain why so many seemingly normal or "ordinary" people participate in mass atrocity across cultures and why such egregious violence occurs repeatedly through history.

Set in the South and Southeast Region, this book attempts to analyse the implications of both genocides perpetrated on the unarmed Rohingya minority community in Myanmar, and the geopolitics of the powers of the region that deter the resolution of this festering problem. The book highlights the helplessness of the UN system to take any punitive actions against the perpetrators (ie: the security forces of Myanmar) given that China, India and Russia, who are taking the side of Myanmar for geopolitical reasons. They have exercised their vetoes at the UNSC to such an action. The book describes the key players in this region, their interests, compulsions and imperatives, and covers different strategies launched by the United States, China, India, Japan, Bangladesh, and Myanmar that tend to stall the resolution of the process or even refusing to take back the Rohingya refugees -- 1.1 million of them including children and women -- now languishing in the cramped camps inside Bangladesh. Most of these refugees were forced to flee their ancestral homes after a ghastly genocide meted out to them in October 2017. Such massacres have been taking place in a series of violence starting from 1977-8. This issue has huge regional security implications. The ugly heads of insurgency are also looming large. This has turned out to be a huge burden on the economy and environment of Bangladesh. However, different donor agencies including UNHCR are providing relief and rehabilitation. The author provides ramifications and reflections in the form of scenario development and suggesting certain options -- uniqueness of this book -- on this festering humanitarian issue.

Global Predator is a damning account of the atrocities committed by invading US armed forces, from the 1846 war on Mexico to the recent wars on Iraq. In between are chapters on the Spanish and Philippines War, the World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam, plus appendices on other incursions. As he marshals the facts for a contrarian view of US history, author Stewart Halsey Ross is angered by a persistent pattern of brutality, jingoism and hypocrisy he finds behind America's mask of "Manifest Destiny" - yet he notes the great reluctance of the American people to enter into five of these eight wars. Ross (d. 2010) was an expert on military affairs. His earlier book published by Progressive Press, Propaganda for War, tells how Woodrow Wilson and the British twisted the truth to get the US into the Great War.

Genocide is a phenomenon that continues to confound scholars, practitioners, and general readers. Notwithstanding the carnage of the twentieth century, our understanding of genocide remains partial. Disciplinary boundaries have inhibited integrative studies and popular, moralizing accounts have hindered comprehension by advancing simple truths in an area where none are to be had. Genocide: A Reader lays the foundations for an improved understanding of genocide. With the help of 150 essential contributions, Jens Meierhenrich provides a unique introduction to the myriad dimensions of genocide and to the breadth and range of critical thinking that exists concerning it. This innovative anthology offers genre-defining as well as genre-bending selections from diverse disciplines in law, the social sciences, and the humanities as well as from other fields. A wide-ranging introductory chapter on the study and history of genocide accompanies the carefully curated and annotated collection. By revisiting the past of genocide studies and imagining its future, Genocide: A Reader is an indispensable resource for novices and specialists alike.

Every year, hundreds of thousands of women become victims of sexual violence in conflict zones around the world; in the Democratic Republic of Congo alone, approximately 1,100 rapes are reported each month. This book offers a comprehensive analysis of the causes, consequences and responses to sexual violence in contemporary armed conflict. It explores the function and effect of wartime sexual violence and examines the conditions that make women and girls most vulnerable to these acts both before, during and after conflict. To understand the motivations of the men (and occasionally women) who perpetrate this violence, the book analyzes the role played by systemic and situational factors such as patriarchy and militarized masculinity. Difficult questions of accountability are tackled; in particular, the case of child soldiers, who often suffer a double victimization when forced to commit sexual atrocities. The book concludes by looking at strategies of prevention and protection as well as new programs being set up on the ground to support the rehabilitation of survivors and their communities. Sexual violence in war has long been a taboo subject but, as this book shows, new and courageous steps are at last being taken o at both local and international level - to end what has been called the "greatest silence in history."

Between the Wires tells for the first time the history of the Janowska camp in Lviv, Ukraine. Located in a city with the third-largest ghetto in Nazi-occupied Europe, Janowska remains one of the least-known sites of the Holocaust, despite being one of the deadliest. Simultaneously a prison, a slave labor camp, a transit camp to the gas chambers, and an extermination site, this hybrid camp played a complex role in the Holocaust.

Based on extensive archival research, Between the Wires explores the evolution and the connection to Lviv of this rare urban camp. Waitman Wade Beorn reveals the exceptional brutality of the SS staff alongside an almost unimaginable will to survive among prisoners facing horrendous suffering, whose resistance included an armed uprising.

This integrated chronicle of perpetrators, victims, and bystanders follows the history of the camp into the postwar era, including attempts to bring its criminals to justice.

This book is an outstanding document and account of the International Military Tribunal that took place in Tokyo at the end of World War Two. As in the Nuremberg Trial, the leaders of Japan were accused of crimes against peace and crimes against humanity, as well as war crimes.

The humanitarian tragedy in Darfur has stirred politicians, Hollywood celebrities and students to appeal for a peaceful resolution to the crisis. Beyond the horrific pictures of sprawling refugee camps and lurid accounts of rape and murder lies a complex history steeped in religion, politics, and decades of internal unrest.
"Darfur" traces the origins, organization and ideology of the infamous Janjawiid and other rebel groups, including the Sudan Liberation Army and the Justice and Equality Movement. It also analyzes the confused responses of the Sudanese government and African Union. This thoroughly updated edition also features a powerful analysis of how the conflict has been received in the international community and the varied attempts at peacekeeping.

The invasion of Czechoslovakia by Nazi Germany in March 1939 helped to precipitate Europe's descent into World War II six months later. The move, supposedly to protect the Sudeten Germans, shocked many in Europe, who saw it as a clear statement of intent by Hitler. Using new Slovakian and Czech primary source material, Patrick Crowhurst argues that occupation of the Sudetenland and the Czech lands was crucial to the Nazi war machine. The armaments, factories and raw materials that Hitler seized accelerated Germany's capabilities; Czech tanks would prove crucial in the Ardennes and, as the Wehrmacht fought at Stalingrad, Armaments Minister Albert Speer was corralling Czech industrial machinery to produce engines, aircraft and equipment in support. Crowhurst alos reveals a new in-depth account of the German reaction to the assassination of Reinhardt Heydrich on the streets of Prague in June 1942. The recriminations were brutal, and dovetailed with Hitler's plans for the genocide of Czech Jewry. This is a new side of the History of Nazi Europe, and argues for the centrality of the Czech occupation in the overall narrative of World War II.

75 years after the United States dropped the world's first atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a group of international scholars offers new perspectives on this event and the history, development, and portrayal of the utilization of atomic energy: in military and civilian industries, civil nuclear power, literature and film, and the contemporary world. What lessons have we learned since the end of the Second World War? Can we avoid disasters such as Chernobyl and Fukushima? Have we learned to live with man-made nuclear power in the 21st century?

During World War II, Croatia became a fascist state under the control of the Ustasha Movement - allied with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Here, Goran Miljan examines and analyzes for the first time the ideology, practices, and international connections of the Ustasha Youth organization. The Ustasha Youth was an all-embracing fascist youth organization, established in July 1941 by the `Independent State of Croatia' with the goal of reeducating young people in the model of an ideal `new' Croat. This youth organization attempted to set in motion an all-embracing, totalitarian national revolution which in reality consisted of specific interconnected, mutually dependent practices: prosecution, oppression, mass murder, and the Holocaust - all of which were officially legalized within a month of the regime's accession to power. To this end education, sport, manual work and camping took place in specially established Ustasha Youth Schools. In order to justify their radical policies of youth reeducation, the Ustasha Youth, besides emphasizing national character and the importance of cultural and national purity, also engaged in transnational activities and exchanges, especially with the Hlinkova mladez [Hlinka Youth] of the Slovak Republic. Both youth organizations were closely modelled after the youth organizations in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. This is a little studied part of the history of World War II and of Fascism, and will be essential reading for scholars of Central Europe and the Holocaust.

***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.

This book explores the subject of genocide through key debates and case studies. It analyses the dynamics of genocide - the processes and mechanisms of acts committed with the intention of destroying, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, religious or racial group - in order to shed light upon its origins, characteristics and consequences. Debating Genocide begins with an introduction to the concept of genocide. It then examines the colonial genocides at the end of the 19th- and start of the 20th-centuries; the Armenian Genocide of 1915-16; the Nazi 'Final Solution'; the Nazi genocide of the Gypsies; mass murder in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge; the genocides in the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda; and the genocide in Sudan in the early 21st century. It also includes a thematic chapter which covers gender and genocide, as well as issues of memory and memorialisation. Finally, the book considers how genocides end, as well as the questions of resolution and denial, with Lisa Pine examining the debates around prediction and prevention and the R2P (Responsibility to Protect) initiative. This book is crucial for any students wanting to understand why genocides have occurred, why they still occur and what the key historical discussions around this subject entail.

Radhabinod Pal was an Indian jurist who achieved international fame as the judge representing India at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal and dissented from the majority opinion, holding that all Japanese "Class A" war criminals were not guilty of any of the charges brought against them. In postwar Japanese politics, right-wing polemicists have repeatedly utilized his dissenting judgment in their political propaganda aimed at refuting the Tokyo trial's majority judgment and justifying Japan's aggression, gradually elevating this controversial lawyer from India to a national symbol of historical revisionism. Many questions have been raised about how to appropriately assess Pal's dissenting judgment and Pal himself. Were the arguments in Pal's judgment sound? Why did he submit such a bold dissenting opinion? What was the political context? More fundamentally, why and how did the Allies ever nominate such a lawyer as a judge for a tribunal of such great political importance? How should his dissent be situated within the context of modern Asian history and the development of international criminal justice? What social and political circumstances in Japan thrust him into such a prominent position? Many of these questions remain unanswered, while some have been misinterpreted. This book proposes answers to many of them and presents a critique of the persistent revisionist denial of war responsibility in the Japanese postwar right-wing movement.

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.

Winner of The Alexander Nove Prize 2018 The nomads of Central Asia were already well accustomed to life under the power of a distant capital when the Bolsheviks fomented revolution on the streets of Petrograd. Yet after the fall of the Tsar, the nature, ambition and potency of that power would change dramatically, ultimately resulting in the near eradication of Central Asian nomadism. Based on extensive primary source work in Almaty, Bishkek and Moscow, Nomads and Soviet Rule charts the development of this volatile and brutal relationship and challenges the often repeated view that events followed a linear path of gradually escalating violence. Rather than the sedentarisation campaign being an inevitability born of deep-rooted Marxist hatred of the nomadic lifestyle, Thomas demonstrates the Soviet state's treatment of nomads to be far more complex and pragmatic. He shows how Soviet policy was informed by both an anti-colonial spirit and an imperialist impulse, by nationalism as well as communism, and above all by a lethal self-confidence in the Communist Party's ability to transform the lives of nomads and harness the agricultural potential of their landscape. This is the first book to look closely at the period between the revolution and the collectivisation drive, and offers fresh insight into a little-known aspect of early Soviet history. In doing so, the book offers a path to refining conceptions of the broader history and dynamics of the Soviet project in this key period.

This important collection of essays expands the geographic, demographic, and analytic scope of the term genocide to encompass the effects of colonialism and settler colonialism in North America. Colonists made multiple and interconnected attempts to destroy Indigenous peoples as groups. The contributors examine these efforts through the lens of genocide. Considering some of the most destructive aspects of the colonization and subsequent settlement of North America, several essays address Indigenous boarding school systems imposed by both the Canadian and U.S. governments in attempts to "civilize" or "assimilate" Indigenous children. Contributors examine some of the most egregious assaults on Indigenous peoples and the natural environment, including massacres, land appropriation, the spread of disease, the near-extinction of the buffalo, and forced political restructuring of Indigenous communities. Assessing the record of these appalling events, the contributors maintain that North Americans must reckon with colonial and settler colonial attempts to annihilate Indigenous peoples. Contributors. Jeff Benvenuto, Robbie Ethridge, Theodore Fontaine, Joseph P. Gone, Alexander Laban Hinton, Tasha Hubbard, Margaret D. Jabobs, Kiera L. Ladner, Tricia E. Logan, David B. MacDonald, Benjamin Madley, Jeremy Patzer, Julia Peristerakis, Christopher Powell, Colin Samson, Gray H. Whaley, Andrew Woolford

"[Alice Walker] has transcended expectations in her response to September 11. Sent by Earth . . . is simple, practical, and beyond argument."--The New Yorker, on Sent by Earth

"There is only one daughter, one father, one mother, one son, one aunt or uncle, one dog . . . or goat in the Universe, after all: the one right in front of you."--From Overcoming Speechlessness

In 2006 Alice Walker, working with Women for Women International, visited Rwanda and the eastern Congo to witness the aftermath of the genocide in Kigali. Invited by Code Pink, an antiwar group working to end the Iraq War, Walker traveled to Palestine/Israel three years later to view the devastation on the Gaza Strip. Here is her testimony.

Bearing witness to the depravity and cruelty, she presents the stories of the individuals who crossed her path and shared their tales of suffering and courage. Part of what has happened to human beings over the last century, she believes, is that we have been rendered speechless by unusually barbaric behavior that devalues human life. We have no words to describe what we witness. Self-imposed silence has slowed our response to the plight of those who most need us, often women and children, but also men of conscience who resist evil but are outnumbered by those around them who have fallen victim to a belief in weapons, male or ethnic dominance, and greed.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, Alice Walker is the author of more than thirty books including The Color Purple and Sent by Earth. Her writings have been translated into more than two dozen languages. From her essays concerning the civil rights movement to cries for intervention on the Gaza Strip, Walker continually and eloquently calls attention to ignored injustices around the world.

Hate crimes against Native Americans are a common occurrence, Barbara Perry reveals, although most go unreported. In this eye-opening book, Perry shines a spotlight on these acts, which are often hidden in the shadows of crime reports. She argues that scholarly and public attention to the historical and contemporary victimization of Native Americans as tribes or nations has blinded both scholars and citizens alike to the victimization of individual Native Americans. It is these acts against individuals that capture her attention. Silent Victims is a unique contribution to the literature on hate crime. Because most extant literature treats hate crimesaeven racial violencearather generically, this work breaks new ground with its findings. For this book, Perry interviewed nearly 300 Native Americans and gathered additional data in three geographic areas: the Four Corners region of the U.S. Southwest, the Great Lakes, and the Northern Plains. In all of these locales, she found that bias-related crime oppresses and segregates Native Americans. Perry is well aware of the history of colonization in North America and its attendant racial violence. She argues that the legacy of violence today can be traced directly to the genocidal practices of early settlers, and she adds valuable insights into the ways in which aIndiansa have been constructed as the Other by the prevailing culture. Perryas interviews with Native Americans recount instances of appalling treatment, often at the hands of law enforcement officials. In her conclusion, Perry draws from her research and interviews to suggest ways in which Native Americans can be empowered to defend themselves against all forms of racist victimization.

"Who were they? Ordinary people like you or me--or monsters?" asks internationally acclaimed author Slavenka Drakulic as she sets out to understand the people behind the horrific crimes committed during the war that tore apart Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Drawing on firsthand observations of the trials, as well as on other sources, Drakulic portrays some of the individuals accused of murder, rape, torture, ordering executions, and more during one of the most brutal conflicts in Europe in the twentieth century, including former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic; Radislav Krstic, the first to be sentenced for genocide; Biljana Plavsic, the only woman accused of war crimes; and Ratko Mladic, now in hiding. With clarity and emotion, Drakulic paints a wrenching portrait of a country needlessly torn apart.