Atrocity. Genocide. War crime. Crime Against Humanity. Such atrocity labels have been popularized among international lawmakers but with little insight offered into how and when these terms are applied and to what effect. What constitutes an event to be termed a genocide or war crime and what role does this play in the application of legal proceedings? Markus P. Beham, through an interdisciplinary and comparative approach, unpicks these terms to uncover their historical genesis and their implications for international criminal law initiatives concerned with atrocity. The book uniquely compares four specific case studies: Belgian colonial exploitation of the Congo, atrocities committed against the Herero and Nama in German South-West Africa, the Armenian genocide and the man-made Ukrainian famine of the 1930s. Encompassing international law, legal history, and discourse analysis, the concept of 'atrocity labelling' is used to capture the meaning underlying the work of international lawyers and prosecutors, historians and sociologists, agenda setters and policy makers.

During what has become officially known as the genocide against the Tutsi, as many as one million Rwandan people were brutally massacred between April and July 1994. This book presents a critical study of fictional responses by authors inside and outside Rwanda to the 1994 genocide. Focusing on a large and original corpus of creative writing by African authors, including writers from Rwanda, Rwanda Genocide Stories: Fiction After 1994 examines the positionality of authors and their texts in relation to the genocide. How do issues of 'ethnicity', nationality, geographical location and family history affect the ways in which creative writers respond to what happened in 1994? And how do such factors lead to authors and their texts being positioned by others? The book is organized around the principal subject positions created by the genocide, categories that have particular connotations and have become fraught with political tension and ambiguity in the context of post-genocide Rwanda. Through analysis of the figures of tourists, witnesses, survivors, victims and perpetrators, the book identifies the ways in which readers of genocide stories are compelled to reevaluate their knowledge of Rwanda and take an active role in commemorative processes: as self-critical tourists, ethical witnesses, judges or culpable bystanders, we are encouraged to acknowledge and assume our own responsibility for what happened in 1994.

This innovative collection offers one of the first analyses of criminologies of the military from an interdisciplinary perspective. While some criminologists have examined the military in relation to the area of war crimes, this collection considers a range of other important but less explored aspects such as private military actors, insurgents, paramilitary groups and the role of military forces in tackling transnational crime. Drawing upon insights from criminology, this book's editors also consider the ways the military institution harbours criminal activity within its ranks and deals with prisoners of war. The contributions, by leading experts in the field, have a broad reach and take a truly global approach to the subject.

This book explores the diverse ways in which Holocaust representations have influenced and structured how other genocides are understood and represented in the West. Rebecca Jinks focuses in particular on the canonical 20th century cases of genocide: Armenia, Cambodia, Bosnia, and Rwanda. Using literature, film, photography, and memorialisation, she demonstrates that we can only understand the Holocaust's status as a 'benchmark' for other genocides if we look at the deeper, structural resonances which subtly shape many representations of genocide. Representing Genocide pursues five thematic areas in turn: how genocides are recognised as such by western publics; the representation of the origins and perpetrators of genocide; how western witnesses represent genocide; representations of the aftermath of genocide; and western responses to genocide. Throughout, the book distinguishes between 'mainstream' and other, more nuanced and engaged, representations of genocide. It shows how these mainstream representations - the majority - largely replicate the representational framework of the Holocaust, including the way in which mainstream Holocaust representations resist recognising the rationality, instrumentality and normality of genocide, preferring instead to present it as an aberrant, exceptional event in human society. By contrast, the more engaged representations - often, but not always, originating from those who experienced genocide - tend to revolve around precisely genocide's ordinariness, and the structures and situations common to human society which contribute to and become involved in the violence.