Genocide and war crimes are increasingly the focus of scholarly and activist attention. Much controversy exists over how, precisely, these grim phenomena should be defined and conceptualized. Genocide, War Crimes & the West tackles this controversy, and clarifies our understanding of an important but under-researched dimension: the involvement of the US and other liberal democracies in actions that are conventionally depicted as the exclusive province of totalitarian and authoritarian regimes.
Many of the authors are eminent scholars and/or renowned activists; in most cases, their contributions are specifically written for this volume. In the opening and closing sections of the book, analytical issues are considered, including questions of responsibility for genocide and war crimes, and institutional responses at both the domestic and international levels. The central section is devoted to an unprecedentedly broad range of original case studies of western involvement, or alleged involvement, in war crimes and genocide.
At a moment in history when terrorism has become a near universal focus of public attention, this volume makes clear why the West - as a result of both its historical legacy and contemporary actions - so often excites widespread resentment and opposition throughout the rest of the world.

Places of Memory examines the post-war history of the site where the 1942 Wannsee Conference was held. The author analyses the different uses of the house to investigate how a site turns into a site of memory.

This book examines the mobilization, role, and trajectory of women rescuers and perpetrators during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. While much has been written about the victimization of women during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, very little has been said about women who rescued targeted victims or perpetrated crimes against humanity. This book explores and analyzes the role played by women who exercised agency as rescuers and as perpetrators during the genocide in Rwanda. As women, they took actions and decisions within the context of a deeply entrenched patriarchal system that limited their choices. This work examines two diverging paths of women's agency during this period: to rescue from genocide or to perpetrate genocide. It seeks to answer three questions: First, how were certain Rwandan women mobilized to participate in genocide, and by whom? Second, what were the specific actions of women during this period of violence and upheaval? Finally, what were the trajectories of women rescuers and perpetrators after the genocide? Comparing and contrasting how women rescuers and perpetrators were mobilized, the actions they undertook, and their post-genocide trajectories, and concluding with a broader discussion of the long-term impact of ignoring these women, this book develops a more nuanced and holistic view of women's agency and the genocide in Rwanda. This book will be of much interest to students of gender studies, genocide studies, African politics and critical security studies.

This book explores how the experience of war and related atrocities tend to be visually expressed and how such articulations and representations are circulated and consumed. Each chapter of this volume examines how an image can contribute to a richer understanding of the experience of war and atrocity and thus they contribute to the burgeoning field of the "criminology of war". Topics include the destruction of war in oppositional cultural forms - comparing the Nazi period with the ISIS destruction of Palmyra - and the visual aesthetics of violence deployed by Jihadi terrorism. The contributors are a multi-disciplinary team drawn mainly from criminology but also sociology, international relations, gender studies, English and the visual arts. This book will advance this field in new directions with refreshing, original work.

Contents:
Preface Acknowledgements The Pacific Theatre, World War II Introduction Part I. Japanese Factories of Death 1. Manchuria 2. Ishii Shiro 3. The Beiyinhe Bacteria Factory 4. Phase 1. Building Ping Fan 5. Phase 2. Hell in Ping Fan 6. The Secret of Secrets: Human Experiments 7. The Death Factory in Changchun 8. The Death Factory in Nanking 9. Experiments on prisoners of War 10. Who Knew? Part II. American Cover-Up The American Biological Warfare Program 12. Discovery of the Secret of Secrets 13. Investigations 14. Scientists and the Cover-Up 15. The Military and the Cover-Up 16. Epilogue Notes Select Bibliography Index

This collection adopts an interdisciplinary approach in order to understand the various factors at work in genocidal processes and their aftermath. The strong emphasis on legal norms, legal concepts and legal measures in other studies fails to consider further significant issues in relation to genocide. This book aims to redress this balance exploring social dynamics and human behaviour as well as the interplay of various psychological, political, sociological, anthropological and historical factors at work in genocidal processes.With contributions from top international scholars, this volume provides an integrated perspective on risk and resilience, acknowledging the importance of mitigating factors in understanding and preventing genocide. It explores a range of issues including the conceptual definition of genocide, the notion of intent, preventive measures, transitional justice, the importance of property, the role of memory, self or national interest and principles of social existence.Genocide, Risk and Resilience aims to cross conceptual, disciplinary and temporal boundaries and in doing so, provides rich insights for scholars from across political science, history, law, philosophy, anthropology and theology.

From events at Nuremberg and Tokyo after World War II, to the recent trials of Slobodan Milosević and Saddam Hussein, war crimes trials are an increasingly pervasive feature of the aftermath of conflict. In his new book, Law, War and Crime, Gerry Simpson explores the meaning and effect of such trials, and places them in their broader political and cultural contexts. The book traces the development of the war crimes field from its origins in the outlawing of piracy to its contemporary manifestation in the establishment of the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

Simpson argues that the field of war crimes is constituted by a number of tensions between, for example, politics and law; local justice and cosmopolitan reckoning; collective guilt and individual responsibility; and between the instinct that war, at worst, is an error, and the conviction that war is a crime.

Written in the wake of an extraordinary period in the life of the law, the book asks a number of critical questions. What does it mean to talk about war in the language of the criminal law? What are the consequences of seeking to criminalise the conduct of one's enemies? How did this relatively new phenomenon of putting on trial perpetrators of mass atrocity and defeated enemies come into existence? This book seeks to answer these important questions whilst shedding new light on the complex relationship between law, war and crime.

The 1971 genocide in Bangladesh took place as a result of the region's long history of colonization, the 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent into largely Muslim Pakistan and Hindu India, and the continuation of ethnic and religious politics in Pakistan, specifically the political suppression of the Bengali people of East Pakistan. The violence endured by women during the 1971 genocide is repeated in the writing of national history. The secondary position that women occupy within nationalism is mirrored in the nationalist narratives of history. This book engages with the existing feminist scholarship on gender, nationalism and genocide to investigate the dominant representations of gender in the 1971 genocide in Bangladesh and juxtaposes the testimonies of survivors and national memory of that war to create a shift of perspective that demands a breaking of silence. The author explores and challenges how gender has operated in service of Bangladeshi nationalist ideology, in particular as it is represented at the Liberation War Museum. The archive of this museum in Bangladesh is viewed as a site of institutionalized dialogue between the 1971 genocide and the national memory of that event. An examination of the archive serves as an opening point into the ideologies that have sanctioned a particular authoring of history, which is written from a patriarchal perspective and insists on restricting women's trauma to the time of war. To question the archive is to question the authority and power that is inscribed in the archive itself and that is the function performed by testimonies in this book. Testimonies are offered from five unique vantage points - rape survivor, war baby, freedom fighter, religious and ethnic minorities - to question the appropriation and omission of women's stories. Furthermore, the emphasis on the multiplicity of women's experiences in war seeks to highlight the counter-narrative that is created by acknowledging the differences in women's experiences in war instead of transcending those differences. An innovative and nuanced approach to the subject of treatment and objectification of women in conflict and post conflict and how the continuing effects entrench ideas of gender roles and identity, this book will be of interest to academics in the fields of South Asian History and Politics, Gender and genocide, Women and War, Nationalism and Diaspora and Transnational Studies.

This book examines Australia's and the United States' ability to prosecute their peacekeepers for sexual exploitation and abuse. The United Nations has too long been plagued by sexual exploitation and abuse in some of the world's most vulnerable communities. Discussion within United Nations' reporting and academic scholarship focuses on policy; however, a significant concern outlined here is that peacekeepers are committing sexual offences with impunity, despite exclusive criminal jurisdiction over peacekeepers being granted to their sending states. In this original study O'Brien provides an in-depth, feminist analysis of US and Australian sexual offending law and jurisdiction over their military and military-civilian peacekeepers. Based on timely critical analysis, this book demonstrates the limitations states face in ensuring accountability for sexual exploitation and abuse by peacekeepers - a factor which directly contributes to ongoing commission of and impunity for such offences. Calling for a rights-based, transnational law response to these crimes, this engaging and thought-provoking work will appeal to international practitioners, governments, UN policy-makers, and scholars of international, military and criminal law.

In mid-1989, the Bulgarian communist regime seeking to prop up its legitimacy played the ethnonational card by expelling 360,000 Turks and Muslims across the Iron Curtain to neighboring Turkey. It was the single largest ethnic cleansing during the Cold War in Europe after the wrapping up of the postwar expulsions ('population transfers') of ethnic Germans from Central Europe in the latter half of the 1940s. Furthermore, this expulsion of Turks and Muslims from Bulgaria was the sole unilateral act of ethnic cleansing that breached the Iron Curtain. The 1989 ethnic cleansing was followed by an unprecedented return of almost half of the expellees, after the collapse of the Bulgarian communist regime. The return, which partially reversed the effects of this ethnic cleansing, was the first-ever of its kind in history. Despite the unprecedented character of this 1989 expulsion and the subsequent return, not a single research article, let alone a monograph, has been devoted to these momentous developments yet. However, the tragic events shape today's Bulgaria, while the persisting attempts to suppress the remembrance of the 1989 expulsion continue sharply dividing the country's inhabitants. Without remembering about this ethnic cleansing it is impossible to explain the fall of the communist system in Bulgaria and the origins of ethnic cleansing during the Yugoslav wars. Faltering Yugoslavia's future ethnic cleansers took a good note that neither Moscow nor Washington intervened in neighboring Bulgaria to stop the 1989 expulsion, which in light of international law was then still the legal instrument of 'population transfer.' The as yet unhealed wound of the 1989 ethnic cleansing negatively affects the Bulgaria's relations with Turkey and the European Union. It seems that the only way out of this debilitating conundrum is establishing a truth and reconciliation commission that at long last would ensure transitional justice for all Bulgarians irrespective of language, religion or ethnicity.

After a controversial war in which he was ousted and captured by United States forces, Saddam Hussein was arraigned before a war crimes tribunal. Slobodan Milosevic died midway through his contentious trial by an international war crimes tribunal at The Hague. Calls for intervention and war crimes trials for the massacres and rapes in Sudan's Darfur region have been loud and clear, and the United States remains fiercely opposed to the permanent International Criminal Court. Are war crimes trials impartial, apolitical forums? Has international justice for war crimes become an entrenched aspect of globalization? In "Global Justice," Moghalu examines the phenomenon of war crimes trials from an unusual, political perspective--that of an "anarchical" international society. He argues that, contrary to conventional wisdom, war crimes trials are neither motivated nor influenced solely by abstract notions of justice. Instead, war crimes trials are the product of the interplay of political forces that have led to an inevitable clash between globalization and sovereignty on the sensitive question of who should judge war criminals. From Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm to the Japanese Emperor Hirohito, from the trials of Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, and Charles Taylor to Belgium's attempts to enforce the contested doctrine of "universal jurisdiction," Moghalu renders a compelling tour de force of one of the most controversial subjects in world politics. He argues that, necessary though it was, international justice has run into a crisis of legitimacy. While international trials will remain a policy option, local or regional responses to mass atrocities will prove more durable.

In recent years there has been a tendency to intervene in the military, political and economic affairs of failed and failing states and those emerging from violent conflict. In many cases this has been accompanied by some form of international judicial intervention to address serious and widespread abuses of international humanitarian law and human rights in recognition of an explicit link between peace and justice.

A range of judicial and non-judicial approaches has been adopted in recognition of the fact that there is no one-size-fits-all model through which to seek accountability. This book considers the merits and drawbacks of these different responses and sets out an original framework for analysing transitional societies and transitional justice mechanisms.

Taking as its starting point the post-Second World War tribunals at Nuremburg and Tokyo, the book goes on to discuss the creation of ad hoc international tribunals in the 1990s, hybrid/mixed courts, the International Criminal Court, domestic trials, truth commissions and traditional justice mechanisms. With examples drawn from across the world, including the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Cambodia, Timor-Leste, Sierra Leone, Uganda and the DRC, it presents a compelling and comprehensive study of the key responses to war crimes.

Peace and Justice is a timely contribution in a world where an ever-increasing number of post-conflict societies are grappling with the complex issues of transitional justice. It will be a valuable resource for students, scholars, practitioners and policy-makers seeking to understand past violations of human rights and the most effective ways of addressing them.

For the past half century, the Indonesian military has depicted the 1965-66 killings, which resulted in the murder of approximately one million unarmed civilians, as the outcome of a spontaneous uprising. This formulation not only denied military agency behind the killings, it also denied that the killings could ever be understood as a centralised, nation-wide campaign. Using documents from the former Indonesian Intelligence Agency's archives in Banda Aceh this book shatters the Indonesian government's official propaganda account of the mass killings and proves the military's agency behind those events. This book tells the story of the 3,000 pages of top-secret documents that comprise the Indonesian genocide files. Drawing upon these orders and records, along with the previously unheard stories of 70 survivors, perpetrators, and other eyewitness of the genocide in Aceh province it reconstructs, for the first time, a detailed narrative of the killings using the military's own accounts of these events. This book makes the case that the 1965-66 killings can be understood as a case of genocide, as defined by the 1948 Genocide Convention. The first book to reconstruct a detailed narrative of the genocide using the army's own records of these events, it will be of interest to students and academics in the field of Southeast Asian Studies, History, Politics, the Cold War, Political Violence and Comparative Genocide.

This book offers a novel sociological examination of the historical trajectories of Burundi and Rwanda. It challenges both the Eurocentric assumptions which have underpinned many sociological theorisations of modernity, and the notion that the processes of modernisation move gradually, if precariously, towards more peaceable forms of cohabitation within and between societies. Addressing these themes at critical historical junctures - precolonial, colonial and postcolonial - the book argues that the recent experiences of extremely violent social conflict in Burundi and Rwanda cannot be seen as an 'object apart' from the concerns of sociologists, as it is commonly presented. Instead, these experiences are situated within a specific route to and through modernity, one 'entangled' with Western modernity. A contribution to an emerging global historical sociology, Entanglements of Modernity, Colonialism and Genocide will appeal to scholars of sociology and social theory with interests in postcolonialism, historical sociology, multiple modernities and genocide.

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.

There exists a dominant narrative that essentially defines the US' relationship with genocide through what the US has failed to do to stop or prevent genocide, rather than through how its actions have contributed to the commission of genocide. This narrative acts to conceal the true nature of the US' relationship with many of the governments that have committed genocide since the Holocaust, as well as the US' own actions. In response, this book challenges the dominant narrative through a comprehensive analysis of the US' relationship with genocide. The analysis is situated within the broader genocide studies literature, while emphasizing the role of state responsibility for the commission of genocide and the crime's ancillary acts. The book addresses how a culture of impunity contributes to the resiliency of the dominant narrative in the face of considerable evidence that challenges it. Bachman's narrative presents a far darker relationship between the US and genocide, one that has developed from the start of the Genocide Convention's negotiations and has extended all the way to present day, as can be seen in the relationships the US maintains with potentially genocidal regimes, from Saudi Arabia to Myanmar. This book will be of interest to scholars, postgraduates, and students of genocide studies, US foreign policy, and human rights. A secondary readership may be found in those who study international law and international relations.

One of the key mission objectives of the UN Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUC) was to disarm and repatriate foreign combatants in the eastern region of the country. To achieve this, MONUC adopted a "push and pull" strategy. This involved applying military pressure while at the same time offering opportunities for voluntary disarmament and repatriation for armed combatants of the elusive but deadly Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) - a predominantly Rwandan Hutu armed group in eastern DRC. As part of its "pull" strategy, MONUC embarked on one of the most sophisticated Information Operations (IO) campaigns in UN history with the core objective of convincing thousands of individual combatants and commanders of the FDLR to voluntarily disarm and join the UN's Demobilization, Disarmament, Repatriation, Resettlement and Reintegration programme (DDRRR). This book is derived from studies of the narratives, coordination and effectiveness of the UN's IO in support of DDRRR and how the UN has integrated IO as part of its Mission peace support operations. This book advances contemporary understanding of the relative importance of communication models and their interactions within conflict settings. It provides instruments with which conflict and communication analysts can compare predictions and rationalize Information impacts for future conflicts. About the author Dr. Jacob Udo-Udo Jacob teaches Communications & Media Studies at the American University of Nigeria. He earned his PhD in Communication Studies from the University of Leeds, United Kingdom

During the twentieth century, the Balkan Peninsula was affected by three major waves of genocides and ethnic cleansings, some of which are still being denied today. In Balkan Genocides Paul Mojzes provides a balanced and detailed account of these events, placing them in their proper historical context and debunking the common misrepresentations and misunderstandings of the genocides themselves. A native of Yugoslavia, Mojzes offers new insights into the Balkan genocides, including a look at the unique role of ethnoreligiosity in these horrific events and a characterization of the first and second Balkan wars as mutual genocides. Mojzes also looks to the region's future, discussing the ongoing trials at the International Criminal Tribunal in Yugoslavia and the prospects for dealing with the lingering issues between Balkan nations and different religions. Balkan Genocides attempts to end the vicious cycle of revenge which has fueled such horrors in the past century by analyzing the terrible events and how they came to pass.

This is R. J. Rummel's fourth book in a series devoted to genocide and government mass murder, or what he calls democide. He presents the primary results, in tables and figures, as well as a historical sketch of the major cases of democide, those in which one million or more people were killed by a regime. In Death by Government, Rummel does not aim to describe democide itself, but to determine its nature and scope in order to test the theory that democracies are inherently nonviolent.

Rummel discusses genocide in China, Nazi Germany, Japan, Cambodia, Turkey, Yugoslavia, Poland, the Soviet Union, and Pakistan. He also writes about areas of suspected genocide: North Korea, Mexico, and feudal Russia. His results clearly and decisively show that democracies commit less democide than other regimes. The underlying principle is that the less freedom people have, the greater the violence; the more freedom, the less the violence. Thus, as Rummel says, "The problem is power. The solution is democracy. The course of action is to foster freedom."

Death by Government is a compelling look at the horrors that occur in modern societies. It depicts how democide has been very much a part of human history. Among other examples, the book includes the massacre of Europeans during the Thirty Years' War, the relatively unknown genocide of the French Revolution, and the slaughtering of American Indians by colonists in the New World. This riveting account is an essential tool for historians, political scientists, and scholars interested in the study of genocide.

The NHS came into existence in an atmosphere of conflict centred on the strong ideological commitment of the Post-war Labour Government and the opposition of the Conservative Party of that time to the idea of a universally available and centrally planned medical care service. There was also opposition from some sections of the medical establishment who feared the loss of professional autonomy. Setting health policy in both an historical and modern context (post 1997) Carrier and Kendall weigh up the successes and failures of the National Health Service and examine the conflicts which have continued for over sixty years, in spite of efforts to solve financial problems in the NHS through increases in funding as well as structural and organisational change. After looking at recent responses to supposed failures of the NHS, they conclude that the NHS has successfully faced the challenges before it and is likely to continue to meet the changing health needs of the population. Financial stresses, concerns about the quality of care and demographic change, with consequent issues for the elderly and the chronically ill, continue to be urgent and politically contentious issues. This book is appropriate for a wide range of undergraduate and postgraduate students studying health policy and the NHS.

The Grandchildren is a collection of intimate, harrowing testimonies by grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Turkey's "forgotten Armenians" the orphans adopted and Islamized by Muslims after the Armenian genocide. Through them we learn of the tortuous routes by which they came to terms with the painful stories of their grandparents and their own identity. The postscript offers a historical overview of the silence about Islamized Armenians in most histories of the genocide. When Fethiye cetin first published her groundbreaking memoir in Turkey, My Grandmother, she spoke of her grandmother's hidden Armenian identity. The book sparked a conversation among Turks about the fate of the Ottoman Armenians in Anatolia in 1915. This resulted in an explosion of debate on Islamized Armenians and their legacy in contemporary Muslim families. The Grandchildren (translated from Turkish) is a follow-up to My Grandmother, and is an important contribution to understanding survival during atrocity. As witnesses to a dark chapter of history, the grandchildren of these survivors cast new light on the workings of memory in coming to terms with difficult pasts.

Throughout the 1990s, humanitarian interventionism sat at a crossroads, where ideas about rights and duties within and beyond borders collided with an international reality of civil conflict where the most basic human rights were violated in the most brutal manner. This growing awareness of humanitarian crises has been enabled by a more globalized media which increasingly shapes public perceptions of distant crises, public opinion, and political decision-making. Clarke examines the extent to which the public discourse, and particular concepts, including those of an ethical and legal nature, influenced British newspaper coverage of the 1994 crisis in Rwanda, and, in turn, the extent to which that coverage influenced the British Parliament's response to the crisis. Through his development and application of a broader methodological approach that combines both quantitative and qualitative analyses, the book offers a fuller understanding of the relationship between media coverage, parliamentary debate, and policy formulation, and the central role that the globalized media plays in this process. Integrating ethics, law and empirical analysis of the media to obtain a more cohesive understanding of the chemistry of the media-public policy nexus, this work will be of interest to graduates and scholars in a range of areas, including Genocide Studies, the Responsibility to Protect, the Media & Politics and International Relations.

At the heart of the field of Genocide Studies lies an active core of vigorous debate that has led to both heated disagreements and productive disputes. This new volume in the Genocide: A Critical Bibliographic Review series focuses on these, as well as other significant issues. Chapters in this volume focus on a number of issues: Did Peru's Ache suffer genocide? What was the role of media propaganda in the Rwandan Genocide, and what more, if anything, could have been done about it? Have Rwanda's post-genocide gacaca courts successfully promoted reconciliation? How has denial affected governmental recognition around the world of the Armenian, Hellenic, and Assyrian genocides? Why have some left-wing "progressives" engaged in denial of the Rwandan Genocide? Has anti-genocide activism had a meaningful effect in prevention of or intervention against genocide? In the pages of this book, readers can explore the various debates that have defined the study of genocide and that are redefining it today. This insightful and provocative volume will entice further discussion on the concept of genocide and will be a must-read for the field of genocide studies.

Winner, "Publishers Weekly" Best Books of 2002, Non-Fiction

"In badly constructed books, the reader doesn't care what happens on the next page. In well-constructed books, the reader can't wait to see what happens on the next page. This book is a rare, third kind: The reader dreads what will happen on the next page. Nevertheless, he feels compelled to read on. . . . McAllester takes the reader not only along the streets where atrocities have been committed but inside homes while they are happening. As is the case with many good reads, the power of such scenes comes from the order in which events are presented. First the author develops a character, then later in the book informs you about his fate. Or the author will describe how a family is brutalized, then describes, almost as an aside -- in the course of a succeeding chapter about his own adventures in war-torn Kosovo -- how he meets a traumatized eyewitness to the previous account. In this way, the reader becomes an observer not only of what was happening inside Kosovo during the NATO bombardment but of what was happening to McAllester himself and how he managed to assemble his book."
--"Washington Post"

"The power of McAllester's extraordinary book lies not in its comprehensiveness or its literary polish-though there are many brilliantly moving and perceptive passages-but in its shocking authenticity and deep moral concern. One gets the sense that he risked his life not simply to pursue a story, timely and important as it was, but because of the enormity of the evil being done and his conviction that, in a world of bland policy abstractions, what happened in those days inside Kosovo had to be told."
--"New Leader"

"McAllester powerfully concludes that a sickening mixture of greed, ethnic hostility, and wartime nihilism has displaced the healing power for love and reconciliation for the forseeable future. One of the most thoughtful accounts of the conflict in Kosovo to date conveyed with taut journalistic clarity that should ensure the book a broad range of readers."
--"Kirkus, Starred Review"

"This account is not of the avirtual wara that Westerners saw on their television screens but of the real effects on people who consider the ravaged area home."
--"Library Journal, Starred Review"

"McAllester's spare, understated prose is potent as is his exploration of the human side of geopolitics and war."
--"Publishers Weekly, Starred Review"

"In a twist that took McAllester as much by surprise as it will the reader, it appears that Isa Bala lived in that ill-defined world too, a world where people make deals and concessions just to survive another day. Perhaps he believed that through such compromises, his family would be safe. if so, he was tragically wrong."
--"Sunday Telegraph (London)"

"Beyond the Mountains of the Damned is a gripping, if depressing, account of what McAllester found among the ruins. . . . There is no bravado. . . . He offers vivid thumbnail sketches of Kosovar warriors in the field."
-- "Newsday"

"McAllester offers us the kind of specific detail that we need to make other people's lives human to us. Even more importantly, he tells us how it is to be the oppressor, or at least one of the minions of the oppressors"
--"American Book Review"

For every survivor of a crime, there is a criminal who forces his way into the victim's thoughts longafter the act has been committed.

Reporters weren't allowed into Kosovo during the war without the permission of the Yugoslavian government but Matthew McAllester went anyway. In Beyond the Mountains of the Damned he tells the story of Pec, Kosovo's most destroyed city and the site of the earliest and worst atrocities of the war, through the lives of two menone Serb and one Kosovar. They had known each other, and been neighbors for years before one visited tragedy on the other. With a journalist's eye for detail McAllester asks the great question of war: What kind of men could devastate an entire city, killing whole families, and feel no sense of guilt? The answer lies in the culture of gangsterism and ethnic hatred that began with the collapse of Yugoslavia.

In March of 1999, the world watched thousands of Albanian refugees pour out of Kosovo, carrying stories of the terror that drove them from their homes. To Isa Bala and his family, Albanian Muslims who stayed in Pec during the NATO bombardment, the war in Kosovo was not about cruise missiles and geopolitics. It was about tiptoeing between survival and death in the town that saw the fiercest destruction, the most thorough eviction of the Albanian population and killings whose brutality demands explanation. To Nebojsa Minic and other Serb militiamen who ruled with murder, the conflict was about the exercise of power. Today they are alive and well in the new Yugoslavia. So unconcerned are they over the prospect of ever being held accountable for their crimes that they were willing to sit down over coffee after the war and discuss in detail their brief, brutal reign.

This book provides a detailed analysis of one of the most prominent and widespread international phenomena to which criminal justice systems has been applied: the expression of revisionist views relating to mass atrocities and the outright denial of their existence. Denial poses challenges to more than one academic discipline: to historians, the gradual disappearance of the generation of eyewitnesses raises the question of how to keep alive the memory of the events, and the fact that negationism is often offered in the guise of historical 'revisionist scholarship' also means that there is need for the identification of parameters which can be applied to the office of the 'genuine' historian. Legal academics and practitioners as well as political scientists are faced with the difficulty of evaluating methods to deal with denial and must in this regard identify the limits of freedom of speech, but also the need to preserve the rights of victims. Beyond that, the question arises whether the law can ever be an effective option for dealing with revisionist statements and the revisionist movement. In this regard, Holocaust and Genocide Denial: A Contextual Perspective breaks new ground: exploring the background of revisionism, the specific methods devised by individual States to counter this phenomenon, and the rationale for their strategies. Bringing together authors whose expertise relates to the history of the Holocaust, genocide studies, international criminal law and social anthropology, the book offers insights into the history of revisionism and its varying contexts, but also provides a thought-provoking engagement with the challenging questions attached to its treatment in law and politics.