During the 20th century tens of millions of people were annihilated by genocidal regimes. As we enter the 21st century, we must look back and attempt to comprehend what has been aptly termed the "century of genocide." It is only through such understanding that we can begin to imagine ways of preventing or minimizing future atrocities. "

Genocide: An Anthropological Reader" lays the foundation for a ground-breaking "anthropology of genocide" by gathering together for the first time the seminal texts for learning about and understanding this phenomenon. While scholars in other fields have conducted excellent analyses of the macrolevel factors facilitating genocide, few have been able to approach genocide from the local perspective. By filling this important niche-pulling together key anthropological and interdisciplinary sources on genocide - "Genocide: An Anthropological Reader" stands both to make an important contribution to our understanding of genocide and to serve as a valuable resource for readers across a wide variety of fields.

A Hundred Days of Carnage, Twenty-Five Years of Rebirth In the space of a hundred days, a million Tutsi in Rwanda were slaughtered by their Hutu neighbors. At the height of the genocide, as men with bloody machetes ransacked her home, Denise Uwimana gave birth to her third son. With the unlikely help of Hutu Good Samaritans, she and her children survived. Her husband and other family members were not as lucky. If this were only a memoir of those chilling days and the long, hard road to personal healing and freedom from her past, it would be remarkable enough. But Uwimana didn't stop there. Leaving a secure job in business, she devoted the rest of her life to restoring her country by empowering other genocide widows to band together, tell their stories, find healing, and rebuild their lives. The stories she has uncovered through her work and recounted here illustrate the complex and unfinished work of truth-telling, recovery, and reconciliation that may be Rwanda's lasting legacy. Rising above their nation's past, Rwanda's genocide survivors are teaching the world the secret to healing the wound of war and ethnic conflict. Includes 16 pages of color photographs.

As the world becomes ever more unequal, people become ever more 'disposable'. Today, governments systematically exclude sections of their populations from society through heavy-handed policing. But it doesn't always go to plan. William I. Robinson exposes the nature and dynamics of this out-of-control system, arguing for the urgency of creating a movement capable of overthrowing it. The global police state uses a variety of ingenious methods of control, including mass incarceration, police violence, US-led wars, the persecution of immigrants and refugees, and the repression of environmental activists. Movements have emerged to combat the increasing militarization, surveillance and social cleansing; however many of them appeal to a moral sense of social justice rather than addressing its root - global capitalism. Using shocking data which reveals how far capitalism has become a system of repression, Robinson argues that the emerging megacities of the world are becoming the battlegrounds where the excluded and the oppressed face off against the global police state.

Although Rwanda is among the most Christian countries in Africa, in the 1994 genocide, church buildings became the primary killing grounds. To explain why so many Christians participated in the violence, this book looks at the history of Christian engagement in Rwanda and then turns to a rich body of original national and local-level research to argue that Rwanda s churches have consistently allied themselves with the state and played ethnic politics. Comparing two local Presbyterian parishes in Kibuye prior to the genocide demonstrates that progressive forces were seeking to democratize the churches. Just as Hutu politicians used the genocide of Tutsi to assert political power and crush democratic reform, church leaders supported the genocide to secure their own power. The fact that Christianity inspired some Rwandans to oppose the genocide demonstrates that opposition by the churches was possible and might have hindered the violence.

Bosnia Remade is an authoritative account of ethnic cleansing and its partial undoing in the Bosnian wars from 1990 to the present. The two authors, both political geographers, combine a bird's-eye view of the entire war from onset to aftermath with a micro-level account of three towns that underwent ethnic cleansing and-later-the return of refugees. Through the lens of critical geopolitics, which highlights the power of both geopolitical discourse and spatial strategies, Toal and Dahlman focus on the two attempts to remake the ethnic structure of Bosnia since 1991. The first attempt was by ascendant ethnonationalist forces that tried to eradicate the mixed ethnic structures of Bosnia's towns, villages and communities. While these forces destroyed tens of thousands of homes and lives, they failed to destroy Bosnia-Herzegovina as a polity. The second attempt followed the war. The international community, in league with Bosnian officials, tried to undo the demographic consequences of ethnic cleansing. This latter effort has moved in fits and starts, but as the authors show, it has re-made Bosnia, producing a country that has moved beyond the stark segregationist geography created by ethnic cleansing. By showing how ethnic cleansing can be reversed, Toal and Dahlman offer more than just a comprehensive narrative of Europe's worst political crisis in the past two decades. They also offer lessons for addressing an enduring global problem.

During the Battle of the Bulge, Waffen SS soldiers shot 84 American prisoners near the Belgian town of Malmedy-the deadliest mass execution of U.S. soldiers during World War II. The bloody deeds of December 17, 1944, produced the most controversial war crimes trial in American history. Drawing on newly declassified documents, Steven Remy revisits the massacre-and the decade-long controversy that followed-to set the record straight. After the war, the U.S. Army tracked down 74 of the SS men involved in the massacre and other atrocities and put them on trial at Dachau. All the defendants were convicted and sentenced to death or life imprisonment. Over the following decade, however, a network of Germans and sympathetic Americans succeeded in discrediting the trial. They claimed that interrogators-some of them Jewish emigres-had coerced false confessions and that heat of battle conditions, rather than superiors' orders, had led to the shooting. They insisted that vengeance, not justice, was the prosecution's true objective. The controversy generated by these accusations, leveled just as the United States was anxious to placate its West German ally, resulted in the release of all the convicted men by 1957. The Malmedy Massacre shows that the torture accusations were untrue, and the massacre was no accident but was typical of the Waffen SS's brutal fighting style. Remy reveals in unprecedented depth how German and American amnesty advocates warped our understanding of one of the war's most infamous crimes through a systematic campaign of fabrications and distortions.

This innovative study of memorial architecture investigates how design can translate memories of human loss into tangible structures, creating spaces for remembering. Using approaches from history, psychology, anthropology and sociology, Sabina Tanovic explores purposes behind creating contemporary memorials in a given location, their translation into architectural concepts, their materialisation in the face of social and political challenges, and their influence on the transmission of memory. Covering the period from the First World War to the present, she looks at memorials such as the Holocaust museums in Mechelen and Drancy, as well as memorials for the victims of terrorist attacks, to unravel the private and public role of memorial architecture and the possibilities of architecture as a form of agency in remembering and dealing with a difficult past. The result is a distinctive contribution to the literature on history and memory, and on architecture as a link to the past.

Keenie Meenie Services - the most powerful mercenary company you've never heard of - was involved in war crimes around the world from Sri Lanka to Nicaragua for which its shadowy directors have never been held accountable. Like its mysterious name, Keenie Meenie Services escaped definition and to this day has evaded sanctions. Now explosive new evidence - only recently declassified - exposes the extent of these war crimes, and the British government's tacit support for the company's operations. Including testimonies from SAS veterans, spy chiefs and diplomats, we hear from key figures battle-hardened by the Troubles in Northern Ireland and the Iranian Embassy siege. Investigative journalist Phil Miller asks, who were these mercenaries: heroes, terrorists, freedom fighters or war criminals? This book presents the first ever comprehensive case against Keenie Meenie Services, providing long overdue evidence on the crimes of the people who make a killing from killing.

The war in Kosovo has been a defining moment in post-Cold War Europe. Kosovo has great importance beyond the Balkans as the most ambitious attempt of the international community to prevent internal conflicts and rebuild a society destroyed by war and ethnic cleansing. As the danger of ethnic conflict prevails in the region and elsewhere around the world, the experience of Kosovo offers important lessons. This is a comprehensive survey of developments in Kosovo leading up to, during and after the war in 1999, providing additionally the international and regional framework to the conflict. It examines the underlying causes of the war, the attempts by the international community to intervene, and the war itself in spring 1999. It critically examines the international administration in Kosovo since June 1999 and contextualizes it within the relations of Kosovo to its neighbours and as part of the larger European strategy in Southeastern Europe with the stability pact. It does not seek to promote one interpretation of the conflict and its aftermath, but brings together a range of intellectual arguments from some sixteen researchers from the Balkans, the rest of Europe and North America.

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction.

In April 1994, the Rwandan government called upon everyone in the Hutu majority to kill each member of the Tutsi minority, and over the next three months 800,000 Tutsis perished in the most unambiguous case of genocide since Hitler's war against the Jews. Philip Gourevitch's haunting work is an anatomy of the war in Rwanda, a vivid history of the tragedy's background, and an unforgettable account of its aftermath. One of the most acclaimed books of the year, this account will endure as a chilling document of our time.

Shortly after the Nazi government fell, a philosophy professor at Heidelberg University lectured on a subject that burned the consciousness and conscience of thinking Germans. aAre the German people guilty?a These lectures by Karl Jaspers, an outstanding European philosopher, attracted wide attention among German intellectuals and students; they seemed to offer a path to sanity and morality in a disordered world. Jaspers, a life-long liberal, attempted in this book to discuss rationally a problem that had thus far evoked only heat and fury. Neither an evasive apology nor a wholesome condemnation, his book distinguished between types of guilt and degrees of responsibility. He listed four categories of guilt: criminal guilt (the commitment of overt acts), political guilt (the degree of political acquiescence in the Nazi regime), moral guilt (a matter of private judgment among oneas friends), and metaphysical guilt (a universally shared responsibility of those who chose to remain alive rather than die in protest against Nazi atrocities). Karl Jaspers (1883a1969) took his degree in medicine but soon became interested in psychiatry. He is the author of a standard work of psychopathology, as well as special studies on Strindberg, Van Gogh and Nietsche. After World War I he became Professor of Philosophy at Heidelberg, where he achieved fame as a brilliant teacher and an early exponent of existentialism. He was among the first to acquaint German readers with the works of Kierkegaard. Jaspers had to resign from his post in 1935. From the total isolation into which the Hitler regime forced him, Jaspers returned in 1945 to a position of central intellectual leadership of the younger liberalelements of Germany. In his first lecture in 1945, he forcefully reminded his audience of the fate of the German Jews. Jaspersas unblemished record as an anti-Nazi, as well as his sentient mind, have made him a rallying point center for those of his compatriots who wish to reconstruct a free and democratic Germany.

The first English-language biography of the de facto ruler of the late Ottoman Empire and architect of the Armenian Genocide Talaat Pasha (1874-1921) led the Young Turks' single-party regime in the Ottoman Empire during World War I and is arguably a founding father of modern Turkey. He was also the architect of the Armenian Genocide, which set the stage for a century that would witness political terror and ethnic cleansing on a scale never imagined. Here is the first biography in English of the revolutionary figure who not only prepared the way for Ataturk and the founding of the republic in 1923, but who shaped the modern world as well. In this explosive book, Hans-Lukas Kieser provides a mesmerizing portrait of the shrewd and merciless politician who maintained power through a potent blend of Islamic-Turkish nationalism and a readiness to employ violent "solutions."

Wolfe Frank was Chief Interpreter at the Nuremberg Trials where he was dubbed 'The Voice of Doom'. A playboy turned resistance worker he had fled Germany for England in 1937 having been branded an 'enemy of the state - to be shot on sight'. Initially interned as an 'enemy alien', he was later released and allowed to join the British Army - where he rose to the rank of Captain. Unable to speak English when he arrived by the time of the trials he was considered to be the finest interpreter in the world. In the months following his service at Nuremberg, Frank became increasingly alarmed at the misinformation coming out of Germany so in 1949, backed by the New York Herald Tribune, he risked his life again by returning to the country of his birth to make an 'undercover' survey of the main facets of post-war German life and viewpoints. During his enterprise he worked as a German alongside Germans in factories, on the docks, in a refugee camp and elsewhere. Equipped with false papers he sought objective answers to many questions including: refugees; anti-Semiticism; morality, de-Nazification; religion; nationalism. The NYHT said at the time: 'A fresh appraisal of the German question could only be obtained by a German and Mr Frank had all the exceptional qualifications necessary. We believe the result of his "undercover" work told in human, factual terms, is an important contribution to one of the great key problems of the post-war world ... and incidentally it contains some unexpected revelations and dramatic surprises'. The greatest of those surprises was Frank single handedly tracking down and arresting the SS General ranked 'fourth' on the allies 'most wanted' list - and personally taking and transcribing the Nazi's confession. The Undercover Nazi Hunter not only reproduces Frank's series of articles (as he wrote them) and a translation of the confession, which, until now, has never been seen in the public domain, it also reveals the fascinating behind-the-scenes story of a great American newspaper agonizing over how best to deal with this unique opportunity and these important exposes.

Beginning in late 1945, the United States, Britain, China, Australia, France, the Netherlands, and later the Philippines, the Soviet Union, and the People's Republic of China convened national courts to prosecute Japanese military personnel for war crimes. The defendants included ethnic Koreans and Taiwanese who had served with the armed forces as Japanese subjects. In Tokyo, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East tried Japanese leaders. While the fairness of these trials has been a focus for decades, Japanese War Criminals instead argues that the most important issues arose outside the courtroom. What was the legal basis for identifying and detaining subjects, determining who should be prosecuted, collecting evidence, and granting clemency after conviction? The answers to these questions helped set the norms for transitional justice in the postwar era and today contribute to strategies for addressing problematic areas of international law. Examining the complex moral, ethical, legal, and political issues surrounding the Allied prosecution project, from the first investigations during the war to the final release of prisoners in 1958, Japanese War Criminals shows how a simple effort to punish the guilty evolved into a multidimensional struggle that muddied the assignment of criminal responsibility for war crimes. Over time, indignation in Japan over Allied military actions, particularly the deployment of the atomic bombs, eclipsed anger over Japanese atrocities, and, among the Western powers, new Cold War imperatives took hold. This book makes a unique contribution to our understanding of the construction of the postwar international order in Asia and to our comprehension of the difficulties of implementing transitional justice.

Tanks roaring over farmlands, pregnant women tortured, 30,000 individuals "disappeared"--these were the horrors of Argentina's Dirty War. A New York Times Notable Book of the Year and Finalist for the L.L. Winship / PEN New England Award in 1998, A Lexicon of Terror is a sensitive and unflinching account of the sadism, paranoia, and deception the military junta unleashed on the Argentine people from 1976 to 1983. This updated edition features a new epilogue that chronicles major political, legal, and social developments in Argentina since the book's initial publication. It also continues the stories of the individuals involved in the Dirty War, including the torturers, kidnappers and murderers formerly granted immunity under now dissolved amnesty laws. Additionally, Feitlowitz discusses investigations launched in the intervening years that have indicated that the network of torture centers, concentration camps, and other operations responsible for the "desaparecidas" was more widespread than previously thought. A Lexicon of Terror vividly evokes this shocking era and tells of the long-lasting effects it has left on the Argentine culture.

In The Experiential Ontology of Hannah Arendt, Kim Maslin examines Hannah Arendt's political philosophy through a Heideggerian framework. Maslin argues that not only did Arendt grew beyond the role of naive and beguiled student, but she became one of Heidegger's most astute critics. Well acquainted with and deeply respectful of his contributions to existential philosophy, Arendt viewed Heidegger's work as both profoundly insightful and extraordinarily myopic. Not contented to simply offer a critique of her mentor's work, Arendt engaged in a lifelong struggle to come to terms with the collective implications of fundamental ontology. Maslin argues that Arendt shifted to political philosophy less to escape her own disappointment at Heidegger's personal betrayal, but rather as an attempt to right the collective flaws of fundamental ontology. Her project offers a politically responsive, hence responsible, modification of Heidegger's fundamental ontology. She suggests that Heidegger's allegedly descriptive and non-normative insight into the nature of being is necessarily incomplete, and potentially irresponsible, unless it is undertaken in a manner which is mindful of the collective implications. As such, Maslin shows how Arendt attempts to construct an experiential ontology that transforms Heidegger's fundamental ontology for use in the public sphere.

On 26 April 1937, a weekly market day, nearly sixty bombers and fighters attacked Gernika. They dropped between 31 and 46 tons of explosive and incendiary bombs on the city center. The desolation was absolute: 85 percent of the buildings in the town were totally destroyed; over 2,000 people died in an urban area of less than one square kilometer. Lying is inherent to crime. The bombing of Gernika is associated to one of the most outstanding lies of twentieth-century history. Just hours after the destruction of the Basque town, General Franco ordered to attribute authorship of the atrocity to the Reds and that remained the official truth until his death in 1975. Today no one denies that Gernika was bombed. However, the initial regime denial gave way to reductionism, namely, the attempt to minimize the scope of what took place, calling into question that it was an episode of terror bombing, questioning Francos and his generals responsibility, diminishing the magnitude of the means employed to destroy Gernika and lessening the death toll. Even today, in the view of several authors the tragedy of Gernika is little less than an overstated myth broadcasted by Picasso. This vision of the facts feeds on the dense network of falsehoods woven for forty years of dictatorship and the one only truth of El Caudillo. Xabier Irujo exposes this labyrinth of falsehoods and leads us through a genealogy of lies to their origin, metamorphosis and current expressions. Gernika was a key event of contemporary European history; its alternative facts historiography an exemplar for commentators and historians faced with disentangling contested viewpoints on current military and political conflicts, and too often war crimes and genocide that result. Published in association with the Canada Blanch Centre for Contemporary Spanish Studies

This fully revised edition of Martin Shaw s classic, award-winning text proposes a way through the intellectual confusion surrounding genocide. In a thorough account of the idea s history, Shaw considers its origins and development and its relationships to concepts like ethnic cleansing and politicide. Offering a radical critique of the existing literature on genocide, he argues that what distinguishes genocide from more legitimate warfare is that the enemies targeted are groups and individuals of a civilian character. He vividly illustrates his argument with a wide range of historical examples - from the Holocaust to Rwanda and Palestine to Yugoslavia - and shows how the question What is genocide? matters politically whenever populations are threatened by violence. The second edition of this compelling book will continue to spark interest and vigorous debate, appealing to students and scholars across the social sciences and in international law.

Since the 1980s, transitional justice mechanisms have been increasingly applied to account for mass atrocities and grave human rights violations throughout the world. Over time, post-conflict justice practices have expanded across continents and state borders and have fueled the creation of new ideas that go beyond traditional notions of amnesty, retribution, and reconciliation. Gathering work from contributors in international law, political science, sociology, and history, New Critical Spaces in Transitional Justice addresses issues of space and time in transitional justice studies. It explains new trends in responses to post-conflict and post-authoritarian nations and offers original empirical research to help define the field for the future.

Despite considerable progress in research and practice in the constructive transformation of intractable conflicts beginning in the 1970s, many terribly destructive conflicts have recently erupted. New circumstances have emerged that have resulted in regressions. The contributions in this book examine many of the new challenges and obstacles to the transformation of intractable conflicts. It also offers an array of new and promising opportunities for constructive transformations. The book brings together analyses of U.S.-based conflicts with those from many regions of the world. International, intra-state, and local conflicts are explored, along with those that have been violent and non-violent. The diversity in disciplines among the authors provides a wide range of theoretical approaches to explaining how a variety of intractable conflicts can be transformed. Case studies of local, national, and transnational conflicts serve to illustrate this new landscape. These analyses are complemented by conceptual discussions relating to new conflict systems, actors, dynamics and strategies. Policy implications of findings are also presented.

In Drunk on Genocide, Edward B. Westermann reveals how, over the course of the Third Reich, scenes involving alcohol consumption and revelry among the SS and police became a routine part of rituals of humiliation in the camps, ghettos, and killing fields of Eastern Europe. Westermann draws on a vast range of newly unearthed material to explore how alcohol consumption served as a literal and metaphorical lubricant for mass murder. It facilitated "performative masculinity," expressly linked to physical or sexual violence. Such inebriated exhibitions extended from meetings of top Nazi officials to the rank and file, celebrating at the grave sites of their victims. Westermann argues that, contrary to the common misconception of the SS and police as stone-cold killers, they were, in fact, intoxicated with the act of murder itself. Drunk on Genocide highlights the intersections of masculinity, drinking ritual, sexual violence, and mass murder to expose the role of alcohol and celebratory ritual in the Nazi genocide of European Jews. Its surprising and disturbing findings offer a new perspective on the mindset, motivation, and mentality of killers as they prepared for, and participated in, mass extermination. Published in Association with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The shocking, true story of a soldier gone rogue, and the court martial case that divided America. This is the full story of Eddie Gallagher, a US recruit who was inspired to serve his nation, who became addicted to combat, and whose need to prove himself among his fellow soldiers pushed him to extremes. His actions during a combat deployment to Mosul would divide his platoon, then the SEALs, the Navy, the armed forces, the government, and even the American public, when the President intervened in his trial. Alpha is an examination of how culture within the military has evolved since 9/11. In an endless war without major victories, the media has instead celebrated achievements of SEAL missions - such as the killing of Osama Bin Laden, the rescuing of Captain Phillips, and the survival of Marcus Luttrell. But the SEALs' popularity blinded the public to what was also happening within the armed forces. When Gallagher was accused of killing an unarmed enemy combatant, it created a scandal that reached the White House and millions around the world.

For over 100 years, at least one concentration camp has existed somewhere on Earth. First used as battlefield strategy, camps have evolved with each passing decade, in the scope of their effects and the savage practicality with which governments have employed them. Even in the twenty-first century, as we continue to reckon with the magnitude and horror of the Holocaust, history tells us we have broken our own solemn promise of "never again." In this harrowing work based on archival records and interviews during travel to four continents, Andrea Pitzer reveals for the first time the chronological and geopolitical history of concentration camps. Beginning with 1890s Cuba, she pinpoints concentration camps around the world and across decades. From the Philippines and Southern Africa in the early twentieth century to the Soviet Gulag and detention camps in China and North Korea during the Cold War, camp systems have been used as tools for civilian relocation and political repression. Often justified as a measure to protect a nation, or even the interned groups themselves, camps have instead served as brutal and dehumanizing sites that have claimed the lives of millions. Drawing from exclusive testimony, landmark historical scholarship, and stunning research, Andrea Pitzer unearths the roots of this appalling phenomenon, exploring and exposing the staggering toll of the camps: our greatest atrocities, the extraordinary survivors, and even the intimate, quiet moments that have also been part of camp life during the past century.

Criminal punishment is increasingly seen as a necessary element of human rights protection. There is a growing conviction at the international level that those responsible for the most serious crimes should not go unpunished. Although there is a wealth of legal writing on international criminal law, an extensive analysis is still needed of the questions why and to what extent criminal prosecution is a necessary means of human rights protection at the domestic level. This book is the first to examine comprehensively the duty to prosecute serious human rights violations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the American and European Conventions on Human Rights, and customary international law. It does so by exploring the phenomena of impunity and amnesties. These issues are particularly relevant for post-conflict situations in which it is often argued that criminal punishment threatens peace and reconciliation. The question of how to deal with post-conflict justice under international human rights law is therefore a continuing theme throughout the book. Apart from post-conflict justice the text also considers the relevance of criminal measures in times of peace by exposing flaws in the criminal legislation and in the conduct of criminal procedure. With its survey of the relevant human rights instruments and jurisprudence, Prosecuting Serious Human Rights Violations is placed at the interface of international criminal law and international human rights. The book analyses the rapidly growing body of human rights case law, dealing with criminalization, prosecution and punishment of serious human rights violations. It identifies and critically examines the standards for the conduct of criminal proceedings developed by the European and Inter-American Courts of Human Rights and the UN Human Rights Committee, providing a unique reference tool for scholars and practitioners working in this area of law. It also describes the standards for criminal law under the Conventions Against Genocide, Torture, and Enforced Disappearances. As the analysis of pertinent case law reveals shortcomings in the current conceptualization of the prosecution of human rights violations, the author develops a solid theoretical framework for future jurisprudence. By evaluating the relationship between criminal law and the protection of human rights, the book elucidates not only the potential but also the limits of the role human rights law can play in the emerging concept of international criminal justice.

As a foreign correspondent, Scott Peterson witnessed firsthand Somali's descent into war and its battle against US troops, the spiritual degeneration of Sudan's Holy War, and one of the most horrific events of the last half century: the genocide in Rwanda. In Me Against My Brother, he brings these events together for the first time to record a collapse that has had an impact far beyond African borders. Filled with dust, sweat and powerful detail, this book graphically illustrates how preventive action and a better understanding of Africa - especially by the US - could have averted much suffering.