Genocide has scarred human societies since Antiquity. In the modern era, genocide has been a global phenomenon: from massacres in colonial America, Africa, and Australia to the Holocaust of European Jewry and mass death in Maoist China. In recent years, the discipline of 'genocide studies' has developed to offer analysis and comprehension.
The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies is the first book to subject both genocide and the young discipline it has spawned to systematic, in-depth investigation. Thirty-four renowned experts study genocide through the ages by taking regional, thematic, and disciplinary-specific approaches. Chapters examine secessionist and political genocides in modern Asia. Others treat the violent dynamics of European colonialism in Africa, the complex ethnic geography of the Great Lakes region, and the structural instability of the continent's northern horn. South and North America receive detailed coverage, as do the Ottoman Empire, Nazi-occupied Europe, and post-communist Eastern Europe. Sustained attention is paid to themes like gender, memory, the state, culture, ethnic cleansing, military intervention, the United Nations, and prosecutions.
The work is multi-disciplinary, featuring the work of historians, anthropologists, lawyers, political scientists, sociologists, and philosophers. Uniquely combining empirical reconstruction and conceptual analysis, this Handbook presents and analyses regions of genocide and the entire field of 'genocide studies' in one substantial volume.

It is twenty-five years since the 1994 genocide of the Tutsi of Rwanda when in the course of three terrible months more than 1 million people were murdered. In the intervening years a pernicious campaign has been waged by the perpetrators to deny this crime, with attempts to falsify history and blame the victims for their fate. Facts are reversed, fake news promulgated, and phoney science given credence. Intent to Deceive tells the story of this campaign of genocide denial from its origins with those who planned the massacres. With unprecedented access to government archives including in Rwanda Linda Melvern explains how, from the moment the killers seized the power of the state, they determined to distort reality of events. Disinformation was an integral part of their genocidal conspiracy. The genocidaires and their supporters continue to peddle falsehoods. These masters of deceit have found new and receptive audiences, have fooled gullible journalists and unwary academics. With their seemingly sound research methods, the Rwandan genocidaires continue to pose a threat, especially to those who might not be aware of the true nature of their crime. The book is a testament to the survivors who still live the horrors of the past. Denial causes them the gravest offence and ensures that the crime continues. This is a call for justice that remains perpetually delayed.

A Few Bad Men is the incredible true story of an elite team of U.S. Marines set up to take the fall for Afghanistan war crimes they did not commit-and their leader who fought for the redemption of his men. Ambushed in Afghanistan and betrayed by their own leaders-these elite Marines fought for their lives again, back home. A cross between A Few Good Men and American Sniper, this is the true story of an elite Marine special operations unit bombed by an IED and shot at during an Afghanistan ambush. The Marine Commandos were falsely accused of gunning down innocent Afghan civilians following the ambush. The unit's leader, Maj. Fred Galvin, was summarily relieved of duty and his unit was booted from the combat zone. They were condemned by everyone, from the Afghan president to American generals. When Fox Company returned to America, Galvin and his captain were the targets of the first Court of Inquiry in the Marines in fifty years. "Fred Galvin is the real deal. His dramatic retelling of his experience as commander of Fox Company reads like a thriller, full of twists and turns, filled with unassuming heroes and deceitful villains." - Rob Lorenz, Producer/Director, American Sniper, Flags of Our Fathers, Letters from Iwo Jima, Mystic River, The Marksman "Fred Galvin has written a real 'page turner' that demonstrates how politics permeates The Pentagon and posts abroad...I highly recommend this book." - J.D. Hayworth, U.S. House of Representatives (Arizona), TV/Radio Host "This book is a must-read for every American who wants to know why, after twenty long years in Afghanistan, we did not win." - Jessie Jane Duff, USMC, Analyst, CNN and FOX "A Few Bad Men is a must-read story of valor, betrayal, and keeping the Marines' honor clean." - Jed Babbin, USAF Judge Advocate, Deputy Under Secretary of Defense, Journalist, National Review, Washington Post "An incredible account and history of the fighting spirit of the 'Marine Raiders' under fire and the relentless fourteen-year campaign by their leader to clear their names." - Maj. Gen. Paul Vallely, U.S. Army (Ret.), Deputy Commander, U.S. Pacific Command

This collection analyses the approach taken by the current government of Ethiopia to deal with the massive human rights violations that took place from 1974 to 1991 under the Derg. How was an autocratic emperor replaced by a totalitarian dictator? An unexpected popular upsurge in February 1974 made the ancien regime of Emperor Haile Selassie buckle. The Derg, a group of army officers led by an obscure and ruthless major Mengistu Hailemariam, seized power by military coup in September 1974 and removed the Emperor. What was the 'red terror'? The callous executions of members of the old regime initiated a cult of violence. The Derg were united by the shedding of blood. Search and destroy campaigns against militants led on to the full-blown 'red terror' in which thousands of the regime's opponents were brutally murdered in the streets. In what way was 'transitional justice' administered? The main officials were found guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity by the Ethiopian Federal High Court and sentenced to life imprisonment. Some of the minor officialshad already been sentenced to death, whilst President Mugabe has given Mengistu Hailemariam sanctuary in Zimbabwe. KJETIL TRONVOLL is Professor in Human Rights, Peace and Conflict Studies at the Norwegian Centre for Human Rights, University of Oslo; CHARLES SCHAEFER is Associate Professor of African History, Valparaiso University; GIRMACHEW ALEMU ANEME is a Research Fellow at the Norwegian Centre for Human Rights, University of Oslo.

An Academy Award-nominated actor and a renowned human rights activist team up to change the tragic course of history in the Sudan -- with readers' help. While Don Cheadle was filming Hotel Rwanda, a new crisis had already erupted in Darfur, in nearby Sudan. In September 2004, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell termed the atrocities being committed there "genocide" -- and yet two years later things have only gotten worse. 3.5 million Sudanese are going hungry, 2.5 million have been displaced by violence, and 400,000 have died in Darfur to date. Both shocked and energized by this ongoing tragedy, Cheadle teamed up with leading activist John Prendergast to focus the world's attention. Not on Our Watch, their empowering book, offers six strategies readers themselves can implement: Raise Awareness, Raise Funds, Write a Letter, Call for Divestment, Start an Organization, and Lobby the Government. Each of these small actions can make a huge difference in the fate of a nation, and a people--not only in Darfur, but in other crisis zones such as Somalia, Congo, and northern Uganda.

ISIS's genocidal attack on the Yezidi population in northern Iraq in 2014 brought the world's attention to the small faith that numbers less than one million worldwide. That summer ISIS massacred Yezidi men and enslaved women and children. More than one hundred thousand Yezidis were besieged on Sinjar Mountain. The US began airstrikes to roll back ISIS, citing a duty to save the Yezidis, but the genocide is still ongoing. The headlines have moved on but thousands of Yezidi women and children remain in captivity, and many more are still displaced. Sinjar is now free from ISIS but the Yezidi homeland is at the centre of growing tensions amongst the city's liberators, making returning home for the Yezidis almost impossible. The mass abduction of Yezidi women and children is here conveyed with extraordinary intensity in the first-hand reporting of a young journalist who has been based in Iraqi Kurdistan for the past four years, covering the war with ISIS and its impact on the people of the country. Otten tells the story of the ISIS attacks, the mass enslavements of Yezidi women and the fallout from the disaster. She challenges common perceptions of Yezidi female victimhood by focusing on stories of resistance passed down by generations. Yezidi women describe how, in the recent conflict, they followed the tradition of their ancestors who, a century ago during persecutions at the fall of the Ottoman empire, put ash on their faces to make themselves unattractive and try to avoid being raped. Today, over 3,000 Yezidi women and girls remain in the Caliphate where they are bought and sold, and passed between fighters as chattel. But many others have escaped or been released. Otten bases her book on interviews with these survivors, as well as those who smuggled them to safety, painstakingly piecing together their accounts of enslavement. Their deeply moving personal narratives bring alive a human tragedy.

What do we know about war crimes and justice? What are the discursive practices through which the dominant images of war crimes, atrocity and justice are understood? In this wide ranging text, Michael J. Shapiro contrasts the justice-related imagery of the war crimes trial (for example the solitary, headphone-wearing defendant at the Hague listening with intent to a catalogue of charges) with ?literary justice?: representations in literature, film, and biographical testimony, raising questions about atrocities and justice that juridical proceedings exclude. By engaging with the ambiguities exposed by the artistic and experiential genres, reading them alongside policy and archival documentation and critical theoretical discourses, Shapiro?s War Crimes, Atrocity, and Justice challenges traditional notions of ?responsibility? in juridical settings. His comparative readings instead encourage a focus on the conditions of possibility for war crimes as they arise from the actions of states, non-state agencies and individuals involved in arms trading, peace keeping, sex trafficking, and law enforcement and adjudication. Theory springs to life as Shapiro draws on examples from legal discourse, literature, media, film, and television, to build a nuanced picture of politics and the problem of justice. It will be of great interest to students of film and media, literature, cultural studies, contemporary philosophy and political science

This book offers a rare and innovative consideration of an enduring tendency in postwar art to explore places devoid of human agents in the wake of violent encounters. To see the scenery together with the crime elicits a double interrogation, not merely of a physical site but also of its formation as an aesthetic artefact, and ultimately of our own acts of looking and imagining. Closely engaging with a vast array of works made by artists, filmmakers and photographers, each who has forged a distinct vantage point on the aftermath of crime and conflict, the study selectively maps the afterlife of landscape in search of the political and ethical agency of the image. By way of a thoroughly interdisciplinary approach, Crime Scenery in Postwar Film and Photography brings landscape studies into close dialogue with contemporary theory by paying sustained attention to how the gesture of retracing past events facilitates new configurations of the present and future.

The Armenian Genocide and the Nazi Holocaust are often thought to be separated by a large distance in time and space. But Stefan Ihrig shows that they were much more connected than previously thought. Bismarck and then Wilhelm II staked their foreign policy on close relations with a stable Ottoman Empire. To the extent that the Armenians were restless under Ottoman rule, they were a problem for Germany too. From the 1890s onward Germany became accustomed to excusing violence against Armenians, even accepting it as a foreign policy necessity. For many Germans, the Armenians represented an explicitly racial problem and despite the Armenians' Christianity, Germans portrayed them as the "Jews of the Orient." As Stefan Ihrig reveals in this first comprehensive study of the subject, many Germans before World War I sympathized with the Ottomans' longstanding repression of the Armenians and would go on to defend vigorously the Turks' wartime program of extermination. After the war, in what Ihrig terms the "great genocide debate," German nationalists first denied and then justified genocide in sweeping terms. The Nazis too came to see genocide as justifiable: in their version of history, the Armenian Genocide had made possible the astonishing rise of the New Turkey. Ihrig is careful to note that this connection does not imply the Armenian Genocide somehow caused the Holocaust, nor does it make Germans any less culpable. But no history of the twentieth century should ignore the deep, direct, and disturbing connections between these two crimes.

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

The Armistice of Mudros was signed on 30 October 1918 and on the morning of 13 November 1918, a mighty fleet of battleships from Britain, France, Italy and Greece sailed to Istanbul, and dropped anchor without encountering resistance. This day marked the beginning of the end of the Ottoman Empire, a dissolution that would bring great suffering and chaos, but also new opportunities for all Ottomans, Muslim and non-Muslim alike. Drawing upon a previously untouched collection of Armenian and Ottoman Turkish primary sources, Ari Sekeryan considers these understudied post-war years. Examining the Armenian community as they emerged from the aftermath of war and genocide, Sekeryan outlines their shifting political position and the strategies they used to survive this turbulent period. By focusing on the Ottoman Armistice (1918-1923), Sekeryan illuminates an oft-neglected period in history, and develops a new case study for understanding the political reactions of ethnic groups to the fall of empires and nation-states.

Crimes of the Holocaust The Law Confronts Hard Cases Stephan Landsman The problem of prosecuting individuals complicit in the Nazi regime's "Final Solution" is almost insurmountably complex and has produced ever less satisfying results as time has passed. In "Crimes of the Holocaust," Stephan Landsman provides detailed analysis of the International Military Tribunal prosecution at Nuremberg in 1945, the Eichmann trial in Israel in 1961, the 1986 Demanjuk trial in Israel, and the 1990 prosecution of Imre Finta in Canada. Landsman presents each case and elaborates the difficulties inherent in achieving both a fair trial and a measure of justice in the aftermath of heinous crimes. In the face of few historical and legal precedents for such war crime prosecutions, each legal action relies on the framework of its predecessors. However, this only compounds the problematic issues arising from the Nuremberg proceedings. Meticulously combing volumes of testimony and documentary information about each case, Landsman offers judicious and critical assessments of the proceedings. He levels pointed criticism at numerous elements of this relatively recent judicial invention, sparing neither judges nor counsel and remaining keenly aware of the human implications. Deftly weaving legal analysis with cultural context, Landsman offers the first rigorous examination of these problematic proceedings and proposes guideposts for contemporary tribunals. "Crimes of the Holocaust" is an authoritative account of the Gordian knot of genocide prosecution in the world courts, which will persist as a confounding issue as we are faced with a trial of Saddam Hussein. This volume will be compelling reading for legal scholars as well as laypersons interested in these cases and the issues they address. Stephan Landsman is Robert A. Clifford Professor of Tort Law and Social Policy at DePaul University. Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights 2005 320 pages 6 x 9 ISBN 978-0-8122-3847-1 Cloth $59.95s 39.00 ISBN 978-0-8122-0257-1 Ebook $59.95s 39.00 World Rights Law Short copy: Landsman discusses the difficulties inherent in prosecuting crimes against humanity, from the Eichmann trial to Milosevic.

Examinando ejemplos historicos de prisioneros mantenidos en prision indefinida durante los conflictos asimetricos y las crisis de seguridad nacional, Hickman desenreda lo presunto de lo aprobado y revela exactamente por que el encarcelamiento corriente en la base naval infame es tan unico y sin precedentes. Ofrece una teoria alternativa que completamente contradice la narrativa inventada por el Gobierno de Bush construyendo su argumento de la historia domestica e internacional existente: los prisioneros fueron exhibidos como simbolos de victoria militar, castigados como sustitutos por los arquitectos del 11 de septiembre que quedaban libres, y usados como peones en un paso neoconservador para senalar una nueva politica exterior estadounidense que no hacia caso de las Naciones Unidas, que no respetaba las Convenciones de Ginebra, y que se burlaba de la Corte Criminal Internacional.

"Justice at Nuremberg" traces the history of the Nuremberg Doctors' Trial held in 1946-47, through the eyes of the Austrian emigre psychiatrist Leo Alexander. His investigations helped the United States to prosecute twenty German doctors and three administrators for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The legacy of Nuremberg was profound. In the Nuremberg code - a landmark in the history of modern medical ethics - the judges laid down, for the first time, international guidelines for permissible experiments on humans. One of those who helped to formulate the code was Alexander. "Justice at Nuremberg" provides a detailed insight into the origins of human rights in medical science and into the changing role of international law, ethics and politics.

China's mistreatment of its Uyghur minority has drawn international condemnation and sanctions. The repression gripping Xinjiang is also hugely costly to China in Renminbi, personnel, and stifled economic productivity. Despite this, the Chinese Communist Party persists in its policies. Why? Drawing on extensive original data, Potter and Wang demonstrate insecurities about the stability of the regime and its claim to legitimacy motivate Chinese policies. These perceived threats to core interests drive the ferocity of the official response to Uyghur nationalism. The result is harsh repression, sophisticated media control, and selective international military cooperation. China's growing economic and military power means that the country's policies in Xinjiang and Central Asia have global implications. Zero Tolerance sheds light on this problem, informing policymakers, scholars, and students about an emerging global hotspot destined to play a central role in international politics in years to come.

China's mistreatment of its Uyghur minority has drawn international condemnation and sanctions. The repression gripping Xinjiang is also hugely costly to China in Renminbi, personnel, and stifled economic productivity. Despite this, the Chinese Communist Party persists in its policies. Why? Drawing on extensive original data, Potter and Wang demonstrate insecurities about the stability of the regime and its claim to legitimacy motivate Chinese policies. These perceived threats to core interests drive the ferocity of the official response to Uyghur nationalism. The result is harsh repression, sophisticated media control, and selective international military cooperation. China's growing economic and military power means that the country's policies in Xinjiang and Central Asia have global implications. Zero Tolerance sheds light on this problem, informing policymakers, scholars, and students about an emerging global hotspot destined to play a central role in international politics in years to come.

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.

Never before has such damning evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity been revealed in the midst of a conflict. As civil war raged in Syria, we owe the disclosure of this evidence to one man. He goes under the codename of Caesar. This military police photographer was required to document the murder and torture of thousands of Syrian civilians in the custody of the Assad regime. Over the course of two years he used a police computer to copy the photos, and in 2013 he risked his life to smuggle out 53,000 photos and documents that show prisoners tortured, starved and burned to death. In January 2015, in the American magazine Foreign Affairs, President Bashar al-Assad claimed that this military photographer didn't exist. "Who took the pictures? Who is he? Nobody knows. There is no verification of any of this evidence, so it's all allegations without evidence." Caesar exists. The author of this book has spent dozens of hours with him. His testimony is extraordinary, his photos shocking. The uncovering of the workings of the Syrian death machine that underpins his account is a descent into the unspeakable. In 2014 Caesar testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee and his testimony provided crucial evidence for a bipartisan bill, the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act, that was presented to Congress in 2016. Caesar's photos have also been shown in the United Nations Headquarters in New York and at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. For the first time, this book tells Caesar's story.

This book places the insurgent group Boko Haram, which has terrorised northeastern Nigeria through the last six years, in an historical and cultural context. It examines cultural changes in the lands south of Lake Chad through deep time, showing how these ancient processes can help us think about Boko Haram's activities in the present. The archaeological and documentary record for this area is unusually rich for sub-Saharan Africa, and allows us to understand Boko Haram within an historical narrative that stretches back directly five centuries, with cultural origins that stretch even deeper into the past. One important way to understand Boko Haram is as a frontier phenomenon, the most recent manifestation of processes of horrific violence, identity production and wealth creation that have been part of political relationships in this area of Central Africa through the last millennium. In striking ways, Boko Haram resembles the slave-raiders and warlords who figure in precolonial and colonial writings about the southern Lake Chad Basin. In modern times, these accounts are paralleled by the activities of smugglers, bandits (coupeurs de route, 'road cutters') and tax evaders, illegal actors who stand in complex relationships to the governments of modern African nation-states. The borderlands of these states are often places where the state refuses to exercise its full authority, because of the profits and opportunities that illegal and semi-legal activities afford, among others to state officials and bureaucrats. For local people, Boko Haram's actions are thus to a great extent understood in terms of slave-raids and borderlands. Those actions are not some mysterious, unprecedented eruption of violence and savagery: they can be understood within local contexts of politics and history. This book is written to counter exoticised portrayals of Boko Haram's activities, and of the region as a whole.

The 1994 Rwandan genocide against the Tutsi was the signature moral horror of the late 20th century. Andrew Wallis reveals, for the first time, the personal lives and crimes of the family group (`Akazu') that destroyed their country and left one million dead. Wallis' meticulous research uncovers a broad landscape of terror, looking back to the `forgotten' Rwandan genocide of the early 1960s and the failure by the international community, to learn lessons of prevention and punishment, a failure that would be repeated thirty years later. Taking the rise and fall of Akazu personalities and their mafia-like network as its central strand, Stepp'd in Blood reveals how they were aided and abetted by western governments and the churches for decades. And how post-1994, many successfully evaded international justice to enjoy comfortable retirements in the same countries that supported them when they were in power. Stepp'd in Blood publishes in the year of the 25th commemoration of the Rwandan Genocide.

Evil is sometimes thought to be incomprehensible and abnormal, falling outside of familiar historical and human processes. And yet the twentieth century was replete with instances of cruelty on a massive scale, including systematic torture, murder, and enslavement of ordinary, innocent human beings. These overwhelming atrocities included genocide, totalitarianism, the Holocaust, and the Holodomor. This Element underlines the importance of careful, truthful historical investigation of the complicated realities of dark periods in human history; the importance of understanding these events in terms that give attention to the human experience of the people who were subject to them and those who perpetrated them; the question of whether the idea of 'evil' helps us to confront these periods honestly; and the possibility of improving our civilization's resilience in the face of the impulses towards cruelty to other human beings that have so often emerged.

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.

From videos of rights violations, to satellite images of environmental degradation, to eyewitness accounts disseminated on social media, human rights practitioners have access to more data today than ever before. To say that mobile technologies, social media, and increased connectivity are having a significant impact on human rights practice would be an understatement. Modern technology - and the enhanced access it provides to information about abuse - has the potential to revolutionise human rights reporting and documentation, as well as the pursuit of legal accountability. However, these new methods for information gathering and dissemination have also created significant challenges for investigators and researchers. For example, videos and photographs depicting alleged human rights violations or war crimes are often captured on the mobile phones of victims or political sympathisers. The capture and dissemination of content often happens haphazardly, and for a variety of motivations, including raising awareness of the plight of those who have been most affected, or for advocacy purposes with the goal of mobilising international public opinion. For this content to be of use to investigators it must be discovered, verified, and authenticated. Discovery, verification, and authentication have, therefore, become critical skills for human rights organisations and human rights lawyers. This book is the first to cover the history, ethics, methods, and best-practice associated with open source research. It is intended to equip the next generation of lawyers, journalists, sociologists, data scientists, other human rights activists, and researchers with the cutting-edge skills needed to work in an increasingly digitized, and information-saturated environment.

How can we comprehend the socio-political processes that give rise to extreme violence, ethnic cleansing or genocide? A major breakthrough in comparative analysis, Purify and Destroy demonstrates that it is indeed possible to compare the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia-Hercegovina while respecting the specificities of each. Based on the essential distinction between massacre and genocide, Purify and Destroy identifies the main steps of a general process of destruction, rational and irrational, born of what Semelin terms 'delusional rationality', responding to fears, resentments and utopias, and re-modelling the social body by eliminating 'the enemy'. The main stages that can lead to a genocidal process, with ordinary people becoming perpetrators, are also identified.