For far too long the discipline of International Relations has failed to engage with the study of genocide. This is despite the fact that genocide holds a direct relationship with the central concepts of international relations: the state, war, power, and security. This bold, innovative and unique book sets out to tackle this by bringing the concept of genocide into the discipline of IR, via the English School, in order to theorise the relationship between genocide, justice, and order. Drawing on a wide-range of primary and secondary interdisciplinary material from International Relations, Genocide Studies, Security Studies, International Law, History, Politics and Political Theory, this book aims to understand genocide within the context of International Relations and the implications that this has on policymaking. Gallagher identifies the obstacles and challenges involved in bringing the study of genocide into IR and uniquely analyses the impact of genocide on the ordering structure of international society.
For far too long the discipline of International Relations has failed to engage with the study of genocide. This is despite the fact that genocide holds a direct relationship with the central concepts of international relations: the state, war, power, and security. This bold, innovative and unique book sets out to tackle this by bringing the concept of genocide into the discipline of IR, via the English School, in order to theorise the relationship between genocide, justice, and order. Drawing on a wide-range of primary and secondary interdisciplinary material from International Relations, Genocide Studies, Security Studies, International Law, History, Politics and Political Theory, this book aims to understand genocide within the context of International Relations and the implications that this has on policymaking. Gallagher identifies the obstacles and challenges involved in bringing the study of genocide into IR and uniquely analyses the impact of genocide on the ordering structure of international society.
Governments, Citizens, and Genocide A Comparative and Interdisciplinary Approach Alex Alvarez A comprehensive analysis demonstrating how whole societies come to support the practice of genocide. "Alex Alvarez has produced an exceptionally comprehensive and useful analysis of modern genocide... [It] is perhaps the most important interdisciplinary account to appear since Zygmunt Bauman's classic work, Modernity and the Holocaust." -- Stephen Feinstein, Director, Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies "Alex Alvarez has written a first-rate propaedeutic on the running sore of genocide. The singular merit of the work is its capacity to integrate a diverse literature in a fair-minded way and to take account of genocides in the post-Holocaust environment ranging from Cambodia to Serbia. The work reveals patterns of authoritarian continuities of repression and rule across cultures that merit serious and widespread public concern." -- Irving Louis Horowitz, Rutgers University More people have been killed in 20th-century genocides than in all wars and revolutions in the same period. Recent events in countries such as Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia have drawn attention to the fact that genocide is a pressing contemporary problem, one that has involved the United States in varying negotiating and peace-keeping roles. Genocide is increasingly recognized as a threat to national and international security, as well as a source of tremendous human suffering and social devastation. Governments, Citizens, and Genocide views the crime of genocide through the lens of social science. It discusses the problem of defining genocide and then examines it from the levels of the state, the organization, and the individual. Alex Alvarez offers both a skillful synthesis of the existing literature on genocide and important new insights developed from the study of criminal behavior. He shows that governmental policies and institutions in genocidal states are designed to suppress the moral inhibitions of ordinary individuals. By linking different levels of analysis, and comparing a variety of cases, the study provides a much more complex understanding of genocide than have prior studies. Based on lessons drawn from his analysis, Alvarez offers an important discussion of the ways in which genocide might be anticipated and prevented. Alex Alvarez is Associate Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at Northern Arizona University. His primary research interests are minorities, crime, and criminal justice, as well as collective and interpersonal violence. He is author of articles in Journal of Criminal Justice, Social Science History, and Sociological Imagination and is currently writing a book on patterns of American murder. April 2001 240 pages, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4, bibl., index cloth 0-253-33849-2 $29.95 s / £22.95 Contents The Age of Genocide A Crime By Any Other Name Deadly Regimes Lethal Cogs Accommodating Genocide Confronting Genocide =
Winner of the Grawmeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order, 2018 Winner of the Joseph Lepgold Prize Winner of the Best Books in Conflict Studies (APSA) Winner of the Best Book in Human Rights (ISA) In Making and Unmaking Nations, Scott Straus seeks to explain why and how genocide takes place—and, perhaps more important, how it has been avoided in places where it may have seemed likely or even inevitable. To solve that puzzle, he examines postcolonial Africa, analyzing countries in which genocide occurred and where it could have but did not. Why have there not been other Rwandas? Straus finds that deep-rooted ideologies—how leaders make their nations—shape strategies of violence and are central to what leads to or away from genocide. Other critical factors include the dynamics of war, the role of restraint, and the interaction between national and local actors in the staging of campaigns of large-scale violence. Grounded in Straus's extensive fieldwork in contemporary Africa, the study of major twentieth-century cases of genocide, and the literature on genocide and political violence, Making and Unmaking Nations centers on cogent analyses of three nongenocide cases (Côte d'Ivoire, Mali, and Senegal) and two in which genocide took place (Rwanda and Sudan). Straus's empirical analysis is based in part on an original database of presidential speeches from 1960 to 2005. The book also includes a broad-gauge analysis of all major cases of large-scale violence in Africa since decolonization. Straus's insights into the causes of genocide will inform the study of political violence as well as giving policymakers and nongovernmental organizations valuable tools for the future.
Climate change caused by human activity is the most fundamental challenge facing mankind in the 21st century, since it will drastically alter the living conditions of millions of people, mainly in the Global South. Environmental violence, including resource crises such as peak fossil fuel, will lie at the heart of future conflicts. However, Genocide Studies have so far neglected this subject, due to the emphasis that traditional genocide scholarship places on ideology and legal prosecution, leading to a narrow understanding of the driving forces of genocide. This books aims at changing this, initiating a dialogue between scholars working in the areas of climate change and genocide. Research into genocide as well as climate change is a highly interdisciplinary endeavour, transcending the boundaries of established disciplines. Contributions to this book address this by approaching the subject from a wide array of methodological, theoretical, disciplinary and regional perspectives. As all the contributions show, climate change is a major threat multiplier for violence or non-violent destruction and any understanding of prevention needs to take this into account. They offer a basis for much needed Critical Prevention Studies, which aims at sustainable prevention. This book was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Human Rights.
Michael Dobkowski and Isidor Walliman have edited a book that, although ominous, is not a fatalistic look at the future. The Coming Age of Scarcity lays out the perils of not recognizing the reality of genocide or of acknowledging the full implications of warfare. Showing how scarcity and surplus populations can lead to disaster, The Coming Age of Scarcity is about evil. It tells of "ethnic cleansing" and excavates the world's expanding killing fields. The writers in this volume are all too aware that the future suggests that present-day population growth, land resources, energy consumption, and per capita consumption cannot be sustained without leading to greater catastrophes. The essays in this volume ask: What is the solution in the face of mass death and genocide? As philosopher John K. Roth says in the Foreword, "The essays can sensitize us against despair and indifference because history shows that human-made mass death and genocide are not inevitable, and no events related to them will ever be."
This case study highlighting the story of Raphael Lemkin challenges everyone to think deeply about what it will take for individuals, groups, and nations to take up Lemkin's challenge. To make this material accessible for classrooms, this resource includes several components: an introduction by Genocide scholar Omer Bartov; a historical case study on Lemkin and his legacy; questions for student reflection; suggested resources; a series of lesson plans using the case study; and a selection of primary source documents. Born in 1900, Raphael Lemkin, devoted most of his life to a single goal: making the world understand and recognize a crime so horrific that there was not even a word for it. Lemkin took a step toward his goal in 1944 when he coined the word "genocide" which means the destruction of a nation or an ethnic group. He said he had created the word by combining the ancient Greek word "genos" (race, tribe) and the Latin "cide" (killing). In 1948, three years after the concentration camps of World War ii had been closed forever, the newly formed United Nations used this new word in a treaty that was intended to prevent any future genocides. Lemkin died a decade later. He had lived long enough to see his word widely accepted and also to see the United Nations treaty, called the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide adopted by many nations. But, sadly, recent history reminds everyone that laws and treaties are not enough to prevent genocide. Individual sections contain footnotes.
