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Genocide: Clarifying Concepts and Causes of Cruelty

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 September 2010

Ernesto Verdeja
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Extract

In the decades after World War Two, most scholars working on genocide focused on particular cases, providing historically detailed descriptions of the causes and patterns of mass violence but rarely branching out beyond a specific case. The study of the Holocaust is typical of this; the vast majority of works on the Nazi genocide had little comparative dimension and instead examined the ways in which anti-Semitism and certain policies condemned disfavored minorities to persecution and extermination. These earlier works are particularly important because they gave us rich understandings of the origins, sequencing, and dynamics of mass violence, as well as the roles of dehumanizing cultural views and ideologies that facilitated extermination. Nevertheless, multi-case studies were the exception, and generally received little attention in the social sciences.

Type
Review Essay
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 72 , Issue 3 , Summer 2010 , pp. 513 - 526
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2010

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References

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18 The final volumes are titled Europe in the Era of Ultimate Genocide (vol. 3) and The Cold War and Genocide (vol. 4).

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25 The practical implications of this are evident in policy debates over whether Darfur is genocide or something else. See, for example, Beardsley, Brent, “The Endless Debate over the ‘G Word,’” Genocide Studies and Prevention 1, no. 1 (2006): 79–82Google Scholar.

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28 An important exception is Hagan, John, Justice in the Balkans: Prosecuting War Crimes in the Hague Tribunal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Hagan, however, only studies the ICTY and does not include the ICTR.

29 For an account of elite factionalization and authoritarianism in post-genocide Rwanda, see Prunier, Gerard, Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)Google Scholar.