Genocide has a way of imposing silence. Part of its purpose is to erase history, and human voices. This series of three volumes aims to contribute to breaking the silence that so often follows genocidal outbreaks. These volumes attempt to document and understand this global phenomenon. The term “genocide,” as a way of describing the “practice of extermination of nations and ethnic groups,” was coined in 1943, when Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959) penned the preface to his 1944 book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. Five years later the United Nations General Assembly unanimously adopted the Genocide Convention. But Lemkin considered genocide to have much older roots. He had set about writing – but did not complete before his death – a three-volume history of genocide from ancient times, in which he argued that the phenomenon had “followed humanity throughout history.”

The academic and popular fixation on Raphael Lemkin confuses biography with historical explanation of the genocide concept. An actual intellectual history of genocide needs to attend to his context rather than rely on his misleading autobiography, Totally Unofficial. His conception of humanity as comprising distinct nationalities did not originate in the liberal cosmopolitanism he postulated upon arriving in the USA, but in a lifelong Zionist commitment to Jewish statehood in Palestine. Similarly, Lemkin couched his appeal to end genocide not in terms of abstract human rights, let alone crimes against humanity, but in relation to an ideal of world civilization whose constituent parts were national, religious, and racial groups. His fixation on such groups and “small nations” led him to ignore the category of “the civilian” and other forms of civilian destruction, such as interwar debate about aerial bombing on cities. In doing so, he contributed to the depoliticization of the language of transgression.

The instalment of genocide as the “crime of crimes” marked a turning point in the centuries-old language of transgression: now only mass criminality motivated by race-hatred that resembled its archetype, the Holocaust, shocked the “conscience of mankind.” This depoliticization had momentous consequences for the visibility of permanent security. Now only illiberal permanent security – embodied by the Axis powers that disgraced themselves in the Second World War – counted as seriously criminal. Practices of liberal permanent security were not so shocking, notwithstanding the postwar peace movement’s attempt to link Auschwitz and Hiroshima. The most dramatic decades are mid-1960s to the early 1980s when scholars and activists who excoriated the US bombing and counterinsurgency strategy in Vietnam, and its nuclear weapons program. At issue were the notions of “national security” and “military necessity,” the watchwords of the juggernaut they called the US “national security state.”