Genocide

this book attempts to make sense of the senseless. Its author considers cases of genocide past and present.

The Rwandan government forces, as well as Cambodia's Khmer Rouge and German, Bosnian and U.S. governments, have all been guilty of the destruction of their indigenous cultures. This book analyses the major atrocities of our times, including recent cases of genocide in Yugoslavia and Iraq.

Focusing on the twentieth century, this collection of essays by leading international experts offers an up-to-date, comprehensive history and analysis of multiple cases of genocide and genocidal acts. The book contains studies of the Armenian genocide; the victims of Stalinist terror; the Holocaust; and Imperial Japan. Contributors explore colonialism and address the fate of the indigenous peoples in Africa, North America, and Australia. In addition, extensive coverage of the post-1945 period includes the atrocities in the former Yugoslavia, Bali, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Rwanda, East Timor, and Guatemala. Robert Gellately is Professor and Strassler Family Chair for the Study of Holocaust History at Clark University, where he teaches a variety of courses in modern German history, modern European history and the history of the Holocaust with a concentration on the study of Nazi Germany and the Gestapo. In Backing Hitler (Oxford, 2001), Gellately uses new evidence to demolish long-held beliefs about what ordinary Germans knew of the concentration camps. His internationally acclaimed book, The Gestapo and German Society (Oxford, 1990) challenges conventional concepts of the Gestapo and daily life in Nazi Germany. He has won numerous fellowships, and awards, most recently from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany. Ben Kiernan is A. Whitney Griswold Professor of History and Director of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University and Convenor of the Yale East Timor Project. Kiernan is the author of The Pol Pot Regime (Yale, 1996), How Pol Pot Came to Power (Verso Books, 1985) and three other works and over a hundred scholarly articles on Southeast Asia and the history of genocide. Choice called him "the most knowledgeable observer of Cambodia anywhere in the Western world." Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge "indicted" and then "sentenced" him as an "arch war criminal." Kiernan is a member of the Editorial Boards of Human Rights Review, the Journal of Human Rights, and the Journal of Genocide Research. He is currently writing a global history of genocide since 1500.

"Fresh, useful, and engaging. This timely book reflects new research and important critical perspectives on the role of social science and the response of anthropology to human suffering."--Richard Pierre Claude, Founding Editor of "Human Rights Quarterly

"Many peoples of the world, including the Mayans in Guatemala, have been devastated and destroyed by genocide. Over many years these horrors remained only in the hearts and memory of the victims. The testimonies of the survivors who had the courage to denounce these crimes are making a contribution to scientific research. In "Annihilating Difference, anthropologists grapple with an urgent public issue, taking new points of view that could help understand the magnitude of past atrocities and develop strategies to prevent future massacres in the heart of humanity."--Rigoberta Menchu Tum, 1992 Nobel Peace Prize laureate

"This volume--a collection of writings on genocide from the perspective of anthropology-seeks a deeper understanding of our era's most heinous crime. It asks not only what happened but why it happened. It seeks not simply to describe but to explain. And in offering an explanation of this horrendous social malady, it points the direction for a possible cure."--Kenneth Roth, Executive Director, Human Rights Watch, from the Foreword

"This volume ranges far and wide across centuries and cultures to present fascinating perspectives on the phenomenon of genocide. It is a new venture for anthropologists, whose insights will be useful to us all and who connect their scholarship to profound moral concerns."--Howard Zinn, author of "You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train

""Annihilating Difference is an anthropologicalcollection that warrants the attention of non-anthropologists. It simultaneously adds to the growing body of knowledge about genocide and provides a revealing glimpse into what anthropologists are studying and how they are studyi

Genocide--the deliberate destruction, usually through mass murder, of an ethnic, racial or religious group--is the ultimate crime against humanity. Drawing upon a wide variety of disciplines, this study assesses ways to prevent this crime. While most books about genocide focus on the history of a particular event, such as the Holocaust, or compare case studies to derive empirical theories, this book outlines many practical aspects of genocide prevention.

Riemer and his contributors argue for a global human rights regime capable of preventing, combatting, and punishing genocide. Such a regime, they assert, will benefit from significant international changes, serious attention to prevention, effective monitoring, keenly targeted sanctions, a standing anti-genocidal police force, a philosophy of just humanitarian intervention, and a permanent international criminal tribunal.

In this controversial book, distinguished scholars address the question of whether the Holocaust is unique as viewed from the perspective of other well-known and apparently analogous instances of genocide and mass death.

The provisions of the 1948 Genocide Convention are now being interpreted in important judgments by the International Court of Justice, the ad hoc Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and increasingly in domestic courts. In this definitive work William A. Schabas gives detailed attention to the concept of protected groups, the quantitative dimension of genocide, problems of criminal prosecution, and issues of international judicial cooperations such as extradition. He explores the duty to prevent genocide, and the consequences this may have on the emerging law of humanitarian intervention.

Scherrer examines the ethnicized conflicts, periodic war, and genocide in Rwanda and Burundi. The 1994 genocide in Rwanda may have resulted in the murder of a million Tutsi and moderate Hutu, while the mass killings in Burundi, especially in 1993 when some 200,000 Hutu and Tutsi were killed, and the current ongoing war in the Congo appear to have the potential to escalate into another round of genocide in the region. Scherrer explores the background to the conflicts as well as what the international community might do to break this tragic cycle of violence and despair.