Genocide is violence that targets individuals because of their membership of a group and aims at the destruction of a people.
Roméo Antonius Dallaire is a retired Canadian politician and military officer who was a senator from Quebec from 2005 to 2014, and a lieutenant-general in the Canadian Armed Forces. He notably was the force commander of UNAMIR, the ill-fated United Nations peacekeeping force for Rwanda between 1993 and 1994, and for trying to stop the genocide that was being waged by Hutu extremists against Tutsis. Dallaire is a Senior Fellow at the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies (MIGS) and co-director of the MIGS Will to Intervene Project.
Raphael Lemkin was a Polish Jewish lawyer who is known for coining the term genocide and campaigning to establish the Genocide Convention. During the Second World War, he campaigned vigorously to raise international awareness of atrocities in Axis-occupied Europe. It was during this time that Lemkin coined the term "genocide" to describe Nazi Germany's extermination policies.
Opération Turquoise was a French-led military operation in Rwanda in 1994 under the mandate of the United Nations. The "multilateral" force consisted of 2,500 troops, 32 from Senegal and the rest French. The equipment included 100 APCs, 10 helicopters, a battery of 120 mm mortars, 4 Jaguar fighter bombers, 8 Mirage fighters, and reconnaissance aircraft. The helicopters laid a trail of food, water and medicine enabling refugees to escape into eastern Zaire. Opération Turquoise is controversial for at least two reasons: accusations that it was an attempt to prop up the genocidal Hutu regime, and that its mandate undermined the UNAMIR. By facilitating 2 million Rwandan refugees to travel to Kivu provinces in Zaire, Turquoise setup the causes of the First Congo War.
This is a bibliography for primary sources, books and articles on the personal and general accounts, and the accountabilities, of the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
Samantha Jane Power is an Irish-American journalist, diplomat, and government official who is currently serving as the Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development. She previously served as the 28th United States Ambassador to the United Nations from 2013 to 2017. Power is a member of the Democratic Party.
Elizabeth Becker is an American journalist and author. She has written five books and is best known for her reporting and writing on Cambodia.
Peter Balakian is an American poet, prose writer, and scholar. He is the author of many books including the 2016 Pulitzer prize winning book of poems Ozone Journal, the memoir Black Dog of Fate, winner of the PEN/Albrand award in 1998 and The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response, winner of the 2005 Raphael Lemkin Prize and a New York Times best seller. Both prose books were New York Times Notable Books. Since 1980 he has taught at Colgate University where he is the Donald M and Constance H Rebar Professor of the Humanities in the department of English and Director of Creative Writing.
The International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) was an ad hoc commission of participants which in 2001 worked to popularize the concept of humanitarian intervention under the name of "Responsibility to protect". The Commission was instigated in the wake of the Kosovo War by Lloyd Axworthy and the Chretien government in September 2000 and co-chaired by Gareth Evans and Mohamed Sahnoun under the authority of the Canadian Government. Part of its membership was from the UN General Assembly.
Screamers is a 2006 documentary film directed by Carla Garapedian, conceived by Peter McAlevey and Garapedian and produced by McAlevey. The film explores why genocides have occurred in modern day history and features talks from Serj Tankian, lead vocalist of the American alternative metal band System of a Down, whose grandfather is an Armenian genocide survivor, as well as from human-rights activist, journalist, and professor, Samantha Power, as well as various other people involved with genocides in Rwanda and Darfur. Screamers also examines genocide denial in current-day Turkey, and the neutral trend that the United States generally holds towards genocide.
Alison Des Forges was an American historian and human rights activist who specialized in the African Great Lakes region, particularly the 1994 Rwandan genocide. At the time of her death, she was a senior advisor for the African continent at Human Rights Watch. She died in a plane crash on 12 February 2009.
Jon Western was an American political scientist who was the Carol Hoffmann Collins '63 Professor of International Relations and Five College Professor of International Relations at Mount Holyoke College and the Five Colleges. He served as Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of Faculty at Mount Holyoke from 2016 to 2020. He received his B.A. in Political Science and Russian Area Studies from Macalester College, his M.P.P. from the University of Michigan, and his Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University.
Barbara Harff is professor of political science emerita at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. In 2003 and again in 2005 she was a distinguished visiting professor at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University. Her research focuses on the causes, risks, and prevention of genocidal violence.
Watchers of the Sky is a 2014 American documentary film directed by Edet Belzberg. The film premiered at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival on January 20, 2014 in the U.S. Documentary Competition. It won the two awards at the festival. It went on to win the Jonathan Daniels Award at the Monadnock International Film Festival and the Ostrovsky Award for Best Documentary Film at the Jerusalem Film Festival.
Linda Polman is a Dutch freelance journalist and author of three books on humanitarian aid and intervention: We Did Nothing, War Games, and The Crisis Caravan.
Prevention of genocide is any action that works toward averting future genocides. Genocides take a lot of planning, resources, and involved parties to carry out, they do not just happen instantaneously. Scholars in the field of genocide studies have identified a set of widely agreed upon risk factors that make a country or social group more at risk of carrying out a genocide, which include a wide range of political and cultural factors that create a context in which genocide is more likely, such as political upheaval or regime change, as well as psychological phenomena that can be manipulated and taken advantage of in large groups of people, like conformity and cognitive dissonance. Genocide prevention depends heavily on the knowledge and surveillance of these risk factors, as well as the identification of early warning signs of genocide beginning to occur.
Genocide studies is an academic field of study that researches genocide. Genocide became a field of study in the mid-1940s, with the work of Raphael Lemkin, who coined genocide and started genocide research, and its primary subjects were the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust; the Holocaust was the primary subject matter of genocide studies, starting off as a side field of Holocaust studies, and the field received an extra impetus in the 1990s, when the Bosnian genocide and Rwandan genocide occurred. It received further attraction in the 2010s through the formation of a gender field.
Timothy Paul Longman is a professor of political science and international relations at Boston University. A protege of Alison Des Forges, he is recognized as one of the top authorities on the Rwandan genocide and its legacies.
Jennifer Trahan is an American legal scholar and academic. She is a Clinical Professor at New York University's Center for Global Affairs and directs their Concentration in International Law and Human Rights.
This is a select annotated bibliography of scholarly English language books and journal articles about the subject of genocide studies; for bibliographies of genocidal acts or events, please see the See also section for individual articles. A brief selection of English translations of primary sources is included for items related to the development of genocide studies. Book entries may have references to journal articles and reviews as annotations. Additional bibliographies can be found in many of the book-length works listed below; see Further Reading for several book and chapter-length bibliographies. The External links section contains entries for publicly available materials on the development of genocide studies.
