Genocide is the intentional destruction of a people in whole or in part.
Raphael Lemkin was a Polish lawyer of Jewish descent 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 outrage against atrocities in Axis-occupied Europe. It was during this time that Lemkin coined the term "genocide" to describe Nazi Germany's extermination policies against Jews and Poles.
Securitization in international relations and national politics is the process of state actors transforming subjects from regular political issues into matters of "security": thus enabling extraordinary means to be used in the name of security. Issues that become securitized do not necessarily represent issues that are essential to the objective survival of a state, but rather represent issues where someone was successful in constructing an issue into an existential problem.
Donald Bloxham FRHistS is a Professor of Modern History, specialising in genocide, war crimes and other mass atrocities studies. He is the editor of the Journal of Holocaust Education.
Mass killings under communist regimes occurred through a variety of means during the 20th century, including executions, famine, deaths through forced labour, deportation, starvation, and imprisonment. Some of these events have been classified as genocides or crimes against humanity. Other terms have been used to describe these events, including classicide, democide, red holocaust, and politicide. The mass killings have been studied by authors and academics and several of them have postulated the potential causes of these killings along with the factors which were associated with them. Some authors have tabulated a total death toll, consisting of all of the excess deaths which cumulatively occurred under the rule of communist states, but these death toll estimates have been criticized. Most frequently, the states and events which are studied and included in death toll estimates are the Holodomor and the Great Purge in the Soviet Union, the Great Chinese Famine and the Cultural Revolution in the People's Republic of China, and the Cambodian genocide in Democratic Kampuchea.
The double genocide theory alleges that two genocides of equal severity occurred in Eastern Europe, that of the Holocaust against Jews perpetrated by the Nazis and an alleged second genocide that the Soviet Union committed against local populations in Eastern Europe. The theory first became popular in post-Soviet Lithuania, in discussions about the Holocaust in Lithuania. A more explicitly antisemitic version of the theory accuses Jews of complicity in Soviet repression and characterizes local participation in the Holocaust as retaliation, especially in Lithuania, eastern Poland, and northern Romania. Double genocide theory has been criticized by scholars as a form of Holocaust trivialization.
The assertion that the Holocaust was a unique event in human history was important to the historiography of the Holocaust, but it has come under increasing criticism in the twenty-first century. Related claims include the claim that the Holocaust is external to history, beyond human understanding, a civilizational rupture, and something that should not be compared to other historical events. Uniqueness approaches to the Holocaust also coincide with the view that antisemitism is not another form of racism and prejudice but is eternal and teleologically culminates in the Holocaust, a frame that is preferred by proponents of Zionist narratives.
The genocide of Indigenous peoples, colonial genocide, or settler genocide is the elimination of entire communities of Indigenous peoples as a part of the process of colonialism. According to Patrick Wolfe genocide of the native population is especially likely in cases of settler colonialism, with some scholars arguing that settler colonialism is inherently genocidal.
Anthony Dirk Moses is an Australian scholar who researches various aspects of genocide. In 2022 he became the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Professor of Political Science at the City College of New York, after having been the Frank Porter Graham Distinguished Professor of Global Human Rights History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is a leading scholar of genocide, especially in colonial contexts, as well as of the political development of the concept itself. He is known for coining the term racial century in reference to the period 1850–1950. He is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Genocide Research.
Racial century is a term that has been used by historians to refer to the century between 1850 and 1950, especially in the context of postcolonial studies. The term employs race and racism as the primary category of analysis of global, national, and local affairs.
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 Rwandan genocide occurred. It received further attraction in the 2010s through the formation of a gender field.
The psychology of genocide attempts to explain genocide by means of psychology. Psychology of genocide aims to explain the preconditions of genocide and why some people become genocide perpetrators while others are bystanders or rescuers.
Genocide justification is the claim that a genocide is morally excusable/defensible, necessary, and/or sanctioned by law. Genocide justification differs from genocide denial, which is the attempt to reject the occurrence of genocide. Perpetrators often claim that genocide victims presented a serious threat, justifying their actions by stating it was legitimate self-defense of a nation or state. According to modern international criminal law, there can be no excuse for genocide. Genocide is often camouflaged as military activity against combatants, and the distinction between denial and justification is often blurred.
The connection between colonialism and genocide has been explored in academic research. According to historian Patrick Wolfe, "[t]he question of genocide is never far from discussions of settler colonialism." Historians have commented that although colonialism does not necessarily directly involve genocide, research suggests that the two share a connection.
The International Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide was the first major conference in the field of genocide studies, held in Tel Aviv on 20–24 June 1982. It was organized by Israel Charny, Elie Wiesel, Shamai Davidson, and their Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide, founded in 1979. The conference's objective was to further the understanding and prevention of all genocides; it marked the shift from viewing genocide as an irrational phenomenon to one that could be studied and understood.
Genocide is the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group. The term was coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin. It is defined in Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG) of 1948 as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group's conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."
In discussions of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, the Holocaust and the Nakba have come to be regarded as interrelated events, both historically and in the way these two tragedies have influenced perceptions of the conflict by both parties. In Israel, all Israeli Jews are considered survivors of the Holocaust who must implement the imperative of never again in regards to being a Jewish victim. The uniqueness of the Holocaust is emphasized and any linkage between the Holocaust and the Nakba is rejected. The 2018 book The Holocaust and the Nakba argues that "unless we can hold these two moments in our hearts and minds as part of the same story, there can be no moving forward in the seemingly unmovable conflict that is Israel-Palestine".
The Catechism Debate, also known as Historikerstreit 2.0, is a debate about German Holocaust remembrance initiated by Australian historian A. Dirk Moses with his 2021 essay "The German Catechism". In the debate, Moses challenges the uniqueness of the Holocaust. In May through August of 2021, scholars reacted to Moses's thesis in the New Fascism Syllabus in a series of reflections curated by Jennifer V. Evans.
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.
The blockade of Biafra by the Nigerian federal government during the Nigerian Civil War (1967–1970) resulted in a famine that ultimately cost at least a million lives and ended with the capitulation of the secessionist state of Biafra.
