Genocide: the power and problems of a concept

Somebody Else's Crime: The Drafting of the Genocide Convention as a Cold War Battle, 1946-48 / Anton Weiss-Wendt -- The Costs of Silencing Holocaust Victims: Why We Must Add Sexual Violence to Our Definition of Genocide / Annette F. Timm -- Frames and Narratives: How the Fates of the Ottoman Armenians, Stalin-Era Ukrainians, and Kazakhs Illuminate the Concept of Genocide / Ronald Grigor Suny -- The Holodomor in the Context of Soviet Mass Killing in the 1930s / Norman M. Naimark -- The Kazakh Famine, the Holodomor, and the Soviet Famines of 1930-33: Starvation and National Un-building in the Soviet Union / Andrea Graziosi -- The "Lemkin Turn" in Ukrainian Studies: Genocide, Peoples, Nations, and Empire / Douglas Irvin-Erickson -- The Orchestrated Inapplicability of the Law of Crimes against Humanity and Genocide--une exception française? / Caroline Fournet -- Is It Time to Forget Genocide? Conceptual Problems and New Directions / Michelle Tusan -- The Limits of a Genocide Lens and Possible Alternatives / Scott Straus.

Since the 1980s the study of genocide has exploded, both historically and geographically, to encompass earlier epochs, other continents, and new cases. The concept of genocide has proved its worth, but that expansion has also compounded the tensions between a rigid legal concept and the manifold realities researchers have discovered. The legal and political benefits that accompany genocide status have also reduced complex discussions of historical events to a simplistic binary--is it genocide or not--a situation often influenced by powerful political pressures. Genocide addresses these tensions and tests the limits of the concept in cases ranging from the role of sexual violence during the Holocaust and state-induced mass starvation in Kazakh and Ukrainian history to what the Armenian, Rwandan, and Burundi experiences reveal about the uses and pitfalls of reading history and conducting politics through the lens of genocide. Contributors examine the pressures that great powers have exerted in shaping the concept; the reaction Raphaël Lemkin, originator of the word "genocide," had to the United Nations' final resolution on the subject; France's long-held choice not to use the concept of genocide in its courtrooms; the role of transformative social projects and use of genocide memory in politics; and the relation of genocide to mass violence targeting specific groups. Throughout, this comprehensive text offers innovative solutions to address the limitations of the genocide concept, while preserving its usefulness as an analytical framework.