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From 1948 to 1988, the United States failed to ratify and implement the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Genocide Convention). In total, seven presidential administrations neglected to expend the necessary political capital to secure the Genocide Convention's passage. This article is the first comprehensive study of the presidential actions—and, more aptly, inactions—on the long road to ratification. Ultimately, of the seven presidents who failed to procure the Convention's ratification by the Senate, only three even sought the Senate's advice and consent on the important international accord, and in all cases, the presidents did so while working to ensure the act did not harm their broader legislative and foreign policy agendas. Ultimately, President Ronald Reagan oversaw the Convention's ratification, though he did so in response to the threat of a public relations disaster that his administration believed the ratification would help avert. Studying the motivations of these eight presidents deepens our understanding of why it took the United States 40 years to finally adopt the Genocide Convention.

This paper explores the realities of men and women forced to marry by the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, as well as the perspectives of children born of forced marriages. Forced marriage has been predominantly investigated in relation to violence and coercion towards girls and women. However, less attention has been paid to forced unions involving both spouses, as well as to children born of these couples. Data were collected from 80 participants, including in-depth interviews with 28 women and 30 men who experienced forced marriage, and focus groups with 22 children born of forced marriages. Those who experienced forced marriage highlighted the coercion and threats of violence that underlay the marriage process. However, interviews also pointed to spouses' key coping mechanisms and resources, such as the long-term acceptance of the marriage and support from larger community, which sustained positive familial relations. Children born of these unions, who regarded their parents' marriage as generally loving and supportive, corroborated these findings. Our study revealed the ways in which forced marriages within the context of genocide were not necessarily characterized by domestic violence and abuse. We suggest that the shared and widespread nature of forced marriage and post-genocide community support may play a role in leading to positive family relationships in the context of unwanted unions.

Genocide prevention has been a field located in the Global North but preoccupied with the Global South. It is an elite field that is dominated by Western technical experts, many of whom have close ties to Western governments, and that is organized along vertical hierarchies. It works largely with states and militaries, and focuses a majority of its attention on military intervention into ongoing conflict as well as legal accountability after genocide has been committed. These priorities have had a dramatic impact on how genocide is defined and identified, preferencing the mass killing element of the crime and "reducing genocide to law," as the legal scholar Payam Akhavan aptly put it in his 2012 book of that title. Although grassroots outreach is sometimes advocated, it is usually understood in terms of pressure politics and lobbying at the center of global power rather than as the empowerment of ordinary people worldwide as transformative and preventative agents in and of themselves. This article is both a call for critical self-examination of the field of genocide studies and a surfacing of paths not taken in the practice of genocide prevention.

This article uses a more than decade of written and oral discussion with Herb Hirsch as the basis for an articulation of key concepts developed by Hirsch and an evaluation of the state of genocide scholarship and critical analysis of certain trends in the field. The dialogic Herbcratic Method disrupts normal, institutionalized, sterile genocide studies production by introducing challenging interventions against generally accepted viewpoints that are problematic and the over academicization of the field and supports a vibrant intellectual approach to addressing genocides of the past and preventing genocide in the future. This includes both a critique of claims of disinterest in scholarship and a rejection of the exclusion of interested activist-scholarship, as well as a defense of a philosophically-grounded yet workable notion of "objectivity" for genocide studies to be achieved through careful efforts. The article elaborates on Hirsch's exposure of policy recycling regarding genocide prevention and the damaging consequences of apparently innocuous if annoying use of jargon in policy proposals. Building on Hirsch's critical framework, the article exposes a new post-denial trend in perpetrator rhetorical falsification and manipulation, fabrication of false claims of genocide. False claims of genocide have the devastating effect of forcing victims of actual genocide and related oppression to appear to be genocide deniers when they refute the false claims.

Review of Jennifer M. Dixon, Dark Pasts: Changing the State's Story in Turkey and Japan, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018. Pp. 258, hardcover, $55 US. The question raised by Dark Pasts is how countries, that have committed either genocide or other mass atrocities, respond to international pressure to acknowledge and take responsibility for such a past? The author's thesis is that international pressures and domestic considerations both play a role in how a country accounts for and deals with its past transgressions. A detailed comparison of the responses of Turkey and Japan is the focus of the book, offering important information about the two countries' responses over a 60-year period.

Between 1975 and 1979 approximately two million men, women, and children perished during the Cambodian Genocide. These deaths are attributed to specific administrative policies and practices initiated by the senior leadership of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK), all of which were geared toward the basic objective of increasing agricultural production. Many of these deaths resulted from starvation, disease, and exhaustion; for others, death resulted from torture, murder, and execution. Within this context, women and men both were subject to sexual and gender-based violence. Scholars understand that much sexual and gender-based violence is directly associated with broader CPK policies toward the family. Less attention, however, has addressed the historical context and ideological basis of CPK family policy. This paper provides a primary-sourced assessment of CPK ideologies of the family and evaluates these within the context of CPK economic planning. In so doing, the CPK's ideology of revolutionary families is situated within the larger history of family policies of communist governments.

This article discusses three different forms of genocide denial that have—broadly speaking—followed one another in post-genocide Rwanda since 1994. Genocide denial is considered a stage of genocide, and each of these three forms of genocide denial is outlined, drawing on the seminal study on denial of Stanley Cohen. The article suggests that collective denial such as genocide denial should be distinguished analytically from more everyday forms of denial of atrocities and suffering. Three types of genocide denial—literal, interpretative, and implicatory—are identified and related to particular phases in post-genocide Rwandan history. It is shown that denial of the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda has been intertwined with post-genocide debates around fundamental causes and triggers of genocide. The article concludes with some reflections on instruments used by the Rwandan government to combat genocide denial, reflecting on the polarization of public and scholarly opinion on Rwanda's recent past.

Diasporas engage in a variety of practices and activities to commemorate past massacres and genocides that might have led to the formation of the diaspora in the first place. In this process, certain massacres can be constructed as the "chosen trauma" and consequently become a central element in commemoration practices and identity formation. In this paper, we discuss genocide memorialization in the context of the Iraqi Kurdish diaspora in Europe. We focus specifically on genocide memorialization of the Anfal Campaign (1986–1989) that was orchestrated by Saddam Hussein's regime against the Kurdish population in Northern Iraq. We examine how collective remembering for Anfal takes place in the diasporic space, what diasporic articulations and representations of Anfal as the chosen trauma are produced in commemoration practices, and how these genocide memorialization processes differ from those in the homeland context. The article asks the following questions: How do Kurdish diaspora communities in Europe commemorate Anfal? How do diaspora narratives relate to collective memory and identity? What spatial and generational dynamics are at play in these processes?