Mass Violence in Modern History - Böcker

The study of genocide has been appropriate in emphasizing the centrality of the Holocaust; yet, other preceding episodes of mass violence are of great significance. Taking a transnational and transhistorical approach, this volume redresses and replaces the silencing of the Armenian Genocide.Scholarship relating to the history of denial, comparative approaches in the deportations and killings of Greeks and Armenians during the First World War, and women’s histories during the genocide and post-genocide proliferated during the centennial of the Armenian Genocide in 2015. Collectively, however, these studies have not been enough to offer a comprehensive account of the historical record, documentation, and interpretation of events during 1915-1916. This study seeks to bridge the gap, by unsettling nationalist narratives and addressing areas such as aesthetics, gender, and sexuality. By bringing forward various dimensions of the human experience, including the political, socioeconomic, cultural, social, gendered, and legal contexts within which such silencing occurred, the essays address the methodological silences and processes of selectivity and exclusion in scholarship on the Armenian Genocide.The interdisciplinary approach makes Critical Approaches to Genocide a useful resource for all students and scholars interested in the Armenian Genocide and memory studies.

This volume examines the changing role which ordinary members of society played in the state-sponsored persecution of the Jews in Bukovina and Bessarabia, both during the summer of 1941, when Romania joined the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, and beyond. It establishes different patterns of civilian complicity and discusses the significance of the phenomenon in the context of the exterminatory campaign pursued by the Romanian military authorities against the Jews living in the borderlands.

This volume brings together leading sociologists and anthropologists to break new ground in the study of cultural violence. First sketched in Raphael Lemkin’s seminal writings on genocide, and later systematically defined by peace studies scholar Johan Galtung, the concept of cultural violence seeks to explain why and how language, symbols, rituals, practices, and objects are so frequently in the crosshairs of socio-political change. Recent conflicts in the Middle East, Africa, and Central Asia, along with renewed public interest in the repertoire of violence applied to the control and erasure of indigenous populations, highlights the gaps in our understanding of why cultural violence occurs, what it consists of, and how it relates to other forms of collective violence.

Is the Armenian Genocide a strictly historical matter? If that is the case, why is it still a topical issue, capable of causing diplomatic rows and heated debates? The short answer would be that the century old Armenian Genocide is much more than a historical question. It emerged as a political dilemma on the international arena at the San Stefano peace conference in 1878 and has remained as such into our days. The disparity between knowledge and acknowledgement, mainly ascribable to Turkey’s official denial of the genocide, has only heightened the politicization of the Armenian question. Thus, the memories of the WWI era refuse to be relegated to the pages of history but are rather perceived as a vivid presence. This is the result of the perpetual process of politics of memory. The politics of memory is an intricate and interdisciplinary negotiation, engaging many different actors in the society who have access to a wide range of resources and measures in order to achieve their goals. By following the Armenian question during the past century up to its Centennial Commemoration in 2015, this study aims to explain why and how the politics of memory of the Armenian Genocide has kept it as a topical issue in our days.

Scene of one of the biggest genocides of the last century Rwanda has become a household word, yet bitter disagreements persist as to its causes and consequences. Through a blend of personal memories and historical analysis, and informed by a lifelong experience of research in Central Africa, the author challenges conventional wisdom and suggests a new perspective for making sense of the appalling brutality that has accompanied the region’s post-independence trajectories.All four states adjacent to Rwanda are inhabited by Hutu and Tutsi and thus contained in germ the potential for ethnic conflict, but only in Burundi did this potential reach genocidal proportions when, in 1972, in response to a local insurrection, at least 200,000 Hutu civilians were killed by a predominantly Tutsi army. By widening his analytic lens the author shows the critical importance of the Burundi bloodshed to an understanding of the roots of the Rwanda genocide, and in later years the significance of the mass murder of Hutu civilians by Kagame’s Tutsi army, not just in Rwanda but in the Congo. The regional dimension of ethnic conflict, traceable to Belgian-engineered Hutu revolution in Rwanda in 1959, three years before its independence, is the principal missing piece in the genocidal puzzle of the Great Lakes region of central Africa. But this is by no means the only one. Reassembling the missing pieces within and outside Rwanda is not the least of the merits of this highly readable reassessment of a widely misunderstood human tragedy.

Scene of one of the biggest genocides of the last century Rwanda has become a household word, yet bitter disagreements persist as to its causes and consequences. Through a blend of personal memories and historical analysis, and informed by a lifelong experience of research in Central Africa, the author challenges conventional wisdom and suggests a new perspective for making sense of the appalling brutality that has accompanied the region’s post-independence trajectories.All four states adjacent to Rwanda are inhabited by Hutu and Tutsi and thus contained in germ the potential for ethnic conflict, but only in Burundi did this potential reach genocidal proportions when, in 1972, in response to a local insurrection, at least 200,000 Hutu civilians were killed by a predominantly Tutsi army. By widening his analytic lens the author shows the critical importance of the Burundi bloodshed to an understanding of the roots of the Rwanda genocide, and in later years the significance of the mass murder of Hutu civilians by Kagame’s Tutsi army, not just in Rwanda but in the Congo. The regional dimension of ethnic conflict, traceable to Belgian-engineered Hutu revolution in Rwanda in 1959, three years before its independence, is the principal missing piece in the genocidal puzzle of the Great Lakes region of central Africa. But this is by no means the only one. Reassembling the missing pieces within and outside Rwanda is not the least of the merits of this highly readable reassessment of a widely misunderstood human tragedy.

This book deals with the Second World War in Southeastern Europe from the perspective of conditions on the ground during the conflict. The focus is on the reshaping of ethnic and religious groups in wartime, on the "top-down" and "bottom-up" dynamics of mass violence, and on the local dimensions of the Holocaust. The approach breaks with the national narratives and "top-down" political and military histories that continue to be the predominant paradigms for the Second World War in this part of Europe.

This book examines postwar waves of political violence that affected six Southeast Asian countries – Indonesia, Burma/Myanmar, Cambodia, Thailand, the Philippines, and Vietnam – from the wars of independence in the mid-twentieth century to the recent Rohingya genocide.Featuring cases not previously explored, and offering fresh insights into more familiar cases, the chapters cover a range of topics including the technologies of violence, the politics of fear, inclusion and exclusion, justice and ethics, repetitions of mass violence events, impunity, law, ethnic and racial killings, crimes against humanity, and genocide. The book delves into the violence that has reverberated across the region spurred by local and global politics and ideologies, through the examination of such themes as identity ascription and formation, existential and ontological questions, collective memories of violence, and social and political transformation. In our current era of global social and political transition, the volume’s case studies provide an opportunity to consider potential repercussions and outcomes of various political and ideological positionings and policies.Enhancing our understanding of the technologies, techniques, motives, causes, consequences, and connections between violent episodes in the Southeast Asian cases, the book raises key questions for the study of mass violence worldwide.

This book examines postwar waves of political violence that affected six Southeast Asian countries – Indonesia, Burma/Myanmar, Cambodia, Thailand, the Philippines, and Vietnam – from the wars of independence in the mid-twentieth century to the recent Rohingya genocide.Featuring cases not previously explored, and offering fresh insights into more familiar cases, the chapters cover a range of topics including the technologies of violence, the politics of fear, inclusion and exclusion, justice and ethics, repetitions of mass violence events, impunity, law, ethnic and racial killings, crimes against humanity, and genocide. The book delves into the violence that has reverberated across the region spurred by local and global politics and ideologies, through the examination of such themes as identity ascription and formation, existential and ontological questions, collective memories of violence, and social and political transformation. In our current era of global social and political transition, the volume’s case studies provide an opportunity to consider potential repercussions and outcomes of various political and ideological positionings and policies.Enhancing our understanding of the technologies, techniques, motives, causes, consequences, and connections between violent episodes in the Southeast Asian cases, the book raises key questions for the study of mass violence worldwide.

Conceptualizing Mass Violence draws attention to the conspicuous inability to inhibit mass violence in myriads forms and considers the plausible reasons for doing so. Focusing on a postcolonial perspective, the volume seeks to popularize and institutionalize the study of mass violence in South Asia.The essays explore and deliberate upon the varied aspects of mass violence, namely revisionism, reconstruction, atrocities, trauma, memorialization and literature, the need for Holocaust education, and the criticality of dialogue and reconciliation. The language, content, and characteristics of mass violence/genocide explicitly reinforce its aggressive, transmuting, and multifaceted character and the consequent necessity to understand the same in a nuanced manner. The book is an attempt to do so as it takes episodes of mass violence for case study from all inhabited continents, from the twentieth century to the present. The volume studies ‘consciously enforced mass violence’ through an interdisciplinary approach and suggests that dialogue aimed at reconciliation is perhaps the singular agency via which a solution could be achieved from mass violence in the global context.The volume is essential reading for postgraduate students and scholars from the interdisciplinary fields of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, History, Political Science, Sociology, World History, Human Rights, and Global Studies.

Conceptualizing Mass Violence draws attention to the conspicuous inability to inhibit mass violence in myriads forms and considers the plausible reasons for doing so. Focusing on a postcolonial perspective, the volume seeks to popularize and institutionalize the study of mass violence in South Asia.The essays explore and deliberate upon the varied aspects of mass violence, namely revisionism, reconstruction, atrocities, trauma, memorialization and literature, the need for Holocaust education, and the criticality of dialogue and reconciliation. The language, content, and characteristics of mass violence/genocide explicitly reinforce its aggressive, transmuting, and multifaceted character and the consequent necessity to understand the same in a nuanced manner. The book is an attempt to do so as it takes episodes of mass violence for case study from all inhabited continents, from the twentieth century to the present. The volume studies ‘consciously enforced mass violence’ through an interdisciplinary approach and suggests that dialogue aimed at reconciliation is perhaps the singular agency via which a solution could be achieved from mass violence in the global context.The volume is essential reading for postgraduate students and scholars from the interdisciplinary fields of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, History, Political Science, Sociology, World History, Human Rights, and Global Studies.

This volume examines the changing role which ordinary members of society played in the state-sponsored persecution of the Jews in Bukovina and Bessarabia, both during the summer of 1941, when Romania joined the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, and beyond. It establishes different patterns of civilian complicity and discusses the significance of the phenomenon in the context of the exterminatory campaign pursued by the Romanian military authorities against the Jews living in the borderlands.

The White Terror was a movement of right-wing militias that for two years actively tracked down, tortured, and murdered members of the Jewish community, as well as former supporters of the short-lived Council Republic in the years following World War I. It can be argued that this example of a programme of virulent antisemitism laid the foundations for Hungarian participation in the Holocaust.Given the rightward shift of Hungarian politics today, this book has a particular resonance in re-examining the social and historical context of the White Terror.

During the twilight years of the Ottoman Empire, the ethnic tensions between the minority populations within the empire led to the administration carrying out a systematic destruction of the Armenian people. This not only brought 2,000 years of Armenian civilisation within Anatolia to an end but was accompanied by the mass murder of Syriac and Greek Orthodox Christians.Containing a selection of papers presented at The Genocide of the Christian Populations of the Ottoman Empire and Its Aftermath (1908–1923) international conference, hosted by the Chair for Pontic Studies at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, this book draws on unpublished archival material and an innovative historiographical approach to analyze events and their legacy in comparative perspective. In order to understand the historical context of the Ottoman Genocide, it is important to study, apart from the Armenian case, the fate of the Greek and Assyrian peoples, providing a more comprehensive understanding of the complexity of the situation.This volume is primarily a research contribution but should also be valued as a supplementary text that would provide secondary reading for undergraduates and postgraduate students.

During the twilight years of the Ottoman Empire, the ethnic tensions between the minority populations within the empire led to the administration carrying out a systematic destruction of the Armenian people. This not only brought 2,000 years of Armenian civilisation within Anatolia to an end but was accompanied by the mass murder of Syriac and Greek Orthodox Christians.Containing a selection of papers presented at The Genocide of the Christian Populations of the Ottoman Empire and Its Aftermath (1908–1923) international conference, hosted by the Chair for Pontic Studies at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, this book draws on unpublished archival material and an innovative historiographical approach to analyze events and their legacy in comparative perspective. In order to understand the historical context of the Ottoman Genocide, it is important to study, apart from the Armenian case, the fate of the Greek and Assyrian peoples, providing a more comprehensive understanding of the complexity of the situation.This volume is primarily a research contribution but should also be valued as a supplementary text that would provide secondary reading for undergraduates and postgraduate students.

This book explores the multiplicity of women’s experiences in the Cambodian genocide during the four-year rule of the Khmer Rouge.The dominant discourses of genocide often speak from a patriarchal and national perspective, rendering women speechless, and yet in this volume, the female survivors of the Cambodian genocide testify not only to the specific atrocities committed during the war but also to the pre-war conditions that laid the groundwork for a gender-specific victimization of women and its continuation post-war. With the help of testimonies from Khmer women who joined the Khmer Rouge, women who experienced sexual violence during the Khmer Rouge era, women who fled the country, and the Cham women who faced expulsion from home, this book explores the diversity of women’s experiences under the Khmer Rouge. Survivors’ accounts show that a Khmer woman’s experience with the Khmer Rouge was considerably different from the experience of not only a Khmer man but also a woman from a religious or ethnic minority group or a woman who chose to join the Khmer Rouge. These differences are conveniently ignored in nationalist discourses in Cambodia and by western scholars of history and gender-based violence, and they are given even less consideration in discourses about women survivors in diaspora. Instead of forcing generalization and universalization of gendered crimes of war, Gender and Genocide in Cambodia employs feminist curiosity and closely examines women’s experiences under the Khmer Rouge from multiple vantage points.This volume is essential reading for students and scholars interested in gender and cultural studies, political history, and modern history.

This book explores the multiplicity of women’s experiences in the Cambodian genocide during the four-year rule of the Khmer Rouge.The dominant discourses of genocide often speak from a patriarchal and national perspective, rendering women speechless, and yet in this volume, the female survivors of the Cambodian genocide testify not only to the specific atrocities committed during the war but also to the pre-war conditions that laid the groundwork for a gender-specific victimization of women and its continuation post-war. With the help of testimonies from Khmer women who joined the Khmer Rouge, women who experienced sexual violence during the Khmer Rouge era, women who fled the country, and the Cham women who faced expulsion from home, this book explores the diversity of women’s experiences under the Khmer Rouge. Survivors’ accounts show that a Khmer woman’s experience with the Khmer Rouge was considerably different from the experience of not only a Khmer man but also a woman from a religious or ethnic minority group or a woman who chose to join the Khmer Rouge. These differences are conveniently ignored in nationalist discourses in Cambodia and by western scholars of history and gender-based violence, and they are given even less consideration in discourses about women survivors in diaspora. Instead of forcing generalization and universalization of gendered crimes of war, Gender and Genocide in Cambodia employs feminist curiosity and closely examines women’s experiences under the Khmer Rouge from multiple vantage points.This volume is essential reading for students and scholars interested in gender and cultural studies, political history, and modern history.

The study of genocide has been appropriate in emphasizing the centrality of the Holocaust; yet, other preceding episodes of mass violence are of great significance. Taking a transnational and transhistorical approach, this volume redresses and replaces the silencing of the Armenian Genocide.Scholarship relating to the history of denial, comparative approaches in the deportations and killings of Greeks and Armenians during the First World War, and women’s histories during the genocide and post-genocide proliferated during the centennial of the Armenian Genocide in 2015. Collectively, however, these studies have not been enough to offer a comprehensive account of the historical record, documentation, and interpretation of events during 1915-1916. This study seeks to bridge the gap, by unsettling nationalist narratives and addressing areas such as aesthetics, gender, and sexuality. By bringing forward various dimensions of the human experience, including the political, socioeconomic, cultural, social, gendered, and legal contexts within which such silencing occurred, the essays address the methodological silences and processes of selectivity and exclusion in scholarship on the Armenian Genocide.The interdisciplinary approach makes Critical Approaches to Genocide a useful resource for all students and scholars interested in the Armenian Genocide and memory studies.

This edited volume offers a new interpretation of the historically momentous 1952 Wassenaar negotiations between representatives of the Federal Republic of Germany, Israel, and the Jewish Claims Conference to negotiate reparations, compensation, and restitution in the aftermath of the Holocaust.Wassenaar 1952 marked the first time that reparations were the subject of negotiations between representatives of victims and perpetrators following mass human rights violations and genocide. The reparations program that Germany established after the Holocaust eventually became a point of reference for many calling for reparations to deal with the aftermath of other atrocities – from colonialism to slavery – in contexts as diverse as Namibia, the United States, and beyond. Combining perspectives from history, anthropology, international relations, and transitional justice, this volume reassesses the course and global legacy of these negotiations.The book’s holistic and nuanced intervention in the study of the politics of repair makes it essential reading for students of history, law, transitional justice, and political science interested in the complex topic of reparations.The Introduction of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Is the Armenian Genocide a strictly historical matter? If that is the case, why is it still a topical issue, capable of causing diplomatic rows and heated debates? The short answer would be that the century old Armenian Genocide is much more than a historical question. It emerged as a political dilemma on the international arena at the San Stefano peace conference in 1878 and has remained as such into our days. The disparity between knowledge and acknowledgement, mainly ascribable to Turkey’s official denial of the genocide, has only heightened the politicization of the Armenian question. Thus, the memories of the WWI era refuse to be relegated to the pages of history but are rather perceived as a vivid presence. This is the result of the perpetual process of politics of memory. The politics of memory is an intricate and interdisciplinary negotiation, engaging many different actors in the society who have access to a wide range of resources and measures in order to achieve their goals. By following the Armenian question during the past century up to its Centennial Commemoration in 2015, this study aims to explain why and how the politics of memory of the Armenian Genocide has kept it as a topical issue in our days.

This book deals with the Second World War in Southeastern Europe from the perspective of conditions on the ground during the conflict. The focus is on the reshaping of ethnic and religious groups in wartime, on the "top-down" and "bottom-up" dynamics of mass violence, and on the local dimensions of the Holocaust. The approach breaks with the national narratives and "top-down" political and military histories that continue to be the predominant paradigms for the Second World War in this part of Europe.

This volume brings together leading sociologists and anthropologists to break new ground in the study of cultural violence. First sketched in Raphael Lemkin’s seminal writings on genocide, and later systematically defined by peace studies scholar Johan Galtung, the concept of cultural violence seeks to explain why and how language, symbols, rituals, practices, and objects are so frequently in the crosshairs of socio-political change. Recent conflicts in the Middle East, Africa, and Central Asia, along with renewed public interest in the repertoire of violence applied to the control and erasure of indigenous populations, highlights the gaps in our understanding of why cultural violence occurs, what it consists of, and how it relates to other forms of collective violence.