Scholarship and commentary on global politics, war and genocide
Genocide is generally conceived of as violence by centralised perpetrators, usually states and regimes, towards whole population groups. In the last two decades, however, there has been more emphasis on the typical complexity of perpetrator forces, including the roles of ancillary states, paramilitaries and even civilians. Few, however, have looked unremittingly at genocide from the… Continue reading Anatomy of a Genocide by Omer Bartov – review
The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide is unusual even in the realm of international criminal law, where enforcement is generally limited due to the priority of state sovereignty and the weakness of international policing and judicial authorities. The Convention, adopted by the United Nations on 9 December 1948, defines… Continue reading The Soviet Union and the Gutting of the Genocide Convention: review
Daniel Feierstein, Genocide as a Social Practice: Reorganizing Society under the Nazis and Argentina’s Military Juntas. Translated from Spanish (Argentine) by Douglas Andrew Town. Rutgers University Press, 2014. Daniel Feierstein sent me an advance copy of the English translation of Genocidio como Practicio Social, his study of the Nazis and the Argentine military junta as… Continue reading Daniel Feierstein, ‘Reorganising Genocide’ and Argentina (review)
Entry on Genocide in Oxford Bibliographies, now online http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199756384/obo-9780199756384-0029.xml?rskey=vzO6sR&result=3&q=.
A draft of my review of this important new book, published this month in the Journal of Genocide Research, 15, 2, 2013. Paul Preston, The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain. New York: Harper, 2012. What happened in Spain in the 1930s has hardly been reckoned with in that country even eight decades… Continue reading Paul Preston, The Spanish Holocaust, review
Draft of my review of Marcia Esparza, Henry R. Huttenbach, and Daniel Feierstein (eds.), State Violence and Genocide in Latin America: The Cold War Years. London: Routledge, 2010. To appear in Democracy and Security, September 2012. Latin America was the site of much political violence in the Cold War period but - apart from the… Continue reading Genocide in Latin America during the Cold War: book review
Draft review for the Journal of Genocide Research Gerard Toal and Carl C. Dahlmann, Bosnia Remade: Ethnic Cleansing and Its Reversal, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, 978-0-19-973036-0. Paul Mojzes, Balkan Genocides: Holocaust and Ethnic Cleansing in the Twentieth Century, Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2011, 978-1-4422-0663-2. The anti-population violence during the Bosnian War of 1992-95 was,… Continue reading Review of Bosnia Remade and Balkan Genocides
A draft of my review of Christopher Powell, Barbaric Civilization: A Critical Sociology of Genocide, for the forthcoming special issue of Sociology on The Sociology of Human Rights.
George Monbiot has written an interesting take in The Guardian on 'left-wing' denial of the Srebrenica genocidal massacre and the Rwandan genocide, Left and libertarian right cohabit in the weird world of the genocide belittlers. Monbiot refers to the recent book by Edward Herman (Noam Chomsky's collaborator of four decades) and David Peterson, with a… Continue reading ‘Left-wing’ genocide denial
Three new contributions, on related themes, to the new issue of Journal of Genocide Research: 1. Jürgen Matthäus; Martin Shaw; Omer Bartov; Doris Bergen; Donald Bloxham, Donald Bloxham, The Final Solution: A Genocide (review forum), 13, 1 and 2, 2011, 107 - 152. Read a draft of my contribution. 2. Martin Shaw, Jeffrey Alexander et al., Remembering the Holocaust:… Continue reading The Holocaust, Stalin’s genocides and the future of genocide research
Martin Shaw 