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GENOCIDE

Sociologyindex, Sociology Books 2012

Genocide is systematic killing of an entire ethnic community.

"Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be the disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups." - Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944).

The Demographics of Genocide: Refugees and Territorial Loss in the Mass Murder of European Jewry - Manus I. Midlarsky, Department of Political Science, Rutgers University,
Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 42, No. 4, 375-391 (2005) © 2005 International Peace Research Institute, Oslo
This study seeks to distinguish between instances where genocide occurred and others where it might have been expected to occur but did not. Territorial loss, a corollary refugee influx, and a resulting contraction of socio-economic space are suggested to provide that distinction. Four analytic perspectives based on emotional reactions, class envy, prospect theory, and territoriality indicate the critical importance of loss. The theory is examined in the context of the mass murder of European Jewry including, of course, Germany and Austria, and all European German allies that allowed an indigenous genocidal impulse, willingness to comply with German genocidal policies, or an ability to resist German pressures for Jewish deportation. Three instances of perpetrating states - Italy, Vichy France, and Romania - emerge from the analysis. The latter two governments willingly collaborated with the Germans in victimizing their own Jewish citizenry, while Italy was on a genocidal path just prior to the German occupation. All five states mentioned above were found to experience considerable territorial loss and a contraction of socio-economic space. Bulgaria and Finland, on the other hand, actually expanded their borders at the start of the war and saved virtually all of their Jewish citizens. The importance of loss is demonstrated not only cross-sectionally, in the comparison between the five victimizers, on the one hand, and Bulgaria and Finland, on the other, but also diachronically, in the changing behavior over time of the genocidal and perpetrating states. - jpr.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/42/4/375

Democracy, Power, Genocide, and Mass Murder 
R. J. Rummel, University of Hawaii at Manoa 
Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 39, No. 1, 3-26 (1995) © 1995 SAGE Publications
From 1900 to 1987, state, quasi-state, and stateless groups have killed in democide (genocide, massacres, extrajudicial executions, and the like) nearly 170,000,000 people. Case studies and quantitative analysis show that ethnic, racial, and religious diversity, economic development, levels of education, and cultural differences do not account for this killing. Rather, democide is best explained by the degree to which a regime is empowered along a democratic to totalitarian dimension and, second, the extent to which it is characteristically involved in war or rebellion. Combining these results with those that show that democracies do not make war on each other, the more democratic two nations are the less foreign violence between them, and that the more democratic a regime the less internal violence, strongly suggests that democracy is a general method of nonviolence. - jcr.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/39/1/3

Testing the Double-Genocide Thesis for Central and Southern Rwanda 
Philip Verwimp, Economics Department Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium 
Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 47, No. 4, 423-442 (2003) © 2003 SAGE Publications
Results of a research project with household-level data on the demographic impact of genocide and civil war in Rwanda are reported. The survey includes demographic and criminological data on 352 peasant households that were part of a large household survey project before the genocide. The absolute number of Hutu killed in the sample is half of the number of Tutsi killed. The statistical and econometric results show that the killing pattern among Hutu and Tutsi was different; Tutsi members of the same household were often killed on the same day and in the same place. The effect of the arrival of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) at the survey sites on the survival chances of Hutu and Tutsi is estimated. - jcr.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/47/4/423

Genocide: A Case for the Responsibility of the Bystander 
Arne Johan Vetlesen, Department of Philosophy, University of Oslo 
Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 37, No. 4, 519-532 (2000) DOI: 10.1177/0022343300037004007 © 2000 International Peace Research Institute, Oslo
In this article, the case of Bosnia is used to raise important theoretical and practical questions concerning the role of third parties in preventing and punishing genocide. After the massacre at Srebrenica, a UN-declared `safe area', the debate over complicity in genocide on the part of UN personnel has gained particular urgency, and much of the discussion here is related to that debate. The article also draws attention to the role of intellectuals in preparing for genocide by way of ideological hate speech, a role of crucial importance in top-down orchestrated genocidal campaigns such as those seen in Rwanda and Bosnia. On the basis of the empirical material presented, it is argued that considerable responsibility resides with knowledgeable third-party bystanders to unfolding acts of genocide. The article also tries to distinguish between different kinds of bystanders, and it attempts to define and discuss what it means - and what it should imply - to be a contemporary bystander to genocidal warfare. - http://jpr.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/37/4/519

Gender, Genocide, and Ethnicity
The Legacies of Older Armenian American Mothers 
Margaret M. Manoogian, Ohio University, Athens 
Alexis J. Walker, Leslie N. Richards, Oregon State University, Corvallis 
Journal of Family Issues, Vol. 28, No. 4, 567-589 (2007) © 2007 SAGE Publications
Women use legacies to help family members articulate family identity, learn family history, and provide succeeding generations with information about family culture. Using feminist standpoint theory and the life-course perspective, this qualitative study examined the intergenerational transmissions that 30 older Armenian American mothers received and transmitted to succeeding generations within the sociohistorical experience of genocide. Mothers passed on legacies that included family stories, rituals/activities, and possessions. Because of multiple losses during the Armenian Genocide, they emphasized legacies that symbolized connection to family, underscored family cohesion, and accentuated ethnic identity. Tensions were evident as well because women's sense of responsibility for legacies clashed with their limited cultural knowledge, few inherited possessions, and the inevitable assimilation of their children and grandchildren into the dominant U.S. culture. - jfi.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/28/4/567

Genocide as Transgression 
Dan Stone, ROYAL HOLLOWAY, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON, UK 
European Journal of Social Theory, Vol. 7, No. 1, 45-65 (2004) © 2004 SAGE Publications
The origins of genocide have been sought by scholars in many areas of human experience: politics, religion, culture, economics, demography, ideology. All these of course are valid explanations, and go a long way to getting to grips with the objective conditions surrounding genocide. But, as Berel Lang put it some time ago, there remains an inexplicable gap between the idea and the act of mass murder. This article aims to be a step towards bridging that gap by adding a human dimension to the existing explanations. Building on Roger Caillois’s anthropological analysis of ‘war as festival’, Georges Bataille’s concept of society’s ‘excess energy’, and Emile Durkheim’s idea of ‘collective effervescence’, and connecting these terms to those used explicitly in relation to the Holocaust by Dominick LaCapra (‘scapegoating’ and the ‘carnivalesque’) and Saul Friedlnder (‘Rausch’ or ‘ecstasy’), I argue that prior to and during any act of genocide there occurs a heightening of community feeling, to the point at which this ecstatic sense of belonging permits, indeed demands, a normally forbidden act of transgression in order to ‘safeguard’ the community by killing the designated ‘threatening’ group. This article is a theoretical starting point aimed at stimulating discussion, in which I refer to the Nanjing and My Lai massacres and the genocides in Nazi Germany and Rwanda to show where empirical research is needed to illustrate this concept of ‘genocide as transgression’. - est.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/7/1/45

On the Social Construction of Moral Universals 
The `Holocaust' from War Crime to Trauma Drama 
Jeffrey C. Alexander, YALE UNIVERSITY, USA
European Journal of Social Theory, Vol. 5, No. 1, 5-85 (2002) © 2002 SAGE Publications
The following is simultaneously an essay in sociological theory, in cultural sociology, and in the empirical reconstruction of postwar Western history. Per theory, it introduces and specifies a model of cultural trauma - a model that combines a strong cultural program with concern for institutional and power effects - and applies it to large-scale collectivities over extended periods of time. Per cultural sociology, the essay demonstrates that even the most calamitous and biological of social facts - the prototypical evil of genocidal mass murder - can be understood only inside of symbolic codes and narratives; that these frames change substantially depending on social circumstances; and that this culture process is critical to establishing understandings of moral responsibility. Empirically, this essay documents, in social and cultural detail, using both secondary and primary sources, how it was that the `Holocaust' gradually became the dominant symbolic representation of evil in the late twentieth century, and what its consequences have been for the development of a supra-national moral universalism that may restrict genocidal acts in the future. - est.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/5/1/5

Criminology and the Holocaust: Xenophobia, Evolution, and Genocide 
Augustine Brannigan 
Crime & Delinquency, Vol. 44, No. 2, 257-276 (1998) © 1998 SAGE Publications
Modern theories of crime and delinquency tend to be individualistic in their level of analysis and tend to focus on consensus crimes. The phenomenon of ethnic genocide is virtually impossible to examine within such parameters. Recent histories of the Holocaust by Browning and Goldhagen suggest that it was carried out by ordinary citizens who supported its objectives, not by dysfunctional psychopaths. Nor was it carried out by individuals intimidated by powerful authority structures. This article reviews the evidence from the new historiographies and proposes a theory of genocide based on xenophobia developed in recent accounts of evolutionary psychology. - cad.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/44/2/257

Anthropology and Genocide in the Balkans 
An Analysis of Conceptual Practices of Power 
Thomas Cushman, Wellesley College, USA tcushman@wellesley.edu 
Anthropological Theory, Vol. 4, No. 1, 5-28 (2004) © 2004 SAGE Publications
This article examines scholarly discourse on the wars in the former Yugoslavia. It focuses on relativistic arguments put forward by anthropologists and shows how such accounts mask and elide central historical realities of the conflict. Relativistic accounts of serious modern conflicts often mirror and offer legitimation to the accounts put forth by perpetrators. In this case, several leading accounts of the wars in the former Yugoslavia display a strong affinity to those asserted by Serbian nationalists. The article addresses the issue of ethics and intellectual responsibility in anthropological fieldwork in situations of conflict and the problem of the political uses of anthropological research. - ant.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/4/1/5

Genocide in the African Diaspora 
United States, Brazil, and the Need for a Holistic Research and Political Method 
Joćo H. Costa Vargas, University of Texas at Austin, costavargas@mail.utexas.edu 
Cultural Dynamics, Vol. 17, No. 3, 267-290 (2005) © 2005 SAGE Publications
Inspired by the multidimensional concept of genocide suggested by Patterson and his collaborators in 1951, I advance an argument for the necessity of coming to terms with the deadly, often state- and society-sanctioned, yet seldom overt contemporary campaigns against peoples of African descent. Approached from various angles, genocide allows us to understand seemingly disparate phenomena as they relate to each other, contributing to the continued oppression and death of Black people in Africa and its diaspora. Building on critical analyses of and comparisons between the US and Brazil, I propose a heuristic framework around which we can not only recognize but also combat the multiple forms that anti-Black genocide has acquired in late capitalist polities. - cdy.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/17/3/267

Genocide and the Social Production of Immorality 
RUTH JAMIESON 
Keele University, UK 
Theoretical Criminology, Vol. 3, No. 2, 131-146 (1999) © 1999 SAGE Publications
This article is an exploration of two different instances of genocide of the late 20th century—the mass rape of women in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1992 (in which women constituted the primary victims) and the genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda in 1994 (in which women were active perpetrators). The connected objectives of the article are, first, to consider the relationship between genocide and other forms of social exclusion and, second, to explore the limits of some forms of criminological commonsense, for example in the field of victimology, and these contemporary instances of genocide. The article then concludes with an assessment of the different analytical approaches to what Zygmunt Bauman calls `the social production of immorality'. - tcr.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/3/2/131

Genocide or a Failure to Gel? Racism, History and Nationalism in Australian Talk 
MARTHA AUGOUSTINOS, UNIVERSITY OF ADELAIDE 
KEITH TUFFIN, MASSEY UNIVERSITY 
MARK RAPLEY, MURDOCH UNIVERSITY 
Discourse & Society, Vol. 10, No. 3, 351-378 (1999) © 1999 SAGE Publications
In a context of wide media attention to public debates about the social, political and epistemic entitlements of different groups within Australian society, an understanding of the rhetorical resources and the discursive work doen by differing constructions of `race', has become an important local issue. This article examines data from discussions between two groups of (non-indigenous) university students on a range of contemporary issues concerning race relations in Australia. Participants drew on four common discursive themes when discussing Aboriginal people. These were: an imperialist narrative of Australian history exculpatory of colonialism; an economic-rationalist/neo-liberal discourse of `productivity' and entitlement managing accountability for a contemporary Aboriginal `plight'; a local discourse of balance and even-handedness which discounted the seriousness of discrimination and racism in Australia; and a nationalist discourse stressing the necessity of all members collectively identifying as `Australian'. These interpretative resources are illustrated and discussed in terms of their rhetorical organization and social consequences. The international pervasiveness of a range of modern racist tropes and the local cultural specificity of their working-up are discussed. - das.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/10/3/351

The First Genocide: Carthage, 146 BC - Ben Kiernan, Yale University 
Diogenes, Vol. 51, No. 3, 27-39 (2004) DOI: 10.1177/0392192104043648 © 2004 International Council for Philosophy and Humanistic Studies
Some features of the ideology motivating the Roman destruction of Carthage in 146 BC have surprisingly modern echoes in 20th-century genocides. Racial, religious or cultural prejudices, gender and other social hierarchies, territorial expansionism, and an idealization of cultivation all characterize the thinking of Cato the Censor, like that of more recent perpetrators. The tragedy of Carthage, its details lost with most of the works of Livy and other ancient authors, and concealed behind allegory in Virgil’s Aeneid, became known to early modern Europeans from briefer ancient accounts rediscovered only in the 15th century, as Europe’s own expansion began. - dio.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/51/3/27

Women, Genocide, and Memory 
The Ethics of Feminist Ethnography in Holocaust Research 
Janet Liebman Jacobs, University of Colorado 
Gender & Society, Vol. 18, No. 2, 223-238 (2004) © 2004 Sociologists for Women in Society
This article explores the ethical dilemmas of doing a feminist ethnography of gender and Holocaust memory. In response to the conflicts the author experienced as both a participant/Jewish woman and an observer/feminist ethnographer, she engaged in a critical examination of her research methods and goals that led to an exploration into the complex moral issues that inform research on women and genocide specifically and feminist ethnographies of violence more generally. Drawing on her fieldwork at Holocaust sites in Eastern Europe, she identified three sources of methodological tension that developed during the research process: Role conflicts in the research setting, gender selectivity in studies of ethnic and racial violence, and the sexual objectification of women in academic discourse on violence and genocide. Each of these ethical tensions is examined from the standpoint of research on gender and the Holocaust. - gas.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/18/2/223

The `Stolen Generations' and Cultural Genocide 
The Forced Removal of Australian Indigenous Children from their Families and its Implications for the Sociology of Childhood 
ROBERT VAN KRIEKEN, University of Sydney 
Childhood, Vol. 6, No. 3, 297-311 (1999) © 1999 SAGE Publications
From around the turn of 20th century up to the 1970s, Australian government authorities assumed legal guardianship of all Indigenous children and removed large numbers of them from their families in order to `assimilate' them into European society and culture. This policy has been described as `cultural genocide', even though at the time it was presented by state and church authorities as being `in the best interests' of Aboriginal children. This article outlines the results of a study of the development of the policy of forced child removal, its antecedents, its surrounding philosophy and politics and the emergence of a more critical understanding of it in recent years, as well as examining the more general implications of this history for the sociology of childhood. - chd.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/6/3/297

Dialogue Toward Agenocide: Encountering the Other in the Context of Genocide - Samson Munn 
Journal of Humanistic Psychology, Vol. 46, No. 3, 281-302 (2006) © 2006 SAGE Publications
What modes of interaction exist between historically heinous human behavior, one’s relationship to such history, one’s identity and one’s responses to counter such behavior and its effects? Of many paths to take and levers to use to engender peace and healing, a vital element constitutes reciprocally respectful efforts at societal bridging. Intensive dialogue group projects and their coordination are described. Participants are personally related to the trauma’s "sides," such as sons and daughters of Holocaust survivors meeting with those of Nazi perpetrators, or Northern Irish Catholic Republicans meeting with Protestant Unionists (and with Britishers). Founded in part on emotional responsibility, the eventual goal is a multiplicative effect toward a culture and consciousness of peace, eliciting tangible responses. The approaches are generally nonreligious, not deliberately therapeutic per se, cost free, and apolitical. The Austrian Encounter is discussed in depth; however, other groups are also introduced. The essence of the work reflects Emmanuel Levinas’s views of the Other, of responsibility, and of dialogue as philosophical truth as process. - jhp.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/46/3/281

Paradigms of Genocide: The Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide, and Contemporary Mass Destructions -ROBERT MELSON 
The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 548, No. 1, 156-168 (1996) DOI: 10.1177/0002716296548001012 © 1996 American Academy of Political & Social Science
When confronted with mass death and forced deportations, the contemporary world community has often reached for the Holocaust as a paradigmatic case of genocide in order both to make sense of and to condemn current events. This article suggests that the Armenian Genocide sets a more accurate precedent than the Holocaust for current mass disasters, especially such as those in Nigeria and in the former Yugoslavia, which are the products of nationalism. Conversely, the Holocaust is a prototype for genocidal movements that transcend nationalism and are motivated by ideologies that have global scope. - ann.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/548/1/156

Ethnic Conflict and Genocide: Reflections on Ethnic Cleansing in the Former Yugoslavia 
DAMIR MIRKOVI 
The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 548, No. 1, 191-199 (1996) © 1996 American Academy of Political & Social Science
Yugoslav society, held together for 45 years by Communists, began to disintegrate in the 1980s. Disintegrative processes have brought in their wake the rise of nationalism as the younger generations, led by a new privileged class of technobureaucrats, could not ride any more on the worn-out ideology of self-managing socialism. The transition from nationalism to ethnic cleansing proved to be very easy and short because ethnic cleansing is not a new phenomenon in the Balkans. During World War II, both the Croatian nationalists, Ustashas, and the Serbian royalists, the Chetniks, used this genocidal method—the Ustashas, to "purify" Croatia of Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies, and the Chetniks, to "cleanse" Muslims from eastern Bosnia. In fact, it is a Balkan tradition to use genocide in order to create pure ethnic territories. This article explores the concept of ethnic cleansing in its broader meaning as cultural genocide or ethnocide and in its narrower connotation as genocidal annihilation of group members. - ann.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/548/1/191

Impartiality and evil - A reconsideration provoked by genocide in Bosnia 
Arne Johan Vetlesen, Department of Philosophy, University of Oslo, Norway 
Philosophy & Social Criticism, Vol. 24, No. 5, 1-35 (1998) © 1998 SAGE Publications
Confronted with Adolf Eichmann, evildoer par excellence, Hannah Arendt sought in vain for any 'depth' to the evil he had wrought. How is the philosopher to approach evil ? Is the celebrated criterion of impartiality ill-equipped to guide judgment when its object is evil - as exhibited, for instance, in the recent genocide in Bosnia? This essay questions the ability of the neutral 'third party' to respond adequately to evil from a standpoint of avowed impartiality. Discussing the different roles of perpetrator and victim, I argue that in any knowledge about evil the victim is the supremely privileged source; this being so, the non-party to the occurrence of evil must privilege the testimony of the victimized - even at the cost of strict impartiality of moral judgment. - psc.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/24/5/1?ck=nck

Genocide and Mass Murder 

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