ABSTRACT
The word ‘genocide’ was invented by Raphael Lemkin (1944), and its legal status was defined by the United Nations (1948) in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the light of the Nazi German suppression of Europe’s peoples and attempted extermination of its Jews. Genocide has ever since been identified with this period in theWestern political imagination, so that it seems to be primarily a phenomenon of what Eric Hobsbawm (1994) called the ‘age of extremes’, the ‘short twentieth century’ from 1914 to 1989. The Nazi genocide was preceded by the Ottoman genocide of the Armenians and the Stalinist ‘liquidation of the kulaks’, and followed by the murderous famine of Mao’s Great Leap Forward and the Cambodian genocide. In short, genocide and related policy-driven mass death seem closely linked to the era of totalitarianism and world war. Thus for many, the twentieth century was ‘the century of genocide’ and few expected the
twenty-first to be scarred by the phenomenon to anything like the same extent. The ‘global age’ ushered in by the end of the ColdWar was often envisaged as an era of peace and global order, in which totalitarianism and major wars belonged to the past and any residual tendency for regimes to commit mass atrocities would be countered by international authority, law, and intervention.However the murderous ‘ethnic cleansing’ in formerYugoslavia between 1991 and 1999 and, above all, the Rwandan genocide of 1994 – in which the rate of killing outstripped even the Holocaust – quickly shattered any idea that globalization meant the decline of genocide. These and other events have even led some to suggest that the new century might equal, if not exceed, the destructive record of the old. As investigations have revealed the extent of genocidal phenomena before the twentieth century, as well as the implication of fundamental relations of modernity in genocidal events, the new field of ‘genocide studies’ is providing support for these fears. This chapter will address the following main dimensions of this problem. First, I shall deal
with the question of definition: genocide is a contested concept and the changing manifestations of political violence in the global era have stimulated new differences over its meaning and scope, in both political and academic debate. Second, I shall address the record of genocidal violence in the post-ColdWar period and suggest some of the questions this raises for analysis. Third, I shall look at how the changed political, economic, social, and cultural relations of the global era have affected the conditions for genocide – whether they make it
more or less likely, and how changed social relations are affecting the forms of genocide in the twenty-first century. Finally, I shall ask how adequate are our resources for preventing genocide in the era of globalization.
