The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies

Genocide has scarred human societies since Antiquity. In the modern era, genocide has been a global phenomenon: from massacres in colonial America, Africa, and Australia to the Holocaust of European Jewry and mass death in Maoist China. In recent years, the discipline of 'genocide studies' has developed to offer analysis and comprehension. The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies is the first book to subject both genocide and the young discipline it has spawned to systematic, in-depth investigation. Thirty-four renowned experts study genocide through the ages by taking regional, thematic, and disciplinary-specific approaches. Chapters examine secessionist and political genocides in modern Asia. Others treat the violent dynamics of European colonialism in Africa, the complex ethnic geography of the Great Lakes region, and the structural instability of the continent's northern horn. South and North America receive detailed coverage, as do the Ottoman Empire, Nazi-occupied Europe, and post-communist Eastern Europe. Sustained attention is paid to themes like gender, memory, the state, culture, ethnic cleansing, military intervention, the United Nations, and prosecutions. The work is multi-disciplinary, featuring the work of historians, anthropologists, lawyers, political scientists, sociologists, and philosophers. Uniquely combining empirical reconstruction and conceptual analysis, this Handbook presents and analyses regions of genocide and the entire field of 'genocide studies' in one substantial volume.

About the Author

Donald Bloxham is Professor of Modern History at Edinburgh University, and works on the perpetration, punishment and representation of genocide. He is author of The Final Solution: A Genocide (2009), The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (2005), which won the 2007 Raphael Lemkin prize for genocide scholarship, Genocide on Trial: War Crimes Trials and the Formation of Holocaust History and Memory (2001), all published by Oxford University Press, and is co-author of The Holocaust: Critical Historical Approaches (2005) with Tony Kushner. A. Dirk Moses is Associate Professor of History at the University of Sydney. His interests are in world history, genocide, the United Nations, colonialism/imperialism and terror, about which he has published a number of anthologies. His book on postwar German debates about the recent past appeared as German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past (Cambridge, 2007), winner of the H-Soz-u-Kult prize for contemporary history in 2008.