Hidden Genocides

Why are some genocides prominently remembered while others are ignored, hidden, or denied? Consider the Turkish campaign denying the Armenian genocide, followed by the Armenian movement to recognize the violence. Similar movements are building to acknowledge other genocides that have long remained out of sight in the media, such as those against the Circassians, Greeks, Assyrians, the indigenous peoples in the Americas and Australia, and the violence that was the precursor to and the aftermath of the Holocaust. The contributors to this collection look at these cases and others from a variety of perspectives. These essays cover the extent to which our biases, our ways of knowing, our patterns of definition, our assumptions about truth, and our processes of remembering and forgetting as well as the characteristics of generational transmission, the structures of power and state ideology, and diaspora have played a role in hiding some events and not others. Noteworthy among the collection’s coverage is whether the trade in African slaves was a form of genocide and a discussion not only of Hutus brutalizing Tutsi victims in Rwanda, but of the execution of moderate Hutus as well. Hidden Genocides is a significant contribution in terms of both descriptive narratives and interpretations to the emerging subfield of critical genocide studies. Contributors: Daniel Feierstein, Donna-Lee Frieze, Krista Hegburg, Alexander Laban Hinton, Adam Jones, A. Dirk Moses, Chris M. Nunpa, Walter Richmond, Hannibal Travis, and Elisa von Joeden-Forgey

"Genocide" may be the most powerful word in the English language. What is the significance and relevance of this formative concept today? In an extraordinarily wide-ranging collection of essays and interviews, Adam Jones, one of the world's leading genocide scholars, explores the uses and controversies surrounding the term that Raphael Lemkin coined during the Second World War to describe and prohibit mass atrocities against defined human groups. In a style that is learned but always accessible and engaging, Jones addresses key historical and contemporary issues, such as: What were the motivations and proclaimed justifications for genocide in the "long nineteenth century" that shaped our modern world? How can "humanitarian" interventions in genocide avoid sliding into new imperialism? What are the connections between religion and genocide? How can the gender variable in genocide perpetration and victimization be understood? A wide range of historical and contemporary genocides and crimes against humanity, from the eighteenth-century slave rebellion in Haiti to Myanmar's destruction of the Rohingya, and to the forms of structural and systemic violence that Jones argues should be encompassed by any global-historical understanding of genocide. Sites of Genocide is illustrated with photos from Jones's own collection and other sources. It will be of interest to all students and scholars of human rights and for general readers seeking a point of entry to the rich and provocative debates in comparative genocide studies.

Genocide has been called the ‘crime of crimes’ and an ‘odious scourge.’ With millions of victims in the last century alone, it is one of the great moral and political challenges of our age. Despite the challenges, such human cruelty has not stopped. The 21st century is recording its first genocide in Cameroon with only a scanty few raising a finger. The significance of the ‘odious scourge’ has compelled Tatah Mentan to research on the trajectory of the ‘scourge’ in Africa over the past centuries. The targeted ongoing mass killings in Cameroon, like those of Rwanda before, have driven the scholar to expand his focus beyond the Holocaust, which had long been the primary case study. In this book, Tatah Mentan explains that these cases were not merely a human catastrophe, nor an atavistic reversion to the barbarism of a past epoch, but rather an event produced by the unfolding of the logic of capitalism itself. This book therefore critically explores the essence of capitalism as genocide in Africa and its consequences on Africans during their colonisation and incorporation into the European-dominated racialised capitalist world system in the late 18th century. It uses multidimensional, comparative methods, and critical approaches to explain the dynamic interplay among social structures, human agency, and terror to explain the connection between structural capitalist terrorism and the emergence of the capitalist world system. Tatah Mentan proposes a genuine participatory democratic alternative to the unending genocide nightmares. Nurturing participatory attitudes, would facilitate and reinforce self-management, and educate and empower individuals and dispossessed and under-represented communities to seek self-determination and democratic participation in the political arena. Tatah Mentan concludes that the same fundamental commitments that urge humanity to promote participatory political democracy should compel them to promote truly inclusive economic democracy as well. Political economists, historians, students, corporate managers and policy makers at national and international levels are invited to share the insights of this book.

Winner of the L. Carl Brown AIMS Book Prize in North African Studies 2022 This original research on the forgotten Libyan genocide specifically recovers the hidden history of the fascist Italian concentration camps (1929–1934) through the oral testimonies of Libyan survivors. This book links the Libyan genocide through cross-cultural and comparative readings to the colonial roots of the Holocaust and genocide studies. Between 1929 and 1934, thousands of Libyans lost their lives, directly murdered and victim to Italian deportations and internments. They were forcibly removed from their homes, marched across vast tracks of deserts and mountains, and confined behind barbed wire in 16 concentration camps. It is a story that Libyans have recorded in their Arabic oral history and narratives while remaining hidden and unexplored in a systematic fashion, and never in the manner that has allowed us to comprehend and begin to understand the extent of their existence. Based on the survivors’ testimonies, which took over ten years of fieldwork and research to document, this new and original history of the genocide is a key resource for readers interested in genocide and Holocaust studies, colonial and postcolonial studies, and African and Middle Eastern studies.

Using autobiographical accounts from multiple sclerosis victims, the author portrays the difficulties and frustrations caused by the disease.

Unlike the Holocaust, Rwanda, Cambodia, or Armenia, scant attention has been paid to the human tragedies analyzed in this book. From German Southwest Africa (now Namibia), Burundi, and eastern Congo to Tasmania, Tibet, and Kurdistan, from the mass killings of the Roms by the Nazis to the extermination of the Assyrians in Ottoman Turkey, the mind reels when confronted with the inhuman acts that have been consigned to oblivion. Forgotten Genocides: Oblivion, Denial, and Memory gathers eight essays about genocidal conflicts that are unremembered and, as a consequence, understudied. The contributors, scholars in political science, anthropology, history, and other fields, seek to restore these mass killings to the place they deserve in the public consciousness. Remembrance of long forgotten crimes is not the volume's only purpose—equally significant are the rich quarry of empirical data offered in each chapter, the theoretical insights provided, and the comparative perspectives suggested for the analysis of genocidal phenomena. While each genocide is unique in its circumstances and motives, the essays in this volume explain that deliberate concealment and manipulation of the facts by the perpetrators are more often the rule than the exception, and that memory often tends to distort the past and blame the victims while exonerating the killers. Although the cases discussed here are but a sample of a litany going back to biblical times, Forgotten Genocides offers an important examination of the diversity of contexts out of which repeatedly emerge the same hideous realities.

Argues that North American settler colonialism included episodes of genocide of Indigenous peoples as defined by the United Nations Genocide Convention.

This book defines genocide, distinguishing it from mass murder, war crimes, and other atrocities; allows readers to grasp the magnitude of the crime of genocide across time and throughout human civilization; and facilitates an understanding of new and potential cases of genocide as they occur. Recently, the topic of intervention against genocide has received attention in global politics and the national political discourse of major countries. The challenges in confronting genocide and attempting to make a positive change are manifold. Simply establishing an agreement on the legal definition of genocide—and distinguishing it from genocidal massacres, war crimes, and other crimes against humanity—is problematic. This book provides a valuable resource for students, scholars, and journalists when public awareness of, and interest in, genocide has reached unprecedented levels. Written in an accessible way for a broad readership, the book makes use of case studies to enable an understanding of emerging and potential genocide with the necessary depth of coverage to evaluate critically the ways in which the United Nations and national governments engage them. Readers will understand the essential ingredients of genocide, from antiquity to the present, and grasp the extent of the crime across human history. A variety of case studies provides a means to measure genocidal magnitudes in terms of their intent and motive, geographical extent, pace, method, participants, outcomes, legacies, punishments, and reparations. A unique and crucial feature of the book is that it gives as much attention to the differences among genocides—for example, between a large-scale genocide like the Holocaust and the extermination of a 500-person Amazonian tribe—while still treating both within a single conceptual framework of genocide, without "discounting" the smaller case.