New Books in Genocide Studies

As a graduate student at Ohio State in the early 1990s, I remember watching the collapse of Yugoslavia on the news almost every night and reading about it in the newspaper the next day.The first genocidal conflict covered in real time, dozens of reporters covered the war from the front lines or from a Sarajevo under siege. Not surprisingly, the media coverage was accompanied by a flood of memoirs and histories trying to explain the wars to a population that, at least in the US, knew little to nothing about the region. These were valuable studies–informative, interesting and often emotionally shattering. Istill assign them in classes today. But histories of the present, to steal a phrase from Timothy Garton Ash, are always incomplete and impressionistic.They lack both the opportunity to engage primary sources and the perspective offered by distance. Twenty years on, we’re now in a position to begin to reexamine and rethink many of the conclusions drawn in the midst of the conflict. Robert J. Donia‘s new book Radovan Karadzic: Architect of the Bosnian Genocide (Cambridge University Press, 2014)is an excellent step in this direction. Donia takes advantage of a remarkable depth of sources, including wiretap records of the phone calls Karadzic made with leading officials in Bosnia and Yugoslavia, to paint a compelling picture of a man transformed by conflict. His argument is simple, that it was the events of the late 1980s and especially early 1990s that made Karadzic into a nationalist willing to employ ethnic cleansing and genocidal massacres in his quest to secure safety and power for his people. In elevating Kardzic, Donia revises our understanding of the role and guilt of Slobodan Milosevic. His argument is detailed and well-supported, made even more compelling by Donia’s recollections of his encounters with Karadzic when Donia was a witness at before the ICTY. It’s a book anyone interested in understanding what happened in the former Yugoslavia will have to read and engage. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

Last month on New Books in Geography, historian Susan Schulten discussed the development of thematic maps in the nineteenth century. Such maps focused on a particular topic such as disease, immigration, or politics and raised questions about society and geography. In many ways, these nineteenth-century maps were the predecessors to the maps made through Geographic Information Systems (GIS). In the past decade, geographers and historians have begun using GIS for innovative historical research. Among the most innovative scholars using this technology is Anne Knowles, professor of geography at Middlebury College. Her new books Mastering Iron: The Struggle to Modernize an American Industry, 1800-1868 (University of Chicago Press, 2013) and Geographies of the Holocaust (co-edited with Tim Cole and Alberto Giordano) are superb examples of how scholars can use GIS to better understand the past. In this podcast, Professor Knowles discusses the iron industry in Antebellum America, the Holocaust, and how GIS can help illuminate previously unknown facets of both. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

In his biography of Jozef Tiso, Catholic priest and president of independent Slovakia (1939-1944), James Ward provides a deeper understanding of a man who has been both honored and vilified since his execution as a Nazi collaborator in 1947. Priest, Politician, Collaborator: Jozef Tiso and the Making of Fascist Slovakia (Cornell University Press, 2013) is also a fascinating look at Catholicism, nationalism and human rights as moral standards in 20th century East Central Europe. The book explores both the political and social contexts that shaped Tiso and the choices he made in attempts to shape the country in which he lived – whether Habsburg Hungary, interwar Czechoslovakia or a Slovak republic.  Ward reveals, as well, how the fight over Tiso’s legacy in post-communist Slovakia mirrored the polarization of Slovak politics at the end of the 20th century. Priest, Politician, Collaborator was the 2014 Honorable Mention for the Reginald Zelnik Book Prize in History from the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

As a teenager, I heard or read or saw (in films or on television) story after story about the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police. Despite the occasional ‘corrective’ offered by Hogan’s Heroes, the impression given was that the Gestapo were all knowing and ever present. We now know differently, of course. But knowing that the Nazi state functioned as much or more through consensus as coercion has led historians to think again about the way in which this consensus was created and sustained. And it has produced a series of books addressing the question of what this consensus meant for policy making and execution. Thomas Kuehne‘s fabulous new book has contributed greatly to this discussion. Belonging and Genocide: Hitler’s Community, 1918-1945 (Yale University Press, 2013), looks hard at the role belonging played in the emergence and success of the Nazi Party. He tells us how important the desire for a sense of community was in the way people responded to the the crises of the 20s and 30s. And he tells us how this desire for community shaped efforts to exclude people who were not part of the community, whether through isolation, removal, or destruction. It’s a great book. Skype was not as cooperative as I would have liked during the interview and there’s a low buzz present at times. The sound is not ideal, but it shouldn’t be too disruptive, and Kuehne’s work and words are fascinating. So I hope you’ll give it a listen.You’ll be glad you did. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

The field of genocide studies is surprisingly young. As Sam Totten and I discussed in an interview earlier this year, it dates back to the late 1980s or early 1990s. That makes the field about 25 years old. That’s about the time it takes for a generation of scholars to lay out their ideas and to train new researchers to follow in their footsteps. And, as it usually goes, that new generation often takes issue with past assumptions and conclusions. It shouldn’t surprise us, then, that a variety of debates have emerged in the past decade. Scholars have clashed over the canon of genocide studies, about the degree to which the Holocaust should be viewed as an ideal type against which other genocides are measured, over the proper balance between academic research and activism and many other issues. Joyce Apsel and Ernesto Verdeja have taken this opportunity to compile a survey of the state of the field at this contested time. Their book Genocide Matters: Ongoing Issues and Emerging Perspectives (Routledge, 2013) offers its contributors a chance to chart the future course of the field. And it offers its readers the opportunity to engage these debates themselves. I spoke with Ernesto about all of this in today’s interview, which was recorded earlier this fall. He’s an engaging speaker with lots to say on the topic. I hope you enjoy the interview. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

What is justice for a man who supervised the interrogation and killing of thousands? Especially a man who now claims to be a Christian and to be, at least in some ways and cases, repentant for his crimes? Thierry Cruvellier has written a fascinating book about the trial of ‘Duch’ the director of the S-21 prison and interrogation center in Cambodia during the rule of the Khmer Rouge. Cruvellier watched virtually the entire trial and interviewed many of the participants and observers. The Master of Confessions: The Making of a Khmer of Rouge Torturer (Ecco, 2014) is both history and philosophy, a deeply moving attempt to understand Duch and his actions. Cruvellier offers the reader an finely crafted narrative of S-21, of the life of Duch and of the place Duch occupied in a genocidal structure. But he also wrestles with deeply philosophical questions about our ability to really understand other people’s actions, about the nature of justice in the aftermath of mass violence, and about the role of courts and trials. It’s a book that gets under your skin in the best kind of way. A journalist, Cruvellier earlier wrote a similar account of witnessing the trial of perpetrators from the Rwandan genocide. As we discuss in the interview, the experience of listening to accounts of atrocities day after day has taken a toll on him, as it would on anyone. But the book that resulted is profoundly moving and unsettling. I hope our discussion offers a taste of the ideas and understanding his book offers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

I live and work in the state of Kansas in the US.  We think of ourselves as living in tornado alley and orient our schedules in the spring around the weather report.  Earthquakes are something that happen somewhere else. Recently, however, our southern neighbor, Oklahoma, has been rocked repeatedly by minor earthquakes.  Why this is so has been the subject of endless speculation.  In the midst of this speculation, one occasionally hears reference to the fact that major earthquakes are frequently preceded by a series of minor earthquakes that can, after the fact, be seen as signs that something big is coming.  All too often, however, this is only recognizable in retrospect. Genocide studies has something of an earthquake problem.  Countless books (well, I suppose you could count them, but you get the point) have proposed theories of causation and prediction.  Many of these books lay out a thoughtful, historically rich set of signs that indicate genocide is possible.  All too often, however, these theories suggest ways of predicting when genocides are likely, but not ways of predicting the speed at which conflicts accelerate or die down, nor a way to discern which crises will explode and which will be resolved more or less peacefully. Deborah Mayersen has set out to try to move us toward a solution of the earthquake problem. In her new book On the Path to Genocide: Armenia and Rwanda Reexamined (Berghahn Books, 2014), she lays out a theory explaining what makes political crises explode and to identify key points at which the pace of events accelerates dramatically.  Using Rwanda and Armenia as her case studies, she examines a rich set of causal factors to craft a thoughtful explanatory framework.  Her work is careful, historically informed and theoretically elegant.  It may not be the end of the story.  But it is an important step in helping expand our understanding of the ways crises become genocide. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

In 1994 I was in graduate school, trying hard to juggle teaching, getting started on my dissertation and having something of a real life. The real life part suffered most of all.  But every once in a while, the world around me would startle me out of my cave and remind me that life was proceeding without me. The genocide in Rwanda was one of these events. Along with the ongoing ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, it made me question whether academics was a meaningful career choice and what I could and should do right then, in the midst of massive violence against innocents. And then, by the time I had actually started thinking hard about it, the genocide in Rwanda was over.  As most people now know, something like 800,000 people were killed in about a hundred days. July was the 20th anniversary of the end of the genocide.  To mark that occasion, we’re going to depart from the usual format of the show.  Instead of interviewing an author about his or her book, we’re going to spend an hour or so thinking more broadly about events in Rwanda and how we now understand them.  Three experts on the Rwandan genocide will help us do so:  Lee Ann Fujii, Scott Straus and Lars Waldorf.  During the discussion we’ll move from the motivations of the killers to the ways in which the genocide has been remembered (or not) to what movies and books they would recommend for people who want to learn more. The podcast is, however, to some degree inspired by a single book, Alison des Forges remarkable Leave None to Tell the Story, published in 1999.  The book is a tour de force of careful research and analysis and set the direction for research on Rwanda.  Nevertheless, it is fifteen years old.  Since then, we’ve had hundreds of studies examining the genocide and its aftermath. So today w’re going to spend a few minutes assessing that new research, using the broad question of “What do we know about Rwanda 20 years after the genocide?”  I hope you enjoy the discussion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

Works in the field of genocide studies tend to fall into one of a few camps.  Some are emotional and personal.  Others are historical and narrative.  Still others are intentionally activist and aimed at changing policy or decisions. Martin Shaw‘s works fit into a fourth category.  A historical sociologist, Shaw brings the very best of the social sciences to bear on the subject.  His work is carefully reasoned, theoretically informed and intensely analytical.  He’s driven to understand how the incidents of mass violence fit together into particular categories and into the broader context of a changing world. His thinking about genocide studies has influenced the field immensely.  A decade ago, he began considering the question of the relationship between war and genocide.  Four years later, he provided a theoretically rich discussion of the nature of genocide as a term and as an event. Now he moves on to consider the way in which the changes in the organization of the modern world have shaped the prevalence and nature of mass killing.  In Genocide and International Relations: Changing Patterns in the Transitions of the Late Modern World (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Shaw surveys centuries of world history to understand the patterns and relationships that drive genocide and mass violence.  Packed with observations and insight, the book demands and rewards attentive reading and reflection.  It’s a short book, but one that lingers long after you’ve finished reading. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

Most of the authors I’ve interviewed for this show have addressed episodes in the past, campaigns of mass violence that occurred long ago, often well-before the author was born. Today’s show is different. In his book Genocide by Attrition: The Nuba Mountains of Sudan (Transaction Publishers, 2012), Samuel Totten addresses the violence against the people of the Nuba Mountains of the Sudan.  This violence was part of a broader civil war and unrest in the Sudan in the 1980s and 90s.  Totten makes a convincing case that, in the Nuba, it reached a level reasonably labeled genocidal.  To demonstrate this, Totten provides a succinct but thorough history of the conflict. But the heart of the book is a series of interviews with victims of the tragedy.  Totten collected the interviews himself and uses them to demonstrate the nature and consequences of the conflict. Our interview won’t stop with the book, however, for conflict has recently broken out again in the region.  Scholars differ about how to label the new violence (Totten himself prefers to avoid calling the new fighting genocidal).  But there’s no question many of the human tragedies of the 80s and 90s have reemerged.  Totten has written extensively about this new conflict.  We’ll use of one these articles, from the recent issue of Genocide Studies International, as the basis for our discussion of current events. Totten has been active in the field of genocide studies since its inception and brings an enormous wealth of information and passion to the subject.  I trust the interview will convey his commitment to his discipline and to the victims of the violence he studies. Also.  I talked with Sam this week and he tells me he’s just finished a major revision of the book we discussed in this interview, almost doubling its length.  The second edition will presumably be out soon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies