New Books In Genocide Studies

For many people Cambodia’s modern history is overshadowed by the devastation and horror of the Khmer Rouge era between 1975 and 1979. Yet arguably the period since the fall of the Khmer Rouge has been much more significant in shaping the Cambodia of today. Perhaps more than any other Southeast Asian country Cambodia’s political leaders have had to deal with much more powerful outsiders: France, Vietnam, Thailand, the US, China, and the “international community”. No-one has been more adept at playing this political game than Cambodia’s remarkable prime minister, Hun Sen, now Southeast Asia’s longest serving political leader. Despite the international community’s best efforts since the early 1990s to fashion Cambodia into a model liberal democracy, Hun Sen and the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) have eliminated all opposition to create a highly authoritarian state. Yet at the same time, and despite huge disparities in wealth, Cambodia is arguably more stable and prosperous than at any time in its traumatic moder

Holocaust movies have become an important segment of world cinema and the de-facto Holocaust education for many. One quarter of all American-produced Holocaust-related feature films have won or been nominated for at least one Oscar. In fact, from 1945 through 1991, half of all American Holocaust features were nominated. Yet most Holocaust movies have fallen through the cracks and few have been commercially successful. This book explores these trends—and many others—with a comprehensive guide to hundreds of films and made-for-television movies. From Anne Frank to Schindler’s List to Jojo Rabbit, more than 400 films are examined from a range of perspectives—historical, chronological, thematic, sociological, geographical and individual. The filmmakers are contextualized, including Charlie Chaplin, Sidney Lumet, Steven Spielberg, Quentin Tarantino and Roman Polanski. Recommendations and reviews of the 50 best Holocaust films are included, along with an educational guide, a detailed listing of all films covered an

In this special follow-up episode in honor of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, I again speak with Rich Brownstein, author of Holocaust Cinema Complete: A History and Analysis of 400 Films, with a Teaching Guide (McFarland, 2021). In this interview, Rich lists the 15 greatest holocaust films from his long-time study. He uses the categories he developed for his book and chooses 3 films from each group. I hope our conversation is both interesting and informative! Joel Tscherne is an Adjunct History Professor at Southern New Hampshire University. His Twitter handle is @JoelTscherne. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

Saving the International Justice Regime: Beyond Backlash against International Courts (Cambridge University Press, 2021) is at the forefront of a new conceptualization of backlash politics. Dr. Courtney Hillebrecht brings together theories, concepts and methods from the fields of international law, international relations, human rights and political science and case studies from around the globe to pose - and answer - three questions related to backlash against international courts: What is backlash and what forms does it take? Why do states and elites engage in backlash against international human rights and criminal courts? What can stakeholders and supporters of international justice do to meet these contemporary challenges? This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad

How do people link the past to the present, marking continuity in the face of the fundamental discontinuities of history? A Time to Gather: Archives and the Control of Jewish Culture (Oxford UP, 2021) argues that historical records took on potent value in modern Jewish life as both sources of history and anchors of memory because archives presented one way of transmitting Jewish history from one generation to another as well as making claims of access to an authentic Jewish culture. Indeed, both before the Holocaust and especially in its aftermath, Jewish leaders around the world felt a shared imperative to muster the forces and resources of Jewish life. It was a time to gather, a feverish era of collecting-and conflict-in which archive-making was both a response to the ruptures of modernity, and a mechanism for communities to express their cultural hegemony. Jason Lustig explores how archives became battlegrounds over control of Jewish culture from the turn of the twentieth century to the cusp of the digital

Embattled Dreamlands: The Politics of Contesting Armenian, Kurdish and Turkish Memory (Routledge, 2020) explores the complex relationship between competing national myths, imagined boundaries and local memories in the threefold-contested geography referred to as Eastern Turkey, Western Armenia or Northern Kurdistan. Spatially rooted in the shatter zone of the post-Ottoman and post-Soviet space, it sheds light on the multi-layered memory landscape of the Lake Van region in Southeastern Turkey, where collective violence stretches back from the Armenian Genocide to the Kurdish conflict of today. Based on his fieldwork in Turkey and Armenia, the author examines how states work to construct and monopolize collective memory by narrating, silencing, mapping and performing the past, and how these narratives might help to contribute and resolve present-day conflicts. By looking at how national discourses are constructed and asking hard questions about why nations are imagined as exclusive and hostile to others, Embatt

Holocaust movies have become an important segment of world cinema and the de-facto Holocaust education for many. One quarter of all American-produced Holocaust-related feature films have won or been nominated for at least one Oscar. Yet most Holocaust movies have fallen through the cracks and few have been commercially successful. In Holocaust Cinema Complete: A History and Analysis of 400 Films, with a Teaching Guide (McFarland, 2021), Rich Brownstein explores these trends--and many others--with a comprehensive guide to hundreds of films and made-for-television movies.Recommendations and reviews of the 50 best Holocaust films are included, along with an educational guide, a detailed listing of all films covered and a four-part index-glossary. The book also has a companion website, Holocaust Cinema Complete. Joel Tscherne is an Adjunct History Professor at Southern New Hampshire University. His Twitter handle is @JoelTscherne. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by

For the past 30 years, a group of Russian scholars have dedicated themselves to uncovering the crimes of Stalinism. Their organization, Memorial, has in that time made great strides in understanding the scale, nature and history of Stalin's repression. On 28 December 2021, Russia's highest court found that Memorial was in violation of the Russian Federation's law regarding "foreign agents" and ordered it to be closed.   In this interview, I talked with Benjamin Nathans about Memorial's history, work, and the reasons Putin decided to shut it down now. Nathans, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, has worked with and for Memorial since the 1990s. For more about Memorial, go here.  Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

In the wake of unthinkable atrocities, it is reasonable to ask how any population can move on from the experience of genocide. Simply remembering the past can, in the shadow of mass death, be retraumatizing. So how can such momentous events be memorialized in a way that is productive and even healing for survivors? Genocide memorials tell a story about the past, preserve evidence of the violence that occurred, and provide emotional support to survivors. But the goal of amplifying survivors' voices can fade amid larger narratives entrenched in political motivations. In After Genocide: Memory and Reconciliation in Rwanda (U Wisconsin Press, 2021), Nicole Fox investigates the ways memorials can shape the experiences of survivors decades after mass violence has ended. She examines how memorializations can both heal and hurt, especially when they fail to represent all genders, ethnicities, and classes of those afflicted. Drawing on extensive interviews with Rwandans, Fox reveals their relationships to these spaces

On July 17, 2018, starting an unjust war became a prosecutable international crime alongside genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. Instead of collective state responsibility, our leaders are now personally subject to indictment for crimes of aggression, from invasions and preemptions to drone strikes and cyberattacks. Noah Weisbord, The Crime of Aggression: The Quest for Justice in an Age of Drones, Cyberattacks, Insurgents, and Autocrats (Princeton UP, 2019) is Noah Weisbord’s riveting insider’s account of the high-stakes legal fight to enact this historic legislation and hold politicians accountable for the wars they start. Weisbord, a key drafter of the law for the International Criminal Court, takes readers behind the scenes of one of the most consequential legal dramas in modern international diplomacy. Drawing on in-depth interviews and his own invaluable insights, he sheds critical light on the motivations of the prosecutors, diplomats, and military strategists who championed the fledgling

Political Scientist Mark Berlin’s new book, Criminalizing Atrocity: The Global Spread of Criminal Laws Against International Crimes (Oxford UP, 2020), examines the process through which laws against international crimes are established and integrated into the legal regimes of nations. One of the initial questions Berlin hoped to answer with his work was why do countries choose to pass and implement laws about genocide and atrocities—noting that there was no clear tracing of patterns around the world when he first started his research. It becomes clear that there are two prongs to this question, in terms of the answers: how do countries establish and integrate these laws, and why do they choose to do so. Criminalizing Atrocity outlines the answers to these questions, explaining that either countries take up a wholesale reform of their criminal codes, and in the process integrate laws against genocide and atrocities, or countries pass and implement specific laws targeted to atrocities and genocide. Berlin’s res

Roger Mac Ginty's book Everyday Peace: How So-Called Ordinary People Can Disrupt Violent Conflict (Oxford UP, 2021) focuses on how individuals and communities navigate through, and out of, conflict. Through theory and concept-building, and empirical examples, it investigates the pro-peace tactical agency deployed by individuals and communities in conflict-affected contexts. It examines how compassion, humanity, civility, and solidarity can take root in unlikely circumstances - even in the midst of war - and the possibility of everyday peace scaling-up and out to disrupt violent conflict. The book develops a number of key concepts, including Everyday Peace Power and Conflict Disruption, to help us understand how everyday 'small peace' actions can accumulate into movements and processes that may have wider significance. As well as a detailed conceptualisation of everyday peace, the book is interested in how local-level peace might connect with other levels (the national, international, and transnational) and us

The archives produced by international courts have received little empirical, theoretical or methodological attention within international criminal justice (ICJ) or international relations (IR) studies. Yet, Henry Redwood argues in The Archival Politics of International Courts (Cambridge University Press, 2021), these archives both contain a significant record of past violence, and also help to constitute the international community as a particular reality. As such, this book first offers an interdisciplinary reading of archives, integrating new insights from IR, archival science and post-colonial anthropology to establish the link between archives and community formation. It then focuses on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda's archive, to offer a critical reading of how knowledge is produced in international courts, provides an account of the type of international community that is imagined within these archives, and establishes the importance of the materiality of archives for understanding how

The idea that states share a responsibility to shield people everywhere from atrocities is presently under threat. Despite some early twenty-first century successes, including the 2005 United Nations endorsement of the Responsibility to Protect, the project has been placed into jeopardy due to catastrophes in such places as Syria, Myanmar, and Yemen; resurgent nationalism; and growing global antagonism. In Sharing Responsibility: The History and Future of Protection from Atrocities (Princeton UP, 2021), Luke Glanville seeks to diagnose the current crisis in international protection by exploring its long and troubled history. With attention to ethics, law, and politics, he measures what possibilities remain for protecting people wherever they reside from atrocities, despite formidable challenges in the international arena. With a focus on Western natural law and the European society of states, Glanville shows that the history of the shared responsibility to protect is marked by courageous efforts, as well as t

NB: This interview contains material about wartime experiences that may be upsetting to some listeners.  When Alex Panasenko was born in 1933, his native Ukraine was devastated by Stalin’s program of mass starvation; millions were murdered and, soon after, millions more removed in Stalin’s Great Purge. In 1941, when Panasenko was eight years old, Hitler’s Wehrmacht invaded and he was deported with his family for slave labor. As the tide turned against the Nazis, Panasenko, now separated from his family, tramped westward with the retreating German army. The Long Vacation is Alex Panasenko’s war memoir, remembering the formative, often harrowing experiences that shaped his character. In this conversation, Mr. Panasenko discusses the extremities of life, death, terror, lust, and hunger from a child’s perspective, and with a child’s canny reactions aimed at survival, even when the prospect seemed most unlikely. With things falling apart around him—laws, governments, the conventions of the adult world—Panasenko ca

Most of us think we know the story of Bambi—but do we? The Original Bambi: The Story of a Life in the Forest (Princeton UP, 2022) is an all-new, illustrated translation of a literary classic that presents the story as it was meant to be told. For decades, readers’ images of Bambi have been shaped by the 1942 Walt Disney film—an idealized look at a fawn who represents nature’s innocence—which was based on a 1928 English translation of a novel by the Austrian Jewish writer Felix Salten. This masterful new translation gives contemporary readers a fresh perspective on this moving allegorical tale and provides important details about its creator. Originally published in 1923, Salten’s story is more somber than the adaptations that followed it. Life in the forest is dangerous and precarious, and Bambi learns important lessons about survival as he grows to become a strong, heroic stag. Jack Zipes’s introduction traces the history of the book’s reception and explores the tensions that Salten experienced in his own li

Is it possible that efforts to make war more humane can actually make it more common and thus more destructive?   This tension at the heart of this query lies at the heart of Samuel Moyn's new book Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2021). He draws fascinating connections between literary figures such as Tolstoy and Bertha von Suttner, civil society organizations such as the Red Cross and Human Rights Watch, and politicans and military figures to try to understand a central question: why, when we have done so much to limit the violence inherent in war, has war remained so common. His answer is counterintuitive and challenging--it is precisely the limitations on violence that have taken some of the urgency out of the effort to eliminate war itself. The result, he suggests, is as series of forever wars.   Moyn's anaylsis is fascinating. But Moyn also reminds the reader about historical figures and movements widely known at the time but largely ignored i

Jeffrey Bachman's edited volume Cultural Genocide: Law, Politics, and Global Manifestations (Routledge, 2019) asks where the boundaries between genocide and other kinds of mass atrocity violence rest and what the stakes are in locating them here rather than there. Bachman, Senior Professorial Lecturer at the American University and a co-host of this podcast, has assembled a wide-ranging set of scholars to consider how and why the label 'cultural genocide' has been so contentious over the past decades. Bachman's own essay (co-written with Lauren Carasik) explains how and why the term was eliminated from early drafts of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. Other essays range from theoretical examinations to contemporary case studies to inquiries about redress and reconciliation. Many highlight little known conflicts or disputes. Collectively, they will challenge the reader to reconsider earlier understandings of genocide and its causes and consequences. Kelly McFall is Professor of Hi

Several months ago, Saskia Wieringa joined her co-authors Jess Melvin and Annie Pohlman on the show to talk about their edited volume The International People's Tribunal for 1965 and the Indonesian Genocide.   This time, Wieringa is on the show to talk about another co-edited volume.  Propaganda and the Genocide in Indonesia (Routledge, 2018) is a kind of companion volume to the first study. Wieringa and Katjusungkana focus here on the way in which propaganda set the stage for, encouraged participation in and offered explanations for the genocide. This campaign portrayed communists as enemies of the Indonesian nation. But more than that, the propaganda leveraged already existing political and gender stereotypes, presenting communists as atheists, hypersexualized and amoral. This propaganda was and remains widely accepted in Indonesia, enabling mass violence in the 1960s and political persecution in the decades since. But the book expands at time from its core focus on propaganda, shedding new light on the eve

What motivated conscripted soldiers to fight in the Romanian Army during the Second World War? Why did they obey orders, take risks, and sometimes deliberately sacrifice their lives for the mission? What made soldiers murder, rape, and pillage, massacring Jews en masse during Operation Barbarossa? Grant Harward’s ground-breaking book Romania's Holy War: Soldiers, Motivation, and the Holocaust (Cornell UP, 2021) combines military history, social history, and histories of the Holocaust to offer a new interpretation of Romania’s role in the Second World War. In this interview he talks about his surprising discussions with veterans, his notion of “atrocity motivation” as an unexplored reason why soldiers commit horrific acts during wartime, the relative military effectiveness of the Romanian army, the role of the Orthodox Church, and the content of propaganda aimed at soldiers. As he explains, Harward’s research opens up whole new fields of research for military historians and others interested in the relationshi