New Books In Genocide Studies

It's safe to say that nobody but genocidaires likes genocide. It's also safe to say that everyone but genocidaires wants to halt on-going campaigns of mass murder and prevent future ones. The question, of course, is how to do this in practice. Keith Pomakoy's significant new book Helping Humanity: American Policy and Genocide Rescue (Lexington Books, 2011) explores exactly this question by analyzing American responses to mass murder over the past 125 years. The results are surprising. Contra Samantha Power, Pomakoy demonstrates that the United States has been anything but indifferent to the suffering of genocide victims abroad. The U.S. has taken measures to stop genocidal campaigns against Cubans, Armenians, Ukrainians, Jews, Cambodians, Bantus, Tutsis, Bosnian Muslims, and Albanians. These measures were not uniform: they were sometimes military (as in the case of Cuba), sometimes humanitarian (as in the case of the Armenians), and sometimes purely diplomatic (as in the case of the Ukrainians). Neither were