Between Genocide and “Genocide”

Cultural History of Genocide, Vol. 2: The Middle Ages (London: Bloomsbury Academic Publishers), 2021

British Journal of Sociology, 2011

This article employs Max Weber's ideal-type method to classify genocides based on their degree of mass killing, unilateralism, and ethnic liability. The identification of the elements of genocide draws from a general theory of genocide and from theories of social control employing Donald theoretical approach, known as pure sociology. Because these theories identify the social features associated with each element of genocide, they can explain the form genocides take.

University of Glasgow, 2019

Genocide is a concept that often heard in the history of security study, but the definition remains unclear and debatable for many scholars. Although Raphael Lemkin brought the concept in 1944, Kuper identified genocide as an “odious scourge that has inflicted great losses on humanity in all periods of history.” Some genocide cases, for example Holocaust during the World War II already happened before the concept exist. Erich Ludendorff used genocide as German strategy of total war. Although genocide and total war connected in the case of Holocaust, those are two separate phenomena with different meaning and way of conduct. This paper aims to review the theories of genocide and distinguish the concept of genocide with other concept like ethnocide, politicide, and total war.

Genocide: Conceptual and Historical Dimensions edited by George J. Andreopoulos, 1994

The definition of genocide adopted in law and by professional social scientists must match the realities of life. so that there should be no situation in which thousands and even millions of defenseless victims of mass murder do not "qualify" as victims of genocide. Insofar as there is ever a major discrepancy between the reality of masses of dead people and our legal-scholarly definitions. it is the latter which must yield and change. The definition of genocide must also be consistent with the everyday usage of the word by reasonable people when they stand and face a mass of murdered people and naturally apply to such an event the only word there is in the human language for such occurrences. Thus, the. mass murders of twenty million Soviet citizens by Stalin, 1 the massacre of one hundred thousand or more of the communist opposition by Indonesia, the murders of one to two million Cambodians by the Khmer Rouge are all instances of clear-cut genocide. And instances of mass murders of a lesser magnitude by governments-five thousand Tamils in Sri Lanka and fiye thousand students in Tiananmen Square in China, for example-are also, in common sense and understanding. genocidal events, although there may be a consensus to characterize these numerically smaller events as genocidal massacres, as Leo Kuper, the doyen of genocide scholars, has proposed. This chapter in Genocide: Conceptual and Historical Dimensions edited by George J. Andreopoulos proposes a generic definition of genocide. which at the same time is supplemented by a series of subcategories of different types of genocide. I shall also propose at least two new categories of genocide: first , accomplices to genocide, and second. genocide as a result of ecological destruction and abuse.

Many authors have proposed different definitions of genocide. This article discusses the concept of the actor of genocide embedded in such definitions. Two groups of authors are distinguishable: 1) authors who have an explicit specification of the actor of genocide in their genocide definitions and 2) authors without an explicit clarification of the actor of genocide in their genocide definitions (using either the word perpetrator or any other general expression/or no expression at all). After discussing genocide definitions, the article develops the concept of “deviantization” as an additional detection of actors of genocide. A process of deviantization is a process which labels a person or group of persons and/or their behavior as deviant and/or criminal. In this article, we define a process of deviantization as a Weberian ideal type.

The Cultural History of Genocide Volume 1: The Ancient World , 2021

Since its inception, the focus of genocide studies has been on modern times. Even though this has sadly provided more than enough examples of genocides, such a limited time frame could potentially inhibit scholarly study of the topic. This article seeks to broaden the horizons of genocide studies by looking at the ancient Near East. However, for a variety of reasons, discussing the causes of genocide in the ancient Near East is a complicated task (the meaning of genocide will be discussed later in the chapter). At a basic level, the historical facts themselves are often poorly preserved and contested due to biased sources. More broadly, the way of thinking in the ancient Near East is very different from modern conceptions, especially when it comes to the most central cultural values and the method of identifying groups. We will begin by surveying several events in the ancient Near East involving either deaths of civilians or massacres of a particular group that could be considered genocide before moving on to think about whether they should be identified as genocide and the causes of these genocide-type events in the ancient Near East in general.

Prof. Michael M. Gunter’s book is the first one that is specifically devoted to criticize the “Armenian genocide” label, published by a mainstream, Western publishing house and written by a non-Turkish scholar.

Genocide Studies and Prevention, 2007

When on 12 October 2006 the French National Assembly approved a bill that made it a crime to deny the mass killings of Armenians in Turkey around the turn of the twentieth century, Turkish leaders lamented the decision as a great disappointment, while several European officials insisted that it was not for the law to write history. That task, however, is compromised when leading historians deny, in Jacques Chirac's memorable words, a country's ''dramas and errors.'' 1 Because experts are lured to power, sometimes at the expense of their integrity, it behooves those searching for the truth to redouble their efforts. Therefore, the genuine need to identify and correct assertions made by those who wish to deny historical facts is a duty both to history and to the truth itself. Guenter Lewy, an emeritus professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, is the latest researcher attempting to deny the Armenian Genocide. 2 Indeed, the inordinate nature of Lewy's resort to political leverage is such as to render the need for a critical review of this agenda-laden tome even more pressing. As Lewy has declared that ''a book [must] be judged by its content and not by the motive of its author,'' 3 this review will attempt such an endeavor. Lewy opines that ''most Armenians. .. do not know Turkish'' (xi); according to him, therefore, few Armenians may be competent to write on the topic of the Armenian Genocide or to offer critiques of books on the subject. In fact, however, not only do many Armenians know Turkish, some are fluent in the language-including this reviewer. 4 The Relocation Assertion Lewy systematic uses and emphasizes the term ''relocation'' throughout his book; this prejudicial stance is striking, and the theme of relocation truly dominates the text. According to Lewy, Turkish authorities had no intention of liquidating the Armenian population but were merely trying to deport and resettle that population; their blunders and failures in the process caused massive but unintended casualties. To foster this perspective, Lewy relies on several techniques, including pronounced selectivity of data, deflection, distortion, and occasional falsification. We are told, for example, that the American Associated Press correspondent George Abel Schreiner explained the fate of the Armenians as merely the result of ''Turkish ineptness, more than intentional brutality'' (qtd. 254); Schreiner asks us to believe that it was mere clumsiness that ''was responsible for the hardships the Armenians were subjected to'' (qtd. 254). 5 In a widely read volume published in 1918, however, and based on diary entries written immediately after particular events, Schreiner writes, ''the Armenians are going through hell again. .. [because] the