Genocide - Origins And Evolution Of The Concept, The Genocide Convention, Persistent Controversies And Ambiguities, Bibliography
human hundreds thousands world
Mass slaughter of human beings by other human beings has been a recurrent phenomenon over the centuries, but until recently neither governments nor international legal specialists had sought to devise formal rules and institutions that could help prevent, or if necessary punish, the perpetrators of large-scale atrocities. Massacres that took place during and immediately after World War I, when Turks killed hundreds of thousands of Armenians, and the systematic annihilation of millions of Jews and hundreds of thousands of Gypsies (Roma) by Nazi Germany during World War II, gave rise to the concept of genocide, which is defined by Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary as "the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group." Scholars have differed in their analyses of the concept, but the most widely accepted understanding of genocide pertains to the deliberate slaughter of vast numbers of human beings.
Additional Topics
The term genocide was coined in the mid-1940s by Raphael Lemkin (1900–1959), a lawyer of Polish Jewish origin who escaped from Poland after the Nazis occupied it in September 1939. Lemkin fled to Lithuania and then to Sweden before eventually reaching the United States in April 1941. In November 1944 he published a lengthy book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, which exhaustively documented th…
Revelations at the end of World War II about the scale of the Nazi Holocaust spurred an effort within the newly created United Nations (UN) to set up an international legal convention that would prohibit genocide and require signatory governments to take all necessary steps to prevent or halt it. Although political leaders were initially slow in moving on the issue, Lemkin did his best to keep the…
The concept of genocide has remained a source of disagreement not only in the political arena, but also among legal scholars, historians, and political scientists. Although most scholars accept the view that genocide is targeted against a particular group, many have sought to expand the criteria for identifying particular groups. Rather than limiting the potential victims to ethnic and cultural gr…
Chalk, Frank, and Kurt Jonassohn. The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990. Fein, Helen. Genocide: A Sociological Perspective. London and Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1993. Gellately, Robert, and Ben Kiernan, eds. The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2…
Citing this material
Please include a link to this page if you have found this material useful for research or writing a related article. Content on this website is from high-quality, licensed material originally published in print form. You can always be sure you're reading unbiased, factual, and accurate information.
Highlight the text below, right-click, and select “copy”. Paste the link into your website, email, or any other HTML document.
User Comments