The Politics of Annihilation: A Genealogy of Genocide Benjamin Meiches (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019)

Abstract

Few terms possess the affective potency of "genocide." This simultaneous ability to captivate and defy imagination gives strength and importance to the academic field of genocide studies, a remarkably multidisciplinary engagement mobilising lawyers, historians, anthropologists, political scientists, and sociologists, amongst others. Such disciplinarily eclecticism would challenge the most ambitious critical theorist seeking to analyze genocide in its totality, which makes Benjamin Meiches' The Politics of Annihilation: A Genealogy of Genocide (hereafter, Annihilation) a highly impressive effort. A far-reaching critique of mainstream presumptions in the field and beyond, Annihilation presents theoretically-sophisticated engagements with a vast array of genocide scholarship backed by numerous case studies. For Meiches, this intervention is warranted by a general observation about the limitations of definition: all attempts to define genocide end up excluding certain forms of destructive violence, and by extension, those who suffer them. Given genocide's frequent placement atop moral and legal hierarchies as the "crime of crimes," the force of this exclusion cannot be underestimated.