Theorizing Destruction: Reflections on the State of Comparative Genocide Theory

Strategies for Masking Anti-Ukrainian Rhetoric in Russian Propaganda Discourse

“…Процес дегуманізації як одну зі складових геноциду розглядали Р. Сміт [9], М. Гіберт [3], Г. Стентон [10] Зокрема, російський пропагандистський дискурс має чотири стратегії маскування антиукраїнської риторики: 1) використання новомови; 2) підміна номінацій на позначення об'єкта, на якого спрямована пропагандистська риторика; 3) штучне розділення українського суспільства на групи; 4) спотворення контексту використання терміну «геноцид» та його нормалізація в російському пропагандистському дискурсі.…”

Religion, Mass Violence, and Illiberal Regimes: Recent Research on the Rohingya in Myanmar

“…Ever since Raphael Lemkin coined the term “genocide” in the 1940s, the field of genocide studies has helped in the creation of an international legal infrastructure underpinned by the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. Over the years, this legalistic approach has also broadened to encompass sociological and political dimensions of such phenomena and opened the way for comparative genocide theorising, which systematically identified agents, structures, and processes that lead to them (Hiebert, 2008; Kim, 2016). The flourishing of the field, however, sits uneasily with the international community’s frequent paralysis in the face of new outbreaks of mass violence and the inability of the United Nations to enforce its responsibility to protect (Janssen, 2008).…”

On Situating the Study of Genocide within Political Violence1

“…This article does not provide an overview of the field of comparative genocide studies. 8 Instead, I examine the theoretical challenge of articulating genocide's relationship to political violence and sketch a few ways forward for the field. These comments are motivated by the belief that we should seek not only to understand the historical contingencies of genocide in particular cases but also to develop theoretical knowledge of mass political violence: the conditions under which it is likely to occur, the small-scale processes (or, in Charles Tilly's terms, "mechanisms") of violent escalation and deescalation at local levels, and the ways in which these processes are shaped by, connect to, reinforce, accelerate, and impede higher-level processes of violence.…”