genocide

The account of one of history's most brutal—and forgotten—massacres, when the Japanese army destroyed China's capital city on the eve of World War II, "piecing together the abundant eyewitness reports into an undeniable tapestry of horror. In December 1937, the Japanese army swept into the ancient city of Nanking. Within weeks, more than 300,000 Chinese civilians and soldiers were systematically raped, tortured, and murdered—a death toll exceeding that of the atomic blasts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.

This study was an elaboration of ideas he first proposed in 1933 in his address to the Fifth International Conference for the Unification of Penal Law (1933), which argued that attacks on racial, religious and ethnic groups should be considered international crimes. Important for the prosecution of the Nazis, it helped to establish the framework for all subsequent efforts to punish crimes against humanity.

Three inescapable observations form the foundation of this report. First, deadly conflict is not inevitable. Violence on the scale of what we have seen in Bosnia, Rwanda, Somalia and elsewhere does not emerge inexorably from human interaction. Second, the need to prevent deadly conflict is increasingly urgent.

In the horrific events of the mid-1990s in Rwanda, tens of thousands of Hutu killed their Tutsi friends, neighbors, even family members. That ghastly violence has overshadowed a fact almost as noteworthy: that hundreds of thousands of Hutu killed no one. In a transformative revisiting of the motives behind and specific contexts surrounding the Rwandan genocide, Lee Ann Fujii focuses on individual actions rather than sweeping categories. Fujii argues that ethnic hatred and fear do not satisfactorily explain the mobilization of Rwandans one against another.

This paper offers a critical analytic reconstruction of some of the main symbolic properties of annual UN Holocaust and Rwandan genocide commemorations since 2005. Applying a discourse‐historical approach (Wodak and Meyer 2010), it retraces how themes of guilt, responsibility, evil and redemption are woven together across annual commemorative performances in the hope of stabilizing shared patterns of cultural translation of the significance of these atrocities to globally dispersed communities.

Scholars have long argued that dehumanization causes violence. However, others have recently argued that those who harm do so because they feel pressured or view violence as justified. Examining the Rwandan genocide, this article contends that contradictory theories of dehumanization can be reconciled through consideration of cultural and moral sociology. Research on culture and action demonstrates that when people strive to implement new practices, they often explicitly work through them cognitively and emotionally.

Sociologists empirically and theoretically neglect genocide. In this article, our critical collective framing perspective begins by focusing on state origins of race-based ideology in the mobilization and dehumanization leading to genocide. We elaborate this transformative dynamic by identifying racially driven macro-micro-macro-level processes that are theoretically underdeveloped and contested in many settings. We investigate generic processes by exploiting an unprecedented survey of refugees from the ongoing genocide in Darfur.

Collective action scholars have long examined why people choose to participate in social movements. This article argues that this body of scholarship can be productively applied to understanding rescue efforts during genocide, which have typically been associated with altruism and other psychological explanations. We analyze the case of Rwanda, where people worked collectively to save Tutsi from the violence that swept across the country in 1994, and ask: What social factors shaped Rwandans’ decisions and abilities to save persecuted individuals?

Creating the Witness examines the role of film and the Internet in creating virtual witnesses to genocide over the past one hundred years. Leshu Torchin’s broad survey of media and the social practices around it investigates the development of popular understandings of genocide to achieve recognition and response, ultimately calling on viewers to act on behalf of human rights.

«Cette femme aux pieds nus qui donne le titre à mon livre, c'est ma mère, Stefania. Lorsque nous étions enfants, au Rwanda, mes sœurs et moi, maman nous répétait souvent : "Quand je mourrai, surtout recouvrez mon corps avec mon pagne, personne ne doit voir le corps d'une mère." Ma mère a été assassinée, comme tous les Tutsi de Nyamata, en avril 1994 ; je n'ai pu recouvrir son corps, ses restes ont disparu. Ce livre est le linceul dont je n'ai pu parer ma mère.