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Publisher's note: Although economic sanctions have become a prominent response to mass atrocity, there has been relatively little scholarship assessing the impact of economic sanctions on genocidal violence. This article examines whether and how economic sanctions are associated with both the magnitude and the duration of state-led genocide. We analyze 39 genocides that occurred between 1955 and 2005. Results indicate that economic sanctions are not significantly associated with decreased magnitude or duration of genocide. These findings contribute to theory regarding the impact of sanctions on state behavior and hold significance for policy decisions in the face of genocide.
Publisher's note: This article, based on event history and a narrative analysis of reports produced by human rights groups, reveals that the genocide of Rohingyas of the Rakhine state of Myanmar is the result of the Myanmar military government’s deliberate policies and unpremeditated consequences that have led to the higher level of conflict among groups in Myanmar. It examines the processes by which the Myanmar government has constructed the collective identity of Rohingya as illegal immigrants. It focuses on the role of the sustained historical and conflictual relationships among the Myanmar government, Rohingyas, and the Rakhine Buddhists that contributed to the Rohingya genocide.
Publisher’s note: Soon after Raphael Lemkin coined the term “genocide” in Axis Rule in Occupied Europe in 1944, he began working on a world history of genocide to popularize his neologism. Correspondence with funding organizations and publishers shows that he was soliciting interest in a book on the subject as early as 1947 and that he had produced substantial draft chapters by the following year. Before his death in 1959, he had almost completed the book on genocide in world history but, in marked contrast to the present, publishers were uninterested in the project, which was neither completed nor published. Both Lemkin and his approach were forgotten until the 1980s, when a small group of social scientists founded a marginal field called comparative genocide studies.
Publisher’s note: This reflection examines how to characterize histories of violence. The genocide in Rwanda has become, after years of labour, documentation, legal proceedings, testimony, and scholarship, a canonical case of mass violence in the twentieth century. That place in world history is deserved. However, whether wittingly or not, the focus on genocide crimes against the minority Tutsi population in 1994 has come to define the history of 1990s violence in Rwanda for many students, policymakers, scholars, and other observers. The “Rwandan genocide” typically serves as the sole referent for thinking about mass violations of human rights against Rwandans, the marker for labelling the country's violence. To make this point, the government in Rwanda has come to insist, and largely succeeded in promulgating the idea, that the correct name by which to mark the period is the “Genocide against the Tutsi.”.
Publisher’s note: Continuing injustices and denial of rights of indigenous peoples are part of the long legacy of colonialism. Parallel processes of exploitation and injustice can be identified in relation to non-human species and/or aspects of the natural environment. International law can address some extreme examples of the crimes and harms of colonialism through the idea and legal definition of genocide, but the intimately related notion of ecocide that applies to nature and the environment is not yet formally accepted within the body of international law. In the context of this special issue reflecting on the development of green criminology, the article argues that the concept of ecocide provides a powerful tool. To illustrate this, the article explores connections between ecocide, genocide, capitalism and colonialism and discusses impacts on indigenous peoples and on local and global (glocal) ecosystems.
Publisher’s note: Numerous national and international parliamentary bodies (such as the European Parliament and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe) have qualified atrocities committed in certain countries as ‘genocide’. Historical cases that have been so qualified include atrocities committed in Armenia, Nazi Germany and Namibia. Current atrocities most frequently qualified as ‘genocide’ are those committed by the Islamic State (IS) against members of minorities in Iraq and Syria. Are such determinations by parliamentary bodies desirable and what are its consequences? This question was posed by the Netherlands Parliament to two standing advisory bodies: the Netherlands Advisory Committee on Issues of Public International Law (CAVV) and the External Advisor on Public International Law (EVA).
Publisher’s note: How did the Cold War impact the occurrence and severity of genocide and politicide? The Cold War is known to have impacted a number of conflict dynamics, yet its influence on genocide and politicide, the most severe forms of state-driven anti-civilian violence, remains unexplored. This article argues that genocide and politicide have followed a number of worldwide trends, like increased democracy and the decreased frequency of intrastate conflict, which have had dampening effects on genocide and politicide. Probit and ordered probit analyses reveal that genocide and politicide occurrence was more frequent during the Cold War, but that the effect of the Cold War on severity depends on model specification; using 1992 as the first year of the post-Cold War era, genocides and politicides are more severe after the end of the Cold War.
Publisher’s note: This article tackles the issue of genocidal intent by placing emphasis on the nature of genocide as a hierarchical and collective crime. While traditionally it is the collective dimension of victimization that is highlighted, in this article the author highlights the collective dimension of perpetration, which is often downplayed in genocide cases. This is done by examining two specific cases pertaining to the genocide in Bosnia (Trbić and Nikolić) and the evidentiary patterns followed by the judges in these cases. Moreover, the author relies on his interviews with perpetrators (in Rwanda, Burundi, Bosnia, and Cambodia). Broadly speaking, the approach taken is that often the intent of individual perpetrators is conflated with more general collective policies and there are elements of this interplay that should be taken into account. It would seem more appropriate for the author to emphasize these collective aspects rather than inferring genocidal intent of individual perpetrators from a set of contextual elements which may not really be sufficient in determining the special intent required.
Publisher’s note: This article argues that revolutionary leaders are more willing to commit mass killing than nonrevolutionary leaders. Revolutionary leaders are more ideologically committed to transforming society, more risk tolerant, and more likely to view the use of violence as appropriate and effective. Furthermore, such leaders tend to command highly disciplined and loyal organizations, built in the course of revolutionary struggles, that can perpetrate mass killing. This study uses time series cross-sectional data from 1955 to 2004 to demonstrate that revolutionary leaders are more likely to initiate genocide or politicide than nonrevolutionary leaders. The violent behaviors of revolutionary leaders are not limited to the immediate postrevolutionary years but also occur later in their tenure. This demonstrates that the association of revolutionary leaders and mass killing is not simply indicative of postrevolutionary instability. This article also provides evidence for the importance of exclusionary ideologies in motivating revolutionary leaders to inflict massive violence.
Publisher’s note: We assess the accuracy of genocide forecasts made by the Atrocity Forecasting Project (AFP) for 2011–15, and present new forecasts for 2016–20. Using data from the United Nations, Genocide Watch and the Political Instability Task Force, we evaluate AFP accuracy. We compare AFP accuracy with that of forecasts from the Genocide Prevention Advisory Network. It is relatively rare in most areas of social science that researchers produce (and make public) future forecasts. It is rarer still to evaluate their accuracy once the future has arrived. AFP five-year forecasts are potentially important for genocide and politicide prevention, and have gained attention from policy makers and news media, but a systematic assessment of their accuracy has not been undertaken previously. Our evaluation of past forecast accuracy, with true-positive rates from thirty-three to fifty per cent, true-negative rates around ninety per cent, and area under the curve (AUC) statistics from .81 to .96, gives an indication of how much confidence should be placed in the 2016–20 forecasts.
Publisher’s note: This review article asks: what is the relationship between war and genocide, as determined by scholars in the field of genocide studies? Where explored in the literature, there is a consensus that war and genocide often share time and space, and that war conditions can act as an enabler of genocide. However, beyond these areas of convergence in the literature, scholars diverge on whether genocide can be committed as part of violence perpetrated in war. Some scholars argue that war and genocide are wholly distinct acts with distinct intentions. Other scholars claim that some types of war and associated methods of warfare may be genocidal based on their indiscriminate nature and destructive capacities. Nonetheless, one commonality ties together these two schools of thought on the relationship between war and genocide – only “innocent defenseless civilians” can be victims of genocide. This article challenges this notion by arguing that military personnel, too, can be victims of genocide, and develops four schools of thought on the relationship between war and genocide based on scholarly positions in the literature.
Publisher’s note: This article brings a fresh perspective to the causal mechanism of coalition-building among diasporas pursuing genocide recognition, particularly horizontal alliances between the Armenian, Assyrian, and Kurdish diasporas. Why, how, and how durably do diasporas build coalitions to address past atrocities? Building coalitions for genocide recognition requires three important factors: a common adversary, a host-land, conducive to proliferation of transitional justice claims, and a single contentious issue on which diasporas can focus. Coalitions based on common experiences of victimhood and identity can elicit long-term cooperation and high-level involvement, as among Armenians and Assyrians. Coalitions primarily based on strategic interests to pressure a common adversary, without common experience, show less organizational involvement, as among Armenians and Kurds. The article discusses diaspora mobilizations around the 2015 Armenian genocide centennial and Turkey’s EU accession with a wider sociospatial perspective of political processes related to Armenia, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria.
Publisher’s note: Protection from genocide has been a common denominator in state rhetoric since 1948 when the Genocide Convention was adopted. However, state accountability for this archetypical crime of the state is virtually nonexistent. This article addresses a two-pronged puzzle: namely, (1) why, no government involved in the commission of genocide has to date been held responsible for it; and (2) how legal processes of the sole court that addresses states' disputes regarding genocide, the International Court of Justice, condition and even limit the quality of decisions taken by the court with particular reference to state liability for this crime. The analysis contributes to an emerging debate on the application of state responsibility with reference to the protection from genocide by highlighting existing shortcomings pertaining to the interpretation and implementation of the Genocide Convention that, in turn, warrants a holistic revision of this treaty.
Publisher’s note: The mass violence inflicted by the radical Islamist fighters of the ‘Islamic State’ organization on the Yazidi population of Iraq is the latest of modern genocides. The violence has placed this little known but ancient community of the Middle East at the centre of international attention, triggering direct international intervention in the fight against ISIS. This article aims to study the motives of ISIS in attacking the Kurds of northern Iraq and in particular the Yazidi population. It will also study the contradictory narratives that emerged in the aftermath of the attack to use it to critically challenge the grand-narratives of the modern history of the Middle East. If one writes the history of the Middle East from the experience and the perspective of the Yazidis, it will be a radically different one than those found in our history books. Hence, its subversive potential that needs to interrogate us.
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