Editors' Introduction

The field of genocide studies is concerned with all aspects of the crime of genocide (including pre- and post-events). It is a relatively new (some thirty-five years old) but burgeoning field. Its scholars come from diverse fields: political science, history, sociology, psychology, law, literature, anthropology, philosophy, education, and even medicine. Most genocide scholars publish their research in their respective disciplines' journals as well as journals that primarily focus on genocide.

As one can readily imagine, the field of genocide studies is radically different today from what it was in the early 1980s when it was just beginning to be formed. Prior to that period there was no field to speak of. Individual scholars were largely working alone, producing works and reports on various facets of genocide and/or case studies of various acts of genocide (e.g., the Armenian Genocide, the Holocaust, the Genocide of the Aché, the Cambodian Genocide). It was not until a small group of scholars—Israel Charny, Vahakn Dadrian, Irving Louis Horowitz, Leo Kuper, and Lawrence LeBlanc—wrote key monographs or books on genocide in the late 1970s and the early 1980s, followed by a major international conference planned and hosted by Charny, that the concept of a field of genocide studies garnered widespread attention and began to attract other scholars. In the early to mid 1980s, Helen Fein and Barbara Harff joined the effort.¹ By the late 1980s the coterie of genocide scholars had expanded further. In addition to Kuper, Charny, Fein, and Harff, among those conducting research into genocide, teaching about genocide, and publishing works on genocide were such individuals as Roger Smith, Herb Hirsch, Henry Huttenbach, Eric Markusen, Frank Chalk, Kurt Jonassohn, Yves Ternon, and Samuel Totten.

In the early to the mid 1980s, if one looked up the term "genocide" in a Dewey Decimal System catalog in search of works available (yes, that was before library catalogs were online) one would generally find a half dozen or so books with "genocide" in the title and a listing of numerous other books on the Holocaust that included the term "genocide" in their titles. Today, literally ten times more books and articles are published each year than the cumulative amount produced through the mid to late 1980s. Many issues addressed by genocide scholars today were not even conceived of in the early days of the field.

Taking Charny's landmark Tel Aviv conference in 1982 as a key point of coalescence, the field is about to enter its fourth decade. Given its continuing vibrancy, the proliferation of conferences and organizations, and its greatly increased public prominence over the past decade, the editors of Genocide Studies and Prevention (GSP) decided that it was an ideal time to take stock of the development of the field and consider where it has been, where it is today, and what possibly lies ahead.

As the editors of this special issue, we decided early on that a key goal was to solicit articles from as diverse a set of genocide scholars as possible in order to include as many perspectives and as broad a range of issues as possible. At the same time, we did not specify or attempt to determine what each contributor would address in his/her article, as long as he/she focused on the "the State of Genocide Studies." That meant soliciting articles from "old hands" who had been in the field from the outset, "big names," "up and coming scholars," and newly minted PhDs from different disciplines. We aimed to include those adhering to different theories of genocide and with different research agendas. An effort (not always successful) was also made to include scholars from each continent.² Ultimately, the contributors focused on vastly different issues (causes of genocide, early warning, gender and genocide, prevention and intervention, research methodologies, lacuna in the field, the aftermath of genocide, etc.).

For many readers of GSP, it is no secret that the relationship between some members of the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) and the International Network of Genocide Scholars (INoGS) has been tense over the years and that attempts...