Editors’ Introduction

Volume 7, issue 1 of Genocide Studies and Prevention continues the discussion of the state of the field of genocide studies that was initiated in volume 6, issue 3. Due to our (the editors’) keen desire to include as many different voices and perspectives as possible, we reached out to old hands in the field, younger but well established scholars, and several scholars who recently completed their graduate studies but have already made an impact on the field.

The sequence of the articles over the two issues began with comprehensive treatments and then moved into articles with more specific focuses, grouped thematically where applicable. Through the entire sequence across these two issues of GSP, we hope that readers will gain a solid sense of the history of the field and insight into some of the perdurable issues that have been at the heart of the field since its inception and that they have opportunities to reflect on the host of issues and concerns raised by authors coming from different disciplines (e.g., history, political science, sociology, psychology, philosophy) with vastly different perspectives. When authors addressed similar, if not the same, issues and concerns, we placed them back to back. In certain of these cases, some authors corroborated their colleagues’ takes on a situation, while others took an almost completely antithetical position. Be that as it may, this concluding set of articles, just as the first set, provides ample food for thought in regard to where the field has been, where it is today, and where it might need to go to become more robust.

Alex Hinton presents an important discussion of the concept of “critical genocide studies.” He argues that the maturity of the field calls for a process of critical analysis of the approaches prevalent in the field such that genocide research becomes self-reflective. Through analyses of many issues in the field he illustrates the value of the approach and, in doing so, advances the critical genocide studies endeavor.

Sheri Rosenberg focuses on advancing the recognition of the concept of “genocide by attrition” as a contemporary method that has been used, for example, most recently in Darfur. She argues that this concept offers a way around legal impediments to intervention against genocide and against the view that only direct mass killing in a short amount of time is true genocide or worthy of intervention. She makes a compelling case that inclusion of genocide by attrition is both legitimate and crucial.

Jacques Semelin also focuses on the issue of intervention. After considering the various issues of inclusion and exclusion raised by the efforts to define genocide in the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (UNCG) and beyond, Semelin raises the question of whether the all-too-frequent failures to intervene against genocide might be better addressed not by continued debate over the precise meaning of genocide and attempts to stretch it to cover new cases but through the development of a UN convention on crimes against humanity that would take the UNCG as a model but have broader applicability. In this light, he discusses the new International Crimes Against Humanity project. Samuel Totten has addressed this issue in his article in the first part of this special issue but has also raised some serious concerns about such an approach.¹

Hannibal Travis’s article is similarly concerned with intervention and prevention, but it maintains the view that the erosion of the centrality of the concept of genocide will not lead to better intervention and prevention. On the contrary, he argues that an important part of the problem in applying the term “genocide” to the range of processes it rightly should fit is the tendency of certain scholars to misinterpret the UNCG definition of genocide in an excessively narrow manner. In the course of his compelling argument, he offers new insights into central debates in genocide studies, such as whether destruction must be biological and how “total” intent must be. His article also presents a critical evaluation of the approach advocated by Semelin.

Evgeny Finkel and Scott Straus’s article, Uğur Ümit Üng...