How should we understand genocide in the modern world? As an aberration from the norms of a dominant liberal international society? Or rather as a guide to the very dysfunctional nature of the international system itself? The Meaning of Genocide is the first work of its nature to consider the phenomenon within a broad context of world historical development. In this book, Mark Levene sets out the conceptual issues in the study of genocide, addressing the fundamental problems of defining genocide and understanding what we mean by perpetrators and victims, before placing the phenomenon in the context of world history. In an original and compelling argument, Levene seeks to explain how state violence against a range of groups has emerged in tandem with the rise of the West to global dominance and the emergence of increasingly streamlined, homogenous states. Levene contends that it is in the relationship of these nation-states to each other that we will find the well-springs of some of the most poisonous tendencies in the modern world. Thought provoking and beautifully constructed, The Meaning of Genocide is the first of a major four-volume survey, Genocide in the Age of the Nation State, which examines its subject within an extensive global and historical framework and which will become the definitive work on the subject.

How should we understand genocide in the modern world? As an aberration from the norms of a dominant liberal international society? Or rather as a guide to the very dysfunctional nature of the international system itself? This is the first book to consider the phenomenon within a broad context of world historical development. In this first volume of a major four-volume survey, Mark Levene sets out the conceptual issues in the study of genocide and the historical linkage between the rise of the West, in both its modern and early modern domestic and colonial settings, and increasing tendencies to physically annihilate native peoples or religiously heterodox communal groups who stood as obstacles in its path.

How should we understand genocide in the modern world? As an aberration from the norms of a dominant liberal international society? Or rather as a guide to the very dysfunctional nature of the international system itself? Genocide in the Age of the Nation State is the first work to consider the phenomenon within a broad context of world historical development. In this book, Mark Levene sets out the conceptual issues in the study of genocide, addressing the fundamental problems of defining genocide and understanding what we mean by perpetrators and victims, before placing the phenomenon in the context of world history. Genocide in the Age of the Nation State is the first of a major four-volume survey which examines its subject within an extensive global and historical framework and which will become the definitive work on the subject.

Most books on genocide consider it primarily as a twentieth-century phenomenon. In The Rise of the West and the Coming of Genocide, Levene argues that this approach fails to grasp its true origins. Genocide developed out of modernity and the striving for the nation-state, both essentially Western experiences. It was European expansion into all hemispheres between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries that provided the main stimulus to its pre-1914 manifestations. One critical outcome, on the cusp of modernity, was the French revolutionary destruction of the Vendée. Levene finishes this volume at the 1914 watershed with the destabilising effects of the 'rise of the West' on older Ottoman, Chinese, Russian and Austrian empires. "Very impressive" - Eric Hobsbawm

A global history of human rights in a world of nations that grant rights to some while denying them to others Once dominated by vast empires, the world is now divided into some 200 independent countries that proclaim human rights—a transformation that suggests that nations and human rights inevitably develop together. But the reality is far more problematic, as Eric Weitz shows in this compelling global history of the fate of human rights in a world of nation-states. Through vivid histories from virtually every continent, A World Divided describes how, since the eighteenth century, nationalists have established states that grant human rights to some people while excluding others, setting the stage for many of today’s problems, from the refugee crisis to right-wing nationalism. Only the advance of international human rights will move us beyond a world divided between those who have rights and those who don't.