Delving into genocidal governments of the past, the work covered in this book explores how these genocidal belligerents had recruited and trained their nation's citizenry into killing machines. Paramilitaries are often employed by these government heads to carry out with such precision the systematic slaughtering of innocents, doing so without resembling compunction. Largely enticing their recruits to join with the promise of wealth and revenge. Training these recruits through political ideological indoctrination sessions, and subjecting the trainees to a demanding training schedule, these trainees eventually get their chance to enact what they have so long been training for. No other work has compiled such an accurate and comprehensive account of the recruitment/selection, and training/development policies of Serbia's Arkan's Tigers, Cambodia's Khmer Rouge, The Third Reich's Hitler Youth/SS, Sudan's Janjaweed, Al-Qaeda, and Rwanda's Interahamwe.

A concise and sharply-focused textbook giving students an up-to-date understanding of genocide in recent European history.

Drawing on data from three different insurgent groups within the Cambodian conflict, the book shows how the social backgrounds of combatants and commanders cause them to pursue different strategies during a decade-long transition into various postconflict settings, thereby creating different “pathways to peace.” By highlighting different vertical and horizontal ranks within the insurgent groups and the role of belligerents’ resources and networks, this qualitative study tackles an imbalance in the current research on Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (DDR), which tends to focus on top-down planning and the technicalities of reintegration programs. It helps explain why conflict dynamics and path-dependencies differ among various social groups within the field of insurgency. By analyzing the social position, life courses and postconflict trajectories of various groups within the insurgency, the book emphasizes the diversity of transitions to peace and “brings the social back in.” The study is grounded in in-depth fieldwork conducted in Cambodia and its diaspora, including 168 firsthand interviews with ex-combatants from groups as diverse as Buddhist monks and Christian converts, intellectuals, powerful warlords, civil servants, and female communist soldiers. Using these details, the book not only builds a theory of the social structure and internal logic of armed groups, but also emphasizes the crucial importance of fighters’ own narratives about their roles in society. Therefore, in addition to advancing a sociological perspective on post-conflict transitions, the study also provides the most detailed treatment to date of the social fields of the insurgents who fought in the civil war that followed the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime in 1979. These social fields continue to have a profound influence on Cambodian politics, even today.

Using more than a decade's worth of fieldwork in South Sudan, Clémence Pinaud here explores the relationship between predatory wealth accumulation, state formation, and a form of racism—extreme ethnic group entitlement—that has the potential to result in genocide. War and Genocide in South Sudan traces the rise of a predatory state during civil war in southern Sudan and its transformation into a violent Dinka ethnocracy after the region's formal independence. That new state, Pinaud argues, waged genocide against non-Dinka civilians in 2013-2017. During a civil war that wrecked the region between 1983 and 2005, the predominantly Dinka Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) practiced ethnically exclusive and predatory wealth accumulation. Its actions fostered extreme group entitlement and profoundly shaped the rebel state. Ethnic group entitlement eventually grew into an ideology of ethnic supremacy. After that war ended, the semi-autonomous state turned into a violent and predatory ethnocracy—a process accelerated by independence in 2011. The rise of exclusionary nationalism, a new security landscape, and inter-ethnic political competition contributed to the start of a new round of civil war in 2013, in which the recently founded state unleashed violence against nearly all non-Dinka ethnic groups. Pinaud investigates three campaigns waged by the South Sudan government in 2013–2017 and concludes they were genocidal—they sought to destroy non-Dinka target groups. She demonstrates how the perpetrators' sense of group entitlement culminated in land-grabs that amounted to a genocidal conquest echoing the imperialist origins of modern genocides. Thanks to generous funding from TOME, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.

There are many different types of power practice directed towards making soldiers obedient and disciplined inside the field of insurgency. While some commanders punish by inflicting physical pain, others use re-educative methods. While some prepare soldiers by using close-knit combat simulations, others send their subordinates immediately into battle. While these variations cannot fully be explained by the ideological set-up of different groups or by their political orientation, the basic assumption of the study is that they nevertheless do not emerge at random. This book puts forth that the type of power being utilised depends on the habitus of the respective commander and, as a result, becomes socially differentiated. Furthermore, power practices are shaped by the classificatory discourse of commanders (and their soldiers) on good soldierhood and leadership. The study found multiple ’habitus groups’ inside the field of insurgency, each with a distinctive classificatory discourse and a corresponding power type at work. While commanders shaped the dominating power practices (such as military trainings, indoctrination, systems of rewards and punishments, etc.), low-ranking soldiers took active part in supporting or undermining power according to their own habitus formation. This book helps professionals in this area to understand better the types of power practice inside insurgencies. It is also a useful guide to students and academics interested in peace and conflict studies, sociology and Southeast Asia.

This book provides an original legal analysis of child soldiers recruited into armed groups or forces committing mass atrocities and/or genocide as the victims of the genocidal forcible transfer of children. Legal argument is made regarding the lack of criminal culpability of such child soldier 'recruits' for conflict-related international crimes and the inapplicability of currently recommended judicial and non-judicial accountability mechanisms in such cases. The book challenges various anthropological accounts of child soldiers' alleged 'tactical agency' to resist committing atrocity as members of armed groups or forces committing mass atrocity and/or genocide. Also provided are original interpretations of relevant international law including an interpretation of the Rome Statute age-based exclusion from prosecution of persons who were under 18 at the time of perpetrating the crime as substantive law setting an international standard for the humane treatment of child soldiers.

Genocide not only annihilates people but also destroys and reorganizes social relations, using terror as a method. In Genocide as Social Practice, social scientist Daniel Feierstein looks at the policies of state-sponsored repression pursued by the Argentine military dictatorship against political opponents between 1976 and 1983 and those pursued by the Third Reich between 1933 and 1945. He finds similarities, not in the extent of the horror but in terms of the goals of the perpetrators. The Nazis resorted to ruthless methods in part to stifle dissent but even more importantly to reorganize German society into a Volksgemeinschaft, or people’s community, in which racial solidarity would supposedly replace class struggle. The situation in Argentina echoes this. After seizing power in 1976, the Argentine military described its own program of forced disappearances, torture, and murder as a “process of national reorganization” aimed at remodeling society on “Western and Christian” lines. For Feierstein, genocide can be considered a technology of power—a form of social engineering—that creates, destroys, or reorganizes relationships within a given society. It influences the ways in which different social groups construct their identity and the identity of others, thus shaping the way that groups interrelate. Feierstein establishes continuity between the “reorganizing genocide” first practiced by the Nazis in concentration camps and the more complex version—complex in terms of the symbolic and material closure of social relationships —later applied in Argentina. In conclusion, he speculates on how to construct a political culture capable of confronting and resisting these trends. First published in Argentina, in Spanish, Genocide as Social Practice has since been translated into many languages, now including this English edition. The book provides a distinctive and valuable look at genocide through the lens of Latin America as well as Europe.