'An angry and eloquent book.' Financial Times'Alain Destexhe, a former Secretary General of the relief agency Médecins sans Frontières and now a senator in the Belgium Parliament, who has writted Rwanda in Genocide in the Twentieth Century, a treatise to counter the catch-all of media coverage in which 'all catastrophes are treated alike and reduced to their lowest common denominator - compassion on the part of the onlooker.' Observer

In this slim, passionately argued volume - first published to great acclaim in France and considerably updated during the translation process - a deeply involved witness of the massacres takes an unflinching look at recent events in Rwanda and what they can tell us about the nature of genocide. Drawing on his experiences in the killing fields, Destexhe illustrates how genocide is trivialized by superficial contemporary definitions and by modern media and its compulsion to describe any mass killing as genocide. Genocide, Destexhe argues, is the most evil of all crimes as it is directed at the very heart of what it is to be human. Reviewing the three most destructive genocidal campaigns of the twientieth century - the Turkish mass murder of Armenians; the Nazi Holocaust; and the Rwandan cataclysm - the book discusses such central issues as culpability and collective responsibility, the limits of humanitarian intervention, and the complexities of punishing genocidal agents after the fact.

'An angry and eloquent book.' Financial Times'Alain Destexhe, a former Secretary General of the relief agency Médecins sans Frontières and now a senator in the Belgium Parliament, who has writted Rwanda in Genocide in the Twentieth Century, a treatise to counter the catch-all of media coverage in which 'all catastrophes are treated alike and reduced to their lowest common denominator - compassion on the part of the onlooker.' Observer

CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2016 Genocide and Gender in the Twentieth Century brings together a collection of some of the finest Genocide Studies scholars in North America and Europe to examine gendered discourses, practices and experiences of ethnic cleansing and genocide in the 20th century. It includes essays focusing on the genocide in Rwanda, the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire, the Holocaust and ethnic cleansing and genocide in the former Yugoslavia. The book looks at how historically- and culturally-specific ideas about reproduction, biology, and ethnic, national, racial and religious identity contributed to the possibility for and the unfolding of genocidal sexual violence, including mass rape. The book also considers how these ideas, in conjunction with discourses of femininity and masculinity, and understandings of female and male identities, contributed to perpetrators' tools and strategies for ethnic cleansing and genocide, as well as victims' experiences of these processes. This is an ideal text for any student looking to further understand the crucial topic of gender in genocide studies.

Why did the twentieth century witness unprecedented organized genocide? Can we learn why genocide is perpetrated by comparing different cases of genocide? Is the Holocaust unique, or does it share causes and features with other cases of state-sponsored mass murder? Can genocide be prevented? Blending gripping narrative with trenchant analysis, Eric Weitz investigates four of the twentieth century's major eruptions of genocide: the Soviet Union under Stalin, Nazi Germany, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, and the former Yugoslavia. Drawing on historical sources as well as trial records, memoirs, novels, and poems, Weitz explains the prevalence of genocide in the twentieth century--and shows how and why it became so systematic and deadly. Weitz depicts the searing brutality of each genocide and traces its origins back to those most powerful categories of the modern world: race and nation. He demonstrates how, in each of the cases, a strong state pursuing utopia promoted a particular mix of extreme national and racial ideologies. In moments of intense crisis, these states targeted certain national and racial groups, believing that only the annihilation of these "enemies" would enable the dominant group to flourish. And in each instance, large segments of the population were enticed to join in the often ritualistic actions that destroyed their neighbors. This book offers some of the most absorbing accounts ever written of the population purges forever associated with the names Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, and Milosevic. A controversial and richly textured comparison of these four modern cases, it identifies the social and political forces that produce genocide.

Benjamin A. Valentino finds that ethnic hatreds or discrimination, undemocratic systems of government, and dysfunctions in society play a much smaller role in mass killing and genocide than is commonly assumed. He shows that the impetus for mass killing usually originates from a relatively small group of powerful leaders and is often carried out without the active support of broader society. Mass killing, in his view, is a brutal political or military strategy designed to accomplish leaders' most important objectives, counter threats to their power, and solve their most difficult problems. In order to capture the full scope of mass killing during the twentieth century, Valentino does not limit his analysis to violence directed against ethnic groups, or to the attempt to destroy victim groups as such, as do most previous studies of genocide. Rather, he defines mass killing broadly as the intentional killing of a massive number of noncombatants, using the criteria of 50,000 or more deaths within five years as a quantitative standard. Final Solutions focuses on three types of mass killing: communist mass killings like the ones carried out in the Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia; ethnic genocides as in Armenia, Nazi Germany, and Rwanda; and "counter-guerrilla" campaigns including the brutal civil war in Guatemala and the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Valentino closes the book by arguing that attempts to prevent mass killing should focus on disarming and removing from power the leaders and small groups responsible for instigating and organizing the killing.

At the end of World War II, the international community deemed genocide a crime against humanity. Yet, at the dawn of the twenty-first century it has occurred repeatedly. This book explains why genocide began to occur in the twenty-first century and why the United States has been ineffective at preventing it and stopping it once it occurs.