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 it in the co
In: Genocide in the age of the nation-state Vol. 2
World Affairs Online
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 Vendee. Levene finishes
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