The Problems of Genocide
Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression

Historically delineates the problems of genocide as a concept in relation to rival categories of mass violence.

A. Dirk Moses (Author)

9781107103580, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 4 February 2021

610 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 3.3 cm, 0.982 kg

'What's in a name? Why and how does it matter whether a particular situation is designated a genocide? And why is it problematic for us to categorise mass violence in this way? Dirk Moses' important new book … addresses these questions head on with an elegantly argued and intricate treatment of the problems at the heart of what he terms the 'language of transgression' - the concept and discourse of genocide … a rich, satisfying and provocative read.' Rachel Kerr, International Journal of Military History and Historiography

Genocide is not only a problem of mass death, but also of how, as a relatively new idea and law, it organizes and distorts thinking about civilian destruction. Taking the normative perspective of civilian immunity from military attack, A. Dirk Moses argues that the implicit hierarchy of international criminal law, atop which sits genocide as the 'crime of crimes', blinds us to other types of humanly caused civilian death, like bombing cities, and the 'collateral damage' of missile and drone strikes. Talk of genocide, then, can function ideologically to detract from systematic violence against civilians perpetrated by governments of all types. The Problems of Genocide contends that this violence is the consequence of 'permanent security' imperatives: the striving of states, and armed groups seeking to found states, to make themselves invulnerable to threats.

Introduction: The Problems of Genocide
Part I. The Language of Transgression: 1. The Language of Transgression, 1500s to 1890s
2. The Language of Transgression, 1890s to 1930s
3. Raphael Lemkin and the Protection of Small Nations
4. The Many Types of Destruction
5. Inventing Genocide in the 1940s
Part II. Permanent Security: 6. Permanent Security in History: Empire and Settler Colonialism
7. The Nazi Empire as Illiberal Permanent Security
8. Human Rights, Population 'Transfer', and the Foundation of the Postwar Order
9. Imagining Nation-Security in South Asia and Palestine: Partition, Population Exchange, and Communal Hostages
Part III. The Language of Transgression, Permanent Security, and Holocaust Memory: 10. Lemkin, Arendt, Vietnam, and Liberal Permanent Security
11. Genocide Studies and the Repression of the Political
12. Holocaust Memory, Exemplary Victims, and Permanent Security Today.

Subject Areas: Human rights [JPVH], Violence in society [JFFE], Military history [HBW], Genocide & ethnic cleansing [HBTZ], General & world history [HBG]