The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression

Description

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