All genocides are horrific, but not all genocides are the same. They can arise from cold-blooded calculations, realistic fears, instincts for revenge or ideologies of purification. Understanding—and perhaps forestalling—genocide requires clear distinctions.
References
1.
BaumanZygmunt. Modernity and the Holocaust.Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989. A clear, if controversial, sociological explanation of the thesis that modernity is responsible for genocide.
2.
BrowningChristopher R.The Path to Genocide.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. These essays by Browning, a leading Holocaust historian, lay out a balanced and thorough explanation of how the mass murders in World War II Germany came about.
3.
ChirotDaniel. Modern Tyrants.Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. Explains how 20th-century tyrants have come to power, and why they caused so many millions of deaths.
4.
HorowitzDonald L.The Deadly Ethnic Riot.Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. A political scientist shows under what conditions ethnic tensions have led to murderous violence throughout the world.
5.
NaimarkNorman M.The Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in 20th Century Europe.Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. A historian's account of five major cases, it offers a disconcerting view of vicious ethnic nationalism.
6.
OberschallAnthony. “From Ethnic Cooperation to Violence and War in Yugoslavia,” in ChirotD.SeligmanM.E.P., eds., Ethnopolitical Warfare Causes, Consequences, and Possible Solutions. Washington: American Psychological Association Press, 2001, pp. 119–150. Oberschall's field work in the former Yugoslavia is a superb study of how this multiethnic society fell apart.
7.
PrunierGérard. The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide.New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. This is the best explanation of the 1994 Rwanda genocide, told by one of France's foremost scholars of Africa.
