The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of TransgressionGenocide 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. |
Contents
The Problems of Genocide | 1 |
The Language of Transgression 1500s to 1890s | 49 |
The Language of Transgression 1890s to 1930s | 94 |
Raphael Lemkin and the Protection of Small Nations | 136 |
The Many Types of Destruction | 169 |
Inventing Genocide in the 1940s | 201 |
Empire | 243 |
The Nazi Empire as Illiberal Permanent Security | 277 |
Other editions - View all
The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression A. Dirk Moses No preview available - 2021 |
Common terms and phrases
Africa Allies American antisemitism Arab Arendt Armenian Genocide atrocities Axis Rule barbarism bombing British Cambridge University Press century Christian civilians civilization Commission concept conflict conquest conscience crimes against humanity cultural declared destruction Empire enemy ethnic European extermination Foreign Genocide Convention Genocide Research Genocide Studies German global groups Hague Hannah Arendt History Hitler Holocaust Human Rights Ibid imperial India indigenous International Criminal International Law Israel Jewish Jews Journal of Genocide Journal of International killing language of transgression leaders liberal permanent security London Martens Clause mass massacres military Modern murder Muslim Nazi Nuremberg Nuremberg Trials Ottoman Ottoman Empire Oxford University Press Pakistan Palestine Palestinian Palgrave Macmillan partition peace persecution Poland political population transfer Princeton race racial Raphael Lemkin refugees regime Review Rule in Occupied settler colonialism slavery small nations Social Soviet terrorism tion Treaty UN Genocide Convention victims Vietnam violence war crimes warfare Western World York Zionist