genocide

genocide
A term devised during the Second World War by Raphael Lemkin and adopted by the United Nations Convention in 1948. Sociologists have been most concerned with five matters: how to define the term; its typological manifestations; the conditions which give rise to genocide; a historical analysis of it; and the consequences of genocide, not just for the victims, but also for the perpetrators. (The best general discussion is F. Chalk and K. Jonassohn's The History and Sociology of Genocide, 1989.) There are many controversies around what constitutes a genocide. Should the witchcraft purges throughout Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries be seen as genocide? The bombing of Hiroshima could also be included, if one is concerned with all forms of ‘death on a large scale’, but this was an (almost) unique and distinct form. Irving Horowitz (in Taking Lives: Genocide and State Power, 1980) defines genocide as the ‘structural and...

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