HST 290 22W: Comparative Genocide (Brown)

Welcome to the Research Guide for HST 290, Comparative Genocide.  Please use this guide to find resources for your assignments.  Please contact myself or any Bristol Librarian if you have any questions.

For individual persons, in the context of criminal behavior, murder is considered the worst possible crime in those criminal justice systems that rank human life as having the most important value. In conjunction with this belief, genocide is probably the most heinous crime recognized by the civilized nations of the world, as it involves the mass murder of people for no legitimate reason. However, defining genocide is not simple. Indeed, there are many different definitions of genocide.

One aspect almost all definitions of genocide have in common is that the genocidal efforts are usually directed against one or more specific, identifiable groups of people. The United Nations (UN) Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide provides a definition of genocide as any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group:

• Killing members of the group

• Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group

• Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part

• Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group

• Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group

This convention was signed in 1948 and marked the first time in history that the crime of genocide was defined.

The date of the signing of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide is important. World War II had just ended in 1945. It was in World War II that probably the most horrible example witnessed by human history of genocide occurred: the Holocaust. As every schoolchild learns, the Holocaust was the systematic extermination by Germany's National Socialist (Nazi) regime of the Jewish people. More than six million Jews in Europe were killed by the Nazi regime until its defeat in 1945. However, it must be realized that the Nazis were not only interested in exterminating Jews; they also sought to eliminate many other classes of people the Nazis considered inferior or undesirable: homosexuals, people with disabilities, religious groups, and people with opposing political beliefs. Thus, many millions more people were slain by the Nazis. In the aftermath of World War II, the nations of the world formed the UN and enacted the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide so that, at least in theory, recurrence of such genocide could be prevented.

An excerpt from, Credo Reference from  Encyclopedia of Transnational Crime and Justice