Law and Genocide: Home
Law is the system of rules which a particular country or community recognizes as regulating the actions of its members and which it may enforce by the imposition of penalties.
Articles
- The 8 Stages of GenocidePrevention of genocide requires a structural understanding of the genocidal process. Genocide has eight stages or operational processes. The first stages precede later stages, but continue to operate throughout the genocidal process. Each stage reinforces the others. A strategy to prevent genocide should attack each stage, each process. The eight stages of genocide are classification, symbolization, dehumanization, organization, polarization, preparation, extermination, and denial.
- Dangerous Speech and Dangerous Ideology: An Integrated Model for Monitoring and PreventionThis paper draws together the authors’ independent past work on dangerous speech and the ideological dynamics of mass atrocities by offering a new integrated model to help identify the sorts of speech and ideology that raise the risk of atrocities and genocides
- Teaching about Genocide: A Guidebook for College and University TeachersDespite the long history and enormity of the subject, the number of courses on comparative genocide remains small. It is our belief that educating about genocide not only enhances causal explanation and understanding but will help to create individuals I societies committed to detect and prevent future genocidal atrocities.
- Vile Crime or Inalienable Right: Defining Incitement to GenocidePolitical leaders in Nazi Germany, Rwanda, and other pre-genocidal societies prepared civilian populations to condone genocide, by using certain techniques to make mass killing seem first acceptable, and then necessary. This article describes those techniques, and includes them in a new six-prong model for incitement to genocide.
- Prosecution and Punishment of the Crime of GenocidePart I of this Article scrutinizes the current definition of genocide in view of its theoretical circumscription in the Genocide Convention and with special reference to the judgment of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Prosecutor v. Akayesu. Part II considers the validity and the application of the principle of universal jurisdiction to the crime of genocide, and the consequent duty of states to bring perpetrators of genocide to justice. Part III focuses on the jurisdiction ratione materia of the ICC regarding the crime of genocide. Part IV will pay special attention to the prosecution of genocide in the United States.
Books & eBooks
Centuries of Genocide by The fourth edition of Centuries of Genocide: Essays and Eyewitness Accounts addresses examples of genocides perpetrated in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries.
Hidden Genocides by Why are some genocides prominently remembered while others are ignored, hidden, or denied? Consider the Turkish campaign denying the Armenian genocide, followed by the Armenian movement to recognize the violence. Similar movements are building to acknowledge other genocides that have long remained out of sight in the media, such as those against the Circassians, Greeks, Assyrians, the indigenous peoples in the Americas and Australia, and the violence that was the precursor to and the aftermath of the Holocaust.
Web Resources and Sites
- Dismantling DemocracyThis lesson from Facing History and Ourselves allows students to learn about the transformation of Germany into a dictatorship in 1933–1934 and draw conclusions, based on this history, about the values and institutions that might serve as a bulwark against dictatorship and make democracy possible.
- Native American Boarding Schools Lesson PlanStudents will examine primary source photos before and after learning about Native American boarding schools in the U.S. and the long-term effects of such policies.
Films
