Books
The Marginalised in Genocide Narratives
By Giorgia Doná. Examining a range of marginal stories and using Rwanda as a case study, The Marginalized in Genocide Narratives’ analysis of the transformation of genocide into a powerful narrative of a nation establishes an innovative means of understanding the lived spaces of violence and its enduring legacy. In a distinctive approach to the social history…
Read moreCinematic Intermedialities and Contemporary Holocaust Memory
By Victoria Grace Walden. This book explores the growing trend of intermediality in cinematic representations of the Holocaust. It turns to the in-betweens that characterise the cinematic experience to discover how the different elements involved in film and its viewing collaborate to produce Holocaust memory. Cinematic Intermedialities is a work of film-philosophy that places a number of…
Read moreViews of Violence: Representing the Second World War in German and European Museums and Memorials
Edited by Jörg Echternkamp and Stephan Jaeger. Twenty-first-century views of historical violence have been immeasurably influenced by cultural representations of the Second World War. Within Europe, one of the key sites for such representation has been the vast array of museums and memorials that reflect contemporary ideas of war, the roles of soldiers and civilians,…
Read moreFeminist Dialogues on International Law: Success, Tensions, Futures
By Gina Heathcote. In the past decade, a sense of feminist ‘success’ has developed within the United Nations and international law, recognized in the Security Council resolution 1325 on women, peace and security, the increased jurisprudence on gender based crimes in armed conflict from the ICTR/Y and the ICC, the creation of UN Women, and Security…
Read moreThe Representation of Genocide in Graphic Novels: Considering the Role of Kitsch
By Laurike in ‘t Veld. This book mobilises the concept of kitsch to investigate the tensions around the representation of genocide in international graphic novels that focus on the Holocaust and the genocides in Armenia, Rwanda, and Bosnia. In response to the predominantly negative readings of kitsch as meaningless or inappropriate, this book offers a…
Read morePerpetrators of International Crimes: Theories, Methods, and Evidence
Edited by Alette Smeulers, Maartje Weerdesteijn, and Barbora Holá. Why would anyone commit a mass atrocity such as genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, or terrorism? This question is at the core of the multi- and interdisciplinary field of perpetrator studies, a developing field which this book assesses in its full breadth for the first time. Perpetrators of…
Read moreOf Mind and Murder: Toward a More Comprehensive Psychology of the Holocaust
By George R. Mastroianni. How could the Holocaust have happened? How can people do such things to other people? Questions such as these have animated discussion of the Holocaust from our earliest awareness of what had happened. These questions have engaged the lay public as well as academics from many different fields. Psychologists have taken an…
Read moreWar Crimes: Causes, Excuses, and Blame
By Matthew Talbert and Jessica Wolfendale. In 2005, US Marines killed 24 unarmed Iraqi civilians in the town of Haditha, including several children. How should we assess the perpetrators of this and other war crimes? Is it unfair to blame the Marines because they were subject to situational pressures such as combat stress (and had lost one of…
Read moreProbing the Limits of Categorization: The Bystander in Holocaust History
Edited by Christina Morina and Krijn Thijs. Of the three categories that Raul Hilberg developed in his analysis of the Holocaust—perpetrators, victims, and bystanders—it is the last that is the broadest and most difficult to pinpoint. Described by Hilberg as those who were “once a part of this history,” bystanders present unique challenges for those…
Read moreState of Repression: Iraq under Saddam Hussein
By Lisa Blaydes. A new account of modern Iraqi politics that overturns the conventional wisdom about its sectarian divisions. How did Iraq become one of the most repressive dictatorships of the late twentieth century? The conventional wisdom about Iraq’s modern political history is that the country was doomed by its diverse social fabric. But in State…
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