Everyone is talking about genocide. The accusation that Israel has committed the gravest of all crimes, and the controversy it has provoked, have made this chilling term a fixture of our everyday speech, and it is likely to stay with us for a long time to come. The Hebrew translation of Martin Shaw’s “Genocide and International Relations” has no doubt arrived against this backdrop, and the Open University Press has done well to take upon itself the task of bringing the subject before the Israeli reader. For the book casts its net far and wide, from debates within the field of research itself to the analysis of genocidal events across the past century.
Shaw, professor emeritus at the University of Sussex, is among the leading authorities in the field, and in this book he takes issue with fellow scholars who, in his view, define the term too narrowly. Even the definition in the U.N. Genocide Convention falls short, according to Shaw, who believes that extraneous political motives held back broader formulations. In his view, the term ought to encompass almost any deliberate and destructive assault against a group of civilians.
Shaw also sets out to dispel the assumption that genocide is chiefly something governments do to their own citizens. More often, he argues, it crosses borders and targets the civilian population on the other side. He places each genocide in its international setting, arguing that international relations shape local patterns of genocide and hold the key to understanding them.
The book opens with a survey of the field. Since genocide studies developed in the shadow of the Holocaust, he observes, attempts to recognize other genocides initially met with resistance. It took a long struggle to secure recognition of the genocide of the Armenians. Once scholars ceased to regard the Holocaust as an event so singular as to preclude comparison, the way opened for further cases to be recognized as well. The problem, Shaw writes, was that the Holocaust was still held up as the paradigm of all genocide, and this conception went on obstructing the recognition of various events of more limited scope.
Thus, in Shaw’s account, the Nazis also perpetrated “genocidal episodes” against people with disabilities, Roma, Poles, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Serbs and others, just as the Ottoman Empire committed genocide against Greeks and Assyrian Christians as well as Armenians. These events are not counted as genocides because they were smaller in scale, yet Shaw insists that they, too, must be recognized as such. He laments that the “mega-genocides” — the term he uses, after Mark Levene, for the destruction visited upon the Jews, the Armenians and the Tutsi — overshadow other genocides, in which large portions of the people targeted were not annihilated.
Unlike some scholars of genocide, Shaw sees no special affinity between genocide and any particular ideology, whether nationalism, fascism, imperialism, settler colonialism or revolt against settler colonialism. Each has given rise to genocide, and for each one can find examples in which no genocide occurred. Shaw argues that each case must be examined on its own terms and compared with others, with due attention to an ever-changing international context.
To illustrate his thesis, Shaw analyses a wealth of examples. If before the 20th century genocide was commonplace and sprang mainly from wars of religion (pogroms against Jews, the expulsion of the Muslims from Spain and the various wars between Catholics and Protestants were all genocide, according to Shaw), with the passage to the modern era religion ceased to be the principal driver of genocidal events, and ideology – most often nationalism – took its place.
In the 20th century the Soviets alone committed genocide against the kulaks (the class of landowning peasants), against the Ukrainians (in the Holodomor, the man-made famine that killed millions), and in the deportations of various ethnic groups within the Soviet Union (the Chechens, the Tatars and others). Stalin’s purges were genocide as well, as was the expulsion of German populations from Eastern Europe after the Second World War. The Japanese committed genocide in Korea as early as 1910; the Chinese committed genocide in Tibet, and against their own people in Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” (1958–1962), which, owing to “the genocidal mentality ingrained in Maoism” brought about the deaths of tens of millions.
Indian and Pakistani independence brought genocidal violence in the population transfers between the two states; Korean nationalists employed genocidal violence in the Korean War; the Khmer Rouge committed genocide in Cambodia; in the 1950s Britain carried out “genocidal counterinsurgency” in Kenya; the Americans committed genocide in Vietnam; half a million people were murdered in the genocide perpetrated by the Indonesian government against its opposition from 1965 onward; and in those same years Muslims waged genocide against Christians in Nigeria. In the early 1970s Bangladesh embarked on genocide against ethnic minorities in the Chittagong Hill Tracts; Mugabe’s government in Zimbabwe waged genocide against its domestic rivals from 1979; in 1983 Saddam Hussein committed genocide against the Kurds of northern Iraq; and apartheid in South Africa, too, produced “genocidal consequences” for South Africa’s Black population. Africa as a whole is a disaster zone: in Shaw’s words, “we might be tempted to see almost the whole of Africa as a region of genocidal conflicts.”
The end of the Cold War brought no improvement. If anything, the collapse of Moscow’s central authority made genocidal violence possible between Armenia and Azerbaijan, between the Georgian state and Abkhaz nationalists, among ethnic groups in Tajikistan and among Muslim groups in Uzbekistan. Then there was the Serbian genocide against the Bosnians, which came in 1991 in the wake of Yugoslavia’s breakup. The American invasion and occupation of Iraq “led to a genocidal civil war” between Shiites and Sunnis. In the 2000s, Sri Lanka used genocidal violence against Tamil rebels. Both the Second Lebanon War (2006) and Operation Cast Lead in Gaza (2009) had “a genocidal element.” In the Syrian civil war there were “genocide issues,” not least by al-Qaida, which perpetrated genocidal violence also in Iraq. In Burma, sweeping genocidal violence was directed at ethnic minorities in 2016–2017; and Hamas’ attack of Oct. 7, 2023, like the current war in Gaza, is, according to Shaw, genocide.
As Walter Benjamin’s angel of history is borne backward, gazing gaped-mouthed at the procession of genocides from which the past is composed, we are left to reckon with the list before us. It is hard to escape the conclusion that when human beings find themselves in a bloody conflict, the aim they ordinarily set themselves is the annihilation or wholesale expulsion of the other side. And since they do what they can to achieve that aim, genocide is hardly rare. Indeed, Shaw’s research suggests that among violent conflicts it is the “ordinary” wars, not the genocides, that are the exception.
Just how pervasive genocide is can be gauged even from its absence. Shaw attributes the fact that no genocide took place in Europe from the end of the Second World War until the 1990s not to international mechanisms capable of restraining it and resolving conflicts, but to the success of the genocide carried out immediately after the war by the Red Army, which expelled the German populations of Eastern Europe: “the ending of genocide in Europe for a generation resulted from the victory of one genocidal project, the Soviet, over another, the Nazi.”
The absence of genocide requires an explanation, and the explanation is genocide. Human beings ordinarily wish to annihilate the strangers who live near them, and refrain from doing so only when those strangers have already been annihilated. The heart of a people inclines to evil against its neighbors, always and everywhere. By this logic, ethnically diverse regions are prone to genocide, and Shaw does indeed observe that genocides recur in the same places, time and again.
The world as Shaw sees it is a bleak place. Yet it is hard to shake the sense that when massacres and wars coincide almost entirely with genocide, the word loses the very distinction that gave it its force. It is telling that when Shaw wants to speak of the genocide of the Jews or the Armenians, he has to use another term, “mega-genocide.” There is a tension here between the desire to rouse international public opinion and the use of a category that grows more banal with each new application. The banality of evil, though not quite as Arendt meant it.
There is a tension, too, between the ease with which Shaw classifies acts of violence as genocide and the urgency with which he calls for their prevention, coupled with his dismay at the international community’s inability to prevent them. Can we expect humanity to put an end to genocide if genocide is something that happens every other year? As Shaw himself puts it, “A world truly without genocide would be a world without war.” It is sadly hard to imagine such a world coming into being any time soon – or ever.
Tomer Persico is a Senior Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute.
