Genocide Studies International

If ever a title offered a point of departure for a book review, Joyce Apsel and Ernesto Verdeja’s edited volume, Genocide Matters, does just that. On the one hand, it expresses such a fundamental truism that one is tempted to respond, If genocide doesn’t matter, [End Page 112] then what does? On the other hand, it not only forms the opening words of Helen Fein’s foreword, but it also reflects a more profound epistemological issue related to the current state of genocide studies. In fact, it might well have been more appropriately recast as Genocide Studies Matters, particularly since the volume was conceptualized by the board of the Institute for the Study of Genocide as a means to offer “a systematic evaluation” (12) of the state of the field. This appears to be an ambitious goal, especially given that Apsel and Verdeja offer an early disclaimer that “the explosion of research on genocide over the past decade means that any assessment of the field must remain partial; there are so many new research questions and publications that no overview can do justice to genocide studies as a whole” (8).

The volume’s eight thematic essays provide an excellent overview of the important methodological, theoretical, and pedagogical issues related to the field from a range of disciplinary perspectives. For example, in three separate essays, political scientist Maureen Hiebert, anthropologist Alexander Hinton, and historian Donald Bloxham focus on issues related to comparative research. In addition, chapters focused on categories and methods of genocidal violence include Roger W. Smith’s “Genocide and the Politics of Rape” and Sheri Rosenberg and Everita Silina’s “Genocide by Attrition.” Likewise, Apsel’s entry explores issues and challenges related to the research and teaching of genocide and constitutes the volume’s sole piece on pedagogy. Finally, Paul Williams’s essay on humanitarian military intervention and Verdeja’s examination of transitional justice relate to the field’s “activist morality” (71) and examine practical issues of prevention, intercession, punishment, and reconciliation.

The volume supports the editors’ contention that genocide studies is “an expanding and rich area of research” (4), but it is also apparent that the maturation of the field has not been without its share of growing pains. A major point of contention has concerned the relative or absolute role of the Holocaust, an issue that many now describe as somewhat antiquarian. For example, Hiebert notes, “The Holocaust is no longer seen as necessarily the case against which all others must be measured and compared or as the main source of explanatory models of genocidal violence” (17). Similarly, Bloxham, in an essay that references the controversy surrounding his The Final Solution: A Genocide, examines the “tensions” between genocide studies and Holocaust studies, ultimately concluding, “The Holocaust is one genocide among many, each with its own particular and general characteristics” (76).¹ Indeed, the volume’s first four chapters all explicitly address aspects of this relationship, and in her foreword, Fein also warns against “using a single genocide—the Holocaust or another case—as a paradigm” (viii). In this respect, one might be reminded of the Historikerstreit, or the historian’s controversy of the mid-1980s concerning the singularity of the Holocaust, a debate reviewed in the pages of an aptly titled work, Forever in the Shadow of Hitler?² Since fully half of the volume’s entries directly address the relationship between Holocaust and genocide studies, one might rephrase the question as “forever in the shadow of the Holocaust?”

If, as the volume’s authors assert, genocide studies has indeed escaped the long shadow of the Shoah, the essays demonstrate that the field has by no means left the quagmire associated with the definition of the term genocide. The debate may seem strange to those unfamiliar with the field, especially since UN Resolution 260—the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide—not only...