Welcome

This blog was inspired by a series of blogs written by my students during a course I taught that explored comparative genocide. The idea that we can subject genocides, ethnic cleansing events, and mass killings to systematic analytical and scholarly inquire surprised my students. In the course of teaching the class, I began to find more and more linkages in genocidal or mass killing events that occurred across cultures, regime type, and historical experience.

I also discovered a meta-politics of genocide: political concerns such as Holocaust or genocide denial, perceptions of perpetrators, and the capabilities or interest of outside forces to intervene or seek justice excite passions and compel systematic inquiry.

This blog is the beginning of my own effort, and efforts by my co-bloggers, to explore these questions, to assess new literature, and to follow unfolding events.