Blackwell Reference Online

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Comment on this article   More than 60 years ago, in the wake of the Holocaust, the United Nations adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (UNCG) to insure that the world would “never again” stand by and allow genocide – the greatest of all crimes – to be perpetrated. Briefly, genocide is defined as the intentional destruction, in whole or in part, of a people based on their national, racial, religious, or ethnic identity. But despite the existence of this universal legal prohibition, genocide continues to be perpetrated again and again, most recently in Bosnia in 1992–1995, in Rwanda in 1994, and in the Darfur region of the Sudan from 2003 to the present. The return of this “odious scourge” has challenged the policy and academic communities to explain more precisely what genocide is, why it keeps occurring, and how it can be prevented in the future. Genocide, by its very nature, is an interdisciplinary problem for scholars; no single academic discipline has yet taken on the study of genocide in a serious, systematic, and significant way, let alone placed an exclusive claim on it. A casual search of the academic literature on genocide reveals that a relatively small number of scholars from a wide range of disciplines – law, sociology, psychology, anthropology, history, philosophy, criminal justice, and political science – have chosen to ... log in or subscribe to read full text