I begin this study with the political, cultural and legal contexts of genocide research, rather than directly with issues arising from the understanding of genocide. This might seem a surprising choice, but it reflects my belief that the academic field has been imbued with similar assumptions to those which have shaped popular consciousness of genocide. Scholars in this field have strong moral and political commitments, and these inevitably affect their research activities. Since genocide is always a matter of great political, cultural and legal import, dialogue between academic research and wider debates is necessary and often fruitful. However we need to be critically aware of these contexts and how they affect scholarship. The argument of this chapter is that genocide research has been heavily skewed, and even distorted, by issues arising from its origins in mid-twentieth-century Europe and how these continue to ramify in twenty-first-century world politics. This skewing is a matter not just of scholars' personal outlooks but of how powerful political, cultural and legal paradigms have affected the conceptual, methodological and theoretical frameworks within which academic research has developed.

Political and legal origins of ‘genocide’

The idea of ‘genocide’, first proposed in Lemkin's (1944) study of Nazi rule, was from the start both a sociological concept, used for analysing historical developments, and a political-legal one, designed to show how genocide might be outlawed and its perpetrators punished. It came to prominence at the end of the Second World War as the victor states and their new United Nations Organization sought ways of, on the one hand, stigmatizing Nazism's policies towards civilians, and, on the other, criminalizing similar policies by others in the future. The UN adopted, in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948), a relatively broad definition of genocide – not limited to mass killing like some later definitions – influenced by the approach of Lemkin who lobbied for it.