Since genocide studies grew in the shadow of Holocaust studies, they have had to struggle to establish their autonomy. Among historians, the weight of Holocaust historiography is so great that genocide remains a poor relation. The necessity of comparison, which might otherwise be seen as normal in historical and social-scientific research, is seen as a hard-won gain over the idea of Holocaust ‘uniqueness’ (Huttenbach 2009). Each additional ‘genocide’ has to be painstakingly added to the canon, often after political campaigning as well as scholarship. The recognition of the 1915 Armenian genocide, pursued both by historians (Hovanissian 1987, Dadrian 2001) and campaigners, is a model which advocates of recognizing other genocides have followed.

Thus although genocide studies have generally criticized the sacralized idea of the Holocaust as a ‘unique’ event – otherwise it would be difficult to talk meaningfully about its relationships to other episodes, and full bridging would be difficult – it still profoundly influences how the field develops. With the Holocaust as the standard against which other genocides must be measured, most predictably ‘fail’: hence a narrow scope for ‘genocide’ is confirmed, and euphemistic descriptions such as ‘ethnic cleansing’ are adopted instead to describe the ‘failed’ episodes (Shaw 2007: 37–62). Yet this does not exhaust the problematic influence of ideas about the Holocaust. Even if bridging from the Holocaust sometimes works for recognition of other genocides, its consequences for understanding genocide are mostly profoundly negative. The bridging approach, I shall argue, has been associated with a theoretical and methodological paradigm which has restricted our understanding of the Holocaust as well as of genocide.