I have criticized the dominant approach of comparative genocide studies for its concentration on a few mega-genocides, compared transhistorically with little attention to their international historical contexts. In the study of contemporary genocide, this approach is represented by concentration on the Rwandan genocide of 1994. The only other widely considered conflict is the crisis in the Darfur region of Sudan since 2002, the main focus of the new genocide activism in the USA and elsewhere in the 2000s. Other cases are considered from time to time, but comparative genocide studies has produced no overall account of the pattern of or trends in genocide in the post-Cold War world. Indeed the key question – have changed conditions of world politics been associated with changes in genocide in the decades since 1989? – has hardly been asked, let alone answered.

Michael Mann (2005: 506–18) is a rare author who has considered current trends in ‘ethnic cleansing’ and genocide. He argues that there had been a decline in the global North, largely as a result of the success of earlier waves of genocide in creating mono-ethnic states. In the remaining Northern multi-ethnic states, he argues, politics is largely defined by class, region and gender, while continuing ethnic politics, both historic and new, is largely non-violent. This seems broadly valid, although I have argued that the production of mono-ethnic states and ending of genocidal conflicts in Europe was the outcome of the Second World War, and especially of the victory of the Soviet programme to reorder European borders and national patterns. This settlement survived because the Cold War system (reinforced by the post-Cold War embedding of nation-states in the European Union) blocked the revival of conflict. We might add that, where genocidal violence has emerged in the North, especially in former Yugoslavia, it has been more strongly internationally managed than in most other world regions. The Balkan genocidal violence of the 1990s appears to have subsided, and Western regulation combined with the expansion of Western international institutions appear to be key mechanisms of containment.