Insofar as the wider world paid much attention to Myanmar,1 by 2010 it was to see it as another state emerging from a dictatorship to some form of democratic rule2. Faced by massive civil unrest in the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis,3 the military regime conceded a new constitution and elections to a parliament in 2010. Objecting to the restrictions imposed on its leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, the National League for Democracy (NLD) boycotted that round but did stand in the 2011 elections.4 Here they won the majority of the votes cast by the ethnic Burmese community (who make up some 70 per cent of the population of Myanmar), suggesting that even with the embedded role of the military5 (which the constitution set as the key guarantors of the state, reserving a number of seats in parliament for their own political party), the state was moving towards the status of a conventional democracy. That the leader of the NLD had spent most of the previous twenty years under house arrest and had won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 seemed further reassurance of Myanmar’s likely trajectory away from dictatorship and intercommunal conflict.6

In June 2014, the Islamic State (IS), at the time calling itself the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), launched a military campaign from its base in Syria into Mosul, Iraq. This signified the terrorist organisation’s early stages of establishing the so-called Caliphate under the leadership of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Following this incredible conquest of Mosul, the ISIS bureaucracy set up shop within its territories in Iraq and its leadership announced its five-year plan, encompassing the territorial conquest of land stretching from parts of western China; Europe; all of North, Central, East and West Africa; and the entire Indian subcontinent including Sri Lanka. (See Map 29.1.)

In 1949 the red flag was raised over the Forbidden City in Beijing, as Mao Zedong proclaimed the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. How should we characterise the mass killings of ordinary people during the following decades? This chapter will focus on how the regime treated the majority of the population it classified, however arbitrarily, as ‘Han Chinese’. A separate discussion would be necessary to examine what happened in the border areas inhabited by what were called ‘minority nationalities’, from Tibet and the Muslim belt running through Xinjiang, Qinghai, Ningxia and Gansu to Inner Mongolia. Whether or not these killings, intentional or otherwise, should be characterised as genocide will depend on the definition one adopts. As Norman Naimark has pointed out, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, the foundational legal document adopted by the United Nations in 1948, excluded crimes of humanity against social and political groups from its definition, largely as the result of sustained opposition from the Soviet and other delegates who worried that the repression of their own people at home might be considered genocidal. As a result, few scholars have used the term to qualify crimes against identifiable groups of people seen to belong to the same ‘national’ group as the perpetrators, whether ‘kulaks’ (farmers classified as ‘rich peasants’) or the nobility in the Soviet Union or those defined by the Nazis as ‘homosexuals’ or ‘handicapped’.1

White people have all too often stereotyped African leaders as bloodthirsty and barbarous, and none more than the Zulu kings. Nevertheless, a substantial body of reliable evidence and the consensus judgement of historians shows that, in the early 1800s, the Zulu kings Shaka and Dingane perpetrated the widespread of killing of innocent civilians as they tried to establish and maintain the Zulu kingdom. It is the contention of this chapter that these killings fit the definition of genocide under international law. However, today the Zulu people include the descendants of both perpetrators and victims of this genocide, and memories of this violence are suppressed or minimized. Despite this history of genocide, Zulu unity has proved to be a popular tool in the fight against colonialism and apartheid.

Until 1988, little was known about the extent of massacres of Aboriginal people and British settlers across the Australian frontier 1788-1928. Since then the question has dominated Australian historiography and raised the critical question: Were the massacres an expression of genocide? This chapter surveys the debate’s origins in the 1970s and the opposing schools of thought that emerged in response: settler genocide versus Aboriginal resistance. In the 1990s the debate focussed on the level of violence on the colonial frontier in Victoria. A decade later the debate shifted to the colonial frontier in Tasmania and changed direction. Historians of Aboriginal resistance were accused of inventing frontier massacres and fabricating footnotes while others claimed there were very few massacres and the Tasmanian Aboriginal people were responsible for their own demise. In response new methods emerged to understand the characteristics of frontier massacre and interrogate the disparate sources of evidence. New texts argued that frontier massacres were a critical component of Tasmanian Aboriginal dispossession. Today digital mapping technologies have identified more than 300 sites of frontier massacre across Australia, providing new evidence that they constitute genocide.

Ever since Adam Hochschild wrote in 1998 that the killings and excess deaths in King Leopold II’s Congo Free State (1885-1908), though of genocidal proportions, did not, “strictly speaking,” constitute genocide, the debate his words sparked has not abated. Historians and others have embraced or denounced the proposition that what occurred in the Congo Free State during the 33 years of its legal existence, 1885-1908, was, in fact, genocidal. Officially sanctioned colonial slaughter had many names: military (in the course of war), pacifying, punitive, retaliatory, and even salutary, to teach the colonized a lesson. At times, colonial governments killed subject peoples to eliminate groups that were deemed incorrigible. The question of intent has a strange role in the study of the pace, scale, and nature of the Congo killings, which were simultaneously genocidal, exterminationist, and the unfortunate result of a highly lethal form of economic exploitation. The logic of the system of rule and economic exploitation relentlessly tended toward atrocity and murder. Whether intentional or not, the slaughter did not end until the Congo Free State itself did, and its long-term effects reverberated for many years thereafter.

On 30 January 1933, German president Paul von Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler chancellor of a coalition government. Hitler sought to rule by decree and set elections (5 March) to secure the majority in the Reichstag he needed to do that. Emboldened by the results, Hitler forged forward to establish a fully Nazi state with a radical antisemitic agenda.

The Genocide Convention of 1948 was passed by the United Nations on 9 December 1948 in Paris. That date is a useful divide in any account of the phenomenon of genocide in the twentieth century, not only because of its formal acceptance in international law, subject to the ratification of two-thirds of the members of the United Nations. The date also separates two periods in the history of warfare. The first period, prior to 1948, may be termed the era of imperial and national war; the second, after 1948, may be termed the era of post-imperial warfare.

The genocide of the Romani people during World War Two occurred throughout Europe and led to the death of approximately 220,000 Romani people, or around 25 per cent of a pre-war population of approximately 1 million.1 The persecution of various Romani groups varied widely throughout the European continent; in some places the UN definition of genocide, including the ‘intent to destroy, in whole or in part’, definitively applied, but in others, the question is more debatable. In understanding the history, motivations, outcomes and horror of the Romani genocide, historians have argued that discussing it in relationship to the Holocaust, while certainly unavoidable, can obscure the specificity of the Romani experience.2 This chapter contends that the Nazis and allied regimes targeted the Romani people in order to destroy them based on their supposed racial heritage, the very definition of genocide. It outlines the history of Romani persecution in Europe, explains debates among historians about the nature and validity of the term genocide, and provides a detailed geographical accounting of the genocide and its victims, perpetrators, bystanders and resisters. At the conclusion, a short Bibliographic Note focused on English sources delineates starting points for both for researchers and students.

The aboriginal peoples of southern Africa, collectively known as San, suffered widespread genocidal violence as a result of colonial invasion from the eighteenth century onwards. Being hunter-gatherers and racially stereotyped as among the lowest forms of humanity, they were targeted for mass violence by colonial states and civilian militias. The first case study in this chapter analyses exterminatory Dutch and British violence against San in the Cape Colony during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The second examines the obliteration of San society in Transorangia by indigenous Griqua polities during the early nineteenth century, cautioning against the over-simple, racialised binaries that often inform studies of frontier strife. Thirdly, from the mid-1840s onwards after the British annexation of Natal, conflict with San communities in the midlands resulted in their eradication by 1870. The fourth case study outlines how South African forces halted the German genocide of Namibian San when they invaded German South West Africa in 1914. The final case reveals a different pattern. It explores how late-nineteenth-century white pastoralists established peaceful relations with San in western Bechuanaland.

Crusading in the Levant remains one of the notorious chapters in medieval history. Though rich in source material and featuring an expansive historiography, the violence of the subject has seldom received attention as a discrete topic. This study limits the analysis to the First Crusade and specifically to events at Jerusalem in July 1099. Consulting Western, Armenian, Arabic and Hebrew sources reveals the nature and perception of this eleventh-century event. Crucial considerations include: pre-existing contextual tumult in the Levant, questions around crusader extermination policy, source material reliability, and if crusade violence was exceptional. Within a century, the fall of Jerusalem became a tool in the service of political agendas. This created mythistory that served to illuminate as well as obfuscate and influenced subsequent scholarship. The central question persists: Did genocide occur at Jerusalem? The sources agree that violence, bloodshed and mass killing characterize the crusader victory. The research concludes that it is not necessary to think or argue that the crusades were in fact genocide, but underscores what we might learn from looking at the violence of the crusades through the paradigm of genocide studies.

The 1994 genocide in Rwanda has become a canonical case of the second half of the twentieth century. In three months, an interim government orchestrated the massacre of at least 500,000 Tutsi civilians. Known for its speed and participatory nature, as well as the failure of international actors to stop the violence, the Rwandan case is a touchstone for debates about the causes, prevention and aftermath of genocide. This chapter presents an overview of the history preceding the genocide as well as of the event itself. In addition, the chapter summarises the violence against non-Tutsi Rwandans during the genocide and thereafter, mass violence that amounts to crimes against humanity.

In the early hours of 3 August 2014, fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, otherwise known simply as IS) attacked the Sinjar region of northern Iraq. In pick-up trucks flying the pseudo-state’s infamous black and white flags, hundreds of heavily armed black-clad men sped northwards from Baaj, a village just beyond the southern reach of Sinjar.

This chapter explores the related questions of whether or not genocide is found in sources from ancient Mesopotamia and whether ancient Mesopotamian empires carried out genocidal violence. The chapter focuses on the three most relevant sets of sources from Mesopotamia: evidence from the 23rd century BCE related to the violent reprisals of two kings of Akkad, Rimuš and Naram-Sin, against the “rebellious” cities of Sumer and Elam; the Sumerian “city laments” dating to a few centuries later; and first-millennium BCE Neo-Assyrian royal inscriptions. This examination demonstrates that, while mass violence is hardly rare in accounts of Mesopotamian history, finding evidence for genocide is not a straightforward task. Whether or not the Mesopotamians practiced genocide hinges on how one defines that term, and whether the targeted destruction of cities constitutes a type of genocide. In addition to an exploration of urbicide as genocide, the chapter considers how Mesopotamian accounts of mass violence contributed to accounts and practices of violence, including genocidal violence, elsewhere in ancient West Asia in later periods.

In the early twentieth-first century, settler colonialism emerged as one of the most identifiable paradigms of social and cultural analysis. This chapter assesses this paradigm’s conceptual origins and identifies the study of Indigenous genocide at its center. Drawing from readings of Patrick Wolfe’s work, this chapter highlights the utility of settler colonial studies for the study of genocide and identifies sets of problematics within certain works of genocide. It examines in particular the inability of historians of the United States to reconcile celebratory and/or exceptionalistic visions of North American history with the genocide of Indigenous peoples.