The Native peoples of North America long possessed a discourse critiquing the violent white invasion of their homelands. This Indigenous conscious of genocide—the belief that whites wanted Indian land and were willing to kill large numbers of Native men, women, and children in order to obtain it—profoundly shaped how Native nations responded in encounters with the new United States from the late eighteenth century onwards. Even in those cases where Indigenous peoples avoided the most extreme forms of violence, the awareness that they could become the targets of genocide still guided Native behavior. The asymmetrical nature of this violence demonstrates the need to stop labeling the nineteenth-century conflicts between the U.S. and Native nations as “Indian wars” and instead to embrace a language that stresses that these confrontations were unilateral colonial invasions of Indigenous homelands. Recentering historical analysis on the Indigenous conscious of genocide also demands greater attention to Native recordkeeping and perspectives, rather than privileging the intentions of the white perpetrators of genocide.

The Kazakh famine of 1930–3 ranks as one of the great crimes of the Stalinist regime. The crisis, which was sparked by Josef Stalin’s programme of forced collectivisation, led to the death of roughly a third of all Kazakhs, believed to be the highest death ratio due to collectivisation of any people in the Soviet Union. More than 1.5 million people perished, of the total population of around 6 million living in the Kazakh Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (the Kazakh ASSR, often known as Kazakhstan). Kazakhs, who speak their own Turkic language, became a minority in their own republic. They would not again constitute more than 50 per cent of the population in Kazakhstan until after the Soviet collapse. The Kazakh famine also constitutes one of the largest pastoral famines in modern history. Prior to the crisis, most Kazakhs practiced pastoral nomadism, carrying out seasonal migrations to pasture their animal herds. But those who survived were forced to settle, prompting a painful and far-reaching reorientation of Kazakh culture and identity.

The Holocaust is often regarded as distinctive because of its organised, industrial-style killing in specially designed extermination camps: Chełmno in the Wartheland; Auschwitz-Birkenau in eastern Upper Silesia; Majdanek and the ‘Reinhard camps’ – Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka – in the General Government in Poland. But around half of the 6 million Jewish victims were killed outside the camps, in fields and forests, in villages and towns across eastern Europe. Murder outside the camps, sometimes dubbed the ‘Holocaust by bullets’, included shooting into ditches, ravines, pits and mass graves, and death through enforced starvation, disease and maltreatment. In the Baltic states, Ukraine, Belarus and Poland, Jews were killed not only by invading Germans but also by locals: former neighbours and workmates. These face-to-face killings may appear, at first glance, more like the kinds of genocide that have exploded elsewhere at different times: people killing other people in the localities where they lived. Yet there are significant differences in purpose, scale and complexity.

Genocide is often framed as something that occurs somewhat spontaneously, or emotionally, or arises in response to singular threats or leaders. But genocide is always an extension of larger socio-political processes. Thus, the genocide committed against Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks) in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) during the 1992–5 war can only be understood if it is viewed within the broader context of dynamic pressures that resulted from the dissolution of federal Yugoslavia into its six constituent republics: BiH, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia.

By 1837 the British government had been sending convicts, soldiers, and livestock entrepreneurs to Australia for almost fifty years. A committee of its own House of Commons, inspired by humanitarian principles, now reported the devastating effects on the indigenous inhabitants. Evidence of ‘extermination’ and ‘extirpation’ meant that the best minds of the Colonial Office were already exercised by the devastation of indigenous peoples inflicted by settlers who might have no clear aim of damaging them. When British government was extended to New Zealand, it was soon evident that Māori, for centuries sharing a largely common language and history, had a more effective capacity to resist than Aboriginal Australians, for millennia divided into hundreds of separate peoples and languages. In all Australian colonies and New Zealand, the determination of immigrants to ‘make productive’ land they knew belonged to others created disaster. Within twenty years of settlement, the Aboriginal population of Victoria declined by eighty percent. As the British spread over the whole continent, countless nations were extinguished. Across the Tasman the indigenous population was halved and the ‘passing of the Māori’ was still openly discussed even as adaptation, intermarriage and parliamentary representation saved it from genocide.

In 146 BCE, Rome destroyed the cities of Carthage and Corinth, and in 133 BCE the Spanish stronghold of Numantia. The destruction of a city in the Greco-Roman world was a deeply symbolic act, and these particular acts of ‘urbicide’ – as we now call the intentional destruction of a city – were viewed by Greco-Roman authors as pivotal moments in Roman the expansion of Rome’s power. All three acts can be understood through the prism of retributive ‘conspicuous destruction’, designed to deter others from revolting against Rome’s power. In each case, Rome effaced individual responsibility for any perceived acts of disloyalty, and collectively punished the community through its effective elimination: after many perished in the siege and or sack of the city, the surviving population was enslaved, and the city itself destroyed – not to be re-inhabited by the survivors. When viewed through the prism of the definition of ‘genocide’ in the ‘Genocide Convention’, these actions of Rome could be viewed as intentional acts to destroy these civic communities ‘as such’, and thus warrant consideration as genocide. Of the three, Carthage stands out in the predetermination on the part of some at Rome – fueled by existential anxieties - to destroy the city, before an actual pretext existed.

This chapter focuses on Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary. I first consider why state violence has remained on the margins of Holocaust scholarship. Next, I present a historical account and an argument about the settler colonial and genocidal character of state violence during World War Two. This section can offer only glimpses into the events and processes it discusses. I highlight similarities between the settler colonial projects of the three states and how anti-Jewish persecution and violence unfolded as an integral part of these destructive processes, which not only targeted other groups as well but also the very idea of a diverse society. I then explore accounts of survivors, mostly – but not only – Jews, who turn our attention to state violence in a way that challenges global Holocaust memory and its purported focus on survivors’ voices.1 Finally, I address the way in which institutes of global Holocaust memory can blur the genocidal assaults of some states during World War Two, which then helps blur and even deny current state violence. I argue that the problematic use of the term ‘antisemitism’, both in global Holocaust memory and in scholarship, facilitates this deeply troubling phenomenon.

The European conquest of the seven islands of the Canarian archipelago lasted almost a century (1402-1496). It was carried mostly by private adventurers backed by the legal rights of the Castilian crown and supplied by private financiers, who expected a quick return. It brought the destruction of the native population of all its islands, the erasure of their names, language, custom, economy, land ownership, ecological environment, beliefs, culture, social structure, and political organization. The means by which it was achieved were enslavement, deportation, disease, and the strategic use of terror. Acculturation, miscegenation, and the building of a colonial society based on plantation agriculture and long-distance trade did the rest to erase any trace of the indigenous culture. Genocide, in the case of the Canary Islands, can be understood both as a process of attrition, following its use by Fein and Rosenberg, and as an outcome, the aggregate result of thousands of specific instances of violence. It also was a prelude, a necessary learning ground and a blueprint of the European conquest and settler colonialism in the Antilles begun in the 1490s. The American conquest proved a much faster application of the same template for genocide, over a vast territory.

The Spanish Civil War was a historic twentieth-century event, known worldwide for certain elements of the conflict, such as the International Brigades, the bombing of Guernica, or the testimonies of international writers and reporters who experienced it first-hand (George Orwell, Ernest Hemingway, Andre Malraux, Arthur Koestler, Gerald Brenan and the photographer Robert Cappa, among many others). It is also considered a relatively minor episode in the turbulent interwar period, the rise of fascism and the crisis of democracy, as well as a local prelude to World War Two.

The Vietnamese Le dynasty launched a massive invasion of its neighbor, Champa, in 1471. The invasion, which was the culmination of centuries of back and forth conflict, produced widespread Cham deaths, and the permanent weakening of the southern kingdom. The Vietnamese actions, resulting in at least 40,000 recorded deaths, may well have been genocidal, though the limited historical record is unclear. It does, though, reveal that the Vietnamese used beheading against many of the victims, an action that appears punitive rather than incidental to warfare, and uniquely applied to the Cham. Furthermore, the Vietnamese carried out a project to rename geographical features in the Cham territories, suggesting a degree of cultural erasure while also substantially and permanently reducing the size of the Cham realm. Thus, although the evidence for genocide is ambiguous, it is clear that the Vietnamese actions in the late fifteenth century sought permanently to reduce the influence and threat posed by Champa via an overwhelming show of force.

Examining the pandemic relations of violence emerged across interior portions of seventeenth-century North America, this chapter assesses the displacement of colonialism onto Indigenous peoples. Starting with the French and Dutch colonization of Northeastern American watersheds, concentric waves of devastation radiated into interior Iroquoian and Algonquian-speaking communities, disrupting existing social, military, and economic relations. This chapter revisits the clash of the Wendat (Huron) and Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) confederacies in the first half of the Seventeenth century and situates this violent history within the broader imperial contests remaking Native North America.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, the Qing empire’s invasion of what is now Xinjiang resulted in the destruction of Zünghar Mongol society and their almost complete extermination as a people. The policy of mass killing represented the failure of the first Qing military campaigns into the steppe to incorporate the fragmenting Zünghar polity. Continuing violence, exacerbated by famine and disease, drove the Qianlong emperor to issue instructions to exterminate the ‘mahachin’, i.e. Zünghar Mongols who had sought refuge from the invasion and/or were still holding out. This chapter charts the historical background to this conflict, situates it in a wider Inner Asian context, and offers a close analysis of the events and imperial decrees that triggered the descent into indiscriminate killing. Despite the ferocity of the campaign, the Zünghars were not entirely wiped out, and I conclude by discussing the resettlement of survivors and their fate during the remainder of the Qing Dynasty.

This chapter explores key episodes of extreme violence in the context of wars between Greek-speaking groups in the Hellenistic period. Case studies explore the phenomenon of destruction of Hellenistic cities and interrogate whether such destruction in warfare should be counted as genocide. The chapter identifies and compares conditions for extreme violence in the Hellenistic period, which was marked by continual warfare. It argues that competing discourses about justice, together with different emotional regimes related to justice, including anger, pity, and shame, serve both to moderate and intensify violence throughout this period. Where violence is taken to be just, views of justice as legitimate punishment and vengeance can ground acts of extreme violence, while view of justice as reasonable, equitable and gentle may moderate violence but could also be activated to justify extreme violence, if it is taken to be responding to extraordinary provocations or ethical and religious violations. These traditions of justice and emotional norms in the context of warfare in turn sit within a range of other cultural and political commitments which may both moderate and provoke extreme violence, including the development and maintenance of civic identity, legal and religious norms, and considerations of economic and political power.

This chapter provides an integrated history of territorial seizure and annihilative measures across three distinct colonial regions - Queensland, the Northern Territory and the northern reaches of Western Australia. The vast arc of Tropical Australia is examined within a single narrative frame, bound by several consistent, over-arching themes: escalating land theft with all its accompanying violences in the latter nineteenth century, into the twentieth; the enhanced capacity in remote regions to mask multiple colonial atrocities and promote intense cultural denialism; and the dramatic intensity of Western expansion, first throughout the vast territory of Queensland, then pushing westward from that base across the remaining tropical zones. Thus, the seemingly independent colonial stories are conjoined into a singular narrative of advance, dispossession and the brutal destruction of lives, societies and cultures, underscoring the environmental theft and transformation of land and nature. This destructive process is here termed ‘indigenocide’ – the inter-connection of mass homicide, ethnocide and ecocide, simultaneously imposed in one sustained, three-pronged attack. Indigenous military resistance continually contests the invasive thrust, demonstrating how, in situations of asymmetrical struggle, warfare can rapidly morph into relentless massacre; as colonialism, in its fundamental practices, becomes virtually synonymous with all the attributes of racial genocide.