Homo sapiens, and all other species inhabiting our planet, are by definition vulnerable to whatever nature throws at them. Sapienza-informed efforts to overthrow nature’s supremacy by harnessing its forces to human ends have simply upped the ante by producing conditions for the near or total obliteration of life on Earth. Since ‘Trinity’, the first detonation of a nuclear device, on 16 July 1945, and the subsequent development and escalation of such weapons of mass destruction, humanity has lived under a cloud of both suicidal and omnicidal foreclosure. Yet by a different, if closely related historical route, associated primarily with the burning of geologically sequestrated solar energy leading to global warming, the species has doubly confirmed its uniquely anthropogenic capacity to bring about not only its own demise but within the planetary record a sixth extinction of life-forms.1 Indeed, in 2020, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, largely on the basis of these two possibilities, moved its symbolic Doomsday Clock forward to just 100 seconds to midnight.2

This chapter examines the hidden history of the Libyan genocide by the Italian colonial state that took place in eastern Libya between 1929 and 1934. The genocide resulted in a loss of 83,000 Libyans as the population declined from 225,000 to 142,000 citizens. Some 110,000 civilians were forced to march from their homes to the harsh desert and then were interned in horrific concentration camps. Between 60,000 and 70,000, mostly rural people (men, women and children) and their 600,000 animals were starved and died of diseases. I argue this calculated mass killing and destruction of people and culture was the result of a twenty-year anti-colonial resistance and represented, by all measures, genocide based on a racist colonial plan to crush local resistance and settle poor Italian peasants in the colony. The Italian state suppressed news about the genocide; evidence was destroyed, and the remaining files on the concentration camps were hard to find even after the end of fascism in Italy in 1945.

This chapter examines mass killing, ‘extermination’ and ‘genocide’ in Chinese history, focusing on the Warring States period and early empires. The Chinese language contains many words for ‘attack’, ‘kill’, ‘extermination’, ‘eradication’, and ‘destruction’ of the enemy. The concept of ‘genocide’ is rendered as ‘extermination’ of an ethnic group. Mass killing was facilitated by China’s precocious development of the technology of rule, especially national conscription and centralized administration. As early as 268 BCE, the state of Qin articulated and practiced an official policy of conquest by ‘attacking not only territory but also people’ to ensure that rival states and their populations could not recover. The Western Han dynasty massacred the Xiongnu in 133-91 BCE and beyond, while the Eastern Han dynasty exterminated the Qiang in 169. Ran Min of a later divided era launched ‘execution of the Jie and extermination of their kind’ in 350. The recurrence of mass killing did not end with the fall of the last dynasty in 1911. The ‘megamurderers’ Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong created ‘China’s bloody twentieth century’ by killing 10.2 million in 1921-48 and 37.8 million in 1923-76, respectively.

On 25 March 1971, a military dictatorship in Pakistan embarked on a massive slaughter of Bengalis. Its consequences echo down to this day: one of the largest refugee flows in human history; a major war between India and Pakistan that ratcheted up the hatred between those two antagonists; and the traumatic creation of Bangladesh, which today is the eighth-largest population in the world.

The question as to whether a genocide took place in nineteenth-century Algeria has always been deeply contentious in western academic scholarship. By contrast, it has tended to be accepted as a given in many Algerian accounts of the past, both as expressed in conversation and in published works. This divergence has arguably been grounded in the manner in which the prevailing means of framing and defining genocide varied wildly between these two literatures. Curiously, Algerian texts, even when they are 'popular' rather than 'academic' accounts lie closer to the spirit and terms of reference of the scholarly field of Genocide Studies. Looked at comparatively, the violence of imperial Algeria shares remarkable affinities with both the exterminatory impulses and outcomes of other settler colonies, as well as other instances of European incursions into the Arabo-Islamic world, especially in Algeria's north African neighbours Morocco and Tunisia, Mauritania and Libya. Lemkin's diagnostics of genocide certainly seem to map onto the organised system of massacres perpetrated in Algeria, the general desire to cause harm to 'recalcitrant' groups en masse, the belief in the merits of a Maghrebi tabula rasa, and the 'slow violence' of the destruction of groups, communities and identities.

Kurds are a diverse ethnic group who number 30 to 40 million, and speak languages of the Indo-European family. A majority of Kurds are Sunni Muslims, but minorities follow Shi’ism, Alevism, Yarsanism, Yazidism, Zoroastrianism and Christianity. They are culturally distinct from Arabs, Turks, Persians, Syriacs and Armenians, their historical neighbours. The Kurds’ experience with modern mass violence, from civil wars to genocides, is long and complex. Whereas Kurds lived for centuries in pre-national conditions in the Ottoman and Persian empires, the advent of nationalism and the nation-state system in the Middle East in the twentieth century radically changed their situation.

On 18 June 2019, California’s Gavin Newsom became the first governor in United States history to apologise publicly for a genocide committed in their state. Shaded by a grove of trees at the site of West Sacramento’s future California Indian Heritage Center, Newsom stood in a circle with tribal leaders. After recounting evidence of state-sponsored mass murder, Governor Newsom insisted: ‘It’s called a genocide. That’s what it was: a genocide, no other way to describe it. And, that’s the way it needs to be described in the history books.’ Finally, the governor of the most populous and prosperous state in the wealthiest nation in the world publicly apologised: ‘I’m sorry on behalf of the state of California.’1 Genocide was a formative event in the making of the state. Yet relatively few people, even in California, know this history.

This chapter examines comparatively three instances of extreme political violence in Indonesia and Indonesian-occupied territory over more than fifty years: the mass killing of roughly half a million communists and leftists in 1965–6; the unnatural death or killing of at least 100,000 people in East Timor from 1975 to 1999; and the systematic physical and cultural decimation of the indigenous population of West Papua from 1963 to 2020. It describes the unique dimensions of each case – including key patterns and variations in the violence, the historical and political conditions that gave rise to it, the identities of the perpetrators and victims, and differences in the degree and nature of resistance. At the same time, it highlights the remarkable similarities and continuities across the three cases. It argues that, despite their differences, these three cases form part of a single broad pattern of extermination and genocide perpetrated by the Indonesian state, driven by competition over valuable resources and facilitated by the acts and omissions of powerful foreign actors.

Caesar’s conquest of Gaul makes for a fascinating study in mass-violence in the ancient world. Caesar’s own narrative of his conquest, the Bellum Gallcium, provides us with one of our few first-hand accounts of conquest. Caesar’s keen political eye means that the narrative must be one he considered would resonate with a significant proportion of Romans. As such, it provides perhaps one of our best guides not so much as to what happened, but as to the place of mass violence within Roman thinking. Within the text, Caesar clearly states what can be regarded as a genocidal’ desire, namely that the ‘the stock and name of the tribe’ (stirps ac nomen civitatis) of the Germanic Eburones might be destroyed for their role in ambushing Caesar’s forces (Bellum Gallicum 6.34), as well as narratives of other acts of mass-killing. In addition, Caesar narrates several instances of mass-enslavement – an action that, although not readily caught by modern legal definitions of genocide, would have the same effect by dispersing a people, and causing the cessation of that people’s existence as a distinct group of people. However, Caesar’s text also shows a concern to portray such events as justified as within a retributive framework of wrongs done to Rome.

The Nigerian Civil War, also known as the Nigeria–Biafra War, was fought between the Federal Republic of Nigeria and its breakaway eastern province from 1967 to 1970. The Republic of Biafra’s secession in May 1967 was a response to widespread violence against members of the Igbo ethnic group. Igbos constituted a long-standing internal diaspora across the Nigerian federation, especially its Northern Region. The Eastern Region, where most Igbo people had their ancestral homes, seceded in the name of protecting their lives and interests. The secessionist government argued that a genocide was taking place, citing the fact that Nigerian soldiers and police had participated in the killings of Igbos the previous year. They also argued that Nigeria pursued a genocidal strategy in the war that followed. Biafra’s status as a genocide was contested at the time, and it remains so in historical memory. Its importance as a case study lies not only in the particularities of its violence, but in what it reveals about how genocide claims can be instrumentalised.

'Urbicide' is a Latin formation - as deployed in this chapter, it refers to the total or near-total destruction of cities (poleis) of the ancient Greek/Hellenic world between the 6th and the 4th centuries BCE. Urbicide was an extreme measure of interstate politics, but not as rare as one might have predicted - or hoped. It represented the other, dark side of the ancient Greeks' fierce attachment to their own native polis. In some cases a polis might be removed from the map once and for all (e.g. Arisba on the island of Lesbos). In others, it might be only temporarily annihilated (Thebes). In all cases, the possibility of largescale enslavement of formerly free Greek citizens was ever-present, and often was realised.