New Books in Genocide Studies

International criminal justice is, at its core, an anti-atrocity project. Yet just what an 'atrocity' is remains undefined and undertheorized. Randle C. DeFalco's book Invisible Atrocities: The Aesthetic Biases of International Criminal Justice (Cambridge UP, 2022) examines how associations between atrocity commission and the production of horrific spectacles shape the processes through which international crimes are identified and conceptualized, leading to the foregrounding of certain forms of mass violence and the backgrounding or complete invisibilization of others. In doing so, it identifies various, seemingly banal ways through which international crimes may be committed and demonstrates how the criminality of such forms of violence and abuse tends to be obfuscated. DeFalco suggests that the failure to address these 'invisible atrocities' represents a major flaw in the current international criminal justice system, one that produces a host of problematic repercussions and undermines the legal legitimacy of international criminal law itself.Jeff Bachman is Senior Lecturer in Human Rights at American University’s School of International Service in Washington, DC. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

Fort Breendonk was built in the early 1900s to protect Antwerp, Belgium, from possible German invasion. Damaged at the start of World War I, it fell into disrepair . . . until the Nazis took it over after their invasion of Belgium in 1940. Never designated an official concentration camp by the SS and instead labeled a "reception" camp where prisoners were held until they were either released or transported, Breendonk was no less brutal. About 3,600 prisoners were held there--just over half of them survived. As one prisoner put it, "I would prefer to spend nineteen months at Buchenwald than nineteen days at Breendonk."In The Prisoners of Breendonk: Personal Histories from a World War II Concentration Camp (Mariner Books, 2020), , James M. Deem pieces together the story of the camp by telling the stories of its victims--Jews, communists, resistance fighters, and common criminals--for the first time in an English-language publication. Leon Nolis's haunting photography of the camp today accompanies the wide range of archival images.The story of Breendonk is one you will never forget. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

How do states and societies confront the legacies of war and occupation, and what do truth, guilt, and justice mean in that process? In Ghosts of War: Nazi Occupation and Its Aftermath in Soviet Belarus (Cornell UP, 2022), Franziska Exeler examines people's wartime choices and their aftermath in Belarus, a war-ravaged Soviet republic that was under Nazi occupation during the Second World War.After the Red Army reestablished control over Belarus, one question shaped encounters between the returning Soviet authorities and those who had lived under Nazi rule, between soldiers and family members, reevacuees and colleagues, Holocaust survivors and their neighbors: What did you do during the war?Ghosts of War analyzes the prosecution and punishment of Soviet citizens accused of wartime collaboration with the Nazis and shows how individuals sought justice, revenge, or assistance from neighbors and courts. The book uncovers the many absences, silences, and conflicts that were never resolved, as well as the truths that could only be spoken in private, yet it also investigates the extent to which individuals accommodated, contested, and reshaped official Soviet war memory. The result is a gripping examination of how efforts at coming to terms with the past played out within, and at times through, a dictatorship.Jill Massino is a scholar of modern Eastern Europe with a focus on Romania, gender, and everyday life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

On September 2, 1945, Japan surrendered to the United States, ending the Second World War. Yet the Japanese invasion had upended the old geopolitical structures of European empires, leaving old imperial powers on the decline and new groups calling for independence on the rise.That unsteady situation sparked a decade of conflict: in Indonesia, in Vietnam, in China and in Korea, as esteemed military historian Professor Ronald Spector writes about in his latest book, A Continent Erupts: Decolonization, Civil War, and Massacre in Postwar Asia, 1945–1955, published by W. W. Norton in 2023.In this interview, Ronald and I talk about the decade of conflict following the Second World War–and whether these conflicts were inevitable in the postcolonial, Cold War world.Ronald H. Spector, professor emeritus of history and international relations at George Washington University, is the author of seven books, including Eagle Against the Sun: The American War With Japan (Free Press: 1984) and In the Ruins of Empire: The Japanese Surrender and the Battle for Postwar Asia (Random House: 2008).You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of A Continent Erupts. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

In the chaos of the end of WWI, the Russian Civil War, and a brief period of Ukrainian independence there occurred a series of massacres of German Mennonites. Sean Patterson's recent book Makhno and Memory: Anarchist and Mennonite Narratives of Ukraine's Civil War, 1917-1921 (University of Manitoba Press, 2020) analyzes the varying historical memories of these massacres. Patterson's book raises numerous and timely issues of national memory and identity, and contains much poignant reflection on the problems faced by an historically pacifist community facing down violent circumstances. What it means to be a member of a national community is an interesting and important question in any circumstances, but the construction of Ukrainian national identity is a subject of more-than-casual interest, in 2022. Makhno and Memory discusses a complicated and important series of event in accessible fashion, and usefully circumscribes what can and cannot be known about Nestor Makhno's specific role in those events.Aaron Weinacht is Professor of History at the University of Montana Western, in Dillon, MT. He teaches courses on Russian and Soviet History, World History, and Philosophy of History. His research interests include the sociological theorist Philip Rieff and the influence of Russian nihilism on American libertarianism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

Kiril Feferman's The Holocaust in the Crimea and the North Caucasus (Yad Vadhem, 2016) presents a comprehensive account of the Jews in the Crimea and the North Caucasus in the Holocaust years. Based on extensive archival research, Feferman covers the life and destruction of the Jewish population in the region and describes in detail the relations between Jews and non-Jews before and during the war; the evacuation of Jews into these regions and out of them; the German occupation and the annihilation of the Ashkenazi Jewish population; the fate of non-Ashkenazi Jews in the area; Jewish responses; and reactions of local populations, including Cossacks, devout Orthodox Christians and Muslims.Objective factors, such as the availability of German manpower and food, weather and geographic conditions, in addition to subjective factors, such as the attitudes of Wehrmacht commanders, left their imprint on the implementation of the “Final Solution” policy in these areas. By the time the Germans occupied the Crimea in November 1941, it was absolutely clear to them that the Jews had to be eliminated. All the more so when they came to dominate the North Caucasus in the summer of 1942. Yet, the Nazi decision-makers were vexed by the need to clarify who was a Jew. The case of the Ashkenazi Jews was clear-cut, and their fate was similar to that of their brethren elsewhere in Europe. However, the Germans faced a formidable difficulty in categorizing the non-Ashkenazi Karaites and Krymchaks in the Crimea, and Mountain Jews in the North Caucasus, who, according to the Nazi world-view, shared some but not all racial and religious characteristics of Jews. Subsequently, German investigation involved a thorough pseudo-scientific analysis of racial and religious features by the Nazi academy, as well as SS “researchers.”Set against the background of the ongoing murder of Ashkenazi Jews in these regions and local politics with geo-political implications, this research title also focuses on the support – or lack thereof – lent to Karaites, Krymchaks and Mountain Jews by local Muslims. These interwoven histories cover a hitherto unexplored terrain in Holocaust history, and offer a fascinating window into the history of the Crimea and the North Caucasus and the fate of their Jewish inhabitants during World War II. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

Beverley Chalmers's book Betrayed: Child Sex Abuse in the Holocaust (Grosvenor House, 2020) exposes a taboo aspect of Holocaust history; the sexual abuse of children. Children were sexually assaulted in ghettos, camps, on transit trains, while in hiding, and even when sent to supposed safety outside Europe. The Nazi’s genocidal brutality facilitated the abuse of children, in addition to targeting them for murder. In addition, children were sexually assaulted by some rescuers and peers who took advantage of their vulnerability. After the war, they were again betrayed by those who discounted their experiences, and by Holocaust scholars who refuse to acknowledge their stories or give credence to their memories.Jeannette Cockroft is an associate professor of history and political science at Schreiner University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

In the years leading up to the Second World War, increasingly desperate European Jews looked to far-flung destinations such as Barbados, Trinidad, and Jamaica in search of refuge from the horrors of Hitler’s Europe.Joanna Newman's book Nearly the New World: The British West Indies and the Flight from Nazism, 1933–1945 (Berghahn Books, 2019) tells the extraordinary story of Jewish refugees who overcame persecution and sought safety in the West Indies from the 1930s through the end of the war. At the same time, it gives an unsparing account of the xenophobia and bureaucratic infighting that nearly prevented their rescue—and that helped to seal the fate of countless other European Jews for whom escape was never an option. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

Human Rights at Risk: Global Governance, American Power, and the Future of Dignity (Rutgers University Press, 2022) is a fascinating book that brings together social scientists, legal scholars, and humanities scholars from both the Global North and Global South to provide a challenge to understandings about normative and empirical claims to human rights. Salvador Santino F. Regilme Jr. and Irene Hadiprayitno's edited collection questions the effectiveness of international human rights institutions, identifying thematic blind spots and providing fresh analysis for a way forward in the Post-Trump era. I very much enjoyed having Dr. Salvador Santino F. Regilme Jr. back on the show; the discussion was enriching and will challenge human rights scholars to move beyond their comfort zone to seek ways to better protect human rights at risk. You can listen to our previous interview, about his book, Aid Imperium: United States Foreign Policy and Human Rights in Post-Cold War Southeast Asia, here.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

Aomar Boum and Sarah Abrevaya Stein's book Wartime North Africa: A Documentary History, 1934-1950 (Stanford UP, 2022), the first-ever collection of primary documents on North African history and the Holocaust, gives voice to the diversity of those involved--Muslims, Christians, and Jews; women, men, and children; black, brown, and white; the unknown and the notable; locals, refugees, the displaced, and the interned; soldiers, officers, bureaucrats, volunteer fighters, and the forcibly recruited. At times their calls are lofty, full of spiritual lamentation and political outrage. At others, they are humble, yearning for medicine, a cigarette, or a pair of shoes.Translated from French, Arabic, North African Judeo-Arabic, Spanish, Hebrew, Moroccan Darija, Tamazight (Berber), Italian, and Yiddish, or transcribed from their original English, these writings shed light on how war, occupation, race laws, internment, and Vichy French, Italian fascist, and German Nazi rule were experienced day by day across North Africa. Though some selections are drawn from published books, including memoirs, diaries, and collections of poetry, most have never been published before, nor previously translated into English. These human experiences, combined, make up the history of wartime North Africa. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies