ABOUT THIS BOOK

How did a powerful concept in international justice evolve into an inequitable response to mass suffering?

For a term coined just seventy-five years ago, genocide has become a remarkably potent idea. But has it transformed from a truly novel vision for international justice into a conservative, even inaccessible term? The Politics of Annihilation traces how the concept of genocide came to acquire such significance on the global political stage. In doing so, it reveals how the concept has been politically contested and refashioned over time. It explores how these shifts implicitly impact what forms of mass violence are considered genocide and what forms are not.

Benjamin Meiches argues that the limited conception of genocide, often rigidly understood as mass killing rooted in ethno-religious identity, has created legal and political institutions that do not adequately respond to the diversity of mass violence. In his insistence on the concept’s complexity, he does not undermine the need for clear condemnations of such violence. But neither does he allow genocide to become a static or timeless notion. Meiches argues that the discourse on genocide has implicitly excluded many forms of violence from popular attention including cases ranging from contemporary Botswana and the Democratic Republic of Congo, to the legacies of colonial politics in Haiti, Canada, and elsewhere, to the effects of climate change on small island nations.

By mapping the multiplicity of forces that entangle the concept in larger assemblages of power, The Politics of Annihilation gives us a new understanding of how the language of genocide impacts contemporary political life, especially as a means of protesting the social conditions that produce mass violence.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Benjamin Meiches is assistant professor of security studies and conflict resolution at the University of Washington–Tacoma.

REVIEWS

"A well-written, cogently argued, significant contribution to a nuanced understanding of how the idea of genocide has emerged and why it matters to world politics."—CHOICE

"A far-reaching critique of mainstream presumptions in the field and beyond, Annihilation presents theoretically-sophisticated engagements with a vast array of genocide scholarship backed by numerous case studies."—PoLAR

"The Politics of Annihilation is a valuable contribution to current scholarship on genocide, considerably expanding the scope of the field. Its originality is compounded by an extensive and demonstrable breadth of knowledge, and its critical appraisal makes it both a pertinent resource and a rich point of departure for future research."—H-Net Reviews

"The Politics of Annihilation is a wide-ranging and insightful deep dive into the contested, often controversial, and complex discursive politics of genocide."—The Review of Politics

"Meiches has successfully provided a deep dive into discursive tussles and contestations that have unfolded underneath the ‘stable’ assumptions of the concept of genocide as we know it, highlighting not only the fluid ground on which much of our understanding of the concept rests, but also how these assumptions shape action."—International Affairs

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"Concepts are always political—and perhaps never more so than when they classify and rank the evils that can befall human beings. Benjamin Meiches’s extraordinary genealogy of the notion of genocide since its coinage during World War II is especially welcome, blending empirical cases, historical perspectives, and theoretical considerations in an ideal fashion. Emphasizing the lability of this concept before it was fixed in our time, for better or worse, Meiches shows how talk of genocide has allowed for moralizing in a violent world, even as it obstructs other perspectives that the future will require." —Samuel Moyn, Yale Law School

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents
Introduction: Genocide as Political Discourse
Part I. The Concept and Its Powers
1. Groups, Paradoxes of Identity, and the Racialization of Global Politics
2. Parts, Wholes, and the Erasure of Indigenous Life
3. Destruction and the Creativity of Violence
4. Desire, International Law, and the Problem of Unintentional Genocide
Part II. The Politics of Genocide
5. The Logistics of Prevention and the Fantasy of Preemption
6. Genocide as Politics and the Horror of Plasticity
7. The Sense of Genocide and the Politics of the Future
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index