Extremely Violent Societies: Mass Violence in the Twentieth-Century World

ISBN-13: 9780521880589 / Angielski / Twarda / 2010 / 502 str.

Christian Gerlach;¬Abar

Opis

Violence is a fact of human life. This book trace the social roots of the extraordinary processes of human destruction involved in mass violence throughout the twentieth century. Christian Gerlach shows that terms such as genocide' and ethnic cleansing' are too narrow to explain the diverse motives and interests that cause violence to spread in varying forms and intensities from killings and expulsions to enforced hunger, collective rape, strategic bombing, forced labour and imprisonment. He explores what happened before, during, and after periods of wide-spread bloodshed in Armenia, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Greece and anti-guerilla wars in order to highlight the crucial role of socio-economic pressures in the generation of group conflicts. By focussing on why so many different people participated in or supported mass violence, and why different groups were victimized, the author offers us a new way of understanding one of the most disturbing phenomena of our times."

Recenzje

'After his remarkable study on the Holocaust, Christian Gerlach demonstrates in this very innovative book, his capacity to tackle mass violence from a comparative perspective. His approach is not only courageous and challenging, but also insightful and certainly deserves to be discussed in genocide scholarly circles and beyond.' Jacques Semelin, CERI-CNRS, Center for International Studies and Research

Spis treści

1. Introduction: extremely violent societies; Part I. Participatory Violence: 2. A coalition for violence: mass slaughter in Indonesia, 1965–66; 3. Participating and profiteering: the destruction of the Armenians, 1915–23; Part II. The Crisis of Society: 4. From rivalries between elites to a crisis of society: mass violence and famine in Bangladesh (East Pakistan), 1971–77; 5. Sustainable violence: strategic resettlement, militias and 'development' in anti-guerrilla warfare; 6. What connects the fate of different victim groups? The German occupation and Greek society in crisis; Part III. General Observations: 7. The ethnization of history: the historiography of mass violence and national identity construction; 8. Conclusions.