Jeff Bachman, Genocide Studies: Pathways Ahead
SIS Professor Jeff Bachman's new edited volume is rich in its interdisciplinarity, with contributions from scholars of anthropology, sociology, gender, political science, history, security, and education. Its contributors include emerging to established scholars, as wellas doctoral students, all of whom are already making important contributions to the field. The incredible group of scholars who agreed to be a part of this volume is evidence that, a mere ten years after Adam Jones' New Directions in Genocide Research was published, the field of genocide studies and its scholars were ready once again for retrospection, introspection, and a view to the future.
Of course, much has changed since 2012. Perhaps most notably, beginning in early 2020, the world was confronted by the global COVID-19 pandemic. There has also been a global rise in right-wing nationalism and extremism among elected officials and non-state actors, accompanied by increased hate speech, propaganda, and incitement to violence, especially in open and hidden digital spaces. Meanwhile, climate change continues to plow ahead, contributing to growing tensions, population movements, and resource scarcity; global military expenditures average approximately $1.7 trillion annually, with the world's military arsenals expected to double in size by 2030, as compared to 2016; armed conflicts/genocides continue to rage in Ukraine, Yemen, Ethiopia, Sudan, and Gaza, to name a few; and violence outside of armed conflict continues to evolve and adapt to changing conditions and international responses.
Such divergent crises, even when they overlap or intersect, confound definition and label, which is why this book is not meant to add to what is a mostly exhausted debate in genocide studies over the definition of the field's namesake. Genocide studies is not a field that requires anchoring in legalism, as its interdisciplinarity can attest, which also makes excessive and intractable definitionalism counterproductive. Rather than seeking to answer what is genocide? this book instead considers the question what is genocide studies?