ABSTRACT
Over the past several years, a small but growing literature has coalesced around the theme of gendercide, or gender-selective mass killing. This literature makes a core distinction between gendercidal strategies, generally targeting non-combatant males of an imputed “battle age,” and “root-andbranch” slaughters, in which mass killing occurs against all sectors of the target population. The classic example of a root-and-branch genocide is the Jewish holocaust, in which all Jews in the Nazi-occupied territories – female and male, old and young, able and disabled – were exposed to the Nazis’ exterminatory drive. There are numerous other examples of the phenomenon, and of explicit calls for root-and-branch genocide. For instance, the eighteenth-century English commander Lord Jeffrey Amherst referred to North American Indians as “a vile and fickle crew” whom he “fully resolved . . . to extirpate . . . root and branch”2 – a strategy of genocidal warfare that was regularly implemented in both pre-and post-independence America, to the shock and incomprehension of the native inhabitants.
