ABSTRACT
The word ‘genocide’ was invented by Raphael Lemkin (1944), and its legal status was defined by the United Nations (1948) in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, in the light of the Nazi German suppression of Europe's peoples and attempted extermination of its Jews. Genocide has ever since been identified with this period in the Western political imagination, so that it seems to be primarily a phenomenon of what Eric Hobsbawm (1994) called the ‘age of extremes’, the ‘short twentieth century’ from 1914 to 1989. The Nazi genocide was preceded by the Ottoman genocide of the Armenians and the Stalinist ‘liquidation of the kulaks’, and followed by the murderous famine of Mao's Great Leap Forward and the Cambodian genocide. In short, genocide and related policy-driven mass death seem closely linked to the era of totalitarianism and world war.
