ABSTRACT
The United Nations defined genocide as an international crime on December 9, 1948, in its Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, and which 147 states have now ratified as law. In its modern incarnation, genocide is almost always linked to forms of state violence. The British sociologist Martin Shaw sees modern war where civilians are targeted for destruction as indistinguishable from genocide, regardless of intention. The field of genocide studies was born in the 1980s by a group of pioneering social scientists, mostly sociologists and political scientists who worked comparatively. The 1948 Convention has very little to say about colonial and cultural genocide. Research on the question of perpetrator motivation is immense, and began after World War II with psychiatrists and psychologists who were hired by the Allies to interview the major Nazi perpetrators in custody at Nuremberg. In the military context atrocity literally means breaking the rules of war.
