ABSTRACT
Tracing the connections between state-formation and empire-building; incorporating an understanding of war and revolution; and linking all these to genocidal outbreaks, is arguably genocide studies’ single most fertile line of inquiry. Genocide is further interwoven with colonialism in the phenomenon of settler colonialism. “Famine crimes” or “genocidal famines” have increasingly drawn genocide scholars’ attention. When famine struck, they imposed free-market policies that were nothing more than a “mask for colonial genocide,” according to Mike Davis. Japanese fantasies of racial supremacy also led to a Nazi-style preoccupation with genocidal technologies, reflected most notably in the biological warfare program and gruesome medical experiments. Genocide scholar Leo Kuper likewise called the war’s conduct “suggestive of genocide.” It was the claimed linkage and mutually reactive/constitutive character of the “Bloodlands” genocides that provoked the most discussion and scholarly pushback. If state formation, imperialism, war, and social revolution are genocide’s “four horsemen,” then war and genocide might be described as its conjoined twins.
