ABSTRACT
The greatest challenge for understanding genocide is that, while there is almost universal revulsion today at what the term is presumed to encapsulate – mass killing and group-annihilation – there is in fact no consensus over the definition of what acts are covered, which groups are protected, nor of what causes it. While there are theoretically informed studies of particular genocides, or certain patterns of genocide, a comprehensive theory, which applies to all genocides in all periods of history and across all regimes and cultures in which they have occurred, remains elusive. In the absence of a coherent theory of genocide, the possibility of plausible prediction is wanting. According to some analysts there has been an average of almost one case of genocide per year since 1945 (Harff and Gurr 1988, 1996: though it should be noted that their dataset also includes what they term ‘politicides’). Academic scholarship on genocide has grown immensely in response to the Holocaust, post-colonial conflicts, and civil wars in developing countries. Yet, until the Yugoslavian civil wars of the early 1990s the international community was reluctant to even attribute the word genocide to any particular conflict, and generally prefers to use, as in the case of Rwanda, the more diluted term ‘acts of genocide’.
