ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces readers to genocide by taking stock of the concept’s evolution and the various attempts to prevent genocide and to punish its perpetrators. To the degree that a significant social change can be attributed to a single individual, Raphael Lemkin stands tall as the most important genocide scholar and activist of the twentieth century. Lemkin described cultural genocide as the destruction of the cultural pattern of a group such as its language, its traditions, monuments, archives, libraries and churches. The Armenian Genocide began under the cover of First World War in the spring of 1915 as an orchestrated, centrally planned attack by the Ottoman Turkish state against millennia-old Armenian communities in the Ottoman Empire. The US and the Soviet Union played key roles in weakening the original draft of the Genocide Convention. The next major example of politicizing genocide also involved the US and was stretched out over four decades.
