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Podcast: New Books in Genocide Studies
Episode: Scott Straus, “Making and Unmaking Nations: War, Leadership and Genocide in Modern Africa” (Cornell University Press, 2015)
Description: Who, in the field of genocide studies, hasn’t at least once used the phrase “The century of genocide?” Books carry the title, journalists quote it in interviews and undergrads adopt it.
There’s nothing wrong with the phrase, as far as it goes. But, as Scott Straus points out, conceptualizing the century in that way masks a fundamental truth about the period–that there were many more crises that could have led to genocide but which stopped short than there were actual genocides.
And this is a problem for the academic study of genocide. For if that d...