In 1948, the United Nations established the Genocide Convention to legally define genocide as actions intended to destroy a particular group of people based on race, religion, ethnicity, and other defining characteristics. The goal was to prevent and punish future acts of genocide, but a number of mass killings have followed since its establishment, and in some situations whether these executions qualify as genocides is surprisingly unclear. The viewpoints...

"Unstable Ground looks at the human impact of climate change and its potential to provoke some of the most troubling crimes against humanity -- ethnic conflict, war, and genocide. The author examines the ways in which resources and global migration patterns will be impacted by climate change and create conditions conducive to violent conflict"-- "Looks at the human impact of climate change and its potential to provoke genocide, addressing future...

At a mere 15 years old, KC Ung's life was turning upside down overnight. In 1975, the Cambodian civil war that had been raging for years was now over, with the Khmer Rouge having seized victories one province at a time. What could have been a new era of peace was instead the beginning of the largest genocide in Asian history, claiming the lives of a quarter of the total Cambodian population. Families across the country were now thrown into a fight...

The Moral Witness is the first cultural history of the "witness to genocide" in the West. Carolyn J. Dean shows how the witness became a protagonist of twentieth-century moral culture by tracing the emergence of this figure in courtroom battles from the 1920s to the 1960s-covering the Armenian genocide, the Ukrainian pogroms, the Soviet Gulag, and the trial of Adolf Eichmann. In these trials, witness testimonies differentiated the crime of genocide...

Why was the UN a bystander during the Rwandan genocide? Do its sins of omission leave it morally responsible for the hundreds of thousands of dead? Michael Barnett, who worked at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations from 1993 to 1994, covered Rwanda for much of the genocide. Based on his first-hand experiences, archival work, and interviews with many key participants, he reconstructs the history of the UN's involvement in Rwanda. In the weeks...

The Maya Empire became a thriving civilization between the third century and the seventh century CE, but by 900 CE war, drought, and disease wiped out most of its cities and the Mayan people were greatly reduced. Unfortunately, the greatest threat to their existence was yet to come, when the Guatemalan genocide would decimate those who remained in the 1970s and '80s. The facts of the Mayans' story will be intertwined with profiles of individuals and...