Social Science Research Council

While previously in the genocide debate it has been stressed that the ultimate Nazi crime is that of the Shoah of European Jewry and therefore the term of genocide should remain clearly defined and not loosely used, and certainly not abused for political motives, in relation to events in the present as well as in [...]

‘Attempts at equalising historical wrongs are often aimed at Holocaust obfuscation’

Lessons for Darfur from an unfortunately not-enough-known Nazi versus Stalinist crimes debate in Europe.
The ‘genocide’ activists who cried the expected howls following the Washington Post’s ‘Sudan’s ‘coordinated’ genocide in Darfur is over’ (18 June) report and the ABC news story (broadcast 17 June), ‘US envoy: [...]

Just how credible are UNAMID monthly mortality figures? The unhappy truth is that UNAMID is weak, ineffectual, widely despised by Darfuris, and has a clear interest in minimizing mortality so as to make its failure less conspicuous. I regard 98 “violent deaths” as a deeply misleading figure to cite in assessing current mortality in Darfur. All the acts specified in the 1948 Genocide Convention continue to take place in Darfur and eastern Chad.

John Maynard Keynes was once irritated by a half-witted critic: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”
In 2004 I wrote in the London Review of Books, “this is not the genocidal campaign of a government at the height of its ideological hubris, as occurred with the 1992 jihad against [...]

Alex de Waal, Joachim Savelsberg, Alex Hinton, Tony Oberschall, Dan Chirot, and Scott Straus form a remarkably distinguished group of genocide scholars. We have benefited from all of their comments about our book, Darfur and the Crime of Genocide.
Our title reflects a deliberate choice that may not seem obvious to many readers [...]

Darfur and the Crime of Genocide is an ambitious and in places interesting book that makes some important contributions. The core contributions concern the detailed analysis of the results from the 2004 Atrocities Documentation Survey (ADS) that was commissioned by the U.S. State Department. The authors make a good overall point that the discipline of [...]

Darfur and the Crime of Genocide is a terrific book, one that deserves praise for doing at least three important things. First, the authors, John Hagan and Wenona Rymond-Richmond make a clear, rigorous, effective argument that the mass violence in Darfur constitutes genocide. This is significant given that previously this argument has too often been [...]

I was surprised to learn that the Prosecutor of the ICC is seeking leave to appeal against the Pre-Trial Chamber’s decision to not to charge President Omar al Bashir with genocide. The Prosecutor’s complaint seems to resemble that of a student who has been given a fail grade, arguing that the examination board should have [...]

In his latest contribution to the debate “what should Obama do about Darfur?” in The New Republic, Alan Wolfe poses the question, why does it matter whether what is happening in Darfur is genocide or not? Wolfe frames the question in terms of its implications for U.S. policy to stop future genocides. If Darfur today [...]

John Hagan and Wenona Rymond-Richmond’s Darfur and the Crime of Genocide constitutes an important, if not always entirely compelling, contribution to the study of genocide. The book inquires into (1) the dynamics of genocide in Darfur; and (2) the promise—and limits—of criminology for making sense of it. It is, in many respects, a path-breaking work. [...]