Extremely violent societies
Subtitle: mass violence in the twentieth century
By: Christian Gerlach
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2010
Place of publication: Cambridge; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 489
ISBN-13: 9780521880589; 9780521706810
Description: "Violence is a fact of human life. This book trace the social roots of the extraordinary processes of human destruction involved in mass violence throughout the twentieth century. Christian Gerlach shows that terms such as 'genocide' and 'ethnic cleansing' are too narrow to explain the diverse motives and interests that cause violence to spread in varying forms and intensities from killings and expulsions to enforced hunger, collective rape, strategic bombing, forced labour and imprisonment. He explores what happened before, during, and after periods of wide-spread bloodshed in Armenia, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Greece and anti-guerilla wars in order to highlight the crucial role of socio-economic pressures in the generation of group conflicts. By focussing on why so many different people participated in or supported mass violence, and why different groups were victimized, the author offers us a new way of understanding one of the most disturbing phenomena of our times"--
Notes: Includes index.
Table of contents: title: Machine generated contents note: 1. Introduction: extremely violent societies; Part I. Participatory Violence: 2. A coalition for violence: mass slaughter in Indonesia, 1965-66; 3. Participating and profiteering: the destruction of the Armenians, 1915-23; Part II. The Crisis of Society: 4. From rivalries between elites to a crisis of society: mass violence and famine in Bangladesh (East Pakistan), 1971-77; 5. Sustainable violence: strategic resettlement, militias and 'development' in anti-guerrilla warfare; 6. What connects the fate of different victim groups? The German occupation and Greek society in crisis; Part III. General Observations: 7. The ethnization of history: the historiography of mass violence and national identity construction; 8. Conclusions.