New Books In Genocide Studies

What do you say to someone who suggests that genocide is not just destructive, but constructive? This is the basic theme of Benjamin Lieberman‘s excellent new book Remaking Identities:  God, Nation and Race in World History (Rowman and Littlefield, 2013). The book surveys two thousand years of history to explain how people have used violence to reconstruct identities.  This obviously involves death and destruction.  But it also involves recasting the identities of survivors.  It involves evangelism and religious conversion.  It entails education and persuasion.  It sometimes requires forced separation from one’s community and integration into a new community and a new way of viewing the world.  In doing so, Lieberman reminds us, many perpetrators intended to create a new world, not just destroy an old one.  It’s an important insight, one Lieberman explores through a variety of case studies ranging from the Islamic expansion of the 700s to the violence of the 20th century. Lieberman was not c