Dr Howie Rechavia-Taylor

This course is available on the MSc in Gender, Peace and Security, MSc in Human Rights, MSc in Human Rights and Politics, MSc in International Affairs (LSE and Peking University), MSc in International Relations, MSc in International Relations (LSE and Sciences Po), MSc in International Relations (Research), MSc in Political Science (Global Politics), MSc in Theory and History of International Relations and MSc in Theory and History of International Relations. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

All students are required to obtain permission from the Teacher Responsible by completing the online application form linked to course selection on LSE for You. Admission is not guaranteed.

This course has a limited number of places (it is controlled access) and demand is typically high.

This seminar course provides an introduction to the study of genocide. The course's disciplinary ambit ranges from anthropology to economics, from history to law, and from political science to sociology. Against the background of diverse disciplinary approaches, it explores major theoretical and empirical aspects of the role(s) of genocidal campaigns in international politics, inter alia, their origins, development, and termination; the manner of their perpetration, progression, and diffusion; their impact on the maintenance of international peace and security; their consequences for the reconstruction and development of states and the building of nations; and their adjudication in domestic and international courts and tribunals. Empirical cases to be discussed include Australia, Cambodia, China, the Democratic Republic of Congo, East Timor, Nazi Germany, Guatemala, Iraq, Northern Ireland, the Ottoman Empire, Rwanda, Uganda, the Soviet Union, Sudan, and the former Yugoslavia, among others. The course is designed to equip students with the analytic tools necessary for making sense of the evolution of the international system from the nineteenth century to the present-and for critically assessing the promise and limits of responding to collective violence.

This course is delivered through ten 2-hour seminars, totalling a minimum of 20 hours in Winter Term.

Students on this course will have a reading week in Week 6, in line with departmental policy.

Students are required to research and write one formative essay (2,000 words) due in Week 7 of Winter Term. Essays must be fully - and carefully - referenced using one of the major conventions consistently.

Lee Ann Fujii, Show Time: The Logic and Power of Violent Display (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2021).

Christian Gerlach, The Extermination of the European Jews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

Jens Meierhenrich, Genocide: A Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

A. Dirk Moses, The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).

Diane M. Nelson, Who Counts? The Mathematics of Death and Life after Genocide (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015).

Gérard Prunier, Africa’s World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)

Sean R. Roberts, The War on the Uyghurs: China’s Internal Campaign against a Muslim Minority (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020)

William A. Schabas, Genocide in International Law: The Crimes of Crimes, Second edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

Essay (100%, 4000 words) in the ST.