Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis - Volume 124, Issue 4, 2011

Genocide can be defined as a process of systematic persecution and annihilation of a group of people by a government. In the twentieth century approximately 40 to 60 million defenseless people have become victims of deliberate genocidal policies. In genocides individuals are persecuted and murdered merely on the basis of their presumed membership of a group rather than on their actual beliefs, character, or actions. G Read More

This article approaches Serbian integral nationalism as an historical phenomenon spanning the entire first half of the twentieth century, a phenomenon that repeatedly influenced the internal developments of the Serbian and Yugoslav states. Serbian integral nationalism refers to the strain of Serbian nationalism that called for the integration of all Serb-populated lands into one national state. The author shows how a li Read More

India’s Hindu-Muslim violence is rarely spontaneous, as this violence is usually fomented by politicians who aim to reap electoral benefits from the ensuing polarisation. This article aims to explain the capacity of politicians to instigate violence, by relating Gujarat’s 2002 violence to the way Gujarat’s state has developed over the last 200 years. As new state institutions developed their capacity to deliver various public service Read More

The opening of the Soviet archives in the 1990s has offered historians of Stalinism unprecedented opportunities to research and understand the violence of the regime. The discovery of key documents and publication of revealing memoirs have shed light on four important genocides: the man-made famine of 1931-3, the Great Terror of 1937-8, the deportations of ethnic groups in 1939-45, and the mass forced labour in th Read More

The differences between rescue in the Netherlands when compared with Belgium and France are primarily in the structures of the organisations involved. In both France and Belgium the extent of Jewish self-help generated from migrant political and welfare groups at an early stage in the occupation helps to explain the speed of reaction when the deportations began. The degree of integration with wider non-Jewish welfare Read More

In post-communist Poland the Second World War is still capable of rousing intense emotions. Issues such as the killing of Jews in Jedwabne, the murder of more than 20,000 Polish officers in Katyń, the clash with Ukrainians in Volhynia, the Soviet role during the Warsaw Uprising, and the appropriation of Auschwitz regularly cause public debate and political tension. This is not surprising: Poland suffered more than any othe Read More

Three decades of memory politics about the collective violence, military rule, and disappearances in Argentina during the 1970s and early 1980s have led to shifting interpretations of this traumatic past. This article demonstrates that the politico-discursive confrontation between adversarial groups, and the unwillingness of the military to resolve the disappearances, have caused a cultural trauma. Unable to mourn an incomp Read More

Genocide studies is a highly interdisciplinary field of research which has grown significantly in the last few decades. This article opens with a short note on recent developments in the academic debate. Thereafter five major topics in this field are discussed: the emergence, development, and end of genocidal processes; the situation in postgenocidal societies; and the prevention of genocide. The last part of the article summari Read More