© Columbia University Press
Purify and Destroy: The Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide
Paper, 352 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-14283-0
$26.00
August, 2007
Cloth, 352 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-14282-3
$75.00
Foreward by Stanley Hoffmann
Acknowledgements
introduction: Understand?
I. The Imaginary Constructs of Social Destructiveness
Unpromising Avenues
The power of imaginary constructs
From the identity narrative to the figure of Traitor
From the quest for purity to the figure of the Other in excess
From the security dilemma to the destruction of the enemy
II. From Inflammatory Discourse to Sacrificial Violence
The intellectual springboard
Reaching political legitimacy
From the religious to the sacrificial
Societies torn between adhesion, consent and resistance
III. International Context, War and the Media
A structure of political opportunities
Spilling into war
Telling the world: a last resort?
IV. The Dynamics of Mass Murder
The decision-making process and the deision-makers
The organisation of mass murder and the actors involved
From collective indifference to popular participation
Morphologies of extreme violence
V. The Vertigo of Impunity
Crossing the threshold into violence
The tipping mechanism
The dual learning process of massacre
The killers’ profiles: revisiting ‘the banality of evil’
Sexual violence and other atrocities
VI. The Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide
Instrumentalisations of a word that is impossible to define?
Distancing genocide studies from the frame of law
Destroying to subjugate
Destroying to eradicate
Destroying to revolt
Conclusion: The ‘Never Again” Refrain
Crisis prevention: arguments and illusions
An ethics of responsibility
‘The revenge of passions’
Appendices
A. Investigating a massacre
B. Comparing massacres
Bibliography
Notes
Name Index
Subject Index