This volume deepens and broadens considerations of genocide’s aftermath. It conceives postgenocide as an approach to study genocide effects after mass killing has ended. In line with an interconnected understanding of past and future, the ‘post’ in postgenocide signifies the entire period following the inception of genocide. Postgenocide implies that the era following genocidal killing is shaped by genocide; hence the necessity of understanding and explaining effects of genocide in moulding realities of societies subjected to cruelty of this heinous crime. Effects given attention in the contributions in this volume vary from various permutations of genocide harms, and legal recourse, after the fact; to scrutiny of the efficacy of the genocide law and prospects of its enforcement; to socio-political responses to genocide—including efforts to recovery and reconciliation; to genocide’s impacts on the victims’ communities and their efforts for recognition and redress; to genocide’s effect on the communities of perpetrators and their attempts to denial and revisionism; to the (re)construction of genocide narratives via the display of victims’ objects in museums, galleries, and archives; to impact of intersections of geopolitical order, climate change, warlordism, and resource exploitation on the re/occurrence of genocide. In doing so, some formerly opaque and overlooked themes and cases are analysed from the standing of several disciplines—such as law, political science, sociology, and ethnography—in the process exploring what these disciplines bring to bear on genocide scholarship and the rethinking of the existing assumptions in the field.
Final solutions: The causes of mass killing and genocide
