Mark Levene :
'Why is the Twentieth Century the Century of Genocide'

This article seeks to relate the specific phenomenon of genocide to broader processes, which have helped to create and shape modern international society. In particular it argues that the emergence of a western-led international system of nation-states has led many new or latecomer states to attempt ´short-cuts´ to development and/or empowerment in order to make good a perceived discrepancy between themselves and the dominant players. Genocide has been a regular by-product of these agendas, not least because their accelerated or alternative programmes of state building assume the rapid creation of ´nationally´ homogeneous and unified populations out of usually diverse ethnographic and social compositions. Though genocide is an extreme outcome demanding attention to the particular cultural, political and socio-economic conditions in each perpetrator state, its repeat-performance - increasingly since 1945 on a world-scale - also suggests less a series of isolated aberrations and more dysfunction of the system itself.