ABSTRACT
“Between the 1950s and 1980s the term ‘genocide’ languished almost unused by scholars” (Jones 2011, 15). The Holocaust dominated the literature, researchers were by and large historians and social-scientific studies were all but absent. During the later 1980s and 1990s genocide studies began to emerge as an interdisciplinary field focusing on man-made disasters that did not fit the definitions found in the existing conflict literature. Early data suggested that genocide phenomena were quite similar to the Holocaust and were neither rare nor absent from the later twentieth century. As I argued later, no lessons were learned from the Holocaust (see Harff 1994; Fein 1994).
