The politics of annihilation

The story of how the ‘crime without a name’ gained a name, then stormed into common parlance has been told many times. Various biographies of the word's creator, Raphael Lemkin, are available to readers. The story of how Lemkin himself was instrumental in transforming his neologism into an international crime is also well documented. But over the last seven decades the word itself has traversed the collective imagination in ways that both illuminate and conceal. Precisely what is illuminated and what is concealed (and why) is the subject of The politics of annihilation: a genealogy of genocide. As the concept of genocide ‘proliferated in a variety of directions’ (p. 30), what emerged was a dominant discourse around a particular character of mass killing, while other more minor aspects of the concept, in the words of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, were ‘overcoded’ and marginalized. The purpose of Benjamin Meiches's book is to uncover the discursive evolution of the concept of genocide, or, in his words, to analyse ‘the historical emergence, propagation and integration of the concept of genocide into global political discourse’ (p. 9). Its focus is on the ‘politics of genocide’––the contestations, debates and competing discourses which impinge on the concept

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