Levene, Mark. “From Past to Future: Prospects for Genocide and Its Avoidance in the Twenty-First Century”.

In this closing chapter of a handbook to genocide studies, Mark Levene explores future sources of potential genocides based on 21st-century challenges such as overpopulation and environmental impact.

Levene proposes an alternative approach to the concept of genocide as also dependent on certain underlying political, economical, social and cultural preconditions. In this way, it is possible to surpass the idea of a certain historical event as only belonging to the category of abnormal violence. Levene makes a plea for a broader contextualization of possible preconditions for genocide that take into account the effects of a quickly changing environment. He sketches out two possible scenarios as new routes into the future, thereby exploring whether climate change will merely increase threats to already existing conflicts or be the key factor in a civilizational collapse. In his concluding remarks, Levene identifies a current shift towards greater forms of violence as a result of the prolongation and intensification of already present societal conditions. He stresses the urgent call for a paradigm shift that changes humanity’s relationship with the planet in order to avoid not only genocide but also ‘omnicide’.  Most relevant to the field of perpetrator studies are Levene’s suggestions about the effects of inequalities between societies as a result of climate change. On a highly suggestive endnote, he writes that western societies might become “the most obvious candidates to make responses which in normal times would be deemed not only unthinkable but unforgivable” (657).

Author of this entry: Lisanne Meinen

Levene, Mark. “From Past to Future: Prospects for Genocide and Its Avoidance in the Twenty-First Century.” In The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, edited by Donald Bloxham and Dirk Moses, 638-659. Oxford: Oxford University Press.