Edited by Jan Claas Behrends, Thomas Lindenberger, and Pavel Kolář. This volume by an international group of historians presents case studies on the use and types of physical violence in the USSR and Moscow’s European satellite states after the death of Joseph Stalin. While communist rule until 1953 was characterized by repression and mass-terror, violence…

By Damien Scalia. This book draws on unique materials – about sixty interviews Scalia conducted with some of the most serious criminals tried by international criminal courts. In his encounters with these génocidaires, the author listened to them for a long time, not to study how they became perpetrators, as is generally the case in…

By Per A. Rudling. Following its declaration of independence in 1991, Ukraine has sought to produce a new national history. After the 2004 Orange Revolution, newly elected president Viktor Yushchenko embarked on an ambitious project to rehabilitate the most radical branch of the far-right interwar and wartime Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its armed…

By Taras Kuzio and Stefan Jajecznyk-Kelman. This book details how Russia’s February 2022 open invasion of Ukraine has led to the biggest military conflagration and refugee crisis in Europe since World War II—a development with global ramifications. Co-written by a leading Western political expert, with three decades of research on contemporary Ukraine, and a prolific…

By Alexander Laban Hinton. Anthropological Witness tells the story of Alexander Laban Hinton’s encounter with an accused architect of genocide and, more broadly, Hinton’s attempt to navigate the promises and perils of expert testimony. In March 2016, Hinton served as an expert witness at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, an international tribunal established to…

By El Jones. In Abolitionist Intimacies, El Jones examines the movement to abolish prisons through the Black feminist principles of care and collectivity. Understanding the history of prisons in Canada in their relationship to settler colonialism and anti-Black racism, Jones observes how practices of intimacy become imbued with state violence at carceral sites including prisons,…

By Oleksandr Melnyk. This book explores the relationship between history, legitimacy, and violence in the building and breaking of nations and states on the territory of contemporary Ukraine during the Second World War and in its aftermath. At its center are various institutions of the Soviet state. Other states and rival political movements also enter…

By Andrew I. Port. Germans remember the Nazi past so that it may never happen again. But how has the abstract vow to remember translated into concrete action to prevent new genocides abroad? As reports of mass killings in Bosnia spread in the middle of 1995, Germans faced a dilemma. Should the Federal Republic deploy…

By Chris Sands and Fazelminallah Qazizai. In 1969, several young men met on a rainy night in Kabul to form an Islamist student group. Their aim was laid out in a simple typewritten statement: to halt the spread of Soviet and American influence in Afghanistan. They went on to change the world. Night Letters tells…

By Iva Vukušić. This is the first book to offer a comprehensive analysis of the emergence, nature, and function of Serbian paramilitary units during the violent breakup of Yugoslavia. In the book, Vukušić investigates the nature and functions of paramilitary units throughout the 1990s, and their ties to the state and President Slobodan Milošević. The…