ERIC D. WEITZ. A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2003. Pp. 360. $29.95

Abstract

Over the past few years, the comparative and transnational study of genocide, until a decade ago the province of a small group of social scientists, has attracted tremendous attention and a notable body of scholarly work. Eric D. Weitz's compelling book, published in 2003, was one of the first historical studies on the subject. While it faced some sharp criticism in the first round of reviews, mostly from specialists, it has withstood the test of time and has become a point of reference for the ongoing effort to explain genocide, the reality of the murder or entire groups of human beings and the theories or concepts informing its study, in all its ramifications. The book's argument, and its set-up, are probably too complex in order to make it truly popular, but it is written lucidly and elegantly, which makes it a pleasure to teach and to debate. The title raises wrong expectations. Weitz focuses on exemplary cases—Nazi Germany, the Stalinist Soviet Union, the Red Khmer in Cambodia, and the Serbian/Yugoslav regime of Slobodan Milosevic—in order to derive general conclusions about genocide. The Armenian and the Rwandan cases are discussed briefly in the introduction and conclusion, but I am not the only one to wonder whether it is a lack of knowledge, which Weitz acknowledges with regard to Rwanda, that keeps them at the margins. A certain artifice of selection is the price to be paid for stringent comparison. The question is whether or not this selection is tautological in the sense that it confirms, or unduly limits, the author's thesis.