Atrocity Labelling

Words such as atrocity, genocide, war crime and crime against humanity have become familiar in international lawmaking, yet their meaning and application are rarely examined in depth. This book asks how and when these labels are attached to events, what determines whether an episode counts as genocide or a war crime, and what that classification means for legal proceedings.

Markus P. Beham takes an interdisciplinary and comparative approach to trace where these terms came from and what they imply for international criminal law efforts to address mass violence. Four cases anchor the analysis: Belgian colonial exploitation in the Congo, the abuses inflicted on the Herero and Nama in German South-West Africa, the Armenian genocide, and the famine in 1930s Ukraine, which was made by human hands.

Drawing on international law, legal history and discourse analysis, the book develops the concept of atrocity labelling to describe the shared understanding behind the work of international lawyers and prosecutors, historians and sociologists, and those who set agendas and make policy.