As genocide studies scholars know all too well, debates about how to properly define genocide as both a crime under international law and as a social science concept have dominated the field since its inception in the mid-1980s. Much ink has been spilled over whether genocide is distinguished by a unique intent to destroy the victim group, by whom the victims of genocide are, by whether there is a de minimus range for the number of victims, and by what methods of destruction (for example, mass killing, deprivation, mental harm, forced assimilation) ought to be recognized as genocidal.

In a new book, which is based on the dissertation he wrote at critical theory powerhouse Johns Hopkins University, Benjamin Meiches constructs a sustained and far-reaching critical theoretical genealogy of the concept of genocide. As the book unfolds, Meiches grapples in turn with all of the above debates, concluding that the majority of genocide studies scholars, along with international institutions and states, have developed and reinforced a narrow, reified hegemonic discourse. This discourse holds that victim groups are defined strictly by objective ethno-national criteria, that genocide is driven by a largely unprovable intent to destroy such groups only through mass killing, that prevention is carried out through neo-colonial interventionist policies and that intervention to stop genocides is increasingly pursued by what Meiches calls humanitarian war. Meiches argues that this discourse is revealed in the “politics of genocide,” or how genocide has been defined over time, and in “genocide in politics” in the real world, which has left other cases of victimization and destruction unrecognized and ignored.

To lay bare this hegemonic discourse, Meiches deploys an impressive array of critical theoretical resources in which he is expert and deeply immersed. These include, but are not limited to: Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's concept of sense, used throughout the volume to challenge dominant exclusionary intuitions about various elements of genocide; Michel Foucault's biopolitics and governmentality, to problematize how states perpetrate, understand and respond to genocides; the concept of mereology, to reject the notion that the number or proportion of the group targeted ought to be used to assess whether genocide has occurred or is occurring; Giorgio Agamben on the state of exception and bare life, to critique the role of international organizations and states in genocide prevention; and Eugene Thacker's concept of “horror,” to counter the narrative that genocidaires are evil monsters.

Through the application of these resources, Meiches arrives at some compelling, at times familiar, critiques. One is his contention that the final report of the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission erased Indigenous suffering by failing to condemn the entire settler colonial project past and present as genocidal or to commit the Canadian state to substantive decolonization. In his deconstruction of how scholars and courts identify and narrate processes of destruction in individual cases, Meiches skilfully uses Catherine Malabou's work on the “plasticity of destruction” to insist that methods of destruction are often highly dynamic over time, with earlier forms of destruction creating new unplanned and unforeseen forms of destruction as the genocidal process unfolds. Looking to the future of genocide studies and international efforts to confront the problem of genocide linked to global threats like human-induced climate change, Meiches wisely calls for “a generous mode of engagement with the politics of genocide [that is, definitional debates] . . . that leave open the possibilities for this concept in the invention of the future” (267).

It is unfortunate that Meiches does not always extend this same generosity to the scholars he interrogates. The book often feels as if Meiches is the critical theorist for the prosecution, charged with exposing hegemonic tendencies in individual scholars who are brought before the bench as stand-ins for the shortcomings of genocide studies as a whole. To be sure, his confrontations with scholars such as Leo Kuper, Jack Nusan Porter, Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, Manus Midlarsky, and Jacques Semelin do reveal a fairly narrow understanding of the key elements of genocide. These and other scholars Meiches references, however, were writing from the 1980s to the mid-2000s, at the latest, and do not fully represent the field as it is now. That genocide studies had been dominated by such scholarship at the turn of the millennium was roundly challenged in influential multi-author volumes by a new generation of post-colonial scholars edited by Dirk Moses (Reference Moses2008), Dan Stone (Reference Stone2008) and Adam Jones (Reference Jones2012) and in the Journal of Genocide Research. It was this challenge that gave rise to what I have described elsewhere as a rich theoretical and methodological pluralism (Hiebert, Reference Hiebert, Apsel and Verdeja2013) that for the last several years has included gender analyses (Thompson and Nagy, Reference Thompson and Nagy2011; Brown, Reference Brown2014) and critical theoretical and historiographical approaches and critiques (Tyner, Reference Tyner2017; Wildcat Reference Wildcat2015; Bloxham, Reference Bloxham2009). Appropriately, Meiches widely cites the post-colonial and critical genocide studies literature in the footnotes in support of his own position, but with a few exceptions, these scholars do not make an appearance in the text of the book.

Meiches also occasionally makes sweeping claims about the content of the alleged hegemonic discourse, arguing, for example, that unnamed (and uncited) scholars characterize the perpetrators of genocide as maladaptive, evil and monstrous. While this argument logically flows from Meiches’ application of Thacker's conception of horror as a critical device, comprehensive empirical research by social psychologists Daniel Chirot and Clark McCauley (Reference Chirot and McCauley2010) and James Waller (Reference Waller2002), historian Christopher Browning (Reference Browning1998) and political scientist Scott Straus (Reference Straus2008), among others, has repeatedly shown that the perpetrators of genocide up and down the ranks and across time and space are, as Browning evocatively tells us, “ordinary men” (and women). This is one of the most consequential—and agreed upon––findings of genocide studies.

In sum, Meiches’ tour de force deconstruction of the concept and politics of genocide yields important insights and critiques. His analysis would have been stronger and more convincing, however, had he fully engaged with the totality of genocide studies in all its current epistemological, ontological and methodological diversity, instead of training his fire on what genocide studies once was.