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The spectre of genocide is always that of a repeat of the last genocide. Many Israelis, faced with the prospect of an Iranian nuclear weapon, fear a "second Holocaust". The United Nations works to prevent "another Rwanda", and genocide campaigners believe that one happened in Darfur. Genocide politics is about recognition-claiming the label for the particular set of atrocities with which people are concerned-and it generally proceeds by analogy with previous events. The Holocaust remains the defining episode: as Jeffrey Alexander has argued, it has been constructed as a "sacred evil",1 the ultimate embodiment of evil in the modern world, so that all other evils must be related to it. Defining "other" genocides requires "bridging" from (or to) the Holocaust, so that some of its sacred-evil quality rubs offon them. Indeed, genocide as such has become something of a "sacred evil": without its recognition, atrocities become second class, "only ethnic cleansing", and the demand for intervention or justice is strangely diluted.
Bridging, or reasoning by analogy, may be understandable politics, but it is inadequate for academic understanding. History may repeat itself, as tragedy or farce, but genocides do not repeat themselves in the ways that elections or football tournaments do. It may be utterly unscientific to claim that the Holocaust is "unique" in a metaphysical sense, but there is a profound sense in which all large-scale historical episodes are distinct from one another. Of course, the argument about the uniqueness of each historical episode does not take us very far, as it risks a loss of generalising perspective. But it is important if it reminds us that history involves change as well as repetition, and that each historical period needs to identify the danger of genocide in its own terms. One tires of the kind of transhistorical "analysis" that always looks for similarities with the Holocaust, whether it be in the earlier events in Armenia or the later ones in Rwanda, let alone its variant that dismisses events in places like Bosnia and Darfur because of their insufficient conformity to the Holocaust paradigm.
This paper argues, therefore, that genocide research requires a more radical historical understanding if we are to understand the specific dangers of genocide in our time. There is, of course, a...