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An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Peace and Conflict Workshop at the University of Notre Dame.
The author would like to thank workshop participants for their comments, as well as Christian Davenport for extensive commentary on the arguments made here. The manuscript also benefited greatly from comments provided by the anonymous reviewers of Perspectives on Politics and its editor, Jeff Isaac.
Genocide has been called the "crime of crimes" and an "odious scourge."1 With millions of victims in the last century alone, it is one of the great moral and political challenges of our age. Its significance has generated extensive research over the past fifteen years as the violence in Rwanda and Bosnia drove scholars to expand their focus beyond the Holocaust, which had long been the primary case study. Today, researchers across disciplines are conducting comparative genocide research, exploring its necessary conditions and patterns. This is evident in the development of several journals, textbooks, readers, encyclopedias, conferences, and professional organizations devoted to its study. Its policy importance is also apparent in the expansion of government agencies, non-governmental organizations, and a special UN office devoted to its prevention.2
This new generation of scholarship has crystallized into the interdisciplinary field of "genocide studies," a community of scholars and practitioners dedicated to researching and preventing genocide. However, genocide studies has emerged as its own research field, developing in parallel rather than in conversation with work on other areas of political violence. Aside from a few important exceptions, mainstream political scientists rarely engage with the most recent work on comparative genocide. Some of the newest genocide research appears in topic-specific conferences and journals like Genocide Studies and Prevention and the Journal of Genocide Research, but not in political science venues.3 The reasons for this separation are complex, but partly stem from the field's roots in the humanities (especially history) and reliance on methodological approaches that have had little resonance in mainstream political science, as well as the field's explicit commitment to humanitarian activism and praxis. Earlier generations of political scientists and sociologists who studied genocide often found little interest for their work among dominant political science journals and book publishers; they instead opted to...