Book review: Genocide and Victimology
| Author | Rick A Matthews |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/02697580221101635 |
| Published date | 01 September 2022 |
| Date | 01 September 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
International Review of Victimology
2022, Vol. 28(3) 367 –372
© The Author(s) 2022
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Book reviews
Yarin Eski (ed.)
Genocide and Victimology
Routledge: Abingdon; New York, 2020; 235 pp.: ISBN 9780429458675 (ebk).
Reviewed by: Rick A Matthews, Carthage College, USA
DOI: 10.1177/02697580221101635
Genocide and Victimology seeks to expand Walklate’s (2018) concept of the victimological imagi-
nation by examining the diverse features of genocide through different disciplinary, methodologi-
cal, and epistemological lenses. This anthology contains 11 chapters written by scholars from
several disciplines including criminology, law, sociology, public administration, and musicology
(among others). Eski notes in the introduction that one of the book’s primary goals is ‘to develop a
more epistemologically, theoretically, and methodologically robust victimology of genocide [in
order to] strive toward the victimological imagination of genocide and an interdisciplinary, cosmo-
politan victimology of genocide’.
The first three chapters focus on theoretical issues related to genocide and victimology. In the
first chapter, Eski asks the reader to consider the existential questions that haunt survivors of geno-
cide. Eski argues that while several criminological works have integrated the insights from existen-
tialism, fewer victimologists have employed existentialism as a framework to study the victimology
of genocide. Eski then makes the case that the insights from genealogical studies may be beneficial
to scholars seeking to understand victim’s lives within their larger socio-cultural context.
In chapter 2, Walklate notes that while early victimologists did not neglect the victims of geno-
cide, there are several critical dimensions to the victimology of genocide that still have not received
enough attention. Walklate then seeks to deepen the victimology of genocide by pointing readers
toward under-examined dimensions of genocide, like the production of gender as a form of power
and the role of choice (including being choiceless). Walklate concludes by demonstrating how
examining the nature of gendered relationships might help us better understand the victimology of
genocide, with implications for understanding both victims and perpetrators.
Lohne then employs a radicalized Durkheimian perspective in the third chapter to examine how
international criminal justice might reinforce a global moral community in the name of humanity.
Lohne uses ethnographic data from Uganda’s humanitarian crisis and violence to analyze Mutua’s
(2001) ‘tripolar metaphor of “savages, victims, and saviors” in international criminal justice’, not-
ing that ‘humanity’ is split into the categories of good and evil. Lohne notes that such categoriza-
tion obscures the role of politics and reflects the dominant moral order.
The following three chapters focus on neglected genocides, including the Rohingya in Myanmar
(chapter 4), the subject of LGBT+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) and genocide (chapter
5), and an examination of how human-centered approaches in genocide studies have ignored the
role of ‘symbiotic destruction’ in genocide (chapter 6).
1101635IRV0010.1177/02697580221101635International Review of VictimologyBook reviews
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