The Routledge International Handbook of Mass Violence

Interrogating the complexities of mass violence in contemporary society, this handbook reconceptualizes the accumulation, intensity, and temporality of mass violence – rather than depending on numbers alone – to develop a critique of mass violence adequate for our times.

The Routledge International Handbook of Mass Violence critically engages with classic political, sociological, psychological, and strategic paradigms to ask how violence operates when it is temporally diffuse, socially obscured, and institutionally normalized. This volume is thematically organised to explore the theories, strategies, legacies, memories, perpetrators of mass violence, and investigates topics that were previously considered to lie beyond the scope of studies of mass violence such as the carceral system and environmental damage. Contending with questions of justice and reconciliation, and issues surrounding burials and exhumations after mass violence, this book explores an extensive range of international case studies to determine the boundaries of the concept of mass violence and how instances of mass violence are categorized.

This volume promotes an intellectual interchange that broadens our understanding of mass violence beyond the instrumental and orchestrated violence perpetrated by political and state actors, and will appeal to scholars and students of sociology, anthropology, law and politics with interests in mass violence.