How should we understand genocide in the modern world? As an aberration from the norms of a dominant liberal international society? Or rather as a guide to the very dysfunctional nature of the international system itself? Genocide in the Age of the Nation State is the first work to consider the phenomenon within a broad context of world historical development. In this book, Mark Levene sets out the conceptual issues in the study of genocide, addressing the fundamental problems of defining genocide and understanding what we mean by perpetrators and victims, before placing the phenomenon in the context of world history. Genocide in the Age of the Nation State is the first of a major four-volume survey which examines its subject within an extensive global and historical framework and which will become the definitive work on the subject.

Mark Levene is Reader in Comparative History at the University of Southampton, and in the Parkes Centre for Jewish:non-Jewish relations. His works include War, Jews and the New Europe (1992), which was awarded the annual Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History, and The Massacre in History (1999) with Penny Roberts. He is also a peace and environmental activist, and co-founder of the Forum for the Study of Crisis in the 21st century.