Business in genocide: understanding and avoiding complicity

MSM academics Nora Stel and Wim Naudé have just published a chapter on Business in Genocide: Understanding and Avoiding Complicity. The chapter is in an Oxford University Press book entitled ‘Economic Aspects of Genocides, Other Mass Atrocities, and their Prevention’.

The book is edited by professors Charles Anderton and Jurgen Brauer and is one of the first books to systemically explore all the economic aspects of Genocides and Mass Atrocities (GMAs).

As the editors point out in their foreword, “occurring on every continent except Antarctica, the sheer number, scale, and scope of mass atrocities are vast, as are their frequency and duration. We have compiled a record of some 201 distinct cases of mass atrocities since 1900…total estimated fatalities for such cases alone range from about eighty million to more than two hundred million people”.

Hence, it is important to understand the economic aspects so as to prevent GMA more effectively.

In this book six broad economic aspects are analyzed: GMA as a choice, the economic conditions that affects GMA, how GMS affects the economy, how GMA is a form of wealth appropriation, GMA as business organization and how GMS distorts the social underpinnings of the economy.

In their chapter, which considers GMA as business organization, Nora Stel and Wim Naudé first map the scholarly debates about what manifests, determines and drives corporate involvement in genocides. They furthermore explore the specific role entrepreneurs and businesses played in three of the most uncontested genocides of recent history: the Jewish, Kurdish, and Darfurian genocides. From this they offer several emerging lessons of the “what,” “how,” and particularly the “why” of business in genocide.

The book is available from Oxford University Press, at : https://global.oup.com/academic/product/economic-aspects-of-genocides-other-mass-atrocities-and-their-preventions-9780199378296?cc=nl&lang=en&