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Professor Jeff Bachman’s book The Politics of Genocide: From the Genocide Convention to the Responsibility to Protect is the first book to explicitly demonstrate how the United Nations permanent member nations (P-5) have exploited the 1948 Genocide Convention to isolate themselves from the reach of the law, marking them as "outlaw states."

Exploring themes of critical genocide studies, critiques of US foreign policy, and a larger critique of major power politics, Professor Bachman argues that since the Genocide Convention’s adoption, the United States, Soviet Union/Russia, China, United Kingdom, and France have worked within and around the system to ensure that they will not be implicated in the crime of genocide, or at least will avoid being held accountable. He shows how the P-5 has prevented jurisdiction for genocide prevention from being territorially bound; worked to ensure that cultural genocide was omitted from acts prohibited by the Genocide Convention; controlled the narrative at the UN Security Council about what is or is not genocide; and invoked Responsibility to Protect (if at all) only when it was not against their interests. As a result, the P-5 has achieved practical impunity for genocide.

Readable and accessible, The Politics of Genocide serves as an excellent complement and counterweight to standard treatments of this vital subject.

The Politics of Genocide was published in 2022 by Rutgers University Press. For more information, click .