In the turbulent years since the term genocide was first introduced into the international legal debate in 1933, it has evolved into a fairly broad concept, applied often - and loosely - to many situations, both historical and contemporary.

While there is no doubt that the Nazis' "final solution of the Jewish question" constituted genocide, there is also sound evidence for applying the term to describe past and present-day massacres committed worldwide: the Armenian genocide during World War I; the slaughter of more than a million Cambodians by the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s; Idi Amin's mass murders in Uganda; and the case of the Iraqi extermination of the Kurds in the 1980s.

And today the specter of genocide has been raised once again, with neo-Nazi violence on the rise in Germany and elsewhere, and with the wide-scale killing of Muslims in Bosnia.

But genocide has also been used to describe a much wider range of events and policies, from the nuclear bombing of Japan at the end of World War II to Western efforts to establish birth control and abortion programs in third world nations. It is these dimensions of genocide that George J. Andreopoulos and the contributors to this volume seek to explore, in the context both of their historical roots and of the implications for current and future international action.

Originally the exclusive terrain of international lawyers, the debate over genocide in recent decades has come under increasing scrutiny from social scientists, who have launched a long overdue inquiry into the origins and unfolding of genocide as a social process.

Armed with different tools and objectives, the social scientists' work has sharpened the focus on the shortcomings of the United Nations Convention on Genocide, which has formed the basis for the internationally accepted categorization of genocide as a crime.

The authors first examine the legal and social-theoretical criteria by which mass killings have been categorized as genocide and debate the extent to which various definitions may lead to conceptual misuse.

Four case studies then cast the theoretical discussion into the historical realm by recounting the mass killings of the Armenians under the Ottoman Empire; the Turkish suppression of the Kurds and the Iraqi chemical warfare waged against its Kurdish population; the plight of the East Timorese after the Indonesian invasion; and the brutal fate of the Cambodians under Khmer Rouge rule.

This volume will be of interest to students and scholars of human rights, international law, political science, sociology, and history.