Revisiting a Founding Assumption of Genocide Studies

Genocide studies has come a long way over the past decade, having attained a level of intellectual sobriety, academic credibility, and public recognition virtually inconceivable forty years ago. At the same time, there have been signs of convergence between the fields of genocide studies and Holocaust historiography and studies. This development can be challenging for those in Holocaust studies and historiography because the relationship betweem the two disciplines is complicated by genocide studies' claim to incorporate the Holocaust into its object of inquiry, whereas the reverse does not hold. There is a potentially subordinate situation here, or at least it can be experienced that way, even though Holocaust studies and historiography is a field with a substantial center of gravity, evidenced by the journals, book series, and research institutes devoted to the subject, such that it hardly needs to gesture to the relatively younger and smaller sibling, genocide studies. This article analyzes a recent critique of this convergence by revisiting the founding assumptions of Holocaust studies and genocide studies.