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Book Review: Law, Anthropology, and the Constitution of the Social: Making Persons and Things

directly legitimates the discourse of these génocidaires – as in verifying the legitimacy of racist doctrines or other specific supremacist world-views. What I am suggesting is that what this approach does is to restate at the level of theory an instrumental recourse to conditions of conflict that has too often informed the discourse of the génocidaires. If lives are to be saved ‘by military action against the perpetrators of genocide’ (p. 242), as Shaw suggests, then it might be expedient to define genocide within a different framework than conflict. Despite this concern, the central narrative of this work holds much promise. I would like to end, however, by pointing to a certain absence. Despite Shaw’s claim that his intention is to ‘challenge dominant understandings’ (p. 4) of the literature on genocide, the dominant representatives of this literature are surprisingly absent. Shaw never addresses, for example, the empirical findings of R. J. Rummel (1995) who claimed that genocides are planned separately from wars and revolutions. Likewise, while Shaw’s analysis of the overlapping conditions of genocide and warfare shares much with the work of Leo Kuper and Robert Melson, there is no attempt to probe the greater depths in which these authors explore this relationship. There is also no examination of any other authors in the tradition of genocide-cum-warfare that Shaw follows (Helen Fein to name one), the majority of who, nonetheless, hold often starkly different views from him. Such authors at best appear under ‘further reading’ at the end of Chapter 2. While this work is significant in its novel view of genocide as a form of war, and while it also has the potential to inspire debate, Shaw neglects the opportunity to establish his view of genocide at the juncture where competing insights would have demanded credible opposition.