Mark Mazower explores the recent tendency to highlight the violent nature of the modern state and questions the degree to which our understanding of this phenomenon has been influenced by the contemporary concern with the Holocaust. He examines the general categories – notably “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” and “totalitarianism” – that have been employed to generate wide-ranging discussions of mass violence, and suggests that these categories are of limited usefulness to historians. Instead, Mazower argues in favor of giving greater attention to the role of contingency in explaining the origins of episodes of mass violence, notably the impact of wars and of periods of international tension such as the Cold War, and explores the differing roles played by military, paramilitary, and civilian agencies within the state apparatus of various regimes and countries. He also examines how the Eurocentric character of the debate on mass violence has led settler violence against indigenous peoples to be downplayed, and how the connections between practices of violence in imperial and European settings have similarly been neglected. Mazower concludes by suggesting that even though mass violence may be a weapon in the hands of non-state actors, we should not write off the state too readily as a violent actor.
