Globalisation, mass atrocities and genocide

Abstract

Nearly half a century separates the writing of Theodor Adorno and Michael Ignatieff, and their sober though not pessimistic perspective on gross human rights violations and cruelty. Both write under the shadow of genocide and mass atrocities. The Holocaust was central to Adorno’s philosophy and social theory; for Ignatieff, the genocides in former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, as well as the failure of the international community to prevent or intervene, informed his analysis of the human rights project, and of what it could achieve. Both philosophers were confronted with the proliferation of mass atrocity and genocide in the second half of the twentieth century, as these spread through regions like Latin and Central America, and Africa, or what had been revealed about Stalin’s Siberian camps and mass starvation in Ukraine at the time.