How should we understand genocide in the modern world? As an aberration from the norms of a dominant liberal international society? Or rather as a guide to the very dysfunctional nature of the international system itself? The Meaning of Genocide is the first work of its nature to consider the phenomenon within a broad context of world historical development. In this book, Mark Levene sets out the conceptual issues in the study of genocide, addressing the fundamental problems of defining genocide and understanding what we mean by perpetrators and victims, before placing the phenomenon in the context of world history. In an original and compelling argument, Levene seeks to explain how state violence against a range of groups has emerged in tandem with the rise of the West to global dominance and the emergence of increasingly streamlined, homogenous states. Levene contends that it is in the relationship of these nation-states to each other that we will find the well-springs of some of the most poisonous tendencies in the modern world. Thought provoking and beautifully constructed, The Meaning of Genocide is the first of a major four-volume survey, Genocide in the Age of the Nation State, which examines its subject within an extensive global and historical framework and which will become the definitive work on the subject.