Politics, Violence, Memory: The New Social Science of the Holocaust. Jeffrey S. Kopstein, Jelena Subotic and Susan Welch

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Abstract
I would like to start this review with a personal statement. As a criminologist, I was surprised (and disappointed) that none of the many lists of social sciences relevant to the endeavor of creating a “New Social Science of the Holocaust” included criminology. In fact, criminologists—side by side with political scientists, who are mainly represented in this volume—have contributed pathbreaking analyses and empirical studies to genocides in Rwanda, Darfur, and the former Yugoslavia using exceptional and unprecedented data collections and testing theories (see, for example, the work of John Hagan, Holly Nyseth-Brehm, and Nicole Rafter). Though criminology was generally a latecomer to the study of genocide—notwithstanding the fact that between 1943 and 1946, Sheldon Glueck, a leading criminologist of his time, wrote the first analyses of the Nazi regime’s crimes for the Nuremberg trials—criminologists, like their colleagues in other social sciences, turned their attention to the genocides in Rwanda, Yugoslavia, and Guatemala in the 1990s.

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