Historically delineates the problems of genocide as a concept in relation to rival categories of mass violence.

A. Dirk Moses is the Frank Porter Graham Distinguished Professor in Global Human Rights History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the co-editor of Decolonization, Self-Determination, and the Rise of Global Human Rights Politics (2020) and The Holocaust in Greece (2018).

Introduction: The Problems of Genocide; Part I. The Language of Transgression: 1. The Language of Transgression, 1500s to 1890s; 2. The Language of Transgression, 1890s to 1930s; 3. Raphael Lemkin and the Protection of Small Nations; 4. The Many Types of Destruction; 5. Inventing Genocide in the 1940s; Part II. Permanent Security: 6. Permanent Security in History: Empire and Settler Colonialism; 7. The Nazi Empire as Illiberal Permanent Security; 8. Human Rights, Population 'Transfer', and the Foundation of the Postwar Order; 9. Imagining Nation-Security in South Asia and Palestine: Partition, Population Exchange, and Communal Hostages; Part III. The Language of Transgression, Permanent Security, and Holocaust Memory: 10. Lemkin, Arendt, Vietnam, and Liberal Permanent Security; 11. Genocide Studies and the Repression of the Political; 12. Holocaust Memory, Exemplary Victims, and Permanent Security Today.