Martin Shaw's basic message is simple and important. Lawyers and political interests have distorted Raphael Lemkin's original insight that genocide is a kind of extreme warfare in which a socially defined group is targeted for elimination. The overlegalization of the term has given us the sad spectacle of a United Nations commission headed by a respected Italian jurist declaring that whatever horrors may be committed in Darfur, this is not legally genocide. On the other side, some have claimed that “their group” has been the victim of genocide when it is doubtful that this is what happened. Has there really been “gendercide” or “femicide” anywhere in the world, the attempt to exterminate all of one gender as a gender? Exploitation of women, brutality, selective infanticide of females, yes, but not all social evils, even murderous ones, are genocidal. And were the Irish subjected to genocide during the potato famine of the mid-nineteenth century, as some claim, or was it more criminal neglect on the part of the English who refused to help?

The proliferation of “cides” sometimes serves to obscure what is truly genocidal. Is there something distinctive about “politicide” (killing people because they are deemed part of a particular political group), “urbicide,” (killing city people because they are thought to be cosmopolitan urbanites), “classicide” (killing those thought to be part of an economic class), or even “hyper-genocide” (the really, really nasty genocides, unlike the regular ones)? Shaw correctly wants us to forget all of these terms and get back to basics. Nor is he a fan of the term “ethnic cleansing,” which is usually genocidal. A group may be targeted for many reasons: ethnicity, religion, class, ideology, region where its members live, and others, but attempts to exterminate any socially defined group, large or small, is genocide and does not need another label.

Shaw carefully dissects the failings of other prominent scholars in this field. Michael Mann's useful insights, he shows, are vitiated by his peculiar decision to claim that modern democracy is the chief cause of genocide. Were Hitler, Stalin, and the Khmer Rouge democrats? Zygmunt Bauman's fixation on the Nazi bureaucracy makes the combination of modern science and rational state bureaucracy the chief culprit in genocide, reducing premodern cases to trivial events. But Shaw points out that this hardly fits the bloody field massacres we have witnessed in Rwanda, Sudan, and Cambodia.

Shaw's insistence on making sociological analysis the center of a valid theory of genocide, however, runs into trouble when he agrees that somehow, modernity makes things worse. So, what are we to make of Genghis Khan's and Tamerlane's massacres of every living soul in cities that did not surrender, or of Caesar's deliberate slaughter of some tribes in Gaul who resisted too much? Athenians and other ancient Greeks sometimes committed genocide. So did an early Ming emperor who sought to wipe out a whole class of Confucian scholars and their entire families. We know that occasionally, warfare in Highland New Guinea got out of hand and turned into the slaughter of entire villages. The Bible called for the total elimination—men, women, children—of certain tribes, particularly Canaanites and Amalekites. Whether or not these biblical stories are true is irrelevant, as the call to genocide shows that this was considered a legitimate tool of war against enemies of the one true Lord more than twenty-five centuries ago.

Sociology from Karl Marx to Emile Durkheim was created largely as a critique of the evolving modern capitalist democracies in which the founders lived, and even the more balanced, wiser Max Weber shared this critique. That tradition of distaste for the modern remains more powerful than ever, not only in sociology but in the humanities as well. So, not only does Shaw lay particular blame on modernity for genocide, but he also calls most modern warfare “degenerate” because so many civilians get killed, even when there is no genocidal program as such. This is an error. It was precisely because wars in the past so often killed civilians that rules kept on being made up in order to try to limit the damage.

In addition, Shaw cannot resist passing moral judgments that seem to defy historical complexity. He calls the atomic bombing of Japan illegitimate. This remains a contentious matter. The American soldiers whose lives were spared because they did not have to invade Japan and fight the terrible battles they had experienced on Iwo Jima or Okinawa would not have agreed, and the millions who were slowly starving to death in the still vast Japanese empire felt relieved by the quick end of the war.

Despite these criticisms, Shaw redeems himself by his deep erudition and common sense. It is time to go back to analyzing genocide for what it is, war fought by extermination. Greed, political competition, religious fanaticism, desire for revenge, fear, or some kind of utopian fantasy about creating a perfectly pure world (all of which may overlap with one another) can be the causes. There are as many reasons for genocide as there are for war. Ultimately, there can be no single theory of genocide, just as there can be none that explains all wars. So, as the author suggests, a careful analysis of what has caused a particular war, be it a civil war or an international one, a small one or a big one, is needed to explain why some become genocidal and others do not.

Shaw is quite right that sociology should be able to contribute to such an analysis and help develop useful typologies. Other social sciences should participate as well. This is not a matter that can be usefully advanced by lawyers or political movements, nor even by ideologically committed social commentators who have come to use the term “genocide” as a political, rather than an analytical, term. His book asks the right questions and should be read by all scholars in the proliferating field of genocide studies.