Genocide and the Geographical Imagination

Tyner considers how genocide reflects spatialities of life and death, but he goes further to examine the calculated valuation of life, the routinization of modern violence, and the roles of state intervention and nonstate actors. In so doing, he demonstrates very real geographies of moral inclusion and exclusion. -- Shannon O'Lear, University of Kansas
Tyner (geography, Kent State Univ.) applies a geographic perspective on state building by considering the complex moral calculus behind policies that determine who lives and who dies during efforts to achieve state-sanctioned utopias. The introductory chapter examines the psychology of killing and state-sanctioned geographic imaginations. The author uses the Holocaust to examine state-sponsored violence and expose ideas of sovereignty and the spatiality of life and death. His analysis of Maoist China questions whether allowing 40 million people to die between 1959 and 1961 was intentional genocide or a by-product of a drive to a utopian worldview. Finally, Tyner explores Cambodia's loss of a third of its 8 million people in the Khmer Rouge's search for a just and egalitarian society through the total erasure of traditional Cambodia. Implicit in these case studies is how the moral geography of the modern bureaucratic state values people. The numbers may be different, but societies still encounter state engagement with contraception, euthanasia, capital punishment, political assassination, and other issues that are part of the moral geography of modern states. The argument is provocative....Summing Up: Recommended. * CHOICE *