Although the celebrations surrounding the fiftieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) highlighted some remarkable achievements in the human rights movement, the international community must remain cognizant of a whole new array of unprecedented challenges. These challenges relate to the relevance of the conceptual framework within which the human rights movement has been operating as well as to the need for effective strategies of promotion and protection.

"The authors first examine the legal and social-theoretical criteria by which mass killings have been categorized as genocide and debate the extent to which various definitions may lead to conceptual misuse. Four case studies then cast the theoretical discussion into the historical realm by recounting the mass killings of the Armenians under the Ottoman Empire; the Turkish suppression of the Kurds and the Iraqi chemical warfare waged against its Kurdish population; the plight of the East Timorese...