The United Nations was designed to be the central world institution for peace and security, with the Security Council at its core. This chapter looks at the law and history of the UN’s role in international peace and security, along with the secondary role played by the General Assembly. The Security Council is at the intersection of law, politics, and enforcement in world politics. The chapter looks at the formal powers given to the Security Council in the UN Charter and then examines how the practical life of the Council since 1945 has been both more than and less than what the Charter says. Case studies of mass killings in Sudan, Rwanda, and Syria show the limits of Council power under the influence of the US, Russia, and other powerful governments.

A comparison of the behavior of the German army in World War I and World War II in occupied Eastern Europe shows the human cost of the difference between Wilhelmine and Nazi nationalism. Hitler aimed not at the paternalistic civilizing of conquered peoples but rather the elimination, evacuation, and instrumentalization of non-Aryan populations. Yet the fact that Hitler is the exemplar of this kind of instrumental violence indicates the rarity of behavior thought to be so common in international relations models. This has great normative implications. As much as moral philosophy seeks to maintain a separation between the way the world is and the way that it should be, all normative arguments rest on (even if only implicitly) empirical claims about what is possible. We know by the empirical rarity of those who think like Hitler that he was mistaken about the amoral nature of man, and therefore that normative theorizing still has a place. Once we understood where Hitler’s crude struggle-based biological determinism went wrong, by failing to recognize what is uniquely about humans among other animals – their morality – biology buttresses rather than undermines liberal ethics. Morality is more than a social construction.

This chapter examines mass killing, ‘extermination’ and ‘genocide’ in Chinese history, focusing on the Warring States period and early empires. The Chinese language contains many words for ‘attack’, ‘kill’, ‘extermination’, ‘eradication’, and ‘destruction’ of the enemy. The concept of ‘genocide’ is rendered as ‘extermination’ of an ethnic group. Mass killing was facilitated by China’s precocious development of the technology of rule, especially national conscription and centralized administration. As early as 268 BCE, the state of Qin articulated and practiced an official policy of conquest by ‘attacking not only territory but also people’ to ensure that rival states and their populations could not recover. The Western Han dynasty massacred the Xiongnu in 133-91 BCE and beyond, while the Eastern Han dynasty exterminated the Qiang in 169. Ran Min of a later divided era launched ‘execution of the Jie and extermination of their kind’ in 350. The recurrence of mass killing did not end with the fall of the last dynasty in 1911. The ‘megamurderers’ Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong created ‘China’s bloody twentieth century’ by killing 10.2 million in 1921-48 and 37.8 million in 1923-76, respectively.

The chapter distinguishes serial lust killing from other forms of serial killing, such as those motivated by attention-seeking, revenge or material gain. However, it notes that other motivations such as those reflected in mission-killing and ego-boosting can combine with killing motivated by sexual desire. It also distinguishes serial lust killing from mass killing and spree killing. The notion of motivation is key to understanding lust killing as the behaviour is guided by a clear purpose and intention, such as to obtain sexual pleasure by the exertion of dominance over a victim. Most serial lust killers are not judged to be insane and are thereby held accountable by law. The chapter rejects the dichotomies of nature versus nurture and social versus biological, suggesting that such killing can only be understood in terms of a dynamic biology-social interaction. The importance of the acquisition of control is described.

Chapter 2, “The Killing Years,” explains the two-wave Nazi police genocide against the intelligentsia in 1939–1940, its fallout, and how these initial killing campaigns shaped the Nazi German occupation administration for Poland. German anti-intelligentsia campaigning was bloody but ultimately drove the resistance it attempted to thwart. The first campaign, codenamed Operation Tannenberg, was coordinated with the military campaign in 1939 but delayed in Warsaw because of the siege. Tannenberg went awry and was complicated by the circumstances of the invasion and incoming occupation. After Nazi Germany established a civilian occupation under general governor Hans Frank, Frank revived anti-intelligentsia killing with his new campaign, the Extraordinary Pacification Action (AB-Aktion). This campaign’s violence shocked Poles and provoked the resistance it was intended to achieve. This chapter argues that the two Nazi genocidal campaigns failed but shaped the nature of Nazi occupation administration, and encouraged the first violent Polish resistance in response.

Chapter 4, “The Warsaw Ghetto: A People Set Apart,” considers how Polish elites grappled with Jewish victimhood in their midst and differentiates between Nazi targeting of Polish elites and the better known targeting and murder of Polish Jews. It traces initial Nazi persecution of Warsaw’s Jewish community, ghettoization in 1940, persecution within the ghetto, and its liquidation to the death camp at Treblinka in 1942, and the outbreak of violent resistance in 1943. This is contextualized against Polish antisemitism before and during the war and particular Polish elite reactions to the developing Holocaust. A handful of intelligentsia figures who reacted strongly to antisemitic persecution in various ways demonstrate the complexity of Polish response to the Nazi Holocaust and how prewar and wartime antisemitism widened gulfs between ethnic Poles and the Polish-Jewish community. It argues that, because of a combination of targeted Nazi violence and native antisemitism, Polish elite response to Jewish persecution arose very late, typically only in 1943 with the outbreak of the ghetto uprisings, which captured the attention of resistance-minded Poles.