Totally Unofficial: Raphael Lemkin and the Genocide Convention

Facing History and Ourselves introduces its first book in the Making History Series. Created for classroom use, this groundbreaking volume highlights the story of Raphael Lemkin, a lawyer of Polish-Jewish decent who, driven by a sense of moral duty and outraged by injustice, helped to facilitate the establishment of the Genocide Convention, and set out guidelines for the international prevention and punishment for the crime of genocide. After studying the massacres of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, Lemkin struggled to find a way to use the law to prevent collective violence. To support his legal arguments, Lemkin coined the word ‘genocide’ in 1943. How did a new word change the way that people thought about a problem? Totally Unofficial explores the spectacular history of one man’s work, and an international community’s need to continue in his footsteps.