2025 Book Award

The 2025 award cycle covers books published between January 1, 2023 and December 31, 2024.

We are currently only accepting nominations for books published in 2023 (January 1st-December 31st, 2023).

NOMINATIONS MUST BE SUBMITTED BY MARCH 1, 2024.

Books from any discipline are accepted. Edited volumes, memoirs, poetry, fiction, and drama are excluded.

The award consists of a citation and the winner is invited to deliver a public address in New York City at an event convened by the Institute for the Study of Genocide in fall, 2025.

Prior to sending books please contact Lemkin Award Committee Chair, Professor Ernesto Verdeja at everdeja@nd.edu.

2023 Lemkin Book Award Recipient Public Event

The ISG is delighted to announce the winner of the 2023 Lemkin Book Award, Sabine Cadeau for her book, “More than a Massacre: Racial Violence and Citizenship in the Haitian–Dominican Borderlands.”

The Lemkin Book Award committee, composed of an interdisciplinary group of scholars in the field of genocide studies, read over sixty books published in 2021 and 2022 and selected “More Than a Massacre” for its methodological sophistication, impressive analysis, and compelling arguments about an understudied case. The book explores the ways in which citizenship politics and statelessness intersected to produce racialized anti-Haitian repression and genocide on the border areas with the Dominican Republic in the early part of the twentieth century.

Sabine Cadeau is an Associate Professor in Latin American and Caribbean history at McGill University.

Join us for a public lecture and discussion with the author:

October 26, 2023
6:00-7:30 PM
Cardozo School of Law
New York City

Join us in person or online.
*Registration is free but required*:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/733023020587?aff=oddtdtcreator

The outstanding list of 2023 finalists for the Lemkin Award included:

-Jonathan Leader Maynard, “Ideology and Mass Killings: The Radicalized Security Politics of Genocides and Deadly Atrocities”

-Rory Finnin, “Blood of Others: Stalin’s Crimean Atrocity and the Poetics of Solidarity”

-Omar McDoom, “The Path to Genocide in Rwanda: Security, Opportunity, and Authority in an Ethnocratic State”

-Dirk Moses, “The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and The Language of Transgression”

Past Winners

2021: Alison Crosby and M. Brinton Lykes, Beyond Repair? Mayan Women’s Protagonism in the Aftermath of Genocidal Harm (Rutgers, 2019)

2019: Geoffrey Robinson, The Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian Massacres, 1965-66 (Princeton, 2018)

2017: Benjamin Madley, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe (Yale, 2016)

2015: Mark Levene, The Crisis of Genocide, 2 volumes (Oxford, 2104)

2013: Yang Jisheng, Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine 1958-1962, translation by Stacy Mosher and Guo Jian (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012)

2011: Emma Gilligan, Terror in Chechnya: Russia and the Tragedy of Civilians in War (Princeton, 2009)

2009: Darius Rejali, Torture and Democracy (Princeton, 2007)

2007: Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (Oxford, 2005)

2005: Peter Balakian, The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response (Harper Collins, 2003)

2003: Samantha Power, A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (Harper Perennial, 2002)

2000: Alison Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda (Human Rights Watch and FIDH, 1999)

Judges for the Lemkin Book Award have included Joyce Apsel, Orlanda Brugnola, Bridget Conley, Daniel Feierstein, Helen Fein, Jocelyn Getgen Kestenbaum, Alexander L. Hinton, Sheri Rosenberg, Roger Smith, Ernesto Verdeja, Jennifer Welsh, Linda Woolf, and Andrew Woolford.