Purify and Destroy: The Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide Jacques Semelin How can we comprehend the socio-political processes that give rise to extreme violence, ethnic cleansing or genocide? A major breakthrough in comparative analysis, Purify and Destroy demonstrates that it is indeed possible to compare the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia Herzegovina while respecting the specificities of each of these appalling phenomena. Jacques Semelin achieves this, in part, by leading his readers through the three examples simultaneously, the unraveling of which sometimes converges, but most often diverges. His method is multidisciplinary, relying not only on contemporary history, but also on social psychology and political science. Based on the seminal distinction between massacre and genocide, Purify and Destroy identifies the main steps of a general process of destruction, both rational and irrational, born on what Semelin terms 'delusional rationality'. He describes a dynamic structural model with, at its core, the matrix of a social imaginaire which, responding to fears, resentments and utopias, carves and recarves the social body by eliminating 'the enemy'. The author identifies the main stages that can lead to a genocidal process, and explains how ordinary people can become perpetrators. Finally, Semelin develops an intellectual framework to analyse the entire spectrum of mass violence in the twentieth century and before, including terrorism. He is strongly critical of today's political instrumentalisation of the 'genocide' notion and urges genocide research to stand back form legal and normative definitions to allow it to come of age as a discipline in its own right in the social sciences. Jacques Semelin is Professor of Political Science and Research Director at CERI-CNRS, Paris, France.