Description

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A brave and timely proposal to name, investigate, and ultimately stop a new crime–the mass murder of millions of people for their faith.

Religion-related violence is the fastest spreading type of violence worldwide. Attacks on religious minorities follow a clear pattern and are preceded with early warning signs. Until now, such violence had no name, let alone a set of policies designed to identify and prevent it. A unique attempt to create a new moral and legal category alongside other forms of persecution and mass murder, Religicide explores the roots of atrocities such as the Armenian Genocide, the Holocaust, the Bosnian war, and other human rights catastrophes.

The authors tap into their decades of activism, interreligious engagement, and people-to-people diplomacy to delve into a gripping examination of contemporary religicides: the Yazidis in Iraq, the Rohingya in Myanmar, Uyghur Muslims and Tibetan Buddhists in China, and the centuries-long efforts to wipe out Indigenous Americans. Yet, even in the face of these horrific atrocities, the authors resist despair. They amplify the voices of survivors and offer a blueprint for action, calling on government, business, civil society, and religious leaders to join in a global campaign to protect religious minorities.

About the Author

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Dr. Georgette Bennett is an award-winning sociologist, widely published author, popular lecturer, and former broadcast journalist for NBC News. In 1992, she founded the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding, the go-to organization for combatting religious prejudice. In 2013, Bennett founded the Multifaith Alliance for Syrian Refugees, which has worked to raise awareness and mobilize more than $175 million of humanitarian aid, benefitting more than 2.2 million Syrian war victims. She is a co-founder of Global Covenant Partners and served on the U.S. State Department’s Religion and Foreign Policy Working Group tasked with developing recommendations to engage religious actors in conflict mitigation. Bennett is a former faculty member of the City University of New York and adjunct at New York University. She has published four books and more than eighty articles. Bennett was awarded a 2019 AARP Purpose Prize, and in 2021 was selected as one of Forbes’ 50 over 50 Women of Impact.

Jerry White is an activist entrepreneur known for leading high-impact campaigns, three of which led to international treaties: the Mine Ban Treaty; the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities; and the Cluster Munitions Ban. White shares in the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. As co-founder of Landmine Survivors Network, he worked with Diana, Princess of Wales, to help thousands of war victims find peer support and job training. White served as U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State to launch the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations, introducing advanced decision analytics to predict the outcomes of complex negotiations. He studied religion at Brown and theology at Cambridge University, with honorary degrees from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, University of Massachusetts Boston, and Glasgow Caledonia University. White is a Professor of Practice at the University of Virginia.

Praise For…

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“A timely (given the rise of White Christian Nationalism and the increasing acts of anti-Semitism in the United States) contribution to personal, professional, community, and academic library Religious Intolerance/Persecution and Sociology of Religion collections and supplemental curriculum studies lists.”
— Midwest Book Review

“Religicide is a new word for an old problem. Nevertheless, we are witnessing acts of violence perpetrated against religious minorities at a scale not seen in centuries. The authors of this indispensable volume have not only documented these crimes, they have given the victims a voice and offered some measure of hope for the world’s most vulnerable religious communities. This is a timely and invaluable treatise.” 
— Reza Aslan, author of No god but God and Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

“As a lawyer and diplomat who has had to navigate myriad global violations of religious freedom, I deeply appreciate Bennett and White’s well-grounded book, which courageously tackles the alarmingly growing form of violence: Religicide. This sophisticated analysis identifies the gaps in human rights law and provides realistic correctives for those gaps. As has been the case time and again in these authors’ distinguished careers, Religicide pulls no punches in revealing the limits of the UN and other international bodies on which we depend for security. But its prescription for derailing anti-religious violence goes far beyond officialdom to tap the economic, political, and social resources, local and national, that can be mobilized in a comprehensive covenant to protect oppressed religious groups. Religicide is a must-read for diplomats, policy makers, religious leaders, scholars, and anyone who cares about human rights and religious freedom.”
— Rabbi David Saperstein, former U. S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom and Director Emeritus, Religion Action Center of Reform Judaism

“How can our conflicted, crisis-plagued world, where over 80 percent of people identify with some religion, have a healthier, more peaceful future that respects our pluralist reality? The global achievements of Georgette Bennett and Jerry White in both religious and secular spheres give their answer unique credibility and weight. They not only offer a prophetic, realistic, and well-researched response to the ways in which religions are being horrendously and increasingly persecuted today; they also propose a practical solution that they themselves have begun to realize. Their vision of how a Global Covenant of Religions can in practice mobilize towards a better global future is the wisdom our century most needs.”
— David F. Ford OBE, Regius Professor of Divinity Emeritus University of Cambridge

“This timely book offers an opportunity for policymakers, activists, and diverse religious leaders to dive deeper into the underlying causes of anti-religious violence. Georgette Bennett and Jerry White call for dynamic, cross-border, cross-sector collaboration to put an end to religicide—heretofore unrecognized as a distinct crime under international law.”
— Zeid Ra’ad al Hussein, Former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights

“Religicide offers a visionary and pragmatic roadmap to curb religiously motivated violence. The authors transcend conventional foreign policy wisdom by proposing unprecedented engagement of religious leaders and civil society to cultivate peace, justice, and healing for the communities most at risk.”
— Queen Noor of Jordan, Author, Leap of Faith

“Naming something gives us the power to fight it. That’s what White and Bennett do in their call to name the violence against religious groups like Yazidis, Uyghurs and Rohingya. And you’ll see why protecting religion is a moral imperative for the most secular of global power brokers.”
— Erin Burnett, News Anchor, Outfront, CNN

“This is a timely and richly informed reminder of the central place that religious and cultural conflict has in our contemporary world. It is also a reminder of how religion can be misused to attack the liberal secularism upon which we depend to protect our human rights.”
— Sir Simon Schama, University Professor of History and Art History at Columbia University