Holocaust research and genocide studies: facing the problem of integration

Over the last forty years, proponents of both comparative genocide and Holocaust research have idnetified anxieties and tensions between the two fields. Indeed, although both Holocaust historians and genocide scholars share a commitment to investigating the perpetration of past genocides, a number of intellectual commitments divide them. Perhaps the most central divisions among them are their differing views concerning how the history of the Holocaust should be integrated within a social-scientific or comparative framework. This chapter addressed how the relationship between the fields of Holocaust history and genocide studies have developed over the last forty years. It contends that although among Holocaust historians the problem of integration preceded the formation of genocide studies, the field’s establishment in the early 1980s cast the problem in a new light. It traces the debates concerning the Holocaust’s uniqueness, which appeared in their most fulsome form in the 1970s, arguing that while the most adamant defenses the uniqueness argument have largely subsided, the relationship between the fields remains contested.