Disciplines involved may include political science, geography, economics, sociology, international relations, and history.
International law recognizes a broad range of forms of violence in which the crime of genocide can be enacted.
[5] Together, War and genocide have historically amounted to the large-scale destruction and devastation of peoples as both involve the deployment of violence through killing and physical harming to destroy the power of the enemy that often includes economic, political, and ideological coercion.
Limited and defensive use of nuclear weapons are not inherently genocidal, even if they have the unwanted consequences of massive civilian deaths,".
Manus Midlarsky defines genocide as “understood to be the state-sponsored systematic mass murder of innocent and helpless men, women, and children”.
[14] Similarly Irving Horowitz defines genocide as “a structural and systematic destruction of innocent people by a state bureaucratic apparatus”.
[15] Finally, Kurt Jonassohn and Frank Chalk define genocide as "a form of one-sided mass killing".
This school also invites scholars to reconsider the use of war in international affairs as well as the concept of genocide as being based on the perceived innocence of those attacked.
Some proponents of this school argue that some examples of twentieth century war is genocidal by nature, given the enormous number of deaths.