Abstract

The twentieth century could be accurately referred to as one of the most violent eras ofhuman history due to the high number of conflicts that arose during that time, including two world wars, and countless civil wars, conflicts and genocides. The last of these refers to the intent to destroy partially or totally a national, ethnic, religious or racial group by killing, or through serious bodily or mental harm affecting the quality of everyday life, such as preventing births or removing the children from a particular group to another, as specified in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted in 1948 by the United Nations (Jones 2011; Khan 2000; Wallis 2006). These 100 years were also seminal in the development of new weapons technologies and, as the twenty-first century dawned, military armaments advanced beyond all imagination for the sake of selective and mass killing ofhuman beings.