Download History 4318 EurOPe SINCE 1914

Holocaust
Studies
Genocide
Studies
FOREVER IN THE SHADOW OF THE HOLOCAUST?:
THE SHOAH & GENOCIDE STUDIES
A SHARED HISTORY & SHARED FUTURE?
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Raphael Lemkin- “The father of Genocide Studies”
 The etymology of genocide: Genos (Greek: race) and
cide (Latin: killer)
 Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944)
UN Resolution 260- “On the Prevention and
Punishment of the Crime of Genocide”
A symbiotic partnership or an unequal relationship?
“The relationship between study of the Holocaust and study of
genocide warrants reflection, because it has been both negative and
positive, characterized variously by synergies, processes of selfdefinition by mutual exclusion, and occasional resentment.”
Dirk Moses, The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies
PLACING THE HOLOCAUST & GENOCIDE
Unique
 Paradigmatic
 Exemplar
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“Many scholars of other genocides still live under the sign
of uniqueness by contesting or just resenting it, or . . .
attempting to make ‘their’ genocides look exactly ‘like’ the
Holocaust in order to gain the attention or even basic
recognition that many of them still lack.” Donald Bloxham
“Comparative genocide studies was born into the
opposition to the dominant Holocaust discourse. . . an act
of revolt has largely informed the subsequent development
of the field and its unduly militant character.” Anton Weiss-Wendt
A CANON OF GENOCIDE?
Cambodia (1975-79)
Armenia (1915-18)
Holocaust (1939-45)
Rwanda (1994)
POINTS TO PONDER
Why is the term genocide so important?
Legal reasons
Symbolic reasons
Political reasons
Moral reasons
Does it need to be genocide to be important?
Ethnic cleansing
War crimes
Mass killing/atrocity
OTHER GENOCIDES?
“the CEH [Commission for Historical
Clarification] concludes that agents of
the state of Guatemala, within the
framework of counterinsurgency
operations carried out between 1981
and 1983, committed acts of
genocide against groups of Mayan
people.”
“When a child was forcibly removed that child’s
entire community lost, often permanently, its
chance to perpetuate itself in that child. The
Inquiry has concluded that this was a primary
objective of forcible removals and . . . amount to
genocide.”
Bringing them Home
POINTS OF FRACTURE OR DIFFERENCE?
(1) disciplinary and methodological orientation
(2) political activism and advocacy
(3) linguistic and definitional issues
(4) political ideology
A DISCIPLINARY FRACTURE?
Social Scientists vs. Historians
 Sample size (n)
 Theory versus practice
 The comparative approach
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“[the] discipline’s predominant social science-positivistic
orientation is frequently directed toward discerning commonalities
and general principles about the phenomenon of genocide, a bias
that is in keeping with a normative commitment to prevention.”
Alexander Hinton
“to rely on the insights afforded by just one genocide is to
parochialize genocide scholarship and condemn it to a corpus of
disconnected monographic studies.”
Henry Huttenbach
THE LIMITS OF SOCIAL SCIENCE?
“Sociology inherently has a difficult time dealing with
unique events such as Hiroshima, Vietnam, or the
Holocaust. It is a generalizing discipline, very
uncomfortable with the idiosyncratic, the singular, the
aberrational. Sociology must immediately place such an act
into a category, comparable to other similar events.
Sociologists are not only uncomfortable with uniqueness;
they are conceptually hostile to the exceptional, to nonconforming events. . . . In part this is because the
Holocaust also makes one confront moral issues, and
sociology is not comfortable with that either, being a
secular, non-moralizing science. For all these reasons,
there is little to date in Holocaust literature by sociologists.”
Sociologist Jack Nusan Porter
THE ACTIVIST’S DILEMMA
“Preventive intervention” is key
 Responsibility to Protect (R2P)
 Policy-centric versus history-centric
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“Scholars of genocide sometimes have the tendency to be
rather self-congratulatory, as if those who do not spend
their lives researching, writing about or actively trying to
prevent genocide are any less concerned about its
occurrence. In a similar sense, the field of Genocide
Studies itself suffers from a ‘scholar-activist divide’ that
sometimes spills over into unattractive internecine debates
about the ‘correct’ relationship between academic research
and political activism.”
Dan Stone
POINTS TO PONDER
Do definitions matter?
Do definitions matter with respect to genocide?
Do we have a definition of genocide?
Do we need others?
UN RESOLUTION 260 (9 DEC 1948)
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following
acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a
national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
 Killing members of the group;
 Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
 Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated
to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
 Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
 Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
WHAT’S IN A DEFINITION?
Mens rea and actus reus
 Intent versus effects?
 State versus non-state actors
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“Requiring proof of a deliberate plan [i.e., specific intent]
and individual culpability imposes strict limits on cases that
qualify as genocide . . . the strict legal analysis makes early
identification impossible and prevention a moot point.”
Sheri Rosenberg & Everita Silina
“There is no simple response to the problem of definitional
proliferation and its consequences, and it is unlikely that
scholars and activists will settle on a single definition.”
Joyce Apsel & Ernesto Verdeja
BROADENING THE DEFINITION?
“While recognizing that all definitions have
weaknesses, we might simply define genocide
as the more or less coordinated attempt to
destroy a dehumanized and excluded group of
because of who they are. . . . opening the door
to cultural genocide, genocide committed by
non-state agents, genocide by neglect, and
genocide of political, economic, social and other
groups as constituted in specific historical and
cultural contexts.”
Alexander Hinton
PREFIXING GENOCIDE?
Politicide (Barbara Harff)
 Gendercide (Adam Jones)
 Gynocide (Mary Daly)
 Democide (R.J. Rummel)
 Ethnocide (Helen Fein and Israel Charny)
 Indigenocide (Raymond Evans & Bill Thorpe)
 Structural genocide (Patrick Wolfe)
 Cultural genocide (Raphael Lemkin)
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THE ROLE OF POLITICAL IDEOLOGY?
The Holocaust & Israel
 Israel & Palestine
 The Nakba & the Shoah
 Genocide as a political tool?
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“[T]he metaphoric reference to the Holocaust exists within the
metaphoric system of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle, On both sides
of the conflict, thus Holocaust-related metaphors are used mainly as
a form or “voice,” aimed to convey the community’s suffering and its
justification for action.”
Ruth Linn
“. . . We should view Israel’s destruction of large parts of Arab society in 1948 not
simply through the perspective of settler-colonial genocide, but as an extension of
the exclusivist nationalism which had brought about extensive genocidal violence in
the European war . . .[this] included the development of an incipient genocidal
mentality towards Arab society.”
Sociologist Martin Shaw
A FORK IN THE ROAD OR A COMMON GOAL?