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Holocaust Studies Genocide Studies FOREVER IN THE SHADOW OF THE HOLOCAUST?: THE SHOAH & GENOCIDE STUDIES A SHARED HISTORY & SHARED FUTURE? 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 “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 “[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 “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 “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) THE ROLE OF POLITICAL IDEOLOGY? The Holocaust & Israel Israel & Palestine The Nakba & the Shoah Genocide as a political tool? “[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?