Genocide Studies Scholarship and its Failure to Solve the “Two Cultures” Problem

Abstract

Herb Hirsch repeatedly insisted that genocide studies ought to be about high-quality social scientific scholarship that raises the alarm about emerging cases of group destruction and successfully presses political leaders and state bureaucracies to fashion informed and workable plans to prevent and stop genocides and other human rights abuses. In this retrospective, I explore Hirsch’s view that genocide studies scholarship is overly abstract, prone to recycling theories and cases, and is serially unable to influence government policy, or more specifically, American policy. At the heart of Hirsch’s critique was his strong belief that scholars must “profess” so that the gulf between the “two cultures” of the academic and the policy worlds can be bridged in the service of confronting and stopping genocides and other human rights abuses around the world. I conclude that the “two cultures” problem cannot be “solved” since academics are neither policy-makers nor journalists, and that there is (and ought to be) room in genocide studies and the social sciences generally for theoretically grounded problem-driven research from a multiplicity of theoretical and methodological approaches.