Concept Of Genocide Research Articles

Práctica genocida en España: discursos, lógicas y memoria (1936-1977)

The concept of genocide is practically unknown among the Spanish historiography, and this is causing errors and serious misunderstanding about its use. The hermeneutical and comparative potential of the concept is, however, unquestionable into the international academic field. This article aims both to contextualize the origin and development of the debates around the concept of genocide, and to show what the concept could add to the debate regarding to other concepts as cultural homogenization. Particularly, it is proposed the use of the concept of genocidal practice to the study of the Francoist violence, through the analysis of the discourses, the reasons and the memory of those facts.

GENOCIDE AND CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY: DISPELLING THE CONCEPTUAL FOG

AbstractGenocide and crimes against humanity are among the core crimes of international law, but they also carry great moral resonance due to their indissoluble link to the atrocities of the Nazi regime and to other egregious episodes of mass violence. However, the concepts of genocide and crimes against humanity are not well understood, even by the international lawyers and jurists who are most concerned with them. A conceptual fog hovers around the discussion of these two categories of crime. In this paper, I draw a number of distinctions aimed at clarifying the concepts. I distinguish three concepts of genocide, two legal and one moral, and two concepts of crimes against humanity, a legal and a moral one. I criticize the current legal concept of genocide and, using the idea of discrimination, propose a model for developing a more adequate legal concept and for better understanding the moral concept. I also criticize the moral concept of crimes against humanity, which many thinkers have conflated with the legal concept of such crimes.

The modernizing bias of human rights: stories of mass killings and genocide in Central America

This article analyses selected cases of mass killings and genocide during the civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala in the 1980s and the way in which the truth commissions in both countries reframed locally grounded narratives to fit the state-centred language of human rights. Redefining wrongdoings as human rights violations produces stories that communicate poorly with local worldviews because the ‘truths’ that human rights language proposes disregard local realities and transform local conflicts into a type of ‘modern’, nationwide struggles. Thus, while the concept of genocide might capture well the horrendous nature of a mass killing, it will also ethnify the conflict. Comparisons between local readings and human rights-based reinterpretations reveal a ‘modernizing’ or ‘Westernizing’ bias of international law; the article argues for more awareness about such effects in analysis as well as in policy-making.

Cultural genocide and indigenous peoples: a sociological approach

This contribution argues that the dominant understanding of genocide as mass killing is sociologically inadequate and at odds with the ideas of the author of the concept, Raphael Lemkin. To date sociological approaches to genocide have failed to appreciate the importance of culture and social death to the concept of genocide. There is insufficient serious discussion of culturally destructive processes, which do not involve direct physical killing or violence, through the analytical lens of genocide. This is especially true when it comes to the experiences of indigenous peoples in the world today. When they invoke the term genocide to describe their present day experiences it is often derided. In the second half of this contribution, however, I argue that indigenous peoples' use of the concept is often more accurate and precise than that espoused by many academics and call for more research into seemingly benign processes of indigenous ‘cultural diffusion’ but through the analytical lens of genocide.

Response to Paul Boghossian, ‘The concept of genocide’

Paul Boghossian is critical of both the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and the concept of genocide as such (the ‘such’ as defined by the Convention itself)....

Commentary on Paul Boghossian, ‘The concept of genocide’

At the outset, let me state that I wholeheartedly concur with Paul Boghossian's conclusion: it is unnecessary to use a single word to frame the debate about the persecution and destruction of the A...

Genocide and the rigor of philosophy: a comment on Paul Boghossian

Paul Boghossian has written a most thoughtful and provocative article about the concept of genocide. Virtually every scholar of the phenomenon knows that the definition of genocide that has come do...

The concept of genocide

The word ‘genocide’ gets a lot of use these days. When a large number of people are killed, it's not unusual for a debate to ensure about whether the event qualifies as genocide. Recently, the high...

Australia: a continuing genocide?

Debates about genocide in Australia have for the most part focussed on past frontier killings and child removal practices. This article, however, focuses on contemporary culturally destructive policies, and the colonial structures that produce them, through the analytical lens of the concept of genocide. The article begins with a discussion of the meaning of cultural genocide, locating the idea firmly in Lemkin's work before moving on to engage with the debates around Lemkin's distinction between genocide and cultural ‘diffusion.’ In contrast to those scholars who prefer the word ‘ethnocide,’ the underlying conceptual contention is that the term ‘cultural genocide’ simply describes a key method of genocide and should be viewed, without the need for qualification, as genocide. While direct physical killing and genocidal child removal practices may have ceased in Australia, some indigenous activists persuasively contend that genocide is a continuing process in an Australia that has failed to decolonise. Concurring with these views the article argues that the contemporary expression of continuing genocidal relations in Australia can be seen principally, and perversely, in the colonial state's official reconciliation process, native title land rights regime and the recent interventionist ‘solutions’ to indigenous ‘problems’ in the Northern Territory.

Understanding Ustaša violence

The Independent State of Croatia (1941–1945) was a multi-ethnic entity in which a range of political and military powers cooperated with and fought against one another. No less complicated were the ruling Ustaša movement and its relationship with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. The persecution of the Serbs, the Jews, and the Roma in the Independent State of Croatia was marked by differences and similarities, which were reflected the decision-making process within the Ustaša leadership. Over time, this mass violence (and Ustaša decisions) moderated due to a variety of factors: the interethnic civil war, victim reactions, local factors, and the harvest. The Italians and Germans, however, also played a role in the persecution of the Serbs, Jews, and Roma in Croatia. Simplifying narratives of the Ustaša as marginal collaborationists and state-centered concepts of genocide are inadequate when it comes to explaining Ustaša violence.

Bio-Normative Geopolitics: The US and the Darfur Crisis in Sudan

Building on the work of Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault, this paper explores the critical intersection between biopolitics and geopolitics. More specifically, an analysis is performed on the discourse that has been produced by the US executive with regard to the ongoing Darfur crisis. I interpret this discourse as part of a bio-normative geopolitical calculation aimed at maintaining the US claim on the valuation of global life without, however, committing many resources to actually protecting and securing this life within a meaningful political community. This investigation points particularly to the challenge that foreign humanitarian crises pose to the legitimacy of the United States' global hegemonic ambitions. I argue that the United States has responded to this challenge by presenting itself as a global moral hegemon whose role is primarily to judge rather than act with regard to the protection of foreign human life. As the named “genocide” in Darfur continues, the United States is also forcing a devaluation of the concept of genocide itself, thus initiating a fundamental recalibration of the relation between global ethics and geopolitics.

International Law and Human Plurality in the Shadow of Totalitarianism: Hannah Arendt and Raphael Lemkin

Hannah Arendt and Raphael Lemkin were witnesses to the twentieth-century. They both experienced the dislocating transformations on the European continent as a consequence of two world wars, lost their states as well as their homes in this process, narrowly escaped the clutches of the Nazi extermination machine, and made it to the New World through sheer luck and fortuitous circumstance. Their thought is marked by the cataclysms of the last century, and they have in turn emerged as indispensable interlocutors for all of us in understanding this past. Arendt and Lemkin were contemporaries and there are astonishing parallels in their early biographies. She was born in Hannover in 1906 (d. 1975) and grew up in Koenigsberg in East Prussia. After WWI, the Polish Corridor was created and cut East Prussia and Koengisberg off from the rest of Weimar. In 1945, Koenigsberg was occupied by the Soviets and renamed “Kaliningrad.” Lemkin was born in Bezwodene in 1900, then part of Tsarist Russia. Between the two World Wars (1918–1939) Bezwodene became part of Poland, and today is Bezvodna in Belarus. When Arendt was arrested by the Gestapo in the Spring of 1933 and was forced to flee to Paris via Prague with her mother, she had been carrying out research in the Prussian State Library at the request of Kurt Blumenfeld on anti-Semitic measures undertaken by Nazi nongovernmental organizations, business associations and professional clubs to exclude Jewish members. Her Zionist friend, Kurt Blumenfeld in turn, was preparing to present this material at the 18th Zionist Congress. During those very same years, Ralph Lemkin was a young clerk in the Polish State Prosecutor’s office who had been collecting documents on Nazi war legislation, particularly those affecting cultural, linguistic, religious activities and artifacts of cultural and religious groups. In 1933, he had sent a paper to a League of Nations conference in Madrid, in which he proposed that “the crimes of barbarity and vandalism be considered as new offences against the law of nations.”1 In 1939, he fled from Poland and reached Stockholm, where he continued to do extensive research on Nazi occupation laws throughout Europe. On April 18, 1941, he arrived in the United States via Japan. That very same year, Arendt and her second husband, Heinrich Bluecher, arrived in New York via Portugal. Yet in contrast to Arendt, who acquired world-wide fame after her arrival in the USA with her many works and university appointments, Lemkin, after the general acclaim he received with the passage of the Genocide Convention by the United Nations in 1948, fell into obscurity and died a lonely death, destitute and neglected in New York in 1959. It is certainly fascinating to speculate whether these Jewish refugees, who were caught up in the great dislocations of their time, ever met one another in some location or association in the United States. We just don’t know. What is even more astonishing is the lack of any discussion in Hannah Arendt’s work of Lemkin’s great book on the concept of genocide,2 nor any evidence that Lemkin knew Arendt’s work on totalitarianism, which certainly was the most powerful historical documentation and philosophical analysis in the early 1950s of the unprecedentedly murderous character of the Nazi regime. Arendt and Lemkin appear to

Raphael Lemkin et le concept de génocide

Raphael Lemkin and the concept of genocide“Genocide” is a word coined in 1943 to describe what Winston Churchill famously called a “crime without a name”. Its emergence and reception is historically specific to the last years of the World War. The often contested term “genocide” was created by Raphael Lemkin on the basis of his personal and intellectual experiences in the Holocaust and his flight from Warsaw where he served as State Prosecutor until 1939. Consequently he meant the term to bridge both the murder of European Jewry and the destruction of the Polish nation. His influential book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944), where the word first appeared, describes the events of 1933-1943, and reveals how Lemkin’s attempt to find “one generic concept” to legally criminalize mass murder derived from the events of those years proved difficult to generalize later. This article also explains why the United States government feared ratifying the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Crime of Genocide because of its use in American racial politics during the Cold War.

The Collective Dynamics of Racial Dehumanization and Genocidal Victimization in Darfur

Sociologists empirically and theoretically neglect genocide. In this article, our critical collective framing perspective begins by focusing on state origins of race-based ideology in the mobilization and dehumanization leading to genocide. We elaborate this transformative dynamic by identifying racially driven macro-micro-macro-level processes that are theoretically underdeveloped and contested in many settings. We investigate generic processes by exploiting an unprecedented survey of refugees from the ongoing genocide in Darfur. Our focus is on the Sudanese government's crisis framing of a dehumanizing collective process. Sudanese forces joined with Janjaweed militia to attack black African settlements. They aggregated and concentrated racial epithets in a collective process of dehumanization and organized terror, which amplified the severity of genocidal victimization, the lethal and lasting scar of the genocidal state. Our findings question primordial and counter-insurgency explanations, while supporting aspects of the instrumental, population-resource, constructionist, and cognitive perspectives that form the foundation of our critical collective framing perspective. It has been more than 50 years since Sutherland famously added white-collar crime to public sociology, radically reordering discourse about crime. It is time to do the same with Raphael Lemkin's concept of genocide.

The Liberation Imperative of Black Genocide: Blueprints from the African Diaspora in the Americas

In this article I analyze the theoretical and practical outcomes of the alliances between Black activists in South Central Los Angeles and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, organizing against the effects of white supremacy—police abuse and housing segregation among them. I develop an argument that locates state- and society-sanctioned manifestations of anti-Black genocide and posits the imperative of radical analysis, action, and liberation. To do so, I first describe the conditions under which the encounter between Black Brazilian and U.S. activists took place in 1993. Second, I draw on concepts of genocide developed by the Civil Rights Congress in the early 1950s, and by contemporary activist-intellectuals in the U.S. and Brazil. Third, I explore the applicability and the theoretical and practical importance of the concept of genocide for ongoing Black struggles. Finally, I reflect on the possibilities for liberation, and explain why, given the ubiquity and persistence of anti-Black genocide, liberation is a necessity we cannot afford not to fight for. Genocide creates the imperative of radical transformation and leaves us with no choice but to destroy the social conditions that generate it.

Génocide. Origines, enjeux et usages d'un concept

Genocide. Origins, Challenges, and Applications of the Concept After a long period of intellectual formation, the concept of genocide was introduced by Raphael Lemkin in 1944. It suffers, however, from the vagueness of the official definition established by the UN Convention in 1948. That is why this category of crime has been instrumentalized by widely different groups trying to be acknowledged as historical victims, whether these rights were real or not. Despite increasing controversy about problems of collective memory, the field of «genocide studies» has proven to be especially dynamic since the 1990s. The notion of «genocidal process» has become a focus of attention that allows the combination of anthropological, sociological and historical approaches. The question about the relation between genocide and war, which has become increasingly significant for historians, permits the conclusion that the First World War and the «minority question» led to a new sense of justice regarding «crimes against humanities». Although it may seem that Lemkin was influenced by the tragic fate of the Armenian and Jewish peoples, it is nonetheless necessary to discuss the genocidal character of other events, like colonial massacres, Stalinist policy, or ethnic cleansing.

To ask other questions: reply to Alex Hinton, Henry Huttenbach and Patrick Wolfe

In my article “Extremely violence societies: an alternative to the concept of genocide” in Vol 8, No 4 of this journal, I offered a new approach to analysing the origins of mass violence. I suggest...

Darfur and the Politicization of International Law: Genocide or Crimes against Humanity?

The humanitarian crisis in Darfur has slowly captivated international public, governmental, and media attention. With at least two million persons displaced and an estimated 400,000 killed,1 it is one of the many grave crises of failed states currently occurring within Africa. The people of the region have faced murder, displacement, rape, and banditry at the hands of the Sudanese government, the state-supported Janjaweed, and other militia groups, most notably the Sudan Liberation Army. Yet the United Nations concluded after a fact-finding mission to the region that these widespread atrocities did not constitute genocide but rather were defined as crimes against humanity. This article provides a brief overview of the background and contemporary state of the situation as well as a legal examination of the nature of genocide in international law and the United Nation Security Council's rationale for applying the label of crimes against humanity. The chief purpose of the article is to clearly differentiate the two concepts of genocide and crimes against humanity and to thoroughly examine the practical difference a definition makes.

A Commentary on David Scheffer's Concepts of Genocide and Atrocity Crimes

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Extremely violent societies: an alternative to the concept of genocide

The past 15 years have seen an avalanche of research about mass violence and “genocide.” This is not only true for the three topics which will play a role in this article: Nazi Germany, the Soviet ...