Genocidal Violence Research Articles

Netanyahu's Bloody Endgame Seeks a Future Israel with a Minimum Palestinian Presence

In the face of mounting global criticism, Israel is stepping up its military offensive in Lebanon, continuing its genocidal violence against the Palestinians and even intensifying its attacks on the Houthis in Yemen. Israel in the year since the Hamas-led attacks on October 7 has insisted that it is motivated only by anti-terrorist and self-defense goals in its original pledge to exterminate Hamas, and more recently expanded by the commitment to destroy Hezbollah as a credible adversary and possibly occupy a buffer zone in southern Lebanon, and in the process weaken its most feared adversary, Iran.

The European Muslim Crisis and the Post-October 7 Escalation

Israel’s war on Gaza following 7 October 2023 has given birth to several political and social changes in European nations. According to the United Nations Report of the Special Rapporteur, Israel has used this moment to “distort” international humanitarian law principles “in an attempt to legitimize genocidal violence against the Palestinian people.” In the European context, this has led to European Muslims and non-Muslims, including organizations, institutions, as well as individual academics, politicians, and activists mobilizing and voicing their condemnation and demand their governments to do more towards peaceful and equitable solutions. However, this has been met with a strong reaction from European governing bodies. This paper situates this reaction within wider discourses on the European Muslim crisis. It begins with a systematic literature review on the so-called European Muslim crisis, followed by case studies on the United Kingdom and Germany on their respective changes to policies impacting Muslims in the post-October 7 contexa Regarding the literature review, this paper illustrates how this concept has three distinct, yet intersecting meanings: the crisis of European identity; the crisis of foundational ideologies of Europe; and an internal Muslim crisis that often leads to radicalization. Through the British and German case studies, this paper illustrates that October 7 has reinforced and strengthened the shift towards values-based citizenship and integration. This paper argues that through branding pro-Palestine protesters and organizations as extremists in the British context, and adding questions related to antisemitism and Israel in the citizenship tests in the German context, the Israel/Palestine issue has now become yet another yardstick to demarcate the European, civilized “us” vs. the Muslim “other.” In doing so, October 7 has escalated elements already present within the wider discourses of the European Muslim crisis.

How Radio Affects Violent Conflict: New Evidence from Rwanda

Researchers have long debated how radio broadcasts affected the dynamics of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, with some arguing that the radio was highly consequential, and others suggesting such effects have been overstated. This article contributes to these debates—as well as to debates regarding the role of old and new media in collective action—by examining whether and how Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (Radio RTLM) coverage was associated with two core aspects of the violence: (1) subnational onset of genocidal violence and (2) participation in genocidal violence across subnational spaces. Drawing on new data on Radio RTLM coverage, we find that areas with coverage were more likely to experience immediate onset of violence. However, our analysis of participation in the genocide—which uses more accurate measures of participation and of radio coverage than prior studies—finds no significant association between Radio RTLM coverage and subnational levels of participation. After illustrating that these results are robust to numerous model specifications, we theorize that information broadcast over the radio’s airways contributed to the creation of a critical mass that initiated genocide in localized spaces. We conclude by considering the importance of understanding the role of media in the subnational onset of violence.

BYSTANDERS, JEWS, AND HISTORICAL INTERPRETATION

ABSTRACTThis article revisits the vast historiography on everyday life in Vichy France to address the moral questions and historical claims implicit in the bystander category. It addresses how historians conceive the relationship between bystanders and Jews, arguing that they implicitly erase the structural violence between the two groups by reproducing the liberal ethics implicit in the slogan “never again” in their own method—and in spite of their commitment to a boundary between history and memory. Drawing on the insights of postcolonial and political theory, it suggests that the category, if rethought, might account for popular complicity in genocidal violence.

Introduction

This introduction aims to frame the texts it predates, to highlight their common theoretical and thematic concerns, and to set them against what we envision as a relevant common backdrop for the issues they raise. To this end, we begin from how insufficient acknowledgement of the current genocidal violence carried out against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank by Western feminism is symptomatic of its enmeshment with colonial rationales and imperialist violence. We question the extent of its liberating and emancipatory politics, reading them against the semiperipheral iterations of what Adam Tooze describes as the “polycrisis.” Focused on the gendered aspects of democratic backsliding - broadly understood as a weakening of faith in liberal democracy and the electoral invigoration of the far-right -, the articles included here trace cultural negotiations of gender justice, as it wanes or strengthens across the region. Variously located within broader networks of transnational transfers and global concerns, the articles included here complement relevant work conducted outside the bounds of academic writing. We gesture towards such feminist, anticolonial and antiracist movements which have emerged in Romania, specifically in the literary field, and to their contestation of the patriarchal and deeply unequal national cultural system.

Avoiding an emotions-action gap? The EU and genocide designations

ABSTRACT Genocide is one of the most heinous crimes perpetrated against humans. Violation of the norm against genocide should thus spark a robust response. Yet naming genocide is a highly contentious act, and the European Union and most of its member states have been cautious about using the term to describe atrocities. This article explores how the emotional resonance of the term ‘genocide’ inhibits its use by the EU, which in turn has implications for the EU’s response to purported genocidal violence. By not using the term, the EU avoids creating an emotions-action gap, as its actions are better aligned with the emotions it expresses through its rhetoric. But in so doing, the EU may also underestimate the potential for genocide and fail to take action to prevent it. In this way, emotions play a constraining role in the EU’s response to purported violations of the norm against genocide.

Revolutionary Enclosures (Until the Apricots)

Jasbir K. Puar and Dima Srouji build upon their respective work in architecture, visual art and decolonial theory to produce a collaborative examination of colonial pathologies for Sharjah Art Biennial 15, 2023. Srouji’s architecture and art practice encompass a variety of mediums that allow her to explore notions of heritage and public space in Palestine and the region. Puar is a writer and scholar whose current work focuses on settler colonial violence, disability and debility in Palestine. Their collaborative installations integrate understandings of space and planning with the contemporary politics of resistance in the context of Palestine and the surrounding region. At Sharjah Art Biennial 15, Puar and Srouji present ‘Revolutionary Enclosures (Until the Apricots)’ (2023), a series of household items that respond to the material conditions of lockdown, interweaving the artists’ experiences of COVID-19 quarantine in Palestine and their memories of the Second Intifada (2000–2005), a major Palestinian uprising against Israel. The project reframes everyday objects emblematic of the trauma of enclosure for Palestinians as transformative matter and reservoirs of affective practices of resilience, community and caregiving: hoarded cans of tuna form the constituent parts of a radiator signifying warmth; resin apricots evoke the exchange of sustenance among neighbours; shrapnel becomes decorative wallpaper motifs; a stairwell used as shelter from air raids transforms into a communal reading space. Exploring the collective rhythms and materialities of these conditions, Srouji and Puar conjure the everyday making and remaking of the commons through and against the constraints of siege and containment. The conversation published here took place between March and September 2023, and thus predates the latest phase in the catastrophic violence that has historically defined Israel’s relationship to Palestine and the Palestinians. Triggered by an unprecedented and shocking attack by Hamas on 7 October, Israel’s genocidal military campaign in Gaza is not an anomaly, but in line with and part and parcel of the systematic ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians and the Apartheid system that the settler colonial state of Israel has relied on for its sustenance since 1948. The questions asked here by Maasri and Toukan, as well as the artworks discussed by Jasbir and Srouji, probe aspects of this very condition that has brought us to the unabashed genocidal violence we are now all witness to today.

Resisting an unfolding genocide: reflections from radical struggles in the Global South

ABSTRACT This essay theorizes radical struggles at the world’s end, emergent from registers of organizing against colonial–imperial–capitalist violence in the Global South. Working through the ongoing genocidal violence carried out by Israel in Gaza, I explore the role of voice infrastructures in the Global South as the spaces where Global South theories are imagined, tested, and continually transformed. The tenets of the culture-centered approach (CCA), reflected in the everyday organizing work of the Center for Culture-centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE), guide the conceptualization of the relationship between theorizing and struggle as embodied practice. For radical organizing to materialize at the world’s end, I argue the urgency of reorganizing the relationship between struggles and theorizing, cultivating a rhetoric and politics of suspicion, enacting sovereignty, forging connections, and sustaining a politics of preparation.

Antisemitism and Zionism: The Internal Operations of the IHRA Definition

In this paper, I focus on the cultural and political work the IHRA definition of antisemitism carries out to explain why it has been adopted by hundreds of actors. I offer three key reasons to explain its effectiveness: First, it operates on an affective level, interpolating people who identify as Jews to also identify with Israel and Zionism; Second, it ties the right to Jewish difference with a Jewish State and Jewish sovereignty; Third, the definition provides a defence of a regime I call ‘democratic apartheid’. The analysis reveals that the IHRA definition of antisemitism serves as a counterinsurgency tool aimed at shielding Israel from resistance to its oppressive form of racial governance and, following its recent war on Gaza, from accusations of genocidal violence.

Gaza in plain sight: witnessing in solidarity

In this visual essay, Mazen Kerbaj and Jana Traboulsi bear witness to the genocidal violence that has been unfolding in Gaza since 7 October 2023. From Berlin and Lebanon, respectively, Kerbaj and Traboulsi have been chronicling and responding to the harrowing day-to-day news and testimonies from Gaza. Their drawings raise fundamental questions about what it is to bear witness to genocide as it unfolds, about the politics of seeing as an act of solidarity against imposed invisibility and about racialized sight – the eye that refuses to see what is hiding in plain sight.

The Czech Republic: Human Rights Defender, Yet No R2P Champion

ABSTRACT The Czech Republic has a strong tradition of promoting human rights; starting in the 1990s it established itself as an active human rights defender, particularly in relation to priority countries such as North Korea, Belarus, Burma/Myanmar, and Cuba. Human rights and their advancement are significant focal points in Czech foreign policy, both bilaterally and within multilateral organizations like the UN Human Rights Council and the Council of Europe with its Venice Commission. It is therefore interesting to examine the Czech position towards the responsibility to protect (R2P) and whether relevant policymakers actively promote R2P norms. Does the Czech Republic rank among R2P champions, which include small states like Costa Rica, Ghana, Rwanda, Denmark, and Slovenia? While the R2P concept may be considered a complement to traditional human rights norms, I argue that a narrow and selective human rights agenda clearly takes precedence among the Czech political elites. This was evident in the Czech response to the crisis in Myanmar. In 2017, despite international calls for a stronger response to the ongoing genocidal violence against the Rohingya, Czech foreign policy focused on the positive prospects of the democratization process and its policy of human rights promotion.

Silence, the Unsaid and the Unsayable in Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins

ABSTRACT The primary aim of this article is to think through how silence can be considered as generating meaning in literary prose. For this purpose, the article focuses on Zimbabwean author Yvonne Vera’s last novel, The Stone Virgins (2002a), which has often been described as ‘breaking the silence’ about the genocidal violence remembered as Gukurahundi. As a secondary aim, the article sets out to rethink Vera’s idea and argues that rather than ‘breaking’ the silence, her novel explores different forms of silence, some of which are necessary for healing and regeneration. However, silence is not just a theme or motif in the novel: Vera also uses silence in her own writing to generate new meaning. Using an essay by Elleke Boehmer as a point of departure, this article proposes a conceptualisation of silence through two terms: the unsayable and the unsaid, where the former refers to meaning that is suppressed and the latter to that which has not yet been said. It argues that the novel presents a poetics that aligns with its theme of meaning, generative silence, which uses opaque and imprecise syntax and referentiality in a way that maximises the possibility of the unsaid to be said.

From the Truth Commission Report to the Stage and the Museum: The Artistic Dislocation of Violence from the Ecuadorian Chapter of 1983 to 2008

Are commemorative plaques enough to collectively and symbolically amend the horror of human rights violations? And if not, why is this strategy still the most common way for governments to pay their due respects to the families of the victims? This paper analyzes the suitability of the arts to address the reparation of the victims of human rights-related crimes perpetrated in Ecuador between 1983 and 2008, as investigated by the ad-hoc Truth Commission installed there afterwards. National and constitutional law, as well as international jurisprudence, will help to illuminate this study objective. Furthermore, in order to unpack the collective and individual dimensions of the right to memory of the victims, their families and their broader social fabric in which they are embedded, the notion of ‘memory sites’ is incorporated into the analysis. To contribute to the establishment of interconnections between the law and the arts, several initiatives for the recovery of memory in Ecuador are reviewed, from a critical stance. In this vein, the text foregrounds a centralizing proposal to consolidate an Ecuadorian aesthetics of memory, through institutionalization and museography, to address the governmental duty for reparations; but more importantly, to finally permeate the consciousness of an entire country whose past is still waiting to be incorporated into its present. By intertwining the legal, the artistic and the political layers present in this discussion, we advance in the direction of an aesthetics of memory that challenges the dominant narratives of genocidal violence.

The Wehrmacht’s Complicity in Late-War Genocide: The Palmnicken Massacre and the Military in East Prussia, 1944–1945

Abstract By examining the death marches from Stutthof’s East Prussian subcamps in January 1945 and the following “Palmnicken Massacre,” this article retraces the role of the Wehrmacht in late-war genocidal violence. Scholars have established the complicity of Wehrmacht soldiers in acts of genocide during their stay on the Eastern Front, and documented the racist mindset that underpinned their behavior. Yet no such research exists on the final year of the war. From Summer 1944 until May 1945, the Wehrmacht’s main task was to defend its home soil. Scholarship has thus focused more on the military’s defense of Germany rather than their willingness to support the regime’s genocidal demands. This article argues that many Wehrmacht commanders were fully aware of the genocide perpetrated in their midst during the war’s final months, and when called upon, different Wehrmacht commanders actively assisted the SS in carrying out the regime’s racist mission even at the very end of the war. Finally, the author reveals how the military attempted to conceal these acts of violence throughout the postwar years.

Low Tide, Black Shoals: Toward Offshore Formations in Celan Studies

While Paul Celan’s lyrical commemoration of the Holocaust has been recognized for its multidirectionality, commentators have not acknowledged his engagement with other colonial and imperial histories contemporaneous with his writing. Celan’s advocacy for reading words “with the acute accent of the present” calls for a reading of his poetry that is attentive to its evocations of, and silence around, multiple histories of racial violence. Recognizing how the longue durée of transatlantic slavery is mediated through oceanic archives and the element of water, this article reads the fraught nearshore landscapes in Sprachgitter for their commemoration of the unresolved unfolding of Auschwitz and, if inadvertently, the unresolved unfolding of the Middle Passage. The reading focuses on “Niedrigwasser,” a poem ostensibly about a coastal landscape that is also about the formation and deformation of that landscape through ecological processes that used materials transported by genocidal violence. The multiple temporalities of the poem move between human time and geologic time in order to grasp the legacy of Auschwitz. In unsettling attempts to contain the spatial and temporal scale of genocide, this and other poems evidence their receptivity to and implicatedness in distant, but not entirely unrelated, histories of violence.

Relocating Yiddish voices: Narrative disfigurement and the “almost-lost” story in Edgar Hilsenrath’s holocaust novel Jossel Wassermanns Heimkehr

My contribution to this special issue investigates how Holocaust survivor and German-Jewish author Edgar Hilsenrath’s 1993 novel Jossel Wassermanns Heimkehr (“Jossel Wassermann’s Homecoming”) adopts a narrative practice of voicing Yiddish-speaking Holocaust victims in a post-Holocaust context for the purpose of imagining fictional alternatives to the historical violence inflicted upon them. Using a narrative strategy that I term the “almost-lost” story, Hilsenrath creates a narrative universe in which Yiddish voices, if not the actual Yiddish speakers, can be collected and saved as “anti-data” by disembodied “Quasselstimmen” (German for “chatty voices”). Coupled with strategic narrative interruptions that surface through iterations of narrative disfigurement, Hilsenrath gives rise to narrative possibilities for Jewish resistance within the scope of a literary text. I demonstrate how attentive readers can identify through Hilsenrath’s highly complex narrative a signature for reconsidering the confluence of imaginative fiction and Holocaust history, emphasizing the reader’s ethical dilemma in encountering this history, while also considering how fiction can point us in new directions as we endeavor to pry open and better understand the full scope of atrocities committed against humanity in search for a renewed commitment to humanity and justice in the aftermath of genocidal violence.

The travelling art installation Prijedor ‘92: transnational memorialisation and the 1.5 generation

ABSTRACTThis article addresses the travelling monument Prijedor ‘92 dedicated to all civilian victims of genocidal violence in Prijedor, Bosnia–Herzegovina. The young Vienna-based artist Anita Zečić developed this project with the aim of raising awareness about the local authorities’ obstruction of memorials for civilian victims in her hometown. The artist suggests an alternative way to advance this goal by using an art installation that travels in transnational space to make the past crimes and the local efforts against continued human rights violations widely known. The article analyses this project with a dual focus. It explores the use of this public art intervention for transnational memorialisation and delves into the artist’s motivation for engaging with these memories. The article argues that reflecting upon her story provides a perspective on the significant experience of the 1.5 generation and its role in dealing with the past in transnational and diasporic space.

Lost in Translation? Agency and Incommensurability in the Transnational Travelling of Discourses of Sexualized Harm

This article argues for incommensurability, incoherence, and difference as the grounds through which to think about sexualized harm and its redress. It seeks to remove the “me” from the “too”, and to instead consider the structures of white supremacy and neocolonial power that have facilitated white Western feminists’ ability to participate in shaping a hegemonic discourse of sexualized harm and its transnational travelling. The article traces the author’s personal genealogy of rights work in the context of shifts in international jurisprudence in relation to wartime sexualized violence. It looks back and reflects on an eight-year feminist participatory action research project that accompanied 54 Mayan women protagonists who survived a multiplicity of harm, including sexual violence, during Guatemala’s 36-year genocidal war. The project documented the protagonists’ engagement with transitional justice mechanisms, including a paradigmatic court case and a national reparations program, as part of their struggles for redress. The concept of “protagonism” is used to understand agency in the aftermath of genocidal violence as relational, co-constructed, and imbued with power. The meaning of sexualized harm is always “in-translation” between Western and Mayan onto-epistemological positionings, as Mayan women seek to suture land-body-territory in their multifaceted strategies for redress that engage but always exceed rights regimes.

Sorry for what? Asking the right questions about the Bangladeshi liberation war and Pakistan's military operation in 1971

AbstractThree aspects of the historical memory of 1971 remain highly contentious. The first concerns the (il)legitimacy of the military operation and the description of Bengali resistance against it as ‘national liberation’. The second centres on the accusation of the Pakistani military's genocidal violence, the use of rape as a weapon, and the counter-allegation of a Bihari genocide. The third focuses on the way forward: whether this should be by forgetting the past or seeking an apology for war crimes.This article will focus on all three aspects of the debate about the violent events of the 1971 war. Instead of writing a history of 1971 as such, I will propose a methodological framework for writing a history of the war: that of asking the right kind of questions. I invoke this method not for a correct answer, or even a different kind of history, but mainly for its interruptive power to sabotage the dominant discourse, force a moment of introspection, and open up a reflective space for the possibility of reparative justice through an intimate historical narrativisation.

Genocide by Other Means: Heritage Destruction, National Narratives, and the Azeri Assault on the Indigenous Armenians of Karabakh

The propaganda efforts of the authoritarian Aliyev regime in Baku and the general Western ignorance of the history of the South Caucasus have contributed to the lack of meaningful response to the genocidal aggression that Azerbaijan has inflicted on the indigenous Armenians of Artsakh, known to many as Nagorno-Karabakh. The humanitarian crisis created by the Azeri blockade of the Lachin Corridor is only the most recent step in a process of cleansing the region of its Armenian population, a process that began in the early years of the twentieth century. The Ottoman Turkish genocide of Armenians in 1915–1923 is not a distinct event of the past but a process whose ideology is central to the Azeri-Turkish genocidal violence perpetrated against Armenians in the present. An integral component of the processes of genocide is cultural heritage destruction as noted by Raphael Lemkin. The erasure of most signs of the indigenous Armenian presence on its historic homeland was particularly pronounced in the decades following the Armenian Genocide and continues today. Cultural erasure went hand in hand with Turkish state genocide denial and the rewriting and mythologizing of its national narrative. Azerbaijan has been following a similar playbook since the collapse of the Soviet Union. These genocidal processes of denial, heritage destruction, and the rewriting of history are what I describe as “genocide by other means.”