Genocide Studies Research Articles

Motion to File Brief Amicus Curiae (with Brief in Support & Amicus Brief) Filed in Yale University v. Konowaloff, 09-466 [United Stated District Court (Connecticut)], of the University of North Dakota Center for Human Rights and Genocide Studies, Michael Berenbaum, Christian Defrancia, Edward M. Gaffney, Jr., Gregory S. Gordon, Michael J. Kelly, Jordan J. Paust, Pammela A. Saunders, Krista Sigler,

The brief was filed in a case failed by Yale University to preempt demands for restitution of The Night Cafe by Van Gogh by Pierre Konowaloff, whose family's property was confiscated by Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution on Lenin's orders in 1918. The Russian Revolution and rise to power of Josef Stalin resulted in the deaths of over 20 million people. Cold War politics and subsequent diplomacy never allowed for resolution of the vast majority of claims to confiscated property. The museum received the painting as a bequest in 1961. The deeply researched amicus brief counsels the court to analyze the legal defenses of the Act of State doctrine and New York time-bar principles in light of true historical context, rather than knee-jerk, broad assumptions about historical events.

Brief Amicus Curiae Filed in Konowaloff v. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 10-Cv-9126 (United Stated District Court Southern District of New York), of the Center for Human Rights and Genocide Studies, Michael Berenbaum, Christian Defrancia, Edward M. Gaffney, Jr., Gregory S. Gordon, Michael J. Kelly, Jordan J. Paust, Pammela A. Saunders, Krista Sigler, Ronald G. Suny, and Fritz Wienschenk, in

Brief Amicus Curiae Filed in Konowaloff v. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The brief was filed in a case seeking restitution on behalf of Pierre Konowaloff, whose family's property was confiscated by Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution on Lenin's orders in 1918. The Russian Revolution and rise to power of Josef Stalin resulted in the deaths of over 20 million people. Cold War politics and subsequent diplomacy never allowed for resolution of the vast majority of claims to confiscated property. The painting at issue is Portrait of Madame Cezanne by Paul Cezanne, in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The museum received the painting as a bequest in 1960. The painting today is valued at $50 million to $70 million, but some believe it would fetch $100 million if it came to market today. The deeply researched amicus brief counsels the court to analyze the legal defenses of the Act of State doctrine and New York time-bar principles in light of true historical context, rather than knee-jerk, broad assumptions about historical events.

Intervening in Settler Colonial Genocide: Restoring Métis Buffalo Kinship Memory in Amanda Strong's Four Faces of the Moon

Intervening in Settler Colonial GenocideRestoring Métis Buffalo Kinship Memory in Amanda Strong's Four Faces of the Moon Brenda Vellino (bio) The Buffalo (Paskwâw Mostos/Mashkode Bizhiki) sustained our ancestors for 20,000 years or more. … Their genocide coincided with our own. Their lands were stolen at the same time ours were. … I dream of seeing 60,000 buffalo roaming free again across Turtle Island. … We are so deeply connected to this nation; we have stories and ceremonies with and about them. They taught us medicines. We dream of them still. —Christi Belcourt, "The Buffalo Will Always Be Our Education" Michif artist Amanda Strong's stop-motion animation film, Four Faces of the Moon, makes a vital contribution to conversations on the reemergence of buffalo kinship teachings evoked in the Plains Cree and Métis-centered scholarship and art practices of Tasha Hubbard and Christi Belcourt. As Hubbard explains, revitalization of buffalo kinship teachings seen in contemporary Indigenous literatures and multimedia art practices works in tandem with the actual restoration of buffalo herds in the prairie grasslands and intergenerational Indigenous resurgence ("'The Buffaloes Are Gone' or 'Return: Buffalo'?" 76). Métis artist Christi Belcourt's luminescent buffalo paintings further honor the integral place of reanimated buffalo kinship teachings for contemporary Indigenous peoples.1 Belcourt foregrounds the cultural, spiritual, and ecological significance of the buffalo for the Métis peoples of Lac St. Anne: "We have songs for the buffalo, as well as buffalo ceremonies. They hold the doorway in our sacred lodges. We tell creation stories of them. Our lives were lived on the land with buffalo and entirely attuned to the rhythms of that shared earth. We travelled freely, as they did. My ancestors survived, and I am alive today, because of them." ("A Letter" 10) [End Page 149] Like Belcourt, Amanda Strong's visual storywork honors the deep kinship connections of her Métis and buffalo ancestors. Her visual storywork further contributes to the renewal of broadly conceived relational ethics taught through the Cree concept of Wahkohtowin, called for in the work of Métis scholar Jennifer Adese ("Spirit Gifting" 50, 53). In Four Faces of the Moon through the device of time travel, Amanda Strong's protagonist-avatar, Spotted Fawn, journeys back across six generations of her ancestors' lived history to renew intergenerational Michif cultural, spiritual, linguistic, and ecological memory. The film's dedication introduces the first narrative voice: "I am Gidagakoons (Spotted Fawn)." This thus refers to the young adult protagonist of the film as Spotted Fawn, who manifests in both deer and human form in the first two sequences of the film. Gidagakoons simultaneously refers to the Indigenous name Strong has been gifted with, the name of her production studio, and the name of her character avatar within Four Faces. Further, Spotted Fawn's shapeshifting capacity between deer and human forms points to Michif teachings on reciprocal human-animal kinship (Adese, "Spirit Gifting" 53). Though I strategically foregrounded Michif resurgence in my opening, Strong's central interventions in Four Faces are twofold. Through Spotted Fawn's journey into her ancestral story, Strong initiates a difficult reckoning with intersecting buffalo and starvation genocides experienced by Plains Indigenous peoples, revealing complex layers of settler colonial genocide (Hubbard, "Buffalo Genocide"; Daschuk, Starblanket, Palmeter). In concert with Tasha Hubbard's work on buffalo genocide, Strong contributes to the turn toward decolonial genocide studies that calls for more comprehensive engagement with the process of protracted settler colonial genocide. For Hubbard and Strong, this includes attention to the intersecting fates of more-than-human kin and Indigenous peoples. Strong counterbalances reckoning with genocidal losses and impacts by calling forth intergenerational Michif resurgence through collaborative, multimedia, handmade art practices that revitalize buffalo kinship memory. Doing so imaginatively reclaims place-based, cultural-spiritual-ecological-material Michif sovereignty in the Prairie grasslands. Strong's buffalo kinship memorywork in Four Faces of the Moon further resonates with the repatriation work of Plains Indigenous peoples like Leroy Little Bear (Blackfoot) who have instigated the process of bringing back wild buffalo herds to the prairie grasslands, as signified by an intranational Buffalo Treaty signed in 2014 and 2015.2 [End Page 150] As M...

‘ein Holocaust, aber eben nicht meiner’: The Armenian Genocide in the Works of Edgar Hilsenrath

My focus is on Edgar Hilsenrath's lifelong preoccupation with the Armenian genocide, with particular reference to Das Märchen vom letzten Gedanken (1989). I draw for the first time on archival papers from Hilsenrath's archive to trace the novel's genesis and identify its extensive sources. I explore how Hilsenrath interprets historical acts of racial persecution via comparison. This underpins the parallels between the Armenian experience and Jewish experience under the National Socialists and influences the textual strategies he deploys. I argue that Hilsenrath is ahead of historiographical research in the late 1980s and anticipates comparative genocide studies of subsequent decades.

Text mining and semantic triples: Spatial analyses of text in applied humanitarian forensic research

The methods and tools of Geographic Information Sciences (GIScience)—spatial analysis, spatial statistics, and geographic information technologies—are increasingly being used in forensic humanitarian projects. In this article we explore ways to parse and analyze social and media releases from the United States Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) to gain an understanding of the death of migrants at the Texas-Mexico border. The methods we used include corpus linguistic (CL)/natural language processing (NLP) and Qualitative Spatial Representation (QSR) and Semantic Triples (ST). Our results indicate that CL/NLP and QSR/ST have the potential to increase and improve deceased migrant case identification by providing a framework for searching for key terms or themes throughout multiple textual sources. In the specific case examined, however, CL/NLP showed that CBP social media focused on drug confiscation and general patrolling activities and were of limited use for tabulating incidences of migrant death. On the other hand, QSR/ST visualizations showed which CBP Stations most frequently reported deceased migrant recoveries (i.e., search and collection of human remains) and with whom they collaborated.We believe these methods are part of the methodological toolkit needed to lay the ground for what we call Humanitarian GIS—the application of spatial analytical perspectives and tools to genocide studies, spatial forensics, and, in general, human rights topics and events. Within this toolkit, CL/NLP and QSR/ST highlight spatial relationships that are not necessarily mappable in a traditional GIS setting and allow researchers to detect patterns across large corpora of heterogeneous information. The mixing of methodologies and the combination of qualitative and quantitative data in Humanitarian GIS may change our understanding of an ongoing humanitarian crisis and aid in improving and increasing response to such crises.

The Politics of Nature at the Former Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp

ABSTRACTThis article seeks to develop a new approach in Holocaust studies, namely an environmental history of the Holocaust. A case study of the former concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau demonstrates the extent of the entanglement of the politics of memory and the politics of nature, or political ecology, to use Bruno Latour’s term. I suggest that memorials should be treated as an environment, and thus explored as an assemblage of human and nonhuman (f)actors. Analysing both the official preservation strategies adopted by the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum as well as artistic projects (including Łukasz Surowiec’s Berlin-Birkenau), I consider commemorative practices’ environmental impact. My investigation thus primarily focuses on the role of the figure of the tree-as-witness in preservation work and in the use of powerful herbicides (namely Roundup) in preserving traces of the camp. This study could open the way to further comparative studies of ecocide and genocide.

Recently Published Works in Holocaust and Genocide Studies

Recently Published Works in Holocaust and Genocide Studies

Recently Published Works in Holocaust and Genocide Studies

Recently Published Works in Holocaust and Genocide Studies

La Conquista del desierto y los estudios sobre genocidio. Recorridos, preguntas y debates

Genocide Studies have grown notably in the last quarter of a century on an international level. The concept, usually linked to Nazism, has crossed the borders to propose itself over other historical processes allowing to studying their potentials and limits. Moreover, its use at judicial and colloquial levels leads to investigate both, legal and socio-political meanings. In this paper we think about the indigenous genocide and the Conquest of the desert, in particular, focusing on certain questions the studies on genocide have asked. First, we return to the analysis of the Conquest in light of the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and its implications, and second we take into account the social and human sciences conceptualization of genocide. Finally the historical and historiographical debates, provocations and social effects produced by the application of the term genocide to theConquest are considered.

Landscape after genocide

The March of Peace (Marš mira) is a 63-mile, 3-day walk through eastern Bosnia organised in memory of the victims of the 1995 Srebrenica genocide and traces in reverse a death march. Marchers take a trail from Nezuk, stopping at mass graves found along the way, arriving at the memorial cemetery in Potočari a day prior to the annual mass funeral for victims who have been recently exhumed. This article charts the journey from the death march to the peace march and asks the reader to assess the efficacy of embodied memory-work and the ethical responsibility to undertake – and responsibilities when undertaking – alternative memory-work in post-genocide landscapes and sites of mass murder, through a series of rhetorical shifts. A number of frames are enacted to challenge other more linear and conventional approaches, allowing the sociological and political productivity of engaging with post-genocide landscapes in a post-conflict state to emerge, referencing dissident forms of remembrance through the method of walking-with others while traversing this post-genocide landscape on foot. Travelling-with around 8,000 mourners, some of whom were survivors of the death march, the aim here is not to simply describe what is taking place; rather, the journey is undertaken in order to activate a space – a space within which I might engage with issues of landscape, conflict and memory in the context of their current discussion within cultural and political geography, genocide studies and memory studies, and more importantly to speak of genocide and a post-genocide landscape.

Personal Names, Hitler, and the Holocaust. A Socio-Onomastic Study of Genocide and Nazi Germany.

Dr. I. M. Nick enjoys a well-deserved reputation for her meticulous scholarship and her ability to engage in interdisciplinary research. Her impeccable credentials are precisely what this massive a...

Specific intent (dolus specialis) in the Armenian genocide, the Holodomor and the Holocaust: comparative analysis

Although comparative genocide as the second generation of genocide studies has developed over the past two decades, the Holodomor as a crime of genocide committed by Stalin’s regime has not been examined in comparative perspective. In this article, the author traces the reasons for that and offers a comparative analysis of the Holodomor with examples of genocide in the first half of the 20th century – namely, the Armenian genocide of the Ottoman Empire and the Holocaust of Nazi Germany. The author compares the three genocides as crimes under international law in terms of the mental (mens rea) elements of genocide that characterize each of them, noting the dissimilarities and similarities in specific intent (dolus specialis) of those crimes. The author draws to the conclusion that the key common element in the genocides perpetrated in the Ottoman Empire, the Soviet Union, and the Third Reich is that state organization was substituted by hegemony of a ruling party: the Ittihadists, the Communists, and the Nazis. The importance of comparing cases of genocide is evident: if lessons from the past are not heeded and genocide is not punished, history will repeat itself as can be seen in the east and south (Crimea) of Ukraine, where the successor state to the Soviet Union – the Russian Federation – continues an attack on the Ukrainian nation. Article received 28.02.2019

Engendering a Difficult Past: Motherhood and Memory among Child Survivors of the Genocide in Bosnia–Herzegovina

The research that is presented here explores the place of maternal memory among child survivors of the Bosnian Muslim genocide that took place in Bosnia-Herzegovina during the 1990s. Using a qualitative research approach, the study is comprised of 24 in depth interviews with child survivors whose families immigrated to the United States in the aftermath of war. Based on the importance of child memory as a source of recollection, the study explores three intersecting areas of research: (1) the role of child survivor memory in documenting histories of civilian warfare; (2) the importance of child survivor memory for the study of gender and genocide; and (3) the significance of child memory for the construction of collective memories of maternal agency. The findings of the research reveal the roles that mothers play in emotion management and in the protection of families during genocidal warfare.

Cultural Genocide, the Forgotten Nemesis of Cultural Heritage. Case Study of the Genocide of Rohingya in Myanmar

Refusing the recognition of cultural genocide as a legal term affects the effectiveness of the prevention and punishment of genocide. The 2018 Human Rights Council report on Myanmar is pivotal, as a new case of genocide creates the opportunity to rethink and reevaluate the 1948 definition of genocide. The quintuple genocidal intent proves that the aim of destroying the Rohingyan tangible and intangible cultural heritage is very much present in the mind of Myanmar’s government. The systematical destruction of mosques, religious symbols and madrasahs, yet also the methodical execution of priests, artists and teachers demonstrate the existence of cultural genocidal policies. Persecuting those having committed genocide and other crimes against the Rohingya creates the opportunity to evaluate the essence of genocide. The contemporary study and interpretation of genocide already attributes a triple role to cultural genocide. It proves the intent, is an independent aim and is intrinsically linked to the fulfilment of physical genocide.

Imperial ardor or apathy? A Comparative international historiography of popular imperialism

AbstractWere the ordinary citizens of imperial metropoles during the 19th and 20th centuries arduous supporters or apathetic observers of their country's colonial expansionism, or did their relationship to empire fall somewhere in between? Although this is a central question for understanding the how and why of modern imperialism and evaluating responsibility for colonial wrongs, scholars in the only loosely knit field of popular imperialism have arrived at widely divergent answers. Complementing its companion article, “By Jingo! Methods for Researching Popular Imperialism,” this article will present an overview of the conclusions of existing studies and present ways that future studies can become more theoretically and methodologically sophisticated through inspiration from comparative and transnational history, nationalism studies, and genocide studies.

The long-term health consequences of genocide: developing GESQUQ - a genocide studies checklist

BackgroundGenocide is an atrocity that seeks to destroy whole populations, leaving empty countries, empty spaces and empty memories, but also a large health burden among survivors is enormous. We propose a genocide reporting checklist to encourage consistent high quality in studies designed to provide robust and reliable data on the long term impact of genocide.MethodsAn interdisciplinary (Public Health, epidemiology, psychiatry, medicine, sociology, genocide studies) and international working committee of experts from Germany, Israel, the United States, and the United Kingdom used an iterative consensus process to develop a genocide studies checklist for studies of the long term health consequences.ResultsWe created a list of eight domains (A Ethical approval, B External validity, C Misclassification, D Study design, E Confounder, F Data collection, G Withdrawal) with 1–3 specific items (total 17).ConclusionThe genocide studies checklist is easy to use for authors, journal editors, peer reviewers, and others involved in documenting the health consequences of genocide.

Between Hagiography and Wounded Attachment: Raphaël Lemkin and the Study of Genocide

Between Hagiography and Wounded Attachment: Raphaël Lemkin and the Study of Genocide

Recently Published Works in Holocaust and Genocide Studies

Recently Published Works in Holocaust and Genocide Studies

Cultural Impairment and the Genocidal Potential of Intoxicants: Alcohol Use in Colonial North America

As a number of scholars have noted in recent critical genocide studies, Raphael Lemkin’s formulation of the “genocide” concept was much broader than the definition later enshrined in the UN Convention. Various facets of settler colonialism framed his conception, including the widespread distribution of intoxicants among subjugated peoples. In Lemkin’s view, culture was the force undergirding human collectivities and intoxicants disrupted social functioning in a number of ways -- through creating internal strife and violence, upsetting previous authority structures, causing premature deaths and eroding pre-existing cultural practices. This article draws upon Lemkin’s unfinished works to examine his case for the distribution of alcohol among Native Americans as a method of genocidal conquest. It finds that while his work on the subject remains important as it highlights the multiple ways in which colonial oppression can operate, it fails to prove genocidal intent and relies on historical materials that at times fall into the trap of “intellectual colonialism” (Quintero 2001).

Is Classroom Boredom Hidden Guilt? A Comparison between Teaching Aboriginal History in Australia and Post-Holocaust History in Germany

History contributes in an essential way to the formation of a nation’s self-perception and identity and the education system is a key mechanism by which this knowledge is dispersed. It is therefore of great concern that students in both Australia and Germany consistently report being bored when learning of their respective nation’s fraught history. This essay analyses the shortcomings of Australia’s Indigenous history education in comparison with Germany’s Holocaust education, examining via psychoanalytic theory how the phenomenon of boredom often acts to suppress difficult feelings such as guilt. KeywordsAboriginal history; genocide studies; history wars