- Editor's Note
Genocide is a constant in human history, occurring from antiquity to the present and in most parts of the inhabited globe. Time and again, peoples, nations, states, colonial powers, and empires have seen the eradication of certain groups as a “solution” to the “problem” posed by those groups. This enduring scourge of human existence is examined in the present issue of Global Dialogue. Our survey moves from general explorations of questions of definition, causation, and prevention, to in-depth accounts of specific historical genocides.
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- Understanding Today’s Genocides: The Snare of Analogy
Much genocide research today consists of transhistorical analysis that seeks to identify thematic similarities between mass slaughters that are widely separated in time and place. This kind of analogical reasoning about genocide has its use, but it risks misleading us when we seek to understand the dangers of genocide in our time. What we face in the twenty-first century is not a repetition of the Holocaust, Armenia, or even Rwanda, but something which has a significantly different form. Some of the new modes genocide is taking in our era—radical changes which reflect epochal changes in the international system—are indicated.
Martin Shaw
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- ‘He in Whose Interest It Was, Did It’: Lemkin’s Lost Law of Genocide
The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948) states that for an act to count as genocidal, it must have been committed “with intent to destroy” a group “in whole or part”. This focus on intent may cause guilt and responsibility for genocide to be seen as restricted to its front-line perpetrators and back-room planners, absolving the wider society. The founding father of the study of genocide, the Polish–Jewish legal scholar Raphael Lemkin, insisted that responsibility could not be thus confined. The examples of Poland under the Nazis and Australia under the British indicate how Lemkin’s concept of “interest”—of material gain or profit—can serve to widen the circle of genocidal responsibility and deepen our historical understanding.
Tony Barta
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- The Genocide Convention: Conundrums of Intent and Utility
The question of intent is one of the thorniest in attributing responsibility for genocide. Article II of the UN Genocide Convention lists a number of acts against members of “a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” that may constitute genocide—acts such as killing, causing bodily or mental harm, preventing births within the group, transferring children outside the group, and so forth. If any of these acts are committed “with intent to destroy” the group “as such”, “in whole or part”, then genocide has been committed. This definition of genocidal intent conceals a number of issues of interpretation that are brought out with reference to legal proceedings against Khmer Rouge leaders in Cambodia and against the Former Yugoslavia.
John Quigley
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- Challenges of Genocide Intervention
Genocide is regarded as a crime of such enormity that its prevention is seen as an absolute moral priority. The quandaries involved in attempting to meet this obligation are examined. States that intervene militarily in other countries on the basis of a “responsibility to protect” threatened civilian populations lay themselves open to accusations of hypocrisy and neo-colonialism. The lessons to be drawn from the crises and controversies over “humanitarian intervention” in Kosovo and East Timor (1999), Darfur/Sudan (2000s), Libya and Syria (2011–13), and Mali (2013) are considered.
Adam Jones
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- ‘Causing Bodily Harm to Members of the Group’: Rhetorical Phrase or Effective Tool for Prevention?
The UN Genocide Convention has been criticised for allegedly providing insufficient guidance on how to prevent the crime it addresses. Yet one of the acts it proscribes, that of “causing bodily harm to members of the group”, could serve as an early warning sign of genocide and so assist in the task of prevention. Although the Genocide Convention does not define the act of causing serious bodily harm, the international criminal tribunals for Rwanda and for the Former Yugoslavia have considered it repeatedly. Analysis of these judicial findings shows that the act, once qualified, “could contribute to the fulfilment of the two promises made by the UN Genocide Convention itself, namely, the prevention and punishment of the crime”.
Caroline Fournet
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- Building a Non-Genocidal Society
A sociological perspective on the nature of genocide. The insights of Norbert Elias are utilised to show that genocide in the modern era is inherent in the very constitution of society, in the civilising process which has generated both the sovereign state and the sovereign individual subject. Genocide’s stubborn persistence and the movement to oppose it are both expressions of the same social formation. Abolishing genocide requires the generation of a form of political society not premised on the maintenance of social deference by the military monopoly of the sovereign state.
Christopher Powell
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- European Livestock Farmers and Hunter–Gatherer Societies: A Genocidal Collision
European settler colonialism was massively destructive of hunter–gatherer societies, be it in Africa, Australia or the Americas. A certain subset of confrontations between colonial settlers and indigenous peoples was frequently genocidal in outcome—namely, encounters between livestock farmers linked to the global capital market and hunter–gatherers. Why should this form of settler colonialism so often have resulted in the near complete destruction of forager societies? A number of key factors are identified that tilted the balance towards genocidal violence.
Mohamed Adhikari
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- The Origins of Genocide against Native Americans: Virginia in the Seventeenth Century
Some genocide scholars see the post-Columbus reduction of the indigenous population of the Americas as the most devastating genocide in history, in terms of the absolute numbers killed, the duration of the extermination, the number of separate peoples eradicated, and the absoluteness with which native presence was expunged from the land. The origins of genocide against Native Americans are considered via an examination of events in England’s first permanent North American colony, seventeenth-century Virginia.
Alfred A. Cave
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- The Armenian Genocide: A Multi-Dimensional Process of Destruction
One of the earliest genocides of the modern era is the Ottoman Empire’s annihilation of its Armenian population. Initiated in 1915, it claimed the lives up to 1.5 million Armenians and was the result of three major contributory causes: military defeat and loss of territory in the Balkans in 1912–13; the Young Turk coup in January 1913; and the outbreak of the First World War. The genocide was not a single phenomenon, but a multifaceted process of destruction that involved the mass execution of elites, expropriation of property, death marches, forced assimilation, artificial famine, and the destruction of material culture.
Uğur Ümit Üngör
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- 1938 and the Porrajmos: A Pivotal Year in Romani History
One of the peoples targeted by Hitler for extermination were Europe’s Roma. They were killed in vast numbers, and their destruction was motivated by precisely the same racial ideology that drove Nazi Germany’s genocide of its Jewish victims. Yet while the Shoah is one of the most widely known and comprehensively studied aspects of the Second World War, the Romani Porrajmos (Devouring) has received comparatively little scholarly and public attention. The pivotal year 1938 is used to anchor an account of the origins, course, and outcome of the Nazis’ persecution of the Roma.
Ian Hancock
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- Racial Ideology, Imperialism, and Nazi Genocide
Hitler’s destruction of European Jewry was not the sole genocide perpetrated by his regime, but part of a unified if uneven process that swept up other groups and peoples for annihilation. Besides the Roma, Russians, Soviet POWs (3.5 million killed), and Poles were murdered in such numbers that the killings may be seen as individual genocides. The roots in racism and imperialism of Nazi Germany’s wide-ranging genocidal programme are analysed. The Shoah is discussed as are the inadequately acknowledged other genocides of the Nazis.
John Cox
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- Mass Violence in the Indonesian Transition from Sukarno to Suharto
The UN Genocide Convention defines the crime as the intentional destruction of “a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”; political groups are excluded from the scope of the convention. In 1965–8, an estimated five hundred thousand people were killed by the army in Indonesia. Most of the victims were members of Indonesia’s communist party and their associates. The nature and magnitude of the slaughter have caused it to be seen as a genocide, even though its victims were targeted not on ethnic or religious grounds, but on the basis of political affiliation. An account is given of the massacre’s causes and progress, and an assessment made as to whether it may properly be regarded as a genocide.
Katharine McGregor
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