Violence & security. Paradigms and debates (73220041FY)
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Universiteit Van Amsterdam (UvA)
Lecture notes for Violence and Security - slides copied down, combined with Lecturer's explanations. Lectures are almost word for word transcribed, any inconsistencies are mostly due to removing the speech quirks. This file contains the last 3 lectures of the course, which is all of the lectures af...
Violence & security. Paradigms and debates (73220041FY)
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Lecture 8
Genocide
Defining ‘Genocide’
● Genocide occurred during the colonial expansion of the empires, the
expansion of the north-american frontier and the killing of the indeginous
communities, etc. → the act of genocide is old but the term is comparatively
new
○ comes out from WW2, with the experiences of the holocaust leading to
the founding of the word to describe this particular type of violence
○ the fact that the term came from the holocaust shapes the trajectory
of research on genocide
● Term coined by Raphael Lemkin in 1944 → fusion of genos (race, nation,
tribe) with the suffix –cide (to kill).
○ Raphael Lemkin was a polish jew, refugee in the U.S., had family that
died from the Nazi regime
○ lobbied the Nuremberg Acords to include the term Genocide as a
crime, but was unsuccessfull
○ but was successful in lobbying the UN to make Genocide a crime
● Legal definition articulated in article II of the 1948 UN Genocide Convention.
○ “Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to
destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious
group, as such
■ Killing members of the group;
■ Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
■ Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated
to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
■ Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
■ Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
● Under this definition residential schools in the US and
Canada count as genocide because they are colonial
states displacing indigenous children
● Critiques of the Legal Definition of ‘Genocide’
○ Evidentiary standards of ‘intent’
■ Genocide as a process, not a single event
● in the UN convention on Genocide there is no necessity of
“special intent” → there is no legal requirement for a
deliberate intent to eliminate a group, but that has been
the way the convention has been interpreted and on
which’s basis the crime ha been prosecuted
● that is a high bar to establish in the court of law → it is
difficult to have unambiguous information of
premeditation
, ● the reason it is hard to prove is because genocide is a
process not a single event → it is not the first choice of
leaders but an effect that emerges across time
○ Narrow range of protected groups → only the killing of national,
ethnic, racial and religious groups counts as genocide
■ Existing definition excludes many cases of mass atrocities
(Valentino 2000; Melvin 2017)
● there were versions of the convention that protected
social and political groups but a lot of states (including
the USSR) were opposed to the inclusion of social and
political groups
○ because many states were afraid they would be
implicated under such a law due to their treatment
of the political opposition
● this is important because there have been many
instances where perpetrators were trying to eliminate a
group but were not seen as commiting genocide
○ cases of mass killing: democide , politicide
● Key Questions in Genocide Studies
○ What makes genocide more likely? (macro perspective)
○ Why do people participate in genocide? (micro perspective)
War and Genocide (strauss)
● Many scholars make the argument that war makes genocide,
● Genocides generally occur in wartime or in response to fears of armed
conflict.
○ but nat all genocides are wartime genocides, thus we cannot say that
war explains genocide but the most recent genocides (“in our
collective conciences” so I’m assuming since WW2) have been
happening during wartime
○ E.g. Herero and Nama Genocide (NAMIBIA)
■ committed by the german empire, considered the first in the
20th century
■ Herero and Nama rebelled against the colonial occupation → as
retaliation the German empire committed genocide through
armed conflict, but also by starving the population and forcing
labour
● (Straus)Three possible ways that war makes genocide more likely:
○ War creates an environment of threat and insecurity → makes the use
of violence more likely
■ comes from political psychology
■ draws from prospect theory: people feel loses more than wins;
war creates loses, loses cause disproportionate responses
○ War creates categories of ally/enemy
, ■ this act of dichotomous categorization underpins and can lead
to logics of destruction
○ War makes the use of “militarized power” more likely
■ militarized power is more acceptable during wartime
● Critique:
○ there’s a lot of wars and most wars don’t lead to genocide
■ So what makes some wars lead to genocides and others not?
Ideology (strauss)
● Ideas and norms make certain forms of action thinkable or unthinkable
○ constructivist view
■ the way leaders see the world explains the occurrence of
genocide
● Regimes animated by exclusionary ideologies are more likely to create
genocide (Harff 2003)
○ Leaders with ideas of establishing utopias will be more likely to
commit violent actions which can more readilly lead to genocide
Genocide in Cambodia
● Happened during the Khmer Rouge period (1975 and 1979)
● 1.6-1.8mln people were killed - 1/4th of Cambodia's population
● it followed a radical form of marxist-leninist ideology
● they wanted to create an ethnically pure khmer state, had to eliminate all
foreign elements: be it ethnic, social or racial
● also had an intent to create a self-sufficient agrarian utopia with no cities
● they established work camps and village cooperatives
● they aimed to create a society that aligned with this utopian vision
○ certainly strategy did shape the khmer rouge but the policies that they
put in place, which led to the deaths of many people was shaped by
this ideological vision
■ f.e. they emptied out the cities and made everyone work of on
farms
Ideology shapes goals, which can sometimes be unrealistic → this leads to extreme
actions to meet that goal within a particular time frame
For scholars that are constructivists this explains why genocide is rare when
compared with other forms of violence
Ideology can also help explain why non-wartime genocides happen: if we think of
racism as a sort of ideology then we can explain why f.e. deliberately spreading
smallpox to indigenous communities becomes a thinkable strategy.Similarly, we can
think of why putting uighur in reeducation camps becomes thinkable.
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