![]()
1
Introduction
Diffusing genocide studies, defusing genocides1
Genocide studies has never been more diffuse an enterprise. And rarely since its inception, if ever, has it been as exciting a field of inquiry. I offer here a few comments on the state of this rapidly evolving field, and try to isolate some present and medium-term trends.
The comparative study of genocide underwent something of an explosion in the first decade of the twenty-first century, particularly the period 2004–08. A raft of excellent contributions appeared, both theoretically sophisticated and thematically diverse. Institutionally, the field not only widened but deepened, and it was rendered politically more complex by the appearance of the International Network of Genocide Scholars (INoGS). INoGS inherited the Journal of Genocide Research as its flagship to stand alongside the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) and its journal, Genocide Studies and Prevention, established in 2006. Two distinct academic “circuits” have evolved around these organizations: IAGS’s center of gravity is on the US east coast and in central Canada, while INoGS is anchored in the United Kingdom for Western Europe and Australasia. As an outlier in this scheme – based in Western Canada, and therefore mostly riding the IAGS circuit, but serving on the editorial board of the INoGS journal – I have come to appreciate the opportunity to bestride the institutional poles of genocide studies. But the field’s division, which maps to some extent onto the scholarship, remains a division. Attempts to merge IAGS and INoGS broke down in 2010–11, amidst some acrimony.
The occasional pettiness of such exchanges has in no way impeded the flood of intellectual contributions during recent years. A pair of essential works, Martin Shaw’s What Is Genocide? (2007) and Mark Levene’s Genocide in the Age of the Nation-State (two volumes so far, 2005), encapsulate major lines of interest and investigation in the field.2 Shaw’s work presents the most nuanced portrait of genocide as social destruction – returning to the roots of the concept in Raphael Lemkin’s work, and participating in a broader “return to Lemkin,” a significant trend of recent years.3 I have expressed skepticism toward a concept of cultural genocide divorced from mass killing, suggesting a couple of cases in which erosion of a group’s identity or expulsion of its members, in the absence of a large-scale murderous component, seemed unlikely to qualify as genocidal.4 But Shaw’s richly sociological vision of genocide, presented in a compact and clearly argued form, will resonate through the field in the coming years.
Levene’s epic project, Genocide in the Age of the Nation-State, overlaps with Shaw’s in that Levene is deeply committed to an exploration of modernity and its particular destruction of social identities, subsistence strategies, and indigenous worldviews. Of all the canonical works of genocide studies, Levene’s is the most eclectic in content, apart perhaps from Ben Kiernan’s Blood and Soil (2007).5
Despite Levene’s commitment to a genocide-as-modernity thesis, the breadth of his analysis may leave us with a global-historical understanding of what is essentially the same phenomenon – that is, while modernity may have reconstructed the institution of genocide, it did not invent it. Nonetheless, Levene’s books stand as the greatest works of genocide studies yet published. They and their successors in his four-volume project will reverberate for as long as we have a field.
With his expert grasp of Central and Eastern European dynamics of genocide in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – captured in many of the book reviews he has published in the Journal of Genocide Research in recent years – Levene exemplifies the increasingly symbiotic relationship between genocide studies and Holocaust studies. The evolution of a comparative field of genocide studies necessarily displaced the Holocaust case from its sui generis position. But Holocaust studies remains amazingly vital today, perhaps more than ever; for that reason, most genocide scholars keep a close eye on it.
A combination of factors and a series of iconic works6 have shifted Holocaust scholars’ focus, both historiographically and geographically, from the death camps and gas chambers of Poland to the killing fields of the “Holocaust by bullets” in the eastern occupied territories, notably Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic states. In these territories between 1941 and 1944, upwards of 1.5 million Jews were exterminated, along with millions of Soviet prisoners of war (2.8 million during an eight-month period in 1941–42 alone).7 These mass atrocities occurred in the zone that Timothy Snyder has dubbed “the bloodlands,” in a book that has commanded considerable attention over the past year or so.8 The core framing of Snyder’s book is not wholly original. The “bloodlands” that he identifies (roughly, the region between what are today eastern Poland and western Russia) were much the same borderlands and “shatter-zones” studied in the interdisciplinary Borderlands Project, sponsored by Brown University’s Watson Institute beginning in 2003. The existing studies pointed to interlocking genocides and repetitive genocidal iterations – inflicted by Nazis, Soviet Communists, and miscellaneous others – during the first half of the twentieth century. But Snyder’s work, lodged with a major publisher and granted a significant publicity push, “branded” this zone of mass slaughter and helped to popularize the notion of Hitler’s crimes in Europe as constituting only part of an escalating series of mass atrocities inflicted alongside those perpetrated by Stalin’s USSR (and eventually in league with it). The seething cauldron of genocides in the bloodlands during the 1930s and 1940s has now been described in dozens of monographs in several languages, most of them published in the last decade. This literature will anchor the new studies of genocide in Europe during its bloodiest paroxysms from 1914 to 1945.
The continuing vitality of Holocaust studies also derives from the links forged with a dominant trend in genocide studies during the last decade or two. I refer to the growing inclusion of native peoples and indigenous genocides – not merely as contributions to the case-study literature, but as foundational to understandings of genocide in the modern (post-1492) period. To Raphael Lemkin’s credit, the more we learn about his genocide research, the more we gain an understanding of his deep empathy for indigenous peoples who were trampled and destroyed by Western colonialism; among the first generation of comparative genocide scholars, Colin Tatz’s contributions also stand out.9 The quincentenary in 1992 of the colonization of the western hemisphere spawned a set of important works by David Stannard, Ward Churchill, Richard Drinnon, Russell Thornton, and others.10 A qualitatively new stage of analysis was reached with works linking indigenous genocides to the unfolding of the Nazi holocaust in the east – against the “redskins” and “barbarians” that Hitler and his henchmen identified and targeted (citing the American “clearing” of the Great Plains as inspiration). A proposed “missing link” in the chain, and the subject of much recent study, was the German genocide in South-West Africa, waged against the Herero and Nama peoples between 1904 and 1907. There was a notable overlap between some leading German South-West African personnel (administrators, ideologues, and pseudo-scientists) and those prominent in the early stages of the Nazi movement. Likewise, the death camps of Europe, or at least the Nazi slave-labor camps, seem presaged by Shark Island and the other now-notorious killing grounds of Namibia’s native people.
Figure 1.1 Museum display with bullets and human ashes from the Bikernieki Forest Holocaust site, with barbed wire from the Salaspils Concentration Camp. Museum of Latvia’s Occupation, Riga, Latvia.
Whether or not strong connections between these two eras of German expansionism are accepted, the understanding that Hitler saw his eastern conquests in rather traditional imperial terms is now held by many scholars (among the most significant are A. Dirk Moses, Dominik Schaller, Jürgen Zimmerer, Ann Curthoys, and Benjamin Madley).11 This emphasis on the holocausts of Western colonialism may well prove the most prominent theme in the literature in the coming years.
Mention of the Namibian genocide reminds us of an enduring project of genocide studies: the unearthing of little-known, often conveniently forgotten atrocities from the past. (The bloodlands/borderlands literature is relevant here as well.) It is my view that a kind of Hippocratic oath should prevail in our field, proclaiming the right of all victims and survivors of genocide to receive due consideration and concern. In addition to extensive work on the Namibian genocide, we have benefited from important investigations of cases as diverse as Patagonia, Tasmania, East Timor, Circassia/the Caucasus, and North America. Madley, for example, is not only unveiling the full dimensions of the Yuki and Tolowa genocides of the nineteenth century but charting a US-wide record of the massacre of native populations. His work shows not just how case studies are proliferating, but how the genocidal record is deepening in its regional and local dimensions. To this trend should be added a reframing of the “classic” genocides – not just the understanding of the Holocaust as colonialism, already noted, but the reconfiguring of the Armenian Genocide as one of a number of intertwined anti-Christian genocides under the Ottoman Empire and the growing study of the Rwandan Genocide in a regional and macro-historical context.12
Do these investigations truly hew to the Hippocratic ideal? Are all victims and survivors receiving their due? To a considerable degree, I think the answer is yes. Genocide scholars, beginning with Lemkin himself, have been extraordinarily open to a geographically and historically broad framing of genocide. But until very recently it was a geographically narrow range of scholars – mostly North American, Western European, and Australasian – who generated the vast majority of academic contributions. Journalistic and public discussion of genocide has likewise been heavily concentrated in the developed West. It is questionable how much this has changed in the last decade or two, but there is certainly a resurgence evident in the UK/Western European/Australasian nexus, centered on INoGS and its Journal of Genocide Research. The introduction of a distinct “Argentinian school,” spearheaded by Daniel Feierstein and his colleagues in Buenos Aires, has significantly influenced the discussion of genocide and modernity, as well as making a strong case for Argentina under the junta (1976–83) as a case of genocide.13 Several African and African American scholars, including Mahmood Mamdani, Charles Mironko, and Chile Eboe-Osuji, have made prominent contributions;14 Bosnian scholars and activists were decisive in shaping the content of the 2007 IAGS conference in Sarajevo.
Overall, though, it must be acknowledged that a gulf exists between the global-historical reach of genocide studies as an intellectual project and its geographical reach as a field. One can hope that as interest in the subject spreads further in Latin America (including Brazil and Mexico), and as scholars in the Global South increasingly assert themselves, we will see more of the internationalization of the discussion that the field requires.
Will we also hear more female voices? Several have been foundational to our field and to closely related ones. Best known is Hannah Arendt, with the controversy evoked by her Eichmann in Jerusalem and, more recently, the attention paid to her groundbreaking study of Nazism as a culmination of Western imperialism, The Origins of Totalitarianism.15 Probably no book in the history of genocide studies has been more widely read, and more influential on the policy front, than Samantha Power’s “A Problem from Hell.”16 Helen Fein’s contributions over many years are also significant; while Barbara Harff, in cooperation with Ted Gurr, has published a number of canonical and methodologically rigorous studies.17 Analyses of gender and genocide have established Joan Ringelheim and Elisa von Joeden-Forgey as influential figures.18
One hopes that a greater gender balance will also soon be evident in an institutional sense. The ballot for the latest (2011) elections for the IAGS executive featured no woman candidate above the (lowest) level of the Advisory Council. The other leading scholarly grouping, the INoGS, is likewise something of a boys’ club. The executives of both scholarly journals in the field display a similar pattern, though both have been commendably open to female contributors. Overall, the unusually diffuse and eclectic character of genocide studies as an intellectual enterprise contrasts strongly with its still rather staid and traditional professional structure.
Fortunately, there seems no sign that another of the field’s key attributes, its remarkable disciplinary pluralism, is ebbing. This was evident from the start, in Raphael Lemkin’s field-defining blend of historical, anthropological, legal, and philosophical strains, overlaid with a moral-entrepreneurial stance. The tendency in genocide studies since its “rebirth” in the late 1970s is to draw ever-wider circles of academics and individuals into the discussion. From an initial array of historians, legal scholars, sociologists, political scientists, and psychologists, genocide scholarship has moved to absorb influences from anthropology, cultural studies, indigenous studies, gender studies, and moral philosophy, to cite only a few. Artists, poets, and playwrights have also moved to the fore, and now we see the natural sciences beginning to assume greater prominence, with the high profile accor...
