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EXCLUSIONARY OTHERING. AND ITS GENOCIDAL CONSEQUENCES. By Simona Maria Ciot. The term Other is conceptualized by Hegel in The Phenomenology of Spirit as opposed to Self.
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EXCLUSIONARY OTHERING AND ITS GENOCIDAL CONSEQUENCES By Simona Maria Ciot
The term Other is conceptualized by Hegel in The Phenomenology of Spirit as opposed to Self. • Other becomes an ethical entity in Levinas` phenomenology, being connected to infinity and the scriptural God, “The Infinite Other”.
“All societies create the self and the other with their own set of categories” (Helen Fein) • Each and every individual or group is at the same time excluded and included, outsider and insider.
“The relation with the Other, or Conversation, is a non-allergic relation, an ethical relation; but inasmuch as it is welcomed this conversation is a teaching.” (Emmanuel Levinas) • Social sciences display limited assertion of othering as a positive and inclusive process, one that implies dialogue, seeing the world from the perspective of another and erasing dividing lines in an attempt to accomplish a sense of community.
Ever since Raphael Lemkin invented the term genocide and defined it, othering as a process was gradually used more in terms of defining exclusion than inclusion. • In Axis Rule On Occupied Europe (1944), the term genocide is first used, a combination between the Greek genos I (people, race) and the Latin cidere(to kill).
The legal definition of genocide is found in the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG).
Article 2 of the Convention defines genocide as "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; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."
Case Study: Rwandan Genocide (1994). • Death toll: almost 1000000 people. • Duration: 100 days, from April until July 1994.
Inclusionary Othering is the power within the relationship, not from outside, that aspires to connect through difference. • Defining Self through difference from the Other in an inclusive, empathic and empowering relationship that cannot contend annihilation and destruction.