Personal Politics and Teaching Genocide Studies

1. Personal Politics and Teaching Genocide Studies Dr Sadiah Qureshi, University of Birmingham HEA Workshop, 19 February 2014

2. GENOCIDE: AN INTERDISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVE • INTRODUCTIONS, ISSUES AND DEFINITIONS • Introduction to Genocide Studies • What is Genocide? • IMPERIAL EXPANSION AND SETTLER COLONIALISM • Imperial Violence and Indigenous Peoples • Settler Colonialism and Genocide • THE HERERO AND NAMA IN GERMAN SOUTH WEST AFRICA, 1904–1908 • The First Genocide of the Twentieth Century • THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE, 1915–1917 • Christians in the Ottoman Empire • WORLD WAR II AND THE HOLOCAUST • Genocide and the Nazis • The Question of Holocaust Uniqueness • LEMKIN AND THE UN CONVENTION OF 1948 • Raphael Lemkin and Establishing Genocide as an International Crime • The ‘Modern’ Crime • BOSNIA AND KOSOVO, 1991–1995 • The Fall of Yugoslavia • Rape and Sexual Violence • PROSECUTING GENOCIDE, THE ‘MODERN CRIME’ • Prosecuting and Denying Genocide • Rwanda and Gacaca Courts • THE ANTHROPOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY OF GENOCIDE • The Genocidal Continuum • INTERVENTION AND PREVENTION • The Politics of Humanitarian Intervention

3. 1. How has genocide been defined from Lemkin onwards? 2. What are the conceptual issues associated with defining genocide and how does this relate to different human groups, e.g. religious, racial, ethnic, national and political? 3. What are the major features, ambiguities, and controversial aspects of the 1948 UN Genocide ‎Convention?‎ 4. In which historical, social and political contexts has genocide occurred e.g. the rise of nation states, the dissolution of empires and/or ongoing wars? Is it possible to compare meaningfully across these diverse contexts or are all genocides unique? 5. How does genocide relate to other forms of mass violence and everyday acts of violence? 6. In what ways is genocide gendered? 7. How have efforts to bring génocidaires to justice varied between local, national and international contexts? 8. Can we know when genocide is likely to occur and on what grounds can humanitarian intervention be considered? Central questions for the course

4. The crime of genocide is defined in international lawin theConvention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. ‘Article II: In the present 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: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. Article III: The following acts shall be punishable: (a) Genocide; (b) Conspiracy to commit genocide; (c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide; (d) Attempt to commit genocide; (e) Complicity in genocide.’ Defining Genocide: The UN Convention