Genocide in a Global Perspective

Catalog description

Is genocide a useful category of analysis, or does it obscure as much as it reveals? Genocide is recognized as a crime under international law and codified in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. It is hailed as the crime of crimes and all states, regardless of their ratification status, are legally bound to prevent and prosecute genocide. Yet genocide not only continues to proliferate in international society, it has also proven a politically useful term of legitimation evidence by its invocation to justify wars, in issues of state sovereignty and territoriality and in questions of reparations to post-colonial states. This class poses and tries to answer the following: How and why did armed conflict and violence against civilians occur? How are war and genocide related? How, if at all, does localized violence relate to broader processes like state decomposition, formation, and consolidation? Or is racial hatred really the main factor? How were the categories of civilians, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide constructed in the history of the law of armed conflict ("international humanitarian law")? How did contemporaries define and categorize violence excess?