ENVIRONMENTAL DESTRUCTION, CLIMATE CHANGE, AND MASS VIOLENCE

Catalog description

This course addresses a central question in Holocaust and Genocide Studies: what defines mass violence in the last 150 years as particularly modern? The course traces how the emergence of nation-states, together with technology and scientific knowledge to alter the environment, created the conditions for distinctly modern violence that has destroyed diversity in societies and in the environment. The course will focus, in four unites, on a number of case studies, past and present, dealing with the impact of mega-dam construction in the Amazon area in South America and in the Omo Valley in Ethiopia on indigenous groups and their lands; uranium mining in the Navajo homeland in the southwest US; climate change and water wars in the Middle East; and the Green Revolution and food policies in the era of global warming. Each unit will include readings, discussions, and assignments that will explore relevant economic, social, political, agricultural, and scientific contexts and elements, the crucial agency of state authorities in creating policies and initiating actions related to climate change, and the various responses of indigenous groups and other people—with attention to issues of culture, gender, and age—who have faced or are facing the intersections of climate change, environmental destruction, and state violence, linking them to key questions in Holocaust and Genocide Studies on truth, justice, memory politics, reparations, and possibilities for different kinds of futures.