Genocide

The saying "To have your cake and eat it" can be used with different meanings, I assume. I use it to describe social practices which combine qualities that, intuitively or by plausible argument, cannot be combined: the intuition or the argument is a bad one therefore. For example, various people the world over have the social intuition that one must beat one's children or the outcome will be a spoilt child (spare the rod, spoil the child, as Samuel Butler wrote). (...) But to have your cake and eat it here is to have a way not to beat your child (as required by good liberalism) and also avoid a spoilt child - a way or a whole set of things which serve as a substitute for beating. I think that have-your-cake-and-eat-it practices are characteristic of the English middle class, the British middle class even: we don't fire you but you will leave; we don't say, "No," but you will realize that we are conveying, "No," etc. They probably exist in some other societies too. In England, even the aristocracy and the working class have to probably make concessions to this approach and associated innovations. One does not want to be just another culture after all. Now there is an infamous German philosopher called Carl Schmitt, who proposes that sometimes the law has to be suspended, to better deal with an enemy: an enemy to the way of life of the nation. One will then do unspeakable things to the enemy, to drive them out or just eradicate them from within the nation’s boundaries. But what if the way of life of a nation consists of have-your-cake-and-eat-it practices? Suspending the law to defend against the enemy, as Schmitt recommends, would then itself be against the way of life in a nation: one should not take this vulgarly direct approach. Now there is probably a person in Germany whose view is: if you had the minorities we had, you would have committed genocide too. And there is probably a person in England who thinks, "No, we are ethical." What to say about this? I am not sure. (Maybe, in some rare cases, a nation will think: for this enemy, have-your-cake-and-eat-it is not doable. Probably not in the German holocaust case though.) By the way, there is an infamous working class English comedian called Roy Chubby Brown. In a Youtube video, he says that this island we live on, or I live on and some others, is full up. He is railing against government immigration policy but does not seem to entertain the following combination, let alone recommend it: anyone can come here but we have techniques such that hardly anyone does. (Surely he knows England better than I do though!). (shrink)

En este trabajo intentamos hacer una aproximación a la problemática de la llamada singularidad del Holocausto. Tomamos como disparador inicial un suceso alusivo relativamente reciente que acaba de causar revuelo en la opinión pública, en el que una política Africana (Helen Zille) se declaró defensora de la singularidad del genocidio perpetrado por el régimen nazi. Desde allí intentamos aproximarnos a distintas articulaciones en favor y en contra de la tesis singularista ¿Fue el Holocausto un hecho único, sin precedentes, o apenas (...) otra manifestación de la violencia occidental, o quizás un poco las dos cosas? ¿Tiene la discusión sólo un sentido “objetivo” o también uno “subjetivo”, y en este último caso, cuál de los dos es más fundamental? En este sentido abordamos de manera sucinta las articulaciones elaboradas tanto por los defensores de la formulación extrema de la tesis singularista (específicamente Goldhagen, Katz, y Genwarth) como de sus objetores relativos (como, a nuestro entender, E. Traverso) y absolutos (por ejemplo Stannard). Intentamos mostrar que la aproximación a la problemática no resiste satisfactoriamente la adopción de posturas binarias a diferencia de lo que ocurre con acercamientos más tendientes a la conciliación como el de E. Traverso, cuyo acento en el estatus doble del Holocausto (como emergente histórico en el plano fáctico-objetivo e irrupción sin precedentes en términos del proceso de comprensión y auto-comprensión occidental del ejercicio de violencia) podría suponer antes que una resignificación del debate reciente, la inauguración, casi, de todo un nuevo horizonte de investigación. (shrink)

A credible fear test is an in-depth interview process given to undocumented people of any age arriving at a U.S. port of entry to determine qualification for asylum-seeking. Credible fear tests as a typical immigration procedure demonstrate not only what structural epistemic violence looks like but also how this violence lives in and through the design of asylum policy. Key terms of credible fear tests such as “significant possibility,” “evidence,” “consistency,” and “credibility” can never be neutral in the context of (...) colonial administrative violence. We argue that these terms function as mechanisms of exclusion and demonstrate that the capacity to be violent (i.e. to be an instrument of violence) is built into these tests, ready to be deployed when an administration wants to stop certain people from certain places from entering without regard to their own ongoing occupation of Indigenous lands. Not only are such practices instruments of violence, but the concept of ‘violence’ continues to be organized, defined, and conceived within settler colonial epistemologies so as to exclude these administrative forms of violence deployed against Indigenous peoples and people of color from recognition and nameability. We argue that this is an intentional strategy of colonial power preservation that is functionalized through social processes that remain structurally stable and self-regenerating across historical and political changes. (shrink)

The paper analyzes the ongoing Russian–Ukrainian war as an existential threat to the survival of the Ukrainian nation. The authors argue that the aggression combines elements of classical interstate conflict and civilizational confrontation, aimed not only at territorial expansion but also at the destruction of Ukrainian cultural, linguistic, and political identity. The analysis emphasizes the historical continuity of Russian imperial policy, the failure of international security guarantees, and the humanitarian consequences of war, including crimes against humanity and cultural genocide. The (...) Ukrainian experience of resistance is presented as both a struggle for national survival and a key factor for the future configuration of European and global security. (shrink)

This article, composed six months after the Oct. 7th Hamas operation “Al-Aqsa Flood,” in the shadow of Israel’s retaliatory genocide, was catalyzed by a viral social media video with alternating clips of Palestinian and Native American people dancing in defiant resistance to ongoing white settler colonial ethnic cleansing and genocide, in loving embrace of their own Indigenous ways of being. After an introductory setting of the stage for this video, the first section rehearses the two historical chapters of dance scholar (...) Jacqueline Shea Murphy’s The People Have Always Danced, emphasizing the paradoxical late nineteenth-century campaigns (1) criminalizing Indigenous American dances, and (2) appropriating these dances and dancers for non-Indigenous audiences. The second section then pivots to Australian choreographer Nicholas Rowe’s Raising Dust: A Cultural History of Dance in Palestine, emphasizing the appropriation of a traditional shepherd dance (Dabke) into the Zionist project of fabricating an orientalist tradition to justify their colonization. Finally, the concluding section spotlights Palestine’s Birzeit University and the El-Funoun folkdance troupe as exemplars, captured in the Palestinian hip hop song’s neologism “Palest-Indians,” of loving Indigenous death-defying dance resistance. (shrink)

This book develops an interdisciplinary framework rooted in philosophy for addressing the political evils experienced around the world. Drawing on resources mainly from Continental philosophy and historical studies, it argues for the relationality and continuity between political evils, using the Armenian Genocide and the Shoah as main examples. The book begins by unpacking a series of limiting assumptions that define the philosophical study of evil. These assumptions crystallize in the idea that evil is an inscrutable phenomenon, what the author calls (...) the paradigm of evil’s inscrutability. Tracing this paradigm through the legacies of five key philosophers—Plato, Augustine, Kant, Arendt, and Levinas—the author shows that by the time we arrive at 20th century, the framing of political evils like the Shoah as inscrutable and exceptional is profoundly constraining; it erases their continuity and connection with other atrocities, including the 1915 Armenian Genocide. The book next turns to practices and ideologies that connect the Armenian Genocide to the Shoah to propose an alternative paradigm for thinking about evil: a paradigm of the continuity of evils. Offering this paradigm to readers in philosophy and adjacent disciplines, the author explores the relationality between the Armenian Genocide and the Shoah, but also between Turkish genocide denialism and a contemporary case of racist evildoing against Armenians in Turkey, shifting the discussion of political evil in a direction that aims to turn overlooked evils around the world into objects of philosophical thinking. (shrink)

Russian aggression against Ukraine has become a critical turning point in the transformation of European political strategy and the global security architecture. The shift toward supporting Ukrainian sovereignty is driven not only by ethical considerations but also by the recognition of Ukraine’s strategic importance as a link between the West and the post-Soviet space. This paper analyzes the historical context, the evolution of Western geopolitical thought regarding Ukraine, and the current challenges facing a unified and consistent Western strategy. The study (...) emphasizes Ukraine's role not merely as a recipient of international support, but as an equal partner in shaping a new European and global order based on democratic values and resistance to authoritarian revisionism. (shrink)

The Polish Jewish photographer Mendel Grossman captured with his camera (officially and clandestinely) the harsh and cruel reality of the Łódź ghetto: industrial production, suffering, starvation, deportation, and death. In this paper, I depict the Łódź ghetto and the agony of the Jewish people through Grossman's eyes, as well as the cultural, religious, and Zionist activities that took place in the ghetto in the midst of so much destruction and death. I assert that Grossman's photographs humanize the victims and are (...) a crucial source of the suffering and annihilation of the Jewish victims of the Łódź ghetto. Moreover, I argue that Grossman's photographs symbolize courage and defiance (two acts that fall within the spectrum of the term amidah) and are an invaluable source for researching both the Łódź ghetto and the Shoah. (shrink)

The Einsatzgruppen massacres mark a turning point in the mass extermination of Jewish men, women, and children during the Shoah. The Jäger report is one of the most detailed sources of the Einsatzgruppen massacres; it thoroughly details the killings of 137,448 victims (the total number of victims given in the report is inaccurate), of whom 135,392 are Jewish victims and 2,056 are non-Jewish victims. The disproportion between Jewish victims (98.5 percent) and non-Jewish victims (1.5 percent) in the report is gigantic. (...) The massacres of the Jäger report were carried out by Einsatzkommando 3 of Einsatzgruppe A (with the enthusiastic collaboration of the Lithuanian auxiliary police), mainly in Lithuania, from July 4, 1941, to November 29, 1941, solely by bullets. Although there are in fact two Jäger reports (September 10 and December 1, 1941), in the present paper I focus on the later one, known as ‘the’ Jäger report. After briefly introducing Operation Barbarossa and describing the structure of the four Einsatzgruppen, I analyze the Jäger report, while emphasizing the high number of Jewish victims (who were slaughtered only because they were Jewish) versus the much lower number of non-Jewish victims (all of whom, except for one Roma/Sinti child and 48 children with physical, psychiatric, and intellectual disabilities –so-called ‘Geisteskranke’, do not include children). I argue that separating Jewish victims from non-Jewish victims is paramount to a serious research of both the Einsatzgruppen and the Shoah. (shrink)

This commentary on the rule of law is a work of fiction drawing on parallels between current socio-legal-political circumstances, conflicts and contradictions, and those depicted in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. Particular attention is directed toward the normative and epistemic frameworks human beings use as they make and purport to explain and justify decisions that affect the lives and well-being of themselves and others. Rule of law, rule by law, and rule-based orders are examined, providing context for a critique of the (...) use of “good intentions” as an excuse or justification for acts that violate human rights. (shrink)

Language is a powerful tool that enables communication and shapes our identity and cultural practices. The right to choose one's language is a fundamental human right that helps preserve personal and communal identities. In a multilingual nation like Ethiopia, language goes beyond communication to define administrative boundaries. Consequently, depriving Ethiopians of their linguistic rights becomes a more complex punishment than food embargoes. This research investigated the motives and means by which the Amhara Regional State-enforced a monolingual and monocultural language education (...) policy in western Tigray through the lens of linguistic genocide. The study involved interviews with ten teachers, selected using a snowball sampling method, and document analysis to reinforce the result. Political and economic factors and a desire to promote the assimilation of Tigrayans into Amhara culture and language, a process known as "Amharanization", appear to have impacted the implementation of the language education policy in western Tigray. Authorities have implemented a variety of measures, including bans, restrictions, penalties, enforcement, forced relocation, and even heinous acts, which have caused the Tigrayan community severe physical and psychological distress. Collectively, these policies, actions, and outcomes constituted an act of linguistic genocide. This study sheds light on the severe repercussions of such policies, examines their implications, acknowledges the inherent limitations, and offers valuable recommendations for future research in this crucial area. (shrink)

This chapter explores the role that non-textual narrations of biblical stories can play in Christian life and practice. Our case study is the Shrine of Divine Mercy in Kabuga, Rwanda. The stations at the shrine tell the story of Jesus’s life and passion, incorporating images from the Catholic devotional tradition of Divine Mercy and elements evoking the Rwandan genocide. While many philosophical accounts of narratives presuppose that narratives are textual, material and visual art like the Kabuga shrine can also be (...) narrative, in that, like text, material and visual art can selectively represent multiple events and connections between them. We argue that material-visual narratives like the shrine can be effective in achieving commonly identified functions of narratives, such as focusing attention, immersing in a story, engaging the emotions, and fostering a common perspective on the world. We further argue that material-visual art is well-suited to narrating the Gospel in particular, for it can present the Gospel story alongside other stories (in this case, the story of the Rwandan genocide) and in so doing reframe these other stories in light of the Gospel. (shrink)

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE OPEN ACCESS. The injustice of genocide denial is commonly understood as a violation of the dignity of victims, survivors, and their descendants, and further described as an assault on truth and memory. This book rethinks the normative relationship between dignity, truth, and memory in relation to genocide denial by adopting the framework of epistemic injustice. This framework performs two functions. First, it introduces constructive normative vocabulary into genocide scholarship through which we can gain a better understanding (...) of the normative impacts of genocide denial when it is institutionalized and systematic. Second, it develops and enriches current scholarship on epistemic injustice with a further, underexplored case study. Genocide denialism is relevant for political and social epistemology, as it presents a substantive epistemic practice that distorts normativity and social reality in ways that maintain domination. This generates pervasive ignorance that makes denial rather than recognition of genocide appear as the morally and epistemically right thing to do. By focusing on the prominent case of Turkey’s denialism of the Armenian genocide, the book shows the serious consequences of this kind of epistemic injustice for the victim group and society as a whole. The Epistemic Injustice of Genocide Denialism will appeal to students and scholars working in social, political, and applied epistemology, social and political philosophy, genocide studies, Armenian studies, and memory studies. (shrink)

This study tackles hashtags as framing devices which shape public arguments and controversies in computer-mediated communication environments. It focuses on the use of the _genocide_ hashtag on Twitter in the context of the Ukraine-Russia war. It proposes and showcases a methodology to surface how the semantic and discourse properties of the term genocide affect its framing properties as a hashtag which bears argumentative functions, directly or indirectly calling for action.

According to Nana (chief) Ani Marimba, “your culture is your immune system” (n.d.). This is to say that culture is a universal reality that provides its members specialness and a shared sense of collective identity. Therefore, for me Wairimu—daughter of Wangũi and Njoroge (my late-mother and still living father, and that of my fore parents and ancestors)—culture is not only about my/our people’s values, traditions, and heritage from our common origins in the Nile Valley (The Earth Center, The history of (...) the Dogon. Retrieved May 10, 2023, from https://www.theearthcenter.org/history, 2023). Most importantly, African culture “holds remarkable solutions to our problems and potential for our greatness” (Marimba, What is culture? Retrieved June 10, 2020, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItHbLahuPBw, 1999, n.p). In this chapter, I as a “continental African” who acknowledges my insider-outsider identity as a resident and student being “mis-educated” in the western colonial institutions, I will explore from an African-centered lens: (1) What is Culture? (2) What is Cultural Genocide? and (3) What is its Impact on my/our holistic being as a Pan-Africanist(s), by looking at What Was, What Became/is Becoming of African culture? (Njoroge, “Mtu Akikuita Mmbwa Usibweke”/When Someone Calls You a Dog, Don’t Bark Back! In Eizadirad, A. & Wane, N. N. (eds.), The power of oral culture in education. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18537-3_2, 2023). In conclusion, since the afflicted is the expert of their reality and with utmost humility, I offer that “the best way to fight an alien culture is to live your own”, as Okuninibaa Safisha Nzingha Hill Adélékè reminds us (The best way to fight an alien culture is to live your own, n.d.). In accordance with the African tradition of honoring thy ancestors, I will capitalize on the already existing and passed-down ancestral and elders’ knowledges and wisdom (The Earth Centre, The history of the Dogon. Retrieved September 10, 2020, from https://www.theearthcenter.org/history, n.d.). (shrink)

The policy of genocide carried out by Armenian nationalists against Azerbaijanis has a history of more than 200 years. The goal of this insidious policy was the expulsion of Azerbaijani people from their historical lands and the creation of a mythical state of “Great Armenia” in these territories. On March 31, 1918, under the leadership of the Dashnaktsutyun party with the help of the Red Army of Soviet Russia, the Azerbaijani population of Baku was subjected to genocide. The corpses of (...) 57 Muslim women, whose ears and noses were cut off, and their bellies were torn open, were found in one of the neighborhoods in Baku. Armenians threw people alive into water wells, burning ovens, and oil wells, ripped apart pregnant women's bellies with bayonets, killed children with bayonets, nailed babies to walls, raped women, young girls, and old women. They hung men upside down by their legs, cut them in half with swords, crucified some of them on wooden beds, wrapped them in carpets and rugs and burned them alive, cut off people's hands and feet, and forced them to eat their own flesh under bayonets. Wild Armenian gangs burned Muslim clerics in the fire of bonfires lit from the Koran, the holy book of Islam. This was the true face of the Armenian nationalists who loudly shouted about “self-determination”, “autonomy” and “genocide”. The cruelty of Andranik, who made “necklaces” from children’s eyes, and other Armenians, knew no bounds. In March 1918, up to 20 thousand Azerbaijanians in Baku, and in 1917-1920 on the territory of Azerbaijan, more than 400 thousand Azerbaijani people were subjected to “genocide” by the Armenians. As the world ignores these atrocities, they are increasing. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: Almost all the voices of the six million Jewish men, women, and children who perished in the Holocaust were shuttered in the massacres of the Einsatzgruppen and inside the gas chambers (and vans) of the six German extermination camps (Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka II, Bełżec, Sobibór, Chełmno, and Majdanek). Some of the victims' writings and drawings have survived, and these testimonies remain today a fraction of the millions of voices that were lost forever. With this paper I would like to convey (...) the idea that the (reconstructed and often fictionalized) voices that can be found in Holocaust feature films represent a homage to the victims who perished, and that these films (independently of their commercial success or their minor historical errors) often bring knowledge about the victims' suffering, antisemitism, the ghettos, the transports, the massacres, the Vernichtungslager and the Konzentrationslager to the vast public, and represent a glimpse into the shuttered voices of the Shoah. I also argue that, approached with caution, Holocaust films (antisemitic German propaganda films, post-war documentaries and post-war feature films) can be a valuable contribution to the historiography of the Shoah. (shrink)

Tous les évènements traumatiques instaurent un rapport spécifique au temps. Parmi eux, le génocide constitue un paradigme de l’expérience extrême. Le génocide est un évènement qui échappe au temps commun et qui instaure une nouvelle temporalité, tant pour les victimes que pour les bourreaux. En analysant des témoignages oraux et écrits de rescapés de la Shoah et du génocide des Tutsi au Rwanda, on constate que la temporalité instaurée par le génocide continue longtemps après la fin des massacres à se (...) réverbérer sur la vie des survivants dont les familles ont été décimées. (shrink)

In the first part of this paper, the author proceeds to identify and clarify three categories that are distinctive for the social philosophy of genocides: aim, subject, and method. The clarification of these categories makes meaningful the social philosophy of genocides. This makes it possible to distinguish between the social philosophy of genocides — and the scientific objectification of this phenomenon — and the social philosophy of genocide — alongside other philosophical disciplines — using the empirical material of genocides. It (...) is argued that the subject of the social philosophy of genocides is the definition of genocide and the epistemically problematic in genocides; the aim of this discipline is to prevent genocides by criticizing the determinants (pre-reasons) that precede decision-making; the method of social philosophy of genocides is a parallax vision and a critical attitude towards the search for the "dark" in modernity. Each of the thematized categories defines the social philosophy of genocide as an independent discipline, distinct through its subject from scientific objectivations of genocide and through its method and aim from objectivations of genocide by moral philosophy and philosophy of religion. The first part concludes with a brief definition of the discipline: the social philosophy of genocides is a cluster of critical philosophical studies which examine the epistemically problematic in genocides, the definition of genocide, the causes of genocide, with the aim of preventing genocides through critical reflection. In the second part, the author situates the methodological problems of the research within the social philosophy of genocides and proposes a program of this discipline consisting of three projects: genealogy of genocides, studies of pre-modern genocides, and a catalogue of family resemblances of genocides. (shrink)

Cet article met en lumière l’expression des mémoires du génocide des Tutsi dans l’espace public, au niveau de la région Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes (France). Nous verrons que la forme et les acteurs des commémorations du génocide ont évolué ces dernières années, avec pour seule constante une absence de témoignages de la part de rescapés. Cela nous amènera à questionner les conditions d’élaboration et de transmission des mémoires individuelle et familiale de l’événement. Les données et analyses produites ici proviennent d’une thèse en sociologie-anthropologie, (...) dont le terrain d’enquête a été réalisé entre 2014 et 2019. (shrink)

In protest of the COVID-19 lockdowns, crowds gathered in downtown Chicago to “Re-Open Illinois” during May 2020. One sign in particular, held by a white woman in an American flag mask, drew particular attention: “ARBEIT MACHT FREI, JB,” invoking the German phrase hung above Nazi concentration camps to taunt the then governor of Illinois, J.B. Pritzker. Reactions to this anonymous woman were swift, but critics missed that “ARBEIT MACHT FREI, JB” merely represented the front of the sign. When flipped, the (...) sign read “Nice Haircut, Lori,” an antiblack affront to Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot. In this paper, we think this semiotic elision to contend with the inextricability of the motives of these protests and the psychic life of labor. Mobilizing this sign as a vehicle to consider the racialization of work as a grammar of suffering, we ask what the deployment of “work makes you free” reveals about the relationship between American whiteness, labor and antiblackness? To answer this question, we excavate the libidinal investments undergirding the protestor’s sign and its reliance on work as a category that renders the slave unthought. We contend that it is this cathexis that subtends the announcement by some conservative commentators that they would rather end their lives than live in lockdown. We conclude by engaging the anti-police brutality protests that occurred concurrent to the lockdowns, querying how the libidinal drives animating anti-masking may also scaffold the popularity of those movements. (shrink)

În ciuda faptului că nu contribuie la ordonarea cunoașterii actuale despre fascism, ci dimpotrivă, creează confuzie, lucrarea Madeleinei Albright are unele merite incontestabile. Primul dintre ele este capacitatea de a simplifica, într-o naraţiune scurtă, ușor de parcurs, ideile și faptele liderilor fasciști interbelici. Începând cu capitolul al doilea și până la cel de-al cincilea, istorisirea ar putea să fie folosită ca un foarte accesibil, viu și instructiv rezumat istoric pentru studenţi. Cu certitudine, experienţa profesorală a autoarei în învăţământul politic american (...) a ajutat-o să ajungă la acest nivel excepţional de persuasiune didactică. În al doilea rând, focalizându-și descrierile asupra personalităţii liderilor mai mult decât asupra fenomenelor social-economice, efectul imediat al lecturii este acela de a te face să reflectezi la cât de mult contează orgoliul și ambiţiile personale în alegerea drumului spre fascism. Portretele pe care cartea le schiţează sugerează că nu politician fascist modest și delăsător pur și simplu nu poate exista, așadar transmite cititorilor o intuiţie interesantă în sine. De asemenea, deși face destul de multe afirmaţii îndoielnice, Albright nu se abţine să enunţe unele adevăruri pe care politicienii de obicei le ocolesc. De exemplu, admiraţia lui Winston Churchill faţă de membrii cuplului fascist italo-german este ilustrată cu citate atât în capitolul despre ascensiunea lui Mussolini (p. 25), cât și în cel despre dobândirea puterii de către Hitler (p. 52). Este descris destul de clar și felul în care anticomunismul elitei liberale și conservatoare a contribuit decisiv la succesul politic al celor doi. În fine, cartea arată indirect cât de diferită este încercarea de a defini un fascist de aceea de a defini fascismul și că fascismul este mai mult decât suma credinţelor și acţiunilor adepţilor lui. (shrink)

In my paper, I document a “travel” journey of concept formation and its concrete expression in law, which also constituted a literal travel journey across continents. Through poetic-hermeneutical approaches to language, guided by previously existing concepts stemming from experiences of the Holocaust, communism, and African-American feminist analyses of rape as an attack on a racial/ethnic group, a previously invisible domain of the human condition was charted. Throughout history, sexual atrocities have been committed within the context of wars, but their weaponisation (...) as acts of genocide remained unarticulated. This changed in the 1990s with Serbia-Yugoslavia’s genocidal wars against its neighbours (Editorial comment: The author uses the term Serbia-Yugoslavia to refer to the entity that succeeded the breakup of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia after Croatia and Slovenia declared independence on June 25th, 1991. The SFRY up to that point consisted of the six republics Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia (including the so-called autonomous regions of Kosovo and Vojvodina), and Slovenia. Further declarations of independence by Macedonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina on April 27, 1992, left only Serbia and Montenegro who the same day declared themselves to be the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY). In 2003, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was reconstituted as the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro, which existed until Montenegro and Serbia declared their independence (on June 3rd and June 5th, 2006, respectively)). I sketch the genesis of the concept of sexual atrocities as genocide in connection with my personal journey and how it guided legal prosecution of this “new” crime. My own travel-experience began with my association with Asja Armanda, and her discovery of coordinated mass rapes, when she came to the aid of survivors fleeing the Serbian attacks on Croatia, crimes she attempted to bring to international attention to prevent their expansion into Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo. Testimonials reached me in the U.S. as well. I went to Croatia to join Armanda, where we named the crime “sexual atrocities as genocide.” On the basis of this new concept, we filed a lawsuit in New York against Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić, pioneering this crime’s recognition under international law. I conclude with philosophical questions that Putin’s similar genocidal attack on Ukraine raises today. (shrink)

In this paper, we discuss Foucault’s formulation of the notions of biopolitics and biopower against the background of the COVID-19 pandemic and the public reaction to it. For this purpose, we first identify his body of work relevant to the issue of biopolitics, since this issue – unlike the subject areas represented in Foucault’s earlier work – has not been the subject of a separate study. We narrow the focus to the period between 1974 and 1976, when he wrote five (...) crucial texts for understanding biopolitics. The final one – “Right of Death and Power over Life”, the only one with biopolitics as the sole subject – provides what could be understood as Foucault’s definitive interpretation of the genesis and position of biopolitics in modern technologies of power. In the second part of the paper, we analyze the conceptual structure of biopower and the position of discipline and biopolitics within this structure. We then turn to Foucault’s final determination of biopolitics as thanatopolitics to raise the question of whether this whole perspective is dystopian. We find that it is not, because this perspective depends on Foucault’s understanding of power relations, according to which resistance is primary and power is derived. Finally, we argue that his conceptualization of biopolitics cannot be used to justify any of today’s antibiopolitical tendencies. (shrink)

Gender-based forms of administrative violence, such as reproductive violence, are the result of systems designed to enact population-level harms through the production and forcible imposition of colonial systems of gender. Settler statecraft has long relied on the strategic promotion of sexual and reproductive violence. Patterns of reproductive violence adapt and change to align with the enduring goals and evolving needs of settler colonial occupation, dispossession, and containment. The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision to end the constitutional right to abortion in (...) Dobbs v Jackson is but one instance of this larger pattern. We analyze reproductive and obstetric violence and the structural trauma they produce through the lenses of i) historical continuity and ii) the global architectures of neoliberal settler capitalism in order to connect reproductive rights rollbacks in the U.S. with the expansion of reproductive violence across a world connected by colonial globalization. (shrink)

Understanding the unique status of uncommemorated trauma sites requires questioning the practice of referring to such sites solely as "mass graves." Indeed, it is the fact that the people once thrown into the pits have never been buried that generates today's ambivalent memory of the past associated with a given place. The unburied—in grassroots perception—threaten social homeostasis. I compare the findings of anthropologists regarding burial practices with the knowledge provided today by forensic/conflict archaeologists and ethnographers, indicating the special status of (...) sites containing unritualized bodies of victims. This more nuanced approach, differentiating "mass graves" from "burial pits" will allow for more complex readings of contemporary interactions with a site, exhibited by local "implicated" bystander communities. Eastern European Holocaust landscapes especially, may thus be open to renewed scrutiny. (shrink)

This article argues that college-educated women play a crucial part in successful resistance against genocide because they are more likely to forge secure interregional networks and, consequently, better able to shelter victims of mass-persecution than their male peers. We develop our argument through a study of Jewish rescue networks in the Netherlands during the Holocaust. College-educated women were especially valuable during rescue efforts due to their ability to operate as defiant conformists. These women – a small minority who were anything (...) but traditional – could more fully exploit their biographical availability and university networks by concealing interregional resistance work through the strategic performance of traditional feminine roles. Statistical analyses of geocoded rescue networks reveal that rescue networks involving college-educated women were more successful because they funneled Jews across the country without getting exposed. More in-depth exploration of distinct networks identifies three dramaturgical strategies that college-educated women deployed to facilitate clandestine and geographically expansive rescue work: 1) strategic coquetry; 2) strategic self-devaluation; 3) strategic motherhood and wedlock. Taken together, our findings suggest we should focus on how gender and other forms of social status interact to produce the relational and dramaturgical underpinnings of civilian agency in times of emergency. (shrink)

The article explores the transformation of the Ukrainian question within the framework of Russian imperial policy from the mid-17th century to the ongoing war waged by Russia against Ukraine. It reveals the mechanisms of socio-economic and cultural subjugation of the Ukrainian people, the imposition of serfdom, Russification, assimilation, and linguistic genocide. The authors argue that throughout the tsarist, Soviet, and post-Soviet periods, the Russian regime has systematically attempted to erase Ukrainian national identity. Emphasis is placed on the civilizational incompatibility between (...) Ukraine and Russia, especially in light of the current aggression, highlighting the significance of national resistance and Ukraine’s democratic aspirations as key factors in global security. (shrink)

This article discusses how pre-Genocide foreign missionary activity prepared the way for relief and existential support during and after the Armenian Genocide of 1915–1921. Examples are drawn from American, British, and German Protestant missionary organisations, especially the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, the Turkish Missions Aid Society or Bible Lands Missions Aid Society, and the Christlicher Hilfsbund im Orient. These agencies developed missionary and relief methods and transnational networks which were utilised by the Action Chrétienne en Orient and (...) other twentieth-century mission agencies in their work among Armenian communities. (shrink)

Language plays a role in the genocide of the Rohingya people in Myanmar and continues to shape their experiences in displacement, yet their linguistic rights are rarely discussed in relation to their human rights and humanitarian concerns. International human rights standards offer important foundations for conceptualizing the “right to language” and identifying how linguistic rights can be violated both in situ and in displacement. The Rohingya case highlights how language policies are weaponized to oppress unwanted minorities; their outsider status is (...) reinforced by the country’s language education policy and they face additional rights challenges in displacement—including obstacles to effectively accessing humanitarian aid. Moving forward, norms associated with self-determination and language rights offer a conceptual foundation for shifting attitudes and altering negative perceptions of Rohingya identity. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt’s portrayal of Holocaust perpetrators in Eichmann in Jerusalem has long been the object of sharp criticism and widespread distortion. This essay attempts to identify and refute some of the most common and pernicious distortions of Arendt’s views while also presenting a new reading of her understanding of Holocaust perpetrators. A comparison of Arendt’s views to those advanced in recent studies of Nazi perpetrators by David Cesarani, Bettina Stangneth, Michael Thad Allen, and Claudia Koonz reveals that they share many (...) of Arendt’s ideas, even as they claim to have refuted her. Far from being refuted, her interpretation is consistent with the findings of the most recent historical research. (shrink)

The "second-generation indigenization" hypothesis of Huntington's phenomenological observations on totalitarianism in Cold War regime collapse subtly portrayed the realpolitik interest groups' political influences with autocracy disbandment processes. The research puts democratization as the premise and globalization as purpose for the analysis, with the cultural anthropological psychopathology & criminological elements of genocide and crime against humanity explained, underlying some of the Communist Party of China (CPC)’s organizational behaviors. With the regionalism purposes & approaches to multilateralism by People's Republic of China (PRC), (...) the end of democratization is leveraged against the procedural means with power politics of declared “decmocracy”. Between quantitative autocratic controls and realpolitik local-regional interest groups, the connotation of democratization in liberal international globalization has either been used for militant purposes or pushed the landscape of regime collapse into realpolitik local groups and autocratic controls in the process of globalization, with a case study on a local branch of Argricultural Bank of China on supply-side hijacking by the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council (SASAC). With the industrial interests omposed on realpolitik local groups, autocratic regionalism becomes of the "best interest scenario" for the realpolitik local groups with psychopathological spread of the criminological behaviors, by the cyber organizational criminal operations correlated with PRC’s approaches to international relations and multilateralism through bilateral trade & finance in monetary and currency domains, developed into the digitization of economies with criminological schemes in telecommunication, information, and informatics systems. However, the diminishing autonomy & freedom of the territorial population in turn derogated the real economy that wielded the prisoners' dilemma between autocracy and totalitarianism in a negative sum game deterioration cycle, with the censorship practices by the illicit regimes for propaganda controls sustaining "ideology security". In the democratization process of the dictatorial regime, "second-generation indigenization" is thus mapped to the sectarian interests respondent to dictatorial propaganda generation, other than a natural phenomenon out of autonomy and freedom premises in decision theory. The article recaps the coup d'état between Xi Jinping and Bo Xilai before Xi took the autocratic power, and analyzes the human rights situation in the obstacle of democratization and by the coercion mechanism imposed on the mainland China civil society for the militant purposes, with its behaviral spread of censorship to the “internet platforms” in liberal democratic countries by financial interest incentives and avoidance from war threats, whereby military backends in the cyber systems already indicate otherwise. (shrink)

Upon Brexit & Trade War, the research took a supply-side analysis in macroeconomic paradigm for the purpose and cause of the actions. In the geopolitical competitions on crude oil resources between the allied powers & the Russian hegemony, the latter of which has effective control over P. R. China’s multilateral behaviors, the external research induced that trade war, either by complete information in intelligence or an unintended result, was a supply chain attack in prohibiting the antisatellite weapon supplies in the (...) Northern regions of mainland China in relation to Russia. Although no substantive change to international relations, the Trade War’s prohibitive effect on the high frequency trading in the monetary domain of CNY was observed, which had been the source of economic bubbles in the import-export control regime with centralized banking. The paper argues that by realism in economy & military strategy, trade war was ineffective in deterring the covert operations of the People’s Liberation Army by their territorial strategies and raises questions in humanitarianism in conflict situations. Moreover, with gross privacy breaches by mass surveillance in domain politics, totalitarianism with coercions, and counterfeit of drone strikes, traditional methods of threat elimination are rendered less pragmatic apart from the adversaries’ cyber security breaches. With the scientific approach, I offer an ecological paradigm with historic analysis of the Chinese military’s conducts in terms economics. The territorial methods of the PLA are contextualized into the ecological paradigm in regionalism & public administration. Electronic combats of the Chinese regime with the Great Firewall and Denial-of-Service attacks not only contribute to the diminishing natural freedoms of the population, but also transgress the fundamental right to health along with non-traditional nuclear threats to P.R.C. itself. (shrink)

This article offers an argument of genocide denial as an injustice perpetrated not only against direct victims and survivors of genocide, but also against future members of the victim group. In particular, I argue that in cases of persistent and systematic denial, i.e. denialism, it perpetrates an epistemic injustice against them: testimonial oppression. First, I offer an account of testimonial oppression and introduce Kristie Dotson’s notion of testimonial smothering as one form of testimonial oppression, a mechanism of coerced silencing particularly (...) pertinent to genocide denialism. Secondly, I turn to the epistemology of genocide denialism and, using the example of Turkey’s denialism of the Armenian genocide, show how it presents what Linda Martín Alcoff calls a substantive practice of ignorance. Thirdly, I apply these considerations to individual practices of genocide denial and analyse the particular characteristics of testimony on genocide, the speaker vulnerabilities involved and the conditions under which hearers will reliably fail to meet the dependencies of a speaker testifying to genocide. Finally, I explore the harms that testimonial oppression perpetrates on members of the victim group, insofar as it systematically deprives them of epistemic recognition. (shrink)

Genocide remembrance is a complex epistemological/ethical achievement, whereby survivors and descendants give meaning to the past in the quest for both personal-historical and social-historical truth. This paper offers an argument of epistemic injustice specifically as it occurs in relation to practices of (individual and collective) genocide remembrance. In particular, I argue that under conditions of genocide denialism, understood as collective genocide misremembrance and memory distortion, genocide survivors and descendants are confronted with hermeneutical oppression. Drawing on Sue Campbell’s relational, reconstructive account (...) of remembering, I argue that genocide denialism involves disrespectful challenges to memory, which systematically misrecognize rememberers. Adopting the case of Turkey’s denialism of the Armenian genocide, I discuss two interrelated mechanisms through which this can happen: i) through the systematic portrayal of survivors and descendants as vicious rememberers, and ii) through distortions of the very concept of ‘genocide’. Based on this, I show how hermeneutical and testimonial injustice are crucially interrelated when it comes to “contested” memories of historical injustice and the biographical testimony it gives rise to. (shrink)

In this article, I explore the possibility of treating cultural destruction and the destruction of cultural heritage as a genocidal act. My argument proceeds in two stages. I first suggest that we ought to view cultural destruction as a necessary by‐product of genocide and a member of a set of jointly sufficient conditions for genocide. However, to securely establish that cultural destruction and the destruction of cultural heritage ought to be viewed as genocidal acts, we need to additionally show why (...) loss of culture and heritage are significant harms, comparable to other instances of genocide. In light of this, I then propose an account of the harms of cultural destruction that grounds these harms in loss of normative agency and show how destruction of cultural heritage contributes to this. In particular, I argue that cultural heritage can be viewed both as a condition for normative agency and as itself an expression of normative agency. (shrink)

We do two things in this article: develop a novel conception of domination and show how the Kurdish people are dominated in this novel sense. Conceptions of domination are usually distinguished in terms of paradigm cases and whether they are moralised and/or norm- dependent accounts, or neither. By contrast, we argue there is a way of understanding domination in terms of distinct social kinds. Among kinds of domination, like economic or racial or sexual domination, there must be a specifically political (...) kind of domination. Borrowing from Carl Schmitt’s framework of differing degrees of political enmity, we argue political domination is best understood as an existential form of domination whereby one people aim to prevent the independent exis- tence of another people mainly through the uncontrolled power and extreme violence involved in absolute enmity. This conception of exis- tential domination is offered as an example of a non-moralised, norm- independent account of domination. We then argue that the Kurdish people, who are the largest stateless people in the world, suffer existen- tial domination from the absolute enmity expressed towards them by the four nation-states they find themselves dominated within: Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran. (shrink)

Criminology has been reluctant to embrace fictional narratives as a tool for understanding, explaining and reducing crime and social harm. -/- In this philosophical enquiry, McGregor uses examples from films, television, novels and graphic novels to demonstrate the extensive criminological potential of fiction around the world. Building on previous studies of non-fiction narratives, the book is the first to explore the ways criminological fiction provides knowledge of the causes of crime and social harm. -/- For academics, practitioners and students, this (...) is an engaging and thought-provoking critical analysis that establishes a bold new theory of criminological fiction. (shrink)

The member states of the United Nations General Assembly in 2005 unanimously adopted the resolution on Responsibility to Protect (R2P) to save citizens from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. Since adoption, the norm has been invoked in Libya, South Sudan, Yemen, and Syria, nonetheless, the UN refrains to respond to the genocide committed in the Jammu & Kashmir and triggering a greater sense of anxiety. In this context, the present paper elucidates the factors behind the UN (...) failure. It asks why the UN failed to call R2P despite systematic crimes against humanity in Kashmir. What factors or forces preclude the UN to invoke R2P? The paper argues that the inability of the UN to invoke R2P is a consequence of systemic and domestic factors. The Indo-US strategic partnership, materialism, and New Delhi’s influence in the international system are obstructing the UN’s ability to play a decisive role. Meanwhile, the economic and military potential of India and its regional influence forbid the international community to dissuade India not to commit genocide in Jammu & Kashmir. So the high politics of materialism and national interests override the norm of human rights and humanity. (shrink)