Explorations into modernity, colonialism and genocide: Revisiting the past in the present (original) (raw)
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Colonial Dynamics of Genocide: Imperialism, Identity and Mass Violence
Conventional definitions of genocide, in particular the United Nations Convention standard, are state-oriented and primordialist. Genocide is seen primarily as the outcome of extremist ideology linked to undemocratic modern bureaucratic nationstates, whose homogenizing structures generate conflict with pre-existing minority groups. The UN definition of genocide imposes unwarranted politicized constraints on Lemkin’s wider original sociological conceptualization of genocide as a colonial form. For Lemkin, perpetrators of genocide could be states as well as decentralized and dispersed groups such as settler-colonists. The need for a return to Lemkin’s Historical Sociological theory of genocide, now increasingly recognized among genocide scholars, demonstrates not merely that specific cases of European imperial violence can potentially be understood as genocidal, but that this is precisely because genocide can best be understood as an extreme form of colonization. A strong case has now been made by several scholars that while this does not mean that all colonialism is genocidal, it is unequivocally clear that genocides are comprised of distinctively colonial dynamics. These colonial dynamics emerge due to the radicalisation of identity politics in the context of historically-specific sociopolitical contestations leading to major social crises, which drive the construction of new bifurcated “inside” and “outside” group identities. This speaks to the need for a new research agenda in Genocide Studies, focusing specifically on the dynamics that link socio-political crisis with exclusionary identity constructions and regressive political programmes which legitimize mass violence. By identifying how and when social crises can lead to the ‘Otherization’ of communities, it may become possible to develop more robust early warning systems for genocide prevention.
Genocide and Violence: An Introduction.
Genocidal Violence, 2023
Genocide is, in many ways, a dogmatic concept. It has, therefore, recently been criticized as too narrow or limited because it excludes numerous victim groups and their respective genocide-related identities not covered by the definition of the UN Genocide Convention (1948). This is to be considered "an unprecedented progressive step in the history of international law" but requires adjustments and a broadened scope to include so far unprotected victim groups. Furthermore, especially with regard to Germany, discussions and reflections about genocide are very much centered on the experience of the Holocaust. The relationship between colonialism and National Socialism was already addressed by contemporaries such as Raphael Lemkin, Hannah Arendt, and Aimé Césaire. After the turn of the millennium, the question has been raised in a historiographical context. Jürgen Zimmerer and others have addressed connections, structural parallels, and direct continuities from European colonialism and imperialism to the Holocaust, especially with regard to the German genocide against the Herero and Nama in what was then German Southwest Africa in 1904-1908. ...
Genocide: on the edge of an act called mass murder
International Politics Reviews
The Problems of Genocide points to a displace site of globalism, namely globalised mass murders. The book suggests two parallel stories, namely the unfolding of the theme of mass murders in global politics in the twentieth century and the ways race has become integrated with the phenomenon of modern liberal nations. The question of mass murders as a problem for global governance became acute only when mass murder created a crisis or took place in the context of a crisis. The book presents a detailed historical account of the context in which genocide emerges as a crucial legal concept to account for the large scale killings of populations in our time. Yet, as the book shows, the concept has remained highly problematic owing to the deeply hierarchised notion of mass murders.
In Dan Stone, ed., The Historiography of Genocide (Houndmills: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008), 156-193.
The post-9/11 US imperial turn is not a reversion to empire, but rather a global strategy of violence in response to a crisis of empire. Orthodox IR theory is unable to grasp this because it largely projects empire and imperial violence, as inexplicable pathologies diverging from geopolitical realities - when it is in fact orthodox IR, not imperialism, which is thus diverging. Political Marxist theory offers the conceptual tools to mobilise a social theory capable of interrogating the historically-specific socio-political relations by which imperial geopolitical orders are constituted and transformed in the context of strategic violence. Integrating this with Raphael Lemkin's sociological conceptualization of the interconnections between colonization, inter-communal contestations and genocide, makes it possible to distinguish the differential dynamics of mass violence in different empires based on their distinctive constitutive social relations, exemplified in precapitalist Spain and capitalist England. It also allows for the re-integration of the central role of violence in the formation and re-consolidation of empires at points of crisis. This revised historical sociology of empires and imperial violence clarifies the evolution of the postwar US liberal imperial system, including the theorization of the post-9/11 'War on Terror' as a radicalized response to a global systemic crisis in the US empire's constitutive social relations, exemplified in the projected depletion of hydrocarbon energy reserves in predominantly Muslim peripheries. This reveals and explains concurrent tendentially genocidal escalatory logics of Othering targeted principally against Muslim communities.
The Violent Destruction of Community during the ‘Century of Genocide’
European History Quarterly, 2005
Much of the early criticism of colonial genocide and genocidal practices elsewhere came from Marxists such as August Bebel, Antonio Gramsci and Ho Chi Minh. The German Left were strong critics of the colonial policy that led to the genocide against the Nama and Herero peoples. When Marxist regimes came to power after the First and Second World Wars, they initiated population politics which were highly detrimental to historical ethnic communities. This has led to a serious crisis of legitimacy on the Left. Clearly, the legacy of debates of the early inter-nationalists is still relevant as we discuss genocide as both a historical and contemporary phenomenon, but it is also essential that we use the full range of new analytical approaches as well as the comparative approach to understand and even begin to prevent this phenomenon.