IAGS2017 Session 1

Day 1, 10 July 1045-1215 Session 1

Genocide Prevention I

Location W332, Level 3, Forgan Smith
Chair Jess Gifkins; Leeds Beckett University
Exploring Resilience to Genocide
Authors Deborah Mayersen, University of Wollongong
Abstract When Leo Kuper penned Genocide, one of the foundational texts within the field of genocide studies, he did not focus exclusively on instances of genocide. In his quest to understand its roots, and the factors that might prevent it, he also examined a number of cases in which a demonstrable risk of genocide was averted. By and large, however, very few researchers have adopted this approach. The vast majority of scholarship exploring the causes of genocide does so through examining the antecedents of paradigmatic instances, such as the Holocaust. In this paper, I consider the limitations of utilising only case studies of genocide for understanding how risk can culminate in genocide. In these cases risk factors dominated, while factors promoting resilience were inoperable or ineffective. Historical examples of resilience to genocide, by contrast, offer insights into factors that have previously been effective in arresting or reducing risk of genocide. Furthermore, as knowledge from genocide studies is increasingly being used to inform genocide prevention, exploring historical case studies of resilience may lead to identifying powerful new preventive tools. In this paper I consider a new theoretical approach to understanding risk of genocide, and a methodological approach that incorporates non-genocidal case studies. I offer some preliminary insights into what can be learned from researching historical instances of resilience to genocide.
Biography Dr Deborah Mayersen is an historian, based at the University of Wollongong, Australia. Her research expertise is in comparative genocide studies, including the Armenian genocide, Rwandan genocide and genocide prevention. Her most recent publications include On the Path to Genocide: Armenia and Rwanda Reexamined (Berghahn Books, 2014/6), and the edited volumes The United Nations and Genocide (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and Genocide and Mass Atrocities in Asia: Legacies and Prevention (with Annie Pohlman, Routledge, 2013).
Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention: Overcoming the Gap Between Research and Practice
Authors Ernesto Verdeja, University of Notre Dame
Abstract Over the past two decades, a number of governments, international organizations, and nongovernmental organizations have sought more detailed and accurate models of mass atrocity prediction and assessment. This paper examines the development of the scholarship-policy nexus on early warning and risk assessment models. Risk assessment (RA) concerns a country’s long-term structural conditions (regime type, state-led discrimination, etc.) that determine overall risk for atrocities. Early warning (EW) focuses on short/midterm dynamics that can serve as violence triggers and restraints. Part I sketches the historical development of RA and EW models and discusses several major policy-relevant approaches rooted in current scholarship, including (among others) the Political Instability Task Force, the UN’s Framework of Analysis for Atrocity Crimes, the Early Warning Project, and the Continental Early Warning System of the African Union. Part II presents the findings of current research on prediction. Part III sketches several ways in which scholarship is translated and adopted into policy-oriented work. This analysis examines the patterns of interaction and exchange between scholars and practitioners by investigating institutional and informal mechanisms (e.g., “focal point” training), types of actors, and pre-existing and self-reinforcing networks of knowledge (epistemic communities). Part IV discusses several strengths and limitations in the scholarship-policy nexus, and draws on interviews with scholars as well as policy analysts and decision-makers in government, international organizations, and nongovernmental organizations.
Biography Ernesto Verdeja is Associate Professor of Political Science and Peace Studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame. He is also the Executive Director of the Institute for the Study of Genocide, a non-profit organization founded in 1982 to promote research and policy analysis on the causes and prevention of genocide and political violence. Verdeja is the author of Unchopping a Tree: Reconciliation in the Aftermath of Political Violence and coeditor of Globalization, Social Movements, and Peacebuilding; Responding to Genocide: The Politics of International Action; and Genocide Matters: Ongoing Issues and Emerging Perspectives. He has also published articles on the causes of genocide, mass atrocity prevention, transitional justice and the politics of reconciliation. He has worked or consulted on human rights with a number of nongovernmental organizations and US government agencies, and served two terms on the board of the International Association of Genocide Scholars.
Causal Model of Genocide Prevention
Authors Mark Kielsgard, City University of Hong Kong
Abstract Genocide prevention is perhaps the most complex issue in genocide studies and the most difficult to accomplish. Prevention must overcome the most prodigious political and socio-economic barriers to international intervention. It requires overwhelmingly compelling evidence a priori and therefore necessitates a rigorous model of prediction. Lemkin arguably allowed for common causative elements to genocide. Stanton provides a processual model through which looming genocide may be predicted but is not rigorous enough to compel international support. Some have called for an elemental model in predicting genocide which strictly adheres to the elements of the legal definition under international law but it provides an impossible framework as it creates barriers to intervention and effectively fails to intercede before genocide occurs. Another model is the causal model. This approach identifies necessary ideological preconditions to genocide and incorporates a methodology that accounts for trends in decision-making and conditioning factors to more credibly predict the likelihood of oncoming atrocity. The necessary preconditions are an unambiguous exclusionary national identity, a state of national emergency and perceived impunity. Conditioning factors and trends in decision-making include aggravating factors (i.e., history of discrimination, shifts in domestic power paradigms, armed conflicts, and political economy) and most of the features discussed in the processual model. Thus, the causal model works in tandem with the processual model. Yet the distinction between the two approaches sometimes lead to differing conclusions, such as in the risk assessment in the People’s Republic of China, and provide a more compelling and rigorous risk assessment model.
Biography Dr. Mark D. Kielsgard is a former trial lawyer from the USA; he is currently an Assistant Professor at City University of Hong Kong School of Law and is a member of the Center for Chinese and Comparative Law. He teaches criminal law, international criminal law, human rights law and the law of evidence. Dr. Kielsgard publishes in the area of international, comparative and domestic criminal law and human rights. He has published, inter alia, in genocide studies and recently published a monograph entitled “Responding to Modern Genocide: at the confluence of law and politics.”

Genocide in Their Best Interests

Location W349, Level 3, Forgan Smith
Chair Kirril Shields; University of Queensland
Child Removal: Genocide with Good Intent?
Authors Colin Tatz, Australian National University
Abstract The UN Genocide Convention was born out of the vortex of World War II. The definition of genocide is the ‘intent to destroy’ a racial, ethnic, national or religious group by any one of five specific acts, including the forcible removal of children. Intent is the key to the crime. We assume that the intent must be male fides, with a malevolent state of mind. But neither the formal definition nor any court has elaborated on the nature of the intent. Michael Storey, a UNSW legal scholar and others, including me, argue that in the absence of a qualifier, intent can be bona fides, with good faith and intent or alleged good faith — and that is the defence of those who removed North American native children for twelve-year spells of compulsory boarding schools, and those who ‘stole’ Aboriginal children. It was said by those who wrote the policies and those who did the removing that all this was done ‘in their best interests’. Such removal is legally criminal. This raises the political question of whether there can be ‘good perpetrators’ of genocide?
Biography Colin Tatz is visiting professor of Politics and International Relations at ANU, Canberra. He writes and teaches about comparative race politics, Holocaust and genocide studies, Aboriginal affairs, migration, youth suicide, and sports history. He has co-edited four volumes of Genocide Perspectives, is solo author of two works and co-author of The Magnitude of Genocide (2016).
Dispositions of Destruction: Genocidal Intent and Symbolic Violence in North American Indigenous Boarding/Residential Schools
Authors Andrew Woolford, University of Manitoba
Abstract This presentation troubles legal notions of intent by examining the complex layers of conscious and predisposed action that take place within relations of genocide. To illustrate by focusing on Indigenous boarding/residential schools in Canada and the US, I note how specific acts of perceived kindness within the day-to-day life of these schools served to advance group destruction within a broader project of forced assimilation. Examples of acts of symbolic violence -- gifts that are not gifts at all -- include how children’s desires for excitement or material goods were used to lure them toward so-called civilization and the ways in which warm relations occasionally formed between teachers and students also served to sever bonds between Indigenous children and their parents and communities. None of this is to suggest that there is not ample evidence of rampant school-based physical and sexual violence that also contributed to cultural destruction. Rather, the goal of this paper is to highlight how perceived acts of kindness reinforced the destructive goals of the schools; in short, such dispositions of destruction were often deployed, encouraged, or simply permitted as part of a larger effort to “kill the Indian and save the man”.
Biography Andrew Woolford is professor of sociology at the University of Manitoba and president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars. He is author of ‘This Benevolent Experiment’: Indigenous Boarding Schools, Genocide and Redress in the United States and Canada (2015, co-published by University of Nebraska Press and University of Manitoba Press). He is co-editor of Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America (2014, Duke) and The Idea of a Human Rights Museum (2015, University of Manitoba Press). He also co-edited (with Jeff Benvenuto) a 2015 special issue of the Journal of Genocide Research on “Colonial Genocide in Canada”. He is currently working on two community-based research projects with residential school Survivors to help commemorate their experiences and enhance societal empathy.

The Holocaust Across Europe

Location W431, Level 4, Forgan Smith
Chair Donna-Lee Frieze; Deakin University
Defiance and Protest: Forgotten Jewish resistance in Nazi Germany
Authors Wolf Gruner, University of Southern California, Los Angeles
Abstract Resistance during the Holocaust is still understood by most scholars as organized or armed group activities that rarely occurred during the Holocaust. Yet, if we apply a new broader definition of Jewish resistance that includes individual acts, an investigation at the micro level of the Third Reich society quickly challenges the common notion of the Jews as passive victims. Based on this new approach and an entirely new set of sources, namely barely touched local files from Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Munich, Leipzig and other cities, as well as survivor testimonies of the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, it can, however, be demonstrated that German Jews performed many individual acts of defiance and even expressed public protest against Nazi persecution, starting in 1933, but up to well into the war. The comparative micro-historical approach allows us to see how Jews developed changing response strategies: First, against Nazi propaganda and exclusionary economic measures, next against violent local attacks and municipal restrictions, later against the nationwide November pogrom and radical segregationist laws, and finally against forced labor and deportation. That fact that German Jews protested in public and defied many Nazi measures, obliterates the common picture of the passivity of the persecuted. Instead, this research gives back agency to ordinary German Jews in extraordinary circumstances and does alter dramatically our understanding how the Jewish population reacted towards Nazi oppression. This research illuminates our understanding of what enables people to resist genocide and thus contributes to the study of prevention of genocide in general.
Biography Wolf Gruner is Professor of History and holds the Shapell-Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles since 2008 and is the Founding Director of the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research since 2014. He is the author of ten books on the Holocaust, among them “Jewish Forced Labor under the Nazis. Economic Needs and Nazi Racial Aims”, with Cambridge UP (paperback 2008), as well as two co-edited books, and 60 academic articles and book chapters. Gruner also published a book on the discrimination against the indigenous population in post-colonial Bolivia: „Parias de la Patria“. El mito de la liberación de los indígenas en la República de Bolivia 1825-1890”, Plural Editores, Bolivia 2015. Most recently, he published a book on the Persecution of the Jews in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and their responses 1933-45 (Wallstein, Goettingen, Germany, 2016).
Legal Theft of Property Rights: The Gradual Hellenization of Jewish-Owned Businesses, 1937-1943
Authors Orly Meron, Bar-Ilan University
Abstract This proposed lecture examines the process whereby Jewish-owned businesses in northern Greece—home to the largest segment of the Greek Jewish community (about 80 percent)—were Hellenized, in particular in the densely-populated metropolis of Macedonian Salonika. Part of a long-term study dedicated to painting a picture of Salonika’s Jewish interbellum business activities, it traces Jewish-owned businesses from their establishment to their final transfer into Greek hands using a range of unpublished archival sources. In parallel with the deportation of the Jewish owners to the concentration camps to their extermination, the Aryanization policy conducted under the guise of the “legal” transfer of Jewish businesses under the German occupying regime into Greek possession took the form of an ostensibly lawful process. This process started already during the late 1930s. As part of these events, large-scale Greek businesses appealed to the Jewish-owned Bank Amar for large credit and voluntary mergers that included Jewish-owned businesses prepared Greek partners to the owners to be in 1943.Thus actually these events stripped Jewish businessmen of their property rights. The documentation analyzed sheds new light on the eve of the destruction of Jewish businesses, enabling detailed information of the way in which they met their end to emerge.
Biography Orly C. Meron is Senior Lecturer and Head of the Interdisciplinary Department for Social Sciences at Bar-Ilan University, Israel. She is the author of Jewish Entrepreneurship in Salonica, 1912–1940: An Ethnic Economy in Transition (Sussex Academic Press, 2011/2013).
Civilian Participation in Anti-Jewish Violence within Romania’s Borderlands Post-July 1941
Authors Mihai Poliec, Clark University
Abstract In my paper I examine the forms civilian complicity has taken in Bukovina and Bessarabia after July 1941, when the two territories were re-annexed by Romania from the Soviet Union. I am looking at the role bystanders played in the perpetration of violence by military authorities against the local Jewish population. In addition, I set out to identify both the objective and subjective factors that prompted the local population to assist in the implementation of anti-Jewish measures by the army and gendarmerie, or initiate independent acts of violence. The methodological questions structuring my research pertain to the identity of the civilian accomplices, the context of their involvement in the crimes and the motivational complexity underlying their actions. In pursuit of a more accurate reconstruction of this complex history, I make use of both wartime and post-war materials. The primary sources I utilize range from official army reports and telegrams, to confidential military correspondence, to witness and survivor testimonies, and postwar trials records. Scholars such as Jean Ancel, Radu Ioanid and Vladimir Solonari, have identified the main perpetrators of the Romanian Holocaust and documented to a limited extent the bystanders’ role. Diana Dumitru examined the phenomenon of collaboration in Bessarabia and Transnistria. My project comes to systematically analyze and expand the knowledge available on the mindsets, patterns of involvement and motivations of bystanders in the two regions, by integrating additional case studies and novel research data for each region separately and in comparison to one another.
Biography Mihai Poliec is a sixth year PhD Candidate in Holocaust History at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts and a Claims Conference “Saul Kagan” Fellow in Advanced Shoah Studies. Poliec earned a Bachelor’s in Psychology and a Master’s in Judaic Studies from the University of Bucharest. He had also studied Judaism and the Holocaust in Israel, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and in Sweden, at Paideia: The European Institute for Jewish Studies.

International Law and Transitional Justice

Location W426, Level 4, Forgan Smith
Chair Olivera Simic; Griffith University
"Vertical Inconsistency” of International Sentencing: Case Study of Bosnia and Rwanda
Authors Barbora Hola, VU University Amsterdam
Abstract Both international and domestic courts have prosecuted perpetrators of international crimes committed during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and the armed conflict in Bosnia in the early 1990’s. Few of “the most responsible” individuals have been tried at the international level by the ICTY and ICTR, while the vast majority of perpetrators have been dealt with by domestic courts. The simultaneous operating of these different legal systems – with different legal traditions and differing dogmatic underpinnings - has generated widely reported incidents of “vertical inconsistency” of international sentencing. A notorious example of the public execution of twenty-two individuals convicted of genocide and sentenced to death by Rwandan criminal courts in the late 1990s is often contrasted to much more lenient sentences and VIP treatment of “those most responsible” tried at the ICTR. This and similar anecdotes feed public imagination and are used as another critique against the the ICTY and ICTR in Bosnia and Rwanda, respectively. However, these claims are largely based on assumptions and no systematic empirical inquiry of sentencing of perpetrators of international crimes committed during the Rwanda genocide and during the Bosnian war has ever been conducted. This paper will present preliminary findings of an original, empirical study comparing sentencing of international crimes committed during the genocide in Rwanda and the armed conflict in Bosnia and will provide an empirical insights into the functioning of the pluralist system of international criminal justice.
Biography Barbora Hola works as Senior Researcher at the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement (NSCR) and asAssistant Professor at the Department of Criminal Law and Criminology at VU University of Amsterdam. She has an interdisciplinary focus and studies transitional justice after atrocities, in particular (international) criminal trials, sentencing of international crimes, enforcement of internationalsentences, rehabilitation of war criminals and life after trial at international criminal tribunals. Besides her research and teaching in the Master’s programme International Crimes and Criminology, Barbora is a co-director of the Center for International Criminal Justice, a knowledge centre dedicated to interdisciplinary studies of mass atrocity crimes and international criminal justice (www.cicj.org) and a co-chair of the European Criminology Group on Atrocity Crimes and Transitional Justice (https://ecactj.org).
Ending Impunity and Prevention of Atrocity Crimes: Does Transitional Justice Reduce Violence in Post-Conflict Societies?
Authors Susanne Karstedt, School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Griffith University
Abstract Accountability for past atrocity crimes is part of the international agenda to build violence-resilient societies. By ending impunity for perpetrators, transitional justice (TJ) mechanisms, in particular criminal trials, should deter prospective perpetrators in the future, and thus contribute to the security of citizens. What if at all, does accountability for past atrocities contribute to improving security in post-conflict societies by reducing violence and atrocities, and strengthening institutions that constrain violence like the rule of law? Contemporary TJ operates in the aftermath of “multi-polar “and “horizontal” violence, where complex conflicts pose major challenges to TJ procedures, as to the prevention of future atrocities. This paper is based on a (quantitative) data set of 63 (post)conflict societies from 1976 to 2012, including data on type of conflict, the involvement of different actors, the presence of different TJ mechanisms (trials, truth commissions, amnesties) in the aftermath of the conflict, and different types of violence, in particular state violence. The paper explores with time-related quantitative methods, whether the presence (or absence) of a TJ mechanism – all combined as well as specific mechanisms – is followed by a significant decrease of overall and state violence, and an improvement of institutional capacity and the rule of law up to ten years after the start of the TJ process. In addition contextual characteristics are explored as to the sequencing of TJ mechanisms (before/ after end of conflict), state fragility and ethnic conflict. The results suggest that TJ mechanisms contribute to preventing atrocities even after complex conflicts.
Biography Susanne Karstedt is a Professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Griffith University since 2015; before she held Chairs in Criminology at the School of Law, University of Leeds, and Keele University, UK. Her field of research is comparative and international criminology, and she has researched and written widely on mass atrocities, state crime, and transitional justice. Historical work covers the Nuremberg Trials and other trials in post-war Germany, public opinion and collective memories, and the lives and careers of sentenced Nazi war criminals after punishment. Recent work includes contemporary TJ processes and their impact in complex conflicts; the role of emotions in TJ processes, and perpetrators in TJ processes. She is presently working on using the evidence-base of criminology for prevention of and intervention in mass atrocities.
The Legal Status of the Shared Responsibility to Protect
Authors Luke Glanville, Australian National University
Abstract This paper clarifies the current legal status of the idea that bystander states have a shared responsibility to protect populations from genocide and other mass atrocities when host states fail to do so. It notes that, while the legal force of key international statements on the ‘responsibility to protect’ principle may be weak at best, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Law Commission (ILC) have offered bold declarations in recent years which do point towards the gradual development of legal duties for extraterritorial protection. It then considers the what, if anything, the ICJ and ILC have to say about how these legal duties should be distributed and shared among various states and international organizations in a given case.
Biography Dr Luke Glanville is a fellow in the Department of International Relations at the Australian National University. He is the author of Sovereignty and the Responsibility to Protect: A New History (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2014) as well as articles in journals including International Studies Quarterly, European Journal of International Relations, and Journal of Genocide Research. Luke is co-editor of the quarterly journal, Global Responsibility to Protect.

Digital Art Installation

Location Moot Court W237, Level 2, Forgan Smith
Beyond Genocide: Silent Power Point Exhibition
Authors Amy Fagin, Beyond Genocide Centre for Prevention
Abstract This independent looping silent power point will provide an introduction to the series “Beyond Genocide”, a series of illuminated manuscripts narrating a documentary treatise of genocides and mass atrocity crimes around the globe. The power point includes overview of the series and case by case visual art experience of the individual compositions within the series. Details and meanings discovered by the artist will be presented as a visual “docent” by describing what and how certain details support the historical basis of the atrocity crime, and narrate the composition of the illumination. All completed illuminations from the emerging series will be included. Considerations regarding narratives of history and the “truths” that they represent are contextualized for individual observation and contemplation. This presentation creates a deeply contemplative experience on the trajectory and legacy of mass atrocity across time and space. The session loops independently and is recommended to be hosted in a darkened “screening room” where individuals can enter or leave independently. Hours of operation can be outlined in the schedule.
Biography Amy Fagin is a U.S. based visual artist specializing in the traditional art form of manuscript illumination. Her body of work represents a meta-modernist approach to the materials, techniques and theoretical principals used in manuscript illumination for contemporary consideration. She is author of Beyond Genocide; an emerging series of illuminations narrating a visual documentary arts perspective on global incidents of genocide and mass violence. Ms. Fagin is also an independent scholar in genocide studies and conducts research / seminars, lectures, workshops and advisory work on global initiatives of memory and memorialization through individual and collective arts expression and the museum experience. She has contributed expertise in international consultative events and currently serves on the advisory board of the International Association of Genocide Scholars. She regularly publishes editorials, reviews and essays on genocide, memory, memorialization, art and 21st century expression and education.