Search results for ""Author Professor Elisa von Joeden-Forgey""

The preamble to the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide recognizes “that at all periods of history genocide has inflicted great losses on humanity”. Studies of the phenomenon of genocide have, however, tended to concentrate on the modern world. The original contributions in this volume turn the focus to the question of genocide and mass violence in the ancient world, with a particular emphasis on the worlds of Greece, Rome and the Near East. This volume presents a range of views on the challenges of applying the modern concept of “genocide” to an ancient context. It also considers the causes, motivations, and justifications of ancient mass violence, as well as contemporary responses to, and critiques of, such violence, along with how mass violence was represented and remembered in ancient literature and iconography. In addition, chapters analyse what drove the perpetrators of mass violence, and the processes of victimization, as well as the consequences of mass violence and ravaging warfare, including in particular mass enslavement and sexual violence.

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Historical studies of genocide in the 20th century trace the roots back to the sociopolitical, economic, and cultural developments of the early modern period. From globalization to urbanization, to imperialism, state formation and homogenization, from religious warfare to enlightenment, to racism: many factors connected with genocide first emerged or vastly developed between the 15th and 18th centuries. While the early modern period did not have a crime of genocide, it possessed its own legal system which contemplated the rightful destruction of whole peoples, and a political culture that sanctioned the use of mass violence. As a result, early modern genocide has been denied or blurred as a regrettable side effect of the global circulation of ideas, goods, and peoples, and the creation of new societies, cultures, and languages arising from it. This collection looks at the different genocides which unfolded around the globe, emphasizing its gendered dimension and its disproportionate and enduring impact on indigenous populations. Although European imperialism and homogenization play a central role, it aims more widely to cover the principal agents, victims and rationale for genocide in the early modern world. As a whole, this volume aims at fostering the debate on the early modern history of genocide, not as an insulated or secondary subject, but as a central issue of the era with profound implications for our own.

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The cry of “never again” reverberated around the world in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Yet despite the unprecedented horrors of the Shoah, and the subsequent creation of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the frequency of genocide intensified in the post-Holocaust period. Since 1945 there have been genocides or mass killings in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), East Timor, Indonesia, Guatemala, Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur, Iraq, and elsewhere. This volume examines the cultural history of genocide in the modern world. It focuses on the period from the end of the Second World War to the present day. The volume examines not only the many genocides that have occurred during this period, but the beliefs and actions that led to them, the local and international responses, and the changing way in which genocide has been understood. It chronicles key developments, including the creation of international legal and political mechanisms to address genocide. It also considers creative and artistic responses to genocide, and how genocide is remembered and memorialized in the modern world. Finally, it examines the issue of genocide prevention, and the prospects for a more positive future.

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The long 19th century, approximately 1750 to 1918, was one of significant existential change for peoples across the globe. The beginning of this period saw the expansion of empires, and shortly thereafter, the Euro-American Enlightenment brought about calls for revolutions and the “rights of man”. The events and ideas made way for empire and the creation of the nation-state. European states primarily concentrated their aggressive colonization in the Global South, bringing mostly white metropolitans and settlers into intimate contact with diverse African, Asian, and American populations. The inherent violence of imperialism eventually ushered in flashpoints of conflict, as well as indentured servitude, racial segregation, ecological destruction, and genocide throughout Europe’s overseas empires. While communal destruction functioned as a central element of 19th-century genocides, colonial governments also used other methods to destroy indigenous life, such as forced assimilation, language adoption, religious instruction, and economic subjugation. Memories of these atrocities have since contributed both to systemic violence in subsequent decades, and to education about these events in the hope of genocide prevention. Yet for all of the violence, a spirit of humanitarianism developed alongside these vile actions that tried to reverse the policies of states and help the aggrieved.

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The period between the two World Wars was characterized by an acceleration of mass violence across the world. Developments in technology, communications, ideology, global political and economic integration, and the organization of society greatly expanded the power and reach of states while radicalizing ideologies of domination and control. Two major 20th-century genocides, the Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire and the Nazi Holocaust of European Jews, are the terrible bookends of this period; they were preceded and informed by colonial genocides, such as the genocide of Herero and Nama peoples in German South West Africa from 1904 -1914, and by ongoing genocidal processes, especially in settler colonies such as the United States, Canada, and Australia, in the renewed Russian empire under the USSR after 1917, and in the expanding Japanese empire between the wars. The essays in this volume examine the dynamics of genocide during this period, when states could draw on new technologies, new identities, and new global ideologies of control to amplify the speed, size, and impact of their destructive impulses towards unwanted populations. The chapters demonstrate the lasting consequences of genocidal processes on the world today, not simply for survivor communities and survivor diasporas, but also on the forms of organizing the world, the concepts of power, and the particular existential crises that we as a species have yet to address and transform.

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The period covered by this volume, roughly 800-1400, considers genocidal massacres and actions within the context of the pre-modern state, a time when the term “genocide” did not yet exist. In considering rhetoric, discrimination, and political and legal marginalization that impacted the lives of particular peoples, the volume takes as its premise that genocidal practices and massacres can occur when social dynamism and political change challenges the identity of a community. The case studies analysed in the individual chapters implicitly or explicitly draw upon the frameworks of comparative genocide scholars to explore genocidal massacres in the Middle Ages as localized phenomenon, even if these isolated outbursts do not graph onto the modern definition of genocide perfectly. Each contribution considers genocide as caused by settling national, religious, and ethnic differences; genocide as designed to enforce or fulfil an ideology; and genocide as designed to colonize. Collectively the essays move beyond the number of people killed to consider the steps taken against a people to erase them from the social and cultural fabric of society. It is hoped that this volume encourages us to think both about the legal structures of genocide but also about how the term can be more inclusive and expansive.

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