Atrocity

Call for Papers:

"The Aesthetics of Trauma, Horror, Atrocity, and the Apocalyptic"

Western culture is riven with powerful manifestations of violence - both actual and fictive. What is the relationship between the two? On one hand the most violent episodes of our times seem to be replicated in our cultural artefacts, on the other, the aggression we see in the Hollywood action film amplifies violence to the point that it seems unreal and cartoonish. Do such cultural artefacts desensitise us to violence or do they instead relieve or absorb the traumatic experiences of our times? Does the rise of the apocalyptic war film, and our fascination with the vitrine of human brutality paraded in the forensic investigation, the horror or blockbuster suspense films, explain our inertia in the face continuing global conflict, including the ongoing eruption of genocide around the world from Rwanda to Bosnia?

Intellectual Background:

This day is being organised by Dr Frances Di Lauro (Writing Hub, University of Sydney) and Dr Christopher Hartney (Studies in Religion, University of Sydney) as part of an ARC grant application that will be based on a body of films contained amongst the collections the Mu-Meson Film Archive in Annandale. Here archivists Jamie and Aspasia Leonarder curate a collection of Cold-War-framed short films that were fashioned from Christian perspectives. These films were produced from the 1950s through to the 1980s and broadcast during those years to Christian and other community groups. The films were shaped by aesthetics that exploited horror, anxiety, and the possibility or inevitability of personal tragedy to address wider simmering anxieties of world annihilation. This suite of fears was then nestled against the backdrop of trauma, holocaust, genocide and apocalyptic ferment that the century had generated.

Professor Vras Karalis, will deliver the keynote address. Professor Karalis is the author of several books on film and editor of Power, judgment and political evil: in conversation with Hannah Arendt. Surry: Ashgate, 2010.

We are eager for our colleagues and fellow academics to share with us a day in which we attempt to unpick the complexities of these emotional currents, and the role of material and cultural artefacts, film, literature, and philosophical attitudes that dealt with or perpetuate these dark legacies of the twentieth century into the twenty-first.   

It is hoped papers presented on the day will be published as an edited collection.

Few events in the history of the world have aroused the passions of the decent, the fair, the peaceful, and the just as much as the brutal terror bombing attack on the Basque town of Gernika. From the decision of the fascist forces to attack the open city, to the horror of the bombing, to its aftermath, this short history tells the terrible events that colored not only the modern history of the Basques, but of all of humanity as it ushered in a new age of warfare.

In describing the concept, organization, and reception of an exhibition on shoes for bound feet at the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto, this essay ponders the perils of telling stories about footbinding. The narratives perpetuated by missionaries and feminists are so successful in dramatizing the violence and pain that a visceral recoil has become the predominant mode of identifying with the subject.

""In the language of most superior jurisdictions in the end of the Middle Ages, the concept of enormitas included the most serious breaches of the legitimate order. It is suggested here that this concept was created during the 12th century in the practice of papal government and ecclesiastical reform. First, around 1130-1150, an « enormity » refered to a simple canonical irregularity without indicating any level of seriousness. From 1150-1160 on, the meaning changed. « Enormity » started to denote a blend of breach of rules or law, sin or stain and potentially radical subversion of the christian order. Although it remained typical of the ecclesiastical sphere, this new concept quickly spread broadly in the secular world, with a sense that was very similar to that of roman « atrocity » but had specific features. The enormitas of the 13th and 14th centuries was structurally unstable and protean. The perimeter of its field as a legal definition was variable, just as were its procedural implications. In many cases, the concept tended to embrace the whole criminal sphere (or « grand criminel », as it was called in France). Its use developed in concomitance with the rise of inquisitorial or « extraordinary » procedures, which were defined by an unprecedented expansion of the arbitrium judicis and therefore by situations of more or less generalized exceptionality with regard to traditional rules. While contributing to delimit the criminal sphere, enormitas thus created a continuum between the restricted field of crime of lese-majesty and that of ordinary crimes.


Dans le langage de la plupart des juridictions supérieures d’Occident à la fin du Moyen Âge, la catégorie de l’enormitas recouvrait les plus graves atteintes à l’ordre légitime. On montre ici que cette catégorie a été élaborée au XIIe siècle dans la pratique du gouvernement pontifical et de la réforme ecclésiastique. En premier lieu, dans les années 1130-1150, une « énormité » désigna une simple irrégularité canonique, sans référence à un quelconque degré de gravité. À partir des années 1150-1160, le contenu de la notion évolua. Elle commença à qualifier – et qualifia dès lors jusqu’à la fin du Moyen Âge et bien au-delà – un mixte d’infraction aux règles ou à la loi, de péché ou souillure et de subversion potentiellement radicale de l’ordre chrétien. Même si elle resta typique de la sphère ecclésiastique, cette nouvelle catégorie connut rapidement une vaste diffusion au sein du monde séculier, dans des acceptions qui présentaient de fortes similitudes avec la notion romaine d’atrocitas, mais aussi des caractéristiques spécifiques. L’enormitas des XIIIe-XIVe siècles était une notion structurellement instable, protéiforme. Le périmètre de son champ d’application comme qualification juridique, tout comme ses implications procédurales, demeuraient variables. Dans de nombreux contextes, la catégorie tendait à embrasser l’ensemble de la sphère criminelle (ou du « grand criminel »). Son usage se développa en concomitance avec l’apparition de procédures inquisitoires ou « extraordinaires » caractérisées par une dilatation sans précédent de l’arbitrium judicis et donc par des situations d’exceptionnalité plus ou moins généralisée eu égard aux règles de droit traditionnelles. Tout en contribuant à délimiter le champ du pénal, l’enormitas ménageait donc un continuum entre la sphère restreinte des crimes de lèse-majesté et celle des crimes ordinaires.""

A few days after 9/11, US Vice-President Dick Cheney invoked the need for the USA to work ‘the dark side’ in its global ‘War on Terror’. Cinema of the Dark Side explores how contemporary cinema treats state-sponsored atrocity, evoking multiple landscapes of state terror. Investigating the ethical potential of cinematic atrocity images, it argues that while films help to create and confirm normative perceptions about atrocities, they can also disrupt those perceptions and build different ones. Asserting a crucial distinction between morality and ethics, a new conceptualisation of human rights cinema is proposed, one that repositions human rights morality within an ethical framework that reflects upon the causes and contexts of violence. It builds upon theories of embodied spectatorship to offer a new perspective on the ethics of spectatorship, providing readers with fresh insights into how we respond to atrocity images and the ethical issues at stake.

Reviews:
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Individuals operating within the scientific paradigm presume that the world is made of matter. Although the perspective engendered by this presupposition is very powerful, it excludes value and subjective experience from its fundamental ontology. In addition, it provides very little guidance with regards to the fundamentals of ethical action. Individuals within the religious paradigm, by contrast, presume that the world is made out of what matters. From such a perspective, the phenomenon of meaning is the primary reality. Th is meaning is revealed both subjectively and objectively, and serves—under the appropriate conditions—as an unerring guide to ethical action. Th e ancient stories of Genesis cannot be properly understood without viewing them from within the religious paradigm. Genesis describes the primary categories of the world of meaning, as well as the eternal interactions of those categories. Order arises out of Chaos, through the creative interme-diation of Logos, and man is manifested, in turn. Man, a constrained Logos, exists within a bounded state of being, Eden. Eden is a place where order and chaos, nature and culture, find their optimal state of balance. Because Eden is a walled garden, however—a bounded state of being—something is inevitably excluded. Unfortunately, what is excluded does not simply cease to exist. Every bounded paradise thus contains something forbidden and unknown. Man's curiosity inevitably drives him to investigate what has been excluded. Th e knowledge thus generated perpetually destroys the presup-positions and boundaries that allow his temporary Edens to exist. Th us, man is eternally fallen. Th e existential pain generated by this endlessly fallen state can undermine man's belief in the moral justifiability of being—and may turn him, like Cain, against brother and God.

In genocide studies, as well as in literary and cinematic representations of mass atrocity, scholars and artists have been concerned with soldiers who experience a physiological and emotional breakdown while committing atrocities. These reactions often resemble disgust responses: perpetrators feel nausea; they convulse and sometimes vomit.

This is book chapter is published in the anthology Emotions and Mass Atrocity: Philosophical and Theoretical Explorations, editors Thomas Brudholm and Johannes Lang, Cambridge University Press, March 2018

Following the end of the First World War, British and Australian atrocity propaganda fell into disrepute. Progressive liberal authors such as British parliamentarian Arthur Ponsonby condemned atrocity propaganda as a series of manipulative lies designed to dupe a naïve populace into supporting a morally meaningless war. However, atrocity propaganda, which focused on the abuse of Belgian women and children at the hands of German soldiers, was not all lies. Yet because propaganda had come to be regarded as a synonym for 'lies', very few historians from the mid-20th century onwards were willing to entertain the idea that some aspects of atrocity propaganda were truthful. Therefore, the just war elements contained in atrocity propaganda, which maintained that the British and Australians fought for the rights of small nations and the protection of non-combatants from military abuse, have not been given appropriate consideration until recently. This article contributes to the revision of Australian and British home front attitudes to the war by using atrocity propaganda as valuable primary source material, rather than merely dismissing it as lies, which to date has been the main approach of historians.

There were many tough decisions to be made in World War II. The lives of many thousands of men, women and children were lost based on these decisions of the few. When such power is vested in the hands of a few men, consulting the possible outcomes of action or inaction in war time degrades human life to a matter of numbers. Some numbers are more acceptable than others implying that certain magnitudes of death to our own species can become acceptable in the name of liberty and opportunity.

In the summer of 1941, German anti-Soviet propaganda focused on the Soviet massacres committed in the Baltic and Western Ukrainian territories. Following official German propaganda, news reports on the executions perpetrated by the NKVD received prominence in the Hungarian public. Hungarian public opinion was informed on these events through reports by German news agencies, which were published in the Hungarian press. But members of the Hungarian press and war correspondents also reported on Soviet atrocities that were discovered in the occupied territories of the Carpathian Group. In addition, NKVD mass killings were recurring elements of war diaries and anti-Bolshevik pamphlet literature. There are three main characteristics of these published atrocity stories. First, the victims and perpetrators of the mass murders were identified based on their nationality. Second, based on the experience of WWI propaganda, descriptions of the murders were emphasized instead of quantitative data. Finally, the primary framework of presenting the murders was that of the "self-disclosure" of the Soviet Union, as the massacres of 1941 were interpreted as a recrudescence of the Red Terror during the Russian Civil War. In addition, the Hungarian anti-Bolshevik discourse adapted symbols of the narrative condemning the Hungarian Soviet Republic to the new atrocity stories.

Scholarly and public commentators frequently discuss the ideological backdrop of atrocity crimes, yet the actual role of ideology in such campaigns of violence remains a key source of disagreement between scholars. This chapter first briefly discusses the variation in contemporary theoretical perspectives on ideology’s relevance to the perpetration of atrocity crimes, and identifies some key shortcomings in most prevailing accounts. It presents the author’s ‘neo-ideological’ approach, which emphasizes ideology’s key role, but departs from some of the cruder, vaguer, or more compartmentalized characterizations of that role found in many existing accounts. It contends that the neo-ideological approach integrates a broad range of key findings from contemporary research on mass atrocities, and explicates the explanatory significance of ideology in the behaviour of various types of perpetrators. It illustrates the plausibility and value of the approach by briefly applying it to the case ...

A survey of opinions of private and public university students about the relationship between the knowledge of university students about the Khmer Rouge (KR) genocide and their attendance at Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum (TSGM) was undertaken at American University of Phnom Penh (AUPP) and at the Department of English of the Institute of Foreign Languages (IFL). The purpose of the survey was to examine the relationship between the knowledge of Cambodian students at public and private universities about the KR genocide and their attendance at TSGM and to look at the difference in knowledge about the KR genocide between public and private university students.

Robyn O'Neil produces epic works of art in the contemporary age with a mechanical pencil. Since 2002 she has created catastrophes on a miniature scale through a series of drawings of natural disasters and severe landscapes populated by a few majestically drawn animals and hundreds of small male figures dressed in identical black sweatsuits. in contrast to the clumsy and awkward tiny human figures, the animals, at home in the natural world are large and impressively beautiful.

This paper, JCS 2019 (published Nov-Dec 2020) examines the relationship between philosophy and evil, inspired by Camus' questioning in The Rebel (1951), and Plato's troubling consideration in the Republic (491d): 'Do not the most gifted minds, when they are ill-educated, become preeminently bad? Do not great crimes and the spirit of pure evil spring out of a fulness of nature ruined by education rather than from any inferiority …?"  Part 1 generates a working definition of evil, through dialectical engagement with the literature on the philosophy of evil.  Evil is defined as "actions, however motivated, which intentionally, with knowledge and foresight, set out to cripplingly harm or destroy one or more other moral agents, physically, psychologically and/or existentially, for no publicly defensible reason," where the last clause is both new and (I suggest) important. Part 2 looks at some examples where leading philosophers have advocated for such actions, on the basis of philosophical principles, and reflects on what kinds of philosophical premises must be accepted, and what philosophical resources ignored or attacked, for this to become possible.  These are the provisional conclusions of this inquiry, recognising that the subject is dark, and one's own limitations always apparent:

1. Evil involves the knowing desire to cause crippling life-, meaning-, or world-destroying harm to (an)other morally salient being(s), for no publically justifiable reason(s);
2. Not all philosophy “is” evil, or forms or justifies evil beliefs, motivations, or actions (thankfully, manifestly, and of course!);
3. Philosophy’s training of people to challenge their own and others’ beliefs, as well as the immoderate beliefs at play in strong passions (including hatred), can play a small but vital role in challenging the intellectual preconditions and rationalizations of forms of evil;
4. Some philosophies nevertheless have formed and rationalized evil-generative beliefs, motivations, and actions, including justifying the very worst historical evils, which makes a metaphilosophical reflection on this subject morally serious;
5. The only justifications evil agents can seek for their actions must be supramoral, calling into question ordinary beliefs, and as such they will tend to be “philosophy-like” or “pseudo-philosophical”, if not formally philosophical;
6. Evil-justifying beliefs such as those positing malign invisible conspiracies which must be combatted, like philosophical visions, posit hidden causes and principles shaping apparent actions and events which call into question standard opinions and perceptions, and to this extent also are pseudo-philosophical (but see 3); 
7. We should be very careful about attempts to deny 4, including by suppressing reference to disturbing passages in renowned philosophers, lest this action inadvertently participates in one dimension of evil, the need to publically deny its existence or possibility;
8. The denial that any putative philosophy that propounds evil-generative beliefs or prescriptions can be “philosophical” is understandable, but insufficient;
9. Philosophy’s search for hidden causes, natures, structures and functions that explain reality as we ordinarily experience it, outside or “above” the “city” of most human life presents a vocational hazard that philosophers should guard against: that of looking down with scorn, contempt, or even hatred of non-philosophers;
10. looking down with scorn, contempt, or even hatred of non-philosophers is one possible evil-generative belief, or it can cross-pollinate other evil-generative beliefs appealing to other, non-philosophical morality-trumping reasons to scorn, hate, and thus potentially justify cripplingly harming others;
11. a metaphilosophy which does not address the relationship between philosophy and evil, as Plato did by including Callicles and Thrasymachus amongst Socrates’ interlocutors, will be decisively incomplete.

A paradox holds back understanding of perpetrators of mass violence. On the one hand, close empirical research has consistently emphasized perpetrators’ heterogeneity – the mix of motives and mind-sets found amongst members of the organizations and societies that engage in violence. At the same time, however, both overarching theories of mass violence and summative characterizations of particular cases tend to homogenize perpetrator groups through causal stories which efface diversity. Rather than being ignorant of diversity, theorists generally, I suggest, resort to homogenizing explanations because of underlying weaknesses in our analytical tools for grappling with heterogeneity. This chapter seeks to address those weaknesses with respects to diversity in levels of ideological belief. First, I explain why perpetrators’ ideological diversity matters. Second, I advance a conceptual framework for better grappling with such diversity, centred around a new typology for different degrees of ideological internalization. Third, I offer some preliminary hypotheses on how different ideological diversities in parts of the apparatus of mass violence matter in perpetration.

ÖZET
1912 Edeköy Katliamı, Birinci Balkan Savaşı’nda yaşanan en büyük katliamlardan biridir. Katliam, savaşın ilk günlerinde, 13-20 Kasım tarihleri arasında yaşanmıştır. Bir hafta süren olaylar sırasında binlerce kişi öldürülmüştür. Katliamı yapanlar, Edeköy yakınlarındaki Sofulu kasabası ve çevresindeki köylerin Rum çeteleridir. Katliamın sorumlusu Rumların bir çoğu, işkencelerle öldürdükleri Edeköylüleri yakından tanıyan, yıllarca Edeköy Müslümanları ile birlikte yaşamış, çalışmış kişilerdir. Katliam sırasında bölgede hakim olan Bulgar askerinin de olaylarda sorumluluğu bulunmaktadır.
Bu makale, Edeköy Katliamı üzerine hazırlanmış ilk geniş çaplı araştırma kitabının, Birinci Balkan Savaşı'nın 100. yılında Atlas Tarih Dergisi tarafından hazırlanan özel sayısı için hazırlanmış kısa bir özetidir.
Görseller, dergi yayınından alınmıştır.

ABSTRACT
1912 Edeköy Massacre, is one of the biggest massacres of the First Balkan War.
The incident happened in the first days of the war, between 13-20th of November.
During this time period, thousands of Muslim Turk people were killed, many women and children raped and Edeköy was plundered.
Greek gangs from Soufli town and other nearby Greek villages were responsible for the massacre.
Most of the members of the gangs had been working and living with the victims of the massacre, for long years.
Bulgarian Army, who was ruling the region these days, also had played a role in the incident.
This article is a shorter version of the first wide-scale study over the Edeköy Massacre; and was published in the Atlas History Magazine’s special issue for the 100th year of the Balkan Wars.

Forensic anthropology makes particular professional claims – scientific, probative, humanitarian, historical, political and deterrent – which attempt to finalise interpretations of the
past. However, I argue that these claims conceal a range of contests and conflicts around the social, political, legal and scientific significance of human remains. I look at the ways in
which forensic work is embedded within a network of artefacts, actors and institutions that have different stakes in the interpretation of the past. I analyse conflicts over human
remains by positing them as ‘boundary objects’ with agency, in which a number of communities are invested and show how forensic knowledge does not finalise, but interacts
with social, political and historical interpretations of past violence in ways that are both conflicted and unpredictable.

What is the significance of our gut feelings? Can they disclose our deep selves or point to a shared human nature? The phenomenon of perpetrator disgust provides a uniquely insightful perspective by which to consider such questions. Across time and cultures, some individuals exhibit signs of distress while committing atrocities. They experience nausea, convulse, and vomit. Do such bodily responses reflect a moral judgment, a deep-seated injunction against atrocity? What conclusions can we draw about the relationship of our gut feelings to human nature and moral frameworks?
Drawing on a broad range of historical examples as well as the latest scholarship from the philosophical and scientific study of emotions, this book explores the relationship of cognition and emotion through the lens of perpetrator disgust. Considering a range of interpretations of this phenomenon, it becomes evident that gut feelings do not carry a straightforward and transparent intentionality in themselves, nor do they motivate any core, specific response; they are templates that can embody a broad range of values and morals. Using this core insight, the book proposes a contextual understanding of emotions, by which an agent’s environment shapes their available hermeneutic equipment—concepts, categories, names—that individuals rely on to make sense of their emotions and navigate the world.

Introduction attached

After the occupation and the annexation of Bosnia and Hercegovina (1878 and 1908 respectively), the Habsburg authorities implemented a full-scale modernisation process. Roads and railways were built, crops improved, endemic diseases tackled and a huge network of garrisons was built along the frontier with Serbia and Montenegro. In many respects both Serbia and Montenegro were similar to Bosnia and Hercegovina. Infrastructural development and agricultural prosperity in the Mačva region, with its river borders to the Habsburg state was unmistakable and widely admired in the press. At the same time, the rise of a pervasive and aggressive anti-Serbian sentiment in the Dual Monarchy meant that Orthodox people on both sides of the border were viewed with suspicion and mistrust. The Balkan Wars were reported so vividly that the Habsburg reading public developed a strong idea about a Serb propensity for violence as well the notion of endemic political instability. The assassination of Franz Ferdinand in 1914 created an opportunity and excuse for the Habsburg Army to invade Serbia. Troops were primed through propaganda, such as the slogan 'hang the Serbs from the willows' , a sentiment found in a Slovenian newspaper on the eve of the war. The first theatre of war was the fertile Mačva region and civilian casualties in its towns, particularly Šabac were extremely high. Furthermore, there were reports of atrocities against peasants in the nearby villages. In this article, I consider the war aims of the Dual Monarchy and the place of the Mačva, suggesting that the position of civilian Serbs in 1914 was highly vulnerable.

Forthcoming in Oxford Handbook of Atrocity Crime.

One of the most long-standing debates over the explanation of atrocity crimes concerns the role of ideologies, identities and extreme speech or propaganda. In this chapter, I provide an overview of these debates, outline key findings on the role of ideologies, identities and speech that have emerged from the latest research on atrocity crimes, and identify enduring puzzles for future research. In particular, I distinguish between three main camps in these debates: a traditional perspective that emerged out of early genocide research in the 1970s and 1980s and has continued to serve as the most familiar way of thinking about ideology, identity and speech in atrocities up to the present day; a skeptical challenge to that traditional perspective, which largely downplays the significance of ideology, identity and speech; and a revisionist perspective which – though drawing on earlier insights – has only really crystallized in the last decade. After mapping out the three perspectives, I proceed to discuss two key theoretical puzzles that require deeper study, before concluding with some broader observations on the state and future direction of research on the role of ideologies, identities and speech in atrocity crimes.

A span of less than forty years of the twentieth century contains three of the most bloody and terrible upheavals of European (if not global) history. The Russian Revolution/Civil War, the Holocaust and the Soviet Gulag each take place within this time period, defacing both the physical and demographic landscape of Europe, mostly the eastern part, to a degree theretofore unimaginable. Despite the fact that each event caused the death and suffering of millions of individuals, the methods and aims (both putative and unstated) of each were widely divergent, giving a distinctive quality to each that makes direct comparison difficult, if not unproductive. It should not be surprising then that artistic attempts to portray the experience of living through such terrible events should embody these differences. By using one representative (and oft-cited) work from each of these three upheavals, I will examine the ways in which the unique characteristics of each action translate themselves into the writing—specifically in the form of the short-story cycle— that emerges in their wake. The works I have chosen are: Isaac Babel's collection of short stories set during the time of the Russian Civil War, Red Cavalry; Varlam Shalamov's Kolyma Tales; and Tadeusz Borowski's This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. Since the proper discussion of this works involves the comparative examination of the historical milieus from which each of the three came forth, I will examine them in chronological order of their settings rather than their publication.

The unfolding “political turn” in animal rights theory has enriched the agenda of animal ethics with the central concepts and concerns of political theory, extending new paradigms for inclusion, representation, and redress to nonhuman animals within the rubric of justice. These projects have concentrated on various forward-looking aspects of the moral, political, and legal standing of different nonhuman animals, with most theorists within the political turn so far having little to say about the symbolic, narrative, and affective dimensions of interspecies justice. In this chapter, I employ a framework of interspecies atrocities in order to begin a conversation with the broad literature on memory and reconciliation after violence and atrocity, exploring the opportunities as well as the limitations and asymmetries this approach highlights for the project of just interspecies community. What might it mean for societies to be sorry, and to take historical responsibility, for vast and still-expanding systems of exploitation and dispossession of nonhuman animals?

In recent years, it has been argued more than once that situations determine our conduct to a much greater extent than our character does. This argument rests on the findings of social psychologists such as Stanley Milgram, who have popularized the idea that we can all be brought to harm innocent others. An increasing number of philosophers and ethicists make use of such findings, and some of them have argued that this so-called situationist challenge fatally undermines virtue ethics. As virtue ethics is currently the most popular underpinning for ethics education in the military, it is important to know to what extent the claim situationists make is correct. Fortunately, a closer look indicates that an interactionist perspective, with our character and the situation interplaying, is more accurate than the situationist perspective.

This paper argues that ideological strategies and interventions should be a key component of the prevention 'toolbox' used by international actors to prevent, halt, and limit violent atrocities. First, I briefly clarify what existing research suggests ideology's role is, and is not, in mass atrocities. Second, I demonstrate that - on a comparative analysis with other major prevention tools like military action, economic sanctions, or peacekeepers - ideological strategies are not infeasibly risky, costly, or unlikely to succeed. If conducted with appropriately modest ambitions, the available empirical evidence suggests that ideological strategies have very real preventive potential. Finally, I discuss how ideological strategies might be designed and implemented in practice, surveying available interventions and providing guidelines on how they should be deployed.

This paper will be published in a special issue on Mass Atrocity Prevention in the journal Politics and Governance.

From holy to base and comic, and then to degenerate and utterly worthless, fit for nothing but extinction: few examples show the extreme flexibility, adaptability and changing fortunes of concepts as well as that of the parasite. What’s more, this strange historical trajectory has turned the parasite into a key term for understanding the exclusionary mechanisms at the heart of modern Western societies, coming to function as a name for a class of beings not entitled to the same basic rights as others. While such mechanisms have historically found their clearest expression in totalitarian regimes, there is no doubt that milder versions are at work in even the most advanced liberal democracies, helping create and secure their borders through separating inside from outside, as well as marking that which is spatially located inside the borders, but which is thought not to properly belong. This article will argue that reconceptualising the parasite is a necessary step if one wants to disrupt and move beyond the workings of such a logic of exclusion and dehumanization.

Rohingya people from Myanmar, once called Burma, are an ethnic group from Rakhine State who are a Muslim minority, and have been living for as long as today from their great grandparents can remember. They are a minority considered "the most persecuted minority in the World" by the United Nations. When the British colonization invaded Burma, majority-Buddhist people of the state refused from an independently administered colony and Rohingya served as a threat. (Blakemore, 2019) In 1977, Burma launched Operation Dragon King in Rakhine State, a national effort in registering citizens and to review foreigners in complying with a national consensus. It resulted to force fleeing of about 200,000 Rohingya to Bangladesh, by accusing them of violence mentioning rape and destructions. (MSF, 2019) In 1982, Burma's Government passed a citizenship act recognizing 135 ethnic groups, the Rohingya were not on the list. (Socialist Republic of the union of Burma, 1982) It deprives the Rohingya citizenship of Myanmar and makes them a stateless people. In 1989, Burma was renamed as Myanmar, 250, 000 Rohingyas fled to Bangladesh as military presence in Northern Rakhine state increased, still Rohingya are

Eyal Mayroz's book, Reluctant Interveners, focuses on how public opinion shapes and is shaped by the US government's response to genocide, a type of mass atrocity. Mass atrocity is defined here as widespread avoidable harm. Hunger can be viewed as another type of mass atrocity, even if the harm is not imposed intentionally. The book and this review show that responses to hunger and genocide have been similar.

North Korea’s human rights violations are unparalleled in the contemporary world. In Dying for Rights, Sandra Fahy provides the definitive account of the abuses committed by the North Korean state, domestically and internationally, from its founding to the present.

Dying for Rights scrutinizes North Korea’s treatment of its own people as well as foreign nationals, how violations committed by the state spread into the international realm, and how North Korea uses its state media and presence at the United Nations. Fahy meticulously documents the extent of arbitrary detention, torture, executions, and the network of prison camps throughout the country. The book details systematic and widespread violations of freedom of speech and of movement, freedom from discrimination, and the rights to food and to life. Fahy weaves together public and private testimonies from North Koreans resettled abroad, as well as NGO reports, the stories and facts brought to light by the United Nations Commission of Inquiry into North Korea, and North Korea’s own state media, to share powerful personal narratives of human rights abuses. A compassionate yet objective investigation into the factors that sustain and perpetuate the flouting of basic rights, Dying for Rights reveals the profound culpability of the North Korean state in the systematic denial of human dignity.



Complete book can be purchased via:

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The cinema in the post-literate age was declared dead and with it cinephilia (see Sontag). This declaration came from the assumption that the image has lost its ennobling powers to animate humans. The genre of film most vilified for its potential to distort rather than animate is the historical trauma film. However, I will examine Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave as a historical trauma film that animates and ennobles repressed traumas of black slavery in America through intricate deployments of filmic strategies. I will base my analysis on Christian Keathley's insight over how cinephilic or epiphanic moments induced by marginal filmic details can ennoble the spectator's metaphysical connection with the image. Like Keathley, I will argue that it is this ability of film to trigger the ineffable that continues to give the historical trauma film relevance in a post-literate, information age.

Présentation L'utilisation de la torture pour extorquer des aveux et obtenir des informations a formé une partie intégrale de la pratique juridique et politique à travers l'histoire – depuis l'enquête menée par OEdipe, aux pratiques inquisitoriales au Moyen Âge, aux interrogatoires de la CIA à Guantánamo Bay et Abou Ghraib.

Two quotes from literary critics form the basis for our examination of a range of literary depictions of human cruelty. Philosopher/literary critic Theodor Adorno wrote that “writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” and critic Lawrence Langer responded to this comment by asking “How should art – how can art – represent the inexpressibly inhuman suffering of the victims, without doing an injustice to that suffering? […] There is something disagreeable, almost dishonorable, in the conversion of the suffering of victims into works of art.” We will read fiction that attempts artistic representation of several different instances of atrocity – the white settlement of South African hinterland, the Stalinist Gulag, the Nazi Holocaust, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the Partition of India, the massacre in Sabra and Shatila, the war in Bosnia, the Hutu/Tutsi violence in Rwanda, and the 9/11 terrorist attacks – and use them to articulate our own responses to Adorno and Langer. Our goal is neither simply to empathize with the victims nor to rank comparatively the horrors of the historical events depicted, but rather to contemplate both the difficulties and the values – immediate and enduring – of applying the creative impulse in the wake of immense destruction.

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This book analyses how international criminal institutions, and their actors – legal counsels, judges, investigators, registrars – construct witness identity and memory.

Filling an important gap within transitional justice scholarship, this conceptually led and empirically grounded interdisciplinary study takes the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) as a case study. It asks: How do legal witnesses of human rights violations contribute to memory production in transitional post-conflict societies? Witnessing at tribunals entails individuals externalising memories of violations. This is commonly construed within the transitional justice legal scholarship as an opportunity for individuals to ensure their memories are entered into an historical record. Yet this predominant understanding of witness testimony fails to comprehend the nature of memory. Memory construction entails fragments of individual and collective memories within a contestable and contingent framing of the past. Accordingly, the book challenges the claim that international criminal courts and tribunals are able to produce a collective memory of atrocities; as it maintains that witnessing must be understood as a contingent and multi-layered discursive process.

Contributing to the specific analysis of witnessing and memory, but also to the broader field of transitional justice, this book will appeal to scholars and practitioners in these areas, as well as others in legal theory, global criminology, memory studies, international relations, and international human rights.

The Chilakaluripeta case proves that even when Dalits commit unintentional, unplanned crimes, they will be punished by death and every court and authority will act on a war footing to hang Dalits. The Tsunduru case proves that if Dalits are murdered by the so-called upper castes, the latter shall enjoy impunity from the state; police and courts shall collude with them and protect them. In this kind of a situation, death penalty will result only in killing Dalits and other marginalised sections in India. Death penalty has to be removed from law books

In describing the concept, organization, and reception of an exhibition on shoes for bound feet at the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto, this essay ponders the perils of telling stories about footbinding. The narratives perpetuated by missionaries and feminists are so successful ...