Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Explores genocide and related crimes in historical context to analyze and critique various term definitions, introducing students to the complexities of politics, international law, post-1945 justice, and historical perspective when applying terms and enforcing legislation. Students with credit for HIST 285 under the title "Genocide in Historical Context" may not take this course for further credit. Breadth-Humanities/Social Sciences.

COURSE DETAILS:

This course is built on three questions: what is genocide? How did genocide and related crimes, including crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing, manifest across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and into the twenty-first? What do interdisciplinary perspectives, as they contribute to the evolution of the field of genocide studies, teach us about the crime, from its preconditions to its aftermath?

This course will explore modern genocide in its historical context in order to analyze and critique various definitions of genocide, underscoring both the usefulness and limitations of the genocide convention and introducing students to the complexities of politics, international law, and historical perspective when it comes to applying the term and enforcing legislation. An interdisciplinary approach is inherent in our exploration of this topic: we will be reading material produced by historians but also by psychologists, journalists, criminologists, sociologists, legal scholars, political scientists, and survivors. Over the semester, we will engage a variety of problems from the field of genocide studies, including the various definitions of genocide; the role of the Holocaust in shaping understandings of the term and related crimes; the context of the UN genocide convention; the role of imperialism, colonial conquest, and settler colonialism in the evolution of genocide; the relationship between genocide and revolution, and genocide and war; the prevalence of sexual violence during war and genocide; issues of memory, justice, and genocide prevention. We will also examine various case studies, including the Holocaust; the indigenous peoples in Canada, the USA, and Australia; Christian minorities in the Ottoman Empire; the Herero and Nama in Southwest Africa; the Cambodian and Rwandan cases; and ethnic cleansing and genocide in the Middle East and the Balkans. Although this course will remain grounded in historical cases, contemporary events will likely figure in parts of our discussion.

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING:

REQUIRED READING NOTES: