 Hello and welcome to the 35th annual Norris and Marjorie Benditson Epic International Symposium on preventing genocide and mass atrocities. My name is Jacob Kirsch and I'm a junior studying international relations and economics. I will be moderating tonight's panel, never again and again and again, causes of genocides and mass atrocities. First off, I want to thank all of our panelists for joining us. In order to prevent future genocides and mass atrocities, it is critically important to understand why they happen. So it seems appropriate to begin the symposium with a big picture discussion of the underlying root causes of these atrocities. Specifically, I would like to consider these causes through the frameworks of identity based conflict and socioeconomic strife. Many mass atrocities come at the intersection of issues of identity, as well as socioeconomic issues. In this panel, we will look at the convergence of these issues and how they can independently or jointly cause mass atrocities. Before I introduce our panelists, I want to first explain how the panel will be run. Each panelist will deliver opening remarks for five minutes. After the opening remarks, the panelists will have a 10 minute discussion, following which the panelists will split into breakout rooms moderated by my peers, Sebastian, Hightone and Connor. The links to these breakout rooms will be posted in the chat. Now that we've gotten all of that out of the way, allow me to introduce our first panelist. Joining us from Scotland, Donald Bloxham is the Richard Parris Chair of European History at the University of Edinburgh. He's known for his numerous publications focusing on the Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide, and the post-World War II war crimes trials. His current projects include working on a manuscript on the role of moral evaluation in the historians' confrontation with the past, as well as co-editing a diary of a Nuremberg prosecutor. Dr. Bloxham, you have the floor. Thank you very much indeed, Jacob. And thank you to everyone who's been involved in organizing my participation and inviting me. And thank you to everyone who's bothered to tune in to listen to this. It's great to be virtually there. So I know that Professor Cox will be talking a little bit in a little bit more detail about issues of identity and specifically about racism. Perhaps I'll pick up a little bit more on the socio-economic aspects when we're talking about causation. I like the title of this panel, causation of genocide and mass atrocities. In some sense, my feeling is that genocide studies has got into a bit of a rut, perhaps into a bit of a dead end. Well, depending upon how tightly or how preoccupied it is with the definition of genocide, thankfully we seem to be moving away from that a little bit, but there is still a concern with whether things fall into the category of the G word or not. And I'm not increasingly uncertain that that's a desperately useful way to approach things, especially since in so many instances we see genocide emerging alongside or out of other sorts of atrocities that we might categorize slightly differently. But in other instances, we might also choose to categorize something that's a simultaneous genocide and does something else. What could equally, I think, put what we could reasonably call genocide in Nigeria during the Biafra conflict and genocide in East Pakistan in 1971. We could quite reasonably call both of those instances genocide, but we could also call them secession conflicts. And calling them one is not to preclude calling them the other, but there's an awful lot of scholarship on secession conflicts, and there's an awful lot of scholarship on genocide, and there's only a partial intersection between those two things. And it seems to me that a lot of I think genocide scholars studies could really fruitfully engage with and it's starting to do so with a whole body of scholarship that deals with things that don't necessarily instantly fall into the rubric of the G word. I'm thinking of a great deal of political science literature on civil wars. There is a significant propensity in civil war to tend towards total targeting of the other side in the civil war in the civil war which lends itself to indiscriminate violence against population groups. This may or may not pass whatever bar is deemed necessary to have the label genocide attached but it's clearly in some sense related to genocide. It certainly falls under the rubric of mass atrocities. That said, there are also very different sorts of mass atrocities. If one thinks of, for instance, the Stalinist case, it's a totalitarian regime like the Nazi regime, and yet unlike the Nazi regime. The Stalinist regime contrives to kill millions of people. But it does that in a rather different way to the way that the Hitler regime does. There's much less, relatively speaking, much less direct mass murder in the Stalin regime, much more exposure to conditions where death is likely if not inevitable in the Gulag system and beyond. The sorts of mass executions we see in Katin during the Soviet occupation of Poland in the run-up to the Second World War is relatively unusual in the Soviet system. Mass executions are there and they're large-scale but compared to the death that comes from massive socio-economic reorganization, things like the famine, or the massive use of the penal Gulag archipelago. They're much greater cause of death, or death from structurally imposed conditions. We can very reasonably, and I think I would call those mass atrocities, but they clearly merit a very different sort of explanation to the sort of explanation that might come as a result of civil war. So even when we broaden out genocide to include mass atrocities, there are still, I suppose, definitional issues because there are so many different sorts of mass atrocity. And we're on a fool's errand if we look for one grand overarching explanation, I think, for this whole kind of complex of nasty things. One has to look, in the Soviet case, at the specificities of communist regimes looking for massive swift industrialization, socio-economic advance, with a contempt for the peasantry and a certain contempt for human life full stop. That's a very different sort of set of considerations, I think, to the overtly racist considerations of exterminatory war in the east that comes from the Nazi perspective. Different, again, are many of the civil wars that we see, even though I still think there's a great deal that genocide studies could learn from the study of civil wars. Especially in the post-colonial context, to think of socio-economic causes, the legacy in a whole series of countries from Chad, Sudan, Nigeria, legacies of unequal development across in different areas of those states, East Pakistan, Pakistan too, bequeathed legacies of differential colonial investment, giving one region a socio-economic advantage over another, and often those regional differences are sort of overlapped with ethnic differences too. But that said, it's very, very rare really for civil wars to occur purely on the basis of ethnic difference. As Jacob quite rightly intimates, there has to be a sort of intersection of causality there. Well, you might think in social science parlance we would talk about horizontal inequalities, different ethnic groups within the same society either having or being seen to perceive to have some kind of intrinsic material advantage over others. When that intrinsic advantage is also kind of layered in terms of regions of historical underinvestment versus historical overinvestment, we see the grievance causes for civil wars. We might also see the possibility of causation for secession as well. So especially well endowed region thinks it would be better off going on its own or thinks it's been historically repressed and would be better off going on its own. Then we see, you know, cause for state breaking or state reinforcing violence or the sort of violence that comes about, you know, civil war coming about from a combination of identity and resource based conflicts. So I think all of those things need to, I suppose a lot of these things move us away a bit from the classic genocide paradigm which does rather have the Nazi genocide and the Holocaust as it as its paradigm for very good reasons because of the extremity of that event. But if we're looking at the world as it is now and has been since since the Second World War. You know, I think the most likely sorts of atrocities the most common sorts of atrocities are going to be those that fall at this nexus of development related issues as they cross over with civil war, secession or conflict, and so on and so forth. I suspect that's my time up. Is that right, Jacob. That is correct. Alright, thank you, Professor Bob. Our next panelist is the director of the Center for the study of mass violence at Rutgers University, Manus Mdlarski. His books on genocide and political violence have earned widespread praise, including recent works such as the killing trap genocide in the 20th century and origins of political extremism mass violence in the 20th century and beyond. In recent publication, genocide and religion in times of war focuses on the critical roles of religious differences in wars as enablers of genocide. Professor Mdlarski. Thank you Jacob appreciate the generous introduction. I'm a political scientist and my field is international relations that's my specialization. And so I suppose it's natural for me to come at the issue of genocide from an international perspective. And so I'm going to talk about some of the issues that generate genocidal events that happen, particularly in more time and such a civil wars as Donald block some correctly pointed out, it is interstate wars as well. And the interstate wars in particular that were so deadly for let's say the Holocaust, World War One and ongoing World War Two when the genocide began. So what in particular distinguishes the genocidal perpetrator in this instance. And what I found is that experience of loss territorial in particular can also be personal. And there's a lot of work that that still needs to be done on this, but the genesis of the Holocaust happened afterwards World War One after Germany lost meant much of its territory in Europe as well as its colonies. And these territories were were central. And the Western Poland, for example, posing and was not of course now under Polish rule. And so the impact of these losses became central to Nazi ideation. And these were the personal losses of the of both the inflation after World War One where carts of of George Marx were brought to pay the salary of workers, because the each individual mark was worth so little to buy a loaf of bread you might need that cart of of George Marx. So that combination of personal loss and territorial loss was a condition that that really enabled the Nazi state power. And then we look at the Soviet case. And in particular the Russian Federation, where Putin comes to power. And one of the first things he does is to actually commit a genocide against the Chechens, roughly 20% of the Chechen population was destroyed in the two wars between 1994 and 2000. So that territorial loss was immense there to where where the Soviet Union collapsed as Putin said it was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century. This this transformation of this huge Soviet Union to something smaller, namely the Russian Federation. And that Rwanda and and, and we see in Rwanda, also a case of territorial loss that took place when the RPF Rwandes patriotic front invaded and took over substantial territories in Rwanda. It was after that territorial loss that the Rwandan genocide occurred in Cambodia. It was a similar relationship with Vietnam Vietnam was gradually encroaching on Cambodian territory, and ultimately interestingly, even though it was called an auto genocide because so many civilians were killed in in that genocide, who were ethnic Khmer, the first to be killed were the Vietnamese and they were totally eliminated, the small Vietnamese patient population in Cambodia, after those losses, both the people to the engaging in war of the Vietnamese invading solely and the territorial loss. So these losses really confer a kind of almost sanctity on the effort to make up for them to revenge them to the war against the Jews, for example, for their treasonous activity presumed trees, trees enough trees enough. I just saw one minute warning, presumed trees in this activity in in in World War One, the infamous stab in the back was of course never occurred. And, and so I suppose in that minute, I'll simply I am pointing out this one I think one salient element. There are many others as as Donald has pointed to as I'm sure John will, but when they come together is really bad. And but even in and of themselves individually, they have important. Thank you. Thank you, Professor Midlarski. Our final panelist, John Cox is the director of the Center for Holocaust Genocide and Human Rights Studies at University of North Carolina Charlotte. He recently published to kill a people genocide in the 20th century, a book focusing on the intersection between modern genocide and racism. He's currently working on a project titled Rebellion and Resistance in the Nazi Empire, fighting Hitler fighting for a new world, in addition to co-editing, co-editing numerous books on genocide. Professor Cox. Yeah, thank you very much. And I'd like to spend more time thanking everyone but the clock is running. Okay, so I'm going to speak very quickly. All right. And but this is a marvelous effort that you all have undertaken. And I know it's been difficult when with postponements and everything and it's great pleasure to be here. And it's also great to hear my two colleagues speak first because that helps me to tie in some things without duplicating things. But so what I'm going to focus on in my very brief few minutes is one factor that I think is really an essential ingredient in genocide in modern times in the last couple of hundred years. It's not the only factor it intersects. I'm also really glad that Donald Manus explained that there's no, there's never one single cause that things intersect. And I also really appreciate Donald's thoughts about not drawing hard borders around between genocide, mass atrocities, crimes against humanity and so on, because all these things are, you know, blend into one another. It depends on how one defines something. And it's not, it doesn't help a victim of an atrocity to know whether or not they're a victim of a genocide or a crime against humanity or war crime or an atrocity and so on. And the dynamics are the same or that is the dynamics flow into one another and so on. And so, for example, in my classes, I talk a lot about American Genocidal American Warfare in Vietnam. And I don't even feel necessarily compelled to put the big G word on top of the entire war effort, although I actually have no problem doing that. But to me, it's more effort to, it's more worthwhile to talk about the facts and to talk about what happened and how it fits in. Well, etc. Okay, so right now, though, I just want to take my last three and a half minutes to speak about the factor of racism and invention of Europeans and eventually other white people over the last 500 years that became especially a key ingredient in the genocide of violence. Yeah, well, in particular for the last century and a half or so. And so, and I'll just say very quickly that a couple, there are many ways in which it does that. One way that's obvious is a lot easier to kill someone if you're a Nazi murderer in Poland, or an American murderer in Vietnam, if you regard them as an inferior race and so on. So racism inevitably was tied in with ideas about nationality and who's indigenous and who's not and so on. And so, for example, the genocide of violence in Rwanda in 1994 was based on ideas of racism brought there by Europeans 100 years that taught among other things that one group to touch the were not were not not only a separate race, but we're also not indigenous to the region. And this is also factoring a couple of things that Dr. Larski pointed to about territorial loss that was often tied in also with ideas of of the the inferior race that you imagine being tied to outside threats. So for example, the very, very, very small population of Vietnamese people in Cambodia being regarded as being tied to a massive external threat, the rather small Armenian population in the Ottoman Empire being seen as being tied to an external threat, because they were not part of the race that was being constructed and fortified. Just say a couple other words I'll say is that it probably doesn't sound too shocking to anyone here to students in general to say that racism is a factor in genocide. But then we often then think immediately of Nazi genocide and other things, but to non specialist to non specialist is surprising to hear that racism imported by the Europeans was a key factor in the Cambodian genocide in the second half of the 70s in the Rwandan genocide of 1994, where Belgians and others had brought full blown really wild ideas about races and the origins of the Tutsi people and so on. But then also in what one could call episodes of well of things that that sometimes have an appearance of some character of the Civil War and so on, including in the Spanish Civil War, and then also in Bosnia and elsewhere and as Yugoslavia was being destroyed in the early 1990s, very powerful and strong ideas of racism. In the case of Yugoslavia ideas and served nationalist mythology that had been had held sway for many centuries, helped to fuel the genocide of violence there and the case of Spain believe it or not. There were people who cooked up some ideas about how communism was a genetic genetic matter there was one person in particular who developed a theory of the of a red gene and so on. And so in fact and actually why not because race itself is completely a fiction something completely invented by human beings. And so therefore is quite malleable. Okay, I know I'm running out of time but I'll just say lastly that I thought about focusing on this especially in the last four and a half months because as well as anyone who's lived in the United States for most of their life. One must be one must take down assume the obligation of learning and being vigilant about racism and combating racism. And yet as much as I've done that throughout my adult life. When I saw the video four and a half months ago of the public lynching of a man named George Floyd. It was especially shocking. And even though I couldn't even watch the video, but the clips I saw but also just something that struck me was that I was saying the face of genocide that cook capacity and potential of genocide of violence. You know genocide starts somewhere. It doesn't start with a massive army and you know the Nazi army and you know invading Russia in 1941. It starts or it's perpetuated or potential is perpetuated in all kinds of ways. And if you could just even just seen a little bit of the facial expressions of the murderer in that video. The murder of George Floyd then you could see a combination of the arrogance, the feelings of racial superiority, the feelings of how dare you even live here in my country and so on. Martin Luther King once said something like that the logic of racism is genocide. Because if you believe that the very essence and the very being of other people is inferior than obviously it's not going to be a huge step toward genocidal violence in time it doesn't take too much of a spark. That is a spark by which I mean social crisis or whatever to go in that direction. Okay, thank you. Thank you Professor Cox and again thank you to all of our panelists for helping us set the stage for this discussion. I first like to ask the panelists if you have any questions for each other. I have one for for john if I may. Sometimes the personal element also enters into it and I'm going to talk now about the George George Floyd thing where the cop who had his knee on his neck, and what eight minutes or so. Apparently there were some sort of personal elements that they both worked in the same bar as as bouncers or whatever. And they had they had a falling out. And I'm wondering to what extent, when racism is combined with that personal element. It gets so magnified that a an open murder can occur. Yeah, thank you that's a really good question because that's something to and yeah maybe Donald might have something to say on this too about because there's definitely been some literature and genocide studies in recent years about the phenomena of neighbors murdering neighbors and so on and and at a more kind of superficial level though I still often believe that when you know someone it's harder to kill them, although maybe that's in a more general way like if one knows if you have many Muslim friends, then it's much more difficult to accept Islamophobic propaganda and rubbish from your head of state, you know, and so many countries. Okay, but anyway, I'm not sure that's, I don't have a real quick answer off the top of my head I'll just say that that was of course one of the most vexing problems in Rwanda, for example, which was a case where people had been turned into races by the Belgians. Of course that's also a lot different I guess than the American experience because they didn't really affect us a little bit more like the Yugoslav experience, where for some generations people didn't really think them that themselves as being distinctly different peoples or races, but yet there was a kind of a reservoir that could be drawn upon later. So I think that the Belgians were building and they were going to do it better than the Germans who had governed Rwanda earlier, where the Germans had some of this identity identity stuff that they forced it on the to see and who to, but the Belgians went beyond them, and made it an almost impenetrable barrier between them, despite the fact that intermarriage was had been ongoing between the two groups for quite a while. Thank you. Um, so I guess I would now like to pose a question to all of the panelists. How does the political stability of a state and its institutions contribute to the risk of mass atrocity occurring. I'll I'll try a essay essay and response. It's very important. Stability is a major issue and in fact, at one point the US government had a state failure task force that was established and it and it's ranked countries in terms of their state failure. Now it's called the political instability task force. So these are countries to watch. Rwanda was certainly one one case in point. And I realize that Russia the Russian Federation's Russian Federation was quite as unstable as it was at the time that Putin took over, but it was. If you look at the indices that I've been looking at recently of the economy and and of people's views of the government so that yeah political instability is very important and doesn't have to leave the genocide but certainly can be an outcome. Absolutely. I mean, I mean much will depend upon the state of the institutions that you have in in situ to deal with instability. I mean, there are all sorts of different forms of instability, some of which are the essence of democratic politics on they and in the sense of competing views about which way you might go and you know often very vibrant and even angry argument about that something about the depth of institutions and civil society that's capable capable of negotiating those differences. I think there's also points to be made about the difference, different distinctions between strong states and weak states, and stable and unstable states those two very different sorts of sorts of dichotomies I mean, we can think of a number of one of the peculiarities of Rwanda, perhaps in the African context is that it was still a very relatively speaking a strong state and partly due to its small size being considered to be something of a developmental model. It was a strong but unstable state as it were a strong state at a moment of kind of constitutional crisis if you like or you know, a period of democratization after economic restructuring and who to elites that felt its hold on power being and being taken away so then played up to the broader who to population the prospect of sort of historical loss of power to the historical enemy. You know that's an interesting example of a relatively strong state in an unstable situation, whereas you could contrast that with with with Darfur in Sudan and say this is a relatively weak state much territorially larger, much weaker institutions much less control over its peripheries. You could say that the Nazi Germany is a strong state, a very strong state house I mean it'd be interesting to say how unstable stable Nazi Germany was. I mean, clearly a state that relies upon the necessity to go to war as it clearly did in its ideology and in its economic model. It was based on an expansionism racist economic military kind of and at the same time, would we call that an unstable state, I don't know. I, it's, you know, it's a state with with the incredibly strong state with obvious grip of a small of a power elite over its main institutions. Particularly not pluralistic in any sense. But I do wonder. This is a very long answer I suppose it's getting round to, if I if I could be so crass as to make this into my own question is to ask all of us looking forward. What we seem to, it seems to me that things like climate change resource scarcity environmental degradation will play out most strongly and most most dangerously in states with relatively weak infrastructures and it will enhance instability. And so it may probably not be worth me talking about Nazism in this sense at all because it's very interesting case but may not have that much relevance to the future going forward. I'd like to follow up on on the Nazi Germany case, and which also has some similarities to Russia at the time that Putin took over, and that is the retreat of democracy that you had the Weimar Republic which was on paper, the most liberal constitution in all of Europe, perhaps the world, although in practice not probably like France or Belgium in practice. And it could not it could not stand that so that the retreat of democracy was was was crucial here in allowing Hindenburg essentially enabling Hitler to say power, even though most people don't realize it. And Hindenburg played a very active role actually, and it will come into power. And Hindenburg was the president of the German Republic, Weimar Republic. And, but I want to, and Russia the same thing Russian Federation, where the Yeltsin will have a major liberal liberalization program that was failing massively given the decline in GDP GDP per capita. And the fact that even minimum standards of living were not being maintained at the Soviet level. With all the lines, people have a minimum, minimum survival, whereas that they were not being able to survive on the amounts of money they were making in the Russian Federation under the Yeltsin liberalization program. So, and this and this led to, along with the territorial problem of Chechnya, led to the Yeltsin appointing Putin, and the essentially genocide of the Chechens to the point of 20% of the population. I want to mention as a political scientist and I happen to be at a zoom meeting this morning with a graduate student of mine. I was talking about state capacity and that is a variable that's been around in political science for a while, and it's gotten new purchase I think, precisely for the kinds of things that we've been talking about here. The issue of instability. Okay, thank you guys so much. So, I'd like to, again just thank our panelists for this really fascinating discussion. To all of you joining us in the audience, I would like to extend my thanks for being here tonight it means a lot both to our panelists and to me that you're dedicating your time and energy to studying such an important topic with us. And with that, we will now split into the breakout rooms with the panelists so the links to each of those rooms should be in the chat. Thank you. Let's head over there.