Genoicde

Lynn Nottage’s award-winning play Ruined (2007) dialectically dramatizes how the genocide in the Democratic Republic of Congo—the deadliest genocide since the Holocaust—must be understood within the context of global capitalism. However, as the play critically suggests, the dominant centers of global capitalism disavow their responsibility for this genocide by exclusively focusing upon and fetishizing sexual assault. This article explores how Ruined critiques Western discourses on African genocides, a critique animated by Afropessimism, a theory that challenges normative understandings of genocide. As Afropessimists argue and Ruined dramatizes, Black genocide is not a historically bounded event, but rather, a structure that enables the modern world.

Two decades ago, Burundi was a 'society gravid with premonitions of genocidal slaughter',  pitting two social groups, the Hutu and the Tutsi, against one another. For a while, the situation seemed so endemic that a US diplomat prescribed 'separation [as] the only solution that will prevent further ethnic slaughter." Against this backdrop, this paper  documents and explains how Burundi reversed the trends, and, in defiance of primordialist prognostics and separatist prescriptions, embarked on a path of recovery from the abyss of mass atrocities.  While political violence is still a major feature of the Burundian landscapes, the paper shows how the ethnic factor has become less salient, with the once rigid Hutu-Tutsi ethnic rifts showing remarkable signs of closing.

Conferencia presentada en el Auditorio Pablo González Casanova de la Facultad de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales (FCPyS) en la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) el 8 de diciembre de 2016 a cargo del Lt. Gen. Roméo A.Dallaire. La transcripción de la conferencia fue realizada con base en grabaciones lagunas interpretativas y auditivas, por lo tanto, tiene algunas deficiencias menores.

This is the syllabus for the new one-term module I have written for SOAS and just finished teaching this week, ending with Genocide and the Rohingya, Armenians, and other targeted groups. We rotate teaching this, but if I am teaching this again next year, I would appreciate recommendations from colleagues on academia.edu for additions to the readings. It is the most rewarding course I have taught in terms of what I, as the teacher, gained from preparing it. Its changed how I look at the impact history has and should have, reaffirmed the importance of inter-disciplinarity, made clearer just how much global inequalities contributing to violence is even more true today than in the colonial period, and revealed the responsibility of consumers in the hemispheric north in southern suffering.

This module seeks to understand the phenomena and impact of war and collective violence in the non-Western world-to understand how violence emerges from particular historical circumstances and how it produces different consequences in different periods and geographical, cultural, ethnic, and even religious contexts.