INTS 221/3.0 - Global Issues of the 21st Century: Comparative Genocide Studies

The Holocaust is undoubtedly the best-known genocide of our time. Thousands of books have been written about it, many films have been made, almost every European capital city has a museum dedicated to it, and it has had an immeasurable impact upon the world we live in today. But the Holocaust is also only one example of the much broader phenomenon of genocide, which afflicted (by some counts) well over 50 other groups during the twentieth century, including in Namibia, Armenia, Cambodia, and East Timor. This course seeks to understand the roots of this extreme human violence by making connections across cases from very different times and places, and also the ways in which it continues to impact upon the present. The first half of the course takes a chronological survey of ten different case studies – from North America and Australia to Bosnia and Rwanda – and will use some original documents and survivor testimonies to gain an understanding of the motives and experiences in each case. The second half of the course then steps back in order to debate the competing explanations for genocide – such as ideology, human aggression and war, religion, and the modern nation-state system – before exploring the difficulties of prosecution and prevention, and the politics of memory and genocide denial: in other words, the many ways in which genocide remains an important political and moral issue in the twenty-first century.