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1 results

  • 11 - Genocide Studies and the Repression of the Political

  • from Part III - The Language of Transgression, Permanent Security, and Holocaust Memory
  • A. Dirk Moses, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
  • Book:
    The Problems of Genocide
    Published online:
    07 January 2021
    Print publication:
    04 February 2021, pp 441-476

  • Summary

    The North American and Israeli scholars who founded Genocide Studies in the 1980s and 1990s also insisted on genocide’s Holocaust archetype. These scholars successfully resisted the “conceptual stretching” of genocide to include political criteria in its definition. Domestically, they advocated an apolitical “toleration” pedagogy as genocide’s antidote. The US victory in the Cold War in the early 1990s sidelined the lively critique of the US national security state and gave rise to a new age of interventions. Vietnam-induced doubts were left behind as “the indispensable nation” became the world’s hyper-power. Although the founders of Comparative Genocide Studies were liberals who opposed the Vietnam War, they eagerly adopted the role of academic handmaiden to US global aspirations: the field anointed the US as the benign force to police the non-West in the form of humanitarian interventions to prevent genocide, other “atrocity crimes,” and to wage “war on terror.”