Ben Meiches: Introducing Brain Science into Genocide Studies

Don't miss our captivating interview with Ben Meiches, a distinguished scholar in global politics and international law. Delving into his groundbreaking article published in the Journal of Genocide Research, Ben unpacks the fascinating relationship between neuroscience, mental harm, and international law. Tune in to explore the innovative approaches shaping contemporary discourse on genocide.

Transcript

0:00

Neuroscience very much teaches us that the brain is a part of an embodied self, it's part of an environment, it's interacting at a biological and social level simultaneously. It's necessary for the articulation of language and the construction of selfhood and memory, but it's also porous and vulnerable as a result, in ways that I don't think we previously would have sort of recognized, including kinds of harm that sort of fall below what the architect Eyal Weizman calls the threshold of detectability often. So there are things we don't initially think about as part of violence. This is not to forgive, but to understand. With your host, writer and scholar of genocide studies, Sabah Carrim. I am your co-host, Luis Gonzalez-Aponte. Not to forgive, but to Understand. Not to forgive, but to Understand. Ben Meiches is an associate professor of security studies and conflict resolutions at the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences University of Washington, Tacoma, with a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University and a B.A. from Whitman College. Ben Meiches brings a wealth of knowledge and expertise to his field. His research delves into the intricate intersections of security, conflict and human rights violations, exploring topics ranging from genocide to planetary violence. Additionally, Ben Meiches is a prolific author with publications in esteemed journals and books such as Review of International Studies

and Non-human Humanitarians: 1:23

Animal Interventions in Global Politics. We have the pleasure of having Ben Meiches today among us, and we will be speaking to him about one particular journal article which drew my attention and which has basically been published in the Journal of Genocide Research. It was published in 2022. Now the title of this journal article. And Ben, we will get back to the other works that you have written in a bit. You also have books that you would like to I'm sure you would like to tell us about, or rather we would get it out of you and delve into what different things you've been working on. But for now, as I said, what I find very intriguing about the work you've come up with is this particular paper titled Genocide and the Brain, Neuroscience, Mental Harm and International Law. And the reason this paper caught my attention is because it introduces the new epistemology of neuroscience into the corpus of material we now have on genocide studies. So could you tell us a little bit more about this work? Sure. So the article was sort of originated in the process of researching my book, The Politics of Annihilation, A Genealogy of Genocide, which was trying to look at a bunch of the debates and discussions around the formation of the concept of genocide. And one of the things that that was a kind of artifact of that project was an interest in The clause of the Genocide Convention in Article two that talks about causing bodily and mental harm as a potential act of genocide. And what I did in kind of the research there and reading through that is to discover that what I had kind of presumed on an initial take that article would be about and what sort of contemporary international courts have read and thought about is things like psychological harm, rape, trauma, torture acts along those lines. But the folks that were involved in the discussion and invention of that were thinking about narcotic use, widespread forced opiate use under Japanese occupation of China, etc. and their conception of what was dangerous about mental harm, was somewhat of a different notion from the way that I think it had been applied now, not to say that the acts that are being covered are the gendered forms of violence that the term has been applied to are not important or significant or that that wasn’t a productive development and it felt like an area that had a lot of potential because this notion that the sort of mind body dualism has been in question is very widespread in the social sciences. And I actually turned it to colleagues because I'm situated in an interdisciplinary program who are in neuroscience and do work in psychology and sort of said, what do you think about this idea and this sort of concept of mental harm? And what do you know about neuroscience? And I was supported by them very generously and giving some introductory resources that I had worked on in the background as I was sort of completing a book and in this interesting lull period and realized that actually I thought that there was an incredibly the connection between the notion of harm that was kind of originally articulated as the basis for this part of the article and some of the discoveries of contemporary neuroscience, because neuroscience very much teaches us that the brain is a part of an embodied self, it's part of an environment, it's interacting at a biological and social level simultaneously. It's necessary for the articulation of language and the construction of selfhood and memory, but it's also porous and vulnerable as a result, in ways that I don't think we previously would have sort of recognized, including kinds of harm that sort of fall below what the architect Eyal Weizman calls the threshold of detectability often. So there are things we don't initially think about as part of violence. And as a consequence, I thought it was really fascinating to say. Hey, here's this much broader in some ways more multidimensional understanding of harm that I think was part of the inspiration for a section of this international law. It resonates with a lot of what neuroscience has to say. And if we start to fold neuroscientific insights into genocide studies, what happens to our understanding of the form, the scale, the intensity of harm, its longevity as well as the way that we might then eventually have to sort of repair or recuperate that, which is a very different project. If genocide involves much more than sort of acts of physical killing and harm, and it stops at sort of the discrete temporal and spatial boundaries. So let me reiterate whatever you're seeing here, because I want to well, let's start from the beginning, as Julie Andrews like to say, likes to say it's a very good place to start. So basically genocide when we speak about genocide, unfortunately, as you said in your article, Jeffrey Bachman talks about that and says that genocide mainly focused on mass killing. And that's what, of course, most people think about when they think about genocide. That's what they refer to. However, what you bring out in your paper is that is the possibility of recognizing many forms of mental harm that one can endure as a consequence of being exposed to or genocidal scenarios. And what you are thinking of doing, what you did in this paper was to introduce or rather to speak about it. This is the very first paper that I've seen in the field that delves into this particular area whereby what you the idea you introduce is the possibility of including all the neurological harm or neurological disorders that can arise as a consequence of exposure to genocide and genocidal scenarios which have not so far been included overtly in the definition of genocide. So what you propose, therefore, is what you mentioned earlier about, you know, the Travaux Préparatoires that contain details about, you know, narcotics and other ways in which one can be harmed mentally. You propose the possibility of expanding, shall we say, that expanding the purview or the understanding we currently have of Article two, subsection B of the Geneva of the Genocide Convention on the Geneva Conventions of Genocide Convention, so which includes the two mental harm. So when when because it includes the word mental harm, you're thinking of expanding the purview of mental harm to include neuroscientific forms of harm that are now detected through, you know, we know MRI's and all of these newer scanning devices. Now then I would love you to tell us more about these types of harms that you have actually already identified and discussed in detail in this paper. So it's kind of fascinating because the literature on brain injury is obviously not what I was first and foremost trained in. So what I did a lot in this is lean on how our existing studies of neuroscience brain injury changes in the brain and the treatment of those injuries applicable in a context that is far removed from the one in which most of those studies are developed. Right. And there are some things that people are very commonly aware of, right? Like the notion of a traumatic brain injury is something that is close to kind of common parlance. If you get hit in the head or have a severe concussion or an injury, a car accident, those kinds of things. But they would obviously be widespread in a context of large scale, intense physical violence. And it's not something that when you traditionally read about literature, which in genocide studies, we talk about harm and atrocity and killing all the time is the immediate thing that comes to our mind, partly because of the discourse and the rhetoric surrounding it, and partly because we tend to lump and bundle events together. That's one very obvious kind. And then we have chronic brain injuries, right. These have become part of popular discourse because of like American football, for instance, right. Where people are kind of constantly bashing their head. And there's this question of who's liable for everything that involve what we think of as very low grades of trauma that I think are also applicable in a situation where what we think of as. I hate using this term is sort of like lower intensity forms of physical violence, but prolonged over great durations that those could be applicable as forms of genocidal behavior because of the effects that they can exert on the brain, which range from early death to severe long term mental disorders, different kinds of disability and debility that emerge from them, etc.. And then there's a variety of things that have nothing to do with sort of discrete acts of physical violence, but are about the surrounding support for a person, right? So prolonged isolation, the effects of nutritional deficits, the effects of exposure to disease when those things are untreated, right. Potential long term impacts of paralysis or extension and environments that are inhospitable to sort of human well-being without shelter, etc.. All of those can have a whole variety of different impacts on the brain and the nervous system, it turns out. And they they impact us at levels that may not preclude or kill our physical bodies. But one of the things that I really call attention to is that the brain is also a social organ, right? And it's embedded in all the way that we do social practices and language. And there are studies that show that those kinds of harms over a long period of time can have severe impacts on a person's capacity to participate as part of a community. Right. And to flourish in the ways that we are accustom to thinking about people doing. And as a result, and this is particularly true, I should say, in the case of children, right? The kind of evidence of developmental plasticity is, again, another point of sort of widespread popular discourse in education settings. It shows up in discussions about child abuse and nutrition and public education in the United States anyways, because we know it's sort of the 0 to 6 range is really critical. And then the 6 to 11 range is a little different, but also critical. And so it's also a focal point on intergenerational and child related aspects of violence that I think are particularly pertinent and powerful. And what I wanted to point out to and this is something I think actually where genocide studies and social sciences actually is something to say back to neuroscience is all of this these neuroscientific impacts which are quite diverse, right, Because the brain is sort of involved in everything. If you're a human, it turns out, and also impacted by everything, right, is that you you have studies based on an epistemology, based in epidemiology and based on individual sort of patient profiles. Right? So we look at a bunch of people and we say they have two similar kinds of injuries and they're broken down in discrete settings. And then we say, okay, these are the likely outcomes of them. But there's no real thought process, I think in something like neuroscience, say, well, what about a scale of a mass violence to right. What would all of these people that are exposed in this way have in kind of common? And we've seen some of that in the form of like epigenetic changes to people who are the descendants of Holocaust survivors. Right. Those kinds of studies. So I think that they're tiptoeing there, but it's a very different scale and intensity at the same time. And so there's probably a need to stretch neuroscience in some way to say, you know, maybe we haven't thought about what these kinds of trauma have. Much like the literature in psychology has for the past 40 or 50 years, recognized that genocide events and other kinds of atrocities sometimes have very distinct and durable consequences on their victims. And so I wanted to pull out all of these diverse kinds of injuries, put them as both having physical and individual social and communal impacts, put them in or generational impacts, and think about them as stretching over longer periods of time, but then also try to say, hey, it doesn't mean like we just should. We shouldn't as genocide Study scholar is just be like, Hey, neuroscience is the coolest thing and it tells all the answers. They also need to kind of learn from us. So I hope that answers your question. Yes, absolutely. And I love how you end it, because I want to really take the discussion from that point on onwards and ask you this question, because even in my explorations of neuroscience and genocide studies, I keep coming across this obstacle that stops me from making conclusive statements about my research. So, for instance, when you speak rightly so, about all the different types of harm that could befall a person who's exposed to genocide or to a genocidal scenario in the long run, detectable to neuroscience mapping devices. My problem is how well documented is this research in the sense that how conclusive are these studies and what difficulties therefore, did you encounter when dealing with this very complex subject? Yeah, I think that's a great question because it's a tiny sliver of the human population that has really been studied, and it turns out that the exact mechanisms of harm are not always the same for everybody, right? Because of differences in embodiment and experience and age and just because the body reacts differently to different forms of exposure. Right. I mean, I think that that's that's kind of a profound statement to some extent, to say that one thing that affects one person is not going to have a self similar effect in another person. And that makes it hard to draw conclusions, as you pointed out, I think and really eloquently, I guess my concern first and foremost is to say if we've neglected this as a series of harms, then we need to at least add it into the sort of map of of concerns. We have a genocide studies. There's there's like a legibility or intelligibility about potential kinds of violence that we sort of I don't want to say it's an ethical project, but it's one that it seems to correct for my mind. A bit of a weird question. What I would actually short the right term is, but sort of like amorphous description of violence that we have resulted to sometimes in genocide studies or reliance on theoretically objective kinds of violence like body counts, as a way to think about when and how gratuitous violence occurs. So that's one, one kind of value. I'm not sure that I think of it as having at this point a prescriptive value per say in understanding exactly where genocide events will occur, but more in terms of addressing people who are dealing with being victimized by genocide events. Right. And the kinds of harms that they may suffer and thinking about practices and forms of prolonged violence that are not necessarily involved in physical killing as their most widespread or signature piece, potentially still having genocidal effects. Right. So one of the things that I pull out in this work in this article is the work of Catherine Malabou who's a French philosopher who's written extensively on the brain. And the reason why I think Malabou is so helpful, actually in thinking about this is Malabou discusses plasticity, which is, from her mind, kind of the study of form, if you will, and form and transformation, but has this very interesting category in some of her works of destructive plasticity, which is there's often a celebration of our capacity for change and transformation, etc.. And she points out that, well, sometimes if the brain experiences a destructive form of plasticity, it can't return to its previous state. It's in other words, it can't self-regulate, it deforms and becomes something different. And she pulls on the example, for instance, of people with extreme dementia. Right. That in some sense undergo a transformation of self that we would consider extremely problematic from the standpoint of losing someone that we may have loved or cared about, etc., as part of our lives, even though they are physically alive and with us. And I wanted to kind of say, well, what would a model almost be of of an act of genocide that doesn't per se eliminate physically all of the members of a community, but does have effects that parallel or analogous in some ways to this concept of destructive plasticity. And I think that that was something that particularly as I was trying to understand how to apply this concept for discussions of colonial genocide was fascinating, right? Where you can look at an example like indigenous genocide, where there are survivance but that survivance and still has forms of harm that we might be able to see and recognize. And I don't want to suggest that neuroscience needs to replace other epistemology of violence. I want it to be complementary and not become a new kind of scientific hegemony which can happen and be kind of problematic. And that's more where I think that there's there's value. I'm not sure that we're at the stage yet where I expect everyone to go through an MRI or the kinds of resources to apply that. And so at some level, its contribution is kind of at the stage of a thought experiment of like, how should we change the category, How should we change the concept? Where would we want to map atrocities and understand their effects? Because I think perpetrators are very clever in some instances. They don't always necessarily have to engage in what we predict their actions will be, and that's one of the ways they hide and disguise. Pretty hideous forms of violence sometimes. I really like the fact that you speak about just Malabou’s destructive plasticity. In fact, I read her after I read your article, I read her work and, you know, these long term effects that people and societies can suffer, can suffer from as a consequence of exposure to genocide is not something that is easy to map, as we just discussed. And we don't often speak about that because we are so concerned with the definition of genocide and all of these other matters about whether, for instance, you know, there is a society embroiled in war or that has suffered any form of mass atrocity can be considered to be to have suffered genocide, obviously. So we're still fighting with just the basics of the definition here. And speaking of which, therefore, when I read your paper, what also came to mind was the in the panoply of research out there which seeks to redefine or to expand the definition of genocide. And you know that there gatekeepers everywhere try to limit the definition of genocide and say, well, if we keep expanding the definition of genocide in all of its many ways, like, for instance, we're speaking about mental harm in neuroscience, specifically these people, these these are those who are against the expansion of genocide feel that it must be limited so that it has the kind of power, in fact, when it is laid out there, when a society said to be genocidal, the effect on us is very different. So my question to you is, have you also been wondering about that question about what potentially expanding the definition of genocide to include these forms of neuroscientific harm, which, as you said, can be traced to very short and long periods of time, who do potentially to those who are the gatekeepers of the definition? Yeah, No, that's that's a great question. And if I'm I'm chuckling a bit, I'm laughing a bit because like that the book I published with Minnesota The Politics of Annihilation: A Genealogy of Genocide in 2019 is very much about the multiplicity of the concept of genocide against gatekeeping. And it sort of it makes what I think is one of the more robust, not just historical, but theoretically grounded rationales for why a lot of the gatekeeping that's done in the discipline and in law is pretty arbitrary at the end of the day and very much in the service of different kinds of power, which is a story we've had for a long time in genocide studies. In some ways I think I detail it and do it a bit differently than others, but I have a there's a long discussion we could go into here about what I think of in genocide studies is an under-theorization of how discourse actually operates, because there's this presumption on the part of gatekeeping and gatekeepers and in the discipline that we somehow own and author the discourse that we speak. And I actually am very much opposed to that sort of model. And so I'm kind of wonder what the gatekeepers think they're doing some of the time and how successful they think they are at gatekeeping. Because I think most people who use the term genocide and embrace it and pull it out in different ways are not experts in that subject in any way. And so the really interesting thing in genocide is actually the emergent effects of it as a political discourse that extend well beyond whatever we want to regulate the discourse into being. And I understand why that's troubling from the standpoint of trying to stabilize the meaning of the term and to apply it in a judicial context. Maybe. But if those judicial rulings are always underpinned by our esthetics and our prejudices and our historical experiences, and you have to call into question the value of that value, so to speak. Right? So that's sort of my teasing response to the phenomenon of gatekeeping. I actually think in this case I resolve the problem pretty directly because I don't know that the gatekeepers have always done their homework. And in this case, this is actually, I think, probably the author's intent, if you will, of this section of the genocide convention, much more in alignment with the arguments made by neuroscience than by the direction it's been taken by the international courts to date. And by the other interpretation. There's not a lot of commentary on the Article B actually compared to many of the other acts, because it is amorpheus. But if you read Ti-Sun Li if you read the ad hoc community Travaux, they're they're very interested in something like long term effects to the brain and what happens to those in the event of something like an occupation, which certainly involved a lot of the other acts that we identify as part of the Genocide Convention, but that they were concerned had distinct harms. And I sort of believe that there empirically responding to conditions that contemporary neuroscience can just give us a more discerning epistemology to describe and articulate. And so my kind of response is like, Hey, if you're a gatekeeper, the Genocide Convention probably is still a relevant document because it influences international norms. For what they're worth, it changes. It is sort of an anchoring point in a lot of the discourses. And so if I can show this development from that concept, I think that it makes it much harder to ignore, which is one of the reasons why I think that the argument is powerful because it puts so much of what critical genocide studies and sort of socially oriented genocide studies have wanted to bring to the table back in to the conversation. And it gives them a grounding in materiality because this is one of the things that comes out of, I think, both neuroscience and sort of history of science studies is there really isn't a social biological distinction when it comes to the brain. Both of those forces impact them, impact the brain, and you can't really participate socially if your brain is is impacted the same way it has, as know, negative effects and the sick in that regard. But your sociality and your social environment also directly informs that. And so I think it's actually a great point to kind of undermine a strong distinction between cultural or social forms of genocide and material or physical. And and that's that to me is a productive intervention to make in a discipline where it's been very hard to think about things like cultural genocide in relationship to some of the gatekeeping that's happened. Thank you, Ben. That makes a lot of sense. I am now curious about what you may have explored, which I am exploring as a consequence of your paper. And I want to just quickly to talk about that. So when I read your paper, I realized and I was fascinated by this addition of the neuroscience to the subject of genocide studies. And when I read your paper, I realize that you were focused primarily on the long term and short term effects on of mental harm or neurological harm on survivors and their families. Right. In my in my case, what I did, therefore, was to veer off from that point and to focus on perpetrators, like how could for instance, neuroscience be relevant to perpetrators, especially if a perpetrator in a trial one day said, it wasn't me, it was my brain, In other words, that the person blamed it on maybe depression or a neurological disorder, because this has happened at the local and federal level, meaning in local courts of many jurisdictions across the world. But what did this actually happened in a trial? And so then I discovered the case of Dominic Ongwen, where he was science. He's, of course, a Ugandan child soldier who was tried at the International Criminal Court a few years ago. And when neuroscience evidence, was actually adduced in court in his defense. So my question to you is whether you have researched any any of this area. And of course, the paper only says one story. We know that a lot goes into a paper, more that is redacted, edited, left out that the end of the process. So I'm curious if you have any story to tell us about what was redacted. Sure. So there's a problem in handling neuroscience and it's I think it's not unrelated to an issue that you asked me about a several minutes ago, a couple questions ago, which is that it's hard as social scientists to want to point to a biological account based off one or series of discrete events and call them determinative of our complex social worlds. Right. And our complex personalities and individuality. So there's this determinism problem that we're sort of fearful of there to some extent. And one of the things that happens often in the court trials, right, is that typically in defense of people that are being prosecuted for one thing or another, that argument becomes that neuroscience is determinative of how they could have act and therefore it is exculpatory with respect to their moral culpability, right in a given situation or their criminal culpability in that situation. And that's often how that that case. And I think that some of the neuroscience and I thought about this for a while and actually considered whether or not I needed to write a part of this about perpetration as well. And it sort of became too unruly is the truth for that, because that's not if you were baked into the story I was telling about the Genocide Convention, which is about identifying the effects of the acts, not the motivations or the subjective intentions of the people who are carrying it out. And so it felt incongruent to some extent, but certainly it feels like there is growing evidence from some of this, the neuroscientific literature that would say there are things that people can be exposed to that will change their propensity to engage in violent events and understand there are violent events. Right. And I think that often that focuses on things like children that are exposed to violence or end up in violent situations. Right. Or are recruited for violence labor, all of which are examples where I think that you could see people in international criminal courts making those contentions. The question that kind of is hard for one person to adjudicate and I'm not sure that the science or the law fully has a good grasp on this answer, and it's probably because we're going at that sort of thorny philosophical kernel of like and what stage are you subject to a series of conditions and emotions and feelings that are beyond you? And what is You as a signature moment, right. That that begs the question of where kind of authorship comes in. Where does your agency actually lie? Because that's what's trying to be criminalized there, I guess. I think that there is some hesitation that this would produce as well as some causal explanations. It would give way to as well. Right. And it would it would make me more inclined to believe, based off my research, that there are a wide variety of conditions where people who have been exposed to violence and traumatic occasions can become much more prone to violence themselves later in life. Right. That's why seems like there's some throughline there. But again, it's not ubiquitous that that's the case because the effects are contingent and dependent. Dependent, which means it's sort of case by case. Still, it would also make me wonder if we need to if it challenges much more generally like the notion of individual criminal culpability that we we have. Right. And our science kind of doesn't align with the idea of a self authoring moral subject that is at the root of most of our legal regimes. And so it's like there's a lots of problems to resolve to resolve there. I'm not sure I have the answers to them one way or another so much as I think that there are tendencies that this reaffirms and aligns with. And some of that is predicted by the literature. I mean, we know, for instance, that history of mass violence and violent events is often one of the best predictors of future violence in a given area. Right. And even if you kind of peel away many of the social constructs and problematic categories that can sometimes go into that, that seems like a very durable observation. Well, this provides a nice rationale for why growing up in and being involved in certain kinds of conflicts would produce persistence over a long period of time. And maybe it gives some tools in peacebuilding and conflict resolution literatures that haven't been thought about about the necessary conditions to kind of erode or reduce the severity of those circumstances. You know, I'm I'm not a lawyer myself. I don't I don't know exactly what the questions in a court context are, in a legal context would be as this evidence was marshaled. My guess is that there's a bunch of different ways it could be prescriptive or descriptive, that it might be about ameliorating the degree or the significance of the penalty. It would be hard in the absence of a really, well evidence to an incredibly expensive case that would probably require a series of studies from somebody early in life going into the present to demonstrate conclusively that, in effect, to their brain had changed them so much that they would then later on commit or be a perpetrator of atrocities. I had somebody in another panel that I was on one phrase presenting a version of this paper, say, Well, this isn't the outcome of this argument that everyone who's involved in atrocity has a potential to say the atrocity is kind of its own excuse because, you know, in a Christopher Browningesque way, they get exposed to violence and then that changes who they are and then they'll participate in violence. And so it's actually whoever exposes us in the first place that is sort of the real perpetrator. And I think that the best I can do is to say, yes, I think it raises interesting questions like that. I don't know that I have the resolutions to those questions, but I'd rather deal with that problem head on than pretend it's not complicated and that there's this new custom ology, a new form of science is posing for us. Absolutely. And I think what you just just to pick on what you just to piggyback on what you just said, you said there is a tendency to become a bit fatalistic. I think when you delve into this subject and I see this primarily because even from a perpetrator's perspective, a perpetrator could just resign themselves themselves to the fact that, well, it's their brain that caused them to do it. And or to take to latch on to what Robert Sapolsky, the neuroendocrinologist, says, we're all cars with dysfunctional breaks. You know, whenever we are facing. And so, you know, that is, of course, one extreme of the argument. And then you have Stephen Morse, who is the other legal legal scholar, who says, well, no, you can't just blame everything on your brain and you have to there must be legal accountability in the legal system exist for a reason. So, I mean, when I study when because of your paper, again, when I started to delve into neuroscience, I realized that both trauma, even a survivor's perspective, if you have you have been affected permanently. Again Catherine Malabou destructive plasticity and you've been you've been affected irretrievably because of genocide of of harm accruing from that, then you are resigned in a way to your fate because you have to accept that this is the condition you're going to suffer from. And so I think we have to be able to find some sort of a juste milieu in all of these arguments, not to be, on one hand, deterministic or fatalistic about it, but and also not to actually go to the other extreme of that, which is to say neuroscience comes with nothing or that, you know, we are individually we're completely responsible for what happens around us and that this is the short story about the long and short of legal accountability and neuroscience. So, I mean, trying to find that juste milieu is what I am struggling with in these studies. But I think it's important, I believe, to remain as humble as possible and recognize that these studies are very seminal. And I think that's what comes out of this discussion with you, so that we can’t have we can’t make definitive conclusions about whether, for instance, even PTSD, for that matter, something you bring up. So I think you mentioned three conditions PTSD, TBI and CTE, Right? So PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, CTE's chronic traumatic encephalopathy, and TBI, which is traumatic brain injury. Now, when you take these three neurological conditions or disorders in the context of genocide, so as a result of exposure to genocide, the problem is, again, some of the papers I read were about when how can you create a causal or situate the causal relationship between the neurological disorder and the event that caused it. So for instance, if a brain is detected with PTSD and the very obvious signs of PTSD, the problem is can you conclude whether definitely definitively whether the PTSD was caused by the actual genocidal scenario or whether it was caused by an event before that? So then in the way to make these conclusions becomes actually very, very complicated. And maybe I'm repeating myself here in You’re I love the the juste milieu is a good a good explanation of where we need to find the ground on this. Right. That is it's fascinating because it's almost like what you're proposing or what we're proposing in discussing is like what would neuroscientific forensics involve? And unlike, for instance, another field that's taken off in the similar time frame that is now used in lots of criminal trials like genetic forensics. Right. Which is easier in some respects to say, although we now know it's quite fraught and interpretively cut up right.“Here's evidence. Here is not”. The problem with the neuroscience is that it hasn't gotten to the stage where it answers that question because I think it's dealing with that very thorny question of what is selfhood and where does it come in. There's not really an explanation of that is an emergent phenomena from the brain totally. Right. So unless there ends up being a further epistemological answer to that question from neuroscience, my guess is that there's always going to be a leap. And that leap is where the politics lies in terms of what the extent to which we're going to moralize and hold people accountable or understand their suffering, etc., will be. In terms of a mass violence event I think that there are two things to say. One, the way that the international law is read from my understanding, is that it is the intent to cause such things that needs to be borne out. Right. And I think that the question is, well, if you produce an environment that is going to lead to TBI, that's going to lead to CTE, that's going to lead to PTSD, and it's coupled with other kinds of comments, right, Statements of intent. That seems like it's something we should be paying attention to. Right. And that we can understand malnutrition not as something that necessarily needs to just kill people, but can produce prolonged harm and suffering. And that needs to be part of the repertoire of things that people who prevent genocide think about the action and intervention. People who are doing support, people who do humanitarian prevention and prosecution should be aware of. And so in some ways, it's just updating the literature on that. Right? Like what? What constitutes violence has gone through a revolution from what we were trained in when we have or we were trained in grad school. Right. That's one one kind of key point. I would say that the other feature there, the other the other argument that needs to be borne out to some extent is, well, there are, you know, a variety of potential precursor events. Somebody might have had PTSD earlier or not a population should have population level effects. Right? So we're talking about collective violence events. And this is where it would be really helpful if people who studied neuroscience would take some time to answer the question as opposed to exposure to discrete circumstances. What does collective exposure and social exposure look like? And I'm not sure that that field is equipped to answer that question. And I don't think it's how research grants are organized or are put together to help field these questions, because, again, it's not it's not central to the way that understand the need for their discipline. But I would be really curious to discover the results of research in people who are survivors of different kinds of atrocities and mass violence events and see how they carry out. Because my guess is in some of the examples that have like smaller scale studies that have done on things like, you know, mass shootings, for instance, which are not exactly the same as mass atrocities, you find parallel effects that you would find that as well. And that would be much stronger evidence of an atrocity committed. I think it would be one that would confirm to our conform to our expectations per se. But I still think that that's value in terms of understanding who and how harm has been carried out. And I don't think it's it's unprecedented. Right. The whole part of the sort of introduction of psychology into the discussion of and psychiatry, into the discussion of genocide and atrocities. Right. Post the Holocaust was partly to study and understand how people were dealing with this, but then very much became about planes and other things along those lines. I'm not sure how helpful it would be in the context of perpetration, because usually perpetrators are few and victims are many in a mass violence event. But you could also see as extension there at some extent depends on how the science evolves and the politics of the science. Yes, that's true. That's very true. And I think as you mentioned earlier, gatekeeping is very much influenced by politics in the end. So whether any of this is admitted or do we do the research on scholars depends a lot on whether it's going to benefit you. If you have to be very direct, you know, if it's going to be a benefit to a certain entity now. And I think this argument actually, if I if I may real quick, I think this argument is actually very hard on multiple gatekeeping fronts because it's out of sync with the dominant legal interpretations. It's asking people to do a lot of work in a new area. We are not trained in. And scholars and lawyers don't particularly love saying we're not experts in something right at this point in time. Along the same note. It's also a bit against the current in social science and humanities that a lot of genocide studies scholars come from, which is historically been somewhat biased to thinking about materiality as an influential factor because of this determinism problem. And so I think there is people who are probably resistant to it for scholarly reasons, resistant to it for legal reasons, resistant because of the kind of workload it's demanding and resistant because of what they foresee the potential long term consequences could be, all of which are reasonable potential fears or anxieties to have. I don't want to dismiss them. I also think, though, that if you follow through on the literature and the arguments that we're generating here, that it's hard to ignore. And, you know, it's sort of a test case of, you know, how how actually capable are we of reflection and criticality. Unfortunately, I think the neuroscientific literature says not very much. Right. Like it's like that Libet experiment. We're not even aware of our reaction before we have it already. So it's a test case. Well, I know I feel the same way. I mean, when I was doing the research for my paper, I realized when I spoke to neuroscience scholars that they were very skeptical about the use of neuroscience, even in a legal setting. They were like, “but we don't have any evidence of that”. And I can understand the skepticism because they often forward the argument. They put forward the argument that we simply find we as a non neuroscience scientist, we tend to simplify the argument about neuroscience and, you know, for instance, even just one act, a certain act, right? A behavioral act, I'd say, is connected to not one part of the brain, but several parts of the brain looks like a network as what we know in computers. By the way, I read that a computer scientists base themselves on neuroscience journal articles to generate new ideas in their own field because you can see the connections in the two. So what I feel what I hear from neuroscience scholars and neuroscientists in general is that they're very skeptical about neuroscience. You know, studies from neuroscience being used in court settings or being used by us genocide scholars. Who are now trying to find ways to, you know, like how we're seeing right now to maybe have a another layer of explanation to what mental harm could possibly be, because so let's be realistic here. The conclusion is that there isn't sufficient research and they aren't conclusive answers on in the field for us to be completely considered. Therefore, my next question is moving forward, what can we do? Because I know, unlike a like my case so far, you have had the advantage of being exposed to scholars in the field who helped you along with this paper that you wrote the one that we're talking about. So what did you discern in terms of their responses, their reservations, And if you were to come up with a project to expand the thought, that seminal thought in this paper, what is how would you go about it? So again, I happened to be situated in an interdisciplinary program, which is very odd and it's interdisciplinary to the extent that we have English literature and Spanish language and cultures and anthropology and history and neuroscience, environmental science and politics all bound together. And so one of the things that we have to cultivate here in our very large program is that there's some degree of disciplinary humility and mutual learning. And I think that that is itself a bit of a break from the way that academic knowledge production happens in almost every other venue, right? Where you're talking to people who come in siloed to some extent with their assumptions, with their methodological barriers, etc.. And so I didn't reach much resistance from my colleagues in starting to propose this idea at all. It was sort of like, that's an interesting, provocative thought. I've taken this to a couple of other venues before and talks where I'd had neuroscientists in the field who have thought that it's actually an interesting case. I think they appreciated the spin and the argument that like this actually raises questions that neuroscientists should probably be interested in investigating because health is not the only form of harm and we don't often phrase atrocities as health related events where morbidity and mortality are concerned. But that is very much their purview at the end of the day, at least in neuroscience, there’s interest in medicine. And so they should help us out and mostly that has been forgiving in terms of, well, this could be a little differently presented or like here's the sort of newest research on this particular theme. And like, you know, I'm fully admitting that I am a non expert calling on other forms of knowledge to be harnessed here in this way. At the same time, I don't think that they have good methodological answers for why those limits in the discipline are always the way that they are. And there are many neuroscientists who are in popular venues who’ve talked about the value that this can bring. It's been used I mean like Daniel Lord Smail's Book or Smail, however you pronounce his name on Deep History and the Brain has been out for what, like 15-20 years now saying that we can understand the brain as a social artifact and in social and historical context for centuries Antonio Damasio’s obviously been very widespread speaking about this in ways that are quite accessible. And so I don't want to let somebody else's methodological barriers, I guess, and professional barriers prevent what is a sort of incipient kind of research. I also think it speaks a little bit to that inchoate and emergent character of genocide studies, though, which is like kind of an awkward subfield that, it's not, it's not history, it's not political science, it’s not anthropology, not it's not law. It draws from a lot of those. It's only recently started to sort of challenge and decolonize its corpus in any significant way. Right. And so maybe maybe it's also that it needs to bring more players into it as well and see what they have to say and ask questions as to why people are not willing to participate in a dialog with us. So and again, maybe that's a bit of a cheeky answer. I'm maybe I'm dodging the question, but I do think that it's a I have to ask the question of what's the fear of being wrong. I think it makes a lot of sense to like ask the people from different disciplines to be a little bit more open about the methodological barriers that we have because I feel that even when I was studying the context of the legal system itself, there's always this discussion about, you know, how how do you include, you know, material from science, from the sciences into a field like the law. And so while having this debate about law and science, I'm of course, not curious about law and neuroscience, you know, how do you try to incorporate the two? And so I think it's not it's not unfair for us to broach this question by saying, well, the way to go about it is actually to start or to further these studies in an interdisciplinary milieu as where you are right now, where you know, you have the exposure to all of these different people and they're open to having this discussion because the methodological barriers just seem unreasonable after a while. I mean, my reading of neuroscience and the possibilities of incorporating it into a larger field have been opposed in many times by people who claim, you know, that neuroscience is a science and it's based on a spectrum of possibilities when we speak about probabilities and all of that. Whereas if you think about the legal system they want yes or no, guilty, not guilty, they want binary sort of like answers or verdicts to whatever case. So I understand that all of these barriers, but they can be overcome if things are negotiated between different disciplines. I will say this, too. There's a difference between genocide studies and neuroscience and law that I think is relevant. If I kind of like zoom back out, which is I think most genocide studies scholars and people interested in it are guided because of an ethical commitment that's about nonviolence, right. And about reducing gratuitous forms of harm. That's why you study genocide and you study atrocities, at least from my mind, is because of a desire to reduce those. And that's the, if you will, the organizing or foundational aspiration of the field. To some extent, I think neuroscience and law in different ways kind of want to be meta fields. They want to dictate what happens elsewhere and for different reasons. Right? So neuroscience is part of a move to to explain reality and human reality based on empirical observation of what the brain can and can't do. Right. And that is dispositive of, as you said, probabilities for action and behavior and everything else. And it doesn't like the limits of its explanation and it doesn't like to be pulled in. And the law is very much the same way, actually. It likes to set the rules right and wants to dictate what can and cannot be stated, what can and cannot be done. And so I wonder a little bit if the organizing principle in both those is slightly different and less willing to push the envelope some of the time, although there's certainly resistance and marginal figures in everything in the way that I think genocide studies, probably, although we discussed its gatekeeping should because at the end of the day, if this knowledge production that we're doing isn't about deepening our understanding of and therefore combating different forms of marginalization, oppression and violence, I'm not sure what we're doing. I love what you said when you started this segment of the conversation. Genocide Studies is definitely governed by, at least for us, those who are aware of it, by our ethical commitment, nonviolence, and that should basically already govern the direction we ought to take in terms of overcoming any barriers, whether the methodological or otherwise. And so in that sense, it's not about who wins, it's not about which field is going to have a certain upmanship over the other one upmanship over the other. But it's really just about finding different ways to be able to discern what is wrong and find solutions to those to those problems. That's a that's a good note to end on. But I just want to say, I do want to speak about your other work. I do want to ask you, you are an associate professor at the University of Washington, Tacoma, and I'm curious about the other work that you've been doing, because I've spoken about some of them to my students as well. So I'd like you to just run through what you've done and tell us your expertise, the areas of research that would be focused on. I'm so most recently I've been working on nonhuman animals and I published a book last year called Nonhuman Humanitarians Animal Interventions in Global Politics, which is about basically the use of nonhuman animal labor in a variety of different humanitarian intervention projects. So I look at the use of explosive detection dogs, rats by an organization called Apropos to do explosive detection, work, TB identification a variety of other and then other tasks, and then the use of of goats and cows by organizations like Heifer International. Right and food aid and support. And I got into another maybe it's another conceptual question, which is, you know, humanitarianism as a field is very much self directed at the question of reducing human suffering. But I think it also often articulates a commitment to be considerate about the welfare of others. And there have been many critiques of humanitarianism Universalism for its gendered, racialized colonial dimensions about the fact that it sort of has to envision the other as inhuman at the same time that it visions people as human, etc.. And so I decided to kind of pose the question of, well, what happens when humanitarians confront and engage actual non-humans? And in some ways you can see a thread line. An interest in my work is kind of in more than human or non-human agencies, and their effects are like some sort of things that are involved. So brain is ecological and material. It's also nutritional. So it's sort of expanded in that way. And I found a really interesting set of highly divergent degrees to which humanitarians were thinking the welfare agency, physical and ethical capacities of nonhuman animals, how expansive or inclusive or exclusive they're understanding of their purview was. And often it felt like as I was doing this research, that there was a pretty strong linkage between their understanding of the nonhuman animals they were working with as sort of different but still complex and multifaceted companion species. And the degree to which they were thinking about their work in expansive and sort of multipronged or multispecies justice ways. And so that's what that project was sort of about. I know it seems like a turn from genocide studies to there, but I promise there's there's a couple of throughlines I was actually for a long time thinking about writing a project on Nonhuman Materials as contributing to atrocities. And so I actually wrote a piece in 2015 that's in security dialog called The Political Ecology of a Camp that started me on the process of thinking about how do you actually construct the built environment of a concentration environment, and was then thinking about the relationship between that and humanitarian and refugee compounds, which led me to, actually there are these interesting, certainly alive and therefore certainly to some degree a dreadful actors, and it just kind of blossomed into its own project, which there are many examples in animal rights, in animal welfare discourse that harness the language of atrocity and international law and want to think about those things. So there were some fascinating points of connection there. But it's it's been an interesting and illuminating sort of separate adventure alongside all of this to discover all of these fascinating elements. And, you know, I know more way more about how rats smell and interact with their environment and communicate with bacteria or understand bacterial communications than I ever thought I would. But I would. Imagine and I think it's interesting to to to actually to do, you know, the offshoots of the mainstream themes that we deal with all the time in genocide studies. I mean, the first generation of scholars who dealt with the major, the main questions about perpetrators and their behavior and the why of the killing. And now we have, I think, well, I wouldn't consider you a second generation, probably a third generation of genocide scholars now who are asking all of these new questions. And I think it's great because it also reveals the extent to which so much is possible in the field. And hopefully this will attract many more new scholars as well to explore even further subfields that go on. I would love to have that. Sorry, you're going to say something? I think you're absolutely right. I mean, we're eventually going to be proven wrong, right? Somebody will update and change our knowledge production. That's that's our obsolescence is is baked into the project of being an intellectual, probably. So I'm Standing on the shoulders of our Giants, right. Of the Giants. And beneath those that are coming in the future. So. That's right. That's right. So thank you so much, Ben. I would love to chat about this new work of yours. I think we can do that probably in the next episode at some point. The future. And thank you so much for this conversation. I really appreciate it. This was not to forgive, but to understand with our guest, Ben Majors. To our listeners, don't forget to like, subscribe and stay tuned for more discussions. This was not to forgive, but to understand with our guest, Ben Majors. To our listeners, don't forget to like, subscribe and stay tuned for more discussions.