Uğur Ümit Üngör: Holocaust and Genocide Studies: Cucumber and Vegetable Studies?

In this interview, historian and sociologist Uğur Ümit Üngör discusses the controversy and complication over the use of the “g-word” (genocide), as well as the damage done to humanity because some genocides are deemed “more equal” than others. Drawing on his expertise in genocide and mass atrocity in the Middle East, he discusses how these issues intersect with the ongoing conflicts in Israel and Palestine. 

Chapter Timestamps
00:00 - Opening
01:17 - Introduction
01:40 - Challenges of the Term "Genocide"
10:01 - Debates Over the Usage and Implications of "Genocide"
17:01 - Academic Perspectives: Are Scholars Addressing Genocide Effectively?
20:29 - "Screaming, Silence, and Mass Violence in Israel/Palestine"
23:56 - Conflict Hotspots in and around the Middle East
29:36 - How Genocide is Viewed on the Global Stage
36:34 - Insights from The Antelope’s Strategy by Jean Hatzfeld
38:21 - Taking Action: Concrete Steps to Prevent Genocide
43:07 - Social Media’s Role in Activism and Genocide Prevention
47:41 - Why People Prefer to use "Genocide" Over “War Crimes” or “Crimes Against Humanity”
51:26 - Exploring the Roots of Violence and Conflict
54:29 - "Genocide Studies Sound Meant to Be Politically Expedient or Emotionally Safe"

Transcript

0:00

And I find that always a lack of failure of imagination. You know, why would it be or why would we assume that victims have become some kind of Zen humanists that all of a sudden have seen the light and will not commit violence anymore or that have, for example, forsaken any form of ethno-nationalism? But that's just not realistic. That's not how victimization works. Uğur Ümit Üngör is a leading historian, sociologist and professor specializing in genocide studies. In this conversation, we will explore critical questions about the complexities of defining genocide, the politics of its recognition and challenges facing scholars as they navigate contentious global and regional conflicts. Please enjoy our conversation. Before the war in Israel and Palestine became a public affair. The world continued to face problems stemming from the G word that is genocide. In the Khmer Rouge genocide the Khmer Rouge tribunal had to focus on the killings of the minority that is the Khmer Krom the Cham Muslims to establish genocide. Not the mass murder of the majority Khmer. In the genocide of the Tutsi. The ICTR, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda found that the Hutus and Tutsis were the same people. They had to therefore base themselves, the ICTR had to base themselves on the emic differences between the two to establish that one people was actually one genos was being targeted for mass murder and therefore there was genocide. Tell us more about the problem then with the term genocide. Well, thank you, first and foremost, for your kind invitation to be on the podcast. It's a real pleasure and it's also really important and timely, actually, that we discuss these topics that relate to the concept of genocide, the phenomenon of mass violence, and then also particular cases and how we relate to those cases around the world, historic and contemporary. So there are obviously a wide number of problems with the concept of genocide in in a number of ways. And there has been fortunately a really brought literature on it. And I think the one topic that you just touched on is in a genocide or in a mass destruction of a civilian population by the government or by an authority. What is it exactly that is being destroyed? And so we understand the -cide element of it. So the suffix -cide. But what is the ‘genos’ actually that we're talking about? And I think there are two ways of looking at it. One is a more objectivist perspective or, you know, you can simply look at there are ethnic groups in conflict with each other, and we know ethnicity is a kind of social construct, of course, So it's a construct that's in the minds of people, but there are objectivist ways of looking at how our ethnic boundaries, how do they emerge, how are they constructed and how are they maintained. So that's an objectivist way of looking at it. And the way that the tribunal, for example, tried to do that is is an objectivist perspective, but trying to pin down what is it exactly which group is it exactly that's being destroyed. Another way of looking at it is let's say, the subjectivist perspective. So what are the categories that are in the minds of especially the perpetrators. And I think one of the biggest problems we have in genocide research is that we focus a lot on the first on the former. So trying to pin down exactly how the victim category exists or emerges or is produced. But we don't focus enough exactly on the changing nature of this victim category in the perpetrators minds. And I think that has plagued actually the problem of the concept from the beginning. And the best illustration of that, I think, is the Soviet Union and Stalin and Stalinism, because as we know, Genocide Convention of 1948, the draft of the genocide Convention that was written by Lemkin went obviously to the great powers who all had a say over it. They had a particular I mean, in a way, one of the great powers, the allies, especially being mostly the US, UK and the Soviet Union, but especially the US, and the Soviet Union. They manipulated the term in a way to fit their own agendas that was politically expedient. And we generally focus on the US. So how the US did this. But actually a lot of research suggests that the convention was most mangled, actually in its original perspective by Joseph Stalin. We know that the convention went to Stalin and that he edited the wording of the convention with his famous blue pencil, he had a blue pencil that only he could use. And he would just edit terms and cross other terms out. And this original document has been found by colleagues who work in the field of Soviet history. That document was sent to the United Nations that was accepted and ratified. And which means, now this is controversial, but I think true to say is currently we are working with the legal definition of genocide, that is Stalin's genocide definition. And I'm thinking, why would I, as a scholar in my right mind, work with the genocide definition of a genocide perpetrator, in fact, of a serial genocide perpetrator? Remember the famous book by Norman Naimark, ‘Stalin's Genocides’, plural, because not only is, the disfiguring and the deformation of the convention, I think an important term for legal thinkers, but also it made a major impact on those distinctions that I just gave about the objectivist and subjectivist ways of looking at it. Namely, Stalin committed a series of mass murders against certain categories of people in the Soviet Union, and these categories were entirely made up. Made up as in they were imagined. So imagined communities, imagined communities of victims as well. For example, the Russian term враг народа, which means enemies of the people who is an enemy of the people, anybody and everybody could become an enemy of the people. For example, by telling a joke about Stalin or by actually sabotaging work or by criticizing the Soviet Union and Stalin's project. And these people were, as soon as you were categorized within this imagined community of enemies of the people, you were sent off to an execution. So if these categories, if these criteria were ethnic criteria, then it would have been much more, let's say, conceivable for ordinary people to see this as a genocide. Why? Because we all work in a way with the sort of ethno-nationalist biases or a form of methodological nationalism for a lot of people, it's very easy to conceive of genocide or to think of genocide or to imagine genocide when it's two ethnic groups because people a lot of people, often they think in terms of ethnic terms, right? We also imagine that there are other groups, but these abstract categories, such as enemies of the people, such as wreckers or such class enemies, for example, these are all disappeared from our vocabulary of genocide because of the intervention by Stalin in the convention. But it was not just Stalin. I mean, there was the negotiation done by various different states who had their own vested interests at play, which includes the American forces too, wanted to make sure that they would not be charged with genocide, for instance, their behavior towards the African American population. Absolutely. And this and the American side of the story, especially the keeping the victimization of African Americans, but also the treatment of Native Americans back then, talking about the mid-20th century where a still pretty serious genocidal process going on. Now has been studied relatively well. The because the Soviet archives were only open from the 1990s onward and they're still only kind of accessible in a piecemeal way. That side of the story hasn't been told much. The American, let’s say, American genocide towards Native Americans, let's say, is also a fundamental ethnic genocide. Right, so we’re dealing with white settlers and we're dealing with indigenous peoples. So the boundaries there and the antagonism there is an ethnic antagonism. Whereas in the Soviet Union or under communist genocides, we're dealing with categories that are a bit more abstract for people to imagine, but they're entirely real in the minds of the perpetrators. I think this is ultimately where we have to reside. We have to, if you want to understand genocide, you have to think like a genocide perpetrator. So you have to try to understand these abstract categories in the minds of the perpetrators. So the schism is not between genocide studies scholars and the rest of the world over the use of the word genocide. There are genocide studies scholars who know the sensitivities of using the word, the technical encumbrances, the practical consequences, etc.. In terms of technical encumbrances, the word genocide as Dirk Moses and many have pointed out, is based on what happened during the Holocaust, an entire race or genos being targeted for mass murder. And that is not the case for every massacre out there, proving the point that the definition itself is limited. And so in terms of practical consequences, eminent professors such as Raz Segal was offered to lead the University of Minnesota Center for the Holocaust and Genocide Studies. So he's offered rescinded after backlash over his characterization of Israel's actions in Gaza as genocide. In addition, an adjunct professor in public health at DePaul University was defrocked because she set an optional assignment in her human pathogens and defense course telling students they could write about the impact of genocide in Gaza on human health and biology. As genocide studies scholars, many of us feel we're walking on thin ice in calling whatever's happening there as a genocide. But as I said, the schism over the use of genocide is not between genocide studies scholars and the rest of the world. Other intellectuals, such as fiction and nonfiction writers who are right now very concerned about censorship, insist on the use of the word genocide. I refer to the many manifestos we have composed globally to assert their vehement opposition to the massacre of Palestinians. What do you make of this? So in this particular case, I think the ongoing mass violence against Palestinian civilians by the Israeli government since the 8th of October, let's say the day after or immediately even on the day maybe. It really clarifies, I think, or uncovers two important problems in the world of genocide studies. One is the tension between, let's say, Holocaust and genocide studies. And so the initial centers that were set up, well, they were all invariably called with the same acronym. We always see C.H.G.S. Center for Holocaust or Genocide Studies, almost invariably all of them from Minnesota down to Amsterdam, down to Copenhagen and beyond and in the US. And this is, of course, a bizarre one, because if you want to study a phenomenon, let's say you're interested in the revolution, of course, and you wouldn't call your institute the Center for the Study of the French Revolution and revolutions. The French Revolution is a revolution. So categorically it's should be simply under the control of the revolution. So why is it that we then have a field called Holocaust and Genocide Studies when the Holocaust is a genocide. To use the book title of Donald Bloxham ‘The Final Solution: A Genocide’ and the indefinite article here is really key. Of course, this is something that historically grew because of the discipline and specialization within the discipline of history. But it does point out a problem. You know, we're dealing here with something like cucumber and vegetable studies, now cucumber is a vegetable, so it doesn't status aparte or like a privileged exceptional status for whatever reason, whether it is the biggest or the meanest or the most European or the whatever it is for whatever criteria can come up with, simply for the fact that it's in the same category as genocide. It has to be treated as one. So that's one tension, and that tension has continued in the field. And the recent articles that came out about that in Jewish Currents and in The Guardian, for example, they talk about how that tension became really apparent with the violence in Gaza, because there are a lot of people who simply they can't imagine a nation of victims like Israel, for example, which still has probably the highest number of Holocaust survivors and also descendants of Holocaust survivors and victims, that a nation like that is capable of actually committing genocide. And I find that always a lack of failure of imagination. You know, why would it be or why would we assume that victims have become some kind of Zen humanists that all of a sudden have seen the light and will not commit violence anymore or that have, for example, forsaken any form of ethno-nationalism? But that's just not realistic. That's not how victimization works. And we know that from other cases, from other kinds of genocide. Such as the Armenian genocide or the Rwandan genocide in which victims can become perpetrators and the other way around. So that's one major tension and the second tension is that it's really fundamentally about how we study violence in the Middle East, right so Gaza, borders on Egypt, Palestine borders on Jordan and on Syria and Lebanon. So why is it that we decontextualize often? Or that a lot of studies, they decontextualize Israel and Palestine from the Middle East and treat it as if it's something completely different on a different planet, like an exceptional status. And that's also wrong because in the end, this society is part of the Middle Eastern ecosystem. Yes, of course, there are very strong ties with the West. For example, Israel has a lot of support from the west of the very close ties, even if it's physically far away from the U.S. Does such really close ties. But in the end, it has to be seen in a particular context. So and this is relevant, I think, for if you want to understand the quantity and the quality of the violence, if you will. So what type of violence is being committed against the victims and also what is the scale of that violence? So a Palestinian Syrian friend of mine, he defined it really well. He said when a Palestinian is killed in the West Bank, then the Western media is all over it. When a Palestinian is killed in Damascus by the Assad regime, they hardly look after us. And I find this kind of painful. I find it kind of painful. But it's also a very telling. It’s telling that the kind of spotlight of a lot of media attention. But also academic attention is on Israel. Palestine also in a way, amplifies the violence that occurs there, whether it's from the Palestinian side or from the Israeli side. It amplifies that violence but thereby decontextualized from the violence broader in the Middle East. I think that's wrong. And we need to say that’s a misperception that we have and we should correct it. So, I mean, is there something that you'd like to say regarding how we are. I mean, we as genocide studies scholars are actually walking on thin ice at the moment and that it's contradictory, it's ironical, rather that our students come up to us and tell us when you're studying genocide, for instance, you know, you're teaching the Holocaust or you're teaching the genocide in Rwanda or wherever else. And students want to know about what's happening at the moment and have the discussion about Israel and Palestine. And we as professors have to often tell them we don't want to broach the subject, and that makes them upset and frustrated. So is there something to be said about how we are the ones who should be talking about it, to be among all the academics and all the fields that exist out there? We should be broaching the subject with our students. Who want to know. And who want to understand, and yet we feel scared to do so. Absolutely. I think the topic should be broached not by I mean it can be by students, of course. I mean, the university is also a democratic space, so the university students show up and say, Professor, this is what I would like to study, but this is what I'm interested in. Will you be able to be interested in talking about that? Then of course we have to be open to that. But I mean, I think the fear here stems mostly and I think this is also primarily a North American problem, not exclusively, but primarily a North American problem, where, of course, public opinion is heavily pro-Israeli as number one. And number two, of course, a lot of private universities they of course, float on donor funds and a lot of donors, of course, whether they fund Jewish studies or Israel studies or Holocaust studies, have a particular affinity or or they have sympathy for Israel or that they are concerned about Israel and which means that it often comes with strings attached. And a lot of academics might feel like also what literally happened to Raz Segal, for example, a colleague who who exactly for this reason was sacrificed, so let's say, his position proposal was withdrawn not on merit, but on the fact that he basically has a tension for a contemporary genocide. So I think that fear is mostly North American for public opinion about money and reasons, but also in Germany, for example, where of course there's the public opinion to when the politics is so incredibly pro-Israeli that I can imagine a lot of academics feel that they would think twice before they would speak out and speak up in the open about ongoing contemporary genocides. I think that's one point. Second point is, you know, I love it when students come to me and they say, I am concerned about this particular genocide going on in the world or I'm concerned about this forgotten genocide. And why don't we give attention to this particular ABC? And I say, yes, we can, absolutely not, but not at the expense of another genocide. And so I'm not going to give less attention to the Holocaust just because Israel is murdering people and the other way around. I'm not going to Israel a free pass just because they suffered the Holocaust. Now. I think what other scholars should be doing is to defend scholarship and teach on the Holocaust and at the same time defend genocide in Gaza and the Palestinians in this particular case. And we can multitask because, again, these are not two different things. They're both genocides of a different scale and a different period by different regime, but ultimately phenomenally the same thing. They're not cucumbers and vegetables. They're all vegetables. So there is an article that was published in the Journal of Genocide Research in 2024, and you authored it the title is ‘Screaming, Silence, and Mass Violence in Israel/Palestine’. In the article you mentioned that there are currently 56 armed conflicts in the world. Can you name some of these? Of course. I'll just have to think about which one of these conflicts there were. But of course there are so many deadly conflicts in the world. I mean, let's for example, on, of course, the attention of the media and of the politics and public awareness has gone mostly to Palestine/Israel right now. But on the 6th of October 2023, if you would look at what genocide is in the news, then you will end up with the Uyghurs in China, because let's not forget, there are a million Uyghurs, they're in camps that can't be called anything else than concentration camps where there are forms of violence, physical and psychological, against Uyghur civilians that can only be categorized as systematic torture. There are forced disappearances, probably also assassinations. We don't know because we can't do research there. And there's also a massive destruction of Islamic heritage in Sinjar or East Turkistan or whatever you want to call the Uyghurs’ lands. And this is a particularly good example, actually, of genocide. Where not only Chinese government’s communist regime was not only attacking the physical lives of people, they're also attacking the culture. Culture and religious, a sort of abstract sense of identity is in particular being assaulted. You cannot teach the Quran, you cannot go to Friday prayer, you cannot grow a beard because it makes you look pious. A lot of mosques are being dynamited and bulldozed and airbrushed out of history. But particularly, I think, poignant case and example of genocide. But we've seen also in other cases like the Armenian genocide, where cultural heritage has been destroyed a lot. So that's only one case where we're dealing with a million people in prison. God knows how many have died. And also we don't know what we don't know because there is no resource really possible. Now, that's one example. I mean, the fate of the Rohingya, for example, has also been forgotten as well, almost entirely airbrushed. In 2016, it was very prominent and of course, there was a spike in the violence. But what was also seen since, especially in the past 2 to 3 years, also mass violence against non-Rohingya Burmese, opposition movements, for example, or political detainees. Those are only two examples. And of course, every once in a while there's violence in Eastern DRC. There is here and there is sometimes a like assassination or a murder or even a massacre in the Amazon rainforest. So, I mean, you can keep, not to mention the violence in Syria, in Iraq, of course, ongoing. So there are a number of examples around the world that are ongoing. And very often in the media there is a peak of attention and then a fissures out. And the quite the challenge for us, I think, is to maintain that on the agenda is to make sure that the attention stays high on it. Not at the expense of another one, but we have to keep all these balls in the air. We have to juggle them in the air because all of them are relevant, because all of human beings, all are equal, all human lives are equal. But all human deaths also have to be equal. You're a genocide studies scholar with an expertise in the Middle East. Now, I remember watching an interview of Nadia Murad, who's a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and survivor of the Yazidi genocide. In a recent BBC interview where she said how war and conflict in one region in the Middle East is intimately, inextricably connected to the rest of that region. So every conflict in a region will have a ripple effect in the rest of the Middle East. You discussed this fact in your recent article in the Journal of Genocide Research. So you basically talk about how Syria is not very far away from Israel and Palestine. Tell us more about that please. Yes, absolutely. Well, it all started with the Ottomans, let's put it that way. So when the Ottoman Empire collapsed in 19, let's say 1923, because that's when the Republic of Turkey was established. But before, of course, it was decaying at the end of the First World War, 1918, when the Empire collapsed, new states emerged in the Middle East. And in a way, so Syria became under French mandate, which is a fancy word for colonialism. Iraq was under a British mandate and there was the Palestine mandate. Transjordan Gradually, later on, you get Saudi Arabia. So a number of different states came up, and in a way, these states were all connected to each other, not only by direct bilateral relations, but also by a shared history, of course. So, for example, the history of the Syrian and Iraqi people, that goes back centuries and only in the last hundred years only it's been separate. But before that, we have many centuries where basically it was one society. You can travel from Baghdad to Damascus to Istanbul without without any borders. So there's also a shared history, which means there are also shared sensitivities of shared in so inter-ethnic structures, inter-ethnic problems inter-sectarian, for example, relations of issues, tensions, that exist, coexisting in society. So when we if you only look at what happened, let's say since 7th of October, Israel effectively destroyed a lot of the Hezbollah structure in Lebanon. The ripple effect of that was that the Assad regime had no longer like a major support base or a support pillar, that support pillar collapsed, which really seriously weakens Iran. As a result of which the rebels who were fighting against Assad. They could overrun Aleppo and Damascus within a matter of a week. Right. So something happens in Gaza in 2023 October, a year later, a year and two months later, the Assad regime falls. So these things are clearly connected to each other so we can't lift them out decontextualize one case as if it has nothing to do with the other. So for that reason I plead for a bit more contextual analysis. Another very good example is the relationship, for example, in Iraq between Sunnis and Shias, as in 2003, Saddam Hussein’s, Baath regime was toppled by the Americans and then the US with the broad coalition they occupied Iraq for a long time, the occupation never really effectively ended, to be honest. In the past 20 years, the relations between the two major sectarian groups in Iraq, especially between Sunnis and Shia, it deteriorated and deteriorated mostly as a result of a combination of factors. On the one hand, lack of a central states state authority that could bring some form of harmony in society, but also foreign interventions and favoritism, for example, by Iran, but also by the US and the radical growth of a militant Sunni Salafi movement. Now, all that violence was going on in Iraq, and we all remember in 2006 and 2007, when bombs were going off in Baghdad. Markets where Shiites were shopping, for example, were bombed. We all remember that situation well. Now, those problems were not only contained to Iraq. When the—that’s called the civil war in Iraq 2006. When all that happened many Iraqis fled to Syria. And when a refugee population flees, they bring their stories with them, they bring their emotions with them, and they bring also their concerns and their fears with them. So Syria, in a site like Damascus, authoritarian, but stable, was awash with atrocities stories from Iraq, where, for example, Sunnis would come and talk about how terrible the Shiite militias treated them. Shiites would come and show up and talk about how terrible Sunni militants and militants treated them. And this had a major impact on how Syrians started thinking about ‘what would happen if there's an intervention against Syria’ or if the regime collapses. And so do these fears from Iraq, they really started also spreading around in Syrian society and ultimately leading, of course, to what we have in 2011, a real fearful reaction of the regime against the uprising. So another example of how societies are connected fundamentally, there's a transnational influence. So I want to know more or I want to touch on this aspect of how the discourse on a genocide changes and evolves as well as people take these stories with them when they flee, or even if it's not these stories or these discourses don’t with the people who are fleeing outside the actual location geography of a genocide people have or formulate their own opinions about what's going on. So for instance, in the case of Israel and Palestine, the discourse traveled to two even Mauritius where I'm from, which is a small island in the middle of the Indian Ocean, where on October 21st, 2023, at a concert in Port Louis, which is the capital, 30 armed young Muslim men clamp down on the crowd during the performance of a song by a Jewish American musician to protest Israeli military operations operations in Gaza. It's also traveled to the United States, as we know where we have had campus protests, and we were concerned with the views of recent electoral candidates in the general elections. So I'd like to know more about what you feel about the opinions that we formulate when we are far away from a genocide, its location. In the neighborhood where I live in Amsterdam, which is a West Amsterdam, if you walk into the streets, you will see on many balconies, you'll see a flag of Palestine hanging. And this is sometimes by people who have a background in the Middle East and very often there's also who don't have a background in the Middle East, so who don't have a Palestinian or Arab Moroccan background. The question is, why do people identify with that ongoing genocide far away from their homes? How do they engage with that emotionally and effectively? And what impact can make on politics? Now, this, of course, is a product of globalization. Let's say 100 years ago, maybe this wasn't that much the case because we didn't have the technological means, of course, to think about suffering on the other side of the planet, although, of course, there was a lot of charity for the Armenian genocide back then, but that was mostly the Christian circles and the limited media, also newspapers, especially where the news was broken about the genocide. And I think that there are two, I think, ambivalent developments here. On the one hand, one can say this is a positive development, that people care about victims on the other side of the planet, Right? People That have never met. They will never meet and they don't really have a good rational reason to support. They don't get anything out of it. There's nothing transactional. So on the one hand, it's a positive development. On the other hand, of course, there's also a sense of selectivity and so that there are certain people in the world often that you do identify with when they're suffering happens and there are other people maybe that you identify less with or that you're indifferent to or that you don't know about is ignorant. I think this is about basically let the media bubble the knowledge bubble that people are in. And so take the example of let's say, conservative, Christians in the United States. Now, a lot of these people, let's say they live somewhere in Oklahoma or Kentucky, somewhere in the southern central states of the U.S., very far away from the Middle East. But they will maybe care, for example, about Coptic Christians or they will care about Lebanese Christians or they will care about the Yazidis as well. So these are about non-Muslim victims, right? So in a way, I would say, well, this is a good thing. At least that they know that there are people out there that are suffering. Or they're having a difficult time. On the other hand, I'm also thinking it's a very selective, almost sectarian way of looking at violence in the Middle East. So there's a broad range of violence. There is the Yazidi genocide, but there's also the killings by Bashar al-Assad, the Islamic State, but also Shiite militias, etc.. And to look at this, spectrum of violence and only pick out those elements and those examples that you identify with. And thereby leave out two other examples that you're not interested. So, for example, those same people who hang the Palestine flying around here, and they would be less and less informed maybe about the genocide of the Yazidis. So and then the problem is that you, you develop a certain kind of segregation, actually, of those people who care about particular genocide, but not about others, not people who care about certain genocide, but then not about others. And this type of, both in the politics and let's say in Western Europe or in the US, in activism and also in the emotional ties that people develop, that even children or adolescents develop with the world. A lot of young people, for example, young Muslims in Europe, they care very profoundly for Palestine. That's a good thing. But at the same time, I'm thinking we should also care about the Rohingya. We should also expand the circle of empathy and emotion that we have. Maybe it would also be important that we that we advocate for the rights of Rohingya or about those groups, for example, that we hear less about. And so there are blind spots in general. So I find it a bit ambivalent as it developed. I am interested in the vacuity of certain statements that we hang on to. So for instance, we know about the overused statement about never again. What we have seen often in what we've been critiquing especially is the fact that the adage never again has been used in a duplicitous manner we’ve already talked about that during this conversation. But I'm also concerned about the question regarding what we as genocide studies scholars are doing currently with regard to the the ongoing conflicts in Israel and Palestine and other places, because we are spending a lot of our time writing these very rigorous intellectual discourses about this subject and we are having all of this published in very prominent journals. But my question is, how is this actually serving the bigger cause of the genocide of the many genocides out there? I am thinking especially about this passage I read yesterday in a book on the Rwandan genocide. It's by a Jean Hatzfeld and it's in the book titled ‘The Antelope’s Strategy’, The author here, by the way, is critiquing the way in which all the different people in Rwanda, the Tutsi, had to change their method of working or operating on a daily basis as a result of the war. And there is a critique here of the intellectuals. I quote, Educated people felt the most degraded. I know a teacher named Elizabeth who died of misery from crawling through the bush. During the first week we didn't think the hunts would last. The intellectuals tried to philosophize about the situation. Unlike the farmers, they craved explanations more than water itself. Some of them even jotted things down on scraps of paper before losing their Bics and notes. They kept apart from the peasants to talk among themselves; their manner was more dignified, and they presented themselves somewhat as leaders, advising on the distribution of food, repeating lessons of survival learned when they were Boy Scouts, offering predictions, they spoke of Hutu colleagues and their insane plots insisted we'd be saved by the inkotanyi or by foreign intervention, claimed we’d soon But as the days passed, they lost credibility, because all their plans fell apart. They saw their knowledge drying up. Book learning and endure our ordeal, Philosophizing, examining history—that Okay, I'll stop there. But my point here is about how, as a genocide studies scholar myself and having perused all the literature that is out there on the subject of genocide in whichever part of the world, my question is, what are we being able to do concretely in all of these political discourses and all of the practical moves that people are doing out there to stop genocide? Not enough. Not much, unfortunately. Not much more. So I have some bad news. The bad news is that it's going to be very difficult to stop genocide in the future, certainly from the vantage point of intellectuals or people studying the phenomenon and the discipline developed or the subfield developed in the 1970s with the intention of studying genocide, would uncover the causes for genocide. And if we understand the causes of genocide, then we can address the causes and we can stop it or intervene or prevent. Prevention was really the main thing. It’s been 50 years and how have we been doing since the seventies? Not great, I think because we have had a couple of really horrific examples of genocide ongoing and it's safe to assume that in the future there's also going to be obviously other cases. Now, I think unfortunately, and this is difficult for people to bear because you might get a sense of kind of existential crisis thinking, why am I studying this if I can't stop it? I can imagine that people think like that. But unfortunately, the ship of state is slow to steer. So the influence that intellectuals have or the influence that experts have or knowledge producers have on global policies is relatively scant. Think of, for example, somebody who would maybe have the most influence with some point, Samantha Power. And she wrote a book, America and the Age of Genocide, in which she out that America failed in intervening, of course, one could think about why was America have to intervene. But that's a that's a different point. She at some point was adviser to the Obama administration. And while it was basically very difficult for her or if not impossible to convince Obama, for example, of the necessity to intervene in Syria to stop the mass killing or to intervene in the Yazidi genocide, to stop the mass killing, Certainly the post well, I guess during the Biden administration too, she doesn’t hold the position and more, but to convince the Biden administration and the presidency that they should stop supporting Israel completely and withdraw completely any and all form of military or political support unless they stop the genocide or they discontinue the genocide in Gaza. So, I mean, if Samantha Power can’t do it or if she was unable to to exert any influence on the course of the genocide in order to maybe not stop it, but to to to lessen it to decrease the level of violence, even if she can't do it, then I don't foresee much good that any of us will be able to do that at all. I think in the end, ultimately genocides are mostly stopped, either because the victims are all dead or are mostly dead to a satisfactory level to the perpetrators, or because a neighboring country intervenes, or there's sometimes also inexplicable de-radicalization of a genocide where they just kind of discontinue it. So but not because intellectuals said that it was a bad thing and they shouldn't do it anymore. So we have to be exceptionally conscious of our limited capacity here does I mean that we should give up. No, we shouldn't give up. We shouldn’t also be complacent thinking, well, this is how it's going to be, and it's just structuralism or it's fate or determined. There's a book by a Belgian scholar called the title of the book is The Next Genocide, and I'm thinking of it. It seems pretty cynical, but unfortunately it's not unrealistic to think that, if only for the fact that there are a number of research centers that have pointed out that a number of places in the world where there's a risk of mass violence against civilians, where ethnic tensions are exceptionally high, or whether an authoritarian government amping up its persecution of a particular group. So we know already which groups and which countries, which regions are vulnerable to it. Right. But in the end, this is political will or it’s the threats by the international community, and not because of intellectuals. So we've spoken about the role of intellectuals and definitely the exercise should not stop us trying to find explanations and understand what's happening. What about students? What about the students that you have? I mean, and many of them are consumers of social media, and they're all of these, you know, gruesome pictures that they are consuming from, you know, on Instagram, Tik Tok and whatever. And I feel well, many of these activities have been described as being forms of voyeurism. They've also been described as in some cases as an act of necrophilia because nothing is being done of it. We are just consuming. And we also speak we have also coined terms such as compassion fatigue. These are the terms that we have coined to describe the phenomenon of what happens, you know, in the process of just watching all of these videos and feeling intensely about what's happening, what are more concrete ways or what are ways in which maybe we can be made to feel more involved in what is happening in the world? I think really social media is is actually key here because imagine that you had a good group of Burmese students or students who could read Burmese or speak Burmese from Myanmar in 2016 that could launch, let's say, or start or advocate for a campaign on Facebook to to suppress or to debunk anti-Rohingya propaganda. Imagine you had a group of people who could do that in 2016. We didn't and the perpetrators, they abused Facebook in not only organizing the genocide, but also inciting, inciting and spreading propaganda on Facebook against the Rohingya. So not only was there just generic propaganda and calls about how terrible Muslims or Rohingya were, and also there were very concrete kind of people pointing out where people are hiding. So actual organization of the violence. Imagine if in 2016 we had a way where a group of students who understand social media really well who could have stopped this. We could have formed like an action group or could have formed like a task force or something. I do think that would have had an impact. They would have it would have saved lives, definitely. Or I can't imagine that it wouldn't have. So definitely. And in the future, that's definitely also the case. The spread of ethnic hatred on social media from the Rohingya genocidal to ISIS, for example, is really important development. And if not, the next generation, who is going to put a halt to these type of practices. Right. So maybe we can't go into a particular ministry of Defense or to disarm all the paramilitaries maybe that we can't do, but certainly students will be able to exert influence online also, for example, by exposing the perpetrators of their crimes. Right. So one really interesting example I know is that there were a number of Ukrainian researchers, many of them were students of university who set up fake pro-Russian social media accounts on the Russian side. On ВКонтакте and they started a personal friend friendship request to Russian soldiers who were occupying Ukraine. And a lot of these and the they could kind of what they call catfishing. So the fake accounts were set up by, let's say, attractive Ukrainian women. And of course, they would allow these Russian soldiers would simply accept and start talking about all the things they were doing. Right. And so by this this type of what they call catfishing, and so putting up and account and then doxxing information, they were able to expose a large number of the crimes and also ascertain the identities of the perpetrators in the Ukraine, the Russian occupation of Ukraine, which has genocidal undertones. Right. So who did that? It wasn't the CIA. I mean, it wasn't some kind of major counterintelligence operation or like an intervention force. No, it was a bunch of students and Ukrainian investigators. Right. So there are ways. Absolutely. Where we can have an impact on. The chief prosecutor of the ICC, the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, came up with a report which he made, of course, official, which we all know about by now. And this is basically charging Hamas and Israel for war crimes and crimes against humanity, not genocide. And as we know, war crimes and crimes against humanity. If you are guilty, you will have the same sentence as if you actually perpetrated genocide wherever you are. So the point is, why do people still favor the word genocide over war crimes and crimes against humanity? Because genocide is also an advocacy term. So when you feel that you've been wronged, you've been victimized by a particular government or a state, because accusation that you can level at them is that genocide because it has particular gravitas, because of the symbolic and political weight that the term has, that people feel it's more powerful than the war crimes or crimes against humanity. Also, in some cases, there isn’t a war. And so therefore, there also in the war crimes, just violence against civilians and individual acts of violence against civilians are individually crimes against humanity. This was a crime against humanity. That was a crime against humanity. So the overarching process of destruction of the civilian population is what we call genocide. For a lot of people, they feel that that's what they suffered. And so they use it as an advocacy term. Advocacy is important. People feel they want to advocate their case when it comes to these these rankings. Let's say, hierarchies of suffering. I'm taking back by the to the book by Daniel Goldhagen, which of course most famous for his book,‘Hitler's Willing Executioners’. But the book he wrote after that is also interesting, if only for the fact that it's kind of misunderstood the relationship between war and genocide, because the title of the book was ‘Worse Than War’. And also, he clearly says genocide is worse than war, which I'm thinking is bizarre. If you would write a history of a war like or the immense destruction of war, 80 million people in the Second World War, 100,000 people plus 180,000 people in the Yugoslav War, the civil war in Syria where actually more combatants died, than civilians died. The enormous destruction of war and civil war. Would you call that book‘Better than Genocide?’ It would be kind of strange to say that, right? So why is it that we think in terms of better or worse, they are both horrific phenomena that destroy the lives of people in different ways and different structures, different motives. But in the end, there are dead people, a lot of the people in there are devastated societies. So we have to stop thinking in terms of these hierarchies and only use the term in a sensitizing way. As in, this is a concept of study of particular phenomenon with, rather than this is a ranking, this is higher, this is better, this is worse. Those are not helpful ways of thinking about violence against civilians. Also, because war and genocide are profoundly related. Profoundly related. Most genocides occur under the cover of war or civil war. Most wars have at some point a genocidal aspect to them. So there's no way that we can kind of tear them apart and then rank them and bracket them off in different ways. That's not helpful way thinking about it. So should we go beyond this conversation or beyond this debate of war and genocide, and also speak about importance of speaking about violence as just a bigger thing? And I say this because I have had conversations, important conversations with genocide studies scholars who are now disillusioned and have in fact moved away at the climactic points of their careers and moved away from genocide studies because they feel it is very limited because one of the main sub areas or one of the areas we actually start off with is the discussion of whether there is genocide or not. And by now many of us know that it is all politicized in the sense that because of the technical complications of establishing genocide, we often get carried away with what we call so-called reasoned arguments, which we knew are not really reasoned. It's just that we've, as the critical legal theorists say we've already made up our minds in what we do emotionally and what we do is then we try to backtrack and come up with these very complicated legal arguments or logic based arguments to justify what we felt emotionally. So having said that, and knowing that, as I said, genocide studies scholars themselves stand disillusioned should we take the approach of looking beyond the terms genocide or war and looking at why there is violence in the first place? I agree. I think it is possible nowadays, unfortunately, to read books about genocide where the word violence is not even used in the book. And that's really strange because genocide is a category again. And brings me to Cucumber and Vegetables. Genocide is a category of mass political violence. So whether you want to use the Latin term on it or not, because you have to think very closely about what the use of the term brings you in terms of added value and how especially it relates to violence. Ultimately, war is a form of violence. Genocide is a form of violence. War crimes are a form of violence. Crimes against humanity, massacres, assassinations, sexual violence. There are all forms of violence.

I think what's important is that: 53:42

A) that we study how this violence emerges, how it evolves and how it ends, and B) why all of this violence is occurring and what the motives are behind it. Because we're dealing here, of course, with political violence and genocide is full of political violence, which means that we have to understand the political motives behind the violence and then to examine what impact the violence has on our society in a broader sense rather than the definitionalism that goes along with it. So I really plead very much for trying to use the term genocide very sparingly. And use the term violence in a very a very broad way, in a broad sense, and there's almost no way of overusing it. You speak about the duplicitous nature of holocaust in genocide studies, especially in this article, as I said, that's titled ‘Screaming, Silence, and Mass Violence in Israel/Palestine’ you speak also of the of people's unequal interest in various genocides across the world. You make the bold statement, I quote, “Genocide studies is not meant to be politically expedient or emotionally safe.” unquote. Could you tell us more about this very powerful statement? Yes. I mean, genocide studies is not meant to to satisfy people's sense of identity or their sense of looking for righteousness. It's not a term or a phenomenon that's here to satisfy a particular emotional need that we try to invent in finding genocide.‘I'm looking after the bad guys. That makes me feel good.’ Well, I feel very strongly as a Russian or a Chinese person or a Turkish person. So therefore, I look at the world and see where we are victimized. All of these things. It's easy to think about your own victimization. The challenge is really to think about other people's victimization. And unfortunately, there's a lot of interest in genocide. It's either selfish or also from a political perspective. So our less anti-imperialist brothers and sisters who feel that the worst violence in the world is committed by the West, which is I mean, is that the case? One has to be exceptionally critical towards it and to not only see the world or see genocides in the world that fit our particular political needs or political expediency. So as I said about for conservative American conservative Christians in the United States, they look at the Middle East and they only see particular aspects of violence to see violence against non-Muslims, but they don't see violence against Muslims and certainly not violence against Muslims committed by Israel. So this is a selective, hypocritical, politically expedient way of looking at genocide. That's not that's not what genocide studies is here for. It's not here to make you feel comfortable or to to confirm and affirm your political prejudice. It's here also, in a way, to shake those up, to make you think differently about the world. A) Anyone is able to commit genocide, B) Any group, any nation, any state is able to commit genocide. And so you can’t pick and choose these cases‘I care about’ and those cases ‘I don't care about’ it doesn't work like that. This was not to forgive, but to understand. With our guest Uğur Ümit Üngör. To our listeners, don't forget to like, subscribe and stay tuned for more discussions.