Lehigh University Professor Arman Grigoryan

Lehigh University Professor Arman Grigoryan International Relations [email protected] Office: Maginnes 206 Tel: (610) 758-3394 IR330 MASS MURDER Spring 2017 Mondays and Wednesdays, 8:45-10:00 Maginnes 112

Course description: The course is an exploration of theoretical and empirical debates on the causes and nature of mass murder. The concept includes, but is not limited to, genocides. We are also going to examine what the literature in recent decades has branded “politicides,” the causes of premeditated barbarism during wars – both interstate and civil- as well as barbaric violence in counterinsurgency campaigns. The last quarter or so of the course will be devoted to debates about remedies to genocide and ethnic cleansing, as well as polemics about the politics of memory.

Grades: There will be two written assignments: a 5-7-page take home essay on a topic I will assign, and a 15-page research paper on a case of mass violence, which we do not cover in the course. You will have to choose the case and write a 1-2-page proposal about it. The proposal must include a brief description of the case and your preliminary hypothesis about its cause(s). The proposals will be due on March 1. The assignment for the first paper will be handed out on March 22. It will be due back at the beginning of the class on March 29. The research paper will be due at the beginning of the last class on May 3. In addition to the two written assignments, there will be a final exam, which will have a mixed multiple-choice/fill-in-the-blanks format. The grades will be weighted as follows: the first paper will be worth 20 percent, the final exam will be worth 15 percent, and the research paper will be worth 50 percent of the grade for the course. Because the course is a seminar, there will be considerable importance attached to active and intelligent class participation, which will make up the remaining 15 percent of the grade for the course.

Readings: There are four books, which we will rely on particularly heavily. I recommend purchasing them online. I will also put them on reserve at the library. These books are: Benjamin Valentino, Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the 20th Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004); Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007); and Scott Strauss, The Order of Genocide: Race, Power and War in Rwanda (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006). Everything else in the reading list will be made available on coursesite.

Office Hourse: Wednesdays 4:00-6:00PM or by appointment.

1 Accommodations for students with disability: Students who have a disability for which they may be requesting accommodation should contact both the instructor and the Office of Academic Support Services, University Center 212 (610-758-4152) as early as possible in the semester.

Policy on academic integrity: See https://ir.cas2.lehigh.edu/node/18.

Course objectives, outcomes, and assessment:

The objective of this course is to provide students with conceptual tools and analytical skills necessary for an independent evaluation of scholarly debates and real world economic, social, and political processes. At the end of the course the students are expected to accomplish five objectives detailed below. Their progress will be monitored and assessed as follows:

Objective Outcome Assessment Understand major concepts in Students will complete Class discussion. the study of mass violence. reading assignments and discuss them in class. Understand the basic Students will evaluate An essay in response to a theoretical arguments and arguments developed by question. methods in the study of students of mass violence. genocide and mass murder. Apply critical reasoning to the Students will assess how well A research paper on a case not analysis of real world theoretical arguments apply in covered in class using the problems. different historical settings. theoretical material learned in class. Practice oral presentation Effectively communicate A final quiz, assessing the skills. factual information and mastery of the literature summarize scholarly covered in class. arguments to their peers. Improve written Write a well-structured essay communication skills. that use evidence to support an argument, and a research paper.

2 Schedule

PART 1: Theoretical Problems

1. January 23: Introduction. (10)1 a. Adam Jones, Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction (London, UK: Routledge, 2006), pp. 12-22.

2. January 25: Is killing natural? (59) a. Ervin Staub, The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence (Cambridge, University Press, 1992), ch. 5. b. Dave Grossman, On Killing (New York, NY: Little, Brown, and Co., 1996), pp. 1-16, 99-106, 156-170, 249-261.

3. January 30: Killing as duty? (42) a. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1963), pp. 146-150. b. Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution (New York, NY: Harper Perennial, 1998), chs. 5, 7, 8. c. Stanley Milgram, “Behavioral Study of Obedience,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, Vol. 67, No. 4 (October, 1963), pp. 371-378.

4. February 1: Killing to survive? (51) a. Paul Gregory, Terror by Quota (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), ch. 8. b. Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature (New York, NY Penguin Books, 2011), pp. 59-81.

5. February 6: Are states or societies the chief culprits? (48) a. Staub, The Roots of Evil, ch. 3. b. Benjamin A. Valentino, Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the 20th Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), ch. 2.

6. February 8: Bad ideas or politics by other means? (35) a. Stuart J. Kaufman, Modern Hatreds: The Symbolic Politics of Ethnic War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), pp. 27-38. b. Valentino, Final Solutions, ch. 3.

7. February 13: Mass politics, democracy, and violent ethnic cleansing. (53) a. R. J. Rummel, Power Kills: Democracy as a Method of Non-Violence (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1997), chs. 6, 8. b. Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 1-20, ch. 2.

1 Total number of pages to read for the session.

3 8. February 15: Malignant vs benign forms of nationalism and ethnic cleansing. (40) a. Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy, ch. 3. b. Anthony Marx, Faith in Nation: The Exclusionary Origins of Nationalism (Oxford University Press, 2005), ch. 6.

9. February 20: Colonialism, settlers, and mass murder. (66) a. Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy, ch. 4. b. Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), ch. 9.

PART 2: Genocides

10. February 22: Case study I - The Armenian Genocide: Background. (95) a. Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2005), ch. 1. b. Taner Akçam, From Empire to Republic: Turkish Nationalism and the Armenian Genocide (London, UK: Zed Books, 2004), ch. 3.

11. February 27: Case study I - The Armenian Genocide: Exclusion and escalation. (110) a. Akçam, From Empire to Republic, ch. 4. b. Ahsan Butt, Secession and Security: Explaining State Strategy against Separatists (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017, forthcoming), ch. 4. c. Valentino, Final Solutions, pp. 157-166.

12. March 1: Case study I -The Armenian Genocide: Controversies.(59) (Research paper proposals due) a. Guenther Levy, The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide (Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, 2005), ch. 7. b. Akçam, From Empire to Republic, ch. 5.

13. March 6: Case study II - the Holocaust: Was German antisemitism a cultural pathology? (70) a. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York, NY: Alfred Knopf, 1996), ch. 1. b. Norman G. Finkelstein and Ruth Bettina Birn, A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth (New York, NY: Henry Holt and Co., 1998), ch. 1.

14. March 8: Case study II – the Holocaust: Was hostility toward Jews rooted in economics and politics? (100) a. Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), chs. 1-2.

4 15. March 20: Case study II – The Holocaust: Escalation. (43) a. Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy, ch. 7. b. Valentino, Final Solutions, pp. 166-178.

16. March 22: Case study III - Rwanda: Background. (35) (First paper assignment handed out) a. Stuart Kaufman, “Symbolic Politics and Rational Choice: Testing Theories of Extreme Ethnic Violence,” International Security, Vol. 30, No. 4 (Spring 2006), pp. 69-81. b. Scott Strauss, The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), ch. 1.

17. March 27: Case study III – Rwanda: The perpetrators and their motives. (57) a. Strauss, The Order of Genocide, chs. 4-5.

18. March 29: Case study III – Rwanda: A theoretical synthesis. (66)(First paper due) a. Strauss, The Order of Genocide, chs. 6-8. b. Valentino, Final Solutions, pp. 178-187.

PART 3: Politicides

19. April 3: Mass murder under communists - The Soviet Union. (46) a. Alec Nove, Was Stalin Really Necessary? Some Problems of Soviet Political Economy (London, UK: Routledge, 1964), ch. 1. b. Kiernan, Blood and Soil, ch. 13.

20. April 5: Mass murder under communists - China. (26) a. Kiernan, Blood and Soil, ch. 14.

21. April 10: Mass murder under communists - Cambodia. (31) a. Kiernan, Blood and Soil, ch. 15. b. Valentino, Final Solutions, ch. 4.

PART 4: Strategic Barbarism

22. April 12: Counterinsurgency and barbarism. (61) a. Ivan Arreguin-Toft, How the Weak Win Wars: A Theory of Asymmetric Conflict (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), ch. 2. b. Valentino, Final Solutions, ch. 6.

23. April 17: Barbarism in interstate wars. (69) a. Alexander B. Downes, Targeting Civilians in War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), chs. 1-2.

5 PART 5: Solutions

24. April 19: Is intervention the solution? (42) a. Tony Smith, “In Defense of Intervention,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 73, No. 6 (December, 1994), pp. 34-46. b. Rajan Menon, The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2016), chs. 3-4.

25. April 24: Can intervention make things worse? (62) a. Alan Kuperman, “The Moral Hazard of Humanitarian Intervention: Lessons from the Balkans,” International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 52, No. 1 (March, 2008), pp. 49-80. b. Arman Grigoryan, “Third-Party Intervention and the Escalation of State-Minority Conflicts,” International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 54, No. 4 (December, 2010), pp. 1143-1174.

26. April 24: Partition (61) a. Chaim Kaufmann, “Possible and Impossible Solutions to Ethnic Civil War,” International Security, Vol. 20, No. 4 (Spring 1996), pp. 136-175. b. James Fearon, “Separatist Wars, Partitions, and World Order,” Security Studies, Vol. 13, No. 4 (Summer 2004), pp. 394-415.

PART 6: History and Politics

27. April 26: The politics of memory I. (59) a. Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999), chs. 7-8. b. David Rieff, In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), ch. 5.

28. May 1: The politics of memory II (45) a. Meline Toumani, There Was and There Was Not (New York, NY: Metropolitan Books, 2014), chs. 1-3, 5. b. Meline Toumani, “We Armenians Shouldn’t Let Genocide Define Us,” The New York Times, April 17, 2015. c. Arman Grigoryan, “Can Armenia See Turkey Differently?” The Washington Post, April 18, 2015. d. William Bairamian, “Manufacturing Cliches: Turk-Hating Armenians and Genocide Obsession,” The Armenite (on-line publication), April 22, 2015. Available at http://thearmenite.com/2015/04/manufacturing-cliches-turk-hating- armenian-genocide-meline-toumani-arman-grigoryan-william-bairamian/ .

6 29. May 3: Worthy and Not So Worthy Victims. (75) (Research papers due) a. Tara Zahra, “A Brutal Peace: On the Post-War Expulsions of Germans,” The Nation, November 28, 2012. Available at https://www.thenation.com/article/brutal-peace-postwar-expulsions-germans/. b. Diana Johnstone, Fool’s Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO, and Western Delusions (New York, NY: Monthly Review Books, 2002), ch. 2.