Preliminary Conference Program
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Preliminary Conference Program The Thirteenth Meeting of the International Association of Genocide Scholars 9th – 13th July 2017 The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia 9 July, 1400-1700, Registration King's College 1600-1745, Welcome Event Canapes and Drinks King's College 1745-1900, Presentations and Dinner King's College Welcome to Country Aunty Valda UQ Welcome Convenors' Welcome Melanie O'Brien & Annie Pohlman; University of Queensland President's Welcome Andrew Woolford; University of Manitoba Presentation of Sponsors & Scholarship Recipients Presentation of New IAGS Boards 1900-2030, Keynote King's College Keynote Title Lilla Watson; The BlackCard Keynote Abstract 2030, Finish King's College Day 1, 10 July, 0800-1700, Registration Forgan Smith Building Day 1, 0900-1015, Keynote Abel Smith Lecture Theatre Chair: Simon Bronitt; University of Queensland Conference Welcome Genocide Studies and Prevention Presentation GSP Editorial Board Holding Back the Tide? Human Protection and Genocide Prevention in our More Violent World. Alex Bellamy; University of Queensland Over the past few decades the international community made significant progress towards strengthening the protection of civilians from genocide and mass atrocities. This was evidenced by consistent declines in the lethality of conflicts and one-sided atrocities. However, since 2011 the trends have moved in the other direction, creating a crisis in human protection that the system may not be able to cope with. This crisis, I will argue, is driven by three principal factors: (1) a significant increase in deliberate attacks on civilian populations; (2) a decline of international commitment to some of the central tenets of human protection; (3) the system’s limited capacity to respond effectively to the increasing burdens placed upon it. The lecture will begin by identifying the trends in civilian targeting before moving on to explain the sources of the current crisis. It will then examine ways in which this crisis of protection might be addressed, focusing in particular on ways of strengthening legal, political and moral accountability for the prevention of genocide and other atrocity crimes. Day 1, 1015-1045, Morning Tea Tower Foyer, Level 3, Forgan Smith Building Day 1, 1045-1245, Session 1 Genocide Prevention I Room1 Exploring Resilience to Genocide Deborah Mayersen; University of Wollongong When Leo Kuper penned Genocide, one of the foundational texts within the field of genocide studies, he did not focus exclusively on instances of genocide. In his quest to understand its roots, and the factors that might prevent it, he also examined a number of cases in which a demonstrable risk of genocide was averted. By and large, however, very few researchers have adopted this approach. The vast majority of scholarship exploring the causes of genocide does so through examining the antecedents of paradigmatic instances, such as the Holocaust. In this paper, I consider the limitations of utilising only case studies of genocide for understanding how risk can culminate in genocide. In these cases risk factors dominated, while factors promoting resilience were inoperable or ineffective. Historical examples of resilience to genocide, by contrast, offer insights into factors that have previously been effective in arresting or reducing risk of genocide. Furthermore, as knowledge from genocide studies is increasingly being used to inform genocide prevention, exploring historical case studies of resilience may lead to identifying powerful new preventive tools. In this paper I consider a new theoretical approach to understanding risk of genocide, and a methodological approach that incorporates non-genocidal case studies. I offer some preliminary insights into what can be learned from researching historical instances of resilience to genocide. Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention: Overcoming the Gap Between Research and Practice Ernesto Verdeja; University of Notre Dame Over the past two decades, a number of governments, international organizations, and nongovernmental organizations have sought more detailed and accurate models of mass atrocity prediction and assessment. This paper examines the development of the scholarship-policy nexus on early warning and risk assessment models. Risk assessment (RA) concerns a country’s long-term structural conditions (regime type, state-led discrimination, etc.) that determine overall risk for atrocities. Early warning (EW) focuses on short/midterm dynamics that can serve as violence triggers and restraints. Part I sketches the historical development of RA and EW models and discusses several major policy-relevant approaches rooted in current scholarship, including (among others) the Political Instability Task Force, the UN’s Framework of Analysis for Atrocity Crimes, the Early Warning Project, and the Continental Early Warning System of the African Union. Part II presents the findings of current research on prediction. Part III sketches several ways in which scholarship is translated and adopted into policy-oriented work. This analysis examines the patterns of interaction and exchange between scholars and practitioners by investigating institutional and informal mechanisms (e.g., “focal point” training), types of actors, and pre-existing and self-reinforcing networks of knowledge (epistemic communities). Part IV discusses several strengths and limitations in the scholarship-policy nexus, and draws on interviews with scholars as well as policy analysts and decision- makers in government, international organizations, and nongovernmental organizations. Causal Model of Genocide Prevention Mark Kielsgard; City University of Hong Kong Genocide prevention is perhaps the most complex issue in genocide studies and the most difficult to accomplish. Prevention must overcome the most prodigious political and socio-economic barriers to international intervention. It requires overwhelmingly compelling evidence a priori and therefore necessitates a rigorous model of prediction. Lemkin arguably allowed for common causative elements to genocide. Stanton provides a processual model through which looming genocide may be predicted but is not rigorous enough to compel international support. Some have called for an elemental model in predicting genocide which strictly adheres to the elements of the legal definition under international law but it provides an impossible framework as it creates barriers to intervention and effectively fails to intercede before genocide occurs. Another model is the causal model. This approach identifies necessary ideological preconditions to genocide and incorporates a methodology that accounts for trends in decision-making and conditioning factors to more credibly predict the likelihood of oncoming atrocity. The necessary preconditions are an unambiguous exclusionary national identity, a state of national emergency and perceived impunity. Conditioning factors and trends in decision- making include aggravating factors (i.e., history of discrimination, shifts in domestic power paradigms, armed conflicts, and political economy) and most of the features discussed in the processual model. Thus, the causal model works in tandem with the processual model. Yet the distinction between the two approaches sometimes lead to differing conclusions, such as in the risk assessment in the People’s Republic of China, and provide a more compelling and rigorous risk assessment model. Genocide in Their Best Interests Room2 Chair: Kirril Shields; University of Queensland Child Removal: Genocide with Good Intent? Colin Tatz; Australian National University The UN Genocide Convention was born out of the vortex of World War II. The definition of genocide is the ‘intent to destroy’ a racial, ethnic, national or religious group by any one of five specific acts, including the forcible removal of children. Intent is the key to the crime. We assume that the intent must be male fides, with a malevolent state of mind. But neither the formal definition nor any court has elaborated on the nature of the intent. Michael Storey, a UNSW legal scholar and others, including me, argue that in the absence of a qualifier, intent can be bona fides, with good faith and intent or alleged good faith — and that is the defence of those who removed North American native children for twelve- year spells of compulsory boarding schools, and those who ‘stole’ Aboriginal children. It was said by those who wrote the policies and those who did the removing that all this was done ‘in their best interests’. Such removal is legally criminal. This raises the political question of whether there can be ‘good perpetrators’ of genocide? Dispositions of Destruction: Genocidal Intent and Symbolic Violence in North American Indigenous Boarding/Residential Schools Andrew Woolford; University of Manitoba This presentation troubles legal notions of intent by examining the complex layers of conscious and predisposed action that take place within relations of genocide. To illustrate by focusing on Indigenous boarding/residential schools in Canada and the US, I note how specific acts of perceived kindness within the day-to-day life of these schools served to advance group destruction within a broader project of forced assimilation. Examples of acts of symbolic violence -- gifts that are not gifts at all -- include how children’s desires for excitement or material goods were used to lure them toward so-called civilization and the ways in which warm relations occasionally formed between teachers