NCGS Seminar and Workshop Series #1 (Virtual)

The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression

Speaker: A. DIRK MOSES (Frank Porter Graham Distinguished Professor of Global Human Rights History, UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History)

This presentation summarizes some main results of Moses’s forthcoming book The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression, which argues that genocide is not only a problem of mass death, but also of how it organizes and distorts thinking about civilian destruction. Taking the normative perspective of civilian immunity from military attack, it argues that the implicit hierarchy of international criminal law, atop which sits genocide as the “crime of crimes,” blinds us to other types of humanly caused civilian death, like bombing cities, and the “collateral damage” of missile and drone strikes. Talk of genocide, then, can function ideologically to detract from systematic violence against civilians perpetrated by governments of all types. The book contends that this violence is the consequence of “permanent security” imperatives: the striving of states, and armed groups seeking to found states, to make themselves invulnerable to threats.

Comment: KONRAD H. JARAUSCH (UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History)

Moderation: KAREN HAGEMANN (UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History)