Statement on pandemic and genocide by academics

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In a joint statement, 24 genocide scholars have released a joint statement on climate change noting that a fundamental paradigm shift in the way they approach their disciplinary field is necessary.

The human rights defenders and academics, including Prof. Taner Akçam from Clark University, shared their statement with the press on Yom HaShoah, namely on the Holocaust Remembrance Day.

In their statement regarding climate change that represents an urgent paradigm shift in their field, the signatories of the statement have proposed a fundamental change to their cornerstone mentalities.

'These issues must move to the center'

In sharing the statement with the public, it is said:

"Genocide scholarship examines why one group of people seeks the annihilation of another group of people.

"And its practitioners have tried to understand how to prevent mass atrocities. Drawing on certain ethical norms, experts on genocide urge the adoption of moral standards that aim to create a better society.

"Until now, devastating man-made crises such as pandemics and environmental disasters were mostly left to the domain of the natural sciences. This is precisely what needs to change.

"Consequences from these human induced catastrophes have the potential to imperil not only Earth's ecosystems but also all living species.

"Moreover, they disproportionately impact marginalized communities and the eventual cost to human life could be on an unforeseen scale.

"To that end, these issues must immediately move to the center of genocide studies entailing major revisions to university curricula, research priorities, and scholarly discourse."

'We need to rethink'

Some highlights from the scholars' statement are as follows:

"As genocide scholars, we need to rethink what we study and why, not just with a view to the horrors of the past but the interconnections between that past and present, and why these interconnections matter to our fate as a global society, not to say species.

"Above all we need to ask why climate change, as with the pandemic, is impacting 'first and worst' on the most exposed and vulnerable, on people of color, primarily in the global south, on the rural as well as urban poor, on subsistence, nomadic and pastoralist societies, the dispossessed and displaced from war zones but also indigenous peoples, otherwise First Nations, everywhere.

"Those in particular who in the past have suffered and continue to suffer in terms of health, mortality and quotidian violence the most searing toxic and polluting effects of fossil fuel and mining extraction, or otherwise the systemic degradation, dispossession, displacement and psychic numbing which comes with the structural violence inherent in a world where principles of social as ecological justice do not carry to those who most need them, are today aptly named as frontline communities.

"Systemic, embedded violence elided'

"Yet the study of genocide in its legitimate concern to identify perpetrators has, to date, only rarely included in its roll call those most responsible for the ongoing structural as well as ecocidal violence visited upon such communities. The field's primary focus on a range of totalitarian, fascistic and authoritarian social formations and their state actors has not been wrong.

"But in effectively reading genocide as some extraordinary aberration from a dominant, liberal, supposedly rules-based norm, it has elided the systemic, embedded violence which is at that liberal order's own heart.

"The fact that rarely, or at least insufficiently have we chosen to interrogate trans-national corporate businesses, or their lead players as perpetrators, may be a function, in significant if possibly sub-conscious part, of the way all of us in wealthy societies are compromised through the benefits we derive as consumers from these corporates.

"But if that requires us to acknowledge our own complicity, it certainly does not and cannot provide an excuse, as students of mass violence, to sit on our hands.

'We cannot shirk responsibility'

"Equally, as teachers in the classroom, we cannot shirk responsibility from saying it as it is. We do not need to be environmental experts to tell the truth about the peril we face as a human community, nor to flinch from acting as role models in our efforts to educate and mobilize our students to act as if that truth were real.

"It is normative – implicitly if not explicitly – in genocide studies to encourage students to empathize, even identify with the victims of mass violence, and often to pay further attention to those who have acted as resisters and rescuers. The same surely should be true of what we might encourage of and enthuse to our students in the contemporary now.

'We have a signal role in it'

"As a human community, we can from this point onwards carry on, oblivious to the damage which our national and corporate-led systems are doing on the road to hell and perdition. Alternatively, we can repent our complicity and set ourselves instead on a different path towards healing between humans and other humans, and between humans and the natural world upon which our sustenance and species-sustainability depends.

"Genocide scholars cannot be exempt from this challenge. On the contrary, we have a signal role in it." 

The undersigned

• Taner Akçam, Kaloosdian/Mugar Chair in Armenian History and Genocide, Clark University.
• Alex Alvarez, Professor, Department of Criminology & Criminal Justice, Northern Arizona University.
• Donald Bloxham, Richard Pares Professor of History, University of Edinburgh.
• Cathie Carmichael, Professor of European History, University of East Anglia.
• Daniele Conversi, Professor, Ikerbasque Foundation for Science, Departamento de Historia Contemporánea, Universidad del País Vasco /University of the Basque Country.
• Martin Crook, Lecturer in Sociology and International Relations, University of Roehampton.
• Debórah Dwork, Director, Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity, The Graduate Center, City University of New York.
• Kate Ferguson, Co-Executive Director, Protection Approaches and Chair of Policy, European Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, University of Leeds.
• Adrian Gallagher, Associate Professor in International Security, Co-Director, European Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, University of Leeds.
• Amos Goldberg, The Jonah M. Machover Chair in Holocaust Studies, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
• Adam Jones, Professor of Political Science, University of British Columbia.
• Thomas Kühne, Director, Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, and Strassler Colin Flug Professor of Holocaust History, Clark University.
• Tony Kushner, Professor, Parkes Institute for the study of Jewish/non-Jewish relations, University of Southampton
• Tom Lawson, Professor in History, Northumbria University.
• Mark Levene, Emeritus Fellow, Parkes Institute for the study of Jewish/non-Jewish relations, University of Southampton.
• Ben Lieberman, Professor of History, Fitchburg State University.
• A. Dirk Moses, Frank Porter Graham Distinguished Professor of Global Human Rights History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
• Emily Sample, Programs Director, The Fund for Peace, Washington DC.
• Victoria Sanford, Professor of Anthropology, Lehman College, Doctoral Faculty, The Graduate Center, City University of New York.
• Raz Segal, Associate Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Stockton University.
• Damien Short, Professor, Human Rights Consortium, School of Advanced Study, University of London.
• Lyndsey Stonebridge, Professor of Humanities and Human Rights, University of Birmingham.
• Mark Thompson, Reader in Modern History, University of East Anglia.
• Jürgen Zimmerer, Professor of Global History, University of Hamburg

(PT/SD)