Challenges to Criminalizing State Responsibility for Genocide

This chapter shows that although often states are parties in a genocide enterprise, the centrality—and responsibility—of states for genocide does not receive attention commensurate with the severity of the problem. Indeed, genocidal states are not held criminally responsibility for genocide. Underscoring difficulties at proving state criminal responsibility for genocide, the analysis compares and contrasts individual criminal responsibility and state criminal responsible for genocide. Whereas in the former case the matter has been dealt with by domestic and international criminal courts and tribunals, in the latter case there is no international judicial authority which can try states for criminal responsibility. However, non-state corporate criminal liability, and evolution of this institute in international law, may provide some transferable lessons for state responsibility for genocide. The chapter highlights the nexus between individual responsibility and state responsibility, and the failures of international genocide law in establishing state responsibility for genocide.

Responsibility to Protect in International Criminal Law

This chapter considers the worst contemporary state-led prosecution of a minority group, which amounts to genocide, namely the Rohingya. It examines the atrocity crimes committed against them under international criminal law (ICL) and the application of Responsibility to Protect (R2P) thereupon. It suggests that such atrocities are constitutive of violations of jus cogens which warrants obligatio erga omnes. Accordingly, the perpetrators can be brought to justice under inter/national and universal jurisdictions, which, nonetheless, has not yet occurred. Given the failure of ICL mechanisms, the normative foundations of the R2P can provide valuable tools for intercepting mass atrocity crimes. The Rohingya—who face direct and structural violence at the hands of the Myanmar state—need protection from these crimes. The chapter explains how insular national politics can undo the gains made by the international community in upholding the distinctiveness of humanitarian claims through the application of the R2P.

Indigeneity, Memory, and Postgenocide in Guatemala

Whereas scholars and activists have examined different aspects of causes and processes of the genocide against the Indigenous Maya community in Guatemala (1981–1983), its aftermath continues to be under-represented in the existing literature. This gap obscures the lingering effects and long-term repercussions of extreme forms of state violence and the reality of resistance by Maya communities. The chapter examines the role played by local archives in decolonizing dominant narratives, which silenced Indigenous Maya resistance against state violence in the wake of genocide in Guatemala in the early 1980s. In this sense, the recovery and preservation of local archives (maintained by Indigenous communities) can reveal alternative memories of resistance to state violence. The chapter considers what presentations of genocide in local archives suggest for the framing of current identities and understanding of indigeneity, and whether local archives might promote intra-community and national reconciliation in the context of persisting genocide legacies.

Sovereignty, Subjectivity, Denial

This chapter uses the case of the Armenian genocide as a via media for exploring a wider theoretical and political concern, namely, what can genocide and genocide denial reveal about ‘sovereignty’, ‘subjectivity’, and ‘violence’, and thereby, about postgenocide and possibilities for resistance. It suggests that denials should be examined in close relationship with the unfolding of the genocide. This claim is pursued via a two-pronged framework, conjunctural and relational, inviting attention to heterogeneous and contradictory forces in a historical conjuncture, and to the relational production of political processes. The analysis shows that denials were not only integral to, but generative of, the Armenian genocide. The implications of the argument for postgenocide—the state of the political in Turkey today—are that without treating denials as generative it is futile to attempt to understand postgenocide denials, and begin to imagine alternatives to current politics.

Introduction

This chapter highlights ways in which the volume broadens and deepens considerations of genocide’s aftermath and introduces the notion of ‘postgenocide’. In line with an interconnected understanding of past and future, the ‘post’ in postgenocide signifies the entire period following the inception of genocide. However, postgenocide does not have merely a temporal meaning. Paying attention to social processes in the aftermath of genocide, their correlations with genocide, and related meanings affords high explanatory purchase. The era following genocidal killing is shaped by genocide. Hence the necessity of understanding and explaining effects of genocide in moulding realities of societies subjected to cruelty of this heinous crime. Conceiving postgenocide as an approach to study genocide and its effects after mass killing has ended, this introductory chapter shows how the volume casts light on a multitude of genocide effects in thematic terms and also in the setting of some formerly opaque and overlooked cases.

Postgenocide Justice? Assessing the Prosecution and Punishment of Genocide by Internationalized Courts and Tribunals

This chapter evaluates the record of the prosecution and punishment of the crime of genocide by internationalized courts and tribunals—primarily the ICTY and the ICTR—the International Criminal Court, and the hybrid criminal tribunals. It unpacks the effects of the criminal sanction against the fulfilment of the responsibility to protect. It shows how the nascent quasi-prosecutorial model can sow the seeds for the delivery of criminal justice before the right place (the forum conveniens) and at the right time, notwithstanding the prospect of a delayed execution thereof. The author appeals to the international community to prosecute and punish genocide as a matter of principle irrespective of side-effects the prosecution itself may trigger at national, regional, or international levels. The chapter upholds ‘justice for its own sake’, a dictum that distinguishes the inherent value of prosecutions from their presumed social effects.

Conclusion

This chapter considers how genocide violence might be framed through the lens of postgenocide. It contemplates, from a world-systems view, the relationships that genocidal violence has to climate change, resource exploitation, warlordism, and crisis-ridden states. Actors within this paradigm are varied and generally labelled as militarized without necessarily a particular state-based authorization. This conception is explored using a variety of cases. Use of postgenocide is not an attempt to broadly redefine genocide. It is to emphasize an approach where legal and historical views on genocide are complemented in capturing the intersections of the geopolitical order, warlordism, climate change, and resource exploitation. The analysis takes into account recent developments, including those in climate violence research. In doing so, the analysis seeks to illuminate the concept of postgenocide so that it could be applied to other conflicts involving mass violence beyond formal states and traditional conceptions.

Rhetorical versus Substantive Reconciliation After Cultural Genocide in Canada

The Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (‘TRC’) report calls for the Canadian government and (settler) Canadians to acknowledge the painful past of the Indian Residential Schools (‘IRS’) (1890s–1990s) and to chart a new nation-to-nation(s) relationship with Canada’s Indigenous peoples. However, the reconciliation discourse replicates unequal power dynamics between Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities endemic in Canadian politics and society. The selective listening of the IRS story is grounded in a constructed identity that paints Canada and (non-Indigenous) Canadians as an inclusive and tolerant society. This self-conception has led various levels of government to emphasize the idea of reconciliation as a process by which settler colonialism is conceptualized as a closed historical event that is now firmly in the past. There is little acknowledgement that the logic and structures of settler colonialism, which as the TRC notes amounts to cultural genocide, are still foundational to contemporary Canadian politics, law, economy, and society.

Constructions of Genocide Denial and Remembrance

Considering genocide denial and identity politics in postgenocide Bosnia, this chapter shows how the genocide discourse remains active in the efforts to construct or contest the Bosnian polity. Recognition of genocide and its denial are part of a broader struggle over pertinent issues of identity, authority, legitimacy, and security. This broader struggle constitutes an intense contest over the re-imagination of the Bosnian polity that has produced serious fractures in national cohesion. Bosnia’s political community is fractured both from without due to the denial of genocide by the Serbs and the latter’s contestation of war narratives, and from within, amongst other factors, due to failures to fully recognize and address the needs of victims. Misrecognizing victims, failing to recognize their suffering, and failing to provide redress, produces for them a form of social subordination which is directly responsible for their disconnect with the community of the nation which ought to embrace them.

Politics of Inter/National Denial of the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda

This chapter charts the proponents of denial of the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, which began contemporaneously with the crimes themselves. In exile from August 1994, the genocidal interim regime ‘rebranded’ itself to the international community to downplay guilt, avoid prosecution, and obtain support for its ultimate aim—a return to power in Kigali. This grouping, heavily based within former francophone and Flemish supporters (legal, political, Church, diplomatic, media, NGOs), has since used a campaign of disinformation, disassociation, and false narratives to confuse and threaten truth. The analysis shows how the failure of international criminal justice—at the ICTR and in states such as France, UK, Belgium, and the Vatican—have wittingly and unwittingly assisted denial. The denial campaign has become more strident during recent years. If unchallenged, such denial has the potential to threaten future positive judicial, political, and economic outcomes for the country and its people.