The Uses and Abuses of History: Genocide and the Making of the Karabakh Conflict

Abstract

Did the 1915 genocide of the Ottoman Armenians play a role in the genesis of the Karabakh war? In the early phase of the conflict, many Armenian activists and politicians drew parallels between the evolving struggles of the present and the traumatic events of 1915. This essay explores the ways in which Armenia, Azerbaijan and Turkey have referred to the events of 1915 to formulate their policies towards the conflict. The essay argues that the largely suppressed past trauma was present in the mass psychology of the conflicting parties, although in radically different ways, and that it shaped developing events. After depoliticising genocide commemorations in the early years of its independence, Armenia has recently witnessed an increase in references to the genocide in political discourse. The same also applies, somewhat paradoxically, to Azerbaijan, which has developed its own state-sponsored discourse of genocide, vehemently denying that the genocide took place while portraying Azerbaijan as a victim of genocide itself. This exchange of roles clearly needs further explanation.     

The global coffee economy and the production of genocide in Rwanda

Most academic work on the genocide in Rwanda uses either a methodologically social scientific or historical approach to explain the genocide's root causes. These causal stories most often focus on ethnicity and, in doing so, understate how structured economic-material relations made the conditions for genocide possible. Turning to Louis Althusser's concept of structural causality, I form an alternative method for narrating the genocide which treats the genocide as the result of highly complex and over-determined social relations. The paper then re-examines the structural causality of the genocide, focusing on how the coffee economy intersected with the economic, cultural, state, and ideological registers at which the genocide was produced. Representing the genocide in terms of structural causality addresses how over-determined exploitative relationships—between Hutu, Tutsi, coloniser, colonised, rich, poor, farmer, évolué, northerner, southerner, coffee producer, coffee consumer, etc—produced the genocide.     

The Congo war and the prospects for state formation: Rwanda and Uganda compared

This article analyses the effect of the Congo war on state power in Rwanda and Uganda. Drawing on theories of European state formation, it asks whether the Congo war has led to a strengthening of the state in the two countries. It is argued that this has not been the case. Neither the Rwandan nor the Ugandan state has been strengthened as a result of the war. While the war has weakened the state in Uganda, the remarkable strength of the Rwandan state just a few years after the 1994 genocide must be understood as a result of the security threat faced by the regime from Hutu militias, and not as a result of the Congo war. This means that security threats against the regime can, in certain circumstances, have the same effect on state formation as war had in early modern Europe. I also argue that changes in the state system have altered the links between war and state formation. The ‘war makes states’ connection presupposes a positive relationship between war, regime survival and state formation. In contemporary Africa there is no such link. On the one hand, state survival is guaranteed anyway, no matter how weak the state is. On the other hand, regime survival does not depend on mobilisation of resources through taxation, since resources are available from elsewhere.     

Testifying Absence in the Era of Forensic Testimony

Commenting on the significance of his work at a mass grave in Vukovar, Croatia, 1993–1995, anthropologist Clyde Snow predicted that the application of forensic scientific methods in the documentation of mass atrocity would help prevent the future denial of atrocities. A couple of years later in nearby Kosovo, others would follow forensic scientific investigators only to report what they never saw or never found leading many commentators and tertiary witnesses to doubt that atrocities had occurred. As absence and lack arise against the backdrop of forensic discourse, we are called upon to weigh the stakes of negative evidence witnessing and its implications for cultural memory. This article contends that the semiotic and positional peculiarity of negative evidence in an era of forensic testimony has its analogue in the paschal figure of Jesus’ empty tomb. Analyzing the rhetoric of denial that accompanied the forensic investigations of Kosovo in the late 1990s, the author suggests that the empty tomb is a paradigm that renders intelligible the interdiction implicitly placed on the forensic presencing of the body as well as the problematic with which memory is met in a world where forensic scientific testimony grows in importance.     

V for Vendetta: Government Mass Killing and Domestic Terrorism

Scholarship explores the impact of human rights abuse and state repression on terrorism. Heretofore, scholarship has ignored the impact of government-sponsored killings on domestic terrorism. This article proposes that mass killings create a focal point for terrorist mobilization. The vendetta agenda fuels violence by animating retributory violence. Additionally, mass atrocities create a permissive environment for violent nonstate activity. A spiral of violence ensues whereby groups resort to terrorism. Utilizing data from the Global Terrorism Database, 1971–2011, the study shows that mass killings significantly increase domestic terrorism. It contributes to emerging scholarship examining how state policies influence terrorist activity.     

A Child-Centered Refugee Resettlement Program in the United States

ABSTRACT

Refugee children are exposed to numerous risk factors resulting from war, genocide and resettlement, and are facing multiple difficulties to cope with the resettlement process. These challenges set refugee children apart from the mainstream community and can stifle their overall adjustment and development. Unfortunately, policy makers have paid little attention to the caring for refugee children during their initial resettlement. This paper examines systematic barriers to refugee children's successful resettlement in the U.S., and presents a child-centered framework as an option to better address the needs of refugee children, and offers recommendations for policy changes and effective social work practice.     

Practice,Pirates and Coast Guards: the grand narrative of Somali piracy

In this article I develop a practice–theoretical account to provide the first systematic investigation of the justification of Somali piracy. Arguing for an understanding of piracy as a ‘community of practice’, I show how this community is organised by a ‘grand narrative’ that projects piracy as a quasi-state practice of the protection of sovereignty against foreign intruders. Paying attention to narrative provides an explanation for the persistence of piracy and assists us in understanding the phenomenon. Relying on publicly available interviews with pirates, I deconstruct this grand narrative and detail the different functions of the narrative in the light of situations in which it is told. The article develops an alternative perspective on piracy based on the study of practice, narrative and situation that provides new avenues for the study of clandestine, illicit or violent practices.     

Problematizing war: reviving the historical focus of peace education

In the last forty years, peace education has broadened its focus from primarily international peace and the prevention of war to an approach that encompasses social justice, environmental education, critical theory, and multicultural education. While this is a positive evolution in many respects, there is a danger in de-emphasizing the actual critique of war and militarism. This article looks at the reasons why peace education should revive its strong historical focus on problematizing war. There is a strong emphasis on how educators can implement this in the classroom by fostering an environment where students can critique both past and contemporary conflicts. This renewed focus is of special importance in our modern globalized world, especially in militarily powerful nations such as the United States.     

The politics of memory and commemoration: Armenian diasporic reflections on 2015

The centenary year of the Armenian genocide witnessed an escalation in cultural production and both political and academic focus. This paper looks at some of the sites and spaces, physical and discursive, in which the centenary was marked. In particular, it seeks to assess how the centenary has challenged and possibly altered the context within which we approach the genocide and its continuing legacies. The paper is positioned in the diasporic space – while recognizing that this is fluid and embodies transnational sites between “homelands” in the form of Armenia and Turkey, and “host states” where diaspora communities have resided (at least) since the genocide, in effect their homes. This paper attempts to pick out some of the themes apparent in the discourse and in the activities during 2015, from the perspective of Armenian diasporan actors, and is based on the author’s observations and participation in centenary events in the USA, Lebanon, Turkey, Switzerland, and the UK, as well as interviews with participants and organizers.     

Protesting Putin or protecting rights? Media reflections on reflective student activism

This paper considers new challenges for Russian universities and the state, including flourishing and widespread corruption, politicization and state pressure, and student activism, and hypothesizes on how these three may be linked. To do so, this paper uses systematic research of media accounts from 2007 to 2012 in order to investigate student activism and its possible links with corruption and university politicization. This paper develops a theoretical extension that explains the corruption and coercion mechanism as applied to student activism, and places emphasis on higher education corruption and state pressure applied to universities. This study concludes that students are more interested in fighting for their economic rights and fulfilment of contractual obligations by the universities, while remaining politically inactive. This is normal for modern Russian society, where market reforms in higher education gain momentum, while democratic changes in the country remain very slow.     

Sectarianism and conflict in Syria

This article challenges the sectarian narrative of Syria’s current civil war, which relies on several false assumptions about the nature of political identity. It first questions how sectarian the uprising and civil war actually are, suggesting that the conflict is ‘semi-sectarian’, given the multiple other fault lines of contention, notably class, ideology and other non-sect, sub-state ties. It then draws on the theoretical debates between primordialists, ethno-symbolists and modernists to historicise political identity development in Syria. In doing so, it reasserts the modernist case, emphasising how political identities in Syria, both national and sectarian, have developed in a complex interrelated manner in the modern era and how the recent violent mobilisation of sectarian identity is the result of long- and short-term structural, economic, socio-cultural and political factors rather than unchanging ancient animosities. Of these, the most vital remain structural changes and elite reactions to them, with the prospect of state collapse in Syria’s future the most likely cause of a descent into further sectarian chaos.     

Cargo cult science,armchair empiricism and the idea of violent conflict

In this paper I develop a philosophical and methodological critique of ‘rationalist’—or ‘social scientific’—approaches to the study of civil war and violent conflict, especially the work of Paul Collier and David Laitin. Rationalist scholars purport to develop universal explanations for the outbreak and the protracted duration of violent conflict using econometric techniques and rational choice reasoning. My critique of their ‘scientific method’ can be summarised in two propositions: first, the scientific approach is considered to be a ‘cargo cult’ science—the cult being universal law-like causalities underpinning social phenomena. Second, most empirical research in this tradition is based on doubtful statistics enriched with anecdotal evidence rather than by empirical field work. Hence, rationalist scholars largely conduct an ‘armchair empiricism’ instead of immersing themselves in the complex nature of social mechanisms in a specific space-time context. I briefly sketch out an alternative approach based on critical realism and how such a research programme could work in practice for studying the political economy of violent conflicts.     

The Coming Genocide? Burundi's Past,Present, and Potentially Deadly Future

The Great Lakes region of Africa is the most conflict-prone region of the world and one current concern is political violence in Burundi. This research investigates whether Burundi is on the precipice of a genocide. Burundi's weak democratic norms, genocidal history, and the impact of contagion and diffusion of violence in the region provide a number of the conditions that could contribute to a genocide. This research investigates the past and present conflict variables of the Great Lakes region with a focus on Burundi and assesses the potential that the ongoing political violence in Burundi will lead to genocide.     

Two post-war paths: popular violence in the Bohemian lands and in Austria in the aftermath of World War I

The study explores the phenomenon of popular violence in the first months and years after the end of World War I on the basis of a comparison between the Bohemian lands, forming the central part of the newly established Czechoslovakia, and Austria, as another successor state to the former Habsburg monarchy. Aside from the continuities, new forms of violence increasingly emerged in the first years after the end of the war, and also the “language” of violence was transformed. While in Czechoslovakia, the framework within which people were learning to understand the new world was shaped by the national and republican discourse oriented to the future, in Austria the collective identities and mentalities were being formed along the lines of particular party political blocks. In both cases, the nationalization and politicization of violence respectively contributed to the emergence of new forms of popular violence; but at the same time they could also be used for its de-escalation, necessary for the re-integration of society disrupted by the wartime experience. However, even if both countries went out from the war on different paths, the violence stayed part of their political culture and it could be mobilized again.     

军事对抗与两岸军事安全互信机制未来前景

本文在阐述军事对抗与军事安全互信机制辩证关系的基础上,提出一种有益于建立军事安全互信机制、创造台海永久和平的新型军事安全战略。这种新型军事安全战略的基本特征是：把维护两岸关系和平发展作为根本目标,既关注如何赢得战争,也关注如何通过战争赢得和平,还关注如何防止已经建立起来的和平转化为新的战争。以此为标准检视台海各方军事安全战略可以看到：中国大陆军事安全战略实现了战略与政略的高度结合,为军事服从政治、服务两岸关系和平发展提供了无限可能;台湾、美国坚持“只经不政”、“和而不解”,使其“和平愿望”难以贯彻到军事安全战略层面,是阻碍两岸军事安全互信机制建立的根本原因。     

Ideational Dimensions of the Boko Haram Phenomenon

This article draws on frame theory to explore the ideational dimensions of the Boko Haram phenomenon. Speech acts by Boko Haram's leaders are analyzed to interrogate how the organization conducts its three core framing tasks. The article argues that Boko Haram deploys three major master frames. These are the return to true Islam frame, the injustice frame, and the war against the infidel frame. Boko Haram's framing strategies draw on the social conditions and cultural reservoir in its domain of operations. This includes antipathy toward the West and Western education, patriarchal beliefs about gender roles and the “place” of women, and the contours of a widely popular Islamic movement that emerged in the early 1800s. Boko Haram's framing approach is also shaped by state repression and the post-9/11 cosmic war discourse. Overall, the article contributes to the limited literature on nonstructural aspects of Boko Haram's terrorist activities.     

The democratizing impact of governance networks: From pluralization,via democratic anchorage,to interactive political leadership

Initially, governance networks were intended as tools for making public governance more effective. Yet, scholars have argued that governance networks also have the potential to democratize public governance. This article provides an overview of theoretical arguments pertaining to the democratizing impact of governance networks. It claims that the initial celebration of the pluralization of public governance and the subsequent call for a democratic anchorage of governance networks should give way to a new concern for how governance networks can strengthen and democratize political leadership. Tying political leadership to networked processes of collaborative governance fosters ‘interactive political leadership’. The article presents theoretical arguments in support of interactive political leadership, and provides an illustrative case study of a recent attempt to strengthen political leadership through the systematic involvement of elected politicians in local governance networks. The article concludes by reflecting on how interactive political leadership could transform our thinking about democracy.     

Airbnb,technological change and disruption in Barbadian tourism: a theoretical framework

This paper focuses on how Airbnb, an internet platform which has created the possibility for mass participation in the tourism market, is resulting in class conflict between new entrants and the ‘traditional’ tourism industry. Specifically, it studies how traditional tourism interests in Barbados have responded to Airbnb by seeking to restrict participation in the industry and presents this as a microcosm of broader class transitions and conflicts associated with new technologies. The paper utilises a Marxist theoretical perspective buttressed by Joseph Schumpeter’s theory of ‘creative destruction’ – places emphasis on the process of destroying productive systems to understand how specific industries expand and survive – and Clayton Christensen’s notion of ‘disruptive innovation’ – a process by which a disruptive product transforms a market – for studying how transformations in technology are impacting the tourism industry in Barbados. Its aim is to provide an account of how the process of disruption is unfolding in Barbados by highlighting the reactions of the main hotel lobby group to Airbnb, while also applying the ideas of Marx, Schumpeter and Christensen as useful theoretical lenses through which to examine the unfolding of the process of disruption of settled class and historical control of a dominant economic sector by new technologies.