Understanding social and political elements of collective violence and mass crimes (with the Yugoslav and Rwandan case)
Instructors: Vlasta Jalusic, Tonci Kuzmanic
Course description:
The course aims at a deeper understanding of conflict escalation in the transitional periods, how they eventually cumulate in massive violent events and what consequences do these events have for the later forms of citizenship and political responsibility. It is focusing on the massive collective violence accompanied by mass atrocities, their preparation and acting out, and the post-conflict de-escalation periods in cases such as former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. It is based on the premise that discourses of collective identity and the intersections of gender, race/ethnicity and religion are key to understand the legitimizing ideologies of violence. Along this, the course pays a special attention to the ways of coming to terms with the past massive collective crime, the issues of collective guilt and responsibility, and their framing of the present and the future.
The empirical base of the course – cases former Yugoslavia and Rwanda – are selected by virtue of them having seen violent, “community” conflict (within a state or in the process of state dissolution and reformation) with the strong gender and ethnic/race dimension in the process of preparation. They both symbolically reflect the ideological claim that certain groups, constructed as essentially different cannot live together, each thus denying the “others” citizenship and the fundamental “right to have rights” (Arendt).Course objectives:
- To understand the links between different levels of conflict and of violence and to discuss the theoretical framework for understanding the contemporary collective violence;
- To explore the intersectional dimenstions of gender, ethnicity and religion in order to better understand the dynamics and conditions under which ethnic, gender or religious identity constructs are used (singly or in combination) to legitimate violence making it an acceptable or even necessary response to conflicts;
- To develop an empirically based understanding of these links through the study of the two cases – former Yugoslavia and Rwanda;
- To discuss the various post-conflict steps, policies and measures to come to terms with the past, conflict settlement, and conflict transformation.
- To reflect on the implications of the inclusion of intersections of ethnicity/race, religion and gender into understanding of collective violence and to reflect about their importance for intervention and policy - both in the selected case studies, and wider.
- Hannah Arendt, O nasilju. U Hannah Arendt, Politi?ki eseji, Antibarbarus Zagreb, 1996, 176-190 – izbor.
- Ton?i Kuzmani?, “Raspad SFR Jugoslavije in nasljedstvo: narodnjaštvo - a ne nacionalizam”. U: Miroslav Hadži?, Nasilno rasturanje Jugoslavije. Uzroci, dinamika i posledice. Centar za civilno-vojne odnose, Beograd 2004, 81-102.
- Roy Gutman, Svjedok genocida. Durieux, Zagreb, 1994. 18-50 i 205-214.
- Julie Mertus, The Role of Racism as a Cause of Factor in wars and Civil Conflict, International Council on Human Rights Policy: Consultation on Racism and Human Rights Geneva, (December 3-4), 1999, (http://www.ichrp.org/ac/excerpts/50.pdf), 14p.
- Jaluši? Vlasta, “Rod i viktimizacija nacije – predratni i posleratni diskurz identiteta”. U Miroslav Hadži?, Nasilno rasturanje Jugoslavije. Uzroci, dinamika i posledice. Centar za civilno-vojne odnose, Beograd 2004. 145-165.
- Erin K. Baines, Body Politics and the Rwandan Crisis, Third World Quarterly, Vol 24, No 3, 2003, 479–493.
- Seada Vrani?. Pred zidom šutnje. Antibarbarus, Zagreb 1996, 179-215
- Nenad Dimitrijevi?: Moralna odgovornost za kolektivni zlo?in. U: Ustavna demokratija shva?ena kontekstualno. Edicija Re?, Beograd, 2007: 275-309.
- Hannah Arendt, Eichmann u Jeruzalemu: izvještaj o banalnosti zla, Zagreb: Politi?ka kultura, zadnje poglavlje – izbor.
- Smrt Jugoslavije (The Death of Yugoslavia)
- Krik iz groba (A Cry from the Grave)
- Se?aš li se revolucije? (Do You Remember Revolution?)
- Hotel Ruanda (Hotel Rwanda)
- other short movies...
Detailed course schedule:
Day one
Understanding violence, power and and the new wars
What is violence? Different levels and places of violence. What is the character of the contemporary phenomena of war and collective violence? What’s new about the “new wars”? Is there a continuity between collective conflict (collective violence) and interpersonal violence?
Day two
How was it possible? Discussing violent confliects and mass killings as phenomena connected with racism and nationalism
Differentiation processes among the groups in the construction of the conflict identities: the paths to collective violence. Nationalism, ethnonationalism, tribal nationalism and the state. What role do past individual or collective experiences with violence (or imagined past or possible future collective experiences of violence) play in them? How this affects the present and future in terms of violence, power and politics?
Day three
Intersections of gender, ethnicity/race and religion
Why gender matters within the ethnno-religious and race constellations? How do dimensions of gender, race/ethnicity and religion interact in time of the preparation of the contemporary forms of conflicts? How do they influence the new forms of wars and collective violence? How do the differentiation processes among groups take place, and how are they gendered?
Day four
Gendered forms of acting out in collective violence
What are the patterns of gender based violence in collective violence and mass killings? Why and how is collective violence gendered? What is the function of rape and other forms of sexualized violence in collective violence, mass crimes and genocide?
Day five
Victims, perpetrators, bystanders and future politics
Relations among guilt, responsibility and “innocence” in times of “ethnopoliticized” collective violence. How to discuss the question of (personal) guilt and (collective) responsibility? “Eichmann’s mentality” and its role in the phenomena of contemporary collective violence.
Day six
Between past and future: how to deal with the mass crimes and collective violence?
What are the ways of coming to terms with the past massive collective crime? How are the issues of collective guilt and responsibility managed, and how they influence the present and the future social and political clashes? Why do we need to analyse and understand the new forms of of “evil”?
Day seven
Plan drafting still in process.