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Turkish denial of the Armenian Genocide is the most persistent case of institutionalized genocide denial in recorded history (Stanton, 2010). Through conducting a multimodal critical discourse analysis based on Foucauldian theories of power and exploring the socio-political dimensions of cultural trauma, memory, and photography, this thesis examines genocide denial in the case of the Armenian Genocide and seeks to understand why the ways in which we choose to remember the past matters. Genocide denial provides a compelling case for identifying how discourses legitimize power, politically, judicially, and globally. By applying a highly theoretical lens, I will consider how history is a highly political project of memory upheld by systems of power, while considering the role of eyewitness narration and documentation. It is in this tension between postmodern conceptualization of the regulatory function of discourse and the existence of historical fact that my thesis situates itself. My research will be informed primarily by Foucauldian (1982, 1995, 2003) theories of power and discourse; the unique role of witness photography in times of atrocity (P. Balakian, 2015; Batchen & Prosser, 2012; Clarke, 1997); and theories of trauma and memory (Alexander, 2004; Halbwachs & Coser, 1992; Herman, 1997; Wertsch & Roediger III, 2008).

In 1948 the international community in reaction to the horrors of the holocaust sought to eradicate genocide forever by creating the 'Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide'. This Convention criminalised the preparation and act of genocide by international law, making all individuals accountable irrelevant of status or sovereignty. But the Convention has not been enough to deter the act of genocide from occurring again, and again, and again. Worst, the international community has been slow to react to cases of genocide. The problem with preventing and punishing genocide is hindered by the power and right of veto held by permanent members of the UNSC. The UNSC has been given the responsibility to maintain international peace and security and is the only entity that can mandate an intervention that overrides the principle of non-intervention. The aim of this thesis is to show that the veto has been a crucial factor in stopping the prevention of genocide, thus it is imperative that the veto change. This study argues that to effectively prevent and punish genocide the veto needs to be barred from use in cases of genocide. It looks at different cases since the Armenian genocide during WWI through to the Darfur genocide which is still in process. The case of Armenia is significant because for the first time, members of the international community were prepared to hold leaders of another state accountable for their treatment of their own citizens. However the collective will to bring justice to those accountable waned coming to an abrupt end in 1923. The holocaust followed in WWII; six million Jews died, and numerous other groups were targeted under the Nazi's serial genocide. The shock of the holocaust led to the Genocide Convention. But thirty years later during the Cold War, Cambodia became embroiled in a genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge. The international community silently stood by. The USSR, China, and the US all had their reasons to stay out of Cambodia, from supporting a regime with a likeminded political ideology to war weariness from Vietnam. In the 1990s, genocides in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia (Bosnia and Kosovo) followed. The former was neglected by the US's unwillingness to be involved in another peacekeeping disaster. The two genocides in the former Yugoslavia were affected by Russia and China's reluctance to use military force even after the clear failure of serial negotiations. Finally, in 2003 Darfur became the latest tragedy of genocide. Again, Russia and China have been timid of calling the conflict genocide thus avoiding any affirmative action to stop it. These cases all show that where one state is unwilling to be involved in stopping genocide, their right and power to the veto stops or delays the international community from preventing and punishing genocide, regardless of whether the veto is used or merely seen as a threat. Therefore, for future prevention of genocide, the veto needs to be changed to prevent its use in times of genocide.

Approved for public release, distribution is unlimited / Europe in the twentieth century witnessed the large-scale displacement and mass murder of civilian populations because of their ethnic or national identity. Genocide is the ultimate expression of this form of integral nationalism. As a result of the Second World War, the term "genocide" was introduced to describe the victimization of nations, and became codified in international law and agreements. The end of the century saw the introduction of a new term: "ethnic cleansing". This term was used to signify something less than the total physical annihilation of a people in the Balkans wars, in contrast to the extermination campaign of the Nazis in World War Two, or the Turks following World War One. This work looks at both campaigns, the Nazis against the Jews and the Serbs against the Bosnians, to argue, however, that ethnic cleansing is genocide. While much of the debate of the 1990s focuses on body counts to justify the distinction between the two, a careful analysis of the original work on genocide and the UN Agreement which outlaws such phenomenon reveal that this "body count" notion is neither correct nor justifiable. Similarly, a look at these two cases reveals act of genocide developed gradually, rather than as part of pre-existing master plans. / Major, United States Army

This essay is about use, misuse and non-use of history in politics. To recognize genocide is a use of history that has been established in politics, but also sparked debate. The position of non-use of history in international policy towards Turkey's denial policy has increasingly been replaced by recognition of genocide as a matter of making up with the story, moral consider, and where fundamental issues of culture, identity, history and morality has become guiding element in the discourse behind European expansion and integration policies. A breakthrough for this change is due to the Cold War's end; since the 1980s it has become possible to realize the humanitarianism which has its roots in the Enlightenment humanism underlying the United Nations, and later the EU conventions on human rights and genocide conventions. A genocide concept has become an important discourse in world politics that puts moral pressure on states to act. Parliamentary recognition of the genocide of the Armenians, Assyrians / Syrians / Chaldeans and Pontic Greeks, is partly redress for the victims and their descendants, but also an opportunity for reconciliation.

Previous studies of post-genocide Rwanda illutrates how nation-building and the government’s urgency to break with the past results in aims to rearrange society in order to prevent further violence and hostility. Developmental aims are also embedded in the broader project of post-genocide nation-building, adapted to promote a new and improved way of life after the genocide. This thesis examines the local experiences of parents in post-genocide Rwanda, with the specific geographical focus on the capital city of Kigali. Based on an ethnographic data collection from spring 2022, this thesis deals with the local experience of top-down rearrangements among parents in “informal” settlements in Kigali. Governmental perceptions of informality highlight the issue of risk in the urban context of post-genocide Kigali. Characterized by lack of order and formality the neighborhoods are deemed as excluded from the new societal modes and norms in the post-genocide aims of social engineering. This thesis uses the theory social engineering by James Scott (1998) to highlight the top-down measures intended to rearrange the lives of parents in “informal” settlements in Kigali. Additionally, the theoretical perspective of parenting culture is applied in order to explore the targeted regulations of parenting, as a result of government’s special interest in children as “future members of the nation” in a post-genocide context. This thesis shows that parenting culture is especially targeted by top-down regulations as a risk preventing strategy to shape the future of the nation. Working with a bottom-up perspective on top- down measures of social engineering the thesis includes the theoretical perspective of governmentality described by Mitchell Dean (2010) and Tania Murray Li (2007). Through mechanisms of self-regulation and accountability the thesis shows how regulations of parents in “informal” settlements are contested by their lack of ability and willingness to integrate top-down social engineering as meaningful rearrangements in everyday life.

Indian Education, including but not limited to Indian Residential Schools and Indian Day schools, are one part of an ongoing system of elimination of Indigenous people in Canada. I argue that Indian Education in 19th – 20th century British Columbia, controlled and operated by churches and state, intended to destroy Indigenous collectives, constituting genocide. I follow this analysis with a oral history of four Gitxsan elders who experienced Indian Education in different forms. These interviews reveal the impact on Indian Education on self, family, community and nation. Most importantly, the elders express their vision for Gitxsan people to know who they are, to heal and to thrive in their homelands. / Graduate / 2020-08-07

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / As a literary intervention, The Post-Genocidal Condition: Ghosts of Genocide, Genocidal Violence, and Representation is situated at the intersection of genocide studies, psychoanalysis, and literature so as to enable a critical engagement with the question of genocide and an attempt to think beyond its formulation as phenomenon. As the dominant framework for thinking genocide within international jurisprudence, and operating as the guiding terrain for interventions by scholars such as Mamood Mamdani, Linda Melvern, and William Schabas, the presumption that genocide may be reduced to a marked beginning and end, etched out by the limits of its bloodiness, is, I argue, incomplete and thus a misdiagnosis of the problem, to various effects. Moreover, I contend that it is this misdiagnosis that has led to what I name as the post-genocidal condition: a deferred return to the latent violences of genocide; enabled often through various mechanisms of transitional justice. This intervention is not a denial that under the rubric of the crime of genocide, as an attempt to destroy in whole or in part what Raphael Lemkin referred to as an “enemy group”, millions of people have died. Rather what I posit is that the physical violence of genocide is a false limit – that the bloodiness of genocide has been mistaken for the thing-in-itself. Thus this intervention is an attempt to offer another way of thinking the question of genocide by reading it as concept, enabling a consideration of its more latent violences, its ghosts. As such, I argue that genocide is first an attack on the minds of the persons who form the targeted people or group, through the destruction of cultural apparatuses, such as books, works of art, and the language of a people, to name but a few; and is lastly an attempt to physically exterminate a people. Thus this intervention invites a return to Lemkin’s formulation of the term in Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (1944); that the word genocide is meant to “signify”, and as such offers a reading of the question of genocide as signifier, understood, I suggest, in the Lacanian sense. Thus, I posit that genocide, as signifier, operates on both the levels of metaphor and metonym, and as such both condenses and displaces its violence(s). The metaphor for genocide as signifier is, furthermore, rather than the signifying chain as Lacan would have it, the network. As such genocide is marked as text, rather than work; its perpetrators not authors, as Lemkin and various pieces of legislation have described them, but writers; and those who engage with the question of genocide, to whatever degree, as readers rather than critics. Consequently, this intervention stages the question of the reach of impunity and complicity, beyond the limit of judicial guilt and innocence. Metonymically, the relational displacement at work within the network of genocide allows for a reading of the various constitutive examples of the violence(s) that, in combinations and as collective, produce a new signification, other than that of the definitional referent.

In three complementary essays, this dissertation analyzes the causes of violent conflict and the impact of third-party interventions that seek to reduce violence and generate post-conflict political stability. In the first essay, I analyze how regimes in fragile states cultivate strong but loyal armies. Drawing on an original survey conducted with members of the Congolese army operating in North Kivu, the largest operational theater in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the epicenter of one of the most violent conflicts in Africa, I show that regime elites withhold payments in order to distinguish loyalty and evidence that this screening strategy drives high levels of civilian abuse. In the second essay, I assess the impact of ``Eyes on Darfur'', the first-ever satellite intervention implemented by Amnesty International USA amidst a brutal genocide with the objective of reducing violence. Using a high-frequency, sub-national dataset on genocidal violence, I show that this intervention resulted in pernicious and persistent effects: monitored areas experienced increases in violence during the program as well as in subsequent years, as did neighboring areas. In the third essay, and in collaboration with Lauren Young, we assess how peacekeepers cultivate cooperation with local populations in Haiti. Using a novel survey, we find that exposure to security and relief activities are associated with increases in cooperation whereas exposure to peacekeeper abuse undermines cooperative behavior. Together, these essays articulate a set of causes for violence against civilians rooted in the political economy of state institutions, analyze how human rights interventions are mediated by the underlying institutional dynamics in the countries in which they are launched, and examine how keeping the peace stems from altering the cooperative incentives local populations face.