In 2015, I was in a taxi in Medellin on my way to the airport. Upon hearing the news about the peace process between the Colombian government and the FARC, the taxi driver vehemently complained that the authorities were negotiating with people who perpetrated atrocities.

I jumped in and pointed out that Colombian paramilitaries also committed atrocities, yet the government negotiated their demobilization a decade earlier and rightly did it so. The taxi driver paused for a moment in silence and then replied: “You’re right. At the beginning, paramilitaries only eliminated drug addicts, prostitutes, gays, and communists. Then, they started to do drug-trafficking, and that is when they went bad.” 

In Cali these days, and in other parts of Colombia, this is exactly the kind of mindset at work as we witness white SUVs running into the protesters at roadblocks and shooting at them. In an intercepted communication that Colombian media recently circulated, a vigilante laid out his modus operandi. “We go to the police officer in charge of the area and tell him – we tell him, we do not ask for permission – that we will approach the protesters and try to convince them to remove the roadblocks. And if they don’t get convinced, then we go back and take care of them” – with lead. 

In a country in which a part of society thinks that way at all levels of the social pyramid, the democratic process has little incentive to converge onto the center and support more encompassing and more moderate arrangements that isolate the extremes. There will always be people who will be ready to turn to their own guns if they do not get what they want. And the party that is willing and able to apply the greatest force will be the one that will ultimately have the upper hand. A race to the bottom will ensue: “When they go low, we will go so much lower.” 

For over a decade during my time in Colombia, I have devoted my sociology to identify channels that might help expand the horizon of civil interactions across a variety of social and institutional scenarios and have attempted to convince the parties on one side and on the other that this was the only path to sustainable gains for all. 

There comes a time in life, though, when one needs to acknowledge one’s own limits and accept that there are actors within society that will play the civil game only till it serves their own interests and that when it does not, or no longer, then they will opt for violent confrontation and for a war of attrition. 

Before this bitter realization, one is confronted with a question that is hard to elude: “And now, what?” One option is to leave my sociology and do something else in life. Paraphrasing Adorno, to do sociology of the civil sphere in certain contexts is almost like writing poetry after Auschwitz.

It is not barbarianism, but one is left powerless and without teeth in the face of barbarianism. It is a bit like writing sermons of hope in Germany or Italy in 1941 or in East Berlin in 1965.

Carlo Tognato is a Senior Policy Fellow at the Center for the Study of Social Change, Institutions and Policy (SCIP) of the Schar the School of Policy and Government at George Mason University.

To hear Carlo discuss his newest work, please click here.

Editor’s note: April 24th marked the 106th anniversary of the Armenian genocide. That Saturday, President Biden formally recognized the event as genocide, the culmination of efforts by the Armenian community, nearly all of which are the descendants of genocide survivors. We asked Lou Ann Matossian, a local community historian, to reflect on the Armenian community’s connection to Minnesota.

By the fall of 1915, when the Ottoman Turkish extermination campaign was making headlines across Minnesota, the Armenian  Genocide had been underway for six months. Closest to the story were two groups of Minnesotans—ethnic Armenians and Protestant missionaries. 

Since 1899, when Oriental rug merchant Bedros Keljik arrived in St. Paul, the  Twin Cities community had grown to about 200 Armenian immigrants and their  American-born children. In May, 1915, as the genocide was unfolding in their homeland, Armenians appealed to President Wilson at a mass meeting in downtown St. Paul. At least 37 Twin Cities Armenians—a sizeable proportion of the community’s military-age men—left that summer to volunteer against the  Turkish army. 

Also in the danger zone were Protestant missionary-educators. Charlotte Willard and Frances Gage, who had met at Carleton College, rescued 41 Armenian women. Carmelite Christie protected Armenian students, distributed aid, and chronicled the destruction around her. Sophie Holt brought her wartime experiences home to Duluth. After the war, returning missionaries took part in national efforts to assist survivors of the Armenian Genocide.  

The largest such effort, Near East Relief, received strong support in Minnesota.  “They Shall Not Perish,” a striking NER poster, was created by Douglas Volk, a  founder of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.  Beginning in 1920, refugees such as Vartanoush Karagheusian, sister of Dayton’s  Oriental rug buyer John Karagheusian, found safe haven in Minnesota. Survivor  Oksent (“Mike”) Ousdigian would lead the Public Employees Retirement Association for more than 40 years. Today, Minnesota Armenians continue to play a vital, productive role in community life. 

We remember and demand.

Lou Ann Matossian, Ph.D., Community Historian

Nearly five years ago, the Center published two blog articles, Another Genocide Declaration: This One Matters, and Berlin’s Message to Ankara, detailing the importance of Germany’s recognition of the Armenian genocide. Then, Germany had just become the thirteenth country to formally declare the targeted destruction of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire as genocide. To many scholars, Germany’s recognition of the genocide was the most important official recognition, not only because of Germany’s support for the Ottoman military but also because the Armenian genocide paved the way for the horrors of the Holocaust just over two decades later. 

Beyond that, back in 2016, it was nearly inconceivable for the United States to recognize the Armenian genocide in any meaningful sense. Several Presidential candidates campaigned on the promise of recognition, only for the idea to be eschewed by the realities of contemporary geopolitics. Finally, in October 2019, the House of Representatives passed a nonbinding resolution formally acknowledging the genocide. In December, the Senate followed suit. Praising the vote, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz tweeted, “the Armenian Genocide is historical fact, and the denial of that fact is a continuation of the genocide.”

Now, two years later, a sitting President has publicly recognized the mass murder of the Armenian people as genocide. It’s a momentous occasion and caps decades of advocacy and awareness building by Armenian-Americans, nearly all of which are in some way connected to victims and survivors of the genocide. 

When the Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies was founded nearly 25 years ago, it was among the first university centers in the country to do research and actively advocate for education and recognition of the Armenian genocide, to such an extent that the Center was sued by Turkish nationalists attempting to stifle our work. The Center’s founder, Dr. Stephen Feinstein, enjoyed a strong partnership with the Twin Cities Armenian community, something we’re fortunate to count on to this day. 

Now with President Biden’s remarks, the United States joins the nearly three-dozen nations in affirming the historical veracity of the Armenian genocide. For decades now, the Center has stood arm-in-arm with the Armenian-American community, but today we celebrate their accomplishment and applaud their tireless efforts to ensure its victims are never forgotten. 

Algeria’s Hirak movement has persisted since its launch in February 2019. From large urban cities to rural towns, the peaceful movement mobilized Algerian citizens throughout the country. Although some analysts feared that the popular social movement would result in a return to violence and create space within the country for violent extremists, the movement has exhibited a strong aversion to extremist groups. Thus, these fears have been largely unfounded, as protestors actively reject groups like the Armed Islamic Group (GIA), which participated in the country’s decade-long civil war (1992-2002). 

The GIA was a Salafi-Jihadist organization that engaged in open warfare with the Algerian government and eventually Algerian society during the country’s civil war. The GIA’s defeat during the civil war and the contemporary Hirak movement’s aversion to extremist organizations can be linked to the GIA’s attacks on civilians and its campaign of kidnapping, sexual violence, and forced domestic servitude. 

When scholars discuss Algerian citizens’ aversion to groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS, they situate the conversation in the number of deaths during the black decade. The organization’s unrestrained violence against civilians led to the group’s defeat and to members defecting into what is now al-Qaeda. Although Algerian citizens point to the legacy of the Armed Islamic Group’s (GIA) violence, these killings are not the only reason al-Qaeda and the like are not welcome in Algeria.

The stories of Algerian women subjected to organized sexual violence are infrequently discussed and primarily lost. A discussion of the GIA’s sexual violence is often absent from the framing of the country’s inoculation to terrorism. The erasure of this history reflects a lack of nuance in how terrorist groups are often studied. 

Therefore, delving into the history of the GIA requires uplifting the stories of women victimized by the group through its systematized sexual slavery in the mountainous hinterlands of Algeria. Revisiting this history also rejects the novelty assigned to other violent extremist organizations’ violence against women and shows a continuity of gender-based violence. 

Although ISIS has frequently been credited with being the first Salafi-jihadist terrorist organization to declare a caliphate (Islamic State), the GIA declared a caliphate nearly 20 years before ISIS in August of 1993. Furthermore, ISIS is frequently credited with setting the precedence for a Salafi-jihadist group institutionalizing sexual slavery. 

Although ISIS’ system of sexual slavery was innovative and highly bureaucratic, the GIA’s use of summer marriages predated the so-called Islamic State by two decades. During the civil war, the Algerian military pushed the GIA and other extremist groups out of the cities and into the hinterlands. Once in the hinterlands, young Algerian men who made up the majority of the GIA and similar groups experienced extreme frustration because of their repeated defeats. 

In their book, Algeria Anger of the Dispossessed, Martin Evans and John Phillips argue that “the armed groups, as male societies based on the cult of the strong, were under constant pressure to assert themselves as fighting men.” Evans and Phillips argue that young men broken by defeat expressed their masculinity by kidnapping women as young as fifteen. Kidnapped women were raped, forced into temporary marriages, and compelled to engage in domestic servitude. These women were considered to be “Sabayas,” parts of the spoils of war. 

It is difficult to know the exact number of victims, as many refuse to speak about their experiences, risking the shame within Muslim Algerian society, which came with being raped. From 1993 to 1997, fundamentalists battling the Algerian state abducted thousands of women.  Five thousand rapes were reported, including those that occurred during organized massacres. 

Human rights groups estimate that hundreds or even thousands of women were raped and sold into marriage, although very little reporting was devoted to the issue. The GIA systematically planned and theologically justified the rapes. The group’s emir and commanders assaulted the women before passing them on to other fighters. This process is eerily similar to Yazidi activist and survivor Nadia al Mansour’s telling of the sexual crimes of ISIS members in her book.  

Although there are several similarities between the GIA and ISIS’ use of sexual violence against women and girls, there are significant differences in their treatment. There is very little documentation of the GIA’s gender-based violence in Algeria during the black decade, especially in English. There is much more documentation of the stories of survivors of ISIS’s sexual violence and the group’s corresponding institutions, bureaucracies, and theological underpinnings that sanctioned it systematized sexual slavery. Furthermore, there are instances of ISIS members being tried in judicial proceedings as a result of these human rights abuses. However, there are still difficulties in prosecuting ISIS members for war crimes and human rights abuses. 

Yet, these successes, although limited, are likely a result of increased attention due to the global war on terrorism and increased visibility of crimes due to advances in social communications technology in a more connected world. Therefore, current geopolitical conditions likely account for the discrepancy between records of the GIA and ISIS gender-based violence. 

Thus, when interrogating the lack of recorded history and contemporary treatment of survivors of gender-based violence during the Algerian civil war, several issues arise. The international community must do more to support survivors of gender-based violence at the hand of violent extremists. This may facilitate the conditions that support survivors who want to tell their stories and who demand accountability.

Second, it is vital that we responsibly discuss how terrorism and human trafficking intersect (both sex and labor/domestic servitude). A nuanced conversation may prevent the securitization of human rights issues while addressing the root causes and precarity that undergird vulnerability to trafficking and recruitment into terrorist organizations. 

Finally, we must continue to examine how organized sexual violence, masculinity, systems of sexual rewards, assigned gender roles during conflict, and societal dynamics may contribute to the erasure of survivors’ stories and the persistence of sexual violence against women. Increased understanding and support for survivors may significantly reduce the difficulty of enforcing international laws and protecting human rights during conflict. 

Sammie Wicks has a MA in International Security from the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver. He has ten years of law enforcement experience, focusing on crisis intervention, mental health, community engagement, and targeted violence prevention. He serves on the board of a nonprofit focussed on combatting human trafficking and has experience as a human trafficking task force member focused on data and research. He has spent time in the MENA region studying and attending international conferences. His research interests include transnational organized crime in diaspora communities, violent social movement organizations, and human trafficking in the Sahel and Maghreb. 

The geographic span of the Holocaust was one of the most pivotal elements of the genocide. The extreme lengths that the Nazis took to displace many of their victims demonstrates their dedication to ethnic cleansing, enslavement, and ultimately the eradication of entire societies.

In Professor Sheer Ganor’s course “History of the Holocaust,” students’ final projects were designed with three core goals: to highlight the spatial dimension of the Holocaust, to give students an opportunity to intimately learn individuals’ life stories, and to analyze primary sources and scholarly studies that shed further light on survivors’ stories. 

The students used StoryMaps, a digital platform intended for telling spatial stories. “[Story maps generally] use geography as a means of organizing and presenting information,” says Shana Crosson, Academic Technology Consultant in the College of Liberal Arts, who worked with Professor Ganor to implement this technology in her course. “In some classes, students create spatial data by closely evaluating primary sources such as newspapers, oral histories, archival records, guide books, or even phone books. This information may be combined with other databases and information to create maps, and ultimately, combined with narrative in a story map.”

Survivors, as students learned, were torn from their hometowns, dislocated multiple times — often through several ghettos and camps — and left to search for a new home after the war’s end. As a result, mapping the paths of different individuals illuminated the Holocaust as a global event and showed how the genocide’s far-reaching effects extended across borders and continents. 

Though millions of people fell victim to the Nazis’ genocidal machine, each person’s experience was unique. By closely studying a single survivor, students developed a sense of familiarity with that person and the details of their biography — from their childhood memories to strategies of processing trauma. Video testimony also increased this familiarity, as students learned to recognize the survivor’s voice, understand their accent, and pay attention to their body language. 

This spatial visualization not only highlighted the centrality of forced removal in the execution of this crime; using story maps, students also embedded the events recounted by survivors into a broader history of the Holocaust and the Second World War. Students took the maps and spatial data they created and then communicated their understanding of events by combining textual narratives, maps, and other visuals. 

The audience for these projects often extends beyond the course instructor, which gives them a different impact than a mere term paper. Students not only create a usable resource when compiling the data themselves; by defining structural parameters themselves (i.e., when students act as the mapmakers), they understand how mapping is left to subjective interpretations.

As Crosson also noted, feedback from students has been quite positive. Kyli Knutson, one of the students in Professor Ganor’s course, said, “I think what struck me the most about this project while working on it was just how close I felt to [Felicia Weingarten] after completing it. Even though I had never met [Weingarten], I learned so much about her life and her personality, that I felt like I had met her.” Knutson’s comments echo what many students said: they learned new skills, including learning a new technology, presenting information in a different format, and how to build maps. 

Knutson enjoyed the opportunity to do something creative with story maps that also addressed challenging topics such as the Holocaust. “It was hard for me at first to figure out how to structure the Storymap because the question was: how do you compile someone’s whole life in a way that does justice to their story while also educating others? The story maps helped combine [Weingarten’s] life story, the educational importance of her story, and relevant secondary sources.”

Knutson’s subject, Felicia Weingarten, was born in Łódź in 1926. Weingarten has been a consultant for the University of Minnesota in the past and has served as a resource for interviews and panel discussions on television and radio, as well as for newspapers and books. She has spoken extensively with high school and college students on topics dealing with the historical, psychological, and political factors of the Holocaust. In 2005, her book “Ave Maria in Auschwitz: A True Story of a Jewish Girl From Poland” was published by DeForest Press. The book is a collection of short stories that poetically reflect her experience in the ghettos and camps during the Holocaust. 

Some students even traced the paths of survivors who settled in the Twin Cities and whose materials are part of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies’ permanent collections. Felicia Weingarten’s book and other materials are available through the Center’s collections. Her testimony is available at the University of Minnesota through CHGS (via Elevator),  the Visual History Archive, developed by the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education. Since its founding, CHGS has maintained and curated its own collections, which are accessible to UMN faculty, students, and staff as well as the general public. 

Taylor Johnon, an MFA Candidate in Art at the University of Minnesota, along with Jennifer Hammer, began in earnest to reorganize the Center’s Elevator site to make it more user-friendly. Since last spring, CHGS staff have begun creating new search parameters and organizational practices. CHGS hopes that, with an Elevator interface that is easier to use, more faculty and students will use the Center’s digital resources. 

Sheer Ganor is an assistant professor of history at the University of Minnesota. A historian of German-speaking Jewry and modern Germany, her work focuses on the nexus of forced migration, memory, and cultural identities. 

Shana Crosson is the academic technology consultant at the University of Minnesota’s College of Liberal Arts. She currently helps integrate Geographic Information Systems in a variety of disciplines in K12 and Higher Education, including History, Sociology, and Foreign Languages. 

Kyli Knutson is a junior History major at the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities. She has always been interested in history. Her undergraduate coursework has allowed her to pose important questions about historical events and figures, as was the case with her Storymaps project. In addition to her interest in History, she plans to double major in Art History and graduate in the spring of 2022.

Meyer Weinshel is a Ph.D. candidate in Germanic studies at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. He is a research assistant and the educational outreach coordinator for the UMN Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. He has taught community Yiddish classes with Minneapolis-based Jewish Community Action and will be a lecturer of Yiddish studies at the Ohio State University in 2021.

In April of 1994, genocide began in Rwanda. More than one million Tutsi were killed over the course of a mere 100 days; the lasting impact of this violence is immeasurable. Each year, beginning on April 7th, Rwandans across the world come together to reflect and commemorate during the annual Kwibuka remembrance period.

Kwibuka, a Kinyarwanda word that loosely translates as “to remember,” is a period to pay respect to genocide victims and reflect on Rwanda´s history and ways to overcome its legacies of conflict. This week, Kwibuka will begin once again, but the ongoing pandemic means that this time will continue to look very different than previous years. 

Before the pandemic, Kwibuka involved many large group gatherings and collective commemorative rituals. The remembrance period customarily begins with a night vigil, a traditional funeral rite in Rwanda, taking place on the eve of actual commemoration. Alongside this comes a “walk to remember” that kicks off other ceremonies at commemorative spaces, like stadiums, memorials, state administrative offices. For the government, Kwibuka gatherings provide a platform to pass on political messages. Annual themes reflecting the government´s vision, like “Remember, Unite, Renew,” can be read on banners across the country.

For many genocide survivors, Kwibuka is both an emotionally challenging time and a time to feel spiritually connected with those killed during the genocide through visits to their burial sites. Physical presence at burials and ceremonies like laying wreaths facilitate this connection to loved ones, as Rwandan spiritual tradition holds that communication is possible at the grave of the dead. This mourning generally requires Rwandans to travel to memorials and other sites where their loved ones were killed. Kwibuka can also promote connection within communities through events at the family level, community level, or even within diaspora communities.  In normal circumstances, Kwibuka necessitates travel, large group gatherings, and physical closeness – actions that are unsafe during the pandemic. 

As author Eric Sibomana wrote last year, COVID-19 has led to significant alterations in commemorative policies in Rwanda. It triggered a shift from physical to digital forms of commemoration, and consequently, the number of mourners attending commemorative ceremonies was reduced. Rituals requiring mass participation were prohibited, and other practices such as the night vigil, a walk to remember, among many others, were canceled to adjust the pandemic regulations.

Last year, the National Commission for the Fight against Genocide (CNLG), the state agency that organizes Kwibuka, called for significant shifts. CNLG Executive Secretary Dr. Jean Damascène Bizimana said, “The official opening of commemoration ceremonies at district levels on April 7 will not take place. All citizens will participate in the commemoration from their homes using TV, radio, and social media.” 

Meetings and ceremonies requiring physical contact and large group gatherings were banned and replaced by video conferencing. In addition to the digitalization of memorial rites, CNLG committed to issuing a daily write-up to help mourners catch up with the aired materials. Officials also suggested alternative forms of commemoration during the lockdown. Some of these were collective, like tuning into commemorative television and radio broadcasts. Others encouraged individual acts of remembrance, like lighting a candle or connecting with community members to discuss genocide memory. 

Shifts in the organization of genocide commemoration speak to debates in the collective memory literature about the importance of physical presence in solidifying the power of memory in sacred space and ritual. For Randall Collins and his theory of interaction ritual, “bodily co-presence” is a required ingredient to establish the collective efference that makes the ritual outcomes of emotionality, solidarity, and norm-setting possible. Through this lens, shared physical presence enables the power of ritual, and to disrupt this physicality is to sap the ritual of its strength.

Many scholars, however, have advanced alternatives to the necessity of co-presence. Jeffrey Alexander and Katz and Dayan point to the capacity of technology to expand the reach of ritual space. Television and radio have the capacity to broadcast rituals to those who might otherwise not be able to access them.

Further, Campos-Castillo and Hitlin theorize that this reach illustrates the inherent subjectivity of co-presence: not all actors experience shared space in the same way. They argue that the power of co-presence is based upon a feeling of unity, which draws from shared attention, emotion, and action over physical proximity. Rather than a binary between present or not, their work illustrates how traditional rituals also differ for those who experience them. 

While scholars debate the impact of shifting to digital forms of commemoration, there are also practical concerns at hand. For example, the pandemic points to the limitations of commemorative mediums that rely on technology. Remote broadcasts are inaccessible to many Rwandans, especially rural inhabitants with limited access to digital platforms or literacy education.

With high rates of illiteracy in rural areas, oral tradition remains a strong means of communication. This suggests the effects of Covid-19 have further isolated the less technologically equipped and illiterate community of mourners in Rwanda, who could not fully participate in commemoration during the pandemic. 

COVID restrictions are beginning to lift across the globe, but this year’s Kwibuka will certainly continue to look different than in pre-pandemic years. While many social scientists point to the potential impact of remote commemorative rituals, such commemoration is different in terms of both power and reach.

And further, the case of Rwanda shows how this difference most impacts those who experience economic and educational marginalization. While the pandemic has shown the potential of remote experiences, such inequities are an important reminder that distanced sites of memory are not equally accessible.

Eric Sibomana is a Rwandan scholar, holder of M.A. in Genocide Studies and Prevention, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Vienna- Austria, and a researcher in the European Research Council (ERC) funded project on “Globalized Memorial Museum,” at the Austrian Academy of Science, Institute of Culture Studies and Theatre History. His research interest is in atrocities – war and genocide – their memorialization and musealization politics and dynamics -political, social, cultural, and judicial – attached to them; and in dead body politics. Since 2012, he has worked on national and international projects centered on genocide in Rwanda and its responses – Gacaca jurisdictions, social integration of former perpetrators, and reconciliation. Also, he has served as a research associate at the African Leadership Center (ALC/Nairobi, Kenya) since 2019.  

Brooke Chambers is a Ph.D. Candidate in the University of Minnesota’s Department of Sociology. Her research interests include collective memory, political sociology, genocide, and the law. Her dissertation work examines generational trauma in contemporary Rwanda, with a focus on the commemorative process. She was the 2018-2019 recipient of the Badzin Fellowship in Holocaust and Genocide Studies and a 2019-2020 Fulbright Research Fellow.

This semester, Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies research assistant, Michael Soto, had the opportunity to interview Carlo Tognato on his 2020 edited volume, the Courage for Civil Repair: Narrating the Righteous in International Migration. In this interview, Tognato discusses the evolution of his work and some of the core themes of this new volume. Below we share excerpts from this interview. Be sure to listen to the entire interview here!

Michael Soto: So one of the things that we’re interested in is this idea of the righteous, which originally comes from use related to the Holocaust. Has there been resistance by either the authors, the protagonists they write about, readers, or others about using the term the righteous in these different contexts as opposed to related to the Holocaust as it’s usually associated?

Carlo Tognato: Let’s say that in general, across various societies, for example, the US, attempts to extend the categories that come from Holocaust memory to other contexts that do not belong to Holocaust memory have always been pretty controversial. So some people believe that those kinds of extensions, are in a way, diluting or are hijacking the true Holocaust experience. And then there are others, also within the Jewish community, who believe that actually, the extension of those categories and those experiences from the Holocaust memory to other setting or other situations outside the very phenomenon of the Holocaust are a way to even redeem the very experiences of some of the victims of the Holocaust.

For example, when the Trump administration went along with the policy of family separation at the border, Jewish activists came to Congress and staged a protest that this was a group … called the Never Again Action, and they said that as Jews, they had an obligation to step up and show that in the face of certain kinds of injustice and the specific experience of family separation they couldn’t be indifferent. And so, they had to stand up and take a position. So in societies, it has been controversial. Some have thought that this is legitimate, and some others thought it’s quite illegitimate to extend those categories outside the phenomenon of the Holocaust — categories that were born out of the Holocaust experience.

Among the authors of the book, there have been cases that talk about the experience of righteous that were born out of Jewish communities in Vienna or Berlin. And so, in those cases, in a way, the Holocaust memory is there [in] the background. And there are other cases, for example, the case from Australia, that talks about the actions that doctors and doctor associations took in defense of the immigrants that were secluded in detention centers, sometimes in little islands in the Pacific. …

And then there are other cases in which Holocaust memory is not even latent and it’s not even in the background. And so in these cases, the authors of those chapters, you know, cases from Mexico, from Cyprus, from Columbia — they are looking at the experience of civil courage of particular actors, but what the book does it juxtaposes the memory of the righteous in the Holocaust to cases in which that memory is there, within the cases and it’s evoked or at least indirect — and with other cases in which it doesn’t play a role.

So in a way, that juxtaposition constitutes a sort of narrative intervention on our part by means of which we are trying to translate the experience of certain actors, within certain contexts, to some broader audiences that might use the category of the righteous to understand what those actions within those specific cases (actions of civic courage) might actually be about.

And so, in those cases, the authors are not referring directly to the category of the righteous but, again, the book provides an umbrella to juxtapose those cases — to draw some parallels and incite us to see potential points of [comparison], but also potential differences. […]

Michael Soto: Related or another idea that recurs or comes up in the book is the idea of how it’s sort of a reinforcing cycle. How the acts of the righteous — either inspire or provide insight into a different way of doing things — a better way of doing things, and others sort of follow. Could you tell us more about that?

Carlo Tognato: Okay, there are various factors that have been found to influence the decision of the righteous to stand up and act. There are some in the literature, especially in the Holocaust literature, [and] some have been identified as psychological factors. There are other social factors, for example, the belonging to certain organizations, certain political parties, or gender or religious beliefs. … And then there are other institutional issues that create (or not) the opportunities for the person to act, and you know to actively engage in action, and, you know, be courageous in a moral, civil way.

So what scholars have found is that none of these factors seem to be sufficient by their own to move the person to engage in an act of courage — of moral and civic courage. What we do in the book is that we are focusing also on one specific cultural dimension, and what we are saying is that in order to enact some civil courage, people also needed to be culturally competent and culturally competent about how the horizon of inclusion and exclusion –how that border between outsiders and insiders is defined {culturally speaking) –in civil communities.

And competent about the history of the trial and errors that within a certain specific context, people who belong to those contexts have experienced and therefore they know what we anticipate when they engage in the breach of that horizon of inclusion and exclusion within their own civil community.

And the more we can cultivate that kind of cultural competence –to understand how that border between insiders and outsiders is defined and upheld — the more people will be able to work out ways to breach it and ways to see the cracks in between those borders. 

And they will be able to engage in those acts. They’re trying to modify those borders, while reducing the risk of doing so. What has been found in the literature is that competence is important for people to engage in acts of courage, and what we are doing in the book is to underscore that among all the different types of competence, like you know organizational competence, psychological competence, there is a very specific aspect of cultural competence… and we focus on that.

So essentially there are various factors that play out to make it to allow people to be courageous and the idea is that if we reflect on those ingredients and, in our case on the cultural ingredients, we will be able to make people reflect on what they need to look at in their everyday life, in order to be able to work what are the channels that can be conducive to change. […]

So the idea is that people who engage in acts of civic courage have to understand the risks involved in contesting the social groups or their society that demarcates insiders from outsiders. Because obviously any attempt to contest those borders would be met by backlash and by the defensive reactions of the guardians of that order, who will try to reabsorb the breach and push those who engaged in some breaches back. […]

The people who engage in acts of civil courage are … trying to engage in something that is right, but they are pragmatic enough to understand that the way to achieve that may entail a lot of constraints, and they have to be creative about searching for the cracks that allow them to contest the border between the insiders and outsiders, minimize backlash or reactions, try to make those contestation stick, and come across as authentic and convincing to other people within their own to the communities.

** This interview excerpt has been edited for clarity and brevity. To listen to Dr. Tognato further discuss the concept of the righteous and his new book, please click here.

Michael Soto is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology and fellow at the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Globalization Change (ICGC). His dissertation research is on the transition to peace in Colombia, with a focus on reintegration and reconciliation processes.

It’s been over four months since the Ethiopian national military invaded the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia. The fighting continues, and the situation has deteriorated into a major humanitarian crisis, marked by mass killings, food shortages, a collapsed health care system, and the flight of at least 60,000 Tigrayan refugees into Sudan. Estimates of how many people have been internally displaced range from hundreds of thousands to over two million.

At 110 million people, Ethiopia is the second-most populous country in Africa. Tigrayans are an ethnic minority that comprises about 7% of the country’s population. Their regional political party, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), has wielded a disproportionate amount of power in Ethiopia in recent decades, dominating the national ruling coalition from 1991 until 2018, during which time an official system of ethnic federalism inextricably linked ethnicity and politics.

The TPLF made many enemies during its years in national leadership; a period characterized both by Ethiopia’s rapid economic growth and infrastructure development and by tremendous repression of individual rights. After current Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed took power, he embarked on a series of reforms that earned him international praise.  At the same time, tensions were brewing. Many Tigrayans were expressing skepticism that Ethiopia was trending in the right direction.

When TPLF forces attacked the national military’s Northern Command in early November 2020, Abiy sent Ethiopian government forces to Tigray. They were joined by Amhara militia groups and, within weeks, by Eritrean forces coming from the north.

The Ethiopian government’s official position is that “rule of law measures” or “law enforcement operations” are being carried out against the TPLF “criminal clique.” They claim military operations ended in November. However, the ongoing, full-scale military incursion enveloping the entire Tigray region contradicts this explanation; arresting TPLF leaders doesn’t require airstrikes, artillery, and months of troop deployments.

The perception among Tigrayans is that they are being targeted in an ethnic cleansing campaign. This view is reinforced with each new report of indiscriminate shelling of residential neighborhoods and each new revelation of unspeakable brutality directed towards civilians by armed forces. The total disregard shown by the Ethiopian government for Tigrayan civilians’ welfare has been a notable theme of the crisis. 

Despite a deluge of evidence that Eritrean soldiers have a significant presence across much of northern Tigray, including video documentation and countless firsthand accounts, the Ethiopian government has made no attempt to protect its citizens from their rampage, insisting that the Eritrean forces are not there.

Those like me, who were previously Peace Corps Volunteers in Ethiopia (RPCVs), have been touched by the conflict in a unique way. With some exceptions, most of us do not have family ties to Ethiopia or identify with any particular Ethiopian ethnic group, and none of us are affiliated with any Ethiopian political party. What we do have are deep personal ties to communities where we spent years of our lives. RPCVs who lived in Tigray find ourselves anxiously waiting for news of the fates of people we care about; our friends, neighbors, colleagues, and former students back in the place we once called home, the place where my Tigrayan friends took to calling me zihawna (“our brother”) and wudi adinna (“son of our country”).

In our conversations in recent years, some of my former students expressed doubts about whether they would be safe if they attended university outside Tigray; they feared that being Tigrayan would make them targets for retaliation by those who harbored grievances against the TPLF. When I returned to Ethiopia in 2018, I saw that this trepidation was widespread. I noticed increased security measures in rural Tigray that didn’t exist during my Peace Corps days.

Now, all their worst fears are being realized. The government-imposed telecommunications blackout of Tigray (now only partially lifted) slowed, but did not stop, the gradual flow of information about conditions on the ground to the outside world. Journalists’ access to Tigray is substantially restricted, and some of those who have been able to enter have been targeted for arrest. Meanwhile, humanitarian organizations have inexplicably been blocked from accessing most of the region. 

The current situation in Tigray raises many questions. What is the actual objective of the national government’s military offensive, given that it’s clearly wider in scope than the mere arrest and capture of TPLF leaders? What is the purpose of unleashing Amhara militias and Eritrean forces on the civilian population? Why shut down telecommunications access for millions of people? And what will the future of Ethiopia look like when the war ends?

The world will be watching for the answers.

Thor Hong (MPP ’15) was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Ethiopia from 2011
to 2013 and a coordinator for the Young African Leaders Initiative
from 2014 to 2015. He lives in Washington D.C.

In Colombia, an official call to mourn the country’s growing number of COVID-19 victims came alongside the news of defense minister Carlos Holmes Trujillo’s death due to the virus. Within the same day, on January 26^th, Colombian President Iván Duque issued an executive decree calling for the “honoring of the memory of COVID-19 victims and especially that of Dr. Carlos Holmes Trujillo García” via a three-day period of national mourning. Duque used rhetoric surrounding this symbolic act to describe COVID-19 as the “invisible enemy” that Trujillo faced while in the “line of duty,” relegating the disease to a collective threat similar to the lingering conflict violence that Duque’s administration has been ill-equipped to manage.

Duque’s strategic fanfare of national mourning came amid ongoing political and infrastructural battles in containing COVID-19 throughout Colombia and the unexpectedly slow march toward vaccine procurement and distribution in one of the wealthiest countries in South America. An official Facebook post announcing the days of mourning garnered outraged comments from the public who demanded more accountability from Duque’s administration. One individual condemned the president specifically, saying, “A leader knows how to anticipate what is to come, but you didn’t do that, so here we are today mourning.” In this public reaction, the charade of presidential mourning for a tragedy that demands (ongoing) governmental intervention and accountability was called out as a paradoxical measure. 

In an almost split-screen occasion, exactly one week prior to Colombia’s state-mandated mourning, U.S. President-Elect Joe Biden led a night of mourning and commemoration for the nearly half a million American lives lost to COVID-19. The ceremony featured visually stunning lights running the length of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in D.C. and a musical performance from a nurse serving on the “frontlines” of the battle against COVID-19. 

In Biden’s case, this calm and dignified occasion on the eve of his inauguration stood in stark contrast to the chaotic optics of Trump’s exit from office and the former administration’s fierce denialism toward COVID-19’s harm and destruction. The ceremony was an opportunity to dramatize the passage to a new administration that is both haunted by yet still immediately in the throes of a deadly pandemic. The New York Times declared that Biden had “assumed the role of mourner in chief,” which interestingly preceded and loomed over the formal transfer of power that would occur the following day on the Capitol steps. 

In both cases, national governments deliberately incorporated mourning into a political agenda still threatened by the urgency of COVID-19 as a mortal, societal, and economic hazard. These vague yet chronologically significant mandates of mourning represent a broader phenomenon I’ve come to reflect on in my research as “meddling commemoration,” or commemoration that is deployed in the middle of a persistent, collective threat. 

In sociological understandings of commemoration following polarizing events, the baseline assumption is that commemoration occurs “after the fact.” As far as the timing of state-sanctioned commemoration, it is usually a matter of days, months, years, or decades between the tragic event and the present ceremonial actions. This distance determines the various ways that political actors interpret and mobilize collective memory of the event. What happens, though, when commemoration (and mourning, in this case) coincides with the ongoing unfolding of a singular, slow-moving tragedy like COVID-19?   

President Duque’s and President Biden’s commemorative actions at the start of 2021 certainly do map onto real losses in the past, as they emphasize the deaths accrued in the pandemic thus far. But they also overlap with ongoing loss, to which both governments are accountable for putting an end. The complexity of the COVID-19 pandemic is such that natural disaster has intertwined with the failures of political leaders and their corresponding infrastructures in a way that makes it easier for governments to divert blame (at least rhetorically). 

The challenge of initiating “meddling commemoration,” then, in the case of a decree or ceremony, is that it must not revert to a diversionary tactic. While mourning and remembrance serve an important function in society, these symbolic actions cannot and should not replace the material crisis management demanded of governments when the “object” of commemoration—in this case, pandemic deaths—extends as a threat to our present and future.

Kristin Foringer is a USIP-Minerva Peace and Security Scholar at the U.S. Institute of Peace and a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on law and culture in post-conflict Colombia, with current work focused specifically on collective memory and symbolic reparations in the country.

On December 30, 2020, Argentina’s Senate voted to legalize abortion. This decision found resonance with thousands of activists present outside the national Congress building, waiting, witnessing, and testifying why aborto sea ley, why legal abortion, must be the law. After 12 years of debate – really, after decades of debate in the wider public forum, the news of the official tally in favor of legalization was met by tears of joy, drumming, and dancing in the streets of Buenos Aires. These celebrations were echoed and sustained in the streets and homes throughout Argentina, but also across the wider transnational feminist network, both in physical spaces and in the digital public sphere. 

In these final days of 2020, the anthem of Argentina’s feminist movement for abortion access transformed from sea ley to es ley. This was a moment that condensed time and space, moving from “it will be law” to “it is law.” From a projection into a labored-for, hoped-for future, these social movement actors found themselves now able to make a definitive statement on social reality as it now is, a defined present. Es ley, it is law, it is our right, our bodies.

In the course of their fight, for justice, health equity, and bodily sovereignty, activists have articulated various framings of abortion as a human right, as a necessary health service, as embodied resolution, as one piece of the puzzle for labor and economic justice, as part of the prevention of gendered violence, and as the marea verde of feminist activism that continues to sweep across Latin America.

This marea verde (green wave), as the transnational feminist movement in Latin America has come to be known, uses a variety of visual symbols in their activism. One of the most recognizable is the green pañuelo (head-kerchief) introduced by Argentina’s movement for reproductive justice and the legalization of abortion. The pañuelo is a bricolage of political history and contemporary mobilization, repurposing the white head-kerchiefs worn by the Madres and Abuelos de la Plaza de Mayo in their protests against the desaparecidos, the forced disappearance of their children and human rights violations of the state. 

The Madres and Abuelas wore their head-kerchiefs in their weekly marches around the central plaza in downtown Buenos Aires, directly outside the presidential mansion, the Casa Rosada. The pañuelo brought the intimacy of the family into the public forum, making an explicitly gendered and very visible statement that expanded the definition of who is a political actor, what mobilization can look like, and which motivations can spur collective action.

With their embrace of the pañuelo, turning it green and wrapping it around necks and wrists as well as hair, Argentina’s contemporary feminist movement expanded the terms of mobilization and the definition of violence once again. It has likewise been transformed into a symbol of protest against gender violence by the Ni Una Menos movement. From their first mobilizations in 2015, Ni Una Menos has worn purple pañuelos in protest of femicide and gendered violence of all kinds, and proclaiming “nos queremos vivas, libres, y sin miedo” (we want them alive, free, and without fear). United by the pañuelo, Ni Una Menos’s work against gender violence overlaps with the goals of the campaign for the legalization of abortion.  

In the weeks between the vote in the lower house and the deciding vote in the Senate, feminist groups from around the world sent messages to Argentina’s feminist groups supporting their fight, wearing the distinctly Argentina symbol of the pañuelo, extending the symbol again beyond physical borders. As an expression of inter-movement and transnational solidarity, the pañuelo has circulated across borders, bridging diverse issues, and framing them collectively as issues of collective violence perpetrated by, at best, the negligence of the state and at worst, by the state’s direct action. 

With this re-articulation of the pañuelo, activists also make present those who are absent, visible only in the spaces created by their ghosting as victims of state violence, intimate violence, of the violence enforced through the absence of access to sexual and reproductive health services like legal abortion. It calls back to those disappeared by the state during Argentina’s dictatorship of 1977-1983, connecting political violence to reproductive violence. It joins the cry of ¡Ni una menos!, of not one more death of a trans- or cis-woman, bringing together questions of reproduction, gender, and sexuality into new focus. 

It connects abortion access to labor rights and poverty, finding the connections between individual experiences of harassment and hunger with collective locations in social structures of inequality. And it gives a logic for connecting access to abortion with the experience of the pandemic, articulating how differential access to prevention and services is undergirded by those same social structures that perpetuate gendered violence.

On January 14, 2021, Ley 27.610 Acceso a la Interrupción Voluntaria del Embarazo was signed into law by President Fernández. It went into effect on January 24, making Argentina the third country in South America to fully legalize abortion as a fundamental human right of its citizens. This is, of course, only one more step towards reproductive justice in Argentina – the difficult process of putting policy into practice remains. And yet, it is a very large and significant step forward in the march towards gender equity across the continent, across the world. 

The marea verde, the green tide, continues to swell with raised fists and pañuelos, in the pursuit of a transversal, feminist future. With its evolution and sustained crescendo as a movement, it carries us to expanded definitions of collective violence and connection across historical and contemporary traumas. And today, in recognition of International Women’s Day, we can continue to bear witness, remember, and imagine an expansive and just future. 

Samantha Leonard is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of sociology at Brandeis University, where she is completing her dissertation tentatively titled “Defining Violences: Feminist Movements Against Intimate Partner Violence in Argentina and the United States.” She is also currently a research associate for the “Cascading Lives: Stories of Loss, Resilience, & Resistance” project, directed by Dr. Hansen at Brandeis University and Dr. Kibria at Boston University, and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates and Raikes Foundations. Her interests broadly include culture, social theory, social movements, violence, and race, gender, and class.