Last Friday, Minnesota nearly became the first state in the country to recognize the Khojaly Massacre as a genocide. A last-second amendment from Governor Walz’s office, however, changed the language in the declaration to massacre, mirroring language found in an earlier declaration Minnesota passed in 2016. In all, 24 states have passed resolutions recognizing the Khojaly events as a massacre. 

In February 1992, in the midst of the First Nagorno-Karabakh War, Armenian forces took the Azeri-held town of Khojaly. Human Rights Watch chronicled the killings of Azeri civilians, with estimates between 200 and 1,000 Azeris being murdered by Armenian forces. While there is a general consensus of war crimes committed against the citizens of Khojaly, scholars stopped short of calling it genocide outside Azerbaijan or its close ally, Turkey (Armenia, for its part, continues to deny wrongdoing in Khojaly, blaming Azeri militia embedded with civilians). 

Therein lies the greatest challenge with labeling events as genocide: We’re often quick to apply the term in spite of a lack of supporting evidence. At best, applying the term genocide is meant to generate increased awareness and support for victims. At worst, it’s a term applied to denigrate enemies. As Mahmood Mamdani writes, “It seems that genocide has become a label to be stuck on your worst enemy, a perverse version of the Nobel Prize, part of a rhetorical arsenal that helps you vilify your adversaries while ensuring impunity for your allies.” The label of genocide applied by the governor’s declaration would have oversimplified a complicated historical event and eliminated the scholarly impetus for critical examination.

While the events in Khojaly nearly three decades ago are clearly heinous, dig a little deeper and you can find bigger issues at play. Azerbaijan and Armenia have been in conflict for decades, well before the massacre, over the region of Nagorno-Karabakh. Beyond that, Azerbaijan is one of two nations to outlaw recognition of the Armenian genocide, an event with unanimous academic consensus. It’s uncomfortable to see Minnesota playing the part of the pawn in a global blame game involving the push for recognition of crimes as genocide. 

For more than two decades now, the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies has been raising awareness and supporting academic work exploring the crime of genocide. The next time legislators wish to delve into the topic, I encourage them to reach out – there’s a lot to learn.

Joe Eggers is the Assistant Director for the Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies.

Michael was born and raised in New Jersey and moved to Minneapolis in 2016 to pursue his graduate studies. He is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology and a Fellow at the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change (ICGC). He has a MA from the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom and a BA from Harvard University.

His dissertation examines the social reintegration of ex-combatants in Colombia, with a comparative element on Northern Ireland. Michael is interested in the relationships that form between ex-combatants and others following a peace accord and the ways these interactions transform perspectives of each other and the past. 

During the summer of 2017, Michael conducted fieldwork in Belfast with his advisor Joachim Savelsberg and the support of the Human Rights Lab, where he interviewed participants in various grassroots peace-building initiatives. He briefly discusses this project in this video. 

During the 2019-2020 academic year, he conducted fieldwork in Meta, Colombia, traveling between the state capital Villavicencio and rural areas of the surrounding municipalities of Mesetas and Vista Hermosa, which have formal settlement camps of FARC ex-combatants. He curated photos from his fieldwork as a photo essay for the Latin American Studies Association’s Colombia section. And he wrote a blog post for a leading Colombian newspaper on the murder of Rodolfo Fierro, a FARC ex-combatant that Michael had become close to through his research.

During the Spring 2021 semester, he is also working as a research assistant for Professor Alejandro Baer and CHGS.

Writing about time and historical periodization in his 2012 book, Foundational Pasts: The Holocaust as Historical Understanding, Alon Confino contended that “Linking the events to what came before and after is crucial to the interpretation of what actually happened.” What Confino meant by this is that “foundational pasts,” or events that are “brief, radical, violent, and self-avowedly transformative,” must be understood within larger understandings of historical beginnings and ends. In other words, major historical ruptures, such as the French Revolution and the Holocaust (the foundational pasts on which Confino focuses), are shaped by the events that come before and after them.

Confino’s theoretical framework is important because it forces historians, of which I am one, to think more critically about how we define historical ruptures in terms of time. Historians often designate historical events into digestible, neatly-defined moments to which we apply dates and years. In many respects, this is useful for marking events and situating them within larger processes at work, but such designations can also be limiting. I agree with Confino when he states that time periods “should be regarded as heuristic devices, categories used to make sense of the story, not as having inherent meaning.” 

Confino’s theoretical positioning on historical beginnings and ends became apparent to me when I began formulating my dissertation topic on the aftermath of the 1932-1933 famine in Soviet Ukraine, now referred to as Holodomor (death by starvation). I became interested in the idea that such a significant historical rupture like the man-made famine of 1932-1933—or what we might call the “foundational famine,” to use Confino’s terms—could really just end in 1933. The famine’s toll was enormous, and it left some three to five million people dead. For those who did not survive starvation, the famine was the ultimate rupture. Those who survived were left to make sense of it, and for many, the famine did not simply end.

Whereas most research on the Holodomor ends in 1933, this is where mine begins. The Holodomor, which is now a regularly researched topic by scholars in a number of disciplines, has been the focus of several articles and books in recent years. Newer publications, such as Anne Applebaum’s popular history of the Holodomor, Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine, speak to this. Despite new scholarship, there is still a dearth of literature dedicated to the aftermath of the famine. 

Inspired by the absence of such literature on the aftermath of the Holodomor, I felt compelled to ask more questions about the people who suffered and survived the Holodomor. How did Ukrainians begin to make sense of the famine? In what ways did people begin to recover their lives? How did individuals and groups respond? What types of aid and assistance were organized on their behalf? How was the separation of family members and loved ones reconciled after so many people were separated from each other during the famine? What happened to the children who became homeless as a result? It was these social questions—histories of everyday people attempting to reconstruct, rebuild, and piece-back-together their lives after tragedy—that inspire my work.

Since the aftermath of famine is not written about widely in the historiography of the Holodomor, I was forced to turn to literature outside of Ukrainian history to better understand how to write about the problems left behind by historically defining events. I was tremendously inspired by several texts, including Tobie Meyer-Fong’s work on the aftermath of civil war in China in her book What Remains: Coming to Terms with Civil War in 19^th Century China, Ronen Steinberg’s newly published monograph, The Afterlives of the Terror: Facing the Legacies of Mass Violence in Postrevolutionary France, which examines the ways that individuals struggled to come to terms with the Reign of Terror in postrevolutionary France, and Drew Faust’s This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, which encapsulated the importance of death and its ability to change and shape society. All of these texts reiterated to me the importance of looking to the “aftermath” of major historical ruptures. Doing so, I have come to realize (and am still in the process of learning), reveals a great deal about the event itself.

The above texts, which have all left their intellectual fingerprints on my work, allowed me to take their methodologies and apply them to the study of the famine. For instance, Drew Faust and  Meyer-Fong’s work helped me to think more critically about how the living interacted with the dead and the way that death shaped Ukrainian society after famine.

In my dissertation, I explore both individual and collective experiences of mass death. One of my protagonists, a photographer who lost one of his sons to starvation, documented his son’s funeral and burial by taking photos of the process. He used his photography skills to create memory boards that he would place at the dining room table to remember his late son. In essence, he captured his own grieving process and, in doing so, left us valuable evidence that provides insight into the ways that everyday people attempted to grapple with the famine’s effects after 1933. 

Other aspects of my dissertation, like a focus on international relief efforts, reveal the ways in which various relief committees, religious groups, and individual efforts in countries all over the world responded to the outbreak of famine in Soviet Ukraine. These groups attempted to provide aid and relief in earnest beginning in July 1933, despite the fact that the Soviet Union denied that a famine was occurring and refused to let in humanitarian organizations like the Red Cross. 

Although mass starvation largely subsided by the end of 1933, fears of future famine—particularly in 1934—loomed in the minds of Ukrainians and international actors. Such fears helped to propel a slew of unofficial fundraisers and donations in late 1933 and throughout 1934 and beyond. The famine even made its way into a closed-door session of the League of Nations in 1934 on the eve of the admission of the Soviet Union to the League, although the issue of the famine was eventually pushed to the side to maintain geopolitical stability. The study of relief efforts, therefore, reveals that the famine was of international concern well beyond 1933, and it is a story that cannot be told without incorporating Ukraine into world history. 

It is therefore prudent that historians, as well as other practitioners, consider how we mark time. Simple beginnings and ends are useful to a degree, but if we take Alon Confino’s advice and look more closely at the events that come before and after major historical episodes, particularly acts of genocide, atrocity, and mass violence, we may find that these ruptures leave a number of unresolved issues behind that do not come to a definitive end.

John Vsetecka is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at Michigan State University where he is working on his dissertation (tentatively titled), “In the Aftermath of Hunger: Rupture, Response, and Retribution in Soviet Ukraine, 1933-1947.” John is the founder and current co-editor of H-Ukraine, a site dedicated to the academic study and promotion of Ukrainian studies. During 2021-2022, John will be on a Fulbright grant to Kyiv, Ukraine, to conduct dissertation research.

Harry Harootunian is a Detroit born Armenian-American distinguished historian of Japan and scholar of Marxist theory at the University of Chicago and New York University. Born to a family of Armenian Genocide survivors in 1929, Harootunian achieved renown in academia for his pathbreaking studies of early modern Japan and Japanese cultural and intellectual history. 

Not particularly known for his work on the Armenian Genocide, which he readily admits in his recently published memoir by Duke University Press, Professor Harootunian has nevertheless managed to produce a book of profound depth and beauty. It is equal parts a personal memoir, a sociological examination of the Armenian Genocide and its often unexamined psychological effects on survivors and their children, and a meditation of what it is to be a second-generation immigrant in a country ensconced in mythic self-glorification. 

Prompted by the 100^th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, Harootunian examines his roots and familial history. He tries to understand the silence of his parents about their life in the Armenian villages of the Anatolian hinterlands in the Ottoman Empire, and more importantly, about their hellish experiences as survivors of the Armenian Genocide. But it is there that our author encounters his biggest challenge, a challenge he comes close to resolving, but one that in the final analysis provides no more clarity than when he first set out on the road. By the close of the book, it still remains a kind of mysterium tremendum, equally unwieldy and fascinating. As he puts it, 

The decision to not share these memories and experiences with the children is still a mystery. It could have been the enormity of experiences, its virtual unbelievability, a negative fable from the Tales of the Arabian Nights, putting into question the credibility of occurrences that exceeded the capability of children and anything they might be able to grasp.

It is not to say, however, that we learn a precious little. It is a silence that speaks louder than many an uttered speech.

No less fascinating than the silence of his parents, which Harootunian attempts to unmute with elegance and certain poetic rhythm, is the process itself and the methodology employed. In a “normal” memoiristic enterprise, a writer’s source material would be the personal memories of the author, past correspondences, memories harvested from his siblings, relatives, and perhaps close friends and colleagues. 

Yet Harootunian is confronted with what can only be described as a persistent absence of evidence. His parents, now long deceased, had refused to deposit any sort of ‘remembrances of things past’ with their children, imagining these memories to be a burden the carrying of which was not to be outsourced to their unwitting progeny under any circumstance. What then the author is left with is an assemblage of fragmentary information, more often hearsay than solid fact. 

Confronted with this reality, Harootunian is left with no option but to employ the powers of his imagination to fill in gaps in order to achieve some semblance of coherence in an otherwise “splintered narrative.” Yet even after much reconstruction, the author remains agnostic, never entirely sure whether this imagination has yielded anything resembling the truth, even if faintly. 

The predicament of what we may call “unsure knowing” was especially the case with his mother, Vehanush. Having grown up in a German missionary run orphanage, she had adopted its rigid Protestant ethic and a corresponding detached emotional world that emphasized stoic perseverance, contributing to her silence. As Harootunian puts it: “What I have been able to piece together from disparate fragments of information and hearsay is not, by any means, her complete story and is at best an outline. For this reason alone, it must stand as much as a recomposed narrative as a verifiable account.” 

Her “disciplined silence,” as he calls it, refused to be probed and prodded. Similar is the story of the author’s father, Ohannes. Though less disciplined than Harootunian’s mother, Ohannes remained equally as silent on his life before the Genocide, only occasionally letting in his children on the carefully chosen episodes from a bygone era and land, if only because he did not reject these memories, cherishing them instead and treating them as something worthwhile. Yet, much like his wife, Ohannes would remain silent on the central formative event of his life, the Genocide.

Although the book is largely a memoir, it is also more than that. In trying to understand the heritage of silence he and his siblings had inherited from their parents, Harootunian attempts to understand the catastrophe that befell the Ottoman Armenians at the turn of the 20^th century. If he could not understand the impenetrable silence, he could at least try to understand what lay behind it.  

What we have as a result is a loosely Marxist interpretation of the Turkish destruction of its Armenian minority, which elevates economic and financial rationales over other traditionally accepted motivation; (organic nationalism, religious antagonisms, ancient hatreds, etc.). Though never dismissing these other factors in toto, Harootunian makes a powerful case by situating the Armenian Genocide as an example par excellence of what Karl Marx has called “primitive accumulation” or “original accumulation.”

In this framework, though Armenians were a hated minority, their wealth, real or imagined, was far more attractive to the Turkish ruling class than their blood. In the final analysis, it would be these two elements that would jumpstart the modern Turkish republic, its original sin being an original crime – genocide. In this respect, Harootunian’s book becomes a standing rejoinder against Turkish denialism and silence. He reminds us that not all silences are equal.

The silence of the criminal is much different from that of his victim. Both victim and criminal embrace silence for different reasons, but whereas the silence of the victim can contain seeds of redemption, the one embraced by the criminal only serves to compound his crime. More than anything else, it is his guilty verdict. 

Reading Harootunian’s book, I kept thinking how his attempts to recover the silence of his parents and make them speak resembled watching a silent movie. We see characters move and speak, but we are not entirely sure what it is that they are trying to communicate, if anything. In this regard, what the author is doing is akin to putting subtitles to the film — through an act of will, imagination, and yes, love. In his effort, the author assumes multiple roles: now he is a hard-nosed historian, now a Biblical prophet proclaiming timeless truths, now a poet, and in everything, a faithful son in search of the comforting voice of his parents in a grim shadowland. 

Artyom H. Tonoyan, Ph.D., is a Research Associate at the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.

2020 was a year defined by people, groups, and communities standing up for their rights, fighting for equal treatment, and their right to exist. The Black Lives Matter movement across the US and protests in the UK calling attention to the government’s failure to investigate the deaths of Black citizens highlighted historical and current racial disparities. The End SARS demonstrations in Nigeria and farmer protests in India brought international attention to those protesting government policies that gravely affected their livelihoods. The world over, these people, groups, and communities have utilized Universal Declaration of Human Rights Article 20, “right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association,” to do this.

However, at almost every turn, these protests and calls for justice, accountability, and respect for fundamental human rights have been unduly met with harsh resistance and actively combatted through violent and illegal means by law enforcement. 

Take, for example, the manner in which the Minneapolis Police Department fired rubber bullets and tear gas upon citizens protesting the heinous murder of George Floyd. In India, scenes of peaceful protesters beaten, hosed with water cannons, and choked in tear gas brought global attention to new laws affecting the farming industry. Moreover, we can also look at the tragic events of “The Lekki Massacre” on October 20th, 2020, as the Nigerian Army fired at and killed their own citizens peacefully protesting at the Lekki toll gate.

The violent response to these protests is highly concerning for several reasons. Of course, it is truly troubling and sickening to see individuals lose their lives for merely seeking to exercise their internationally guaranteed human rights. At the same time, it is deeply disturbing and alarming to see just how easily law enforcement and nation-states are willing to flout international law and standards in their efforts to suppress peaceful protestors and their message(s). 

The right to protest has been under a concerted attack from nation-states within recent years, with France, Germany, and the United Kingdom attempting to impose blanket bans on protesters, which were then overruled by courts. However, the violent resistance which has befallen protesters across the globe in 2020 has taken this attack to a new extreme as states use public health concerns in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic to further restrict protests. 

At almost every step, we have seen states comfortably disregard internationally accepted standards and practices, actively putting their citizens at risk of serious harm and danger. We have seen police deploy tear gas, classified as a chemical warfare agent and banned under the 1925 Geneva Protocol for use in war. Yet, we saw law enforcement agencies across the United States use tear gas against civilians throughout the summer 2020 BLM protests. 

Police also used Kinetic Energy rounds (rubber bullets), demonstrating the weapon’s devastating effects on protestors. Unlike traditional bullets, which pierce the skin, rubber bullets are designed to strike someone with blunt force. However, a 2017 study found that three percent of people hit by rubber bullets died from the injury sustained, and a further 15% were permanently injured.

The summer 2020 protests in Minneapolis tell a similar story as Humphrey School Graduate, Soren Stevenson, was left with serious eye damage after being struck by a rubber bullet. In the Lekki Massacre, the Nigerian state unleashed the force of its military against peacefully protesting citizens, further demonstrating the extreme harm caused by these weapons as they injured dozens, leading to a tragic and heinous loss of life. So devastating are the potential effects of rubber bullets that Dr. Rohini Haar states: “using them against unarmed civilians is a huge violation of human rights.” 

What truly compounds this gross violation of international human rights is the continued overall lack of accountability for these violations. Barring a few hearings held at the international level, there has been little done by way of accountability for states openly committing crimes against humanity and other such human rights violations. Calls to suspend future sales of tear gas equipment to the US in the UK fell upon deaf ears. Authorities in Nigeria attempted to cover up the true death toll of the Lekki Massacre. The international community has displayed a collective ambivalence towards the plight of India’s farming community, save for minor commentary from Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. 

On the one hand, it is encouraging to see the beginnings of conversations seeking to hold governments and police forces accountable for their actions against peaceful protesters. We welcome the finding that the City of Portland was in contempt for violating orders limiting the use of tear gas. It is also positive to see state and local lawmakers begin the push for the police to use “less lethal” weapons. However, these are only tiny steps to address a much larger problem.

The continued assault on the right to protest by nation-states is an extremely dangerous and troubling trend. We as citizens run the risk of having one of our fundamental human rights drastically altered and eroded. The fact that so many of the world’s leading nations have been allowed to take such drastic, disproportionate, and unlawful measures to curtail the right to protest is a frightening reality.

Moreover, the lack of accountability with which these nations have been able to usurp international law represents an egregious failure to uphold basic human rights. The right to assemble and peacefully protest is one of the most centrally important human rights guaranteed to each of us. It is a right that needs not only to be protected but championed to the highest degree possible. The manner in which this right has been attacked in recent years is a trend which each of us needs to work diligently to debunk. NGOs, nation-states, and multilateral agencies such as the UN must do more to not only protect the rights of protesters, but also hold accountable the nations and actors who would seek to curtail the exercise of this right.

Sarah Allis is an alumnus of the Master of Human Rights program, concentrating on research methods.

Joy Hammer is an alumnus of the Master of Human Rights program with a concentration in international conflict and security.

Paul Olubayo is an alumnus of the Master of Human Rights program with a concentration in International Justice and Human Rights Law. Paul presently works at an international Anti-Slavery organization.

Hannah Shireman is an alumnus of the Master of Human Rights program with a concentration in research methods. 

Bailey Sutter is a second-year Master of Human Rights student with a concentration in racial justice, education, and the school to prison pipeline.

Vanesa Mercado Diaz is a second-year Master of Human Rights student with a concentration in women’s rights, migration, and Latin America. 

Raven Ziegler is an alumnus of the Master of Human Rights program with a concentration in business and human rights.

In 1975, Edward Tronick and his colleagues conducted what would become one of the most replicated experiments in developmental psychology.  A video discussing a more recent replication of the experiment can be found below:

In the video, a baby sits in a chair. The child’s mother enters the room and begins interacting with her child, smiling, cooing, and responding. Then, suddenly, as part of the experiment, the mother stops, simply standing with a blank expression. The baby notices immediately. At first, the baby makes sounds and moves her arms. Soon, the baby begins pointing to things, hoping to attract the mother’s attention. When the mother gives no feedback, the baby starts screaming and crying inconsolably. Some of the most severe physical reactions occurred within a minute of the mother becoming unresponsive. Eventually, as Tronick described in his original experiment, “When these attempts fail, the infant . . . orients his face and body away from his mother with a withdrawn, hopeless facial expression.”

Evolutionarily, this makes sense. Humans are social creatures seeking reciprocal interaction in order to survive. Other’s faces are deep reservoirs of information we regularly trove for meaning. Psychologist Paul Ekman revealed human faces contain 43 muscles working in concert to show our emotions. His scientific experiments found that our most basic facial expressions (like sadness, anger, and fear) were cultural universals—that our expression of key emotional states had clear meaning across cultures. 

An infant growing despondent at being unable to connect emotionally to a caregiver indicates how early in life we are hard-wired to seek out emotional correspondence to survive. Sociologists have long studied how we rely on others as social mirrors to read for clues about our own sense of self in the social world. Most humans then become especially adept at learning what gets us attention, either positive or negative. When it doesn’t work, we become hopeless.

The still-face experiment indicates infants desperately want attention and feedback from caregivers. When these are withheld, the anchor for their sense of self, and their reality, is cut. Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have long hired psychologists to study and then apply such insights on our essential survival instinct—a primal need for clear, positive feedback from others—to gain users. Social media “likes” have been connected to dopamine hits in the brain, or an immediate physiological reaction rooted in a pleasurable response. People post things on social media to be read, seen, and/or heard, and for those posts to be connected back to themselves. Even those who post anonymously are interested in other’s reactions to their input. We don’t post in vacuums.

A recent Op-Ed in the New York Times, titled “They Used to Post Selfies.  Now They’re Trying to Reverse the Election,” discussed how basic human needs for individual affirmation for some people have moved away from face-to-face interaction, toward mediated affirmation rooted in extreme politics. The authors looked at a few young adult’s media posting patterns before and after their online embracing of right-wing and conspiratorial-themed postings. The article indicated that, before these young adults began posting right-wing conspiratorial theories, they used social media to post about themselves, their lives, and their mostly non-political opinions. They, in other words, posted personal information and, as the Op-Ed title says, selfies; pictures of their own faces.

The article said their original approach to posting on social media received little positive feedback—perhaps a few dozen “likes” and handfuls of comments, usually from those they knew. They were not at that point associated with the extreme far-right. Once these young adults discovered and began posting such far-right political content, and learned to choose hashtags used to organize that content by topic for larger consumption outside of immediate friends, “likes” and comments on their posts increased several fold. They became more visible. Those young adults had found groups of like-minded individuals validating each other in what could be called an imagined community.

Communities are groups with shared values and beliefs that interact over periods of time. Communities are a source of affirmation for their members. Communities form an in-group, one that provides an ecosystem of values and beliefs in opposition to other groups or out-groups. In-groups also promote in-group bias, vilifying the out-group based at times on even arbitrary distinctions. One thing the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol showed was how important such a sense of community is to people and how social media can connect disparate far-right groups under one umbrella to pose an imminent danger to the world’s preeminent democracy.

Social media also involves speed of communication—an individual can post anything, to be seen everywhere in the world, with one click. Such speed of transmission and response, together with the potential for a large audience, makes social media fundamentally different from all previous forms of media-based communication. It provides an enticement for individuals seeking attention to think short-term, for the positive feedback we all crave and can grow despondent without. 

Much attention has been given lately to the “echo chambers” that exist within social media. Perhaps, though, these might be better thought of as emotional and behavioral call-and-response feedback loops. Actual echo chambers don’t have emotions—they are spaces that allow for the repetition of sounds. Emotional and behavioral call-and-response feedback loops, though, are dynamic forms of communication with a self-reinforcing quality that might then trigger action in the physical world.

The dopamine hits for individual users on social media should also be considered through a recognition of the increased importance of social networks responding to hierarchical forms of power. Online, far-right extremists and conspiracy followers developed, and/or found, a network that, initiating an insurrection, aspired to compete for legitimacy over a hierarchal system of elected officials in a representative democracy. 

In his book the Tower and the Square, Ferguson notes that hierarchies (like medieval towers) represent vertical (top-down) forms of power, while networks (like the public square) represent horizontal (equally distributed) forms of power. Social media networks, promoting the immediate dissemination of material through instantaneous posts, pose a challenge to slower, vertical forms of media where editors control and direct content.  Social media can, therefore, more rapidly promote and inspire communities that might then threaten slower, more deliberate forms of government that rely on long periods of campaigning, election, and the weighing of evidence, opinion, and policy.

The speed of social network communication and the immediate feedback of “likes” and “views” promote an environment of information now competing against traditional mass-media sources. The democratic, individualistic, and most importantly, immediate, nature of participation in social media networks means that everyone is, in a sense, competing for attention—for likes, for views, for subscribers. Social media platforms have struggled to vet material on the sites in the same way as hierarchal-based mass media can. Today, social media “influencers” work to find followers, as an important measure of their “success” concerns developing a large following. Generally speaking, social media platforms have promoted attention from others as a more important measure (a measure of audience size and impact) than promoting accuracy and truth.

Media and politics, though, ultimately involve individuals.  Individuals who feel rejected from others can at times be drawn to extremist groups without initially expressing extremist views.  In “White Supremacy Was Her World.  And Then She Left,” Seyward Darby described the experience of one of her interview subjects, Corinna Olsen, who initially turned to online hate forums to ask rudimentary questions about whether Whites should feel able to “feel pride” in “their culture.”  Instead of being ridiculed by true believers for her naivety, Olsen felt acceptance into online forums for hate.  “They seemed immensely interested in me and my life, and they wanted to be my friend.  [For someone who] grew up without friends, that was very appealing.  It made me feel like I must be doing something right” (Olsen quoted by Darby).  Olsen described herself as initially ignorant of those forums with skinheads or Neo-Nazis as trolling for recruits.  Darby, who has long studied hate groups, believes Olsen’s route into hate groups to be fairly common.  For Darby, hate can simply become “a social bond” and “a cure for loneliness.” 

The insurrection at the U.S. Capitol has proven that through social media, those craving attention can find imagined communities under an umbrella of unfounded conspiracies, hate, and disinformation. But perhaps therein lies another question: how many of the people espousing far-right conspiracy theories, hate, and disinformation on social media are true believers in such communities, and how many might simply be lonely people in search of validation, or perhaps simply opportunists? An element I found noteworthy about the rioters at the Capitol was how many of them held phones with cameras, recording, posting, and live-streaming their participation. The revolution was, indeed, televised, as a form of reality TV delivered on YouTube and Twitter, seemingly featuring real and wannabe “influencers.”

A number of rioters, though, were clearly true believers. Their imagined community was largely based not on a single platform, but a gross rejection of a hierarchal structure of representative democracy in the U.S. They felt they weren’t being represented. So, they had taken to representing their resentment, to themselves and each other, to meet that key social need expressed in infants, for a deep sense of their existence through validation by others. These individuals under one umbrella of imagined community had found enough in common to collectively agree that if their nation’s leader could be re-elected, that too would confirm a change in their marginal status. His and their interests became one. His narcissism and anger at perceived affronts became the galvanizing force and centerpiece for a coalition for wounded pride, hate, and paranoia. Together, the leader and the rioters would right a host of perceived wrongs.

It is then worth considering how politics and emotional expressions might correspond. One recent study of President Trump by psychologist Erika Rosenberg focused on systematically analyzing his facial expressions using Paul Ekman’s Facial Action Coding System (the FACS being the original, empirical assessment tool used by Ekman to understand the facial physiological correspondence with human emotion). Rosenberg’s summary of her scientific opinion: “Trump’s facial repertoire suggests these things to me. He has a great deal of fear under the surface. He tries to position himself as superior to others, whether he truly sees himself that way or not. He is rarely happy.”

Such expressions, I suggest, might also fruitfully be read against the symbols on several flags flown by the crowd outside of the riot. Many rioters, claiming they were true “patriots,” brandished the American flag.  Several other rioters held flags with snakes, flags with their leader as Rambo, various flags with guns, and the Confederate Battle Flag. These are symbols of dominance, superiority, aggression, wounded national pride, and righteous anger against deep-seated threats.

Together, I am arguing that the insurrection involved a perfect storm of many seemingly disparate elements. A key is the promotion of conspiratorial views on social media to both true believers and social media opportunists, some of which overlap. Another element is that social media has the perverse effect of separating and isolating us through individual phones and computers (likely compounding some people’s sense of isolation recently exacerbated by the pandemic). Third, a coalition of conspiracy theorists, hate-mongers, and far-right extremists formed something of an imagined community, enough of whose members became determined to wreck a legitimate, representative democracy. Fourth, they were not a community with a shared view, however, rooted in replacing a hierarchal form of representative government with their own policy platform. There were true believers, there were those who became radicalized through fellowship, and there were those who simply wanted attention.  

Social media, when fused with politics, perceived slights, conspiracies, individual isolation through technology, and a narcissistic, anti-democratic, and deeply disturbed leader, created this perfect storm culminating in an insurrection against the modern world’s longest-standing democracy. Holocaust and genocide scholars know well how perfect storms can lead to once unimaginable consequences.

Kurt Borchard, Ph.D., is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Nebraska Kearney.  His areas of interest include the Holocaust, genocide, social psychology, and critical cultural studies.

The following describes how I have explored settler colonialism theory with my secondary social studies students. Like many of my students in a rural south-central Wisconsin community, I am White and from a working-class background. I share my students’ struggles in understanding our place and  identities within the larger landscape of U.S. society. We’ve found that settler colonialism theory helps to complicate and nuance our understanding of the history and present realities of the United States. 

Setting the Stage 
Before our in-class discussion, I typically assign two TED Talks for students to watch: Aaron Huey’s 2010 “America’s Native Prisoners of War” and Bryan Stevenson’s 2012 “We Need to Talk About Injustice.” Both present hard truths about the histories and legacies of the genocide and dispossession of Indigenous peoples and the enslavement and mass incarceration of African Americans. Though increasingly common, the realities of Indigenous genocide and African American enslavement, which are called the United States’ “first sins,” are rarely discussed in social studies curricula and classrooms as part of the same overarching structure of settler colonialism.

We begin class by discussing the TED Talks. Though my students are sophomores in high school, most have had few opportunities throughout their formal schooling to discuss the issues raised in either talk. Initially, the issues discussed by Huey and Stevenson seem far away or part of some other America. Indeed, the August 2020 police shooting of Jacob Blake, the responding uprisings, and the co-occurring white nationalist violence in Kenosha, Wisconsin (60 miles away) highlighted the sobering reality of racism in Wisconsin. Yet, these went unmentioned and seemingly unnoticed by students at the start of this school year. These talks provide accessible entry points for class discussions. Note: Huey’s talk demands additional scrutiny. As a white photojournalist, his images from the Pine Ridge Reservation that accompany the talk – images that appeared in a 2012 National Geographic cover story – could perpetuate the (settler) colonial gaze.

Drawing Indians
Next, borrowing a prompt from Patrick LeBeau (Cheyenne River Sioux), I instruct students to “draw what you know about Indians” on a sheet of notebook paper. Though initially uncomfortable with the prompt, students soon begin filling their sheets with images. Similar to what LeBeau has found, students’ drawings invariably include teepees, tomahawks, and feathered headdresses – the stereotypical trappings of nineteenth-century Plains Indians. These are reflected in schoolwork from my own childhood, as well (see image below). Asking students to reflect on why these are the common images they hold of American Indians (images that are still prevalent in advertising, sports, and education) pushes non-Indigenous students to reckon with how they view American Indians.

Defining Settler Colonialism Theory
Next we examine Eve Tuck (Unangax̂) and K. Wayne Yang’s settler-native-slave triad, which provides a framework for understanding power relations within settler colonial society regarding land. Settler colonialism is a distinct type of colonialism in which non-Indigenous settlers remove and then replace Indigenous inhabitants on the land, occupying the land in perpetuity. Simultaneously, Africans and African Americans are enslaved to work the land. 

Within the triad, settlers occupy stolen Indigenous land, creating structures to ensure their continued dominance over society and land. The native continues to be removed from the land and erased within historical and contemporary narratives, while the chattel slave is restricted from owning land, disenfranchised, and valued exclusively for their labor. The prison-industrial complex represents a continuation of enslavement in U.S. society. Thus,  Patrick Wolfe wrote that settler colonialism is a “structure not an event,”  infused with a genocidal “logic of elimination.” While students might initially view the settler-native-slave triad as corresponding to identities, la paperson wrote that these are not identities, but rather technologies of the settler nation-state.

 “Therefore, the ‘settler’ is not an identity, it is an idealized juridical space of exceptional rights granted to normative settler citizens.” 

Thus, racialization and the racial categories of Whiteness and Blackness serve as organizing logics, or tools for maintaining settler colonialism. 

Returning to the TED Talks, students reflect on the following quotes through a settler colonial lens:

• “More than 90 percent of the population [on Pine Ridge Reservation] lives below the federal poverty line […] The life expectancy for men is between 46 and 48 years old — roughly the same as in Afghanistan and Somalia” (Huey).
• “In urban communities across this country — Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington — 50 to 60 percent of all young men of color are in jail or prison or on probation or parole” (Stevenson). 

Viewed through the lens of settler colonialism, the structural issues described by Huey and Stevenson are clarified and brought into relationship. 

Settler Colonial Imagery in the Settler Colonial Imaginary
Next, we turn our attention to John Gast’s 1872 painting: American Progress. In the painting, Columbia, adorned with the star of empire, floats across the American landscape. Stringing a telegraph wire, she ushers in settlement via Conestoga wagons, stagecoaches, and railroads. Bringing the light of civilization, she drives out darkness along with buffalo and Indigenous peoples. The imagery of the piece is not subtle, and students have little difficulty decoding the painting using a settler colonial lens. 

When considering the book in Columbia’s arms, most students reason she holds the Bible. However, zooming in, they see it is a school book. This revelation leads us to discuss how schools and curriculum function as mechanisms to sustain and perpetuate settler colonialism. Dolores Calderon has analyzed social studies curricula as examples of “settler grammar,” or those “discursive logics that maintain settler colonial ideologies.”

Unsettling Local Erasures
Clinton, Wisconsin, the rural community where I teach, like all settler communities, has a long history and collective memory of misrepresenting or erasing Indigenous peoples. A log cabin stands in town as a “visible reminder of the sacrifices made by early pioneers as they settled this area.” Yet, the many Indigenous communities that have called this land home are nowhere mentioned. The practice of memorializing first settlers through monuments while simultaneously writing Indigenous peoples out of existence is what Jean O’Brien (White Earth Ojibwe) referred to as “firsting and lasting.” A 1987 volume of local history stated: “There seems to be no record of any permanent Indian settlement located at Clinton before the coming of the Whiteman.” Discussing these local erasures brings the lessons of settler colonialism home for students. We follow these discussions with learning about land acknowledgments, which are more common in Canada or U.S. higher education, before drafting our own statement. 

Reflections on “Settler Fragility”
Discussions of settler colonialism are not easy for most non-Indigenous students, many of whom can trace their family histories to the founding of this close-knit farming community. It is not uncommon for male students to express frustration or anger when confronting local histories and legacies of violence, dispossession, and continued erasure. Students sometimes crumple their drawings and otherwise disrupt class discussions or put their heads down on their desks and disengage. It is not uncommon for female students, seeking to comfort their agitated peers, to become defensive and seek to excuse past and contemporary settler violence. Settler colonialism is heavily steeped in heteropatriarchal social norms. Such behaviors signal what Dina Gilio-Whitaker (Colville Confederated Tribes) called “settler fragility,” or the “the inability to talk about unearned privilege—in this case, the privilege of living on lands that were taken in the name of democracy through profound violence and injustice.” 

Beyond Settler Colonialism
J. Kēhaulani Kauanui (Kanaka Maoli) reminds us that taking up settler colonialism, though important, cannot replace the need for Indigenous (as well as other BIPOC) presence in the curricula, classroom, and community. While settler colonialism theory helps students recognize the logics that govern schooling and society, this lesson is only part of my and my students’ efforts to unsettle traditional social studies education. 

George Dalbo is a high school social studies teacher and Ph.D. candidate in Curriculum and Instruction and Social Studies Education at the University of Minnesota. His research interests include Holocaust, genocide, and human rights education in K-12 curricula and classrooms.

The Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s present but another case where casualty numbers are highly politicized— manipulated and employed by various actors to serve their interests. Twenty years after the wars in the former Yugoslavia ended, debates continue about their naming, framing, and death tolls. These debates are so polarized that the various ethnic groups involved do not even agree on who committed genocide to whom. 

The violence in ex-Yugoslavia is particularly politicized because it resulted in the breakup of one country into five new successor states (now seven). Actors in each country use collective memory of past violence (the most recent wars and other historical periods) as a tool to build a national identity, and casualty numbers are one key ingredient in this construction. 

One example illustrating these debates is the Srebrenica massacre that occurred in July 1995 during the Bosnian War. Because the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia designated the Srebrenica killings an act of genocide, the politics of numbers are tied up with the politics of naming (or refusal to name) genocide in this specific case. It should be noted that this is just one ten-day period of violence within ten years of ethnic conflicts, civil wars, and insurgencies together known as the Yugoslav wars. There are many other events whose casualty numbers are hotly contested, such as the Siege of Sarajevo, Operation Storm, the War in Kosovo, and the U.S.-led NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. The International Center for Transitional Justice estimates 140,000 people were killed and four million displaced during the wars.

Independent researcher Victor Toom calls the casualty numbers in Srebrenica an “ontologically dirty knot.” The “knot” is the quasi-consensus that Bosnian Serb Army and Serbian paramilitary units executed between 7,000 and 8,000 Bosniak men and boys in the town of Srebrenica. However, the threads that tie this knot, consisting of both material elements (like human remains and DNA) and subjective interpretations, can be unraveled at any point. This table shows some of the casualty numbers used in the Srebrenica case:

A monument at the Srebrenica-Potočari Memorial Center, pictured below, depicts the highest victim count of 8,372, and underneath it reads: “total number of victims which is not definitive” (my translation). Clearly, the numbers debate rages on for all parties. 

Some American scholars and journalists like Edward S. Herman, David Peterson, and Noam Chomsky invalidate that number as being used in the service of U.S. imperialism to justify selective intervention when it benefits the U.S. and not in other cases. Bosnian Serb leaders like Milorad Dodik dispute that figure, citing numbers as low as 2,000, and call Srebrenica “the greatest deception of the 20th century.” The Bosnian Serb governmental estimates have changed over time depending on who is in power (mainly Serbian nationalist versus E.U. sympathizers).

What are the consequences of these debates? In a CHGS-sponsored talk, anthropologist Sarah Wagner showed how commemoration and victim identification are used by both Bosniaks and Serbs to “forge a new nationalism” based on reconstructed ethnoreligious identities. Wagner emphasizes the importance of identifying victims at the familial level while arguing that “on a more abstract societal level, the political interpretation of bodies recovered and reburied has at times exacerbated tensions in post-war Bosnia.” She describes the political and religious overtones in victim burials at both the Srebrenica Memorial Cemetery and nearby Serbian commemorative monuments. Rather than “building a cohesive national identity around shared experiences of loss and violence,” these commemorations divide and exclude. 

According to its website, the ICMP’s use of DNA to identify 6,693 of Srebrenica’s missing since 2001 is the first time such scientific methods have been applied to a post-conflict case. Wagner states in her talk that this “forensic intervention into the missing persons issue… has effectively raised the stakes of facticity, forcing both Bosniaks and Bosnian Serbs to document their losses in increasingly quantifiable terms.” Though some may deny its validity, all parties are now forced to confront this empirical evidence in making their case. “Gone are the days when they can speak in generalities.” Effectively, this scientific identification process, while certainly helpful to the victims’ families, is fueling the increased numericization of the politics of memory in this post-conflict society. 

The politics of numbers in the Yugoslav case are unavoidable, least of all for this Serbian-American researcher. They raise questions about how to study and commemorate this violence without furthering ethnonational divisions, particularly when even basic facts cannot be established without antagonizing someone.

Nikoleta Sremac is a Ph.D. student in Sociology and a graduate board member of The Society Pages at the University of Minnesota. She studies gendered power relations and collective memory of mass violence in ex-Yugoslavia and the U.S. 

The election of Donald Trump in November 2016 coincided with the 78^th anniversary of Nazi Germany’s state-sponsored anti-Jewish riots known as Kristallnacht. On that occasion, we titled our newsletter: Infamous Past, Disturbing Present. The shocking ascendancy in a post-Holocaust world of a movement rooted in the United States, mainly powered by toxic rhetorical brawling and sheltering authoritarian and anti-democratic impulses, was destined to be a ruinous affair. The ransacking and rioting at the nation’s capital by those courted and enthralled by this cult of personality is deeply despairing.  

In 2016 we looked carefully at the facts and summarized our concerns about the potential direction of unrestrained incendiary speech and actions. Five years later, despite Trump not being elected President, or maybe precisely because of that, we have now reached the precipice. 

The shocking assault on the Nation’s Capitol should not make us overlook the rage-filled gathering that unfolded simultaneously outside Minnesota’s State Capitol in Saint Paul, which included several Republican lawmakers. These Trump followers were not only decrying the Biden certification, in support of the insurrection of some members of Congress, validating the mob violence inside the Capitol and threatening the Minnesota Governor and other Democratic local officials. They were openly initiating the threat of war and, yes, genocide. The recording of the speech leaves no room for doubt. An unidentified individual preceded the Republican state representatives and local Republican leaders in the rally with the following call to action:

“We cannot move forward; we cannot evolve as a people because we have been choked off by weeds. Weeds of communism, weeds of socialism, weeds of leftist liberals subjecting us, suffocating us. We are a garden that needs to grow. We cannot grow if we have weeds choking us off.” The audience chimes in, shouting: “Kill the root, kill the weeds!” and the speaker closes his rant with: “We need to pull the weeds!”

Let me put things in an even more clear perspective. This is the Us vs. Them vision in its most dangerous and extreme manifestation. There is no room for both. In Modernity and the Holocaust, sociologist Zygmunt Bauman explained that eliminating the adversary is a necessary step needed to be taken to reach the end of the road, which is the desired society. Moreover, Bauman warns about a “gardeners vision,” were those creating the garden identify its “weeds,” those groups of people who spoil their design. “All visions of society-as-a-garden define parts of the social habitat as human weeds. Like all other weeds, they must be segregated, contained, prevented from spreading, removed and kept outside the society’s boundaries”, writes Bauman. But if all these means prove insufficient, he concludes, “they must be killed.”

Elected state officials endorsed a genocidal playbook with their participation in the Minnesota Capitol rally.

As a Saint Paul resident, as the son of refugees from Nazi Germany, as the director of an academic Center whose mission is to investigate and teach the lessons of the Holocaust and other genocides, I was left momentarily speechless. I and so many other colleagues across the country have not ceased to point to the unambiguous historical parallelisms and alarming facts when elected officials engage with authoritarian, fascist and Neo-Nazi ideas. Meanwhile, we witness events nationwide unfolding in their grotesque and dreadful manner. Elie Wiesel captured this sense of helplessness in a stirring way. There is something more frightening than the tragedy of a messenger who cannot deliver his message, he said. And that is when the messenger has delivered his message and nothing has changed.

Alejandro Baer, Ph.D., is an associate professor of sociology and the Stephen C. Feinstein Chair and Director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies

Philip Gourevitch opens his book on the Rwandan genocide, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, with a quote from Plato:

Leontius, the son of Aglaion, was coming up from the Peiraeus, close to the outer side of the north wall, when he saw some dead bodies lying near the executioner,  and he felt a desire to look at them, and at the same time felt disgust at the thought, and tried to turn aside. For some time he fought with himself and put his hand over his eyes, but in the end the desire got the better of him, and opening his eyes wide with his fingers he ran forward to the bodies, saying, ‘There you are, curse you, have your fill of the lovely spectacle.

Many people desire to make sense of violence, a pursuit that often leads to engagement with violent imagery. However, as Susan Sontag captures in Regarding the Pain of Others, depictions of violence cannot ever replicate its lived experience. While graphic imagery or descriptions of violence may serve to aid in an understanding of violence, they also hold vast destructive potential. In contrast to assumed education benefits, they can also dehumanize or inhibit agency. As such, we are responsible for critically reflecting upon how we engage with this content in our roles as both researchers and educators.

To do so, we must acknowledge that representations of violence are not equivalent across populations. Historically, a hierarchy of suffering has prioritized the humanity of some groups above others. Within this hierarchy, violence against the Black community, Indigenous groups, people of color, and throughout the Global South is devalued in contrast to White populations in the Global North.

In “Savages, Victims, and Saviors: The Metaphor of Human Rights,” Makau Mutua reflects upon the limiting and, at times, the dehumanizing impact of human rights institutions and their depictions of violence. Commonly held understandings of human rights violations, especially against marginalized communities, can have the effect of reducing individuals to their experience of atrocity. This constructs violence as something that happens elsewhere, to other people, and it characterizes those who experience violence into limiting, unagentic categories. They may be hapless and helpless victims, incapable of caring for themselves, or barbaric, savage perpetrators. When people think of genocide and mass atrocity, for example, they often think of Africans before thinking about Native Americans. This violence is colloquially understood as being perpetrated by Africans against Africans, rather than by the early settlers of what we now call America against Native communities.

Crucially, our role as scholars can have the impact of reinforcing these destructive identities, especially when we share graphic imagery that supports these archetypes. Sharing depictions of violence can have the effect of shrinking a nameless individual’s identity to the experience of violence, as a “victim” or a “perpetrator,” an “other.” Closely intertwined with the capacity of violent imagery to reduce the subject’s humanity is an ethical conversation of agency. 

There is a profound intimacy in the experience of violence and death, and more often than not, those depicted have no voice in how their experience is captured. This, of course, is especially true for the dead – they cannot support or counter the narratives that depictions of their passing are utilized to further. Images of victims strip agency from those whose death and pain we voyeuristically consume from the comfort of our air-conditioned rooms.

We need to ask ourselves why we need images of death and suffering to make the point that humanity can be destructive, and further, what it means when we share such depictions in our classrooms. We need to think about the secondary traumatization process we put students through when they see bodies that look like theirs displayed for all and sundry to consume in the name of education. 

If the constant images of police violence against Black people in this country has not stopped the killing of Black people, why do we think that showing images of victims of genocide and mass atrocity will prevent these events from happening? These images are destructive in how they perform the function of allowing their consumers, subconsciously, to think of certain groups as already socially dead. They run the risk of presenting Black and Brown bodies as disposable. Just another body. Seeing as most images of victims of genocide and mass atrocity often look like the second author’s body, this is not merely an intellectual debate. It is position viscerally felt by him even as he studies the representation of genocide and mass atrocity in Africa.

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

j. Siguru Wahutu is an Assistant Professor at NYU’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, and a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard. His primary scholarship examines media constructions of knowledge in Africa, with a particular focus on genocide and mass atrocities. His research interests include the effects of ethnicity and culture on the media representations of human rights violations, global and transnational news flows, postcolonial land claims, and the political economy of international media, with a regional emphasis on postcolonial Africa. His primary book project offers an extensive account of media coverage of Darfur between 2003 and 2008 within various African states (including Kenya, Rwanda, South Africa, Nigeria, and Egypt). When not studying media and genocide, he works on issues surrounding data privacy, and media manipulation in African countries. This secondary research stream is the subject of his second book project currently under contract with MIT Press. Wahutu’s research has appeared in African Journalism Studies, African Affairs, Global Media and Communication, Media and Communication, Media, Culture, and Society, and Sociological Forum.