The New School Graduate Program in International Affairs

The Critical Social Science Search Committee of the Graduate Program of International Affairs at the New School invites you to attend following job talks for the Assistant Professor of International Affairs position. Your participation and feedback is valuable. 

Date and Time: Wednesday, March 10, 12-2pm

Location:  A407

Title of Lecture: Genocide by Attrition

Candidate: Everita Silina

Current conceptions of genocide are often too narrow and state-centric in their view of the phenomenon. There is a tendency to look at genocides as discretely demarcated events, as if they were frozen in time. Genocide, however, is not an event. Genocide is a process that can unfold over several years, even decades. It can be waged by variety of methods beyond direct and violent murder. In fact, I argue that many victims of historical genocides die from slower indirect and less immediately deadly methods of annihilation than machetes, guns or gas chambers. I propose a notion of genocide by attrition that takes the usual linear (causal) accounts of mass death as its starting point and expands on them to suggest a more complex picture of genocidal processes. Genocide by attrition moves the debate away from the strictly legalistic concerns with establishing the intent of the perpetrators and with identifying the governmental policy behind the mass atrocity crimes. I believe that this more flexible, human rights oriented understanding of genocide would be a more effective tool of prevention in the current international environment where the states are no longer the only or the most violent actors. To achieve this, I aim to illuminate the concept of genocide by attrition in its proper legal and historical contexts, and identify indicators thereof through the lens of existing international human rights laws and obligations so as to assist legal, humanitarian and political actors in the difficult task of genocide identification and prevention. I draw on empirical evidence from various cases of genocide by attrition to identify a set of attributes that allow a fresh rethinking of the process of genocide.

Students will have the opportunity to meet the candidate form 4:30-5:00pm in Room 609