Dr Jens Meierhenrich CBG.10.01

Dr Pilar Elizalde CBG.9.08

This course is available on the MSc in Conflict Studies, MSc in Gender, Peace and Security, MSc in Global Politics, MSc in Human Rights, MSc in Human Rights and Politics, MSc in International Affairs (LSE and Peking University), MSc in International Relations, MSc in International Relations (LSE and Sciences Po), MSc in International Relations (Research), MSc in International Relations Theory, MSc in Theory and History of International Relations and MSc in Theory and History of International Relations. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

All students are required to obtain permission from the Teacher Responsible by completing the Student Statement box on the online application form linked to course selection on LSE for You. Admission is not guaranteed.

This seminar course provides an introduction to the study of genocide. The course's disciplinary ambit ranges from anthropology to economics, from history to law, and from political science to sociology. Against the background of diverse disciplinary approaches, it explores major theoretical and empirical aspects of the role(s) of genocidal campaigns in international politics, inter alia, their origins, development, and termination; the manner of their perpetration, progression, and diffusion; their impact on the maintenance of international peace and security; their consequences for the reconstruction and development of states and the building of nations; and their adjudication in domestic and international courts and tribunals. Empirical cases to be discussed include Australia, Cambodia, China, the Democratic Republic of Congo, East Timor, Nazi Germany, Guatemala, Iraq, Northern Ireland, the Ottoman Empire, Rwanda, Uganda, the Soviet Union, Sudan, and the former Yugoslavia, among others. The course is designed to equip students with the analytic tools necessary for making sense of the evolution of the international system from the nineteenth century to the present-and for critically assessing the promise and limits of responding to collective violence.

This course is delivered through seminars totalling a minimum of 20 hours across Lent Term. This year, some or all of this teaching will be delivered through a combination of in-person classes/classes delivered online. Students on this course will have a reading week in Week 6, in line with departmental policy.

Students will be expected to produce 1 essay in the LT.

The formative assessment is a 2,000 word essay.

• Christian Gerlach, The Extermination of the European Jews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016)
• Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
• Jens Meierhenrich, Genocide: A Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
• A. Dirk Moses, The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021)
• Filip Reyntjens, The Great African War: Congo and Regional Politics, 1996-2006 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
• Geoffrey B. Robinson, The Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian Massacres, 1965-66 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017)
• Joachim J. Savelsberg, Representing Mass Violence: Conflicting Responses to Human Rights Violations in Darfur (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015),
• William A. Schabas, Genocide in International Law: The Crime of Crimes, Second edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
• Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory Through the Camera’s Eye (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998)

Essay (100%) in the ST.