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Adam Jones, "Sites of Genocide" (Routledge, 2022)
01:11:41
An interview with Adam Jones
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- [00:01]
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- [00:58]
Adam Jones
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Adam Jones
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- [01:29]
Adam Jones
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:33]
Keller McFall
Hi, and welcome back to New Books and Genocide Studies. My name is Keller McFall from Newman University, and I'm a host on the show, which is part of the New Books Network of podcasts. And today I'm thrilled to welcome Adam Jones back to the show. Adam is professor of Political Science at the University of British Columbia at Okanagan, and he's an influential writer and researcher in genocide studies. Most of you have probably heard his name. He's also been a guest on the show twice before. And if you're interested in going back and hearing those podcasts, you can find those interviews on the New Books and Genocide Studies webpage. But today we're going to talk about his recent collection of writings titled Sites of Genocide. And, Adam, thanks for joining us and welcome back to New Books and Genocide Studies.
- [02:16]
Adam Jones
It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks, Kelly.
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Keller McFall
So, Adam, I've asked you to introduce yourself before. I'm not going to ask you to do that again, but I do want to ask you about a particular moment that you discuss in the introductory essay to this book, your visit to Murambi in Rwanda. And I'm going to guess, given what you write, that you remember that. Well, I'm wondering if you can tell us about that visit and maybe say something about what it says about why somebody might want to study mass violence and the challenges involved in that.
- [02:54]
Adam Jones
Well, it's a unique site and a controversial one. Murambi is the only genocide memorial site in rwanda commemorating the 1994 genocide of the Tutsis, where the exhumed bodies of victims are still on open display. The they are desiccated corpses. They are shrouded in lime for preservation, and they have been returned to platforms in the school rooms where they had sought shelter on a hilltop and refuge from the rampaging Hutu militias. And the first time that I visited the site, I've been there twice. I had written permission from the Rwandan government to photograph it and to photograph inside the rooms. This is another major way which I try to engage with genocide and with sites of genocide, to use the title of the new book. And that meant that I could proceed unaccompanied by a guide and a monitor who would, among other things, ensure that I wasn't taking photographs. So that took some time to arrange from what is effectively the Ministry of Genocide remembrance in Kigali. And I found myself walking through room after room filled with cumulatively hundreds of bodies and with no barrier between yourself and them. So you are literally walking around trying not to knock off limbs. And at the same time, I was trying to record the scene and interpret the scene photographically, which brings up a range of ethical questions of its own and is also a little bit of an emotional shield in a situation like that. You know, you have something in front of your face, you have a task, a project to perform. When I was back the second time to visit that site, it was not with photographic permission, and I didn't want to photograph it any further. And I was kind of naked to the poignancy of that scene. So the camera as defense and the challenges of turning something which is so atrocious into something that is aesthetic was part of that encounter. I mentioned that the site is controversial, and that's for the rather obvious reasons that you have the bodies of victims on open display to basically be ogled by visitors. And that brings up very substantial questions. There has been a movement for some years to remove the bodies and give them a decent reburial. But meanwhile, it stands as a place that really is unique on earth. And I don't think there is another site of genocide that brings you so directly and inescapably in contact with the reality of that mass atrocity.
- [07:21]
Keller McFall
Yeah, I mentioned to you in an email that I've also been there, although I was there with a guide and not attempting to photograph and what I was without that kind of task to focus my attention on, I was really struck by the smell.
- [07:40]
Adam Jones
Yeah.
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Keller McFall
And that is startlingly different than most genocide memorials.
- [07:46]
Adam Jones
And that kind of acrid smell of the lime, right?
- [07:50]
Keller McFall
Yeah, exactly. It's not a smell smell you typically associate with dead bodies, but it is still something that kind of cements that moment into your head in ways that's not typical and reminded me of the way in which studying genocide is often of necessity, an intellectual, rational kind of enterprise rather than a sensory experience. And I wonder, as a photo, you kind of hit this. As a photographer, you are both opening yourself up to a more sensory experience than is often true, and yet doing so in a mediated way. What has that meant for you as a. As a researcher?
- [08:32]
Adam Jones
Yeah, it's a good question, because I travel an enormous amount, obsessively, some might say, and really the photography is an extension of that, which is, okay, if I'm here, I might as well document it kind of thing. But the essence of the experience is the encounter with the sight and with the history as I have studied it, and with the smell of the air. You know, for some reason, I find it difficult to kind of cement, as you said, or actualize the reality of these events, these processes, without some kind of totemic or talismanic visit and immersion in the physical spaces connected with them. And some of those sites, I mean, Morambi is one thing, and it's very unusual to have the actual physical evidence of genocide visible to you. Normally, it's a process of kind of reconstruction from what you're seeing and what you know of the context. A good example of this is the ruins of the old city of Van in eastern Turkey, which was a scene of Armenian resistance to the genocide in 1915, and subsequently was utterly raised to the ground. I mean, to rubble, with a couple of mosque minarets still standing, but that's it. And the city was rebuilt several kilometers away. And unless you know what you're looking for and how to find it, the visual history of that herbicide, as we call it, just literally wiping an urban living space off the map as part of the intentional destruction of the group that occupies it, you would not be able to access that signifier. And when you see those ruins, and you know what they mean, and they are standing there behind a barbed wire fence and completely unsigned, you know, unindicated, it says a lot about where Turkey is at with the process of remembrance of the genocide, or more specifically, the continued marginalization of it. You have a very physical symbol of that marginalization in the way that this site has been abandoned but is still, still there to be captured photographically and to speak across the generations. I'm interested by this question of can landscapes speak? How do they speak to us? How do sites of genocide on those landscapes communicate something vital to us? And I've personally always found it a really important part of anchoring my own studies in the field.
- [12:42]
Keller McFall
But Adam, this is a. This is a compilation of your writings over a decade or so. And as such it in some ways represents a kind of intellectual trajectory. So I'm going to approach it from both sides of the the question. And I'll start by saying, given these essays and your reflection on them as you compiled them and edited them, what can you say about how your own intellectual interests have evolved during the period of the writings of this book?
- [13:19]
Adam Jones
It's an interesting question. The book is in many ways a form follow up to an earlier volume called the Scourge of Genocide, which we discussed on this program. And it is likewise a compilation of essays over a substantial period of time. The previous volume actually extended back to bits and pieces that I had written as far back as the 1980s, and the new book is more concentrated in the sense of deriving, with one small exception, from work that I have written and published over the last decade. That has been an interesting decade, as you're well aware, and even today as I grapple with stuff that didn't make it into the book, like Genocide and Covid and Structural Violence, which I've been speaking on recently, it's a challenge to stay on top of these quite dramatic transformations in the global scene, from a pandemic to the urgency of climate change to the invasion of Ukraine. One has a sense of acceleration over the past decade on a number of fronts and not necessarily in a positive or productive direction. And that is concerning, and probably it is reflected in the reflections of the book that we, I think, have moved beyond the wave of idealism and institution building and intervention mounting that characterized roughly the period from the end of the Cold war, so early 1990s through the early 2000s. Maybe not a terribly long historical moment, all things considered, let's say perhaps to 2010, 2012, which is really the point where I pick up the pen for this book. And so I think we see in genocide studies, for example, with the rise of critical genocide studies, a more reflective and self analytical, some would say navel gazing, a scholarly enterprise, a more of, more attention to the framings of this concept and the politicization of it and the reconfiguration and attempted redefinition of it, which seems to be an endless part of the task, really. And in the international political sphere, I think we see a waning of the multilateralist impulse. We see an increasing self isolation and self preoccupation among the leading powers of the world, exacerbated by stressors and crises, including climate change, including the invasion of Ukraine, and so on. And so it is a fraught moment and without easy answers on a number of fronts. Now, genocide studies, I think, partly because it's so protean and the concept is such an essentially contested concept, has never really settled down into dogma. And one of my criticisms of critical genocide studies is that it tends to give short shrift to what I think are a number of positive and progressive aspects of comparative genocide studies. It has been a very questing field of inquiry. It has been attentive right for the beginning, and I'm talking about Raphael Lemkin, but more generally, the growth of a distinct literature in the 1980s and 1990s. It was attentive to questions of power in the world order, a colonialism in world history, the specific vulnerabilities of indigenous people, people. The term that I have used a lot in my work, gendercide, was coined in the mid-1980s by a scholar, Marianne Warren, who wanted to push the genocide framework into questions of gender and human rights. So many of the themes that we would associate with a critical perspective on genocide studies, I think, have been notable and often quite prominent in the field for some decades, and we should be glad of that. And I think it prepares us well for complicated and unstable and unpredictable times. It's not as though our entire idealistic worldview view that things were heading in an unremittingly positive, touchy feely direction have been shattered. I think we've been more skeptical from the start and more realistic about the challenges and about the enormity of this particular challenge. So the field, both in a scholarly sense and in an activist sense, has that resilience. And I hope that to some extent this book reflects that in the sense that it's continuing to seek new applications of sometimes familiar variables. Like, for me, the gender variable has been quite significant. It's concerned with questions and issues such as structural forms of violence and genocide. And in that sense, I think it typifies the exploratory but also contingent elements of genocide studies. The fact that it is founded on a word and a concept that still no two people fully agree on, it seems, keeps us modest. I think in that sense there is still a measure of that kind of humility and quite questing that I hope is reflected in my own work.
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Keller McFall
I'd like to ask you to explore a couple of the kind of specifics that you mentioned in that. And so one of the things that I noticed in this book is a kind of dynamic that you argue has driven the way scholars engage with mass violence across time and space. So can you say a little bit about the idea of anchoring genocides and the way these shape research?
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Adam Jones
It relates to another of those critiques mounted by critical genocide theorists, which pertains to the construction of a canon in genocide studies. And in particular, given that comparative genocide studies very much grew out of Holocaust studies and then the first attempts at comparison with the Armenian genocide. Above all, there has been a kind.
- [22:40]
Keller McFall
Of.
- [22:42]
Adam Jones
Distinction drawn between and among genocides in. Let's just talk about more modern world history in which the Holocaust has still occupied kind of pride of place. The Armenian genocide is kind of the junior partner in the initial comparative enterprise, and room was made for it on those grounds. And then we get a fairly consistent reading of 20th century genocides that includes Rwanda, includes Bosnia, includes Cambodia. Not coincidentally, these are a number of the key case study chapters in the textbook that I've written on the subject. Genocide, a comprehensive introduction. At the same time, I wanted to destabilize that kind of canonical thinking. And in the textbook I included a lot of secondary case studies of Bangladesh, for example, the Kurds of Turkey and elsewhere, cases that typically had fallen off the agenda or were at the margins of the field. And something that I did very consciously in the case study section of that book was put as the first case study, genocides of indigenous peoples. And then proceeding more or less chronologically, including the Ottoman destruction of Christian minorities. So framing that is something more than the Armenian genocide, bringing in the Pontian and Anatolian Greeks and the Assyrian populations, trying to make that discussion more inclusive. Stalin and Mao as a chapter unto themselves, and then the Jewish Holocaust and the Nazis other victims. So to some extent it contextualizes, some might even say, say relativizes the case that has kind of been the anchoring case in genocide studies. That term, anchoring genocides is kind of wrestling with the fact that, as can be seen in the evolution of editions of my textbook, I had a chapter to start with through the first two editions called Holocaust in Rwanda, which was itself a somewhat provocative title because it was using the language of Holocaust in relation to a non Jewish case, the most significant structural change that I made in the last edition of that textbook was to reconceptualize that chapter as genocide in Africa's Great Lakes region from 1959, which, as you can see, is a substantially broader framing in which the rwandan genocide of 1994 assumes a kind of anchoring point place. The argument is that there is something about particular genocides, their scale, their severity, the proportion of the targeted group that is destroyed, and other variables that warrants them to some degree, being highlighted in the analysis. Right. So you can talk about the Nazi crimes, as I do, on an ethics scale, and against a whole range of groups, as Raphael Lemkin spoke about at the time. But it's also legitimate to focus on and highlight the Jewish Holocaust because of its scale, its systematic nature, its industrial character, the massive proportion of the victim group that was murdered, and so on. You can make similar arguments regarding the specific Tutsi genocide of 1994 in Rwanda, the Armenian genocide during the late Ottoman period, and we could cite a number of other cases. So I argue that there's been a kind of emergence in genocide studies of a trend whereby you have an anchoring genocide of that type and then you have a kind of inkblot effect. I probably am mixing my metaphors a bit, but the idea is that from that initial locus of scholarly attention and activist attention and trials in the legal sphere, the sort of things that generate the media attention that results, there are a lot of factors that contribute here. You can usefully move beyond that, anchoring genocide into the whole regional and historical context in which it took place, and indeed, and perhaps in some genocides more than others. But Rwanda is a great example. You really have to do that in order to understand why, where the 1994 Rwanda genocide comes from, it is closely related to stuff that happened in Rwanda and elsewhere in 1959. The whole course of events in Rwanda since 1994 has been intimately tied with what's going on in Congo right next door, which is still probably the most severe humanity and mass atrocity crisis in the world. And you can't understand Hutuv Tutsi over the decades without understanding Burundi and how this fits into the story. And that is one of the. Tracing that narrative personally has been one of the exciting scholarly enterprises that I've had to undertake because it has forced me to get beyond the kind of Superficial Reading of 1994 in Isolation and to understand a heck of a lot more than I ever imagined, knowing about history, politics, sociology, anthropology in the Great Lakes region. Which is a pretty fascinating and central part of the world. So I think one can kind of pivot off the canon in useful ways, while recognizing that the canon of leading cases in our literature and in our framing of modern genocide is not purely arbitrary or reflective of political agendas. It does also reflect inherent characteristics of the genocides in question. At least very often it does. And I think we can use them to anchor necessary further explorations that contextualize those genocides and very often bring other genocides and mass atrocities to light.
- [31:59]
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- [32:10]
Adam Jones
I got to sit in the driver's seat.
- [32:12]
Keller McFall
I grew up in an aviation family.
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- [32:22]
Adam Jones
It felt like I was the captain.
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Keller McFall
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- [32:59]
Keller McFall
I'll just point out to the listeners, although I doubt we'll have time to get to it today. There are several chapters about the Great Lakes region, and in particular about the practical challenges of researching and writing about a region in which, if in the longer 75 year span of violence, there's a wide variety of actors and a wide variety of victims. And how to write about that in an environment where there are indeed some people engaging in genocide denial is a complicated question. And so I will point to those chapters and suggest that you go buy the book and read them because they're very interesting and in particular with a recent set of books by Judy Reaver and most recently Michaela Romm. But now it's another question about the kind of your arc and about how this book reflects that. One of the things you stress here is a Recognition that genocides can be a process as much as an event. And you do that both broadly and specifically in terms of your discussion of the 19th century. So I wonder, what do you mean when you say genocides can be a process as much as an event?
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Adam Jones
Yeah.
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Keller McFall
And why I thought the essay on the 19th century was really good, so why spend so much time thinking about or extending the kind of area of focus of genocide studies backwards?
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Adam Jones
Yeah, I guess I should say that I don't really extend it very far backwards. My own historical knowledge and interest starts to get pretty sketchy around 1830, you know, and if you look at my attempts to highlight genocides of the past prior to that, they're fairly cursory. And I wouldn't say that I have made or sought to make any substantial contribution to those discussions beyond kind of referencing them for more general interest and to establish, I hope, that genocide is an ages old time honored institution in human affairs, because that has been a debate in genocide studies. Is it a peculiarly modern phenomenon or does it go back to. To the dawn of history and beyond? And I'm definitely a dawn of history guy. So those that argue for the modern framing are typically contending that genocide, or genocide as we know it or have come to know it, emerges from this collision of rising Western states and the industrial modernity and capitalism that they brought with them and the rest of the world, what we could broadly call the global south today, or indigenous population populations worldwide. And that collision is typically studied as a process, Right. At the very least, even in its initial phases in parts of the world, it was decades long. And in many parts of the world, arguably up to and including today, the process continues. The process of imposition of the invaders or colonizers, pattern of life and pattern of subsistence on indigenous populations, the claiming of indigenous resources, the economic and political marginalization of indigenous peoples. Many people would argue, and many scholars have argued, that you can trace a direct line from the original point of collision through to the situation and status of indigenous peoples around the world today. Now I mentioned that that is something that in comparative genocide studies has long been unusually attentive to, from Raphael Lemkin on down. Raphael Lemkin's early investigations often involved indigenous peoples, as we would call them today, in Tasmania and elsewhere. He was very sensitive and attentive to that. And again, unusually for his time. One sees early in the comparative genocide literature critiques that are very much focused on on the status of indigenous peoples. I think of Ward Churchill's book, A Little Matter of Genocide, the Subtitle of that is, if I remember correctly, Holocaust and Survival Is it in the Americas 1492 to the present. And that subtitle kind of conveys the processual thinking and not a process in that case that has terminated. So how do we approach that question of indigenous genocides? I think that has been a challenge from nearly the outset. And the broad recognition has been that they don't look like they Jewish holocaust, right? They don't look like the Rwandan genocide. There may well be phases or locales where very similar patterns prevail, you know, slave labor or massacres on an immense scale. But when we talk about that genocide and those genocides, we talk about them as extended processes, even in the most minimalist framing. And by a maximalist framing, they're lasting hundreds of years. Right? And so that's something that genocide studies has to wrap its mind around in the case of the chapter on genocide in the long 19th century, which is an interesting kind of imposition of a historical scheme onto genocide studies and a worthwhile one because there are skeins of connection throughout that whole period related to the rise of modern capitalism and colonialism and industrialism, the expansion of the west as a global force. And one of the questions I ask in that chapter is, well, what were the motivations? And unless you can really see the processes, I don't think you can understand the motivations and I don't think you can understand the specific form that genocidal intent takes, because it is much more of a structural and societally embedded intent than functionary who wakes up in the morning and goes to do his work in the gas chambers. Right? It is embedded at a different level, reflected in different ways, and produces destruction and mass more mortality by different means, typically. So engaging with that I think is necessary if we're to do justice to indigenous peoples and other cases of genocide and understand their motivations. And honestly, Kelly, the more that I dig into the motivations underpinning genocide, the more I'm convinced that they are not rocket science, right? That things like greed and narcissistic ambition and fear and security questions, as Dirk Moses has highlighted in his recent work, I think over highlighted actually, but that's another question. These are basics of human psyche and human society. I think it's one of the reasons it's useful to carry the study of genocide thousands of years back into the past. Human nature has not changed a lot. Nation building and state building and empire building haven't fundamentally changed a great deal. Making has a different face, but is also in many ways recognizable as part of an institution also going back thousands of years. So our extending of the temporal frame of genocide and an increasing sensitivity to the way that it may work itself out as a process which typically implies systemic and structural features. Right. That's typically where it's embedded if it's going to endure over time and if you're going to see like actions and like policies inflicted. So that you can say that this is a process. That kind of flexibility and subtlety is increasingly evident in the field and also in my own work.
- [44:10]
Keller McFall
I hope, I will say any academic who's been in academia for a while is now shuddering because by saying that this is not rocket science, you are depriving deans of. Of reasons to support your research.
- [44:23]
Adam Jones
But doing something about it is the challenge and is the complexity and the frustration. The motivations, I think, are not that difficult to read.
- [44:37]
Keller McFall
Well, I want to ask you, and I know we're coming to the end of our time. I want to put a pin for a second in that question of doing something about it and come back to it. But first I do want to ask because. Because one of the areas of the field that you're probably most known for is this question of gender based violence. You have several essays in this book around that or focusing on that. So I wonder how have your. Or maybe let me rephrase that. In the decade or so from which these essays emerged, how have your interests in this evolved? Or what. What have you learned about gender based violence that has maybe moved you in a different direction? Or what can you say about this based on kind of this decade of thinking and writing and researching.
- [45:27]
Adam Jones
Well, and decade of evolution engendered processes. And the structural and systemic aspect of this is not only important when it comes to recognizing genocides or gendercides, but also in recognizing progress. And I would mention one thing that has happened in the last 10 years that pretty much flew past everybody's attention was when it was announced that, at least according to one major data set, it turned out that there were now, for the first time in recorded history in India, more females than males, which is, of course, a typical demographic model around the world. There are generally more women than men in adulthood, at least in India, of course, and in other countries where there has been being gendercidal persecution of women and girls and infant girls, the demographic ratios have for a long time been skewed. And if that data is reliable, it suggests that a truly dramatic and revolutionary transformation has taken place place in what will soon be the most populous country on the planet. And it obviously reflects gender side intervention, one might say, at a very kind of grassroots and diffuse and difficult to discern level. It has a lot to do with changing societal attitudes. Those changing attitudes have a lot to do with the growing economic and educational presence of women in Indian society and therefore the greater value that families are likely to apply to girl children, et cetera. And with all of those structural and processual forms of genocide and gender based atrocities, I think are notably structural and notably processual and have been around for thousands of years. In many cases. It is a reminder that we can see very dramatic advances, very broad based interventions that don't amount to sending in the Marines or the peacekeepers, but produce consequences, fortunately in this case, positive ones that impact millions or tens of millions of lives. Much more dramatic, successful interventions than we're used to thinking of as genocide interventions. Right. So in some ways my thinking about gender has deepened in that structural sense and also in a programmatic sense that a lot of this will be addressed at a grassroots level by hundreds of millions of people just learning to think differently and governments that are supportive and resources that are available and NGOs that are active and religious figures that are speaking out. You know, there's a whole range of contributors to this kind of norm transformation, but it can be accomplished, it can be dramatic, and it can sometimes be taking place at such a grassroots level that we barely even notice it. We should notice it, we should celebrate it, and we should learn, learn from what is producing those kind of dramatic, positive results in a historically very restricted period of time. So thinking about gender and the atrocities associated with gender in that structural sense and as something that we can shape every, every day in a way as simple as how we think about others and the lives and experiences that we prioritize, think. Much the same argument can be extended to indigenous peoples and their continuing struggles for recognition and justice and restitution. Much the same argument applies. And then I guess what I find myself doing, and sometimes tying myself up in knots as a result, is applying these frameworks to emerging cases. How does gender and atrocity play out vis a vis the Rohingya or vis a vis the Uyghur in China? What is my responsibility? When we see, since I've done a lot of work on war and violence and masculinities, when we see forced conscription of young men in Ukraine and restrictions not only on their ability to leave the country and seek refuge, but even to move around from city to city within the country without being registered and monitored and getting official permission and so on. Something which sets off warning bells for anyone that has studied, you know, mass conscription institutions and the often very destructive gender, the imperial impact that they've had. On the other hand, I am a staunch supporter of Ukraine's right to national independence. I will actually have a Ukraine related photo on the COVID of the next edition of my textbook by, by coincidence, as it happens, and I've traveled repeatedly in the country for extended periods. I feel a very visceral sense of connection to it. And I know that if any effective military resistance is going to be mounted, men of a particular age are going to be essential to it. And so these are quandaries and, and recognizing vulnerabilities as a result of the research that I've done, but then also coming up against and confronting the ethical quandaries and political realities of a given case is a task that I think will never end. So a certain evolution in my broader thinking, but really by this point, it's another thing that I don't consider to be particularly rocket science. Like, although you can cover it with a lot of postmodern jargon to make it look very complicated again, when it gets right down to things like, for example, negative or demonizing portraits of women, females or men slash males, these kind of paradigms are very deeply embedded in histories and cultures. They go back a long way.
- [54:06]
Keller McFall
So that brings me to a quote that you have in the book where you suggest that genocide scholars, quote, have as much in common with physicians as they do with historians, sociologists, and moral philosophers, unquote. So we have a number of graduate students or early career professionals who listen to this podcast. Do you have advice for people who are interested in this discipline and what they might do with it? What does it mean for a graduate student to be in a field where they have as much in common with physicians as historians?
- [54:43]
Adam Jones
Well, maybe it's worth extending the comparison a little bit further. My partner, for example, is a pediatric neurosurgeon in Mexico. My genocide textbook is dedicated to her, Griselda Ramirez. And she has been a constant source of inspiration and often awe at the kind of tasks that she undertakes on a daily basis. You know, whether it's opening up an infant's brain and taking out a tumor or speaking with parents of a young child and saying that there's nothing that can be done. And both of which I find kind of. Professional and emotional experiences that are well beyond anything that I, as an academic or as a traveler and a photographer or whatever, are experiencing much more hands on Much more consequential, a lot more challenging. And she and that whole class of physicians and emergency workers and all of the people that we depend on on a daily basis in our society have found a way to stage these constructive interventions and to keep going in the face of the challenges and the emotional burdens and the consequentiality of what they're involved in in a way that just leaves me slack jawed. So we should learn, I think, from people whose encounter with the traumas of society and history is a much more daily kind of hands on thing. And let's think also of the humanitarian and aid workers in the field who likewise inspire me on a daily basis. The scholarly enterprise. Enterprise is a relative luxury by comparison. We have the opportunity and the ability to keep much of this stuff at arm's length. And there's no doubt that I personally and psychologically and emotionally make use of that. I don't think I could be immersed and invested, vested emotionally in the vast panoply of horrible things that humans have done to each other. It does require a measure of self defense. And I imagine that that is the case in many other settings as well. And I think that probably one of the things that keeps people going in those other professional contexts is the knowledge that they are making a difference. They are not always or even consistently able to make a difference or to make a decisive positive difference, but they are able to see also in a hands on way way, the constructive consequences of their actions. We have a bit of a different challenge. We have a more luxurious setting for those interventions, but we also have a more challenging time seeing the positive consequences of them. Certainly on any kind of geopolitical scale. How can you ever make a connection between some effort that you have made and some output in world politics or genocide prevention? So maybe the challenge there too is to look for things in our more immediate environment. The personal is political to a certain extent. Whom can we enlighten? Whom can we help? For example, are there refugees from this horrible situation that we can assist at a local level? There are very often local interventions that can directly affect people's lives and give you a sense that you are making a difference in that regard and recognize also that you are not likely to see direct large scale consequences from your actions alone. Maybe you'll be able to look back in 15 or 20 years and say, hey, the movement that I was part of actually did a lot of good things. But you're going to have to find a way on a day to day basis, I think, to inspire you to give that, give you that sense of constructive intervention and to allow you to make meaningful changes rather than simple intellectual explorations.
- [60:48]
Keller McFall
With your time. I always end with the same question or two, and they should be quick, but I hope. But we'll see. So first I wonder if you'd suggest one or two books that have been influential in moving the field of genocide studies forward in the decade encompassed by your own book.
- [61:11]
Adam Jones
Well, I can certainly think of a few in the field of Holocaust studies reflecting the way that it has shifted towards, first of all, a more Eastern locus, Russia and Eastern Europe, fundamentally partly with the opening up of the archives following the fall of the Soviet Union. But a book by Weightman, Wade, Bjorn, spelled B E O R N called Marching into Darkness and its subtitle relates to the Holocaust in Belarus. And I just remember reading that monograph, it had something of the same impact on me as reading Browning's book Ordinary Men, which is focused on very similar events and in somewhat similar locales. Belarus says the kind of heart of the Bloodlands, as Timothy Snyder calls them. And he just did very original archival research that reconstructed the killing rampage of a Wehrmacht division and thereby further eroding the myth of, you know, the Wehrmacht soldier as somehow standing apart from the atrocities of the Einsatz group and or so on, which is an important advance in our understanding of the Holocaust and its dynamics. So it, it moved the field of Holocaust studies further in the ways that I mentioned it. Like Browning's book, I think has embedded itself in comparative genocide studies. And I just found it very difficult to put down a book called Learning from the Germans by Susan Nayman, if you've read that. But it's an engagement with sort of post Holocaust memory and a distinctive reading of that. I could mention Robinson's book the Killing Season, about the Indonesian genocide, which is a good example of a case that is being kind of resurrected for contemporary. Maybe let's go with that. Maybe I'll mention Robinson there. Unless you have any strong preferences, that's fine. Okay, so I'll just come in back in with another book that I'd mentioned. Okay. Another book that I'd mention would be by Jeffrey Robinson, who's the author of a quite heart pounding volume on the events in East Timor in 1999, when that country achieved its independence after considerable violence. He wrote a book titled in quotation marks, if you leave us here, we will die, which is a quote from Timorese displaced person in the UN facilities in Dilley. He's somebody who's been very involved in that part of the world, including as the Amnesty International desk officer for Indonesia and East Timor. So he has very hands on, at the same time as a very scholarly, rigorous understanding of both these Timor case and his most recent book called the Killing Season, pertains to the indonesian genocide of 1965, 1966. And I mentioned that case and Robinson's book because it's a good example in genocide studies of the way that particular genocides are incorporated, incorporated into the canon. Others are excluded, and sometimes those more marginal cases establish themselves in the mainstream. Sometimes they do that and then fall out of the mainstream again. It's a strange proceeding. But the Case of Indonesia is one of those that in the past decade that I've been writing, this book has moved somewhat to the forefront from being a case that few people had ever heard of or being viewed as just a case of a political crackdown in an authoritarian state. Robinson reflects that literature by conceptualizing it as genocide. He explores the framing and application of the concept in a methodical way. We have also seen and he also addresses a kind of People's Tribunal established to get to the heart of this state sponsored and state organized campaign of killing of members or alleged members and sympathizers of the Indonesian Communist Party. This is one of the reasons it had difficulty establishing itself as a case of genocide. The vast majority of the victim group were defined in political terms. And that has long been a stumbling block since political groups aren't protected under the United Nations Convention. So Robinson and many other scholars addressing many other cases, including other scholars I could mention on the Indonesian case in particular, have in some respects resurrected such historical events for a contemporary audience. They've investigated the dynamics and laid those out in a way that legal or quasi legal endeavors like the People's Tribunal can draw upon. They stand, I think, with survivors and descendants of survivors in Indonesia in calls for recognition of the genocide, study of it within Indonesia, media attention to it, restitution for it, and in all of those senses, as a work of engaged scholarship, I think it is both excellent in and of itself and emblematic of many other contributions that are being made with regard to many other genocidal events and processes.
- [68:49]
Keller McFall
And I hope wholeheartedly encourage the audience to go out and read those books if you want a preface or an introduction to them. I know Weightman has been on the, on the podcast and I've interviewed Jeff about that book and other people involved in kind of exploring the events in Indonesia, Jess Melvin and Annie Pullman and people like that. So go back to the archives. But right now we've been speaking to Adam Jones about his book, Sites of Genocide. Adam, what are you, what are you working on next?
- [69:23]
Adam Jones
I am finishing up the fourth edition of my textbook, which I do hope, and my publisher earnestly hopes I will have out of the way in the next four to six weeks. I will then probably take a break and I am contracted with Routledge to do a shorter volume called Studying Genocide, which will engage in a more direct way with the specific challenges of pedagogy and learning around genocide, some of the hopefully effective tools of genocide education, and hopefully be a resource for for educators and students down the line and will not be 900 pages long. So that's the textbook I should add, Sites of Genocide. The volume we're discussing is a much more manageable 270 I believe. So I do think it represents a pretty good overview of where my thinking has been at in diverse areas and is also a quite useful and accessible overview of some of the core debates in genocide studies moving forward.
- [70:49]
Keller McFall
Well, I will take note of your pledge that the new Routledge book will be less than 900 pages, which I suspect the editors will also be glad to hear. And I will express my hope that you'll come back and join us again on the podcast when the book is published and talk about it. But until then, thank you so much, Adam for talking to us and I hope that you have a great rest of your summer.
- [71:10]
Adam Jones
Thank you very much. Likewise, Kelly.
- [71:24]
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