Chapter 6 discusses the representation of memory in trauma narratives. Accounts of victims of childhood trauma are contrasted with the testimony of Holocaust survivors. I argue that that the distinctive qualities of trauma narratives can also be understood as differences in the culturally constructed landscapes of memory that shapes the distance and effort to remember affectively charged and socially defined events. Landscapes of memory draw from implicit models of memory that influence what can be recalled and warranted as accurate. Trauma narratives involve cultural models and metaphors of personal and historical memory. For them to function as personal and collective history, there must be public places for them to be told, acknowledged, and retold. The political recognition of collective identity and history can help create such a place. Individuals’ stories, in turn, can serve as testimony to ground collective history and call for further moral and political response. Understanding the personal, social, and political meanings of trauma in theory and practice requires tracing the systemic loops that link memory, symptom, and response with a landscape of cultural affordances.

The last chapter of the book critically examines the production of history within multilayered matrices of power – influenced by “precolonial,” colonial as well as contemporary contexts. Two key concepts are the main focus of this chapter: the “greater Rwanda” thesis for Rwanda, and “balkanization” discourses for Congo. The chapter traces how both concepts instrumentalize the past to explain the present, and at times are used to justify violence or interference within the context of tense relationships between Rwanda and Congo as well as the protracted conflict in the region since the 1990s. The chapter shows that while both discourses are crucial to understand meta-narratives of the nation in both countries, they also need to be considered in their cross-border context, as they are in constant dialogue and function as cross-border foils.

The chapter also addresses how in Congo historical narratives are mobilized in debates over citizenship, a pivot of conflict in the region, emphasizing that these discourses were often constructed with the imperial débris left by the Belgians. The chapter further considers how memories about Rwandan aggression in the nineteenth century are used to “naturalize” conflicted relations between Rwanda and Congo, turning “suffering together” – at the hands of Rwanda – into an important part of defining Congolese nationality. However, as the chapter also emphasizes, while such victimhood discourses are often instrumentalized politically, they do not mean the suffering is less real. Moreover, in Rwanda as well, suffering has at times been turned into a political tool.

This chapter considers examples of State enforcement of international law, including in cases of war crimes and genocide. It then assesses collective enforcement under mechanisms provided for in the UN Charter, giving particular consideration to UN sanctions, including Australian law and policy approaches giving effect to sanctions, and peacekeeping.

The issue of international rightful conduct, as an expression of international legitimacy advanced by international law, concerns not only the state and the individual but also international organizations. However, this chapter focuses on the state and the individual because they are particularly significant international rights holders. Due to the hierarchy among international rights holders, with the state at the top, the determination of the rightful conduct of states is a crucial aspect of rightful conduct. This introduces the question: What are the right or legitimate ways for states to behave? The answer to this question is based on the actors with which states interact and toward which they project their power—that is, other states and individuals. Thus, this chapter analyzes the issue of rightful conduct (1) in the setting of interstate relations and (2) in the setting of the attitude of the state toward individuals.

Whereas the previous chapter explored the great unsettling of human security effected by the postmodern war-machine, we now turn to a critical examination of the violent consequences of the globalisation of modern codifying process – in particular, through colonisation and imperialism. The chapter turns to what on first glance appears to be relatively unmediated embodied violence. In descriptive terms, we move from drones to machetes. However, what we find in this violence is the clash of ontological formations as prior forms of identity and meaning are existentially unsettled by modern impositions. The broader argument here is that the global spread of unreflexively modern ways of organising meaning and identity, particularly in situations of unequal power, has had horrifying consequences in the Global South. Imperialism and colonialism have a lasting impact. Abstracting from prior dominant forms of customary and traditional life, it has ushered in forms of violence that were previously constrained: genocide, civil war, and never-ending localised transnational conflict. The chapter uses the Rwandan genocide and Sri Lankan ‘civil’ war as its key points of reference.

This chapter explores the relationship between Holocaust and genocide, beginning with the the emergence of the concept of genocide and its relationship to prior law on war crimes. The chapter offers a close examination of Lemkin’s evolving thinking, and that of other contemporaries on the relationship between the Jewish experience under Nazism and other mass atrocities. It argues that Lemkin’s genocide concept blurred some critical distinctions, notably whether genocide necessarily implied biological extermination. This ambiguity was, however, critical to its political utility in the early postwar context, but the resulting law and terminology has become a political weapon, often obscuring the reality of the violence it purports to describe.

This chapter explores Nazi violence against non-Jewish eastern Europeans during the Holocaust. It covers German anti-Slavic thought, the experience of Slavic peoples and POWs during the Nazi genocidal project, and issues of collaboration and complicity.

The core idea in this chapter is that there was a substantial, transnational, effort to rethink medical ethics – how it was framed by, taught to, and practiced by health professionals such as physicians – after the Holocaust. Because of the intense involvement of medical professionals in the Holocaust, both in the extermination process and through medical experimentation, there was a widespread sense after 1945 that the medical profession needed to rethink its ethical foundations. The chapter in particular highlights postwar currents in east-central European ethical thought, which engaged its own indigenous tradition of medical ethics (“deontology” as it was called) in ways that sometimes went beyond the parallel but more familiar debates in western Europe and the USA. The Holocaust informed – but did not determine – the evolution of biomedical ethics throughout the postwar period. Such thinking was also, necessarily, shaped by other currents – economic, political, and scientific – such that it is hard to say that medicine has “learned the lessons of the Holocaust,” at least not completely.

We almost cannot think today about mass atrocities without Holocaust references. Holocaust analogies frame and enflame our ethical debates. Holocaust words dominate our humanitarian lexicon. Yet the deep linkage between the Holocaust and global justice is accompanied by a marked crisis of confidence in international law. Many question whether global legal institutions can ever prevent and properly punish atrocity crimes. The more we invoke the Holocaust, it seems, the less certain we become about the legal world built in its name. This chapter traces this development, from the first discussions of what would come to be called “genocide” in the 1930s, through private litigation geared toward restorative justice. Each legal mode of dealing with the Holocaust has served as a model for how to approach other atrocities, and each has been unavoidably politicized, despite law’s promise to depoliticize the response to political crimes.

The loss of human life and physical injuries through violence are an inherent consequence of armed conflict, including civil wars. Deliberate atrocities – such as war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, politicide and “ethnic cleansing” – have been a conspicuous feature of many wars. Civil wars – whether correctly or incorrectly from an empirical perspective – have often been regarded as particularly vicious, transgressing all norms of decency in the frequency and type of atrocities. This chapter explores several key questions that have arisen in the conflict analysis field in relation to atrocities in civil war – and war generally. Are atrocities specifically associated with certain “types” of civil war, such as separatist, ideological, intercommunal, or resource conflict? Are there patterns in terms of which types of actors – state or non-state rebel groups – are more likely to perpetrate atrocities? What motivates individuals and groups to perpetrate atrocities, and what “role,” if any, do such atrocities play in armed conflict? Do atrocities play a strategic role, or are they better understood as a manifestation of individual and group sadism, revenge, and hate or fear, spread in the contemporary era by social media? Are all combatants capable of perpetuating atrocities in the “right” circumstances? The chapter concludes with a discussion of the international norms that have emerged over the last century – which prohibit war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide – and the calls for accountability and justice after mass atrocities that have arguably made a significant although limited impact on conduct in war. As a part of this, “transitional justice” has emerged as an important topic, designed to address the societal impact and legacy of atrocities.

A hybrid legal discipline dealing with the relationships between the right to punish and state sovereignty, international criminal law (ICL) overturns classical conceptions of the state, law and justice. Its existence, foundations, scope and effectiveness are determined by the outcome of an attempt – which has proved more or less successful throughout the different phases of its evolution – to reconcile it with the founding principles of the modern state, sovereignty and legality, inherited from the Enlightenment. Adopting a historical perspective helps us its development, on either side of the pivotal moment represented by the creation of the League of Nations: the starting point marked by the 1919 Paris Conference and the immediate aftermath of the First World War; and the turning point marked by the work of the League and international legal doctrine in the interwar era. These two crucial phases saw a string of initiatives which, rather than failures, can be interpreted as a series of necessary transformations for the emergence of a new discipline and, more generally, a profound change in the global legal and judicial order.

Torture committed in the context of and in direct connection with any armed conflict is beyond doubt a war crime under customary international law. Torture that is committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against a civilian population within or outside armed conflict, with knowledge of the attack, is a crime against humanity. Torture is not explicitly an act of genocide when committed with the specific intent ‘to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such’. Nevertheless, in a landmark judgment, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda held torture formed part of the predicate offence of causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of one of the four protected groups.

Genocide is sometimes called the ’crime of crimes’. The word was coined by Raphael Lemkin in 1944, then declared an international crime by the United Nations General Assembly. In 1948, the Genocide Convention was adopted. As the first human rights treaty of modern times, it constituted a significant intrusion into what had previously been a matter exclusively of domestic concern. This explains the narrow definition of the crime of genocide. It requires proof of an intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. Only a half century after its adoption did the Genocide Convention take on real significance with inter-State cases being filed at the International Court of Justice and many prosecutions at the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. The Convention requires that States Parties punish genocide but they are also required to prevent it, even when it takes place outside their own territory. More than 150 States have ratified the Genocide Convention. Genocide is also prohibited under customary international law. It is generally agreed that the duty to punish genocide is a peremptory norm of international law (jus cogens).

This chapter of the handbook introduces dehumanization as another dark side of humanity. Humanness is a central concept in moral psychology, and whereas people normally treat other humans with moral consideration, they may turn to dehumanize others as a result of moral disengagement and moral exclusion. The author reviews recent psychological accounts of dehumanization that are grounded in empirical research and highlights the diverse forms it takes: dehumanization varies from subtle to blatant, from interpersonal to intergroup, and from simple to complex. In these theoretical accounts, dehumanizing a person or group means ascribing less of certain human attributes to the target – both attributes that distinguish humans from other animals and attributes that distinguish humans from inanimate agents. Within this general framework, the author reviews the empirical literature on how dehumanization may function to prime, facilitate, and justify harm during intergroup conflict. He also considers a number of critiques and debates over these ideas and findings that have recently surfaced.