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Lecture of A. Dirk Moses Genocide and Armed Conflict: The Construction of an Artificial Distinction

The lecture reconstructs and explores how the construction of armed conflict as a legitimate practice of state violence was severed from genocide during the codification of genocide in law in the late 1940s and since. This distinction was entrenched in the postcolonial conflicts in Africa and Asia in the 1960s and 1970s, and has sedimented in the international law being applied in the Israel-Palestine war today, as the ICJ proceedings reveal. The distinction allows any state to justify its action as in terms of military necessity despite its seemingly genocidal consequences. Taking the approach of the history of concepts, this paper reveals the instability of this distinction and the purposes it serves.

A. Dirk Moses is the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Professor of International Relations at the City College of New York. He is the author of the books German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past (2007) and The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression (2021).

The lecture is organised by Department of Political Science, Faculty of Arts, CU and Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Faculty of Humanities, CU. There will also be A. Dirk Moses and Pavel Barša discussion which Yasar Abu Ghosh will moderate.