Violence & security. Paradigms and debates (73220041FY)
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Summary Summaries and lectures notes for the final exam of Violence & security. Paradigms and debates (FY)
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Violence & security. Paradigms and debates (73220041FY)
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Universiteit Van Amsterdam (UvA)
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Violence & security. Paradigms and debates (73220041FY)
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PART II (final exam)
Lecture 8
P. Wakeham: The Slow Violence of Settler Colonialism: Genocide, Attrition, and the
Long Emergency of Invasion
In recent decades, scholarship has sought to redress the ways that genocide studies has
overlooked genocides against Indigenous peoples in settler colonial contexts.
While this scholarship has made interventions into a field dominated by the Holocaust
prototype, work on genocides targeting Indigenous peoples has still laboured under
the shadow of the Holocaust paradigm and its norms, including the prioritization of
time-intense direct violence enacted with explicitly declared intent.
Scholarship regarding the Australian context has considered settler colonial genocide
in relation to “two phenomena”:
o (1.) “frontier violence, mainly in the 19th century
o and (2.) “the various policies of removing Aboriginal children of mixed
descent from their families, mainly in the 20th century.”
This historical case-specific approach remains prevalent in discussions regarding
genocide in settler colonies.
Given the detailed evidence, it is understandable that scholars have focused upon specific past
policies and events in relation to particular acts in the UN Convention on the Prevention and
Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
At the same time that scholars have pursued this approach, they have also
acknowledged that particular historical injustices cannot be understood outside of
the longue durée of settler colonial invasion.
And, yet, precisely how to account for the impacts of this overarching context has
been a matter of debate.
This essay intervenes in these debates by developing a conceptual framework that
avoids positing a totalizing structure for all settler colonial contexts while also
resisting the reduction of genocide to discrete “events” that privilege time-intensive
mass murder.
, Drawing upon examples from the Canadian context, I will demonstrate how slower,
attritional modes of destruction have often been key to such assaults on Indigenous
group life.
o This is because the less direct nature of these methods enables settler states to
deny relations between cause and effect, naturalize Indigenous
“disappearance” through racist narratives of inherent “Indigenous
deficiency,” and thereby sustain fictions of liberal democratic benevolence.
Genocide’s Genealogies: Of Amnesia and Attrition
Assaults on Indigenous group life in Canada have been denied in national narratives and
political discourse.
In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada became the first
commission to invoke the spectre of genocide in describing a government policy.
Tasked with investigating the residential school system that separated Indigenous
children from their families, the TRC denounced the system “as ‘cultural
genocide.’”
o Resistance to the declaration was prompt.
In June 2019, when the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous
Women released the findings of its investigation, it did not prevaricate: it diagnosed an
ongoing genocide tout court.
o Refusing to be constrained by the single-issue focus of its mandate, the
Inquiry situated contemporary violence against Indigenous women, girls, and
2SLGBTQQIA people as one prong of this multi-dimensional, long-term
assault.
In this vein, the Inquiry argued that the actus reus—the physical element of
“genocide committed in Canada”—is “a ‘composite act’” comprised of a range of
colonial policies over the long course of settler occupation.
o The Inquiry noted that in the 1750s, scalping bounties were offered in Nova
Scotia to reward the murder of its Indigenous peoples.
o In addition to this premeditated killing, the Inquiry also referenced “colonial
policies that caused bodily and mental harm to Indigenous peoples forced
sterilization, systemic violence against Indigenous women and girls, etc.
,Summing up these examples, the Inquiry articulated a framework for understanding this
multi-dimensional genocide: colonial destruction of Indigenous peoples has taken place
insidiously and over centuries.
The intent to destroy Indigenous peoples in Canada was implemented gradually and
intermittently.
o Without a clear start or end date to encompass these genocidal policies,
colonial genocide does not conform with popular notions of genocide as a
determinate, quantifiable event.
Proactively anticipating objections, the Inquiry addressed the challenge of making visible
“the unique nature of ‘colonial genocide,’” given that it is often implemented gradually,
resulting in forms of slow death.
Such methods of group destruction are deemed insufficient to qualify as genocide
when measured against “the ‘Holocaust prototype’”.
The National Inquiry’s findings have thus re-ignited discussions about the particular
contours of settler colonial genocides.
My goal here is not to argue against the importance of understanding the specificity of
settler colonial genocides; rather, it is to guard against the ways that specificity
might be misconstrued as anomaly.
For far too long, a range of narratives have suggested that the harms “suffered by” (rather
than perpetrated against) Indigenous nations have been too diffuse to qualify as genocide.
By demonstrating that prolonged genocides are much less anomalous than reductive
narratives regarding the Holocaust would suggest, I challenge the idea that the very
nature of the genocidal processes effected within such settler colonial contexts are
outside of the legal parameters of “real” genocide.
To make this case, I draw support from scholarship on genocide by attrition.
The Inquiry does not mention this concept in its reports despite its salience.
Though settler colonial genocide studies and scholarship on genocide by attrition have
yet to engage each other, cross-pollination between these fields helps to challenge the
juridical fictions that underpin the Holocaust prototype.
o genocide is a process, not an event.
, o Such processes may involve state and non-state policies that deprive
individuals of human rights, that do not cause immediate death, but rather lead
to the slow destruction of the group.
The concept of genocide by attrition consequently contributes toward a more nuanced
understanding of genocide.
There are many examples throughout Canadian history that resonate with the attritional
methods.
For example, in the 1870s and 1880s, the federal government seized upon famine
caused by settler decimation of bison herds in the northern Plains to “coerce”
Indigenous peoples “into submitting to treaty.”
Plains nations were forced onto small reserves, their horses and guns were
confiscated.
o Indigenous peoples thus lost their ability to hunt and were left to rely upon
inadequate government rations.
By the 1890s, Plains Indigenous populations declined by a third due to malnutrition,
overcrowding, and oppressive government policies.
Recognition of such indirect methods is also evident in the work of Lemkin who developed
the concept of genocide in his 1944 book.
There, Lemkin considers the Germans’ slow-moving assaults on targeted populations
including “rationing of food according to racial principles throughout the occupied
countries”.
o Discussing the Warsaw Ghetto, Lemkin notes the cumulative impact of
“withholding firewood and medicine” and crowding people together under
conditions of housing inimical to health.
While Lemkin’s development of the concept of genocide is well-tread terrain for
genocide studies scholars, the cultural amnesia that continues to underpin
understandings of genocide demonstrates that such details warrant repeating.
o Genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation.
o It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming
at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups.
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