Undergraduate Course: Modernity and Genocide (HIST10380)
Course Outline
| School | School of History, Classics and Archaeology |
College | College of Humanities and Social Science |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 10 (Year 3 Undergraduate) |
Availability | Available to all students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | This course seeks to establish an historical understanding of genocide, informed by the theoretical and multi-disciplinary approaches that have so shaped the field of genocide studies. The cases are largely chosen from the record of modern history (primarily the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) but since the course is directly concerned with the relationship between genocide and modernity, it will also include reflection on selected cases from earlier centuries. Students will emerge from the course being able to think comparatively and conceptually about genocide as well as about individual cases of it and connections between different cases. They will interrogate the utility and problems of the very concept itself. They will also study responses to genocide in the form of 'humanitarian intervention' and war crimes trials. The cases will be drawn from across the world: Asia, Africa, Europe, and Australasia, with perpetrators ranging from imperialist powers to fascists, communists, nation-state builders, 'developmentalists' and counter-insurgency fighters, and 'enablers' ranging from structural features of the international political economy to regional and world powers and the contours of the Cold War. |
| Course description |
Weeks:
1: Course Introduction and Overview; the concept of genocide
2: Introducing Competing Theories of Genocide, and the Modernity question
3: Colonial Genocide: Case Studies from British Australasia and German Southwest Africa
4: The Armenian and Assyrian Genocides and the end of the Ottoman empire
5: The genocides of Nazi Germany
6: Postcolonial Asia: Cambodia and comparisons with Indonesia
7: Feedback and Feedforward
8: The Rwandan genocide and wider mass violence in the Great Lakes region
9: Explaining Individual perpetration: evidence from a range of cases
10: Intervention and non-Intervention: key determinants
11: Retrospective and Prospective: the relationship between the international political economy, states, their populations, and environmental degradation
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
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Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | Students MUST NOT also be taking
Genocide in the Modern World: theories and case studies (HIST10368)
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Other requirements | A pass or passes in 40 credits of first level historical courses or equivalent and a pass or passes in 40 credits of second level historical courses or equivalent.
Before enrolling students on this course, Personal Tutors are asked to contact the History Honours Admissions Secretary to ensure that a place is available (Tel: 503783). |
Information for Visiting Students
| Pre-requisites | Visiting Students should usually have at least 3 History courses at grade B or above (or be predicted to obtain this) for entry to this course. We will only consider University/College level courses. |
Course Delivery Information
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| Academic year 2014/15, Available to all students (SV1)
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Quota: 26 |
| Course Start |
Semester 2 |
Timetable |
Timetable |
| Learning and Teaching activities (Further Info) |
Total Hours:
200
(
Seminar/Tutorial Hours 22,
Summative Assessment Hours 2,
Programme Level Learning and Teaching Hours 4,
Directed Learning and Independent Learning Hours
172 )
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| Assessment (Further Info) |
Written Exam
67 %,
Coursework
33 %,
Practical Exam
0 %
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| Additional Information (Assessment) |
Coursework 33%: one 3,000 word essay on either general themes in genocide studies or a specific case-based question
Exam 67%: one two-hour paper, comprising questions on general themes and patterns in genocide studies and particular case-based questions
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| Feedback |
Not entered |
| Exam Information |
| Exam Diet |
Paper Name |
Hours & Minutes |
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| Main Exam Diet S2 (April/May) | | 2:00 | |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- Students who complete the course successfully will have demonstrated, by way of written coursework as well as participation in seminar discussion:
- knowledge and understanding of key patterns, events, concepts and themes in the modern history of genocide and related atrocities, including responses to those events - - understanding of the issues around the relationship between modernity and genocide
- - an ability to distinguish critically between the particular and the general
- - an ability to develop the tools for broader comparative analysis
- - an ability to research for appropriate materials and weigh up the merits of pieces of historical evidence
- an ability to develop and sustain coherent intellectual argument
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Reading List
Donald Bloxham and A Dirk Moses (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies (Oxford University Press, 2010)
Dan Stone (ed.) The Historiography of Genocide (Palgrave, 2008)
Adam Jones, Genocide, A Comprehensive Introduction, (2nd edition, London, Routledge, 2010)
Mark Levene, The Meaning of Genocide (Tauris, 2005)
Leo Kuper, Genocide, Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century (London, 1981) :
Alain Destexhe, Rwanda and Genocide in the Twentieth Century (London, West Haven CT, 1995)
Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide, Analyses and Case Studies (Yale, 1990)
Eric D. Weitz, A Century of Genocide, Utopias of Race and Nation (Princeton and Oxford, 2003)
RC Ben Kiernan and Robert Gellately, eds., The Spectre of Genocide : Mass Murder in
Historical Perspective (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003)
Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy, Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (CUP, 2005)
A.L. Hinton, Genocide, An Anthropological Reader (Oxford, 2001)
idem., Annihilating Difference, The Anthropology of Genocide (University of California Press, 2002)
Samuel Totton and Paul Bartrop, The Genocide Studies Reader(Routledge, 2009).
Manus Midlarsky, The Killing Trap, Genocide in the 20th Century (CUP, 2005)
Benjamin A. Valentino, Final Solutions, Mass Killing and Genocide in the 20th century (Cornell UP, 2004)
Gil Eliot, Twentieth Century Book of the Dead (Penguin, 1972)
Irving Louis Horowitz, Taking Lives, Genocide and State Power (1997)
Israel Charny, Genocide, A Critical Bibliographic Review , 3 volumes(1988 -1994)
Antony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence (1985)
Barbara Harff and Ted Robert Gurr, ¿Victims of the State: Genocides, Politicides and Group Repression from 1945 to 1995,¿ in Albert J. Jongman, ed., Contemporary Genocides: Causes, Cases, Consequences (1996). Also Ethnic Conflict in World Politics (1994)
Helen Fein, ¿Accounting for Genocide since 1945: Theories and some Findings¿ International Journal on Group Rights 1(1993) 79-106. (ML copy)
Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil, A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (Yale, 2007)
A. Dirk Moses ed., Empire, Colony, Genocide, Conquest, Occupation and Subaltern Resistance in World History (Berghahn, 2008)
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Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
- enhanced abilities in research, critical thinking, weighing up of arguments and evidence
- production of innovative research pieces that adhere to bibliographical convention
- skills in presenting information and arguments to fellow students / lecturer in class
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| Keywords | modernity genocide |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Prof Donald Bloxham
Tel: (0131 6)50 3757
Email: donald.bloxham@ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | Miss Annabel Stobie
Tel: (0131 6)50
Email: Annabel.Stobie@ed.ac.uk |
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