Meeting with our authors is always a pleasure, and last month, it was wonderful to welcome Joachim Savelsberg to UCP’s offices in Oakland. Joachim Savelsberg, a world-renowned expert on mass atrocities, is author of the upcoming title Representing Mass Violence, set to release this August.
Upon publication, Representing Mass Violence will be available through Luminos, University of California Press’ new Open Access publishing program for monographs. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.
“You look at countries like my own home country Germany in the way they memorialize the Holocaust, the way they live up to the responsibilities of the past. It does not do them any harm in the international community. To the opposite, it has increased acceptance in the international community,” says Savelsberg in his recent feature in the Minneapolis Star Tribune’s op-ed.
Be sure to listen to his interview with John Hines on WCCO Radio for more of Savelsberg’s profound analyses of the history of genocide.
Representing Mass Violence uncovers competing narratives of international justice in the ways in which human rights crimes in Darfur (and also Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Cambodia) are represented around the world, particularly through the lens of the International Criminal Court.
This work stands apart from other accounts of genocide by focusing not on the crimes themselves or the immediate legal or political responses but on the distinct meta-narratives that develop in Western industrialized nations about the possibility of justice as administered through international judicial forces. Ireland, for instance, with its collective memory of extreme poverty, may officially support the ICC’s efforts but express strong skepticism about any judicial intervention that would interfere with food and aid delivery. And Germany, with its own history of genocide, is slow to apply the term elsewhere, recently making global news by acknowledging the Armenian genocide as such on its 100th anniversary.
These local, social, and political forces profoundly shape the ways in which mass crimes in Darfur and elsewhere are perceived and addressed. Only by understanding how they shape collective memories and representations of human rights crimes, Savelsberg argues, can we better respond to, and prevent, future atrocities.
