Episode 04: Genocide Studies | Dr. Marie Berry

Audio & Transcript

Executive Producers: John Lamberger, Connor JL Moore

This transcript has been edited for clarity and readability while preserving the speakers’ original meaning and conversational tone. Minor repetitions, filler words, and false starts have been removed. Speaker attributions have been carefully reviewed against the audio to ensure accuracy.

Dr. Berry

I think one of the things that is really important to understand about genocide is that it is not, the result of a bunch of evil people doing evil things. For the most part, genocide is an accumulation of a lot of kind of broader social structures, political structures and economic structures that then results in the possibility. Right?

For the intentional targeting of a group of people. Genocide is never inevitable. It is never the inevitable outcome of a group of people that is like, you know, has been, marginalized and demonized by the majority. It's it's never inevitable. It's always something that takes actually a lot of work to, to do. Which I think, you know, should really remind us that we need to be ready to, to stop it.

INTRODUCTION

John

What group am I in? Well, what group are you in? You see, humans naturally seek belonging, being part of a group can mean identity, family, culture and protection. But it can also become the line used to decide who belongs, who is protected and who can be destroyed. This is an episode about genocide, a word that carries almost unbearable weight.

But genocide is not a natural disaster. It is built by people, which means people can recognize it, interrupt it, and try to stop it.

This is Sheepland. Our flock, the fence and the wolves.

And today the fence matters. Who draws it? Who gets placed outside it? And what happens when fear turns that boundary into violence? To understand how those boundaries become systems of violence.

We talked to Dr. Marie Berry, who researches gender violence and social movements. But before we get to law and definitions, Dr. Berry starts with the moment genocide stopped feeling like a word on a page.

PART I

Dr. Berry

There's a couple different ways of telling the story. I actually remember being in a th grade world history class, at high school and being given a choice of topics. And one of those topics was Rwanda. And I remember selecting Rwanda without really knowing why. And I thought, actually that this topic might be something related to conservation or, natural history, something like that, and didn't realize, kind of the broader landscape of the Rwandan genocide. And this was in about , I want to say, maybe. And I began to really dive in to the topic of the Rwandan genocide. And, I discovered there was a book that had come out just a couple of years prior called we wish to inform you that tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families by Philip Gorevic. And I read that book, and as a sophomore in high school, I was just, deeply moved and horrified and alarmed and it taught me, of course, about what happened in Rwanda, about the perhaps , or more Rwandans that were killed in a very brief period of time, in. And it it taught me about the ordinary people that had lived relatively normal lives, prior to that. And I remember thinking at the time that I had that life when this had happened, I had been ten years old in . Something about my sort of teenage self realizing that this was not ancient history. This is not something that had happened in kind of my parents or grandparents generations, but that this was actually something that, you know, kids my age, had lived through or had had not lived through. I think it really floored me, and it really made me aware that these atrocities were unfolding all around us, even if they weren't, in my awareness and they weren't necessarily on the front page of the newspaper.

And so actually, I ended up for that project doing this, this, this, investigation into what The New York Times had covered during the days of genocide. And I ended up going to those microfilm machines at the University of Washington and kind of flipping through every day of the New York Times, during the genocide and was just really kind of floored about how little it was reported on at the time. And this is what totally changed my entire life and career. And I then, went off to college and ended up, with an opportunity to spend some time at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in DC.

From there, I, started volunteering with, what's now called the Holocaust Center for Humanity in Seattle. And it was in that job that I got to meet all of these amazing Holocaust survivors that had lived through unfathomable horror in their lives, and who had come to Seattle at some point and had created lives and community and families and who, of course, carried with them the, the scars of what had happened, but also found ways of, of being joyful and being in community. And I learned a lot from them. And so that was my my very first work was working with Holocaust survivors. And so I'd say that I, you know, I, I've been thinking about genocide almost my entire kind of conscious life. And I think at the core, what really keeps me caring about it is that it's not something that we can relegate to ancient history. It's something that, unfortunately, is still happening in the world. And as a professor, I always, every year, I find that when I teach a class on comparative genocide, there's, there's unfortunately updates that need to be made to my syllabi and to my, my slides because there are these atrocities happening somewhere else in the world that deserve attention and, and instruction and, you know, kind of learning about. And so, I would say that that's the arc, that that brought me to this, this topic today.

Lindsey

So after all of your years of studies and your words, what is genocide?

Dr. Berry

Well, you know, there's a legal definition that genocide is the intent to destroy in whole or in part, racial, ethnic, religious or cultural group. And I think that is a really useful legal definition and a really important definition. But I think more broadly, ultimately, what we're talking about usually when we're talking about genocide is not necessarily the legal definition. It's really the intentional targeting of a group of people because of who they are. And it's the targeting of that group through some sort of coercive violence, that aims to destroy their way of life or even their existence. And I think, kind of broadening that definition is, is is helpful for, for thinking about how we might be able to apply our understanding of genocide in many, many cases around the globe.

John

Genocide is, you know, this large scale act by many people. Yeah. But how do individuals as leaders or just average people enable genocide to happen?

Dr. Berry

Well, I think the difference between genocide and other forms of mass atrocity, or other forms of really what I should call like mass death or mass killing are is all about a structure. And genocide only occurs within a structure of of oppression. It occurs within a political or economic or social structure in which there is one group that is trying to assert power over another group. And so, you know, the difference between saying like a mass shooting, of, random people, that is what we'd call a mass killing, an atrocity, a horror, of course. But it doesn't occur within a broader structure in which that group that is targeted is already sort of, socially, economically, politically disadvantaged or marginalized within the broader, world in which they live-

John -So like, like legal systems or like markets or..

Dr. Berry

Exactly, exactly. And so if we think about, you know, the, the of course, like the classic, archetypical example of, of the Holocaust, this the slow sort of encroachment on the rights of the Jewish community in Europe, the beginning to deprive the Jewish community of, property, of access to jobs of of, you know, their resources and then that structure, really then, you know, it takes many steps before it, then, you know, like results in a mass killing and so, you know, with your question, I think one of the things that is really important to understand about genocide is that it is not, the result of a bunch of evil people doing evil things, genocide. You know, there's there's a couple examples in history we could talk about, where you see pretty maniacal leaders that are doing extreme, that have, that have very hard to pass politics that, that do end up, committing genocide. But for the most part, genocide is an accumulation of a lot of kind of broader social structures, political structures and economic structures that then results in the possibility, right, for the the intentional targeting of a group of people. And while I think that is both I think it's really important to, to to to note that at the get go, because I think when people hear about genocide, we oftentimes think about really bad people doing bad things. And I'll I'll take the case of Rwanda, and we can talk more about this case at some point. But with Rwanda, a lot of people who have maybe heard of it, there's a really easy way of thinking about what happened in Rwanda as people who turned on their neighbors because they had some sort of like ancient ethnic hatred, and every single serious analyst of the Rwandan genocide would tell you that is simply not what happened. That ancient hatred is not something that existed. It was something that was sort of manufactured. And, it really had much more to do with fear than it had to do with hatred. And I think that's an important, I think that's really important because I think it helps us, it helps us in many ways find opportunities to intervene and to stop this type of atrocity before it happens, because genocide is never inevitable. It is never the inevitable outcome of a group of people that is like, you know, has been, marginalized and demonized by the majority. It's it's never inevitable. It's always something that takes actually a lot of work to, to do, which I think, you know, should really remind us that we need to be ready to, to stop it.

LANDING #1

John

To most of us. Genocide can look like walking into a kitchen and seeing water boiling over the stovetop. Something terrible is happening, and the danger is obvious. But Dr. Berry is asking us to look earlier at who put the pot on the stove, how the temperature rose, and what signs showed the water was starting to boil. If genocide is built through systems, through law, markets, institutions and political power, then those warning signs may appear earlier than we want to admit. To see those signs, Dr. Berry turns to Rafael Lemkin, the man who gave genocide its name.

PART II

Lindsey

So a little bit further on the definition of genocide and just how to think about it, how to approach it. Raphael Lemkin describe the two parts of genocide. One part is this domination by an oppressor. The other part is the destruction of the oppressed groups. Way of life. How can people observe either of these?

Dr. Berry

Yeah, yeah, I think Lemkin legacy is such a powerful one in this because, he did a lot of work not only to coined the term, but also to get it codified in international law and to inspire really, generations of, of, human rights activists to really, be attentive to the process by which this happens. And exactly as you said, the, the first step is that process of domination. Domination isn't always material or coercive. Although it it gets that way. Oftentimes domination can happen very bureaucratically, can happen through for instance, in Rwanda, the establishment of quotas for the ethnic minority group, the Tutsi, in different government offices or in schools, in, you know, in different, sectors of the economy. And, and the, that those I think whenever you see, discriminatory laws, you can observe them that that's, that's one thing that you can observe. Then, you know, the, the, the there is a broader suite of work that needs to be done to create this kind of fear or scapegoating of that ethnic group or that kind of minority group. And I think you could anytime you, you there's a, you know, Staub and others have, have really tried to document these steps in the process of genocide. And one of them is, is kind of dehumanization. And the demonization of a group of people. So you can, you know, really easy ways to identify this is when you begin to associate people with animals or, and especially vermin or insects. And, you know, you begin to see political discourse, that references groups of people as animals or animal having kind of animalistic characteristics. This is just like classic textbook process of of demonization. That is a is a core part of what Lemkin is talking about. In terms of the discussion of oppressed people, sort of, you know, well, domination of them. Right. And then kind of the slow destruction of their way of life by positioning them as a threat. And it's that it's that next step of kind of positioning those minority groups as a threat. That is really where we begin to see the the kind of quote unquote, legitimate use of violence to try to counter that threat. So genocides throughout history, you know, especially kind of, racial or ethnic genocides, they tend to follow that logic, that, that trajectory. And I think all of those steps are very observable. And so there and also there are there are groups that are monitoring this, right. There are groups like Genocide Watch that are out there actually documenting. Okay. The president of this country referred to this group of people as something less than human. And that's just that's just like a bing, bing, bing on the like, let's like see this process as it unfolds and call it out for what it is. We have all these signposts, these observations we can make now. It's all built on all this literature and work on genocide studies.

John

During the First World War, in , the Ottoman Empire targeted its minority Armenian population while being deported, Armenians were murdered along the journey through forced marches and in massacres. Many historians estimate up to 1.5 million Armenians were killed. Decades later, Lemkin then coined the term genocide, and then in the decades following that, scholars governments began to recognize, what happened to the Armenians as genocide. So I say all of that to ask, is genocide a legal term used to explain a crime that we can now see, observe, or as genocide, a moral term that we can recognize throughout human history? Or is it both?

Dr. Berry

Right. I think it's both. I think genocide is both a legal term that applies to a specific kind of subset of episodes of mass killing, and it's a moral term that captures, I think, the unjust, and immoral killing of groups of people just because of who they are. But it is ultimately really rooted in a moral understanding of right and wrong. And it is a kind of, I think of it as the type of violence that is that is deeply wrong. I would also say that I think all militarized violence is deeply wrong. And so I think we do get into some, real nuances in the, in the utility or the importance of this concept. But, but I do think there's a deep moral weight to understanding that genocide is that, is that targeting of people because just simply because of who they are, not because of any security or political or kind of other reason.

Lindsey

It was by that the convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was signed and ratified by countries. What motivates countries to recognize this crime, interpret genocides meaning, or even prosecute those that commit genocide?

Dr. Berry

Essentially, I think what motivates countries to understand genocide as a crime and to undertake to prevent and to punish the crime of genocide, which is what it what essentially the being a signatory and and ratifying the convention on the Elimination of Genocide requires the state to do it or requires the state to, undertake to prevent and to punish this crime of genocide. I think that essentially that mission or that commitment is bound up with, with a, with the sort of liberal turn in, in international politics after the Second World War that was attentive to this value of individual liberties and human rights and states that wanted to either signal that or for whatever reason, were, you know, dealing with the geopolitical, alliances that required them to, to agree with this. I think there's a it's signals a strong moral commitment to that, that version of liberalism that values human life and values human rights. And so I think, for a lot of states, that's that is the that's the main motive for signing the Genocide Convention. I think that states oftentimes decide to recognize genocide at moments that it is politically expedient for them to do so. I don't think we actually have much evidence that states recognize genocide when it's happening, especially Western states like the United States. I don't think we have much evidence that the United States recognizes a genocide when it's happening, simply based on international human rights commitments. I think the United States in it traditionally has a has actually, only recognized genocide as happening when it served their national security interests. And, that is a real shortcoming with the entire idea that the Genocide Convention and by defining genocide as such, that we have created like an architecture for actually responding to mass atrocities when they're happening, you know, during the Clinton administration, when the genocide in Rwanda was going on, we had an incredible amount of evidence that what was happening rose to the level of genocide very quickly. Not only did the UN commander on the ground, Romeo Dallaire, identify that there were large caches of weapons that had been kind of secured and stored around the city. There were, you know, very, very clear cables sent between the embassy in Kigali and, and DC, about the, the type of discourse that was happening against Tutsi Rwandans on the radio or by different political elites that was incredibly demonizing, dehumanizing, calling them cockroaches, things like that. We had so much information that this this essentially when when the violence really erupted and when the kind of, the horrors began in April of , it should not have been hard for the US, government to, to establish that this was a genocide. And yet, even under a Clinton administration, that was very, you know, kind of outwardly committed to human rights and international law. We had members of, of Clinton's cabinet kind of administration, wavering about, well, maybe these are acts of genocide, not genocide. This was kind of the this is the famous the famous quote was that acts of genocide are occurring but not genocide. And I think what you what you what you have to kind of wind back there is that the Clinton administration had just sent us American troops to Mogadishu, and it had ended with the black half cock down disaster, where American troops were quite literally dragged through the streets of, of Mogadishu. And that loss was an incredibly salient political moment for the Clinton administration, who didn't want to turn around, just months after and send a bunch of American troops to the to to actually stop, undertake, as I said, to prevent genocide, which is what the convention requires you to do. They didn't want to send troops to Rwanda to stop what was happening. And so they kind of took the definition and found a way to dance around it, to not actually feel like they had to at had to to send troops. And so again, I think, you know, we can think of recent examples very much, continuing in this trend, you know, when there are, strong geopolitical or national security reasons for the US to be somewhere militarily, it's much easier to call that thing a genocide, or if it's a genocide that's happening underneath, one of our adversary's, rules. So, for instance, in China, there's been I think, a more of an openness in some ways to call what's happening with the Uyghur population in China a genocide because it doesn't actually, really, it doesn't we know that we're not going to invade China, right? To try to, to try to, you know, challenge this issue. And it doesn't do anything to our alliances by essentially calling out somebody like an actor or a state that we're already, in a, you know, very tense relationship with, by saying that they're committing human rights abuses. We've been saying that China is committing human rights abuses for a long time. So I think there's a lot we can be really cynical. I think, of how the term genocide ultimately gets used in global politics. And that's why I do think, actually, in my read, the most important, thing that the term genocide does is it gives marginalized communities a chance to raise awareness about their plight. And it creates a in some ways, kind of a moral clarity and a moral call, to, to international solidarity and action. And in that way, I think genocide has a very moral kind of like a moral weight to it, and thus is really important.

LANDING #2

John

There is a comfort in the idea of crime. It assumes that in an orderly world, criminal acts should face justice. But genocide challenges that comfort. Because if the crime is the destruction of a people's life, safety, dignity and future, then punishment can feel painfully limited. So the question becomes harder can justice restore what was destroyed? Or can it only name the harm after it has happened?

PART III

John

Is there still value in criminalizing genocide? Does it deter? Does it inspire justice and action to achieve justice?

Dr. Berry

Yeah, this is actually a question I ask my students in my genocide class every year. And, I have. Yeah. And I think, I think one of the things that, they often agree with me on is that it is a tool, you know, charging somebody with genocide is one tool amongst many tools, that we need to use to, to do the work, which is the real work. Right, which is protecting the human dignity and life of everybody on this planet to the extent that we can. And so I think, yes. Like, I think, we in the last couple of years, I think there's been two really important events that, are very controversial events. One more than others, probably. But, essentially was the International Court of Justice charging both Benjamin Netanyahu and also Vladimir Putin with genocide, because of very different types of, of, behavior as heads of states. And this was important for different reasons. I think it was important, you know, to, to give, some international leverage to the very weak systems that we have at the international level to essentially say that, you know, we need to be protecting human lives, Palestinian lives, Ukrainian lives, and even Russian lives. Right? And that it's, so that, you know, the act of charging those heads of state was, I think, important for for the broader work of trying to stop the wars in both of these places. And to stop the atrocities that were happening. And I think they, you know, I think there there's going to be, you know, we don't expect to these, these indictments to lead to the arrest of these leaders. But we're we're slowly building an international legal system that we hope in some, you know, in some future actually has more teeth. And one of the things about charging these two particular leaders with this crime was that, they're you know, in many ways, you know, European or white, heads of state. And in the past, the only, real charges brought on genocide or crimes against humanity had been towards, mostly African and global South heads of state or, former heads of state or, warlords and people like that. And so there there has been this long running critique of international law that it targets the quote unquote, reward states to quote, Mahmoud Mamdani, way of dividing the kind of globe into states that are sovereign, that gets get to make decisions about what they do, get to make decisions about their own security. And then Ward states that essentially are kind of protectorate states of the, of that of the sovereign states, who in the kind of, liberal human rights, framework would would be states that would be invaded if they started committing a genocide against their people, sovereign states would invade those ward states and essentially stop their killing of civilians. In a hypothetical, of course, oftentimes international law and the the kind of charges of genocide have been directed at people from those those quote unquote, ward states, those those African ward warlords, that are accused of these reckless atrocities and horrific human rights violations. And it's not to say that those people have not committed those things. They certainly have. But I think a lot of, a lot of scholars and a lot of advocacy has also recognized the sheer sort of atrocities that oftentimes get perpetrated by those sovereign states as well, oftentimes in the name of permanent security. There's a wonderful, scholar named Dirk Moses who has written a book, called The Problems of Genocide. And, you know, he says the first problem of genocide is that it occurs and it's horrific. The second problem of genocide is that it creates the sort of moral hierarchy where certain forms of violence are seen as necessary and legitimate to create the security for, like Global North states and other forms of violence like genocide are relegated to this kind of category of immoral violence, which could be punishable by like international law. And I think when you think about that hierarchy, it essentially it makes sense on some level because some violence does seem worse than others because of its kind of sheer targeting of humans just based on what they are. But the critique to that would be that we we see a lot of really, really, really high civilian death tolls, in the name of permanent security logics, in the name of eliminating threats to the United States. And that in some ways, I think one of the biggest challenges right now, in this moment, in the st century is to, is to say that a new human rights era has to say has to challenge the the old deaths, all deaths from states, you know, including the deaths that are, that are, that are created in the name of creating more security. And that until we do that, we are essentially, we are, we are, we are being, insufficiently attentive to the ways in which we have normalized systems of harm that are that are reaching the same levels of destruction on people's lives around the world. And I, you know, that's really where a lot of my advocacy and work lies is in that sort of conversation and tension. But I get that sometimes it's not, it's it's maybe a lot to folks that are kind of just coming into this space or coming into these conversations.

John

-Like, how do you, how do you measure, do you think of in terms of, like, pain or harm or injury or is it do you count the dead? Yeah. How do you how do you view.

Dr. Berry

Super great question. There's been a lot of debate about this. Like what is the threshold of genocide. And I think, you know, to to answer it one way, genocide, you know, can actually occur with no deaths. It can be about cultural erasure. So it really isn't about a death toll. Genocide can occur. You know, for instance, like, if we think about what happened to indigenous communities in North America, the the kind of stripping of people of their names, the stripping of people from their, land, forcing them into, into reservations. The, the “reeducation”, and putting reeducation in quotes, of of indigenous children, in kind of Western Christian schools. The, you know, cutting of people's hair, all of that, that doesn't actually require the, the, the material death of indigenous communities. Although, of course, there was a tremendous amount of, of death as well. But that that's is just about the structure of cultural erasure. And, and that constitutes genocidal, erasure in, in kind of the conventional genocide framework. A lot of times people, have this question about kind of, well, what at what stage, right. Do we have a genocide? If there's one massacre, does that count as a genocide? Is it three massacres? Is it people? people? And I think I'll, I'll come back to that, to that. Insistence on always trying to identify the structure of, of oppression and harm because we, we actually a massacre is not a genocide, right? A massacre, massacres could occur during a genocide and usually do. But they are not the same. The genocide is the overarching structure under which the mass, the logic of the massacre plays out the logic of targeting an ethnic or racial minority. Right. And the and the kind of violence that is then directed at them.

Lindsey

Has the word genocide become diluted or to often strategically avoided?

Dr. Berry

Great question. So, I mean, you know, genos as like a group of people side as in killing. This is a this is a very deliberate attempt to draw. Yeah. To draw global attention to what Lemkin had just observed happening in, in his own community of, of of Jewish community, of the Jewish community in Europe. Right. And and, you know, to go back to a little bit briefly to one of your earlier questions, Lemkin also knew that Hitler remembered the Armenians. So Hitler is is really famous. He is famous to have quoted or has said at one point that nobody remembers the genocide of the Armenians. And it was this, statement that I think, helped to explain, right? Why Hitler maybe thought he could get away with this. And Lemkin remembered that, too. So he, you know, he noted that it was really important to be able to call this type of mass murder something that differentiated it from its from the kind of political strategy. But instead of but said, see these see these episodes of genocide as, as linked throughout history, so do I think it's too diluted or strategically avoided? I do not, I think in many ways, I think genocide is a is a is a is a moral call, is a moral call to attention, to horror, to outrage, because there is a group of people that are experiencing tremendous suffering and, and, and harm. And I think it, I think it, it does get used in many different ways. People are talking about whether, what happened in Gaza over the last couple of years was a genocide. And I think by every, by every single international definition, it absolutely was. And it's, it has created a tremendous amount of, of real alarm and frustration and horror. And I and I understand that. Right, because I understand I understand how, how hard it is to hear, that that the State of Israel may be committing genocide when the State of Israel was created out of genocide, right? It was created by genocide survivors. And so there's a real, real, just just like, heart wrenching grief that I think a lot of people have felt, when they hear people calling, what has happened to the Palestinians a genocide? And I think that that's where this that's where this, these, these nuanced conversations really matter. And that's where the deep listening really matters, because I understand, why they're why so many people were so horrified to hear that word, being used. In the way that it was over the last couple years with the student encampments and with a lot of the, advocacy and campaigns around Palestinian rights. At the same time, the the thing we know so profoundly from the Holocaust was that the structure of a state was designed to strip rights from the Jewish community, right? That the entire design of the German state, you know, was designed to, to, to take away their freedom of movement, to take away their, economic access, to take it to dehumanize, to and to just slowly erode. And I think that, you know, if you, you know, for folks that can, can, can thoughtfully look at what the state of Israel has done to Palestinians, it absolutely, it absolutely follows a similar script. And I think the, you know, from the, you know, the the land displacement to the, freedom of mobility, of restrictions to the, to, you know, to the to the dehumanizing rhetoric from a lot of politicians to the, kind of callous disregard for civilian casualties. All of those things are, you know, I don't think any serious genocide scholar, including Israeli genocide scholars. Right. I don't think any serious one would would argue that that that's not what this looks like. Here's the thing that I think is really important to talk about. When people think about genocide, they almost always think about an unarmed group of people. And this is where the difficulty in thinking about Palestine and Gaza comes up, because people say, what about Hamas? They started this the absolutely right. And they absolutely, you know, with October th, started this phase of the of the of the horror and of the protracted sort of atrocities with that, you know, absolutely unforgivable. Atrocity on October 7th. And people, I think, really like to think that genocide is a massacre of the innocence of people that are not armed. And here's the and I do think and I teach this in my class, right, that I think the reason people think that is primarily because the, the the Holocaust is the reference point for genocide and genocide studies. Right. And the Jewish community of Europe was not armed. They were not armed. And certainly not a security threat. What's what's different, though, about almost every genocide sense, is that some faction of the group that was targeted in the genocide actually was armed and did pose some level, whether it's an inflated level or not, right, of a security threat to the state or to people. The one I want to talk about is the counterinsurgency killings, counterinsurgency, genocide. So that category of a counterinsurgency genocide essentially follows a script like this. There is a group of marginalized people, and they are marginalized for a variety of different reasons, whether it's ethnically, religiously, racially, whatever. Some portion of that group picks up arms and decides that they're done with our marginalization. They cannot handle it anymore, and they want to fight for rights, and they want to fight for a better life, and they're going to do throats do so through armed struggle. What happens next is the state identifies that group as a security threat and begins to suppress the security threat, which is a legitimate sort of counterinsurgency strategy. What happens with a genocide, though, is that every member of that ethnic or racial group that the militants come from becomes associated with the militant group, and they they then become seen as a threat and as a potential member of that militant group, just by the very nature of their identity now in Rwanda, just to give one example, right, Tutsi Rwandans were allied with the colonial regime all throughout the colonial period, and they were the monarchy. They were generally more elite and they were kind of, an ethnic or racial. They had an ethnic or racial distinction that was really codified by the Belgians. That was really kind of formalized when the independence movement happened. The, the monarchy and the and the colonial powers were were sacked. They were they were you know, overturned. And a lot of those Tutsi minority folks fled to other countries. And the Hutu group, which is the majority of the population, took over control of the state when they took over control of the state, they implemented these really, really discriminatory laws against Tutsis. And these discriminatory laws were things I mentioned before, things like quotas in schools, things like, you know, restrictions on whether they could, participate in government offices. And they also didn't let all of the Tutsis that had fled Rwanda. They didn't let them return to Rwanda. And sometimes many of them wanted to return. But if they were to return, they were basically told they would not be able to get jobs. Their land had been taken, their homes had been taken, so they didn't have like places to come back to. And so, you know, you can imagine that a group of people in exile slowly becomes really frustrated about living in exile. And so this particular group of folks is living in Uganda. It's a group of Tutsi exiles. They're growing up in Uganda, which is just the country right above right north of Rwanda. And they they're facing all these sorts of discrimination in Uganda. They can't get educated, they can't vote, and they can't get citizenship rights. And after decades and decades in exile, about decades an expert, sorry, about four decades in exile, maybe a little less. A group of them says, you know what? We're going to go back to Rwanda. But with arms. We're going to go back and basically try to take over the state. We're going to try to like militarily, try to pressure the Rwandan government, the Hutu government, into taking us back. At this point, there's a million Tutsi living outside of Rwanda, and this is a very tiny country, about million at the time, million even. And so when this armed group tries to come back into the country, it triggers real catastrophic fear. There's a fear that a million people are going to come in, they're going to take everybody's lands, are going to really destabilize, are going to take back the political system. They're going to put everybody under back under the yoke of colonial occupation. And there's real fear that that military group, which, by the way, is very, very skilled military. It's not a ragtag group of folks. It's it's actually they a lot of them have had training in the US. They have allied already with President Museveni and Uganda. They have really pretty decent weaponry. They have good funding from the diaspora. And so they want to come back into Rwanda. So what have the logic of genocide in Rwanda is a counterinsurgency genocide. It essentially means that this group of rebels from Uganda invades. And instead of seeing all of the Tutsi that lived in Rwanda at the time as really quite a separate group of people from this armed group, a bunch of politicians and others made the association between the armed group and the citizens. And they said, all Tutsis in Rwanda are are potentially members of this armed threat. So in that way, they expanded this idea that these everybody is a security threat. And at that moment, you essentially see Rwandans and Hutu Rwandans and the Hutu regime and the Hutu state. It's more complicated because there's a plane crash and all these things. They begin to say, well, we need to kill the Tutsi civilians, or they're going to kill us first. We have to kill them before they kill us. Similar thing happens in Guatemala, where you have a kind of a racial minority in the Mayan highlands that basically is very marginalized. They end up some pick up weapons. And then there's this expansion of seeing all Mayan, Guatemalans as potential rebels. And so there's this massive genocide that happens in the Mayan highlands. And I think in many ways, just to go back to the case of Palestine right into this question of whether the word is used too often today, I think what you have is a very similar logic applied to Palestinians who have become associated with militancy because of Hamas. And there isn't there isn't. There is not a to correlation, of course, right, between Hamas militants and Palestinians. There's there's not that there's no relationship, you know, between Hamas and many, many Palestinians, certainly not Hamas's militarized, priorities. And so when you have a genocide against a group of people that has a faction of them that is armed, it is still a genocide, it is still a genocide. And I think that is, that is a really, hard thing for people to kind of reckon with.

LANDING #3

John

This is where the logic of security can become dangerous. When a broader group of people are treated the same as an armed group, identified with them. States rarely describe this kind of violence as genocide. They describe it as security, defense or the targeting of a specific armed group. That doesn't mean armed groups or security threats are imaginary, but it does mean we have to ask whether the state is fighting that armed group or treating the broader people as the threat. That is what makes genocide so difficult to name or prosecute or stop. We have to hear what a state says it is doing, but also look at what its actions show. PART IV John Do you have a sense for how prosecuting genocide will be used in the future? Dr. Berry Yeah, we are certainly living through a moment in which international law is being actively eroded and stomped on, if you will. By global superpowers. And I think that there is a, you know, we're recording this, just five days after the US began a war in Iran, an unprovoked war in Iran, in violation not only of national law requiring congressional approval, but also many different international laws have already been broken, including what we know about the bombing of a girls school that's left perhaps , mostly children dead, which is, you know, undoubtedly a war crime. Even if it was an accident, right, it's still a still a war crime. So I think, I think one of the things about prosecuting genocide going forward is that we have to understand how global power, politics, plays into who gets charged when and to what end. I think we, you know, when the United States is not a party to entities like the International Criminal Court, it makes it really difficult, to think about how we whether it makes it difficult to think that we will be able to essentially establish a kind of a universally agreed on set of legal principles that can be used to prevent, you know, mass atrocitiesin the future. And so I don't have I, you know, I don't in many ways, I, I remain a cautious optimist around international law because I don't think that resulting in a conviction or is actually what the goal is. Although, of course, that's one of the goals. I think international law is one tool amongst many to try to, you know, bend the arc of the world towards justice to, to kind of paraphrase MLK, I think we need more tools to bend the arc towards justice. And I think, I certainly am not ready to throw any of them out. I think we, genocide is also one of those crimes that requires intent to actually, legally prosecute. And intent is a really interesting thing to try to retroactively identify. Intent can happen at an individual level, but it can also, I think more often times happen at a real structural level. Is the intent to, you know, essentially, erase indigenous communities from the United States, or at least kind of, assimilate them so, so sufficiently into, you know, white culture in the US, that they don't, you know, don't have any sort of meaningful distinctions. Right? That if we think about intent in that, in that kind of scenario, it's not just one person's kind of maniacal dream. It's really, a broader pattern of, of kind of American exceptionalism and American kind of the American story of westward expansion and innovation and things like that, actually relies on a very genocidal, treatment of its of its indigenous communities. And so I think that's where we get into difficulty actually identifying or that's where we get into difficulty using international law to prosecute, crimes like genocide. That said, we've got these huge cases right now at the international court of Justice, and I think they're really important. Right? I think they're really important for identifying, you know, for identifying, a global community that is unwilling to allow the mass killing of civilians and of children, happen. And I think, you know, we we know that there is massive, you know, kind of genocidal violence happening in Sudan right now. In parts of Myanmar, certainly. And Ukraine certainly kind of the, the, ongoing forms of violence in Gaza and in, in Palestine more broadly. All of these are, are are things that all of these are types of violence that certainly I think in my, in my book constitute genocidal violence. And and yet I don't necessarily think that international law is like the thing that's going to stop them. I think that there's there are other tools that we need to also pull on, other levers we need to pull to think about how we might actually, ameliorate some of those, those harms and atrocities going forward.

Lindsey

Well, I'd like to hear what you think those tools are. That's kind of what this next question is about. It's a tough one to answer, but I'm interested in what you have to say. How can we best prevent genocide? Is it by learning about it, by learning what other people have done to prevent it? Or what are those tools that you're talking about?

Dr. Berry

Oh, this is such a big question. And it's a question I've thought about a lot. Because I think there's a few different ways to approach this topic. I'll start with, maybe the, the, the basic answer. Right. Which is that I think absolutely. Like for, you know, keeping, continuing to strengthen international, responses and protocols and laws to be able to, actually, try to stop, atrocities when they're occurring is important. You know, I think, you know, much as I was not a huge fan of the of the kind of liberal order as it, led to, so much, I think death and destruction and inequity in the world over the last years. The liberal order at least, did, value human rights. And I think human rights frameworks remain really, really important. And so, you know, increasing those, making them more robust, recommitting the United States to those frameworks, which just seems like a complete, like not something that we're we're likely to see happen anytime soon. So, you know, I think some of those conventional tools, it's not that they aren't, really important, it's that they're not fully implemented. And so making them as more as robust as possible, resourcing them, investing them, ensuring that they can be fully implemented. I just think it's like step one, I think there's another, really important thing that I want to name because I think it's where I spend a lot of my time thinking, which is that when I was talking about this idea that sometimes genocide occupies like a different moral place than conventional war, when we think about our response or our outrage just as people. I think there's a really instructive story just from my own, like my own advocacy in my own life. Here, which was that when I was in college, as I, as you learned already, I was I was very active in, you know, kind of, genocide prevention efforts and in college, I spent a lot of time working on the Save Darfur movement, Darfur as a region in western Sudan still beset by tremendous violence. But during the early , had a had a genocide occur, in which these, you know, militias that were really commanded by Khartoum, were really a brutalizing and murdering many, many people in the West. Hundreds of thousands of people died, many people were displaced. And myself and many college students at the time were really upset about this. We were we were staging Dion's. We were, you know, in our campus, on our campuses. We were, you know, writing letters to our senators and our congresspeople. We were holding rallies downtown. And what strikes me now, although it didn't strike me as much at the time, was that the years of Darfur really overlapped, with the years that the US military was in, engaged in the ground war in Iraq. And, we know, both through direct civilian casualties, which were probably around a half a million in Iraq, as well as broader indirect deaths from the war on terror. The US led war on terror in the Middle East, which mounted up to about million deaths. If you look at the estimates from the Cost of War project at Brown University, those deaths far outweigh the type of, the deaths that were happening in Sudan and in North Darfur at the time. And that doesn't make me one of them, you know, better or worse. But it means that where my attention was as a as a young something activist, my attention was in some ways on, a genocide. And I was sort of in many ways, I was aware of the Iraq War. Of course, I was very opposed to the Iraq War, but I was not mobilized in the same way because I had been convinced, as a lot of people were, that this was for our security. And I think if we can reflect on that as an example, what we need to do to stop genocide is to actually reimagine our security, is to really reimagine what it means to keep people safe. And there's been a lot of work on this. We we last year, myself and a bunch of, collaborators at different organizations launched something called a Feminist Peace Playbook, where we really tried to articulate what it would be like to think about security in terms of safety, community safety in terms of everybody having everything they need and in terms of really trying to limit the US military budget in a way that would, allow us to reinvest in things like early childhood education, things like childcare, things like Snap benefits and Medicaid. Things that we know actually keep people safe. Right. And. Well, and that can create more prosperity for America. You know, and I think when we think about genocide prevention right now, we think too much on stopping atrocities once they've started. And we don't think enough about trying to create a world in which everybody has access to political power, to a safe place to live, to all of the kind of clean air and clean water that people need to thrive, to the social community around them, to nurture themselves and their and their children. And we are so eager to put out fires that we have we have not really figured out how to change the way that the United States, works in the world, which is creating which has created. Right, so much insecurity in so many places that I think ultimately has eroded our safety and has not made us safer and have certainly not made people around the world safer. And this isn't like, you know, I say this sometimes when people say, oh, you know, you're not thinking about it from a very concrete and tangible point. And I and I, I disagree, right? There's a lot of us that have done a lot of work thinking through how we might do foreign policy differently and so my, my pitch rate, my, my, my pitch to stopping genocide is a twofold one. Strengthen all of the institutions, all the systems that we have right now to try to ensure that the human rights of all people on this planet are protected. And second, to try to reimagine how we would structure our state and our foreign policy in a way that does not create, does not reinforce those systems of of militarization, of, of of permanent security logics and things like that, that ultimately are, I think, reverberating in ways that are creating profound insecurity and harm for so many people around the globe. And in that two-fold strategy, I hope that we think we we can think about, we can think about a world in which we never in which the classes I teach every year, or in the history department, not in the Global affairs department. Right. Not in the not in the not in the international studies department. Right. I would love to teach my classes, you know, not at a policy school, but unfortunately, it's these are contemporary things that are happening. And even though, you know, so many of the Holocaust survivors I worked with as a young adult, even though they said, you know, people said never again, right? Never again after the Holocaust, we have seen that type of harm, that type of atrocity happen over and over and over again, so many times that we can hardly count. And something needs to change. And I think we can start actually here with interrogating kind of U.S. imperial role in the world. And I think that will go a long way.

John

Dr. Berry, thank you for coming, first of all. And and talking to us, this was this was really great. This is really awesome. And to thank you for sort of, taking great care and walking us through this very intense, very dark, very complicated subject.

Lindsey

Of course. But before we leave, we have too much more lighter questions. Just to pick your brain, if you could personally recommend one place that everyone should visit for its beauty or its culture, where would that be?

Dr. Berry

Well, I'm going to say Sarajevo, Bosnia. And I'm going to tell you why. Because oftentimes when we talk about genocide, we, we think about it as something that is that is a period of absolute tremendous suffering and horror. And it is that right? It absolutely is that it is devastating. And it is, it, it profoundly traumatizes and harms so many people at the same time. In every genocide that I've studied, I've been just amazed at the sheer creativity, humor, resilience, and power that ordinary people display even when living through the most bleak and impossible situation imaginable. And Sarajevo, if you have never been, it's not only a stunningly beautiful city with surrounded by, you know, these incredible hills, this gorgeous sort of intersection of Ottoman architecture and Austro-Hungarian architecture. It is kind of this, this, this, amazing, you know, mix of Balkan, cuisine and, a kind of an infusion of a Turkish sentiment and sensibility. And it is just stunning. And it was also the site of some of the most vibrant, art during the during the broader genocide. And Bosnian war. And, if you, actually kind of read up on the history here, you know, the the, many like dozens of theater, shows were staged and produced during the siege in Bosnia. People could go to, an opening of a new play, like, every other week during the siege. You know, these would be, performances held by candlelight. And in basements and things like that. But, you know, Bosnians essentially took art and said that we are not going to be dehumanized by this war, that we didn't want, that we didn't choose, and said, we're going to live our most, like, full human selves, in part by celebrating beauty and by creating things that are, that are, you know, that resonate with, kind of the, the, the, the, the kind of, artistic global, cosmopolitan vision that they had for themselves. And I just think that's that's really cool. And I think it's a just an awesome place to go. And, it's fun. Yeah, yeah. So I'd say Bosnia.

Lindsey

How beautiful that they were able to create such bright, vibrant art during the darkest times.

Dr. Berry

And, and a film festival. One of the best film festivals in Europe started in during the siege. It was this, like, very funny idea, by a man, Harris Pacific, who decided that he was going to just, like, open up his office and have people come in and watch, videos in his office and call it a film festival and try to, like, raise some awareness and he ended up getting really big and like, hundreds of films got sent to Syria for during the siege, smuggled in, you know, taken in by humanitarian workers. All these different ways. They started the film festival and it continues every single year in August. And so if you go to Bosnia, go in August, go to the film festival, and just know that this, this idea of creativity and almost normalcy, right? Like the the very normal act of going to the movies was something that was a political act that they decided to start during the siege as a way of saying, this is not our war. It's pretty cool.

Lindsey

That's very cool. Yeah, I would love to experience that film festival. Yeah. Just seeing their resiliency. Yeah. Firsthand.

John

That's that's pretty cool. So the last question, at more posts, we want to make it a point to promote nonprofits or organizations that create positive impacts. Are there any that you would want to share with us?

Dr. Berry

So one of the things that I gosh, this is an interesting question because, I have so many that I want to share with you that I don't know where to start. And so some ways I want to be really selfish. And I want to tell you about the work that we do here at the Korbel School, because there's a program here called the Inclusive Global Leadership Initiative that I've run for the last ten years, and it's essentially a collection of women from around the world that are working for peace and are trying very, very aggressively, very creatively, very boldly to try to create a world where there's, you know, no more war. Whether they stop genocide, they protect human rights. And it's it's all of the organizations that those women that come to represent that I want to pitch. Right. So everything from, an incredible organization called Women Cross the DMZ, which is, a peace organization, focused on trying to end the war on the Korean Peninsula. To, gosh. So many different collaborators that work in Latin America trying to do, kind of resiliency building with women in Guatemala that are still recovering from the genocide there. I would just direct you to maybe our website, and we've got a lot of resources there. Inclusive Global Leadership initiative.org.

CONCLUSION

John

Dr. Berry's answer about Sarajevo stayed with me because after everything we discussed, she ended with people making art during a siege, plays by candlelight, films carried through danger, people gathering together to do something ordinary and human that matters. Because genocide narrows the circle of who gets to be treated as fully human, genocide turns identity into accusation, fear into policy, and security into permission for violence. And what genocide tries to destroy is never only physical. It is memory, family, culture, dignity and the future a people imagined for themselves. And in Sarajevo, art became one way of refusing to let that circle close. Justice still matters, but the harder task is whether we can recognize the systems that make genocide possible, see the fences being built, and refuse a world where anyone has to prove their humanity.

Thanks for listening.

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