I ramble about genocide scholars ...

I spent last week attending the International Association of Genocide Scholars conference here in Sarajevo. Leslie Dwyer, my advisor, was here to present a paper on her continuing work surrounding the massacres in Indonesia in 1965. It was great to see her, to hear her present her work, and to see a new documentary that includes interviews both with her and with her husband Degung.
I was fascinated to get a peek at a bit of the varied scholarship going on in the field of genocide studies (and to see what sort of creatures genocide scholars are!), and to meet a range of professors, researchers and students from around the world and especially from Bosnia, who came to present their work or to share their experiences. I got to hear - and even meet - some of those scholars whose works I’ve been reading in my Peace and Conflict courses for the last few years. (Additionally, I got to meet one of the first students to graduate with a degree in Anthropology in Kuwait - Jawaher was also the first female student body president of a Kuwaiti university, if not in all of the Middle East - and I got to hear Vijaya Thakur BMC ‘08 bravely present a paper on Burundi on the same panel as Rene Lemarchand, perhaps THE Burundi genocide scholar).

As present as the effects of the war are in Sarajevo, as moving and painful as the stories I come across in my research are, as many times as I’ve cried (quietly!) while the choir rehearses, nothing has been quite as academically and emotionally exhausting as a week focused exclusively on genocide ... on so many genocides. There were papers about Armenia, about the Holocaust, about Rwanda, Burundi, Guatemala, about the Kurds in Iraq and the Pontic Greeks, about Indonesia, about Darfur, and, many, many, about the former Yugoslavia.

IAGS does not normally hold its conferences in places where genocide has occurred, I don’t think, but it was fascinating and moving to have the participation of so many scholars and witnesses from Bosnia. It grounded the academic work being presented, and the tense and difficult questions being raised brought home how important (and, sadly, how contested) this ongoing work is for the region as well as the discipline.
Carla del Ponte, for example, received an award from the IAGS for all the work she has done (she’s the prosecutor for the ICTY) and some very blunt questions from the audience about all those war criminals she’s failed to bring to justice. In a wonderful gesture, the students of the Sarajevo law school invited their colleagues at the Belgrade law school to attend the conference. Security was higher than I think it might normally be for an academic conference, but I saw no problems.