Editors’ Introduction

In our first general issue of Genocide Studies International, we have included a mix of academic articles; a “Research Note” on an important book containing primary documentation of a case of genocide that has not been given the attention it should have; and, in our first “Notes from the Field” installment, an extended interview with a humanitarian aid worker in the midst of ongoing mass violence in the Nuba Mountains area of Sudan. These contents are intended to put into practice GSI’s mission of publishing a journal that not only makes new research and analysis on genocide studies and genocide prevention available to readers but also puts on the record and disseminates important primary documents and other forms of policy-relevant information and analysis that can inform the work of scholars, policy makers, and anti-genocide NGO workers and activists. Our vision for this issue and the journal generally is to bridge the gaps separating ivory-tower academics, policy makers, and communities around the world; researchers and practitioners; and theory and practice. The editors of this issue believe that the articles and other material contained herein go some distance toward accomplishing this task.

GSI 8.2 opens with a new article by Hannibal Travis, who is likely well known to many readers for his pioneering work that has reshaped genocide studies’ approach to the genocidal process of the late Ottoman Empire and its transition into the Republic of Turkey. In his latest work, Travis brings his international law expertise to bear on a crucial problem concerning the application of the UN Genocide Convention to different cases of mass violence. Travis strongly challenges the liberal legal notion that international law and international organizations function in neutral ways to prevent, condemn, and punish genocide and other atrocities. Rather than seeing international human rights and criminal laws as acting indifferently to govern all states’ behaviors in the same way across time and place, Travis identifies patterns of what appear to be “purposeful actions” (to borrow Helen Fein’s well-known phrase) in which groups of states differentially apply the laws on genocide based on biased attitudes and beliefs. States responsible for genocide and other atrocities are more likely to be identified as such by individual states and member states of international organizations if those pointing the finger do not share a common sectarian identity such as ethnicity, race, or religion, while wrongdoers within the family, so to speak, are not similarly condemned or confronted. Travis’s article thus reinforces the position of critical legal scholars, which is that the real-world functioning of the law is a reflection of social relationships and identities in society rather than a neutral arbiter between equal parties to a dispute. Here, Travis also goes further than the New Haven School and its realist-inspired suggestion that international law is merely a tool used by powerful states to get what they want, and, in the case of lack of genocide prevention, to ignore instances of gross human rights abuses so long as one’s own national security and interests are not at risk. For Travis, the situation is much worse: genocide is at times ignored when the perpetrator lies within a state’s own ethnic, racial, or religious community of nations while states that belong to different sectarian communities and with which the accuser maintains hostile relations can be unjustly condemned for having committed the crime of crimes. The issue’s second article provides something of an illustration of Travis’s concerns. Using extensive primary research, Adam Hughes Henry painstakingly demonstrates how the coordinated propaganda efforts of external actors via their own national and global news media directly and indirectly shape the narratives and perceptions of identity surrounding the targets of genocide and mass violence of a third-party perpetrator regime. Henry’s article gets at a number of key issues, including the fact that the role of powerful Western states in genocide is not just that of bystander whose indifference and inaction allows genocide to occur unfettered in far-off lands; instead, Henry’s article shows us that in the Indonesian case, two global powers...