Genocide and Humanitarian Intervention

The seminar traces the history of genocide since the beginning of the 20th century. It examines the role of humanitarian intervention to prevent or stop it and the use of international law to punish it. The discussion begins with the Armenian genocide during the First World War and includes the Holocaust, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s, and the Kurds in Iraq in the 1980s. Coverage starting in the 1990s includes the cases of Bosnia, Rwanda, Kosovo, and Darfur and the more recent discussions of the appropriateness of the term genocide to describe the fate of the Yazidis in Syria, the Rohingya in Myanmar, the Uighurs in China, and the people of Ukraine.Students will learn about the origins of the word "genocide," which was coined during the Second World War, and about the legal definition of genocide as spelled out in the 1948 Genocide Convention. A chief focus of the course is the response of the United States, both in words and deeds, to alleged cases of genocide from Armenia in 1915 to Ukraine in 2023.