Keith David Watenpaugh will deliver the first talk in the CMENA Student Choice Speaker Series, titled “Who Has the Human Right to Charge Genocide?: Reclaiming Genocide as a Powerful Justice Tool Requires Moving Beyond the 1948 Genocide Convention.”

The 1948 Genocide Convention doesn’t work – at least not for peoples seeking justice for mass atrocity. It does work to protect most states that have destroyed a people, in whole or in part, from ever being held responsible for committing the “crime of crimes.” As the public and academic understanding of genocide has been shaped by the narrow and legalistic interpretation of the genocide idea in the Convention, that understanding has been used to deny the right of victims of historical and contemporary mass atrocity to argue that they have faced genocide. The putative failure to meet the international legal standard not only reenacts the colonial and racist origins of the statute itself but has also been a way to negate and deny the legitimacy or veracity of broader justice claims by communities of victims. Once denied, these communities are no longer eligible for the kinds of restorative justice and global attention that the charge of genocide carries. Denial and its afterlives has shape the right of indigenous peoples in the Western Hemisphere and Australasia, descendants of enslaved Africans in diaspora, Armenians, Assyrians, Kurds, and most recently Palestinians to charge genocide.

In this talk, historian and theorist of human rights, Prof. Keith David Watenpaugh, argues that historians, international lawyers, humanities scholars and those in law and public policy should stop using the Convention’s terms to define genocide. Rather he asks us to embrace an understanding of genocide closer to Raphael Lemkin’s original proposal and as outlined in his Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation – Analysis of Government – Proposals for Redress, (1944) to reclaim the genocide idea as both a powerful human rights tool of analysis and justice, and a basis for making violence and mass atrocity more visible, actionable and preventable.

Keith David Watenpaugh is professor and founding director of Human Rights Studies at the University of California, Davis.  He is author and editor of several books, including the multiple-award winning Bread from Stones: The Middle East and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism (University of California Press, 2015.) His articles appear in the American Historical Review, Perspectives on History, Social History, Journal of Human Rights, Humanity, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Education, and Newsweek; his work has been translated into French, German, Armenian, Arabic, Turkish and Persian. He has lived and worked in Syria, Turkey, Lebanon, Armenia, Iraq, and Egypt. In addition to awards from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, in 2019 he received the Institute of International Education Centennial Medal and in 2021 for defending the right to education, and in 2021 the Edmund O’Brien Award for Individual Achievement in Human Rights Education by Human Rights Educators-USA.