Genocide and Mass Violence I

About the course

For decades, the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide and the terror in the Soviet Union have represented the suffering that has affected millions of innocent civilians throughout history, sometimes with the aim of eliminating groups of people in whole or in part. The fact that the worst cases of genocide and other mass killings happened outside the context of an armed conflict between victim groups and perpetrators has meant that standard theoretical models from the field of conflict theory cannot explain this type of extreme behaviour.

In order to provide in-depth explanations and increase our knowledge of the character of extreme forms of violence, we, therefore, need to place specific events in their proper historical, cultural, social, political, ideological and other contexts. After the course, you will have increased knowledge of some of the most important cases of genocide and mass killing up until the mid-twentieth century, with a particular focus on the nineteenth-century colonisation processes, the growth of nationalist, fascist and communist ideologies during the first half of the twentieth century, and the two world wars. You will obtain knowledge about some key theoretical concepts while acquiring important skills in the comparative method.