The Yale Herald, CT
Oct 5 2007
Yale Genocide Center: a hidden humanities gem
BY NICHOLAS KEMPER AND CAIO CAMARGO
COURTESY PULITZERCENTER.ORG
The GSP establishes missions in overseas countries in hopes of
unearthing documents concerning genocide.
t first glance, there’s nothing exceptional about it – a modest office
in the corner of Luce Hall. But when Benedict Kiernan, Whitney
Griswold Professor of History, digs out the files – literally thousands
of photocopied pages of Khmer propaganda, records, and diaries – the
place suddenly comes to life. Many undergraduates may not even know
it exists, but Yale’s Genocide Studies Program is instrumental in the
study and analysis of atrocities worldwide. In the case of the Khmer
Rouge in Cambodia, Kiernan, the program’s director, has made
significant contributions to the field. `In 1996, our Cambodian
mission discovered over 100,000 pages of secret police files,’ said
Kiernan. The files included lists of names produced during torture
sessions with execution orders at the bottom signed by Pol Pot.
According to Kiernan, the Yale Genocide Studies Program is a
`research and policy oriented program’ that documents the mass murder
of civilians and tries to prevent recurrences. Affiliates of the
project have produced ten books and 35 working papers since the
Program’s inception. Kiernan himself released a new book last Friday,
Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from
Sparta to Darfur, which incorporated research done using the
Program’s funds.
The organization was founded in 1994 as the `Center for Cambodian
Genocide Studies,’ but Professor Ben Kiernan expanded its mission and
changed its name in 1998. The Program does not have any full time
staff – in this way, it is a kind of extracurricular activity for
faculty and graduate students – but it does count historians,
sociologists, a professor of psychiatry, and `people from comparative
literature, from English, from human rights programs, from genocide
studies programs in the Northeast, [and] political science’ amongst
its members, said Kiernan. Beyond faculty, myriad graduate students
from multiple Yale professional schools, Europe, and South America,
whose research focuses on topics ranging from Native Americans to the
Armenian Massacre, associate themselves with the project. The
Genocide Studies Program also convenes in a weekly seminar in which a
wide range of speakers comment on varied genocide-related topics.
Interestingly, it is also affiliated with The Yale Institute for
Biospheric Studies, Yale’s principal environmental research
organization, which is interested in correlations between genocide
and the environment. In fact, no other Yale research institute has so
global a list of affiliates.
To Kiernan, genocide must be considered in both the short and long
term. In the long term, it’s a familiar list: war, poverty, political
and economic destabilization. In the short term, the individual
decisions and goals of political groups, as well as blind
hatred – usually directed against an ethnic group – tend to unleash the
pent-up forces of economic and societal deprivation. Kiernan firmly
ruled out popularly-held beliefs about religious, political, or
ideological tendencies as the roots of genocide: `Every movement has
its bad apples.’
Kiernan makes it clear that the Program’s research has helped the
academic community realize that no single policy will stop genocide.
The prospective killers must be persuaded that the costs of their
crimes outweigh the perceived benefits. Sometimes, such as in Rwanda
and Kosovo, killers are beyond reason – a common ailment amongst the
typical mass-murderer – and military force is necessary to put and end
to the atrocities. However, Kiernan was careful to mention that such
action should only be a last resort, for often military force can
spawn more problems than it solves. For instance, American military
intervention in Cambodia in the ’60s is believed to have been
instrumental in propelling the Khmer Rouge to power. The Khmer Rouge,
of course, went on to kill somewhere between one and three million
Cambodians. Thus, more focused and precise measures, such as economic
sanctions, become a preferable alternative if there are signs that
the perpetrators value money over life. Finally, prosecution through
criminal proceedings `makes new information available and deters
future perpetrators,’ explains Kiernan.
Despite the many political debates surrounding genocide today, the
Program’s fellows do not lobby or advocate specific policies in
conjunction with their research. The Program approaches genocide as
an historical, sociological, political, and scientific problem;
policymaking implications are rarely considered. As for improving
public knowledge about past atrocities not always understood as
genocide, the GSP puts out myriad publications and has established
missions in countries overseas with the goal of unearthing documents
related to genocide. For instance, the GSP mission in Cambodia not
only collected, translated, and published secret police documents,
but was also set up in such a way that it now stands alone as an
independent institution.
Such fostering of permanent growth in genocide studies may be the
Program’s greatest contribution. According to Laura Saldivia, LAW
’10, a Law School doctoral student who was once a fellow for the GSP,
the Program has helped `to bring together a remarkable diversity of
scholars that has helped to entrench the discussion within the
scholarly community’ about an issue that was, until the mid-1990s,
practically ignored in academia. Such an accomplishment is, without
doubt, rare in any field.
At first glance, there’s nothing exceptional about it – a modest office
in the corner of Luce Hall. But when Benedict Kiernan, Whitney
Griswold Professor of History, digs out the files – literally thousands
of photocopied pages of Khmer propaganda, records, and diaries – the
place suddenly comes to life. Many undergraduates may not even know
it exists, but Yale’s Genocide Studies Program is instrumental in the
study and analysis of atrocities worldwide. In the case of the Khmer
Rouge in Cambodia, Kiernan, the program’s director, has made
significant contributions to the field. `In 1996, our Cambodian
mission discovered over 100,000 pages of secret police files,’ said
Kiernan. The files included lists of names produced during torture
sessions with execution orders at the bottom signed by Pol Pot.
According to Kiernan, the Yale Genocide Studies Program is a
`research and policy oriented program’ that documents the mass murder
of civilians and tries to prevent recurrences. Affiliates of the
project have produced ten books and 35 working papers since the
Program’s inception. Kiernan himself released a new book last Friday,
Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from
Sparta to Darfur, which incorporated research done using the
Program’s funds.
The organization was founded in 1994 as the `Center for Cambodian
Genocide Studies,’ but Professor Ben Kiernan expanded its mission and
changed its name in 1998. The Program does not have any full time
staff – in this way, it is a kind of extracurricular activity for
faculty and graduate students – but it does count historians,
sociologists, a professor of psychiatry, and `people from comparative
literature, from English, from human rights programs, from genocide
studies programs in the Northeast, [and] political science’ amongst
its members, said Kiernan. Beyond faculty, myriad graduate students
from multiple Yale professional schools, Europe, and South America,
whose research focuses on topics ranging from Native Americans to the
Armenian Massacre, associate themselves with the project. The
Genocide Studies Program also convenes in a weekly seminar in which a
wide range of speakers comment on varied genocide-related topics.
Interestingly, it is also affiliated with The Yale Institute for
Biospheric Studies, Yale’s principal environmental research
organization, which is interested in correlations between genocide
and the environment. In fact, no other Yale research institute has so
global a list of affiliates.
To Kiernan, genocide must be considered in both the short and long
term. In the long term, it’s a familiar list: war, poverty, political
and economic destabilization. In the short term, the individual
decisions and goals of political groups, as well as blind
hatred – usually directed against an ethnic group – tend to unleash the
pent-up forces of economic and societal deprivation. Kiernan firmly
ruled out popularly-held beliefs about religious, political, or
ideological tendencies as the roots of genocide: `Every movement has
its bad apples.’
Kiernan makes it clear that the Program’s research has helped the
academic community realize that no single policy will stop genocide.
The prospective killers must be persuaded that the costs of their
crimes outweigh the perceived benefits. Sometimes, such as in Rwanda
and Kosovo, killers are beyond reason – a common ailment amongst the
typical mass-murderer – and military force is necessary to put and end
to the atrocities. However, Kiernan was careful to mention that such
action should only be a last resort, for often military force can
spawn more problems than it solves. For instance, American military
intervention in Cambodia in the ’60s is believed to have been
instrumental in propelling the Khmer Rouge to power. The Khmer Rouge,
of course, went on to kill somewhere between one and three million
Cambodians. Thus, more focused and precise measures, such as economic
sanctions, become a preferable alternative if there are signs that
the perpetrators value money over life. Finally, prosecution through
criminal proceedings `makes new information available and deters
future perpetrators,’ explains Kiernan.
Despite the many political debates surrounding genocide today, the
Program’s fellows do not lobby or advocate specific policies in
conjunction with their research. The Program approaches genocide as
an historical, sociological, political, and scientific problem;
policymaking implications are rarely considered. As for improving
public knowledge about past atrocities not always understood as
genocide, the GSP puts out myriad publications and has established
missions in countries overseas with the goal of unearthing documents
related to genocide. For instance, the GSP mission in Cambodia not
only collected, translated, and published secret police documents,
but was also set up in such a way that it now stands alone as an
independent institution.
Such fostering of permanent growth in genocide studies may be the
Program’s greatest contribution. According to Laura Saldivia, LAW
’10, a Law School doctoral student who was once a fellow for the GSP,
the Program has helped `to bring together a remarkable diversity of
scholars that has helped to entrench the discussion within the
scholarly community’ about an issue that was, until the mid-1990s,
practically ignored in academia. Such an accomplishment is, without
doubt, rare in any field.
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