Jacques Semelin is Professor of Political Science at Sciences Po Paris (Center for International Research and Studies), author of Purify and Destroy, Columbia UP (2007), a comparative and interdisciplinary analysis of 3 cases: the Shoah, Rwanda and Bosnia. He shows how it is possible to compare cases while respecting their specificity. Jacques Sémelin’s approach to the study of mass violence is multidisciplinary, relying not only on contemporary history but also on social psychology and political science.
Based on the seminal distinction between massacre and genocide, this conference will identify the main steps of a general process of destruction, both rational and irrational, made of a "delusional rationality". It will describe a dynamic structural model with, at its core, the matrix of a social imaginaire which, according to its fears, resentments and utopias, shapes the social body, razing and eliminating “the enemy”. It will look at the different variable that can lead to a genocidal process, trying to explain how ordinary people can become perpetrators.
Jacques Sémelin is also Editor in Chief of the Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence. This project is based on a strong opposition to the political instrumentalization of the word “genocide” today, urging genocide research to take some distance with this legal and normative definition to allow it to emerge as a discipline of its own right in the field of social sciences.
The event will be followed by a reception and a distribution of the first issue of the ICCSN journal: “Issues of International Criminal Justice”. |
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