Event
SG - Genocide (an urgent key-concept)
Genocide as a concept emerged from the horrors of the Holocaust and is a precisely and narrowly defined term in international law. In history and other disciplines, the story is more complicated and the concept more contested.
Dr. Iva Vukušić, a historian who worked on investigations and participated in trials in Bosnia and Herzegovina and The Hague, will discuss this concept also in light of recent discussions about Ukraine, Israel and Palestine. The talk will include a brief history of the concept, the critiques of it, and what international courts in The Hague do to address cases of alleged genocide. Given how often this concept is abused for political purposes, it is key we understand what it means.
About series Islands, Race, Genocide
3 key-concepts
In this series we take a thorough look at three key-concepts from three different scientific schools, fields or disciplines. A key-concept lies at the core of such a scientific habitat. How do you sharply define such a concept? How strong is the concept? Did it change in time? And also, how to delimit it from the connotations and associations in daily life and other societal practices? The series is about a new, rising key-concept: Islands; about an evanescing concept in Biology: Race; and about an urgent concept: Genocide.
About Iva Vukušić
Dr. Iva Vukušić is an Assistant Professor in International History at Utrecht University, and a Visiting Research Fellow at the Department of War Studies, King's College London. She is a historian and a genocide scholar, and her work is on irregular armed groups, genocide, mass violence and transitional justice, especially criminal accountability. Before coming to The Hague in 2009, she spent three years in Sarajevo, where she worked as a researcher and analyst at the Special Department for War Crimes at the Office of the Prosecutor. She is a frequent contributor to public debates on war crimes and accountability, and has appeared on CNN and BBC; in the New York Times, the Guardian, Le Monde, Liberation, Der Spiegel, de Volkskrant, NRC, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, etc. Her first book Serbian Paramilitaries and the Breakup of Yugoslavia: State Connections and Patterns of Violence was published in 2022 by Routledge and the translation into Croatian was published in 2024. Iva is also one of the editors of the CEU Press series “Perpetrators of Organised Violence: Eastern, Central and South-Eastern Europe”. Most recently, Iva has been providing analysis and advice to different stakeholders on accountability for crimes in Ukraine.