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Among the contexts not covered elsewhere are understudied genocides (e.g. Bangladesh), near-genocides (e.g., Côte d’Ivoire), contested genocides (e.g.,  Argentina), and mass violence against civilians within the context of other conflicts (e.g., Iraq).

Please note that the selection of cases highlighted on the Genocide Studies Program’s web site is not meant to serve as an exhaustive or “official” list of genocides.  Rather, the topics addressed reflect the interests, linguistic capabilities, and research focuses of GSP personnel, which is necessarily limited.  Moreover, it is not necessarily the task of the scholar to make a determination regarding whether or not a given situation must meet a particular set of criteria to qualify as genocide (although some work is devoted to this approach); nor is it necessary for scholars of genocide to determine that a case qualifies as a genocide before engaging in research on it. In short, the cases covered here may implicate issues related to genocide without necessarily reaching the conclusion that genocide did or did not occur in a given case.

GSP Holocaust Trauma Project

Dori Laub, M.D. is a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine and a psychoanalyst in private practice in New Haven, Connecticut. He works primarily with victims of massive psychic trauma and their children. In 1979 he was the co-founder of the Holocaust Survivors’ Film Project Inc., which subsequently became the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale. His work on trauma extended studies on survivors of the “ethnic cleansing” in Bosnia and of other genocides. He has published and lectured extensively on the multifacted impact of the Holocaust on the lives of survivors and that of their children.

Dr. Laub was born in Czernowitz, Romainia in 1937. He obtained his M.D. at the Hadassah Medical School at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel and his MA in Clinical Psychology at the Bar Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel. He is cofounder of the International Study Group for Trauma, Violence and Genocide, which became part of the wide trauma research net in 1998 and he is Deputy Director for Trauma Research at the Yale Genocide Studies Program; click here for the French version of the website.

Dr. Laub has published on the topic of psychic trauma, its knowing, representation and rememberance, in a variety of psychoanalytic journals, and has co-authored a book entitled “Testimony – Crisis of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History” with Professor Shoshanna Felman.

He has helped organize an international collaborative interdisplinary effort at describing the phenomenology, formulating the psychodynamics and qualitatively measuring the characteristics of a hitherto unacknowledged diagnostic entity – the traumatic psychosis. Defining the appropriate categories into which the observed phenomena fit and finding or devising the proper instruments to measure these phenomena, will greatly contribute to the validity and reliability of such a diagnostic entity and to the search for effective treatment strategies to address it.

Dr. Laub’s work can be found at the cite for his “Traumatic Psychosis Video-testimony Research Project.”

video testimony pilot study

of psychiatrically hospitalized holocaust survivors

Principal Investigator: Dori Laub, MD, Deputy Director (Trauma Studies), Genocide Studies Program.

purpose

The purpose of this research is to systematically assess the effects and potential psychotherapeutic benefits of reconstructing traumatic Holocaust experiences. The reconstruction of the history of personal trauma were conducted through the creation of a videotaped testimony and a multi-disciplinary analysis of the testimony. This study addressed two hypotheses:

(1) Is massive psychic trauma related to chronic severe mental illness with psychotic decompensation that leads to either chronic hospitalization or multiple psychiatric hospitalizations?

(2) Does a therapeutic intervention such as video-testimony that helps build a narrative for the traumatic experience and gives it a coherent expression help in alleviating its symptoms and changing its course? May these changes be attributed to direct intervention (through the occurrence of the testimonial event itself), or through indirect intervention (through the impact on treatment planning, involvement with family members or the survivor community, or the knowledge that the videotaped testimony will be made available to others)?

background

A 1993 examination of approximately 5,000 long-term psychiatric inpatients in Israel identified about 900 Holocaust survivors. These patients were not treated as unique: trauma-related illnesses were neglected in diagnosis and decades-long treatment. Evaluation by the Israeli Ministry of Health concluded some 300 of them no longer required inpatient psychiatric hospitalization; specialized hostels (similar to nursing homes) were established on the premises of three psychiatric hospitals. We hypothesize that many of these patients could have avoided lengthy if not life-long psychiatric hospitalizations, had they been able or enabled by their treaters and by society at large to more openly share their severe persecution history. Instead, their traumatic experiences remain encapsulated, causing the survivor to lead a double life: a robot-like semblance to normality with incessant haunting by nightmares and flashbacks. Attention to the particular features of these patients traumatic experiences is of particular importance in the rehabilitation and the re-evaluation of these patients whose initial hospitalization and diagnoses long predate more recent theoretical developments and clinical formulations (e.g., differential diagnosis of PTSD, testimony as therapy).

Phase II of the video-testimony study which is now underway, consists of an in-depth analysis of the videotexts by an interdisciplinary team of experts, in order to define the unique features of the traumatic psychotic disorder these patients most likely suffer from.

the slave labor video-testimony project

The Foundation for “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” has organized an international project to collect 550 video and audio testimonies from former forced and slave laborers in the German “Third Reich.” Ex-laborers from 25 different countries, mostly in Eastern Europe, are being interviewed. The project requested the GSP’s Trauma Project to conduct 20 video-testimonies with Jewish Holocaust Survivors in the United States. The names of these survivors were obtained through the Fortunoff Video Archive and through the Connecticut Child Survivor Organization. After proper preparation, the video-testimonies were filmed on the European PAL format and on the American NTSC format, in parallel with professional audiotaping. The testimonies were all given in English and lasted between two and four hours. All subjects also filled out a symptom checklist PCL-9 for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which will be repeated within a year of their testimony to see whether the testimonial event has brought about possible symptom changes and symptomotology.
 
The twenty video-testimonies, taken in Dr. Laub’s office in New Haven, Connecticut, have all been completed and transcribed and translated into German. The PAL videocassettes were sent to an audio visual lab in Israel to be transferred to an enhanced BETA format.  After that enhancement, they were shipped to Hagen University in Ludenscheid, Germany, which coordinates this international study, along with their translated transcripts and the consent forms, as well as summaries. They were also sent to the Foundation for “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future.” This project has created a substantial database, useful for future historical, psychological and linguistic studies, for which definite funding is needed. 

Common themes or targets of research in genocide studies include: the history of genocide; the factors that contribute to it; the process by which genocide unfolds; the role of different actors within that process, including those of perpetrators, victims, witnesses, bystanders, rescuers and resisters; the role of external third parties who may choose to intervene, permit, prevent, facilitate, or ignore genocide; and the debate over the definition of the term itself.

The Genocide Studies Program has contributed to these discussions in many ways.  GSP Director Ben Kiernan did so in his 2007 book, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (Yale University Press), as did former GSP Fellow Adam Jones in his multi-edition Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction (2006, 2009).

Welcome to the GSP’s Amazon Region genocide case study.

In some regions of the Amazon basin, especially in parts of Brazil, Peru, and Colombia, small ethnolinguistic  groups of forest dwellers are under attack and in some cases threatened with genocide. For instance, according to The Economist (“Trees or Oil,” July 4, 2009): “Though half of Ecuador lies in the Amazon basin, its rainforest is shrinking faster than in neighbouring countries (by 1.67% a year). It has been ravaged by logging, poachers and oil extraction … Native tribes have been uprooted, forced deeper into the forest or have disappeared” (p. 47).

In the left sidebar you will find links to bibliographies and related websites.  

See also Survival International’s photo gallery, “Faces of Genocide.”

Between the ascension of the Nazi regime to power in Germany in 1933 and the defeat of the German army in 1945, over six million civilians perished at the hands of German forces, their military allies, and their civilian associates.   The word “Holocaust,” with Greek roots meaning “destruction of life by fire” and a common translation of the Hebrew word “Shoah,” is nearly universally understood to refer to these events.

The murderous effort rested on an ideology of racial superiority and aspirations of racial “purity.”  Jews were by far the largest component of the victims.  Roma and Sinti (both commonly – but sometimes derogatorily – referred to as “Gypsies”) were also targeted, as were the physically disabled, the mentally disabled, and members of several religious minorities.  Political opponents, as well as Slavic and Russian civilians, were also murdered in large quantities, although whether these mass atrocities constituted part of a genocide is less certain.

The Holocaust unfolded over time.  When the Nazi regime came to power, it was already imbued with an ideology of racial ideology – which happened to comport with its own sense of it political enemies.   It began establishing concentration camps shortly after coming to power.  The regime also systematically discriminated against Jews (and other groups it perceived to be racially inferior) in the economic, political, and civic realms.  November 1938 pogroms known as “Kristallnacht” demonstrated that the German police would tolerate (and, indeed, encourage) violence against Jews and their property.  Once World War II broke out the following year, the German government expanded its concentration camp system, and soon converted them into an infrastructure for mass killing.  Meanwhile, an even greater number of Jews and other civilians would be killed outside of the camps, either through the Nazi SS Einsatzgroppen (mobile paramilitary units) or the actions of Nazi supporters on either side of the front lines in Eastern Europe.

The Holocaust is undoubtedly the seminal event for the field of genocide studies.  Even as scholars examine new and different cases from a variety of perspectives, the foundation of the field lies in effort to understand the organization, behavior, and psychology of different actors  – those who killed, those who stood by, those who perished, those who attempted to help, and those who survived – the Holocaust. Many of the field’s most important scholars continue to address these issues today.

A central component of the Genocide Studies Program has been Dr. Dori Laub’s  study of trauma among Holocaust victims, which makes extensive use of Yale University’s Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies.

videotestimony pilot study of psychiatrically hospitalized holocaust survivors

Principal Investigator: Dori Laub, MD, Deputy Director (Trauma Studies), Genocide Studies Program. For more details please visit the Traumatic Psychosis: A Videotestimony Research Project website.

purpose

The purpose of this research is to systematically assess the effects and potential psychotherapeutic benefits of reconstructing traumatic Holocaust experiences. The reconstruction of the history of personal trauma were conducted through the creation of a videotaped testimony and a multi-disciplinary analysis of the testimony. This study addressed two hypotheses:

1. Is massive psychic trauma related to chronic severe mental illness with psychotic decompensation that leads to either chronic hospitalization or multiple psychiatric hospitalizations?
2. Does a therapeutic intervention such as video testimony that helps build a narrative for the traumatic experience and gives it a coherent expression help in alleviating its symptoms and changing its course? May these changes be attributed to direct intervention (through the occurrence of the testimonial event itself), or through indirect intervention (through the impact on treatment planning, involvement with family members or the survivor community, or the knowledge that the videotaped testimony will be made available to others)?

background

A 1993 examination of approximately 5,000 long-term psychiatric inpatients in Israel identified about 900 Holocaust survivors. These patients were not treated as unique: trauma-related illnesses were neglected in diagnosis and decades-long treatment. Evaluation by the Israeli Ministry of Health concluded some 300 of them no longer required inpatient psychiatric hospitalization; specialized hostels (similar to nursing homes) were established on the premises of three psychiatric hospitals. We hypothesize that many of these patients could have avoided lengthy if not life-long psychiatric hospitalizations, had they been able or enabled by their treaters and by society at large to more openly share their severe persecution history. Instead, their traumatic experiences remain encapsulated, causing the survivor to lead a double life: a robot-like semblance to normality with incessant haunting by nightmares and flashbacks. Attention to the particular features of these patients traumatic experiences is of particular importance in the rehabilitation and the re-evaluation of these patients whose initial hospitalization and diagnoses long predate more recent theoretical developments and clinical formulations (e.g., differential diagnosis of PTSD, testimony as therapy).

Phase II of the videotestimony study which is now underway, consists of an in-depth analysis of the videotexts by an interdisciplinary team of experts, in order to define the unique features of the traumatic psychotic disorder these patients most likely suffer from.

The Slave Labor Video Testimony Project

The Foundation for “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” has organized an international project to collect 550 video and audio testimonies from former forced and slave laborers in the German “Third Reich.”  Ex-laborers from 25 different countries, mostly in Eastern Europe, are being interviewed. The project requested the GSP’s Trauma Project to conduct 20 videotestimonies with Jewish Holocaust Survivors in the United States. The names of these survivors were obtained through the Fortunoff Video Archive and through the Connecticut Child Survivor Organization. After proper preparation, the videotestimonies were filmed on the European PAL format and on the American NTSC format, in parallel with professional audiotaping. The testimonies were all given in English and lasted between two and four hours. All subjects also filled out a symptom checklist PCL-9 for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which will be repeated within a year of their testimony to see whether the testimonial event has brought about possible symptom changes and symptomotology.

The twenty videotestimonies, taken in Dr. Laub’s office in New Haven, Connecticut, have all been completed and transcribed and translated into German. The PAL videocassettes were sent to an audio visual lab in Israel to be transferred to an enhanced BETA format.  After that enhancement, they were shipped to Hagen University in Ludenscheid, Germany, which coordinates this international study, along with their translated transcripts and the consent forms, as well as summaries. They were also sent to the Foundation for “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future.” This project has created a substantial database, useful for future historical, psychological and linguistic studies, for which definite funding is needed.

Dori Laub, Presentations 2005-2011

In the early 1980s, military dictatorships in Guatemala conducted a “scorched-earth” counter-insurgency that included the genocide of five indigenous Mayan groups, including the Maya Ixil. On January 28, 2013, a judge in Guatemala ordered the man who had been the country’s president in 1982-83, General José Efraín Ríos Montt, to face trial for genocide. He is the first former head of state to be tried for genocide in the Americas. His successor as president of Guatemala, General Oscar Mejía, had also been indicted for genocide, but then deemed unfit for trial. On March 19, 2013, the court began hearing the case against Ríos Montt, namely, that he committed genocide against Maya Ixil while he held office between March 1982 and August 1983.

In the left sidebar you will find readings, databases and maps and satellite images pertaining to the genocide in Guatemala.

Scholars can learn many things about genocide from making comparisons across time and space.  Broadly, two strategies exist: examining known instances of genocide (or of mass atrocity that possess some characteristics of genocide) to search for commonalities, or examining a broader spectrum of cases to consider why genocide (or mass atrocity) arose in some instances and not in others.

Much of the work considered in the case-specific case studies contributes implicitly to the comparative genocide project – although, for some scholars, the project of comparing traumatic events like genocide risks reducing intense human experiences to mere data points. As such, not all case-specific work is meant to be comparative, although it may nonetheless contribute to our broader understanding of genocide.

Conversely, when comparative research successfully identifies factors that are present in all (or most) cases, including in a single case where it may not appear prominent and might easily be otherwise overlooked, can help us to understand even one specific genocide.

Amazon Region

CIP Americas Program    
Survival International
Theme: Resistance

This page is still under construction.

In the near future, you will be able to follow the Audio/Visual link on the left menu to access 30 video interviews compiled by Proof: Media for Social Justice with individual rescuers who performed heroic acts of resistance during the Holocaust in Europe, and genocides in Rwanda, Cambodia, Bosnia and Herzegovina.  From their stories, we hope you will learn about the tremendous courage and spirit of resistance that has accompanied genocidal crimes and human rights violations worldwide.

GSP Interdisciplinary Colloquia on Rescuers, 2008 and 2009:

2008 Colloquium:
“Rescuers of Genocide Victims: Research Perspectives for the Future”

2009 GSP-Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics symposium
“Genocide, Rescue and Prevention: Understanding and Fostering Rescue Behavior in the Face of Mass Killing” (May 8, 2009). See the report on this symposium in Bioethics at Yale, 2009-10, pp. 98-101. See the Conference Program and a description of the GSP/Bioethics project here.

GSP-sponsored research on Rescuers:

Mette Bastholm Jensen, PhD dissertation, Solidarity in Action: A Comparative Study of Rescue Efforts in Nazi-occupied Denmark and the Netherlands, Yale University, Department of Sociology, 2007.

“Courage of ordinary heroes on show to stop genocide,” The Australian, July 21, 2012.

Historical Analyses of Rescue

“The Rescue of Norwegian Jews,” by Ragnar Ulstein (1985)

New Publications on Rescue Behavior

Narratives of Rescue

Malka Czismadia (Hungary)
André Trocme (France)
Thérèse Nyirabayovu (Rwanda)

Post-Conflict Research Centre’s (Bosnia) Ordinary Heroes project

Truth commissions offer a prospect of facilitating national and personal reconciliation while potentially complementing efforts to promote justice.  However, they might also serve as a post-conflict battleground of narrative construction and unwanted compromise.

Truth commissions came to prominence following the fall of the military regimes in Chile and Argentina, which may activists and scholars in the region consider to have pursued genocidal policies against dissidents.  The commissions were meant to help relatives of victims of those regimes – whether missing or deceased – attain closure by uncovering the specific fate of those victims.  They also served to publicize the misdoings of those regimes, and thereby increase pressure for retribution of some sort against them.

Guatemala’s 1995 Historical Clarification Commission was created in 1994 as part of the peace process between the government and the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG) rebels. The Commission’s report conveyed evidence of the systematic, targeted slaughter of ethnic Mayans – in short, genocide.  The experience of the commission also illustrates both the power and limitations truth commissions face:  For many years, the government of Guatemala essentially ignored the CEH’s final report (which was translated into English through an effort supported by the GSP), allowing individuals named in the report to live and even hold office with impunity, while ignoring the report’s calls for reparations to victim groups.  Yet, in 2013, the report’s findings served as one of the bases for a case – and conviction – of genocide against General Rios Montt, which became the first instance of a national court reaching a guilty verdict on a charge of genocide against a former head of state.

Welcome to the Yale East Timor Project, since 2000 a component of the Genocide Studies Program.

Indonesia’s military dictatorship invaded the small territory of East Timor (then Portuguese Timor) in December 1975. Up to a fifth of the East Timorese population perished during Indonesia’s 24-year occupation (1975-1999), a similar proportion to the Cambodians who died under the Khmer Rouge regime of Pol Pot (1975-1979). As Indonesian forces finally left the territory in 1999, they massacred over a thousand civilians and burned down eighty percent of the buildings in the country.

In the left sidebar you will find research products of the Yale East Timor Project.

UN-sponsored Truth Commission Verdict on East Timor: “Extermination as a Crime Against Humanity”

Full Report of the Truth Commission                   

US Role