Please join us for the Raymond H. Kevorkian Annual Armenian Genocide Remembrance Lecture. This event will be held in person and virtually.
In-person: 6275 Bunche Hall, UCLA | Virtual: RSVP via bit.ly/MAH04-21-23
Australian historian and student of genocides, Professor Dirk Moses, recently published a bold and provocative challenge to political and military leaders, as well as the field of genocide studies — The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression (Cambridge University Press, 2021) — which questions the utility of the concept of genocide, analyzes its harmful effects, and proposes that an alternative concept, permanent security, be used as a more inclusive and effective analytic for crime against civilians. Genocide leaves too much out, for example, aerial bombing, and lets states, notably Western countries, off the hook by allowing arguments made from military necessity. Professor Ron Suny, emeritus of the University of Chicago and the University of Michigan — and author of a major study of the massacres and deportations committed by the Ottoman Turks in 1915, “They Can Live in the Desert But Nowhere Else”: A History of the Armenian Genocide (Princeton University Press, 2015) — uses the insights of Moses’ work to take a fresh look at the Armenian tragedy and how it provides another lens to look at the concept of genocide.