Resonant Violence: Affect, Memory, and Activism in Post-Genocide Societies

By Kerry Whigham

From the Holocaust in Europe to the military dictatorships of Latin America to the enduring violence of settler colonialism around the world, genocide has been a defining experience of far too many societies. In many cases, the damaging legacies of genocide lead to continued violence and social divisions for decades. In others, however, creative responses to this identity-based violence emerge from the grassroots, contributing to widespread social and political transformation. Resonant Violence explores both the enduring impacts of genocidal violence and the varied ways in which states and grassroots collectives respond to and transform this violence through memory practices and grassroots activism. By calling upon lessons from Germany, Poland, Argentina, and the Indigenous United States, Resonant Violence demonstrates how ordinary individuals come together to engage with a violent past to pave the way for a less violent future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Feb 11, 2022
• ISBN: 9781978825574

Book preview

Resonant Violence

Genocide, Political Violence, Human Rights Series

EDITED BY ALEXANDER LABAN HINTON AND NELA NAVARRO

Nanci Adler, ed., Understanding the Age of Transitional Justice: Crimes, Courts, Commissions, and Chronicling

Alan W. Clarke, Rendition to Torture

Alison Crosby and M. Brinton Lykes, Beyond Repair? Mayan Women’s Protagonism in the Aftermath of Genocidal Harm

Lawrence Davidson, Cultural Genocide

Daniel Feierstein, Genocide as Social Practice: Reorganizing Society under the Nazis and Argentina’s Military Juntas

Joseph P. Feldman, Memories before the State: Postwar Peru and the Place of Memory, Tolerance, and Social Inclusion

Alexander Laban Hinton, ed., Transitional Justice: Global Mechanisms and Local Realities after Genocide and Mass Violence

Alexander Laban Hinton, Thomas La Pointe, and Douglas Irvin-Erickson, eds., Hidden Genocides: Power, Knowledge, Memory

Douglas A. Kammen, Three Centuries of Conflict in East Timor

Eyal Mayroz, Reluctant Interveners: America’s Failed Responses to Genocide from Bosnia to Darfur

Pyong Gap Min, Korean Comfort Women: Military Brothels, Brutality, and the Redress Movement

Walter Richmond, The Circassian Genocide

S. Garnett Russell, Becoming Rwandan: Education, Reconciliation, and the Making of a Post-Genocide Citizen

Victoria Sanford, Katerina Stefatos, and Cecilia M. Salvi, eds., Gender Violence in Peace and War: States of Complicity

Irina Silber, Everyday Revolutionaries: Gender, Violence, and Disillusionment in Postwar El Salvador

Samuel Totten and Rafiki Ubaldo, eds., We Cannot Forget: Interviews with Survivors of the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda

Eva van Roekel, Phenomenal Justice: Violence and Morality in Argentina

Anton Weiss-Wendt, A Rhetorical Crime: Genocide in the Geopolitical Discourse of the Cold War

Kerry Whigham, Resonant Violence: Affect, Memory, and Activism in Post-Genocide Societies

Timothy Williams, The Complexity of Evil: Perpetration and Genocide

Ronnie Yimsut, Facing the Khmer Rouge: A Cambodian Journey

Natasha Zaretsky, Acts of Repair: Justice, Truth, and the Politics of Memory in Argentina

Resonant Violence

AFFECT, MEMORY, AND ACTIVISM IN POST-GENOCIDE SOCIETIES

KERRY WHIGHAM

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Whigham, Kerry, author.

Title: Resonant violence: affect, memory, and activism in post-genocide societies / Kerry Whigham.

Description: New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, [2022] | Series: Genocide, political violence, human rights | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021016529 | ISBN 9781978825550 (paperback; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781978825567 (hardback; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781978825574 (epub) | ISBN 9781978825581 (mobi) | ISBN 9781978825598 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Genocide—Social aspects. | Genocide—Political aspects. | Violence. | Collective memory.

Classification: LCC HV6322.7 .W495 2022 | DDC 304.6/63—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021016529

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2022 by Kerry Whigham

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

References to internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Rutgers University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

Manufactured in the United States of America

Pentru Tibi, sufletul meu

CONTENTS

Introduction: The Abuse Lives in Our Blood

1       Resonant Violence: The Felt Unfelt of Genocide and Its Aftermath

2       Building Memory: Practices of Memorialization in Post-Holocaust Berlin

3       Filling the Absence: Embodied Engagements with Former Sites of Atrocity

4       Embodied Justice: H.I.J.O.S., Practices of Trans-Action, and Biopoetics in Post-Dictatorship Argentina

5       Occupying Space, Amplifying Affect: The American Indian Occupation of Alcatraz Island

Conclusion: Out of the Desert

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Resonant Violence

Introduction

THE ABUSE LIVES IN OUR BLOOD

LATE IN THE evening of Sunday, November 10, 2016, amidst freezing temperatures, police officers from the Morton County Sheriff’s Department in North Dakota shot water cannons at the activists gathering on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. This group of demonstrators, who referred to themselves as water protectors, had grown in numbers over several months since the demonstrations began in August 2016. The water protectors—comprising Native Americans from the Standing Rock Sioux, members of other Native tribes, and a number of non-Native allies—occupied the land to block the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), the 1,170-mile conduit meant to carry crude oil from North Dakota to Illinois. DAPL passes directly north of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, through unceded Sioux territory.

The water protectors asserted that they were protecting not only themselves, but millions of non-Indigenous people whose water supply would be affected by DAPL. Their claims are supported by the fact that the original plans for DAPL to pass just north of Bismarck, North Dakota, were scrapped out of fear that the capital city’s water supply would be contaminated. Aside from potentially polluting local waters for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations, construction of DAPL also disrupted traditional burial grounds of the Sioux, destroying this sacred land in September 2016. Throughout the process, both the federal government and Energy Transfer Partners, the Fortune 500 energy company behind the construction of DAPL, failed in their responsibility to obtain free, prior, and informed consent, as mandated by an array of international mechanisms.¹ The activists were met with extreme force by local police, who used a range of ruthless tactics to break up the demonstrations, including attack dogs, tear gas, water cannons, and rubber bullets.

One video posted on the New York Times’s website shows police firing water cannons at the demonstrators on November 20, 2016. The police are dressed in full riot gear. As the water cannons fire, a woman screams over the torrent: We’re not animals! We’re not animals! We’re human beings! We have honor and we have courage!² The temperature outside was reported to be around 23 degrees Fahrenheit (–5 degrees Celsius). A medical official on the scene reported that the water protectors were exhibiting signs of hypothermia. Dave Archambault II, chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux, said of the attack, The use of water in freezing temperatures just goes to show that they’re being more aggressive and they’re actually trying to hurt people. This is far more threatening to human life than any other time of confrontation with law enforcement.³

In a cruelly ironic twist, this violence toward the water protectors came just four days before Thanksgiving, the U.S. national holiday that celebrates the settler colonists of Plymouth, Massachusetts, and their plentiful harvest of 1621—a feat they could only accomplish with the help of the local Indigenous population, who taught them how to cultivate crops in the new, unfamiliar environment. This kindness was reciprocated with centuries of genocidal policies and practices that would decimate Native populations across the country. Those Indigenous Peoples who were not killed went on to face the seemingly insurmountable odds of forced removal, involuntary assimilation, and endless discriminatory policies that would make Native life a nightmare. The enduring reality of that violence is evident in the construction of DAPL, along with the police and governmental response to those activists working to stop it.

And yet, the visibility of the #NoDAPL demonstrations at Standing Rock is an exception to the usual invisibility of Native American groups and their political interests in the public sphere. The violence against American Indians⁴ in the United States is usually perceived by non-Indigenous people as history, not as current events. In 2009, for example, President Barack Obama signed Public Law 111–118, the 2009 Defense Appropriations Act, which also included an official apology to Native Americans. The apology recognizes that there have been years of official depredations, ill-conceived policies, and the breaking of covenants by the Federal Government regarding Indian tribes. It goes on to state that the United States apologizes on behalf of the people of the United States to all Native Peoples for the many instances of violence, maltreatment, and neglect inflicted on Native Peoples by citizens of the United States. The apology ends with an official disclaimer stating that nothing in the apology authorizes or supports any claim against the United States.⁵ In other words, the apology is not an admission of guilt worthy of legal suit and formal reparations.

The law frames the violence against Native Peoples squarely in the past, just as it bars against claims for restitution in the present. Upon signing the apology, Obama reiterated the pastness of the violence in his public remarks:

These cases serve as a reminder, passed by both parties in Congress, finally recognizing the sad and painful chapters in our shared history—a history too often marred by broken promises and grave injustices against the First Americans. It’s a resolution I fully supported—recognizing that no statement can undo the damage that was done; what it can do is help reaffirm the principles that should guide our future. It’s only by heeding the lessons of our history that we can move forward.⁶

This 2009 statement, which was the first time a U.S. president apologized to all Native Peoples for the violence they experienced, was a meaningful step in the process of the United States dealing with its own genocidal past. Still, Obama’s statement places the violence against Native Peoples wholly within the past, obscuring all the ways this violence continues today, including the issues surrounding the anti-pipeline demonstrations at Standing Rock.

I begin with the story of Standing Rock and the Dakota Access Pipeline to introduce a central argument of this book: genocidal violence entails a force that far exceeds the horror of mass killing. It also manifests in any number of other forms of violence that continue long after mass killing comes to an end. This durable, affective force is all the more dangerous because of its relative invisibility, and it must be negotiated and transformed for a society to have truly confronted the systematic degradation of a group’s human rights—and to prevent the abrogation of those rights in the future. In this book, I argue for a new way of thinking about the impact of genocidal violence and how it shapes physical bodies and interpersonal relationships. By connecting the physical and psychological language of trauma, the social concept of collective memory, the embodied transmission of knowledge and power explained through performance studies theory, and the field of affect theory, this book develops a concept of violence that understands it as a phenomenon that is both physical and affective. It articulates a way of thinking about the violence of genocidal regimes, frames that violence as a process rather than as an event, characterizes the damage caused by this violence as affective rather than merely physical or psychological, and analyzes the various ways this violence performs upon a population, as well as how populations perform upon this violence. It undertakes this project to provide a broader framework for those working on the frontlines of developing policy (in governmental settings) and activist practices (in civil society settings) that aim to prevent the recurrence of genocide and other mass atrocities in the present and future. To do so, I propose a theory of resonant violence.

Resonant violence is the term I use to describe the affective energy of large-scale violence that both predicates the mass killing of groups and continues to resonate within individuals and communities even after that killing stops. This force undergoes various stages of amplification and intensification, until or unless it is transformed, or, to continue the sonic metaphor, transduced through acts that allow this energy to resonate differently. Although genocide is traditionally understood, especially to the layperson, as the attempted physical annihilation of a targeted identity group, this conception highlights only the most visible aspects of genocide. In fact, the murder of a group is only part of the violence of genocide. This physical component is both preceded and succeeded by an affective violence, which pervades an entire society and has any number of effects, including but not limited to the physical act of murder. In actuality, the attempt to destroy an entire group physically through mass murder cannot occur until and unless this affective violence is firmly established within a society.

Both the appropriation of Native land and the police response to activist dissent at Standing Rock are concrete examples of resonant violence in action. Concomitant to the tendency for politicians to frame identity-based violence toward Indigenous communities as history, as demonstrated in Obama’s apology and accompanying statement, there may be a tendency to view the construction of DAPL and the targeting of water protectors as an ad hoc occurrence. In reality, it is a clear example of what performance studies scholar Diana Taylor calls a scenario: a paradigmatic setup that plays itself out again and again through history—a script with the same players reenacting the same encounter, and all too often with the same results.⁷ Standing Rock is nothing new. It is the scenario of conquest and colonization replaying itself once again. The colonizer takes the land of the Indigenous group. The Indigenous group resists. And the colonizer rains down on them with the full force of law and arms to tamper that resistance. The echoes of past genocidal violence ring clearly. It re-sounds. It resonates.

To illustrate further what I mean by resonant violence, I offer another example from perhaps the most widely known of the cases with which this book engages. Although Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist party rose to power in 1933, it was not until nine years later that the first death camps began to operate. Today, many historians agree that when Hitler was elected chancellor in 1933, he was not yet conceiving of the total annihilation of European Jewry, but at most their removal from the country.⁸ Had Hitler tried to completely destroy all German Jews from the beginning, in all likelihood he would have faced much greater resistance. We can assume this because Hitler’s first major anti-Jewish act as chancellor took place in April 1933, when he announced a national boycott of Jewish businesses. Both international and domestic resistance to the boycott was so strong that it was cancelled after just one day.⁹ Bit by bit, however, the Nazis began to chip away at public attitudes toward Jews, using the power of affect. First, Nazis built upon histories of antisemitism that already existed.¹⁰ Because antisemitic feelings were often latent in Germany, a country where Jews were well assimilated into the general population, especially in urban settings,¹¹ Nazis instrumentalized fear and insecurity, taking special advantage of the fact that Germany was facing a continued economic depression after the First World War, in order to displace emotions of dissatisfaction and social instability on the Jewish population. Through political discourse, Nazi leaders scapegoated Jews for past defeats, blaming enlisted Jews for betraying their fellow soldiers in combat and for orchestrating the catastrophic framework for the Treaty of Versailles.¹²

Slowly, the Nazis began to introduce legislation targeting Jews. First, they withdrew Jewish employment opportunities, excluding Jews from the civil service, prohibiting Jewish editors of German newspapers, and disallowing Jewish doctors and dentists from receiving public insurance funds. These measures were easier to sell to the German public because unemployment was high, and they allowed for the appearance of more job opportunities for non-Jewish Germans. I say the appearance of more opportunities because, in reality, less than 1 percent of the German population was Jewish, even if Nazi rhetoric depicted Jewish people as ubiquitous. Bit by bit, the Nazis unveiled more insidious legislation, including the Nuremberg laws of 1935, which further restricted the daily lives of German Jews and prohibited marriages between Jews and non-Jews. According to historian Marion A. Kaplan, the incremental nature of all these changes allowed both Jews and non-Jews to adapt to their roles by showing how abuse, insidiously and incrementally, became ‘normal’ to some and familiar to all.¹³ In the Nazis’ ideal scenario, this legislation was intended to make Jews emigrate en masse. But as Germany invaded and annexed surrounding countries, including Poland, which had a population of around three million Jews, its Jewish population grew along with its borders, and the Nazis had to come up with another solution. Even then, they did not plan on the physical annihilation of Jews. Instead, they sought other modes of relocation, including one plan to send all Jews to Madagascar. Only when these plans became infeasible did the Nazis develop their Final Solution to the Jewish Problem—the group’s complete destruction. Reaching this decision, however, was a gradual process that required years of policies and actions to shape a society that would accept genocide as a viable option.

When World War II ended and the Nazis were defeated by Allied forces, the systematic physical killing of Jewish victims in Nazi death camps and on the Eastern Front ended. The affective violence and antisemitism that allowed for that killing to occur in the first place, however, did not disappear. Survivors were not only forced to deal with the enduring trauma of the harms they and their loved ones experienced; they also confronted economic and social violence as they worked to rebuild their lives, along with the continued threat of physical violence for some, as pogroms and other forms of identity-based violence continued in places like Poland even decades after WWII ended. Indeed, this affective violence is still present, as is evident in the recent growth of far-right nationalist groups in Europe and around the world who invoke antisemitic tropes to champion their political agendas. As I will explain, affect has a long half-life. It can resonate across time and bodies, continuing its work for many years, decades, or even centuries.

Resonant violence, then, is not only the affective energy that justifies genocidal violence, but is also this residual, felt aspect of violence, which continues to perform long after the initial genocide or physically violent act. In her influential treatise on the connection between trauma and affect, An Archive of Feelings, Ann Cvetkovich writes about the force field around trauma, the low-level ‘insidious’ way that it continues to make itself felt even at a remove from the experience itself.¹⁴ Cvetkovich’s description of a force field paints the picture of some sort of affective membrane that separates the individual from experiencing the world because of a past traumatic event. This may be a good metaphor for thinking about individual trauma and how that trauma can exclude the traumatized individual from fully experiencing the world around them. Resonant violence, however, is the cause and product of a social violence, experienced by society as a whole. It suffuses an entire space, moving within and among bodies, continuing to perform. It does not limit experience with the world; it mediates it. Although resonant violence most directly and negatively impacts victimized groups, it mediates the experience of all other groups of a society as well—perpetrators, bystanders, resisters, and collaborators alike. To be clear, this is not to equate the way that each of these groups encounters resonant violence, as the experience of the victim and the perpetrator are not at all analogous. For resonant violence to be transformed, however, all those within a community must confront how they are impacted by resonant violence, whether as its beneficiary or its target. In this way we can think of resonant violence as what Raymond Williams calls a structure of feeling. Williams develops the concept of structures of feeling to describe the pre-emergent and emergent social forms and structures that, even when they are not fully understood or recognized, exert palpable pressures and set effective limits on experience and on action.¹⁵ Resonant violence is a structure of feeling; it is the affective force that circulates within a society, motivating and allowing for the perpetration of identity-based violence. It is also the felt social experience of that violence—the aspect of identity-based violence that extends beyond physical harm and death, manifesting in other, more obscured forms, which are, as Williams says, often not yet recognized as social, but taken to be private, idiosyncratic, and even isolating.¹⁶

Many existing frameworks for genocide prevention acknowledge the existence of some force like resonant violence, though without codifying it in the way I do here. As genocide studies scholar and social psychologist James Waller points out in his book, Confronting Evil: Engaging Our Responsibility to Prevent Genocide,¹⁷ a number of thorough and credible risk assessment models exist for predicting when a society is at risk for mass atrocity,¹⁸ including the United Nation’s Framework of Analysis for Atrocity Crimes,¹⁹ the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Early Warning Project,²⁰ and Australia National University’s Atrocity Forecasting Project,²¹ to name a few. These models compile predominantly quantitative data from past instances of mass violence to articulate an array of specific factors that put a society at risk for genocide and mass killing. These factors involve analyses of government type, strength of institutions, economic conditions, and levels of social fragmentation. Because of these risk assessment models, the international community has a fairly clear view of when a society is at risk for atrocity. The problem, of course, is that preventing atrocity also requires political will, and that is much harder to develop. Furthermore, many people still see mass atrocity prevention as synonymous with military intervention in the midst of crisis. In fact, long-term atrocity prevention does not involve military intervention, at all. Rather, it focuses on assessing the structural risk factors that exist within a society and mitigating those risks through social and political action, thus preventing a situation from escalating to the point of mass killing.

Risk assessment models vary to some degree on what risk factors are most predictive of risk for genocide, but there is one risk factor that appears in a number of these models. One strong indicator that a society is at risk for atrocity is if it has a history of genocide or atrocity in its recent past. Political scientist Barbara Harff goes as far as to say that prior genocide or politicide makes a country three times more likely to experience another episode of mass atrocity.²² If there is general agreement on genocidal history as a risk factor for future genocides, this raises one big question: is a country with a history of genocide somehow doomed to repeat the violence of the past? The answer, of course, is no. There are many instances where societies with a history of genocide have avoided its recurrence. Consequently, conflict history alone is not a sufficient variable for measuring the risk of atrocity in a society. In truth, countries with a history of atrocity are at risk especially when they do not take measures to confront the underlying structural issues that allowed such violence to occur in the first place.²³ It is not, then, the past genocide that puts a society at risk, but its refusal to confront the initial causes and enduring effects of that violence. In other words, when a society does not face the resonant violence that led to and was generated by genocide, then that society remains at risk for the return of such violence in the future. If a society only sees genocidal violence as the mass killing of groups, it appears to have been dealt with when that killing stops. But genocidal violence also has an affective force, which not only shapes interpersonal relationships within a society, but also leads to the institutionalization of societal structures that can perpetuate or lead to new forms of social, institutional, or economic violence. These structures signify risk for mass atrocity; they debilitate a society’s capacity to manage difference and weaken the structures or institutions that may be in place to protect the rights of vulnerable groups. Without engaging with all forms that large-scale identity-based violence can take, along with the affective forces that allowed for it in the first place, the structures remain in place for the return of the more visible, physical violence that one typically associates with genocide.

Resonant violence is a detrimental and damaging force. If not dealt with, it will continue to perform its work, often in subtle and insidious ways. The resonant violence of the Holocaust, for instance, contributed to insufficient efforts to punish Nazi war criminals in post-war Germany. It led to the mischaracterization of Jewish victims as anti-fascist fighters behind the Iron Curtain. It allowed for further pogroms in the late 1940s and the 1950s in Poland against Jewish people who survived the Holocaust. Survivors who were forced to emigrate with only a few suitcases had to start over in new countries, often without knowing the local language and with little financial means. This is also resonant violence: the initial affective violence that continues to resonate far into the future through its ability to impact action and the ways people engage with the world. This book seeks to clarify the ways this violence functions, but it more crucially illuminates the ways that individuals come together to respond to and transform resonant violence. There are many fields that provide a framework for explaining resonant violence, but I argue that any examination of the lasting impacts of genocidal violence that does not consider the role of affect falls short of fully comprehending the way genocide operates.

A MISSING APPROACH

To understand what affect theory has to offer for understanding genocidal violence, let us return to the story of the water protectors at Standing Rock. Several fields provide a lens through which we can view this story. Within the framework of genocide studies, for example, we could analyze the activism of the water protectors and the state resistance they faced as part and parcel of the continuing project of settler colonial genocide. For many years, the definition of genocide was perhaps the most debated question in the field of genocide studies,²⁴ so it seems necessary that, before moving forward, I explicate the definition I use for the purposes of this book. I take my definition of genocide from Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term in 1944 in his Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. He defines genocide as

a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be the disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups. Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group.²⁵

I use Lemkin’s definition, rather than the legal definition established in the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, for several reasons. First, due to an array of political and historical obstacles, the UN definition fails to recognize certain identity groups, including political groups, as an entity that can experience genocidal violence.²⁶ By using Lemkin’s definition, the ideas of this book also apply to the violence of perpetrator regimes in places like Latin America and Cambodia, for example, where a large proportion of state violence was directed against political subversives, as defined by the perpetrator regimes. Furthermore, Lemkin’s definition highlights the numerous ways in which a group can be destroyed that do not involve killing or other physical violence at all; for instance, he cites the prohibition of cultural practices and language, as well as economic restrictions, as potentially genocidal.

Today, genocide is one of three international crimes that comprise the larger category of mass atrocity. The three legally defined atrocity crimes are genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. Ethnic cleansing is often included under this umbrella, although there is no official, legal definition for this term. In recent years, the broader term mass atrocity is often used to describe these crimes that involve large-scale human rights violations for a number of reasons.²⁷ For now, I will say that I alternate between the two terms throughout the book, and, in my view, all the cases I detail meet both definitions, though they may not meet the legal definition for genocide.

Related to Standing Rock, a broader definition of genocide is key to examining the genocidal characteristics of settler colonialism. The United States—like Australia, Canada, Israel, New Zealand, and South Africa, among others—is a settler colonial society, meaning that the European colonists and their descendants who currently reside in these states do so because they have taken the land and resources of its former inhabitants. Whereas most genocides are perceived as having a beginning and an end, settler colonialism represents an ongoing act of violence against Indigenous populations, as its victims continue to be dispossessed of their lands.²⁸ Given that Indigeneity, by definition, refers to a certain connectedness to land, this perpetual dispossession represents a permanent effort to sever Indigenous people from their lands, thus destroying the connection between Native people and their ancestral territory and, consequently, disrupting the principle relationship that defines an Indigenous identity. As genocide studies scholar Patrick Wolfe explains, the settler colonial project is motivated by a logic of elimination that, in fact, has no end point, as settler colonists have no intent to return the land they have taken.²⁹ Within this framework, the construction of DAPL through Indigenous land and the (ultimately unsuccessful) Native resistance to stop it are just another example of Taylor’s scenario of conquest—an illustration of a settler colonial logic of elimination in action.³⁰

Even outside of a settler colonial frame, current thinking in the field of genocide studies emphasizes genocide as a process, rather than as an event. Beginning with Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism³¹ and Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews,³² scholars increasingly have articulated the processual nature of genocide.³³ One of the most influential contemporary models of this process comes from genocide studies scholar Gregory Stanton in his Eight Stages of Genocide, first presented as a briefing paper to the U.S. State Department in 1996, before being published as a book twelve years later.³⁴ In 2013, Stanton expanded his model to include ten stages of genocide.³⁵ Through his model, Stanton argues that the actual killing of individuals is only one step in a much larger process that begins with much less extraordinary stages—for instance, the classification of individuals into specific social groups and the marking of those groups through processes of symbolization.³⁶ When they go unaddressed, these earlier stages can continue to escalate gradually toward mass killing. Not only do Stanton’s ten stages not begin with the actual killing of populations, but they also do not end with it; Stanton’s final stage in the ten stages of genocide describes the processes of denial whereby perpetrators refute their actions, demonstrating how the covering up of genocidal acts and human rights abuses is an equally important factor in the conception of genocide.³⁷ Even if this understanding of genocide highlights the ways that genocidal violence continues through denial, however, it does not represent fully the ways that genocidal violence continues to play out through structural violences initiated during the initial period of genocide. Although settler colonialism provides the clearest instance of how these structural violences continue to be experienced by target populations, each case of genocide provides some example of this more insidious form of violence that persists long after the physical targeting of an identity group comes to an end.

Just as genocide itself is a process, recovery in the aftermath of genocide is also a process. Both scholars and practitioners have focused substantial energy on the periods of transition after atrocity violence comes to an end. A principal focus of these scholars and practitioners is the socio-political process of transitional justice, a broad term that refers to any number of measures taken by a society to deal with and make amends for past human rights abuses committed by or within a state.³⁸ While the term itself seems to refer solely to judicial modes of dealing with the past, transitional justice can include both juridical and nonjuridical components. Transitional justice (TJ) is a recent field that perhaps began with the post-WWII prosecution of Nazis by the Allies. It blossomed, however, in the post-dictatorship countries of Latin America and the post-communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe. In the last several decades, TJ has become such a defining feature of post-atrocity societies that there is a normative understanding of what TJ entails. This normative understanding is clearly articulated by the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ), which breaks TJ strategies into four different categories: 1) the criminal prosecution of perpetrators, 2) material and symbolic reparations for victims, 3) institutional reforms, and 4) truth-seeking processes.³⁹ This approach to transitional justice was further institutionalized in 2011, when the United Nations’ Human Rights Council appointed its first special rapporteur on the promotion of truth, justice, reparation, and guarantees of non-recurrence, Pablo de Greiff, who was commissioned with a mandate to evaluate and promote TJ mechanisms around the world.

Experience has shown that the implementation of only one of these strategies is usually insufficient for addressing past abuses; rather, like genocide itself, TJ is a process with multiple stages and multiple levels of implementation. It is largely a political process, however, and while civil society has been essential in demanding TJ measures around the world, the actual mechanisms of TJ are left mainly to the state to execute—an ironic twist given that it is usually the state itself that has perpetrated the crimes it addresses through TJ. TJ may contribute to healing and reconciliation, as many often argue, but its central purpose is often the consolidation of a more durable and (typically) more democratic regime.⁴⁰ Although it can serve to stabilize a government, it can only do so much to ameliorate the emotional and social trauma experienced by a post-genocide society on an individual or collective basis (as its main purpose is not necessarily to address this sort of trauma). Societal transitions, then, certainly require state-led action through an array of mechanisms like those articulated in this normative TJ model. As I will demonstrate, however, histories of large-scale violence also require action beyond the level of the state—or rather, they require action outside of the state to influence and guide state action. This need becomes even more pronounced in the case of societies that may not necessarily be in a state of transition. Despite the fact that the mechanisms of TJ have now been implemented in non-transitioning societies, there is still active debate regarding how recent an atrocity must have been to justify TJ measures. Although consensus has developed around the use of these tools in the immediate years and even decades following mass atrocity, there is more resistance to calls for TJ in cases where the violence appears to be much more historic in nature. In the United States, for instance, those who view the country’s history of slavery and Indigenous genocide as squarely within the past see calls for a reckoning with