The Holocaust-Genocide Nexus in Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Israel and Palestine
Lea David, Ph.D. ::: Fulbright-Rabin Postdoctoral Fellow
In this paper I wish to address critically the human rights agenda, which is based on the assumption that in settings of conflict and post conflict, a proper memorialization of past human rights abuses is necessary in order to promote universalist, human rights values. Memory construction is a crucial category through which human rights regimes enforce moral responsibilities for past atrocities. In nationalist ideologies, however, memory is used for the sake of defining borders across ethnic lines. The purpose of this paper is to understand what happens when certain memory standards are enforced and institutionalized through globalizing discourses of human rights, displacing the concept of national memory from the setting of nation-states to the global, international arenas. I analyze here the Holocaust-genocide nexus in various conflict (Israel and Palestine) and post-conflict (Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina) settings. This results in an escape from the human rights regime and a strengthening of ethnic nationalism.
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