Acknowledging Guilt: How does Germany deal with the Holocaust and the Genocide of the Herero and Nama?

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ABSTRACT

Germany is often praised for its handling of the Holocaust and for its acknowledgment of collective guilt towards that atrocity. At the same time, the absence of a comparable reckoning with colonial atrocities is largely ignored. Even though Germany acknowledged guilt regarding the genocide of the Herero and Nama in 2021, the extent of that acknowledgment differs. This paper therefore offers a comparative analysis explaining why Germany acknowledges guilt to a different extent in relation to the Holocaust and to the genocide of the Herero and Nama. Seven factors are analysed: political will and leadership, international pressure, transitional justice processes, historical evidence and research, international law, historical context and time, and public opinion and societal factors. The analysis shows that in both cases political will, international pressure, historical evidence and research, and historical context and time influenced Germany to acknowledge guilt, while the factors of transitional justice processes, international law, and public opinion and societal factors differ.

KEYWORDS *

Collective guilt, memory politics, Holocaust, Herero and Nama, colonial genocide, Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung, transitional justice, apology, reparations, social identity theory, Namibia, comparative analysis

INTRODUCTION

“It is necessary, yet so difficult, to come here as a German and as Germany’s Federal President. The terrible crimes that Germans committed here fill me with profound shame” (Steinmeier 2023). Those were the words of German Federal President Steinmeier at the commemorative event marking the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. He was the first German president to take part in the event, and by participating he seized the opportunity to re-emphasise Germany’s guilt towards European Jews because of the atrocities committed by Germans in the first half of the 20th century. German politicians have regularly acknowledged and reacknowledged Germany’s guilt regarding the Holocaust. Probably the most memorable such moment was Chancellor Brandt’s genuflection at the memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto on a rainy day in 1970. The photographs travelled around the world; it was a historic moment. In half a minute, Brandt changed Germany’s reputation and its memory policy. It was not an undisputed gesture at the time, with half of Germans not ready to ask for forgiveness for the crimes of the Nazi regime and with Poland not ready to see Germany as a state asking for forgiveness and prepared to make amends. Historians agree that with the genuflection and his Ostpolitik, Brandt opened the way to reconciliation between Germany and Poland (Hille et al. 2020).

Steinmeier and Brandt are not the only high-ranking German politicians to acknowledge and emphasise Germany’s historical guilt for the Holocaust. On the international stage, Germany is often praised for the way it has dealt with its past, as in the opinion essay “Germany faced its horrible past. Can we do the same?” (Norris 2021), which refers to Germany’s Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung as a model that the United States might consider in dealing with the history of slavery and racism.

But even though Germany has a strong reputation for its memory culture, and even though a word as unwieldy as Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung is known internationally, one might wonder why Germany exhibits this extensive memory culture chiefly in relation to the atrocities committed by the Nazi regime during the Second World War. There are, after all, many atrocities committed by Germany in its colonies. Probably the best known is the genocide of the Herero and Nama in what is now Namibia in 1904, which has come to be described as the first genocide of the 20th century (Boehme 2020: 242). Historical reappraisal of the German colonial past is far more contested than the question of guilt in relation to the Holocaust. While the majority of Germans know about the Holocaust and the crimes of the Nazi regime, most Germans do not know much about Germany’s colonial past, let alone about the genocide of the Herero and Nama or other atrocities committed under German rule (Pelz 2021). Over the last few years there have been more discussions about Germany’s dealing with its colonial past. One of the milestones of that debate was the return of the first Benin bronzes to Nigeria in December 2022 (Mücke 2023). Other atrocities are condemned by German politicians without any official acknowledgment of guilt or responsibility, as in the case of the suppression of the Maji Maji rebellion of 1905 to 1907 in what is now Tanzania (Schiwikowski 2023).

The following question therefore arises: why is Germany so forthcoming in dealing with the dark past of the Nazi regime and the Holocaust, but not with its colonial past, even though more and more voices demand reparations or other forms of reconciliation? Or, more generally: what factors determine whether a state acknowledges guilt regarding past atrocities? The question is not about when states feel guilty and thus experience the emotion of guilt because of past atrocities. To address the question, a state of research is given first. A conceptualization of collective guilt follows, which establishes the guilt of Germany regarding past atrocities, acknowledged or not. Then follows an analysis of and comparison between two atrocities committed by Germans: the Holocaust and the genocide of the Herero and Nama. To combine research with the practice of international politics, academic literature, media coverage and speeches by politicians are analysed.

MAIN CORPUS

State of research

The question of collective guilt is a wide-ranging field in academia. Several books and studies deal with the guilt of nations regarding past atrocities and with intergroup conflict in general (Barkan 2002; Branscombe and Doosje 2004; Gunn and Wilson 2011; Schori-Eyal et al. 2015; Bassan-Nygate and Heimann 2022). Social identity theory is identified as the underlying mechanism that leads members of a former perpetrator group to feel guilty because of their identity and the recognition that their forebears or other members of their ingroup have acted wrongly or harmed others (Branscombe and Doosje 2004: 3). Moral emotions such as guilt are also used as a political instrument (Bassan-Nygate and Heimann 2022: 1).

The literature is most extensive on the Holocaust and Germany’s dealing with its past and the emotion of collective guilt (Janowitz 1946; Jaspers 2001; Merkl 1965; Berger 2012). While some sources note that collective guilt was denied by Germans, especially by perpetrators and in the period shortly after the war (Janowitz 1946; von Kellenbach 2013), surveys and contemporary politics show a general acceptance of collective guilt among Germans in relation to the Holocaust (SPD et al. 2021; Stiftung Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft 2021). One study shows the influence of the interpretation of time on the feeling of collective guilt (Peetz et al. 2010). To mitigate the threat to self-esteem posed by an atrocity committed by one’s ingroup, people tend to place such atrocities subjectively further in the past, particularly when German resistance and reparations are not mentioned (ibid.: 608).

However, research on Germany’s acknowledgment of guilt regarding atrocities under colonial rule remains thin by comparison (Sarkin 2009 and 2011; Boehme 2020). Boehme (2020: 238) analyses Germany’s attitude of reactive remembrance towards the genocide of the Herero and Nama. A paper reporting two experiments evaluates the collective guilt felt by students in relation to the Holocaust and to the genocide of the Herero and Nama (Imhoff et al. 2013). The study shows that individuals feel greater collective guilt if the victims of an atrocity committed by the forebears of their ingroup still suffer from its consequences (ibid.: 86).

Literature on the guilt of states is extensive, but more studies focus on collective guilt experienced and expressed by individuals than by groups or states. This paper therefore aims to explain why Germany as a state acknowledges collective guilt to a different extent in relation to the Holocaust and to the genocide of the Herero and Nama.

Collective emotions and a conceptualization of collective guilt

Despite the long-standing premise that rationality and emotion contradict each other, research has shown that people need emotions for rational decision-making and for prioritising their wants and needs (Mercer 2005). Emotions influence our values and how we view our social reality, and they connect human beings to each other (Hutchinson 2016: 74). They are therefore needed for political thought and behaviour (ibid.). Even though emotions are defined by and connected to biological experience (Mercer 2014: 516), collective or group emotions are central in international politics as well. The concept of collective emotions rests on social identity theory (Tajfel and Turner 1986) and amounts to more than the sum of the emotions of individual group members (Mercer 2014: 516). Collective emotions are based on the individual’s identification with the group. If a person identifies with a group, such as a nationality, he or she will feel differently about situations and is likely to adopt the collective emotion of the group (Peetz et al. 2010; Mercer 2014). The key term here is identification; merely acknowledging one’s membership of a group does not equal identification and thus does not necessarily lead an individual to feel the collective emotions of that group (Brewer 2001: 20f). If belonging to a group resonates with the member’s self-concept (Hitzler and Honer 1994: 310), the group member identifies with the group rather than simply belonging to it. The individual then feels connected, feels a sense of belonging, and wants to be an active part of the group. This motivation is the basis for an emotional connection to the group, making one open to its collective emotions because one’s self-worth depends on it (Brewer 2001: 21). Generally, a positive evaluation of one’s ingroup is important for individuals. Social identity theory rests on a constructivist approach: emotions, like social groups, are constructed socioculturally and therefore cannot be separated from social context (Hutchinson 2016: 90f). Emotions condition the rationality of groups (ibid.: 92f). Because of the social context of emotions, ingroup members are likely to influence each other’s feelings. Mercer (2014: 524) states that emotion is contagious. But not all group members necessarily feel the same at all times (Koschut 2020: 20f). Ingroup members can feel differently about the same situation. For example, where person A identifies more strongly with the group than person B, person A will likely feel more positive about the group and tend to neglect or downplay its wrongdoings while focusing on positive emotions such as pride, whereas person B might be more willing to accept those wrongdoings and therefore feel negative emotions such as guilt or shame (Mercer 2014: 522).

Guilt, like all other emotions, can be felt at the individual or the collective level. Guilt is a self-conscious emotion, felt when someone feels responsible for a negative outcome that led to harm to others (Branscombe et al. 2004: 16f). The feeling of guilt therefore has moral implications. It can be felt not only by those who actually harmed others but by uninvolved ingroup members as well, through the sheer fact of identification with the ingroup (Branscombe and Doosje 2004: 3f).

“According to self-categorization theory, when the self or others are categorized at the group level, emotional experiences and expectations for others’ emotional responses should also occur at the collective level” (Branscombe et al. 2004: 18).

The philosopher Jaspers (2001) states that not all guilt is the same. He conceptualized guilt as a phenomenon that is not only an emotion that can be experienced but a fact, comparable to the judgment: you are guilty, and it does not matter whether you feel guilty about the crime you committed or not. Collective guilt plays a large role in his conceptualization, as two of his four concepts of guilt are placed in a social context: political guilt and metaphysical guilt. Jaspers states that everybody is co-responsible for the way he is governed (ibid.: 25f), meaning that citizens, as members of the national group, bear responsibility for the wrongdoings of their government even though they may not have sanctioned them. The concept of political guilt may be translated into collective guilt. But it does not lead mono-causally to collective guilt, because whereas the concept of collective guilt rests on the experience of emotion, political guilt makes an ethical argument about the responsibility of a state’s citizens. Metaphysical guilt, which is based on the principle of solidarity between human beings (ibid.: 26), can lead individuals to feel guilty about the actions of other ingroup members, which in turn can lead to a stronger sense of collective guilt because of the way group members influence each other. Metaphysical guilt is thus based on the experience of the emotion.

Collective guilt need not be understood as legal guilt; the emotion itself is at the centre of the concept (Branscombe and Doosje 2004: 3f). Guilt as a collective emotion is a particularly interesting phenomenon, as guilt usually comes at a high cost and might therefore appear to contradict rational decision-making, showing once again that emotions influence the priorities of individuals and social groups. As individuals tend to rely on a positive image of their ingroups, collective guilt is rare. The first reaction when confronted with an accusation is defence rather than acceptance of guilt (Jaspers 2001: 41), because guilt poses a threat to identity, since no one wishes to admit to themselves that they acted wrongly (Gunn and Wilson 2011: 1475). People rely on defensive strategies to avoid feeling guilty and to reaffirm their individual and social identity (ibid.). Another strategy for dismissing guilt is justification: if people feel that morally disputed actions were justified for some higher reason, for example to prevent something worse, guilt will probably not be experienced, because the decision can be morally justified. A prominent example is the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where many Americans consider that ending the war outweighed the loss of Japanese lives and therefore do not feel guilt about the use of the bomb (Branscombe et al. 2004: 19). At the same time, group members with a more sensitive moral compass can shape the collective emotion regarding a situation such as an intergroup conflict, and can increase the likelihood that collective guilt is felt as more individuals condemn the actions of other group members (Jaspers 2001: 96).

With all the difficulties that come with collective guilt, its high costs are not incurred for nothing: the experience of guilt has a learning effect and can shape the future attitudes of ingroups towards outgroups and thus lead to a reduction of intergroup conflict (Ashmore et al. 2001). While a positive attitude towards one’s ingroup leads at least to favouring ingroup members over outgroup members, in worse cases pride and love towards the ingroup can lead to rejection and even hatred towards outgroups. Human beings need a sense of belonging and, simultaneously, differentiation from others. These two contradictory needs can explain the positive evaluation of the ingroup and the more negative evaluation of the outgroup (Brewer 2001). But since people, and therefore groups, do not want to feel guilty, working through guilt can lead to the priorities of groups being renegotiated and to a more peaceful future in intergroup relations, as groups and their members may act according to their moral compass in order to avoid feeling guilty.

However, the concept of collective guilt is not undisputed. The legal system deals with guilt only on the premise that individuals, and individuals alone, are responsible for their own actions. Collective guilt therefore cannot stand before a court. That is why individual perpetrators, and not social groups, are tried before the International Criminal Court. Also, condemning a whole social group, such as a nation, for crimes committed by some of its members can prolong or create intergroup conflicts. It is important to restore justice after crimes and to compensate victims, but it can be counterproductive to assign collective guilt unconditionally to a social group over several generations while ignoring that the group may itself be interested in restoring justice and coming to terms with its past. Some scholars (Cribb 2018) argue that collective guilt is not needed where all the perpetrators of the condemned action are convicted and punished as they should be. Furthermore, history shows that attributing collective guilt to whole nations can create new problems. Victor’s justice after wars can be morally flawed as well. The question of guilt for the First World War is an example. Even though guilt should not have been attributed to one state alone, guilt for the war was assigned only to Germany, the loser, by the Allied Powers, the winners (Jaspers 2001: 41f). Just as guilt is a learning process that should lead to future morally acceptable decisions, the admission of guilt should also be handled with morally sound decision-making, so that a healing process can begin: perpetrators receive a just punishment, but they and their social group are not condemned for all time and should rather be encouraged to work at rebuilding their reputation (ibid.). The question of the admission and acceptance of collective guilt is a political one and can even become a political weapon, even though the question remains open whether the admission of guilt helps the victims and opens the way to reappraisal (ibid.: 42).

Methods

For the comparative analysis of the two atrocities and the acknowledgments of guilt, a systematic review of literature and media coverage is used, together with a qualitative content analysis of speeches by senior German political actors. The literature, news articles, and speeches were identified using the keywords Holocaust, Herero and Nama, genocide of the Herero and Nama, and guilt.

Emotions are among the aspects most difficult to measure in international politics (Hutchinson 2016: 89). In this paper the question is not whether guilt is actually experienced by those acknowledging it, but rather the expression of guilt is examined. The extent of the guilt admitted is the factor of interest. This is assessed by quantitative means, such as frequency in the literature and the proportion of people admitting collective guilt, and by qualitative means, such as apologies from senior as against junior politicians, the exact wording of an apology, and readiness to pay reparations.

For the independent variable, the factors political will and leadership, international pressure, transitional justice processes, historical evidence and research, international law, historical context and time, and public opinion and societal factors are analysed.

The Holocaust

Arguably the most widely known atrocity committed by Germans, the Holocaust is a powerful example for analysing the question of acknowledging guilt, since it laid the ground for its own research fields: genocide studies and later the narrower field of Holocaust studies. As mentioned in the introduction, Germany is often praised for its Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung (Norris 2021), and this case serves as the positive example in the comparative analysis.

“The Holocaust was the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its allies and collaborators” (USHMM w.D.a). The aim of the Nazi leadership was the killing of the whole of European Jewry, a strategy for which the euphemism final solution of the Jewish question was used (von Kellenbach 2013: 15). At the conference at Wannsee, Berlin, in 1942, details of the strategy were settled, on the basis of a figure of eleven million Jews living in Europe.

Contemporary Germany expresses a high level of political will in its leadership to deal with Germany’s responsibility and guilt regarding the Holocaust. In the coalition treaty for the government of 2021 to 2025, the word Holocaust is mentioned five times, and responsibility for the care and treatment of Holocaust survivors is stressed (SPD et al. 2021: 110). Federal President Steinmeier’s speech in 2023 at the commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising was referred to in the introduction. Chancellor Scholz gave a speech on International Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2022, warning that the horrors of the Holocaust risk being forgotten as contemporary witnesses die, and insisting that Germany must not allow this to happen (Bundesregierung 2022). These statements show that the German government and state leadership have a strong commitment to remembering and to expressing German guilt towards Holocaust survivors. German politicians also stress that relations between Germany and Israel must be seen in the context of Germany’s guilt regarding the Holocaust. Chancellor Scholz stated that as Germany committed the genocide of European Jews, every German government bears permanent responsibility for the security of the State of Israel and the protection of Jewish life (Strack 2023).

Even though the international community praises Germany today for dealing with its past (Norris 2021), international pressure after the end of the war played a key role. Especially after the mass killings in the concentration and extermination camps became visible to the world through the liberators of those camps and their accounts, through journalists, and through senior political figures such as the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe and later United States President Eisenhower, international pressure increased. Eisenhower acted with foresight in recognising the importance of eyewitness accounts. “I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to propaganda”, he said after visiting Ohrdruf (USHMM w.D.b). This international pressure contributed to the Potsdam Conference, where the Allied Powers decided on Germany’s future (bpb 2019), and to the Nuremberg trials, the first international military tribunal to prosecute individuals for atrocities.

The Nuremberg trials were therefore a precedent with far-reaching consequences for international criminal law. During the principal trial, three defendants were acquitted, twelve were sentenced to death, and seven received prison sentences (Kirsch 2005: 2). With the verdict, guilt was attributed to individual actors, but with the Potsdam Conference and the goals set for the reconstruction of Germany, where denazification was a declared aim (bpb 2019), individual guilt was extended in the sense that National Socialist ideology was recognised as the cause of the Holocaust and had to be systematically removed from society. Further, through judicial process under the rule of law, future peace was to be strengthened, as changes in international law and especially the strengthening of international human rights were intended to prevent future perpetrators from committing mass atrocities (Kirsch 2005: 3).

The eyewitness accounts of the liberators also played a crucial role in the extensive historical evidence and research: the Holocaust may be considered the best-documented genocide in history. The bureaucracy of the Nazi regime also assisted later understanding of the Holocaust and its dimensions (Palamarchuk et al. 2019). To this day, historical evidence of the Holocaust is collected, archived, and reviewed on a large scale by museums, such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and by former camps remodelled as memorials for education and remembrance, such as Auschwitz and Dachau. The academic field of Holocaust studies is dedicated to this genocide alone. Not only academics and large institutions play a role in documenting perpetrators, crimes, and victims; smaller civil associations work on discovering local connections. For example, one association conducts research on the workers of a labour camp at Überlingen on Lake Constance and is dedicated to educating civil society about the camp in that region. Additionally, interviews and testimonies of Holocaust survivors and of others involved, such as the liberators of camps, complement the research and add a moral and emotional dimension to remembrance (Beyer et al. 2020).

During the war, genocide was not yet a crime under international criminal law, but the scale of the destruction of a people led to a change in international law. A more general change occurred when classical international law was modernised, restricting the unconditional sovereignty of states (Krell and Schlotter 2018: 112f). But as Sarkin (2009: 11) states, even though not known under the names crimes against humanity or genocide, atrocities were already unlawful under human rights law. The United Nations, and therefore the international community, acknowledged for the first time that citizens should be protected from abuse by their own state. Atrocities were then specifically recognised as crimes under international criminal law (Global Centre R2P 2018). It should be noted that even though sovereignty was not restricted at the time of the Holocaust, Nazi Germany itself disregarded the sovereignty of other nations by starting the war and occupying foreign territory (Smith et al. 1992: 336f).

Historical context and time also play a role in explaining why states do not acknowledge guilt immediately after committing an atrocity. As Jaspers (2001: 41) stated, the first answer to an accusation is defence. Responses after Germans were confronted with evidence of the camps were shock and denial of knowledge, even though some camps were located directly beside German villages (Steinhoff 2001). But events such as the pogroms of November 1938 are indicators of the level of antisemitism in Germany throughout the period of the Nazi regime (Honig 2021). Historians also show that the regime did not conceal the existence of the concentration camps (Steinhoff 2001). There is a statement made by Chancellor Adenauer to parliament in 1951 acknowledging awareness of the suffering imposed by Germans and asking for forgiveness for German crimes. Even though he spoke of a willingness to make reparation payments to Israel, the speech is interpreted in the literature not as an official acknowledgment of guilt but as a first step in shaping a new image for Germany (Löwenheim 2009: 549). In 1951, West Germany had also not yet regained full sovereignty (bpb 2019). Chancellor Brandt’s highly symbolic acknowledgment of guilt in the form of the genuflection in Warsaw in 1970 (Hille et al. 2020) is considered the first acknowledgment of guilt regarding the Holocaust by a senior German politician. It may have been influenced by the trial of Eichmann in Israel in 1961 (Honig 2021) and by the Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt that followed (Wildt 2021).

The debate about guilt at the political and academic level may be important for international politics and conflict management, and will probably help to overcome past conflicts and provide some closure for victims, but for collective emotions the public opinion of Germans regarding guilt for the Holocaust is crucial as well. If one is to feel guilty about something, one must know about it. However, knowledge of the Holocaust is beginning to fade in Germany. In one study, 40 per cent of those aged 18 to 34 said that they knew nothing or little about the Holocaust (Zeit Online 2018). At the same time, people think that antisemitism is on the rise in Europe and consider it a problem (ibid.). These results are striking, as the Holocaust is firmly established in German curricula (KMK 2005). Almost half of Germans think that they discussed the National Socialist past rather a lot or a great deal at school (Stiftung Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft 2021). According to a study from 2020, 32 per cent of those interviewed acknowledged shame and 82 per cent believe that Germans bear collective guilt regarding the Holocaust and the outbreak of the war. One in four wants to draw a line under the National Socialist past and 6 per cent are not interested in the topic at all (Die Zeit 2020). In conclusion, collective guilt regarding the Holocaust is widely acknowledged in German civil society and only a minority rejects it.

The genocide of the Herero and Nama

In 2021, Germany acknowledged the mass killing of the Herero and Nama in 1904 (Auswärtiges Amt 2021). Even though guilt was acknowledged, the handling of this past atrocity differs greatly from the handling of the Holocaust.

The territory of present-day Namibia was colonised by Germany in 1884. From the beginning of colonisation there were repeated uprisings, but the climax came in 1904, when more German settlers acquired land in the colony and human rights violations and racial segregation became more frequent and more severe. The Herero began to fight back, and after the battle at the Waterberg on 11 and 12 August 1904, the German commander von Trotha issued an extermination order against the Herero. Tens of thousands who fled into the desert died of thirst. Because the Nama also rose in revolt, an extermination order was issued against them as well. In total, about 80 per cent of the Herero were killed; estimates of the number of dead range between 54,000 and 100,000 (bpb 2021).

During the First World War, Germany lost the former colony. For decades there were no special relations between Germany and Namibia. It was not until 1990 that Germany began development cooperation, without addressing the genocide (Boehme 2020: 243f). In 2004, at the centenary of the genocide, the then development minister Wieczorek-Zeul issued an apology for the past atrocities, but the government of the day distanced itself from the speech (ibid.: 245). She also attributed guilt to von Trotha alone (Sarkin 2009: 133). A second phase began in 2015, when a Herero delegation visited the Federal President with a petition for comprehensive compensation and reparation (bpb 2021), and the then President of the Bundestag, Lammert, described the crimes against the Herero and Nama as genocide and acknowledged the intent to destroy the two peoples (Tagesschau 2015). Opposition politicians had been demanding an acknowledgment of guilt before that (ibid.; Boehme 2020: 239). Talks with Namibia began, and after five years the then foreign minister Maas formally acknowledged Germany’s guilt regarding the genocide of the Herero and Nama (Auswärtiges Amt 2021). Germany undertook to support Namibia with 1.1 billion euros, framed not as official reparations but as a reconstruction and development programme (ibid.). Generally speaking, German governments acted more reactively than proactively (Boehme 2020: 238). In the coalition treaty of the government of 2021, the word genocide is not used in relation to Namibia, but the parties spoke of a special historical and moral responsibility towards Namibia and planned to work on a reconciliation agreement (SPD et al. 2021: 126).

It is contested whether the British Empire knew about the genocide of the Herero and Nama while it was still ongoing. But the colonies were connected regions and it is probable that the movement of traders carried information from German to British colonial territory. Still, the British did not speak out about the genocide and the mass violence until 1915 (Nielsen 2017: 319f). The Herero had campaigned for an official apology and reparations for a long time, with the success of attracting international media attention and the spread of information in museums (Anderson 2005: 1185). But international media coverage has always been greatest following actions by Germany (Burke 2016; BBC 2021). Before acknowledging the Herero genocide as genocide, German politicians had pressed Türkiye to acknowledge its guilt for the Armenian genocide (Tagesschau 2015).

Regarding transitional justice, there has been no criminal trial comparable to the Nuremberg trials or to later trials of Nazi perpetrators. Reparation payments may be regarded as such a process (Boehme 2020: 240), but Germany is careful to stress that the 1.1 billion euros are not to be understood as reparations but as development assistance (Auswärtiges Amt 2021). There have been only symbolic transitional justice processes in the form of apologies (Boehme 2020: 240). The Herero did attempt to sue German companies for compensation in the United States in 2001 (Sarkin 2009: 148).

Literature on the genocide of the Herero and Nama remains relatively thin, but historical research in the form of oral testimony is extensive. “Unlike any other group that took part in this research, the Herero and Mbanderu respondents were able to track the direct impact of the war on their own families, providing both the names of people who had died and the places where they died” (Erichsen 2008, cited in Sarkin 2011: 28).

European powers also conducted research on the former German colony after the First World War. One of the most important documents is the so-called Blue Book, to which the Germans replied with the White Book (Nielsen 2017: 319f). Both concerned the empires accusing each other of violence in the colonies. As mentioned, connections between the Holocaust and the Herero genocide have been drawn in academic literature, but other research points to the Herero genocide being more similar to general colonial warfare and violence than to the Holocaust (ibid.: 317f). Overall it can be concluded that there is sufficient historical evidence and research to attribute guilt to Germany.

It was a widely used argument among German politicians that there was no need to acknowledge guilt because in 1904 (Sarkin 2009: 1) genocide had not yet been unlawful under international law, while violence against indigenous people in colonial territories was considered a legitimate political instrument by the European empires (Krell and Schlotter 2018: 109). But as already mentioned, other scholars argue that even though the crimes were not known under the terms crimes against humanity and genocide, human rights law already provided protection against such acts in 1904 (Sarkin 2009: 11).

With the issuing of the White Book in response to the Blue Book, it becomes clear in the dimension of historical context and time that states are not ready to acknowledge guilt shortly after an atrocity. In this case Germany produced a document pointing at other empires rather than reflecting on its own conduct (Nielsen 2017: 319f). The racist and imperial interpretation of international law that permitted violence against indigenous people in colonial territory (Krell and Schlotter 2018: 109) arguably also helped to justify violence against the Herero and Nama within Germany. Even though normative pressure for apologies for former atrocities rose in the 21st century (Boehme 2020: 238), Germany was slow to respond. Only a hundred years after the genocide was a first apology issued (Tagesschau 2015), and only after 117 years was there an official acknowledgment of guilt. The reticence of German governments in admitting guilt may also be due to the general colonial context. Not only were there crimes against humanity in German colonies, but the numbers of indigenous people in colonies worldwide declined sharply. The Herero case could thus become a precedent for how former colonial powers deal with their guilt (Sarkin 2009: 155f).

After the war, German civil society was relieved that its colonial past was not under scrutiny as in Britain and France (Boehme 2020: 244), as the guilt of the Holocaust was enough to deal with (ibid.: 249). Knowledge of the German colonial era is generally low in the German population (ibid.), even though according to school curricula German colonialism should be taught (Pelz 2021). Regarding emotional attitudes, only 9 per cent of Germans feel that German colonialism is something to be proud of, and 20 per cent feel it is something to be ashamed of (YouGov 2020), indicating that colonialism is an emotional topic for about three in ten Germans, though viewed more negatively than positively. In international comparison, Germans are the least proud of their colonial past (ibid.). As there is little general knowledge and historical reappraisal of German colonial history, there is no data on the emotional assessment of Germans specifically regarding the genocide of the Herero and Nama. Generally speaking, where there is a debate on colonialism it is a debate conducted among white Germans, neglecting Black Germans as descendants of formerly colonised people (de Wolff 2021: 370). There are, however, civil associations criticising the way Germany deals with its colonial past (DW 2021), which indicates that at least a part of the population is ready to engage with it. Descendants of von Trotha have expressed deep shame over their ancestor’s actions and apologised, but did not wish to become involved in the political process of state acknowledgment (BBC 2007). An experimental study showed that Germans are ready to feel collective guilt regarding the genocide of the Herero and Nama when they believe that the descendants of the victims still suffer because of the past atrocity (Imhoff et al. 2013).

Comparison

The analysis of the two cases shows that the factors examined were influential in both, though under different circumstances. While political will regarding the Holocaust has been driven forward by members of successive governments, political will regarding acknowledgment of guilt for the Herero genocide has also been evident for two decades, though located more among opposition parties. Future research should focus on the reasons for this difference. A more extensive analysis should also investigate resistance among members of parliament and political parties, to give a more detailed picture.

International pressure influenced German politics in both cases. In the case of the Holocaust this pressure came most prominently from the Allied Powers, whereas in the case of the Herero genocide the descendants of the victims played the key role. The role of the international community in pressing Germany to acknowledge guilt should be explored further. The political debate on colonial atrocities in particular requires further analysis, to see how states can be moved to acknowledge guilt for past atrocities. The fact that Britain may have known about the Herero genocide and did not press Germany to stop it during the events or to acknowledge guilt afterwards indicates a fundamental difference in the handling of atrocities in a colonial context and atrocities in Europe.

There is no equivalent to the Nuremberg trials in the case of the Herero genocide, which shows that even in the absence of transitional justice processes, guilt for atrocities can be acknowledged. But following the logic of Cribb (2018), collective guilt should perhaps be felt more intensely where individual perpetrators were never convicted. However, the analysis does not show indicators of collective guilt felt by Germans for the genocide of the Herero and Nama, even though none of the perpetrators were convicted. A possible explanation for the absence of guilt despite the absence of convictions could be the lack of education on the topic among Germans. Even though the literature on the Holocaust is more extensive, historical evidence was sufficient to establish Germany’s guilt in the Herero genocide as well.

In both cases, genocide had not been recognised as a crime at the time it was committed. During the Herero genocide, Germany did not breach international law as then understood, since violence towards indigenous people in colonies was not treated as unlawful; but with the war and the persecution, deportation, and mass killing of foreign citizens, Nazi Germany did breach international law. This may be one explanation why international pressure was greater regarding the Holocaust than regarding the Herero genocide, though it follows only if human rights law is set aside.

Collective amnesia and denial of involvement and guilt played a role in both genocides, but the first acknowledgment of guilt regarding the Holocaust came much earlier than the first acknowledgment regarding the Herero genocide. Some historians see the reason for this in the fact that Germans were occupied with coming to terms with the Holocaust and could not deal simultaneously with atrocities committed under colonial rule.

This is also evident in how Germans deal with the Holocaust. Still today, general knowledge about the Holocaust is much higher than general knowledge about German colonialism, let alone the Herero genocide. While a broad majority of Germans feels collective guilt for the Holocaust, for most people colonialism is not linked to emotion. The acknowledgment of guilt regarding the Herero genocide was almost entirely a political process with little involvement of private individuals. This suggests that states can acknowledge guilt even though their citizens may not feel the same way. But the experimental study suggests that Germans are willing to feel collective guilt provided they are informed about the subject. More research is needed to confirm this tendency.

This research is not exhaustive of the factors that may influence states to acknowledge guilt regarding past atrocities. Rather, the influence of these seven factors was examined as a starting point and should be reviewed in future research in further detail.

SUMMARY *

The article’s comparative design isolates something that a study of either case alone would obscure. Both atrocities were committed by the same state; both are documented beyond dispute; in both cases the act was not a crime under the international law of its day. What differs is everything that came afterwards, and the article’s seven factors sort those differences into two groups. Political will, international pressure, evidence, and the passage of time operated in both cases, though through different actors, since in the Namibian case the pressure came from the descendants of the victims rather than from victorious powers. Transitional justice, international law, and public sentiment did not. The finding that follows is the article’s sharpest: a state acknowledged guilt that its population does not feel, which suggests that official acknowledgment and collective emotion are separable, and that the second does not follow automatically from the first.

CONCLUSION

Collective guilt plays an important role in international politics and relations. Intergroup conflict remains one of the challenges in intergroup communication and relations. Social identity theory shows that emotions connected to social identity can cause, intensify, and prolong intergroup conflicts because of the need for a positive image of one’s ingroup, often connected to the devaluation of the outgroup.

Furthermore, this paper has stressed not only the influence of collective guilt on international politics and relations, but also that Germany may be viewed as a model regarding its Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung of the Holocaust while not serving as a general model for historical reappraisal. German politics shows that the Holocaust is viewed in a different light from colonial atrocities such as the genocide of the Herero and Nama. This may have several explanations which require further research. International pressure, historical evidence and research, and historical time and context appear to have had the greatest influence on the acknowledgment of guilt in this analysis, and possibly political will and leadership as well, even though the leading actors in the process differed. Further research is needed to explore the influence of the seven factors. This paper can serve as a starting point.

Further research is especially needed regarding the acknowledgment of colonial atrocities by the former European empires in general. With research showing that the Herero genocide was more similar to other colonial atrocities than to the Holocaust, comparative analyses of how former empires deal with colonial history and guilt are needed to identify the factors influencing acknowledgment. Like Holocaust studies, the study of colonial atrocities could form its own academic field, helping victims and their descendants to be heard in their demands for acknowledgment by their former colonisers. Acknowledging guilt for colonial atrocities, provided that it and any accompanying request for forgiveness are sincere, is likely to improve bilateral relations and to help overcome colonial structures in the international community.

POTENTIAL SOLUTION *

The article’s central finding, that a state acknowledged guilt which its population does not feel, is the point at which this analysis becomes useful beyond its own case, and it deserves to be stated as a general proposition. Official acknowledgment and public sentiment are separable, they move at different speeds, and an acknowledgment that runs ahead of public understanding is fragile in a specific way: it can be reversed by a later government at little political cost, because no constituency has formed to defend it.

That points toward the variable the article identifies without quite naming as decisive, which is knowledge. The experimental finding it cites, that Germans are willing to feel collective guilt where they believe descendants still suffer, combines with the survey data showing that most Germans know little about the colonial period to produce a straightforward conclusion: the absence of collective emotion here is not a refusal but an absence of information. Curriculum is therefore not a secondary recommendation but the primary one, and the comparison the article draws demonstrates the point, since Holocaust education is extensive, taught in every federal state, and the corresponding public acknowledgment is near universal.

Three observations about the 2021 agreement bear on the article’s account. It was described by the German government as a gesture rather than as reparations, a formulation adopted precisely because the legal term would carry consequences, and it is the principal reason significant parts of the Herero and Nama leadership rejected it. Those representatives were also not directly party to the negotiations, which were conducted between two states, and the descendant communities are minorities within Namibia whose government did not straightforwardly speak for them. And the funds are disbursed as development projects over thirty years rather than as payments to the affected communities. Each of these is a design choice rather than an inevitability, and together they explain why an acknowledgment that took 117 years to arrive did not settle the matter. For a journal concerned with mediation, the lesson is the one this field returns to repeatedly: an agreement about a group, negotiated without that group, is unlikely to be received as the acknowledgment it was intended to be.

Two additions would extend the article’s contribution. Its argument applies to every former colonial power and the comparative material is now available: the Belgian expression of regret over the Congo, French acknowledgments regarding Algeria and Rwanda, British settlements over the Mau Mau detentions, and Dutch apologies for Indonesia and for slavery. What distinguishes the cases that produced durable settlements is not the wording of the apology but whether an enforceable claim existed. The Mau Mau case reached an English court and produced compensation to named individuals; nothing comparable exists in the German and Namibian case, and the Herero attempt to litigate in the United States failed on jurisdictional grounds. And the article’s observation that the debate is conducted among white Germans identifies a gap that is itself part of the problem: descendants of colonised peoples living in Germany are participants in this history rather than an audience for it, and a memory culture constructed without them reproduces the structure it is meant to address.

Finally, the article’s framing invites one reflection that its own material supports. Germany’s reckoning with the Holocaust is presented internationally as a model and is understood domestically as a moral achievement. The colonial case shows what that reckoning actually required: defeat, occupation, an imposed tribunal, sustained external pressure, and then a generation of domestic conflict driven by the children of those involved. Where those conditions are absent, as they are for every colonial atrocity, acknowledgment has depended on the persistence of the victims’ descendants and on very little else. That is the more sobering finding of this comparison, and it is the one most worth carrying to other cases.

* Added by the WMO Editorial Team

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Fostering Interfaith Dialogue in Schools: The Role of Religious Identity

How to cite this journal: Author, Date of the post, WMO Conflict Insight, Title of the post, ISSN: 2628 6998, https://worldmediation.org/journal/

EDITORIAL NOTE *

This article quotes statements attributed to individual politicians which are reproduced as evidence of the discourse the author describes. One of the two quotations cited from the fact-checking source used by the author is recorded there as unverified, and readers are referred to that source. The article’s argument does not rest on the quotations.

ABSTRACT *

This article argues for interfaith religious education in the German school system as a means of building bridges between religious communities. Beginning from the increase in antisemitic and anti-Muslim incidents and from the observation that hostility towards other faiths often accompanies insecurity in one’s own, the author sets out a theoretical framework drawn from social identity theory and from Fiske’s five social motives of belonging, understanding, control, self-enhancement and trust. Herling’s four principles for the study of religion, namely self-consciousness, comparison, defamiliarization and empathy, are introduced as the pedagogical sequence. The article then examines the German situation, in which religious education is the only subject named in the Basic Law but is organised denominationally in most federal states, and analyses the evaluation of Bremen’s interfaith model, the only one of its kind in Germany. The challenges are addressed at length, in particular the paradox of religious inclusivity, by which an inclusive subject may exclude non-religious and strongly religious students alike, and the tendency to treat pupils as future citizens rather than as present persons. The article closes with proposals at federal, state and classroom level.

KEYWORDS *

Interfaith dialogue, religious education, Germany, social identity theory, Bremen, antisemitism, hostility towards Muslims, paradox of inclusivity, peace education, empathy, federalism, non-religious pupils

INTRODUCTION

Germany has become a country of high religious diversity, with over 150 religious groups and communities (Özoguz 2020). At the same time, the proportion of people without religious affiliation is rising. And how are people of these different faiths living together? Unfortunately, tensions between religious groups in Germany can be observed.

Resentment against Jews and Muslims in particular has increased, leading to more violence against these two religious groups. Antisemitic offences increased sharply after the attack by Hamas on Israel on 7 October 2023, with most such offences in Germany recorded as coming from right-wing extremists (Tagesschau 2024). At the same time, anti-Muslim sentiment has a long history in Germany. One of the most striking examples is the investigative approach and public discourse of the police in the murders committed by the right-wing extremist group Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund. Although witness reports pointed towards white perpetrators, for more than ten years the murders were framed by police and media as outcomes of organised crime (Ayata 2016: 215). While this could be considered a matter of general racist attitudes, the formation of the protest group Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes shifted the focus onto the religious identity of certain groups. These sentiments have now arrived in politics, especially in the AfD party (DIDE 2024). Some of the more radical party members have attracted attention with anti-Muslim, antisemitic and racist remarks, quotations of which are documented by fact-checking organisations, though not all attributions are verified (Hoffmann and Echtermann 2020).

Why does religion divide society so much? Özoguz (2020: vii) states: “I think that the sometimes absurd perceptions of religion are also based on the fact that many people have become insecure in their own faith or cannot relate to religion at all, no matter what religion we are talking about.” Following this logic, this paper explores the idea of implementing interfaith religious education in the formal school system. I argue that by strengthening the religious identity of students in the formal school system, bridges between religious groups can be built in the long term. As Özoguz mentions, identity, and being secure in one’s identity, is crucial in accepting difference in society. Addressing identity building is thus a crucial step in fostering interfaith dialogue.

The paper is structured as follows. First, a state of research is given on the literature on interfaith dialogue. Then the theoretical framework is explored, with definitions of religion and interfaith dialogue. Individual and social identity building is explained using the social identity theory of Tajfel and Turner and Fiske’s five social motivations. The importance of religious identity is established. After this theoretical part, I explore how interfaith dialogue can be fostered in the formal school system by reforming religious education classes, drawing on existing literature and on findings from Germany’s only interfaith religious education, in the federal state of Bremen. After addressing the challenges of interfaith religious education, I name actions for policymakers before drawing a conclusion.

MAIN CORPUS

Interfaith dialogue in academic literature

The literature on interfaith dialogue is extensive, ranging from interfaith dialogue at the macro level (Körs et al. 2020) to the outcomes of interfaith initiatives at the individual level (Visser et al. 2024). Interfaith dialogue and interreligious dialogue are often used as synonyms. Most research focuses on context-specific interfaith dialogue, for example between different religions in a specific locality (Stamatović 2024; Alemany-Arrebola et al. 2024; Purnomo 2024; Hazaymeh 2024). It is striking that interreligious dialogue is researched particularly in regions with a violent political conflict, past or present. This applies in particular to the Middle East (Abu-Nimer et al. 2007; Driessen 2020; Kayaoglu 2015), the former Yugoslavia (Stamatović 2024; Admirand 2020), and other regions, and Islam is usually given special attention (Garrard-Burnett and Yildirim 2011; Voulgaraki-Pissina 2023). To counteract the perception of Islam as extraordinarily problematic and prone to violence, the bias of focusing on the violence of Muslim practitioners while neglecting the religious identity of Christian or Jewish perpetrators has been noted (Esposito 2001: 24).

This bias shows that even while interfaith dialogue aims to build bridges, prejudices can still prevail. Still, interfaith dialogue initiatives in practice are seen as promising sites for personal and societal growth (Visser et al. 2024: 704). While there is no single approach to interfaith dialogue, because of context sensitivity, it usually aims to improve three core competencies: knowledge, skills, and attitudes. Knowledge refers to factual knowledge about one’s own and other religions; skills deal with reflection and contextualization; and attitudes refer to opinions and attitudes towards one’s own and other religions (ibid.: 698ff).

Interfaith dialogue initiatives have been researched in Germany as well. Körs and Nagel (2018: 359) mention that measures of state and interfaith collaboration are on the rise. This may be traced back to immigration, especially to the refugee movements of 2015 and 2016. One example is the establishment of Germany’s first Muslim and Christian kindergarten. This kindergarten, established in 2007, shows how the nexus of interfaith dialogue and governance can be managed from a local perspective (Emmerich 2022: 578). The role of interfaith dialogue in the formal school system, however, remains under-researched. In particular, how interfaith dialogue is fostered within religious education classes is not a topic of research. Knauth (2007) wrote on developments in German religious education up to the attacks of 11 September 2001 and their influence on the debate on religious education in Germany. While interreligious and intercultural dialogue was discussed in the 1990s and has been recognised as an important factor in religious education (ibid.: 258), after 2001 the introduction of Islamic religious education in particular became contested. Other texts focus on the complexity of the German school system and on current analyses of religious education in German schools (Domsgen and Witten 2022). Challenges mentioned there include the plurality of organisational arrangements in the different federal states (ibid.: 18ff) and the alternative classes offered for non-religious students or for students of religions not covered by the denominational classes available at a given school (ibid.: 32ff). Most texts focus on Islamic religious education in German schools (Körs 2023; Weiße 2008; Mohagheghi 2010), mainly addressing questions of integration.

Definition of religion and interfaith dialogue

So far there is no standardised definition of religion. It is particularly noticeable that definitions differ depending on the focus and context of the research; discourse plays a leading role here (Gorski 2018). Furthermore, peace researchers sometimes criticise a restrictive understanding of religion in conflict research and analysis (Biess and Nolden 2021: 12). Brubaker addresses the complexity of religion in peace and conflict studies and calls for a qualified particularizing stance: “while none of the key violence-enabling modalities and mechanisms is uniquely religious, religious beliefs, practices, structures, and processes nonetheless provide an important and distinctively rich matrix of such modalities and mechanisms” (Brubaker 2015: 7).

Following Brubaker’s understanding of the complexity of religious identity, this paper uses the following definition of religion by Johnson (2021: 109): religion is a “more or less organized set of beliefs and practices that is concerned with how humans relate to the Divine, the sacred, the holy, or the transcendent.” The phrase a more or less organized set of beliefs and practices stresses the importance of internal coherence, although this coherence may not be visible to non-practitioners or to practitioners with only limited understanding of the philosophical and theological content of their religion.

Biess and Nolden (2021: 11) set out an extensive model of five dimensions of religion: spirituality; symbols, rituals, and practices; a set of ideas; community; and institution. Spirituality refers to subjective experiences of the divine or transcendent and to personal motivations to believe. Symbols, rituals, and practices are often the visible part of religion, such as religious signs, buildings of worship, and forms of worship. The set of ideas describes the philosophical part of religion, found in scriptures, including norms and values. The dimension of institution reflects the official or structural part of religion, for example religious leaders, hierarchical structures, and official bodies as actors in public discourse. Finally, the community aspect refers to social groups, more specifically religious groups. This dimension is essential for social identity building, as community involves interpersonal relations with other practitioners of the same faith and thus establishes a sense of belonging.

Hoffman and Thelen (2018) offer a definition of interfaith dialogue that distinguishes it from interreligious dialogue: “Interfaith dialog is a specific type of interaction between religious and/or spiritual groups intended to build bridges and foster understanding between religious groups. Interfaith dialog is intentionally more inclusive in that it can refer to dialogs within a religion or between religious groups.”

The goal of interfaith dialogue is thus that people of different faiths come to a mutual understanding and respect that allows them to live and cooperate with each other in spite of their differences (Andrabi 2020: 264). This shows that interfaith dialogue does not consist only of dialogues but can include other initiatives such as museums and art. The goals and skills developed by the initiative are more important than its format. Skills crucial in interfaith dialogue are developing the ability to listen, to respect the diversity of beliefs, and to identify common religious experiences, as well as openness to difference and the predominance of ethics over dogmatism (Vilà et al. 2020: 256).

How to approach interfaith dialogue is described in Herling’s guide to the study of religion (cited in Johnson 2021: 110ff). Herling lists four self-reflective methodological principles for studying religion and reflecting on those studies. The first principle is self-consciousness, assessing one’s own religious identity. The next principle is comparison, focusing on an academic and objective study of the practices, symbols and rituals of different religions. In the next step Herling introduces the principle of defamiliarization, used to learn that those things which are unfamiliar to us are not necessarily strange; they are simply unfamiliar (ibid.: 112). These three principles together lead to the fourth, which is at the same time an independent principle: empathy.

“The crucial importance of the development of empathy cannot be overstated, and this development is dependent upon our capacities to be self-reflective about our religious commitments, to take a comparative approach to religious beliefs and practices, and to be open to others’ perspectives” (ibid.). Empathy does not necessarily mean agreement, but rests on the intent of understanding and tolerating another person’s worldview, although it may differ completely from one’s own. Empathy is thus a crucial skill to develop in interfaith dialogue.

Identity building

As Johnson and Herling emphasise, religious identity plays a crucial role in social contexts. “At core, people are motivated to maintain affiliations and bonds with others” (Fiske 2000: 305). We build our social identity through five social motivations: belonging, understanding, controlling, self-enhancing, and trusting (ibid.: 305ff). If membership of a certain social group is considered beneficial, people will want to become members of the group. To belong to a group, the second motivation must be fulfilled. Ingroup members share a common understanding of the environment and of each other (ibid.: 306). The understanding of the ingroup must be shared, and at the same time what does not constitute ingroup behaviour or characteristics must be understood clearly. Fiske also mentions the importance of control (ibid.: 308). To feel secure, people need a certain level of control over their environment, and persistent lack of control is depressing and unhealthy (ibid.: 309). Self-enhancement motivates individuals to improve self-esteem through group identification. Trust, essential for social cohesion, is more easily extended to ingroup than to outgroup members. However, trust with outgroup members can be developed through successful interpersonal and intergroup contact (ibid.: 311).

On the basis of these five motivations, an individual composes their social identity. Social identity theory, mainly introduced by Tajfel and Turner (1986), begins with the premise that individuals define their own identities in relation to social groups, and that such identifications work to protect and bolster self-identity (Islam 2014). The aspect of protecting and bolstering self-identity is often coupled with favouritism towards ingroup members and derogation of outgroup members. In German discrimination research, group-focused enmity is studied as a result of social identity building. Antisemitism and hostility towards Muslims are specifically named as two elements of it (Möller 2023: 436). At its core is the conception of a hierarchical social order that elevates one’s own group and degrades outgroups, which can be based on religion.

If we consider the individual perspective, we can establish the importance of religious beliefs for the person. With an integrated identity-building model, four domains, namely ideology including politics and religion, occupation, the interpersonal domain, and mortality and mental health, can be identified as a foundation of identity building in individuals (Van der Gaag et al. 2020: 273). Religious beliefs, belonging to the first domain, address the purpose of human life (Johnson 2021: 110), and religious identity can also be linked to national identity. Especially where people belong to the main religious group of their nation state, they are more inclined to see that religion as a key part of their national identity than those who do not identify with it (Huang et al. 2024). This tendency can lead to majority groups discriminating against minorities, in line with the five social motives and the concept of group-focused enmity mentioned above.

Interfaith dialogue in the formal education system

The importance of implementing peace education approaches, of which interfaith dialogue is an example, has been established in the literature as well as by policymakers and other institutions (Brooks and Hajir 2020; Jäger 2014). “Peace education in formal schools should ideally aim to produce caring, compassionate, critical, and civically engaged citizens who can advance cultures of peace” (Brooks and Hajir 2020: 10). Peace education in formal schools is all the more important because schools are sometimes criticised for perpetuating forms of violence, including structural and cultural violence (ibid.; Zembylas 2018: 577).

Interfaith dialogue in European schools is especially prominent in the model of integrated schools in Northern Ireland. While research suggests that integrated education may have a positive impact on identity, outgroup attitudes and forgiveness, with the potential to heal division and promote a less sectarian outlook (McGlynn 2011: 55f), integrated schools in Northern Ireland focus on dialogue between Catholics and Protestants, without specifically including students of religions other than Christianity. Not restricted to interfaith dialogue but concerned with intercultural dialogue in general, the Superschools project aims to contribute to peacebuilding, reconciliation, and intercultural learning and dialogue (RYCO 2024), and to help overcome the segregated school arrangements found, for example, in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Soetermeer 2023). Fostering intercultural and interfaith dialogue in the formal school system is thus an accepted model for peace education in Europe.

The situation in Germany differs from that in Northern Ireland and the Balkans. In Germany there is no history of public schools segregated on the basis of religious identity. However, developments in society, such as the rise of antisemitism and of hostility towards Muslims described in the introduction, show that conflict transformation is needed to prevent further escalation of tensions between social groups on the basis of religious identity. Yet interfaith religious education remains rare in Germany.

Religious education is the only school subject mentioned in the Basic Law. However, which approach should be implemented is debated (Spielhaus and Stimac 2018). According to the standing conference of education ministers (2024: 7), about a quarter of students from year one to year ten each participate in Catholic religious education, Protestant religious education, and ethics. Only 4.5 per cent of students participate in interfaith religious education, while 6.1 per cent do not participate in religious education or any substitute subject. Interfaith religious education is offered in three of sixteen federal states, namely Bremen, Lower Saxony, and Saarland (ibid.: 14). However, alongside its interfaith subject Values and Norms, Lower Saxony also offers Protestant, Catholic and Islamic religious education as well as philosophy. In Saarland, Protestant and Catholic religious education are offered alongside general ethics. Bremen is thus the only federal state that exclusively offers interfaith religious education. As education is a matter for the individual federal states, it is not always clear to what extent the respective programmes address other religious groups (Spielhaus and Stimac 2018). In general, religious education remains firmly focused on Protestant and Catholic provision. In Baden-Württemberg, for example, there has been a curriculum for Alevi, Old Catholic, Protestant, Catholic, Syriac Orthodox, Jewish, and Sunni Islamic religious education since 2016, but no primary school students taking part in Jewish or Orthodox religious education were recorded in 2024 (KMK 2024: 11f).

There are increasing calls for more interfaith religious education in German schools, for example from the youth organisation of the Green Party in North Rhine-Westphalia. It has demanded not only that all students in the state should take part in interfaith religious education covering at least the five world religions, but also that the peaceful use of religion should be strengthened. This includes breaking down prejudices, questioning uncritical role models, and analysing the potential for conflict, so that students are strengthened in their peaceful personal development (Grüne Jugend Nordrhein-Westfalen 2019).

Interfaith religious education brings many advantages. The main aspect is to build bridges between communities and to nurture open-minded, tolerant students who in turn will strengthen the democratic landscape of future Germany. As mentioned, some education authorities are trying to respond to the increasing plurality of religious groups in Germany. This comes with multiple challenges.

First, the infrastructure and logistics of offering classes for every religious group prove difficult. Religious education for Muslims in schools is particularly contested. On the one hand, with several million Muslims in Germany there is an evident need for Islamic religious education in schools where Christian religious education exists, not only in terms of integration but also because of the state’s neutrality and the freedom of religion laid down in the Basic Law (Bösing et al. 2023). However, implementing it is easier said than done. As an official school subject, certain criteria must be met, among them the training of teachers and the design of the syllabus. While actors involved in designing syllabi for Islamic religious education would like to work with Muslim organisations, there is often hesitancy because of concerns about extremism and political implications (ibid.). The increasing plurality is also mirrored within other religious groups. According to a survey of Catholic teachers, 91 per cent of respondents see differences between their own convictions and doctrinal positions (BKRG and VKR 2022). Islamic religious education is therefore not the only form in which the approach is questioned.

Interfaith religious education in the light of social identity theory

By offering interfaith religious education, some challenges in the current system can be addressed. Inclusive, interfaith religious education aims to bridge outgroup and ingroup tendencies. It should strive to create a social group that is diverse in religion. If religious education is offered denominationally, social identity is reinforced by membership of a particular religious group. However, if the new social group is the class itself, then the following logic applies. If students realize that their direct ingroup, my class, is just as diverse in religion as the indirect ingroup, my nation, the perception of the indirect ingroup can change. If members of different religions are in the ingroup, it is more likely that students will accept members of other religions in their nation as well. As mentioned, social identity is built by five motivations.

Belonging. Every student is placed in a class when they enter school. Classes are usually diverse. Especially in larger towns and cities, students of different nationalities, ethnicities, and religions share the classroom. By learning together daily, having experiences such as school trips, and through community-building measures, students create a sense of belonging and notice that they are part of a group. Community-building in classes has been well researched (Nicholas 1997).

Understanding. When class members come together and discuss their social reality, including their religious convictions, mutual understanding can be enhanced. Interfaith religious education gives room for that. The teacher acts as a moderator and ensures that all students are treated with respect. Only if ingroup members understand each other will they agree to belong to the same group (Fiske 2000: 306). The understanding need not be that all students agree on the truth of one scripture. Rather, students in one class can agree that independently of their religion, every person should be treated respectfully and given the freedom to follow their own beliefs.

Controlling. Students should always feel safe and secure in their class. As Fiske notes, control means being able to anticipate the response of others to one’s actions. This means, for example, that students can expect a serious reaction when they comment on a topic. As soon as the reaction of other students deviates from what is expected, the student becomes insecure. This could be the case if students are laughed at because of their answer.

Self-enhancing. Students should have a positive relation to their class community and be proud to belong to it. This can and should be based on values (Fiske 2000: 310). A positive self-image can be achieved when students can say that they are part of a tolerant, diverse, and open class.

Trust. Students will not trust new ingroup members from the first day, or even in the first week or month. Trust needs to be fostered. It should be developed not only in interfaith religious education; every day should be used by teachers to help students trust each other. Asking students to help each other or introducing group work can enhance trust. In interfaith religious education, discussions about personal religious experiences should not go too deep from the first class. Icebreaker questions and more general topics can help students gain confidence that others will not mock them because of their beliefs. This trust can significantly help in identity building, as there is room for inner freedom in which there is space for emptiness and for the unexpected and unplannable (Van Deursen-Vreeburg 2024: 218).

If all five social motivations are served, interfaith religious education will build a strong sense of community among students. As there has been a comprehensive evaluation of religious education in Bremen in 2023, the interfaith approach of that federal state can be analysed in the light of these five motivations.

The evaluation shows that while Bremen students overall like the subject (69 per cent) and learn something new in class (79 per cent), especially about other religions (84 per cent), the students do not feel that the questions discussed in class relate to their lives or have importance for them (59 per cent), and only about half of the students question their lives and beliefs as a result of the subject (46 per cent). While all students feel that they are taken seriously, the approval ratings for non-religious students (81 per cent) and Muslim students (80 per cent) are lower than for Protestant and Catholic students (91 per cent each) (Nelson 2023: 5ff). This result indicates that students can open up in class, that is, that at least the social motives of understanding, trust, and control are present. The other two motives are not directly addressed. The high approval rating for learning about other religions coincides with the teachers’ priorities of facilitating dialogue among students of different religions (98 per cent), of students learning about other religions (98 per cent), and of students learning to be tolerant towards other belief systems (98 per cent). When it comes to more personal involvement of the students, the teachers give somewhat lower priority but still strong approval. Teachers find it important that there is room in class for students’ personal questions about life and the world (95 per cent) and that they can contribute their convictions (88 per cent) (ibid.: 10), which is not mirrored in the students’ responses.

In the qualitative part of the evaluation, teachers mentioned that although they try to address all students, this does not always succeed. Dialogue seemed to work well, although mostly on a superficial level (Klinkhammer and Spieß 2023: 12f). Teachers appreciate their students opening up and speaking about their convictions and experiences (ibid.: 15). Yazidi students, however, perceive it negatively that their religion is not dealt with in class (ibid.: 22). The subject can also lead to tensions in strongly religious families (ibid.: 26).

While the evaluation shows that religious education in Bremen schools is mostly accepted and positively regarded, there is still a gap between the curriculum, teachers and students. While the curriculum and the teachers want to include religious identity building, students focus more on interfaith learning. There is very little research on religious education in Germany, so it remains unclear what causes these different perceptions. Further research is needed.

While religious education in Bremen already strengthens interfaith dialogue and teaches students tolerance, the curriculum should be improved, as students of religious groups other than the world religions, such as Yazidi students, feel neglected. This can threaten their sense of belonging to the ingroup. Teachers should therefore either teach about every religious group to which students of the class belong, or involve students more in deciding which religions should be discussed in class.

Also, in comparison to the second evaluation of the Bremen curriculum, more students were withdrawn from the subject. The evaluation offers no explanation for that increase (Nelson 2023: 4). The increase shows, however, that interfaith religious education comes with challenges that need to be addressed.

Challenges in interfaith religious education

There are different challenges in offering interfaith religious education in formal schools. One of the greatest dangers is to create new forms of exclusion while striving for inclusion. This is what Moulin (2023: 270) calls the paradox of religious inclusivity. Bringing different religions together can cause practitioners of different faiths, or non-practitioners, to feel threatened in their security. On the one hand, if one assumes freedom of religion, one cannot compel people to engage with religions; on the other hand, a discussion of the Qur’an, for example, can place a Christian in a position of rejection if they regard the Bible as the only true scripture. This threat to identity arises because religions are in a sense exclusive (ibid.: 270f). Exclusive is ambiguous in this context. It can mean either that a practitioner denies the truth or even the right to exist of another religion or belief system, or, in a weaker form, that other religions are recognised but one’s own, with its practices and scriptures, is regarded as the best. At the same time, other practitioners may welcome the opportunity to study the scriptures of different religions and to find commonalities. Practitioners and non-practitioners cannot all be placed in one category. The degree of openness towards other faiths differs from person to person.

By offering interfaith religious education, non-religious and strongly religious students, or students from such families, may feel excluded: the former because they may feel obliged to engage with religious views and would form a minority in the class; the latter, or more particularly their parents, because they may not wish their children to study other religious scriptures and traditions.

Non-religious students could feel excluded for several reasons. If the subject is called religious education, they may feel excluded by the name alone. In some countries, such as the United Kingdom, it is therefore discussed whether to rename the subject religion and worldviews (Strhan and Shillitoe 2022). Interviews with non-religious primary school students in English religious education show that they sometimes feel excluded, for example in discussions of whether one believes in a God. Some students were taken aback by this because they did not attribute much importance to those questions (ibid.: 265). Religious identity may not be important to everyone. If students have to engage with their religious identity, they may resent the subject because it simply does not matter to them. Interestingly, the non-religious students emphasised the importance of tolerance towards people of different religions (ibid.: 266). It should be noted that the context of English religious education and interfaith religious education may differ, so the findings might not be applicable as a whole. It remains important, however, to keep in mind how non-religious students may feel when required to spend time discussing a topic that does not interest them. One could argue that all students have to take subjects they do not like, but if this disproportionately affects a particular group in the class, and cannot be attributed solely to individual preference, better inclusion of the affected group should be sought. The interviews also include positive findings. While non-religious students may not feel an incentive to explore their own worldview independently, they might still find it helpful to learn about non-religious perspectives. “Learning about non-religious perspectives can give students a vocabulary through which to be able to express their worldviews in a way that is currently not happening for many” (ibid.: 267).

A further challenge arises from the goal of interfaith religious education itself. Teachers may focus on students in their role as future citizens, wishing to raise responsible, open-minded, and tolerant adults. This carries the risk of neglecting the present child, who is not being recognised in their own right as a human being but is rather treated as a human becoming (Osbeck et al. 2025: 16). The long-term goal should of course be that students develop values such as tolerance and respect. Still, pedagogical and didactic approaches should always be tailored to the age of the students and address them at their current level of maturity. Looking at the interviews with non-religious students, we can see that children already display respect and tolerance towards people of other religions and beliefs (Strhan and Shillitoe 2022: 266). Teachers should therefore focus on the students in front of them, not on their future influence as citizens.

Finally, while a class can form a social group, it is not detached from other social groups. Students remain part of their families and friendship circles, and the school community itself is a social group. The five social motivations should therefore not be considered only within the class. In order to implement interfaith religious education successfully in the long term, the social motivations operating in the family and in the school community must be taken into account. Strictly non-religious or strongly religious parents in particular may be wary of interfaith religious education. They should therefore be shown the reasons for it. Through information evenings, individual conversations, and joint projects with the students, parents can better understand why interfaith religious education is not a threat to their own religious identity. At the same time, teachers can respond to parents’ concerns through dialogue and address them in lessons or projects.

Implications for nationwide implementation

As education is a matter for the federal states, it is difficult to demand a nationwide solution. However, as there is a federal ministry for education, some impetus is conceivable. The federal ministry could refer to the special status of religious education, as it is the only school subject mentioned by name in the Basic Law. On this basis, nationwide objectives could be proposed. For example, instead of denominational education, as is the case in most federal states, the objective could be that religious education should be offered in interfaith form. Nevertheless, significant resistance from the federal states is to be expected, and since general education is neither an area of exclusive federal legislation nor an area of concurrent legislation (Articles 70, 73 and 74 of the Basic Law), the federal government does not have the right to legislate. The federal minister can therefore only advocate more interfaith religious education through appeals and other diplomatic approaches.

Another possibility would be to introduce the topic at the standing conference of education ministers, where the education ministers of the individual federal states come together. As the federal states can discuss and exchange ideas on equal terms there, it is conceivable that the advantages of interfaith religious education evident in Bremen could make pilot projects possible in other federal states. It should be borne in mind, however, that religion and its treatment is a sensitive topic that usually generates considerable discussion, and resistance is to be expected.

As changes are difficult to implement at the structural level, attention should be paid to what teaching staff can achieve. Teachers are close to their students and cultivate relationships with them. It is difficult to offer interfaith religious education throughout under a denominational curriculum, but teachers could, for example, consider project days on which students from different classes come together for interfaith dialogue. This could take the form of reflecting on one’s own beliefs following Herling’s approach, such as whether one believes in a god and how one imagines divinity. These reflections could then be discussed with other students following the comparison approach, and finally the whole group could visit different places of worship to introduce defamiliarization. It will probably not be possible to develop empathy within a few days. Still, it could be a first step towards making room for interfaith dialogue.

SUMMARY *

The article’s argument runs against the intuition that reducing hostility between religious groups means emphasising what they have in common. On the author’s account, hostility grows where identity is insecure, and the remedy is therefore to make religious identity more secure rather than less salient, so that difference ceases to be experienced as threat. The mechanism proposed is a shift of the operative ingroup from the denomination to the classroom, examined systematically against Fiske’s five motives. What distinguishes the paper is that it takes its own counter-evidence seriously: the Bremen data show students learning about other religions while not finding the subject relevant to their own lives, which is the opposite of what the theory predicts, and the paradox of religious inclusivity means that a subject designed to include may exclude the non-religious and the strongly religious alike.

CONCLUSION

This paper, like many scholars, politicians, and practitioners, identifies a need for more interfaith dialogue to reduce outgroup derogation between religious groups in Germany. With antisemitism and anti-Muslim discrimination on the rise, bridges between different religious identities must be built before tensions escalate further. Implementing interfaith religious education in the formal school system was identified as a suitable means to foster interfaith dialogue in Germany.

The paper further explains how religious and social identity is built and perceived, and how addressing this identity building for students in the formal education system can help foster interfaith dialogue. However, this paper also has limitations. As mentioned, structural and political change will be very difficult to achieve. And even where there is an incentive for change, the paradox of religious inclusivity is very difficult, if not impossible, to overcome. Policymakers, school leaders, and teachers must therefore be careful and mindful of others and of their perceived security of identity in order to achieve acceptance of interfaith religious education. Implementing it would require reform of the formal school system. While this paper has not focused in detail on implementation, it offers insight into how interfaith dialogue can succeed while keeping in mind the risk of the paradox of inclusivity.

It is also important to note that interfaith dialogue in religious education is not a universal remedy for religious discrimination, especially against Jews and Muslims. Strengthening the religious identity of students can help to nurture tolerant citizens; however, current negative sentiments towards religious minorities will still be present. Furthermore, even if the proposed methods were perfectly implemented, other challenges would remain. The formal school system is not the only social environment in which students engage. Their homes, friendship groups, and social media influence their identities. Creating room for more interfaith dialogue in school is therefore only one step towards a more inclusive society.

POTENTIAL SOLUTION *

The article’s mechanism deserves to be named by the literature that supports it, because doing so both strengthens the argument and specifies its conditions. What the author describes when the operative ingroup shifts from denomination to classroom is the recategorisation described in the common ingroup identity model, and it is one of the better established findings in intergroup research: where members of two groups come to see themselves as belonging to a single superordinate group, bias between them declines. The conditions under which contact produces this effect were set out by Allport and have been confirmed repeatedly: equal status within the situation, a shared goal, cooperation rather than competition, and the support of authority. A classroom satisfies all four more readily than almost any other setting an adolescent enters, which is the strongest argument available for the author’s proposal.

Two qualifications follow from the same literature and both are practical. Recategorisation that requires people to set aside their original identity produces resistance, and the arrangement that works is the dual identity model, in which the subordinate identity is retained and valued within the superordinate one. Applied here, the aim is not that students become simply pupils of a class but that they are Muslim, Jewish, Christian, Alevi, Yazidi or non-religious pupils of a shared class. That is precisely what the author’s insistence on strengthening rather than dissolving religious identity implies, and stating it in these terms answers the objection that interfaith education waters down belief.

The paradox of religious inclusivity is the article’s most honest passage and there is more to say about how it has been handled. The English shift toward religion and worldviews is one response, and the more instructive is the distinction now standard in that literature between learning about religion, learning from religion, and being taught religion. Only the third raises the difficulty the author identifies. A subject that teaches what adherents believe, why it matters to them, and what questions of meaning are at stake, without requiring any student to locate themselves on a question of truth, is available to the non-religious student and to the strongly religious family alike. The Bremen finding that students learn a great deal about other religions while not finding the subject relevant to their own lives is precisely what one would expect from a curriculum weighted toward the first mode, and it identifies where the reform should go.

Two additions belong here for readers of this journal. The article treats the parental dimension as an obstacle to be managed through information evenings, and the experience of comparable reforms suggests it is better treated as the primary site of the work: opposition comes from homes rather than from classrooms, and where religious communities were involved in designing the curriculum rather than consulted about it afterwards, withdrawal rates were markedly lower. That is a mediation task in the ordinary sense, conducted between a state authority and organised communities before any lesson is taught. And the finding that dialogue in Bremen remained mostly superficial is not a failure but the expected result of a subject taught in periods of forty-five minutes by teachers with no training in facilitation. Depth in interfaith conversation requires time, ground rules, and someone able to hold a room when a student says something that wounds another. Training religious education teachers in facilitation, which the field this journal serves knows how to do, would address the gap the evaluation identified more directly than any curricular change.

Finally, the article’s central claim is stronger than its own framing suggests and worth stating plainly. The alternative to teaching pupils about one another’s convictions is not neutrality; it is leaving them to acquire that knowledge from the sources the article describes in its opening paragraphs. Whatever the difficulties of interfaith religious education, they are difficulties of a curriculum, and curricula can be revised.

* Added by the WMO Editorial Team

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Is there a duty to prevent atrocities? If so, what should it consist of?

How to cite this journal: Author, Date of the post, WMO Conflict Insight, Title of the post, ISSN: 2628 6998, https://worldmediation.org/journal/

ABSTRACT *

This article argues that a duty to prevent mass atrocities has emerged from changes in international law and international politics since 1945, and examines why that duty remains difficult to discharge. The four categories of atrocity crime named at the World Summit of 2005 are set out and distinguished, with attention to the disputed boundaries of the definition of genocide and to the anomalous status of ethnic cleansing, which has never been codified as a crime in its own right. The legal framework is then traced from the Charter and the Genocide Convention through the Universal Declaration to the responsibility to protect and its three pillars. A section on prevention distinguishes systemic from targeted measures and cautions against the metaphor of a toolbox, since instruments that work in one setting may not work in another. The final part addresses the limits: enforcement that depends on goodwill, the veto power of the permanent members of the Security Council, a framework centred on states in conflicts where the state is not the aggressor, and the perception among states of the Global South that the doctrine is applied to them and not by them. The author concludes that reform of the Council, greater involvement of non-state actors, and attention by states of the Global North to prevention at home are the conditions for the doctrine’s credibility.

KEYWORDS *

Mass atrocity prevention, responsibility to protect, genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, Security Council veto, sovereignty, risk factors, Global South, Libya, responsibility while protecting

INTRODUCTION

Never again was one of the phrases most commonly used when international actors talked about the Holocaust (UN 2018). Generally speaking, history gives us more examples of mass atrocities than we can count. Many of these occurred under colonial rule and are partly forgotten by the Western world, but not by the descendants of the wronged peoples (Shakya and Rivas 2020). Up until the 19th century, mass atrocities did not play a large part in the morals of international politics; they were not condemned, but even considered legitimate political instruments (Krell and Schlotter 2018: 109). Only after the horrors of the Holocaust during Nazi Germany did the international community reconsider its standing on mass atrocities and its responsibility to act if an atrocity should happen. The newly founded United Nations was highly ambitious about promoting human security in the form of human rights, but unfortunately change only happened slowly. While the Genocide Convention and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights proved the good intentions of the United Nations, the documents and promises turned out to be no more than hollow words for a long period: during the Cold War the two blocs of the United States and the West and of the Soviet Union were more concerned about geopolitics and being at the top of the international order, so that atrocities became instrumentalized in the rhetoric of each bloc to show its population and allies how bad the enemy was (Straus 2016: 4).

After the end of the Cold War, the world was once again hopeful and believed that human rights were at the core of international politics now more than ever. But humanitarian assistance in Iraq and Somalia, as well as the genocide committed against the Tutsi in Rwanda and the massacre of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica, proved the international community wrong. Even though the narrative of never again had emerged after the Holocaust, states and the United Nations stood and watched the atrocities happen (Kurtz and Rotmann 2016: 24). The shame of the failure in the 1990s led to the introduction of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, based on the Rome Statute, to establish a permanent court to try atrocity crimes instead of only having ad hoc tribunals for specific situations (Straus 2016: 7). At the turn of the millennium, the United Nations reiterated the promise of the protection of human rights, and following the report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, the responsibility to protect was introduced at the World Summit of 2005. Since then, it has been the leading policy on the prevention of mass atrocities (General Assembly resolution 60/1).

This paper follows the argument that there is a duty to prevent mass atrocities based on the changes in the premises of international law and international politics. As the developments in the second half of the 20th century showed, the international community became more and more set on preventing mass atrocities and continues to deliver on its promise to protect, enforce and promote human rights. Following this introduction, a conceptualization of mass atrocities will be given. Important conventions, policies and official documents of the United Nations will be analysed to show its understanding of the self-imposed duty to prevent mass atrocities. After that, means to promote the prevention of atrocities will be shown, before the paper points out the limitations of the prevention of mass atrocities.

MAIN CORPUS

What are mass atrocities?

At the World Summit of 2005, the General Assembly introduced the four types of mass atrocity with its responsibility to protect principle: genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing (General Assembly resolution 60/1). Generally speaking, mass atrocity crimes are human rights violations against civilians on a grand scale (Straus 2016: 117), but the four types of crime differ regarding victimization and target group, context and other characteristics.

As discussions about the prevention of mass atrocities gained momentum after the Holocaust, genocide is arguably the atrocity crime most represented in research. Not only is there the field of genocide studies but also Holocaust studies (USHMM w.D.). In the Genocide Convention, genocide was defined as acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, with acts including not only the killing of members of the victim group but also other acts leading to the destruction of the group, such as preventing births (UN 1948: 1). Lemkin, the academic father of the term genocide, campaigned for a broader definition of the crime, so that groups such as social classes and political groups would be included as well, but because of political pressure the United Nations adopted only the narrower concept. Nor are other forms of identity such as gender or sexual identity included in the original concept of the Genocide Convention. Therefore scholars have introduced new concepts such as gendercide (Schaller 2011: 250f). A more inclusive definition is given by the anthropologist Hinton (2012: 9f): “We might simply define genocide as the more or less coordinated attempt to destroy a dehumanized and excluded group of people because of who they are.” Even though the social groups to be included in the definition of genocide are controversial, two aspects are undisputed. First, genocide victims are deliberately targeted because they belong to the victim group, and second, genocidal acts always follow intent on the side of the perpetrators (Global Centre R2P 2018).

War crimes are defined in Article 8 of the Rome Statute and include wilful killing, torture or inhuman treatment, wilfully causing great suffering, extensive destruction and appropriation of property, compelling a prisoner of war or another protected person to serve in the forces of a hostile power, wilfully depriving a prisoner of war or another protected person of the rights of fair and regular trial, unlawful deportation or transfer or unlawful confinement, the taking of hostages, attacks against civilians and against peacekeeping and humanitarian assistance personnel, as well as the use of particular weapons or methods of attack. War crimes are violations of international humanitarian law that arise from the acts of an individual perpetrator and occur only in the context of an armed conflict. The group identity of victims does not matter (UN w.D.a).

The concept of crimes against humanity may be traced back to slavery and the slave trade (UN w.D.b). It has yet to be codified in a dedicated international treaty, but is defined in the Rome Statute: crimes against humanity are acts committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, and include acts such as killing, torture, deportation, sexual violence, and apartheid. Crimes against humanity are widespread or systematic (Global Centre R2P 2018). They are therefore intentional, as genocide is.

Last but not least, ethnic cleansing takes a special place among atrocity crimes, as it has not been recognized as an independent crime under international law, so there is no agreed definition (ibid.). The term derives from a Serbo-Croatian expression which emerged in the context of the conflict in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s (UN w.D.c). An expert commission reporting to the Security Council described ethnic cleansing as rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove persons of given groups from the area (Security Council S/25274: 16). It remains contested whether ethnic cleansing should be a category of atrocity crime in its own right, as depending on the case it can fall under the definitions of the other three (UN w.D.c).

What is the legal framework for the prevention of mass atrocities?

After the horrors of the two World Wars in the first half of the 20th century, a change of morals in international politics took place which showed a clear commitment of the international community, and namely of the United Nations, to a duty to protect civilians from their own state’s authorities and therefore to prevent mass atrocities. After having identified the empirical changes in international politics in the introduction, the following part will shed more light on the underlying changes in international political theory and on the resolve of states to shape international politics around the protection of civilians and human rights.

Especially after the Second World War, international law was modernized and shifted towards a stronger protection of civilians and therefore towards a restriction of national sovereignty. Before that change, the premises of classical international law had been that the nation-state was the only entity in the international community that mattered, and that national sovereignty on the Westphalian model stood at the centre of international politics (Krell and Schlotter 2018: 112f). At the start of the 20th century, international norms, policies, and mechanisms to prevent and respond to atrocity were virtually non-existent (Straus 2016: 1f), because they contradicted the strong belief in state sovereignty. Modern international law, on the other hand, follows the premise that war between states cannot be justified, leading to a prohibition of the use of force and a duty to observe peace for member states of the United Nations. As mentioned, national sovereignty was restricted in order to keep the peace (Krell and Schlotter 2018: 118). Additionally, the United Nations focused on the protection of human rights. With the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, introduced in 1948 by the General Assembly, the member states formulated the basic human rights, which include that every human being is entitled to freedom and is not to be discriminated against on grounds such as race, religion or ethnicity (UN w.D.d).

At the World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna in 1993, the United Nations stated that human rights were universal and indivisible (Brock 2016: 8f). But even before the Universal Declaration, human rights and international politics based on a peaceful international community were expressed in the Charter. The preamble states that the peoples of the United Nations are determined to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, and in the equal rights of men and women. Article 1 sets out the overriding goal to maintain international peace and security and to remove threats to the peace. To achieve this goal, the Security Council is equipped with powers for the peaceful settlement of disputes and for enforcement action under Chapters VI and VII of the Charter. In the Genocide Convention of 1948, the United Nations and its member states stated that genocide is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish (UN 1948: 1).

Because of the modernization of international law and the focus on the protection of persons in international politics in general, the General Assembly adopted the principle of the responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity at the World Summit of 2005 (General Assembly resolution 60/1: 30). It not only states the responsibility of each member state to protect its population, but also provides for collective action through the Security Council if an atrocity should occur. In the outcome document, the General Assembly also stressed the importance of the United Nations and the willingness to strengthen its institutions. This extension of the protection of civilians may also be traced back to the failures of United Nations peace missions in the 1990s, namely in Rwanda and Bosnia (Straus 2016: 5f). Since then, the responsibility to protect has been considered an important norm in international politics, one that states are not supposed to break if they are to follow through on their goal of being a good global citizen (Hehir 2019: 60).

The concept follows the constructivist logic that because states endorse the responsibility to protect, they are less likely to commit mass atrocity crimes, as they themselves agree that such crimes are morally wrong. In the first years after the adoption of the principle it remained unclear what it was to look like exactly. It was only clear that United Nations peacekeeping should shift the focus from humanitarian intervention to the protection of victims of atrocity crimes, as humanitarian intervention was believed to be vulnerable to abuse as a pretext for interference in the affairs of other states, and was therefore considered by some scholars and political actors as neo-imperialist. “R2P represents the voice of potential victims, not the voice of presidents and generals” (Popovski 2019: 504). In 2009, the United Nations introduced the three pillars of the responsibility to protect (General Assembly resolution A/63/677) for more clarity regarding the implementation of the new international norm. With these pillars, the international community re-emphasises that first and foremost states are responsible for protecting their citizens from mass atrocities. Other actors on the international stage can help governments to follow through on that responsibility by offering advice and assistance. Only with the third pillar is the wider international community directly involved in the prevention of mass atrocities, or rather in the response to them, as the keywords are timely and decisive response (ibid.: 2). While the international community acknowledges the duty to prevent mass atrocities, the implementation of that duty falls first under the realm of national sovereignty, and the international community becomes involved when atrocities are already in motion.

What can prevention of mass atrocities look like?

As already stated, the prevention of mass atrocity crimes is first and foremost assigned to states. Prevention should take place at the domestic level, undertaken by governments and other institutions such as courts and parliaments. The goal of prevention is the protection of the state’s civilians. This can be achieved by different means, and states can resort to different strategies. But while scholars and policy advisers talk about policymakers having a toolbox full of different prevention tools, the metaphor can be misleading (Straus 2016: 132). While prevention must consist of different strategies and actions to be successful, the tools cannot be used with the same outcome in two different settings. For example, stopping hate speech against a minority to prevent genocide will firstly not always work and secondly may not work in the same way in two different settings, as situations that could lead to atrocities are context-sensitive. For successful prevention it is therefore crucial to make a comprehensive assessment of the situation at hand. Also, tools are usually used one at a time.

When it comes to atrocity prevention, policymakers should not waste precious time relying only on one strategy or action at a time, but should rather implement different strategies and actions right from the beginning to increase the chances of preventing mass atrocity crimes. The first step to successful prevention is a comprehensive assessment of the situation at hand. Identifying the risk factors and the level of escalation are crucial steps (Reike et al. 2013: 5f). Seven risk factors have been identified as potentially leading, though not mono-causally, to mass atrocities: the presence of war and armed conflict; economic or social instability and crisis; an exclusionary ideology; an authoritarian government; the mobilisation of the population by leaders and elites for self-interested ends; group dynamics and conformity effects; and a history of previous atrocities (ibid.). At the first step of escalation, the risk factors emerge, then follow upheaval and mobilisation, for example through the dissemination of an exclusionary ideology, followed by imminent emergency (ibid.).

The less escalated a conflict, the easier and more successful it is to prevent with the right strategies. But it is not necessary to wait until risk factors emerge to take measures of prevention. Systemic prevention of mass atrocities, including strengthening democratic institutions, reducing discrimination and general conflict prevention, decreases the probability of atrocity crimes occurring (Straus 2016: 136f). In the case of an imminent atrocity crime, a more targeted approach is needed. A criminological approach can help to prevent the crime by focusing on three factors: the perpetrator, the victim, and the situation (Reike et al. 2013: 8). Perpetrators can be threatened with punishment if they should follow through on the atrocity crime, victims can be protected from the perpetrators, and the situation can be de-escalated by mediation between the groups.

Unfortunately, governments and institutions are often not strong enough, or are themselves involved, when atrocity crimes are imminent. Then the international community must step in to prevent the crime from happening. As with the domestic approach, the goal remains the protection of civilians, especially of the victim group. The international community can use different means, such as diplomacy or coercion, as well as humanitarian or military means. There are also several strategies available: general conflict prevention, shielding civilians, nudging, threatening or the general use of soft power on the perpetrators, sanctions, and, as a last resort, a peacekeeping mission authorised by the Security Council (Straus 2016: 115ff, 139f; General Assembly resolution 60/1).

What problems may arise in the prevention of mass atrocities?

While the moral duty to prevent mass atrocities is uncontested in the international community, the implementation of the responsibility to protect and the application of policies regarding the prevention of and response to atrocity crimes has limits and is the ground for wide-ranging critique.

First, being a norm in an international political order which is anarchic leads by its nature to limitations. The adoption of the norm was a significant step to prevent further mass atrocities, but it rests on the goodwill of nation-states. The norm was not introduced to prevent the great majority of states from carrying out mass atrocities, but to prevent those states that accept the use of violence against civilians and find it a legitimate political instrument from committing these large-scale human rights violations. But this specific target group is less likely than the rest of the states to act on international norms, because domestic politics matters more to political actors than international standing. Additionally, while there is a new norm in the international order, the mechanisms of enforcement remain weak. Not acting when mass atrocity crimes happen may be scorned, but there are no consequences for the international community if it decides to look the other way and ignore an ongoing atrocity in a country, regardless of whether it is state-sponsored or not (Hehir 2019: 59ff, 174).

At the centre of the responsibility to protect we find the Security Council, which in itself is argued to be a flawed institution. The Council is the body responsible for authorising peacekeeping missions and interventions if the international community should decide that it is time for a response to an atrocity crime. But the five permanent members can always make use of their veto to prevent a resolution and therefore a mission. Critics state that the permanent members use the Council to promote their own interests and act according to them and not on the will of the international community, which can lead to stalemate and inaction even though the majority of member states would approve a mission (Hehir 2019: 173; Popovski 2019: 515). Member states as well as non-state actors have been campaigning for the voluntary restraint of the use of the veto by the permanent members in mass atrocity situations, as the political bargains and power politics harm the credibility of the United Nations and its will to ensure and promote peace worldwide (Global Centre R2P w.D.), and of course also abandon countless victims and civilians in their time of dire need.

Even with those calls for more responsibility, there are numerous examples of permanent members placing national interests above the responsibility to protect. Especially the civil war in Syria has led regularly to outcry in the international community and civil society. The national strategies of the permanent members contradicted each other, with Western countries supporting the Syrian opposition, Russia supporting Bashar al-Assad, and China unwilling to intervene at all. With those opposing positions, a stalemate formed in the Council which paralysed the international community and stopped efforts to protect Syrian civilians, who were left to suffer because of power politics (Al-Oraibi 2021). As the international community and victims cannot rely on a voluntary restraint in the use of the veto in mass atrocity situations, a reform of the Council is needed as a supportive means in the general strategy of preventing mass atrocities.

Generally speaking, the focus on state actors can prove problematic. With the emergence of newer theories of international relations, the importance of non-state actors has gained recognition over the last decades. But the framework of the international order, especially in the United Nations, still puts the nation-state at the centre of international politics, even though states have proven unwilling to follow through on international norms in the past, as in the Syrian war. Non-state actors could be useful, if not crucial, in the prevention of and the response to mass atrocity crimes. International media, human rights organizations and other advocates can use soft power to influence perpetrators (Popovski 2019: 510). The consideration of non-state actors is not only important regarding the protection of civilians. Atrocity crimes do not always have to be state-sponsored, and these crimes can be committed by other groups, as in the cases of Afghanistan, Nigeria, and Yemen. Focusing only on traditional security concepts and only dealing with states cannot prevent further escalation in those conflicts where the state is not the aggressor (Ercan 2022: 295f).

Newer concepts integrating non-state actors could also help with another limitation. Even though the responsibility to protect brought a rhetorical shift from humanitarian intervention to a focus on the responsibility of the state to protect its population (Evans and Sahnoun 2002: 101), in international politics and the academic debate the question remains whether states use the doctrine to justify intervening abroad in pursuit of their own interests (ibid.; Popovski 2019: 503). This debate gained momentum after the mission in Libya in 2011, which saved civilian lives but also led to a change of regime, which in turn led to criticism in the international community (Mabera and Spies 2016: 208). The states of the Global South in particular emphasise the need for the responsibility to protect, but express concerns and doubts about the intentions of Western states regarding their motives for peace missions. Advocates of the doctrine as a global norm point out its origins in Africa, with the two African Secretaries General, Boutros-Ghali and Annan, highlighting the need for a shift towards the human security paradigm (ibid.: 211), among other precursors. The unanimous adoption of the principle at the World Summit of 2005, as well as the concept having sprung from many corners of the world and been developed in global discussions (Popovski 2019: 502), is also used to point out its global character. And while non-Western states generally support the idea of a duty to prevent atrocities, the translation of the abstract international norm into feasible action is another matter, with states being reminded of colonial and imperial times. Security Council resolution 1973 on Libya, authorising all necessary measures to protect civilians, arguably fed into the fears of non-Western states as they worried about the overthrow of the Libyan government by Western powers (Mabera and Spies 2016: 208ff).

Brazil became a key actor in the global discussions about the doctrine (Stuenkel 2016: 620), introducing the concept of responsibility while protecting, which calls for clear and strong limitations on the use of force by peacekeeping forces during their missions, to prevent the mixing of protection with the pursuit of national interests. Other postcolonial views argue that the focus of the doctrine lies on the Global South. The liberal theory of genocide and mass atrocities argues that genocide can only occur either in totalitarian regimes or in failing states in the so-called third world (Schaller 2011: 249), and therefore liberal democracies of the Global North think of the responsibility to protect as a foreign policy issue and instrument only (Richmond and Visoka 2022: 1242). As Straus (2016: 133ff) noted, the prevention of mass atrocities starts at the domestic level. In most, if not all, European democracies and in the United States, alarming signs of risk factors are visible should conflicts escalate. Straus (2016: 78) identifies hate speech as an instrument to provoke violence. And while femicide has led to protest across Latin America for years (Dannemann 2019), European law enforcement authorities still struggle with the prosecution of gender-based violence (Hellmann 2023). The European Union meanwhile supports an initiative in Latin America to stop gender-based violence (Dannemann 2019). It would be an exaggeration to speak of imperial designs on the basis of examples like these, yet, understandably, states of the Global South perceive a double standard behind the intentions of the Global North.

SUMMARY *

The article’s structure sets a claim against its own qualification. The claim is that a duty to prevent has emerged, established through the Charter, the Genocide Convention, the Rome Statute and the outcome document of 2005, and unanimously accepted. The qualification is that the duty is discharged through machinery in which the states most likely to need restraining hold a veto, in which no consequence attaches to inaction, and in which the doctrine has been applied almost exclusively to weaker states by stronger ones. The author’s most striking move is to turn the last point inward: if prevention properly begins domestically, then the risk indicators the doctrine identifies are present in the states that most readily invoke it, and the perception of a double standard among states of the Global South is not merely a perception.

CONCLUSION

While there is no doubt in the international community that there is a duty to prevent mass atrocities and to protect civilians from resulting harm, the implementation of the responsibility to protect comes with problems that need addressing if the international community wants to stand united in its task. The United Nations has set an ambitious goal and has established, through the responsibility to protect and the definition of atrocity crimes in the Rome Statute and other legal frameworks, the basis for feasible action. With the responsibility to protect as a widely acknowledged international norm, mass atrocity crimes should be prevented in the future and, if not, at least responded to. However, when the norm is to be translated into action in the case of an occurring atrocity crime, the typical problems of international politics and global governance arise: the anarchic setting, the focus on the nation-state and sovereignty, and especially a perceived divide between North and South and power politics in the Security Council, all of which complicate the task of aiding civilians in times of need. Possible solutions in the international setting would be a reform of the Security Council, a stronger involvement of non-state actors, and a refocusing by states of the Global North on the prevention of mass atrocities at home, to address the concerns of states of the Global South about imposed views. Additionally, a general focus on the domestic prevention of atrocities before conflicts between groups arise will help prevent atrocity crimes and protect civilians without international intervention.

POTENTIAL SOLUTION *

The article’s assessment is sound and its most useful contribution is easy to miss, because it appears as a complaint about the doctrine’s limits rather than as a finding about where it works. The three pillars are not three routes to the same destination. The first and second, the state’s own responsibility and international assistance to help it meet that responsibility, have been used continuously and quietly for two decades: preventive diplomacy, national mechanisms for atrocity prevention, support for human rights institutions, mediation of the local disputes that escalate into worse. The third, coercive action, has been invoked in full once. Judging the doctrine solely by the third pillar therefore measures it by the part that was always going to be blocked, and obscures the part that has been doing the work.

That said, the veto problem is real and it is worth reporting what has actually been attempted, since the article calls for reform without naming the proposals. The initiative for restraint in mass atrocity situations, supported by well over a hundred states, and the code of conduct promoted by the Accountability, Coherence and Transparency group both ask permanent members to undertake voluntarily not to veto where atrocity crimes are at issue. Neither binds anyone. What was achieved, in 2022, is that any veto now triggers an automatic debate in the General Assembly at which the vetoing state must explain itself. This is a modest measure and it is the first structural change in decades, and it works by the only means available to the wider membership, which is the imposition of a reputational cost.

The Libya case deserves more weight than the article gives it, because it explains the subsequent paralysis rather than merely accompanying it. The states that abstained on resolution 1973 concluded that a mandate to protect civilians had been used to effect regime change, and their consequent unwillingness to authorise anything similar is the proximate cause of the deadlock over Syria. The Brazilian proposal on responsibility while protecting was a direct response and contained the elements that would address it: criteria assessed before authorisation, sequencing that exhausts other measures first, and, crucially, monitoring and reporting during a mandate so that the Council retains oversight of what is done in its name. Those proposals were not taken up, and the pattern the article describes followed.

Two additions belong here for a journal of this field. Prevention as the article describes it operates at the level of states and international bodies, and the record suggests the decisive work is often local: atrocity is usually preceded by the breakdown of relations between specific communities in specific places, and the mechanisms that hold those relations, inter-communal dialogue, early warning networks rooted in communities rather than in capitals, and local mediation, have repeatedly interrupted the sequence where national politics could not. And the article’s treatment of hate speech identifies the right indicator and can be sharpened: what has been shown to precede violence is not the expression of prejudice in general but the specific combination of dehumanising language, the identification of targets, and signals from authority that killing is sanctioned. That combination is observable, which makes it actionable in a way that a general concern about rhetoric is not.

Finally, the article’s closing argument is the one to press hardest. A doctrine applied outward and never inward will be received as an instrument of power, whatever its origins, and the credibility of prevention depends on states of the Global North submitting themselves to the same assessment. National mechanisms for atrocity prevention exist in a number of states and their value is precisely that they treat the question as domestic. Establishing them where they are absent would cost little, would strengthen the argument the article makes, and would answer the objection it identifies more effectively than any reform of the Security Council is likely to.

* Added by the WMO Editorial Team

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Brock, L. (2016). Wozu brauchen wir heute die Vereinten Nationen? Bilanz und Perspektiven der Weltorganisation. In: UN und Menschenrechte. Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 66, 10 to 11/2016, 3 to 10.

Dannemann, V. (2019). ¿Cómo erradicar el feminicidio en América Latina? Deutsche Welle. https://www.dw.com/es/c%C3%B3mo-erradicar-el-feminicidio-en-am%C3%A9rica-latina/a-49574355

Ercan, P. G. (2022). R2P at Twenty: A Shared Responsibility? In: Ercan, P. G. (ed.). The Responsibility to Protect Twenty Years On: Rhetoric and Implementation. Palgrave Macmillan, 289 to 302. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90731-0

Evans, G., and M. Sahnoun (2002). The Responsibility to Protect. Foreign Affairs 81(6), 99 to 110.

General Assembly resolution 60/1 (2005). Resolution adopted by the General Assembly on 16 September 2005. https://www.undocs.org/en/A/RES/60/1

General Assembly document A/63/677 (2009). Implementing the Responsibility to Protect: Report of the Secretary-General.

Global Centre R2P (2018). Defining the Four Mass Atrocity Crimes: Background Briefing. Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect. https://www.globalr2p.org/publications/defining-the-four-mass-atrocity-crimes/

Global Centre R2P (w.D.). UN Security Council and the Responsibility to Protect. https://www.globalr2p.org/calling-for-a-unsc-code-of-conduct/

Hehir, A. (2019). Hollow Norms and the Responsibility to Protect. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90536-5

Hellmann, D. F. (2023). Femizide und Gewalt gegen Frauen: Gewalt gegen Frauen in Deutschland. Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung.

Hinton, A. L. (2012). Critical Genocide Studies. Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal 7(1), 4 to 15.

Krell, G., and P. Schlotter (2018). Weltbilder und Weltordnung: Einführung in die Theorie der internationalen Beziehungen. 5th edition. Nomos.

Kurtz, G., and P. Rotmann (2016). Der Schutz von Zivilisten durch UN-Friedenseinsätze. In: UN und Menschenrechte. Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 66, 10 to 11/2016, 24 to 29.

Mabera, F., and Y. Spies (2016). How Well Does R2P Travel Beyond the West? In: Bellamy, A. J., and T. Dunne (eds.). The Oxford Handbook of the Responsibility to Protect. Oxford University Press, 208 to 226.

Popovski, V. (2019). The UN Security Council and Responsibility to Protect as Global Approach to Prevent Mass Atrocities. In: Kulnazarova, A., and V. Popovski (eds.). The Palgrave Handbook of Global Approaches to Peace. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78905-7_24

Reike, R., S. Sharma, and J. Welsh (2013). A Strategic Framework for Mass Atrocity Prevention. Australian Civil-Military Centre.

Richmond, O. P., and G. Visoka (2022). Peace and the Responsibility to Protect.

Schaller, D. J. (2011). From Lemkin to Clooney: The Development and State of Genocide Studies. Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal 6(3), 245 to 256.

Security Council document S/25274 (1993). Letter dated 9 February 1993 addressed to the President of the Security Council.

Shakya, T., and A. Rivas (2020). To Native Americans, Reparations Can Vary from Having Sovereignty to Just Being Heard. ABC News. https://abcnews.go.com/US/native-americans-reparations-vary-sovereignty-heard/story?id=73178740

Straus, S. (2016). Fundamentals of Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. https://www.ushmm.org/genocide-prevention/reports-and-resources/fundamentals-of-genocide-and-mass-atrocity-prevention

Stuenkel, O. (2016). Responsibility While Protecting. In: Bellamy, A. J., and T. Dunne (eds.). The Oxford Handbook of the Responsibility to Protect. Oxford University Press, 620 to 637.

UN (1945). Charter of the United Nations and Statute of the International Court of Justice. San Francisco. https://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/CTC/uncharter.pdf

UN (1948). Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

UN (2018). Genocide: “Never Again” Has Become “Time and Again”. https://www.ohchr.org/en/stories/2018/09/genocide-never-again-has-become-time-and-again

UN (w.D.a). War Crimes: Definitions. United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect. https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/war-crimes.shtml

UN (w.D.b). Crimes against Humanity: Definitions. https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/crimes-against-humanity.shtml

UN (w.D.c). Ethnic Cleansing: Definitions. https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/ethnic-cleansing.shtml

UN (w.D.d). Universal Declaration of Human Rights. https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights

USHMM (w.D.). Holocaust and Genocide Studies Scholarly Journal. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. https://www.ushmm.org/research/publications/journal

Supplementary references added by the WMO Editorial Team

United Nations General Assembly Resolution 76/262 (2022) establishing the standing mandate for a debate following the use of the veto in the Security Council.

Accountability, Coherence and Transparency Group, Code of Conduct regarding Security Council action against genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes, 2015; and the France and Mexico Political Declaration on Suspension of Veto Powers in Cases of Mass Atrocity, 2015.

Letter dated 9 November 2011 from the Permanent Representative of Brazil to the United Nations, A/66/551 to S/2011/701, on responsibility while protecting.

United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect (2014). Framework of Analysis for Atrocity Crimes: A Tool for Prevention, New York.

Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (2001). The Responsibility to Protect, Ottawa.

Bellamy, A. J. (2015). Responsibility to Protect: A Defense. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Global Action Against Mass Atrocity Crimes, documentation on national mechanisms for atrocity prevention.

Yanagizawa-Drott, D. (2014). Propaganda and Conflict: Evidence from the Rwandan Genocide. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 129(4), 1947 to 1994.

Fragmented Germany: An analysis of the European Elections 2024

How to cite this journal: Author, Date of the post, WMO Conflict Insight, Title of the post, ISSN: 2628 6998, https://worldmediation.org/journal/

ABSTRACT

The 2024 European Parliament elections highlight Germany’s deepening social and political fragmentation, with the AfD emerging as the second-strongest party. This article explores the historical context, rising extremism, and societal divisions, concluding with a call to reinforce democratic values, enhance social cohesion, and counter extremism for a more united future.

Editorial note: the assessment of the parties and movements discussed reflects the author’s own perspective. This journal’s editorial position is neutral on contested questions of party politics. *

KEYWORDS *

Germany, political fragmentation, social cohesion, European elections 2024, AfD, right wing extremism, populism, East and West Germany, political education, radicalisation, democracy, trust in institutions

INTRODUCTION

The results of the elections of the European Parliament 2024 show that the social fragmentation Germany has been experiencing for years has made its way into the political landscape. The AfD has become the second strongest force, overtaking the party of the Social Democrats (European Parliament 2024). After months of mass protests against right-wing extremism on German streets (Tagesschau 2024a) and court proceedings concerning the classification of the AfD as a suspected case of right-wing extremism (Jeske et al. 2024), this election certainly shows how fragmented German society is at the moment.

MAIN CORPUS

Election results of the European election 2024

In Germany, the conservative parties of CDU and CSU are clearly the winners of the European elections, with around twice as many votes as the second-placed party, the AfD. Interestingly, the AfD, the SPD, and Bündnis 90/Die Grünen only differ by 1.5 to 2 percentage points each in their votes. Also, other parties reached very similar shares of the votes. In total, 11 parties got more than 1 per cent of the votes (European Parliament 2024). This shows how fragmented German voters are. How can this political fragmentation be explained? Let us take a step back and look at Germany’s civil society.

Drifting apart: social fragmentation in Germany

Humans are social beings. Having social relations with the people of our surroundings is therefore crucial for humans in order to feel content. In an ideal society, humans deal with each other based on respect to reach the best possible circumstances for society. “Therefore, personal interests can never surpass the community’s needs” (Erdmann 2024a). Unfortunately, citizens of a country usually strongly disagree on what is best for the community. While most, maybe all, individuals of a group might agree that peace is the best option for the community, what this “peace” would look like may be different to each individual (Erdmann 2024b).

German society has arguably been fragmented for decades. Looking at historical events like the separation of Germany and its reunification, the divide between West Germany and East Germany is still noticeable today (Regev 2020). There are many attempts at explaining the economic disadvantage of the eastern part of Germany, which is evident even three decades after Germany’s reunification. Stereotypes about people from East Germany are still present in German civil society. One especially relevant stereotype is the tendency of East Germans towards extremism, be it left-wing or right-wing extremism.

Looking at empirical data, however, this stereotype cannot be supported in the simple form in which it is usually stated (Högele 2019). However, whether due to distorted media coverage or a different form of right-wing extremism, East Germany seems to be in the news more often on topics related to right-wing extremism. In the new federal states the PEGIDA movement evolved and has been holding regular protests since the arrival of many Syrian refugees in 2015. An attack on a synagogue by a right-wing extremist, in which two people were killed, also happened in East Germany (bpb 2020). However, there are also signs of racism and other right-wing tendencies noticeable in the western parts of Germany. In May, a video of young adults partying and chanting racist slogans on Sylt went viral on social media (Tagesschau 2024b), just to mention one example.

The question arises: where does this radicalisation come from? While right-wing extremism has a long history in Germany, for many decades right-wing extremism seemed to have been a marginal appearance only. Perhaps the most prominent example is the murder series of the NSU, a neo-Nazi group that killed ten people over the course of more than a decade (Radke 2013). For some years, however, extreme right-wing beliefs and patterns of racism and antisemitism like the above-mentioned incidents have made their way more and more into the midst of society. This radicalisation can have several reasons.

Maybe these beliefs have been there the whole time and they only now surface because of new media types like social media. But that can hardly suffice as a full explanation. Radicalisation seems to be rooted in “profound discontent and scepticism at a fundamental level towards their political system” (Erdmann 2024b). Political fragmentation as shown in the European elections is thus rooted in social fragmentation. What does this fragmentation mean for the political landscape?

Political fragmentation in Germany

Compared to other nations, Germany has always been politically more fragmented than most other nations which rely on a two-party system. Even at the beginning of the Federal Republic of Germany, at least three parties held political power: the CDU and CSU as the conservative camp, the SPD as the social democratic camp, and the FDP as the liberal party. A few decades later, Bündnis 90/Die Grünen and Die Linke joined. For a long time, four or five parties were represented in the German parliament. Since 2017, with the AfD moving into parliament for the first time, six parliamentary groups have been forming the Bundestag. Another trend can be noticed: the vote totals of the individual parties are converging in some cases, blurring the boundaries between the traditional large parties and the smaller ones. This can at least be noticed with votes of CDU and CSU, with exceptions, as well as SPD, Bündnis 90/Die Grünen and the AfD.

Looking at the AfD, we can see the above-mentioned loss of confidence in the political system. Analysing statements, a populist speech pattern which uses racism and other forms of discrimination can be detected. In the election campaign of the AfD for the German parliament, the slogan was “Deutschland, aber normal” (AfD TV 2021). Traditional life concepts and highly regulated or closed borders are at the centre of the campaign video. The AfD’s election programme in the European elections was even clearer: there was talk of “Festung Europa”. The critical examination of the colonial era is also not desired by the AfD, as this would fuel what the programme calls “antiweißen Affekt” (AfD 2023). Traditional gender roles as well as the family of husband, wife and children are to be preferred to other life concepts.

Democracy: living with different ideologies

Living in a democracy means that every voter has the right to vote for whatever party they want. If we dismiss this fundamental right, we no longer believe in the basis of democracy. However, the electoral result of the AfD in the European election of 2024 still harbours dangers that need to be addressed. First, the tone in politics has changed very much. Campaign posters no longer set out the goals of the respective party; in the last election campaign, many campaign posters were used to differentiate one party from another. This was also very much the case with the established parties. The ÖDP, a minor party, used the slogan “Alternative ohne rechts” (ÖDP 2024), using the rhetoric of the AfD.

Blaming this trend on the rise of populism is too simplistic; however, it may play an important role. Second, aligning with the post-factual age, allegations concerning AfD politicians did not appear to matter to AfD voters. Even though an employee of one of the lead candidates was suspected of espionage for China and the other lead candidate faced allegations of unlawful conduct, the AfD came out much stronger than anticipated in the elections (Pfeffer and Schmidt 2024). This may be due to the AfD presenting itself as a victim of the media, or, as can also be seen in the United States (Murray 2024), to the fact that allegations against politicians no longer influence the voting decisions of their supporters.

This points to a blatant social divide, as people no longer recognise the same rules for social and communal life. Last but not least, slogans of the AfD and other right-wing parties can lead to people in Germany being put into an unsafe position. When a political party openly makes racist and other discriminatory statements or puts corresponding contents into its electoral programme, then it can also lead to individuals with the same views seeing their opinions reinforced and legitimised and behaving accordingly. In the last decade alone, the number of annual offences motivated by right-wing extremism has climbed from 16,557 offences in 2013 to 25,660 in 2023 (BMI 2024). This makes up more than 60 per cent of politically motivated extremist offences.

SUMMARY *

The article’s argument runs from society to politics rather than the reverse. On this reading, the distribution of votes in June 2024 did not create the fragmentation it displayed but registered a division that had been forming for years, along a line the author traces to the incomplete convergence of east and west and, more fundamentally, to a loss of confidence in the political system among people who feel unrepresented by it. The second half examines what follows from that within a democratic order: that the right to vote for any lawful party is not in question, that the tone of political competition has shifted from proposing programmes to positioning against opponents, that allegations against politicians appear to have lost their disciplining effect, and that party rhetoric shapes what individuals believe they may say and do, with the recorded increase in politically motivated offences cited as the measurable consequence.

CONCLUSION

The election result of the AfD in the European elections shows that the AfD and its ideology are an integral part of the German political landscape and an expression of a profound social divide in Germany. Speaking up against right-wing extremism will not be enough anymore; rather, we need to address the underlying social dilemmas of people drawn to right-wing extremism to rebuild trust in the state and democracy. Political education, a more targeted welfare state and integration processes for people who feel left behind by politics are crucial to achieve this goal. Of course, this will not erase right-wing extremism, as extremism is a part of democracy as well. However, the general public should be united to a certain degree so that extremism will be a marginal appearance only. Addressing these challenges requires a comprehensive and coordinated effort from all sectors of society. By reinforcing democratic values, enhancing social cohesion, countering extremism, ensuring media responsibility, promoting political accountability, and encouraging civic engagement, Germany can work towards a more united and stable future.

POTENTIAL SOLUTION *

The article’s central proposition, that addressing grievances matters more than denouncing those who hold them, is well supported and requires one important qualification, because getting it wrong wastes effort and can make matters worse.

The research on this question does not find a simple relationship between economic disadvantage and support for radical parties. Regions in decline show elevated support even where individual incomes are not low, and the stronger predictors are perceived loss of status, the sense that one’s region or way of life is disregarded, and the experience of being spoken about rather than to. That finding points away from redistribution alone and toward what has been called the geography of discontent: the closure of the last bank branch, the bus route, the school, the clinic, the local paper. Places where people have no reason to encounter one another and no institution that belongs to them produce the conditions the author describes. Restoring that infrastructure is expensive, slow, and among the few interventions with a demonstrable effect.

The article’s opening question about east and west deserves the answer the research supplies, since the alternative is the stereotype the author rightly rejects. Attitude surveys find the differences between east and west smaller than the electoral results suggest. What differs is the composition of civil society: fewer associations, unions, churches and local media, a consequence of the institutional collapse of 1990 rather than of any disposition, and a corresponding absence of the intermediary bodies through which discontent is ordinarily channelled and moderated. That is a structural account and it identifies something that can be rebuilt.

Three points belong here from this field’s own experience. First, on how such conversations are conducted: dialogue formats that succeed do not debate positions but begin from concrete local questions on which participants have direct experience, and they are facilitated rather than moderated. Formats that place opposed camps on a stage reliably harden both. Second, on what to expect: the evidence on deradicalisation and on cross camp dialogue shows small effects on entrenched views and considerably larger effects on the much bigger group who are undecided, disengaged or ambivalent. Programmes aimed at the committed frequently fail; programmes aimed at holding the middle generally do not. Third, on the boundary the article implicitly draws and could draw more explicitly: a democracy accommodates disagreement about policy and does not accommodate the denial of others’ equal standing. Locating that line clearly, and defending it consistently rather than selectively, is what makes engagement with grievance something other than concession.

Finally, the increase in politically motivated offences the article records is the point at which this ceases to be a debate about political competition. Where rhetoric is followed by threats against local officials, attacks on places of worship and violence against individuals, the people affected need protection now, and that is a matter of policing, prosecution and support for those targeted rather than of dialogue. The two tracks are not alternatives, and confusing them serves neither: the long work of rebuilding cohesion does not substitute for the immediate obligation to keep people safe, and the immediate obligation does not remove the need for the long work.

* Added by the WMO Editorial Team

REFERENCES

AfD (2023) Europawahlprogramm 2024.

AfD TV (2021) Deutschland. Aber normal. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHNlw2tuuDk

Bundesministerium des Innern (2024) Anzahl der extremistischen Straftaten aus dem Bereich der politisch motivierten Kriminalität in Deutschland nach Bereichen von 2013 bis 2023.

Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (2020) Der Anschlag von Halle.

Deutscher Bundestag (w.D.) Bundestagswahlergebnisse seit 1949, Zweitstimmen.

Erdmann, D. (2024a) The Dynamics of Polarized Pluralism: On the Benefits, Challenges, and Threats of a Constantly Changing Fragmented World Order. WMO Conflict Insight.

Erdmann, D. (2024b) Personal Identity and Peace Building. WMO Conflict Insight.

European Parliament (2024) Ergebnisse der Europawahl 2024, Deutschland. Results as of 10 June 2024.

Högele, T. (2019) So unterscheiden sich rechtsextreme Einstellungen in Ost- und Westdeutschland. Zeit Online.

Jeske, A., Baumbach, V. and Langer, S. (2024) AfD: Ein rechtsextremer Verdachtsfall. ZDF.

Murray, M. (2024) What the First Polls after Trump’s Conviction Show and Don’t Show. NBC News.

ÖDP (2024) Wir präsentieren: die Wahlplakate der ÖDP.

Pfeffer, K. and Schmidt, M. (2024) Stark trotz Gegenwind. Tagesschau.

Radke, J. (2013) Rechtsextremismus: Der Nationalsozialistische Untergrund (NSU). Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung.

Regev, D. (2020) German Reunification: What Still Divides East and West? Deutsche Welle.

Tagesschau (2024a) Die Menschen feiern die Demokratie.

Tagesschau (2024b) Große Empörung über rassistisches Partyvideo.

Supplementary references added by the WMO Editorial Team

Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, Verfassungsschutzbericht, annual editions, Cologne.

Decker, O., Kiess, J., & Brähler, E. (Eds.), Leipziger Autoritarismus Studie, successive editions, Psychosozial Verlag, Gießen.

Rodríguez Pose, A. (2018). The Revenge of the Places That Don’t Matter (and What to Do about It). Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 11(1), 189 to 209.

Gidron, N., & Hall, P. A. (2017). The Politics of Social Status: Economic and Cultural Roots of the Populist Right. British Journal of Sociology, 68(S1), 57 to 84.

Mudde, C. (2019). The Far Right Today. Polity Press, Cambridge.

Kalla, J. L., & Broockman, D. E. (2020). Reducing Exclusionary Attitudes through Interpersonal Conversation. American Political Science Review, 114(2), 410 to 425.

Berghof Foundation, handbooks on dialogue facilitation and on preventing and countering violent extremism, Berlin.

Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, materials on political education and democratic resilience, Bonn.

How good people turn evil – the Rwandan Genocide

How to cite this journal: Author, Date of the post, WMO Conflict Insight, Title of the post, ISSN: 2628 6998, https://worldmediation.org/journal/

EDITORIAL NOTE *

This article concerns the genocide committed against the Tutsi in Rwanda in 1994. That genocide is an established historical and legal fact. The article addresses the question of why ordinary people participated in it, and the explanations it examines are offered as analysis and not as extenuation.

ABSTRACT

The following article explores the Rwandan genocide, highlighting the involvement of “ordinary” people in mass killings. Drawing on historical context and perpetrator testimonies, it reveals complex motivations behind genocide. It emphasizes the need for vigilant civil societies and robust institutions like the rule of law to prevent future atrocities.

KEYWORDS *

Genocide, Rwanda, Tutsi, perpetrators, ordinary people, obedience, social dynamics, early warning signs, atrocity prevention, Gacaca, testimony, rule of law

INTRODUCTION

Humans are generally good, at least, that is what most people want to believe. This view is mirrored in the thoughts of countless philosophers like John Locke. Most people cannot imagine using violence against other human beings. Or at least, most people want to believe that. We want to have a positive self-image; we want to believe that we are intrinsically good people. That includes living peacefully with our neighbours. However, history is full of examples of humans persecuting other social groups who are knowingly harmed by others: the support of broad German society for the concentration camps in the Third Reich (Goeschel and Wachsmann 2010) or the violence against the Rohingya (OHCHR 2023). One historical example is even more shocking: in the genocide committed against the Tutsi in Rwanda in 1994, “normal” people got involved in brutal violence, turning against and killing their neighbours and friends. How is such an escalation in genocides possible? What makes good people turn evil?

MAIN CORPUS

Causes of and motivations behind genocide

Genocides are a complex phenomenon and are never monocausal. Even though a common belief is that the main root of these atrocities is a deep-seated hatred amongst social groups, Straus (2016) contradicts that, as “deep social divisions, ethnic conflict, distrust between ethnic, regional, or religious groups, and the existence of prejudice and stereotypes, are fairly common globally”, while genocides, on the other hand, are relatively uncommon. He lists instability and conflict, ideology, and previous discrimination and violence as causal factors. These findings show that most people are not intrinsically motivated by their emotions to participate in a genocide. Rather, there seems to be a strategy behind it. This is supported by the fact that there are early warning signs, which of course are not bullet-proof, but can alert the international community (ibid.; USHMM w.D.a). These signs include tension and polarization, apocalyptic public rhetoric, labelling civilian groups as the “enemy”, and removing moderates from leadership or public service.

Naturally, there is no genocide without perpetrators. But how does a person become a perpetrator? Literature suggests that a specific percentage of every society are perpetrators, at least in theory (Baum 2008). While some sources put this percentage at 2 to 15 per cent, others put it at 15 to 20 per cent. Whatever the exact number may be, this social research suggests that in every society, there are people who do not share the same empathy and compassion towards other people as the majority of society. After committing an atrocity, those perpetrators do not feel remorse or guilt.

Hutu against Tutsi: the Rwandan genocide

After gaining independence in 1962, “Rwanda’s population was composed of three ethnic groups: Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa” (USHMM w.D.b). The Hutu population, being the majority, was in power, and Tutsi had been discriminated against from the 1960s on. During this period, there were already incidents of mass violence against Tutsi, and many had to flee the country. A turning point in the long-term conflict between both groups was when “a Tutsi rebel force invaded Rwanda from the north” in 1990 (ibid.). Hutu extremists became radicalized when the war between the government and rebels reached a stalemate, leading to a peace agreement that foresaw a government with power shared between Hutu and Tutsi. When Rwandan President Habyarimana was killed when his aircraft was shot down, Hutu extremists took advantage of the convoluted circumstances. Violence spread when the extremists killed moderate Hutu who stood in their way of promoting genocide against the Tutsi. Tutsi and suspected Tutsi were killed in major massacres when seeking refuge in churches, schools, and government buildings, as well as in their own homes. Actual numbers of the death toll vary; according to the USHMM (w.D.b), “as many as one million people, mostly Tutsis, were slaughtered in 100 days”, while other scholarly sources put the death toll lower. Straus (2004) puts the number at “at least 500,000 civilians”.

The genocide against the Tutsi is not only extremely shocking due to the high death toll in a short time but also because of the broad involvement of “ordinary” citizens. In the Gacaca system, a community court system implemented especially for the reconciliation process, more than 1.2 million cases were tried (USHMM w.D.b). How could that many people become involved in the mass killings?

Rwandan perpetrators

The violence of the Rwandan genocide puzzles scholars. “Neighbors are not supposed to kill neighbors, let alone commit genocide against them”, Fujii (2010) states. Not only is the killing of kith and kin on that scale very uncommon, but the question also arises why rural civilians became perpetrators when peace would have gained them more than violence (ibid.).

Straus (2016) focuses on emotions as a motivation behind participation in the genocide. He talks about a period of “emotional momentum”. In interviews and in the courts after the genocide, perpetrators gave two main motivations. One was built on this emotional momentum: many perpetrators allegedly were afraid because of the unrest and violence before the genocide. In fear for their lives, “they chose to take part in the violence” (Straus 2016). At the same time, they feared repercussions from the authorities, which had planned the genocide, if they did not take part in the violence.

However, Fujii (2010) gives a different explanation. According to her field study, there is little evidence that supports a strong hatred among Hutu against Tutsi. She also dismisses fear as the motivator for participation. Instead, she uses the social interaction argument. Most of the perpetrators who did not have any military training before the genocide and who only killed rather than planned the atrocities, “Joiners” in Fujii’s terms, seemed to have killed people who had been accused of something. Social dynamics were at the centre of changing behaviour. “Even the most active Joiners did not act the same offstage as on” (ibid.). Another important factor was group identity and strength in numbers; the creation of new groups produced more killings, which in turn created more and stronger groups. A vicious cycle started.

But who exactly were the perpetrators or “Joiners”? Reviewing certain testimonies shows different personality types. In the testimony of Jean de Dieu Twahirwa, a convicted perpetrator of the Rwandan genocide, he confesses to killing three Tutsi in a massacre at a Catholic church (Aegis Trust 2020). When asked about his motivations, he confirms what Straus (2016) and Fujii (2010) already stated: it was the “leaders” who motivated him and other perpetrators in the mass killings. “They really motivated us to get involved in the killings,” he said (Aegis Trust 2020). His feelings towards Tutsi seem to have been dualistic even during the genocide. On the one hand, he felt threatened by the Tutsi and believed they wanted to suppress Hutu; on the other hand, he said that he felt sad when he saw his former classmates being killed at the Catholic church. After the incident at the church, he claimed to have fled Rwanda, and he did not take part in any other killings. Even after the genocide, he stated he needed to confess to his crimes to relieve himself of the guilt and to ask for forgiveness.

Twahirwa’s motivations, following the orders of authorities, are mirrored by other testimonies. The Rwandan genocide “was sponsored and conceived from above by a small group of powerful extremists in President Habyarimana’s regime. These mighty few objected to the power-sharing terms of a recently signed peace agreement between Habyarimana and the RPF. Through genocide, they sought to maintain their monopoly on power” (Fujii 2010).

Were the “Joiners” then only used as instruments by the elite who planned the genocide? It is worth looking at some other testimonies as well. For example, the testimonies of members of a group of farmers in Kibungo who killed some 50,000 of their Tutsi neighbours, about 85 per cent of the Tutsi population in that region (Baum 2008). One of the perpetrators states: “Some offenders claim that we changed into wild animals, that we were blinded by ferocity, that is a trick to sidetrack the truth” (ibid.). Even while confessing, there is a total lack of remorse for the atrocities committed.

Learnings from the past

The various perpetrator groups involved in the genocide against the Tutsi should give us pause for thought, and we must learn different lessons from their involvement. It is worrying that there are people in our society who feel less empathy than the majority of society. At the same time, the involvement of people who themselves feel and express empathy and remorse shows that it is not only the people who are categorized as ‘perpetrators’ by academia who become perpetrators themselves but also people outside this group. This means that in certain situations, people can also become perpetrators who would never expect it of themselves.

The fact that ordinary people without a prior history of extraordinary violent behaviour can become perpetrators involved in genocide or other atrocities is troubling. These findings are in line with the findings of Holocaust research (Hale 2020) and the results of experiments like the Milgram experiment (Miller 2014). We have to acknowledge that individuals who are not inherently violent can still be driven to commit horrific acts under the influence of fear, social dynamics, and authoritative manipulation. This understanding compels us to recognize the potential for atrocity in any society and thus gives us an approach to global genocide and mass atrocity prevention. By acknowledging that genocides are not solely the product of deep-seated ethnic hatred but rather the culmination of strategic manipulation and social pressures, international efforts can focus on early intervention strategies.

SUMMARY *

The article’s central tension lies between two explanations it presents without collapsing them into one. If a fixed proportion of any population lacks ordinary empathy, then perpetrators are a distinct category and the question is how they come to be released. If, as the research on Rwanda largely finds, participation was driven by fear, authority and the dynamics of groups formed in the moment, then the category dissolves and the relevant question becomes what conditions convert neighbours into killers. The author declines to choose, and the testimonies assembled here support that reluctance: one man describes sorrow at the killing of his former classmates and a need to confess; others, decades later, insist that they were not blinded by anything and knew exactly what they were doing. The preventive conclusion drawn holds in either case, since it concerns conditions rather than persons.

CONCLUSION

Particularly in this day and age, when politics and social media fuel emotions and especially hatred, we need a vigilant civil society that closely monitors these developments, exposes abuses, and takes a stand against them. And precisely because all people can become potential perpetrators, we need institutions such as the rule of law to protect minorities from the arbitrariness of others.

POTENTIAL SOLUTION *

The article’s most important move is its refusal to settle on a single explanation, and the reason that refusal is correct deserves stating. Research on Rwanda has converged on the finding that participation was heterogeneous: the small group that planned the genocide, the local officials who organised it, the militia who led the killing, and the very large number who joined, hesitated, complied, fled or resisted were not one population and did not act for one reason. The most consistent finding across the field studies, which the article’s own sources support, is that participation was better predicted by local social ties, by the presence of an authority figure willing to give orders, and by whether one’s neighbours were participating, than by anything about the individual. That is what makes the conclusion generalisable, and it is also why the figure of a fixed percentage of latent perpetrators should be treated with caution: it locates the danger in a type of person, when the evidence locates it in a type of situation.

Two additions strengthen the preventive argument. The article names early warning signs, and the record shows that in this case they were seen. Dehumanising broadcasts, lists of names, the distribution of machetes and the organisation of militias were all reported before April 1994, including in a cable from the force commander of the United Nations mission in January. The independent inquiry commissioned afterwards concluded that the failure lay not in information but in the will to act on it. Prevention research has therefore shifted from improving detection toward the harder question of what makes decision makers respond, and the answers identified, standing capacity, pre agreed triggers, and political costs for inaction, are institutional rather than analytical.

The second concerns what actually stopped participation where it was stopped. Alongside the perpetrators, Rwanda produced a substantial number of people who hid neighbours at mortal risk to themselves, and the research on rescuers across atrocities finds that they were not distinguished by exceptional moral conviction but by circumstance: prior close relationships across the dividing line, membership of a group with its own authority structure that did not endorse the killing, and, above all, being asked. If ordinary people become perpetrators through social dynamics, they also become rescuers through them, and prevention that builds cross community ties in ordinary times is acting on the same mechanism from the other direction.

Finally, the article’s turn to the present deserves to be made specific, because the comparison is closer than a general warning about social media suggests. The role of Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines is among the most studied features of this genocide, and its function was less to create hatred than to identify targets, signal that killing was sanctioned, and let each listener know that others were participating. That is precisely the function that platform amplification performs now, and the finding matters for how it is addressed: what proved dangerous was not the expression of prejudice but the coordination of action and the manufacture of the impression that everyone was already doing it. The conclusion is a demanding one and follows from the article’s own argument. If atrocity is a matter of situation rather than character, then no society can regard itself as exempt, and the institutions the author names, an independent judiciary, protected minorities, a press that is not an instrument, exist to hold at the point where individual conscience has repeatedly been shown to give way.

* Added by the WMO Editorial Team

REFERENCES

Aegis Trust (2020) Testimony of Jean de Dieu Twahirwa, Genocide Perpetrator. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MslanLXzx6Y

Baum, S. (2008) The Psychology of Genocide: Perpetrators, Bystanders, and Rescuers. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.

Fujii, L. A. (2009) Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.

Goeschel, C. and Wachsmann, N. (2010) Before Auschwitz: The Formation of the Nazi Concentration Camps, 1933 to 1939. Journal of Contemporary History 45(3), 515 to 534.

Hale, R. (2020) ‘They Were Just Following Orders’: Relationships between Milgram’s Obedience Experiments and Conceptions of Holocaust Perpetration. In: Foster, S., Pearce, A. and Pettigrew, A. (eds.) Holocaust Education: Contemporary Challenges and Controversies. UCL Press.

Miller, A. G. (2014) The Explanatory Value of Milgram’s Obedience Experiments: A Contemporary Appraisal. Journal of Social Issues 70(3), 558 to 573.

OHCHR (2023) UN Expert Demands Accountability for the Rohingya and an End to ‘Paralysis of Indifference’.

Straus, S. (2004) How Many Perpetrators Were There in the Rwandan Genocide? An Estimate. Journal of Genocide Research 6(1), 85 to 98.

Straus, S. (2016) Fundamentals of Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention. Washington, D.C.: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

USHMM (w.D.a) What Have We Learned about the Risk Factors and Warning Signs of Genocide?

USHMM (w.D.b) The Rwanda Genocide.

Supplementary references added by the WMO Editorial Team

Report of the Independent Inquiry into the Actions of the United Nations during the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda, United Nations, 15 December 1999.

Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, 1948.

United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention (2014). Framework of Analysis for Atrocity Crimes: A Tool for Prevention, New York.

Straus, S. (2006). The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda. Cornell University Press, Ithaca.

Des Forges, A. (1999). Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda. Human Rights Watch, New York.

Yanagizawa Drott, D. (2014). Propaganda and Conflict: Evidence from the Rwandan Genocide. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 129(4), 1947 to 1994.

McDoom, O. S. (2013). Antisocial Capital: A Profile of Rwandan Genocide Perpetrators’ Social Networks. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 58(5), 865 to 893.

Monroe, K. R. (2011). Ethics in an Age of Terror and Genocide: Identity and Moral Choice. Princeton University Press, Princeton.

From Syria to Ukraine: Unpacking Europe’s Refugee Reception Divide

How to cite this journal: Author, Date of the post, WMO Conflict Insight, Title of the post, ISSN: 2628 6998, https://worldmediation.org/journal/

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the EU’s differing responses to Syrian war refugees in 2015 and Ukrainian refugees after Russia’s invasion in 2022. It explores factors like cultural background, religion, gender, and skill level affecting refugee reception. Despite the EU’s human rights principles, political complexities and societal biases lead to unequal treatment. The article underscores civil society’s role in combating xenophobia and advocating for consistent adherence to human rights in refugee policy.

KEYWORDS *

Refugees, European Union, asylum policy, Temporary Protection Directive, Dublin regulation, Syria, Ukraine, pushbacks, public opinion, discrimination, solidarity, civil society

INTRODUCTION

“Wir schaffen das”, these three words by former German chancellor Angela Merkel stood out from the rest of her chancellorship (Heißler 2021). She said it in the context of the refugee movement in 2015 caused by the still ongoing war in Syria. It was an emotional time for many Germans and other EU citizens. I vividly remember photos and videos of refugees walking the Balkan route in the hot summer and seeing the picture of the drowned Syrian boy Alan Kurdi in school. It was practically impossible not to know about the hundreds of thousands of refugees seeking to flee the terror in their home country. Sports halls of schools were reorganised as refugee camps. This also happened at my school. When the headmaster called for an assembly to inform parents about the new situation, one mother stood up and asked how it could be that it could not be ensured that her son would probably not be able to do sports once a week anymore. Other people in my social environment warned me of the young men from Syria who were not used to seeing girls and women showing skirts and that it could be dangerous outside for me. Merkel’s optimism about overcoming the challenge of helping about a million people seeking refuge from a war in their home country was not always mirrored by society. However, even though faced with a very similar situation in 2022 after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Germans and other Europeans were more than happy to take in as many Ukrainians as would like to come. It seems like Merkel’s “Wir schaffen das” can apply to refugee policy. But why was the EU’s reaction to the refugees of Ukraine so different from the reaction to refugees of other countries?

MAIN CORPUS

EU asylum policy

The EU claims to stand for human rights. This becomes also visible in its approach to asylum seekers: “The European Union is an area of protection for people fleeing persecution or serious harm in their country of origin” (European Commission w.D.a). There are different directives and EU strategies to deal with refugees. First, “to alleviate pressure on national asylum systems and to allow displaced persons to enjoy harmonised rights across the EU”, the Temporary Protection Directive was created after the Yugoslavia wars (European Council 2023). In this directive, the rights of refugees are set down, which include the topics of residence, access to the labour market and housing, medical and social welfare assistance, and access to education for children (ibid.). The directive is directly designed for the EU to deal with “the event of a mass influx or imminent mass influx of displaced persons from non-EU countries who are unable to return to their country of origin” (European Commission w.D.b). Second, to determine the jurisdiction for asylum seekers, the Dublin III regulation is used. According to the regulation, the EU country in which a refugee is registered for the first time is responsible for processing their asylum application (Schwartz 2016).

The EU’s response to the refugee crisis in 2015 and 2016

After political unrest due to the Arab Spring, thousands of people made their way via the Mediterranean Sea towards the EU in search of safety. In 2015 almost a million refugees and migrants arrived on European shores (Spindler 2015). Throughout the year, several turning points led to the so-called crisis. In April, “over 600 people drowned in the Mediterranean when their boat capsized shortly before midnight on April 18 in Libyan waters some 180 kilometres south of Italy’s Lampedusa Island” (ibid.). However, rescue-at-sea operations continued to be controversial. When the body of the young Syrian boy Alan Kurdi washed up on the Turkish shore, empathy rose increasingly in the population of EU member states like Sweden or Germany but levelled off again after a short time (Schulte von Drach 2017). Due to the high risk of drowning, more and more refugees from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq chose to follow the Balkan route to reach western Europe. However, there were still many dangers on the way. In August 2015, 71 dead refugees were found by Austrian authorities in an abandoned refrigeration truck (Spindler 2015). Also, Hungary built a fence at the border with Serbia, not allowing more refugees and migrants to pass through the country. Other EU member states followed by re-instating border controls (ibid.).

Especially Mediterranean EU members like Malta, Italy and Greece did not want to accept more refugees. Italy and Malta were still high-frequented destinations for refugees from North African countries like Tunisia and Libya. Even though this event happened in 2019, it is still noteworthy in the handling of refugees and migrants reaching the EU over the Mediterranean Sea: The Sea Watch 3, a ship belonging to a private sea rescue organisation, was denied entry in many European ports after a rescue mission. When the captain of the ship, Carola Rackete, entered the Italian port of Lampedusa without permission after rescuing refugees who needed medical attention, she was arrested and put on trial for breaking laws (Kailouli and Schreijäg 2019). Also, since 2016, so-called pushbacks have been used regularly by the EU as a border control instrument (ECCHR 2021).

Studies show that public opinion on migration remained relatively stable during the years 2015 and 2016. In most EU countries, open migration policies are supported (Goubin et al. 2022). However, not everyone was welcoming towards refugees. During the years 2015 and 2016, there was an all-time high in attacks on refugees in Germany. In 2015, there were 1031 offences against refugees, in 2016 there were 921 (LPB 2021). This makes between two and three attacks against refugees every day, which is a horrific number. While most of these offences were committed by right-wing extremists, there was a shift in German society as well. The events of New Year’s Eve in Cologne, in which men, many of whom had come to the EU irregularly from North Africa, committed sexualised crimes of violence against women, brought about the first change of mood. Germans were becoming more cautious of refugees and migrants and some even tried to defame them as a whole group (Werthschulte 2017). This shift in Germany, which triggered a debate about general migration and asylum policy, is important to note as Germany was a pioneer in accepting and welcoming refugees (BAMF 2017).

The author wishes to state explicitly that framing the ordeal that refugees coming to the EU had and have to go through as a crisis for Europe shows a lack of empathy towards the refugees. However, as this is unfortunately the coined term in the debate, the expression is used here.

The EU’s response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022

The EU’s response towards refugees coming from Ukraine after Russia’s invasion in February 2022 was quick and demonstrated solidarity. For the first time, the Temporary Protection Directive was activated (European Commission w.D.c). For individuals fleeing the war, the EU centralized key information on a webpage, providing practical details in English, Ukrainian, and Russian about their rights concerning temporary protection, travel within the EU, and access to housing, healthcare, education, and jobs.

Hungary and Poland, two EU member states that were very restrictive in the acceptance of refugees from Syria and other Arab countries in 2015 and 2016, were among the most welcoming member states in the EU towards refugees from Ukraine. “The Hungarian Government, being the first in Europe, decided to grant temporary protection to everyone, regardless of their nationality, who had a legal basis to stay in Ukraine and fled the country to Hungary” (Juhász et al. 2022). The acceptance of Ukrainians in Polish society was described as a “refugee miracle” (Rice-Oxley 2022). However, while welcoming Ukrainian refugees, non-Ukrainian refugees are not allowed to enter the country (ibid.).

Why are refugees being treated so differently?

This different treatment of refugees based on their country of origin opens up questions. The EU does claim to support human rights universally, but evidently, politics are more complicated than that. Several factors can influence attitudes towards refugees: especially the cultural background of the refugee, including religion, as well as age and gender.

Even though there is not much research on the acceptance of refugees, similar trends in comparison with the acceptance of immigrants can be noticed (Bermúdez 2020). For example, refugees, like immigrants, are more likely to be accepted by society if they are Christian, and Muslim asylum-seekers are less likely to be accepted (ibid.). Bermúdez also states that the high-skilled are more likely to be accepted. Another study shows that female and younger asylum-seekers are more likely to be accepted than male asylum-seekers (Bansak et al. 2023).

Factors like former high-skill employment in the country of origin and having host country language skills have a positive impact on the acceptance of refugees (Bansak et al. 2023).

Last but not least, the reasons for fleeing one’s country also matter. If refugees were victims of torture and fleeing persecution or war, they were more likely to be accepted than those migrating for economic reasons (ibid.).

The question then remains: how are the different factors weighed? Refugees from Syria are fleeing war and persecution; many of them were victims of torture, and most refugees are young. However, they are still not treated the same as Ukrainian refugees, who are mainly Christian and female (ibid.). Are gender and religion the main factors determining the attitudes towards individual refugees? Looking at the political reactions regarding different refugee groups and their media coverage, it could seem so.

SUMMARY *

The article’s comparison rests on a single institutional fact that makes the difference measurable rather than merely perceived. The Temporary Protection Directive existed in 2015 and was not used; it was activated within days in 2022. The same instrument, the same legal threshold of mass influx, the same member states, and two opposite outcomes. From this the author turns to the research on what predicts public acceptance and finds that the factors identified there, religion, gender, skill and reason for flight, do not resolve the case, since Syrian refugees met several of the criteria that are supposed to increase acceptance and were nonetheless received differently. The implication the author draws is that the decisive variables were the ones the studies measure least well, namely religion and perceived cultural proximity, and that the evidence for this lies in the conduct of governments as much as in the attitudes of populations.

CONCLUSION

Human rights are universal and apply to everyone, regardless of nationality, religion, gender, or cultural background. Every refugee has the right to seek asylum in the EU, and political motivations and societal biases should not undermine these fundamental rights. However, in light of increasing populism and a shift towards the right in the European community, there is a pressing need for action. It is disheartening to witness xenophobic voices gaining traction in society and discriminatory policies being enacted by political actors. This must not be tolerated.

Therefore, it is incumbent upon politicians to take a stand for justice and equality in refugee policy. They must condemn xenophobia and racism, as well as any anti-Islamic sentiments present in the EU. Instead, they should prioritise policies that uphold human rights principles and ensure fair and equal treatment for all refugees, regardless of their personal background.

Only by concerted efforts from political leaders, civil society organisations, and engaged individuals can meaningful change be achieved. We must strive to create a Europe where compassion, solidarity, and respect for human dignity prevail over fear and prejudice. Let us work together to build a more inclusive and just society for all.

POTENTIAL SOLUTION *

The comparison the article draws is sound and it becomes more useful when the differences that are not about identity are separated from those that are, because the residue is then harder to explain away.

Several distinctions are real. Ukrainians held visa free access to the Schengen area before February 2022 and could therefore arrive lawfully, which removes the smuggling routes, the sea crossings and the irregular entry that shaped the response of 2015. Movements from a neighbouring state produce different logistics from movements across a sea and several transit countries. And the political framing differed, since the aggressor was a state against which the European Union had already positioned itself, which made reception an expression of policy rather than a departure from it.

What those differences do not explain is the treatment of third country nationals fleeing the same war, documented at several borders in the first weeks, or the simultaneity of open reception on one frontier with pushbacks on another. Nor do they explain the language used by a number of European politicians and broadcasters at the time, which made the criterion of proximity explicit. That is the evidence the article’s argument actually rests on, and it is stronger than the attitudinal research it cites.

The Temporary Protection Directive deserves more attention than it usually receives, because its activation in 2022 changed what is now arguable. An instrument dormant for two decades has been shown to work: it delivered status without individual determination, immediate labour market access, schooling and healthcare, at speed and at scale, and it did so without the collapse that the ordinary asylum system was said to risk. Its use for one group and not for others is now a matter of political choice rather than of capacity, and the practice established makes that choice visible. This is what advocates have to work with, and it is considerable.

Two additions would complete the picture. The reception of 2022 also demonstrated what the research on integration has long shown, namely that immediate work authorisation is the single most effective measure available: employment rates among Ukrainian arrivals substantially exceeded those of comparable cohorts held for years in reception centres without the right to work, at correspondingly lower public cost. The argument for extending that treatment is therefore fiscal as well as moral, and the fiscal version reaches audiences the moral version does not. And the article’s own conclusion, addressed to politicians, understates where the leverage lies: officials responded in 2022 to a population that was visibly ready to receive people, and the local reception structures, municipal capacity and volunteer networks built in 2015 were what made the second response possible. Preserving that infrastructure between emergencies is the practical work, and it is done by the civil society the article names.

Finally, one observation belongs in a mediation journal. The author’s opening scene, a mother concerned about a school sports hall alongside warnings about young men from Syria, describes the level at which reception is actually decided. Those concerns are frequently dismissed as prejudice, and where they are dismissed they harden. Where they have been engaged, through information, contact and visible attention to the disruptions people actually experience, they have generally moderated. Communities that have received refugees successfully are not those with less anxiety but those where the anxiety was addressed rather than argued down, and the facilitation of those conversations, in schools, parishes and municipal halls, is among the more valuable and least visible contributions this field makes.

* Added by the WMO Editorial Team

REFERENCES

Bansak, K., Hainmueller, J. and Hangartner, D. (2023) Europeans’ Support for Refugees of Varying Background Is Stable over Time. Nature 620, 849 to 854.

Bermúdez, S. (2020) Refugees Welcome? Cross-European Public Opinion on Asylum Seekers Following the 2015 Crisis. https://www.realinstitutoelcano.org/en/analyses/refugees-welcome-cross-european-public-opinion-on-asylum-seekers-following-the-2015-crisis/

Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge (2017) Das Bundesamt in Zahlen 2016: Asyl, Migration und Integration.

European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (2021) Report for the Special Rapporteur on Pushback Practices and Their Impact on the Human Rights of Migrants at European Land Borders.

European Commission (w.D.a) Common European Asylum System.

European Commission (w.D.b) Temporary Protection.

European Commission (w.D.c) Migration Management: Welcoming Refugees from Ukraine.

European Council (2023) Ukrainian Refugees: EU Member States Agree to Extend Temporary Protection.

Flack, A., Hanewinkel, V. and Latz, V. (2017) Das Jahr 2016: Ein Rückblick.

Goubin, S., Ruelens, A. and Nicaise, I. (2022) Trends in Attitudes towards Migration in Europe: A Comparative Analysis. HIVA, Research Institute for Work and Society.

Heißler, J. (2021) Ein Jahr “Wir schaffen das”: Merkels drei große kleine Worte.

Juhász, K., Metevzic, G. and Szekeres, Z. (2022) Country Report: Hungary.

Kailouli, N. and Schreijäg, J. (2019) Exklusiv: Was geschah auf der Sea-Watch 3?

Landeszentrale für politische Bildung Baden-Württemberg (2021) Fremdenfeindliche Anschläge.

Rice-Oxley, M. (2022) Poland Has Worked a Refugee Miracle. But How Much Longer Can It Last? The Guardian.

Schulte von Drach, M. C. (2017) Aylan Kurdi: Die vergängliche Macht der furchtbaren Bilder.

Schwartz, K. (2016) Fragen und Antworten: Wie funktioniert das Dublin-System?

Spindler, W. (2015) 2015: The Year of Europe’s Refugee Crisis. UNHCR.

Werthschulte, C. (2017) “Nach” Köln ist wie “vor” Köln: Die Silvesternacht und ihre Folgen.

Supplementary references added by the WMO Editorial Team

Council Directive 2001/55/EC on minimum standards for giving temporary protection in the event of a mass influx, and Council Implementing Decision (EU) 2022/382 of 4 March 2022.

Regulation (EU) No 604/2013 (Dublin III), and the Pact on Migration and Asylum adopted in 2024.

Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, 1951, Articles 3 and 33.

United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, statements on the treatment of third country nationals fleeing Ukraine, March 2022.

European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, reports on the situation of people fleeing Ukraine and on pushbacks at the external borders.

Organisation for Economic Co operation and Development (2023). What We Know about the Skills and Early Labour Market Outcomes of Refugees from Ukraine. OECD Publishing, Paris.

Dennison, J., & Geddes, A. (2019). A Rising Tide? The Salience of Immigration and the Rise of Anti Immigration Political Parties in Western Europe. Political Quarterly, 90(1), 107 to 116.

De Coninck, D. (2023). The Refugee Paradox during Wartime in Europe: How Ukrainian and Afghan Refugees Are (Not) Alike. International Migration Review, 57(2).

How not to forget victims or: lobbying for remembrance

How to cite this journal: Author, Date of the post, WMO Conflict Insight, Title of the post, ISSN: 2628 6998, https://worldmediation.org/journal/

ABSTRACT

This essay explores Germany’s selective remembrance of historical atrocities, focusing on the Holocaust while neglecting others like the genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples. It examines factors contributing to this selectivity and advocates for a more inclusive approach to remembrance. Drawing on remembrance strategies, it emphasises the importance of acknowledging all victims and their individual stories. The author reflects on personal struggles with Germany’s memory policy and expresses hope for change following the recent apology to the Herero and Nama peoples.

Editorial note: the assessment of German memory policy and its motives reflects the author’s own perspective. This journal’s editorial position is neutral. *

KEYWORDS *

Memory politics, Holocaust remembrance, Herero and Nama, colonial genocide, selective memory, victim individuality, reconciliation, memorialisation, Vergangenheitsbewältigung, street names, education, Germany

INTRODUCTION

On the international stage, Germany often gets praised for its dealing with its past, like in the opinion essay “Germany faced its horrible past. Can we do the same?” (Norris 2021). But not many people know that the “horrible past” only refers to a tiny excerpt of Germany’s past: the Holocaust. Being German, I was confronted with the Holocaust in history class when I was still a teenager. However, German colonial rule was a widely neglected topic in school. Only during my B.A. studies, I stumbled upon the Genocide of the Herero and Nama. How can it be that a society that attaches so much importance to righting old wrongs is so selective in its approach and that some crimes are simply ignored?

MAIN CORPUS

Selective memory: remembering or forgetting?

Alone the atrocities Germany committed are hard to remember all without being overwhelmed by emotions. Having a closer look just at the atrocities of the Nazis during the Third Reich, there is an overwhelming variety of victim groups. For example, people with disabilities were killed systematically before the Holocaust started (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum 2020). Other social groups who suffered and were killed in the concentration and labour camps were Blacks, communists, homosexuals, and Romani. Out of all these groups, mainly the European Jews are widely remembered. The Holocaust, which describes the systematic killing and the attempt to wipe out European Jews by Hitler and his followers, rewrote history as it laid the foundation of Genocide studies. Even today, the Holocaust is singled out among other genocides as the term “Holocaust and Genocide studies” for the academic discipline shows. It is not my intention to question the emphasis on the Holocaust. On the contrary, I am sure that the Holocaust needs to be remembered even more in the future as almost 10 percent of Germans have not learned anything about the Third Reich and 23.5 percent “only little” in school or elsewhere (Stiftung Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft 2021). The Holocaust must continue to be remembered especially when contemporary witnesses have died. However, this does not imply that other victim groups are to be neglected.

Generally, there are various reasons why some victims or victim groups are neglected while others are remembered. First, when analysing atrocities, we realise “that not all victims are equal” (Ryrie 2020). Ryrie argues that victims are only remembered if their suffering and death is useful for successors. At the same time, repression is a very important coping mechanism for humans, “especially of use when awareness produces unbearable pain” (Minow 1999).

Another reason for the selectiveness of the remembrance of victims could be the total number of victims. About the Blacks who suffered as a social group, Kesting (1992) says: “Even though their losses were minimal compared to other groups, their torment and suffering were no different.” This shows another problem when remembering atrocities. It is easy to reduce victims of atrocities to anonymous grey masses, thinking only about quantitative data like victim numbers and death tolls, and to forget that behind each victim stands an individual with a past, present and robbed future (Minow 1999). In this way, atrocities become pure historical facts that do not allow any emotional processing, neither by victims, perpetrators nor bystanders.

Last, but not least, local factors can shape the memory culture of conflicts and atrocities as well. The Genocide of the Herero and Nama, for example, has never found much attention among Germans. The government took over a century to issue a formal apology (Auswärtiges Amt 2021). While it is questionable whether the geographical distance between Germany and Namibia, formerly German South West Africa, is satisfactory as a monocausal explanation for the hesitant endeavouring to reappraise history and to ask the victims and their descendants for forgiveness, surely the genocide was easier to neglect in society as the majority of Germans had perhaps not even heard about the massacres ordered by General von Trotha. Even today we notice due to media coverage that geographical proximity changes our perception of and interest in armed conflicts and atrocities. In the EU, the probably most evident cases are the wars in Syria and Ukraine and the reception of refugees. While refugees from Syria were accepted only reluctantly, for the Ukrainian neighbours the doors were wide open (Wamsley 2022).

Giving victims their individuality back

When attempting reconciliation after an atrocity, it is crucial to put the individuals who suffered and died at the centre of this process. This goes especially after a genocide which uses de-individualisation and dehumanisation of the victim group as reasoning for the horrendous violence against a specific social group (cf. Browning 1992). Genocide victims must get their individuality and identity back if there is to be a healing process. This can happen with different strategies.

While quantitative data like victim numbers are important, the “story behind victims” must be remembered. This can happen when survivors or other eyewitnesses are interviewed and the gathered information is archived. Kesting (1992) lists in his essay single incidents of Blacks being executed, giving some information about their military position or their backgrounds. Even though there are no names given, just listing different incidents and the specific details about the death of the respective victims gives their cases individuality. With that, the reader sympathises with the victims and will more likely remember them. When institutionalised in the form of educational programmes and museums, the processed knowledge is made available to the public. Including remembrance of atrocities committed by Germans in the educational plan of secondary schools ensures that new generations will be aware of past conflicts and their consequences even after all eyewitnesses have died.

In Kesting’s essay, there is also another positive example that shows another way of strengthening remembrance. He writes of a monument being erected by the townspeople of Wereth, Belgium to remember and honour the victims of the horrible mutilation and execution of eleven Afro-American soldiers of the 333rd Field Artillery Battalion. Making victims visible in the townscape is a way of including remembrance in daily life. Additionally, public discourse must shift and balance out the former imbalance of power between perpetrators and victims. How can it be that there are still street names named after colonists who participated in the extermination and enslavement of thousands and millions of people while the names of the victims are forgotten (Kastner 2013)? Taking these names out of the public sphere does not mean that their deeds should be forgotten but rather that the perpetrator is no longer supported by “the system”.

While there are many strategies for remembering past atrocities and starting a reconciliation process, it is very selective which atrocities are dealt with. Political intentions and goals, victim numbers, the anonymisation of victims, and geographical proximity are factors that influence the probability of the remembrance of an atrocity.

SUMMARY *

The essay identifies four filters that determine which atrocities a society remembers: whether the memory serves a present political purpose, how many victims there were, whether those victims remain individually knowable or dissolve into a number, and how far away the events occurred. Applied to Germany, these filters explain a pattern the author finds difficult to defend, in which one crime is memorialised with unusual thoroughness while another, committed by the same state, is absent from the school curriculum in which the author was educated. The remedy proposed is not to weigh one against the other but to apply to the neglected case the practices already developed for the remembered one: archived testimony, museums, curricula, monuments in public space, and the removal of perpetrators’ names from streets.

CONCLUSION

As a German, looking back on the history of my country, I cannot help but wonder whether our “exemplary” memory policy of the Holocaust is really that, exemplary, or whether it was not simply imposed on us by the victorious powers and picked up by Germans to continue getting the support of the U.S. Keeping the Genocide of the Herero and Nama in mind, it can certainly feel that way. I know firsthand that dealing with one’s country’s ugly past can be difficult. It can be uncomfortable and upsetting. It will for sure raise many emotions, guilt and shame, and maybe even abhorrence. What I cannot help but wonder: How must it feel for the victims and their descendants to be trapped in the collective trauma for decades and still be ignored or even antagonised? Fortunately, recent changes put me in a hopeful mood. An apology was finally issued towards the Herero and Nama. Now, remembrance of the genocide of these two peoples must be institutionalised in Germany to nourish that new-found awareness and compassion.

POTENTIAL SOLUTION *

The essay’s argument is sound and two clarifications would strengthen it considerably, because both concern points on which a critical reader would otherwise stop.

The first is the character of the colonial genocide itself. The extermination order of 1904 was issued by the commander of the imperial Schutztruppe and executed by regular German troops under state authority; between roughly sixty and eighty per cent of the Herero and about half the Nama population were killed, survivors were confined in camps where mortality was extreme, and the racial theories developed to justify this were carried into the following decades by individuals whose careers spanned both periods. The point matters because the essay’s own thesis is stronger when the two crimes are shown to be connected by more than a shared national perpetrator. This was not a matter of colonists acting on their own account; it was a state act, which is precisely why the state’s remembrance of it is the relevant question.

The second concerns the German reckoning with the Holocaust, which the essay suggests may have been imposed from outside. The historiography points elsewhere, and the correction supports rather than undermines the argument. The post war decade was characterised by widespread silence, extensive reintegration of former officials, and public resistance to prosecution. What changed the position was largely domestic and came later: the Ulm trial of 1958, the Frankfurt Auschwitz proceedings from 1963, and above all the generational challenge of the later 1960s, in which people of the author’s grandparents’ age were confronted by their own children. Read this way, the German case does not show that memory can be imposed but that it takes a generation and is driven by those who inherit the past rather than those who made it, which is exactly the situation now obtaining with the colonial period.

That yields the practical question the essay raises and leaves open, namely what institutionalised remembrance would consist of here. The elements are known from the existing case and are transferable: the colonial period in the curriculum of every federal state rather than as an optional module; a permanent memorial and museum presence in Berlin comparable to that accorded other victim groups; the return of human remains taken to German collections, of which a substantial number are still held; support for archival and genealogical work that allows individual names to be recovered, which is the essay’s own central demand; and the street renaming already underway in several cities, conducted with the descendant communities rather than about them.

Two further points bear on the settlement of 2021. It is described by the German government as a gesture rather than as reparations, a formulation adopted because the legal term would carry consequences, and this distinction is the principal reason the agreement has been rejected by significant parts of the Herero and Nama leadership. Those representatives were also not directly party to the negotiations, which were conducted between two states. Whatever view one takes of the outcome, the procedural objection is the one this journal would recognise: an agreement about a group, negotiated without that group at the table, is unlikely to be received as the acknowledgment it was intended to be. That is not an argument against what was achieved; it is the explanation for why the matter remains open.

Finally, the essay’s comparison of the reception given to Syrian and Ukrainian refugees is apt and its implication is worth stating. Selective remembrance and selective compassion operate through the same mechanism, which is the perceived proximity of the people concerned. A memory culture that succeeds in making distant victims individually present is therefore doing more than historical justice; it is practising the capacity on which every response to a current atrocity depends.

* Added by the WMO Editorial Team

REFERENCES

Auswärtiges Amt (2021) Außenminister Maas zum Abschluss der Verhandlungen mit Namibia, https://www.auswaertiges-amt.de/de/newsroom/-/2463396

Browning, C. R. (1992) Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. HarperCollins: New York.

Kastner, B. (2013) Umbenennung von Straßen: Ehre, wem keine gebührt, https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/umbenennung-von-strassen-ehre-wem-keine-gebuehrt-1.1731842

Kesting, R. (1992) Forgotten Victims: Blacks in the Holocaust, The Journal of Negro History 77(1), pp. 30 to 36.

Minow, M. (1999) The Work of Re-membering: After Genocide and Mass Atrocity.

Norris, M. (2021) Germany Faced Its Horrible Past. Can We Do the Same? The Washington Post.

Ryrie, A. (2020) Forgotten Victims from the Age of Atrocity.

Stiftung Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft (2021) Wie viel haben Sie in der Schule über die Zeit des Nationalsozialismus gelernt?

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (2020) Euthanasia Program and Aktion T4, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/euthanasia-program

Wamsley, L. (2022) Race, Culture and Politics Underpin How, or If, Refugees Are Welcomed in Europe, https://www.npr.org/2022/03/03/1084201542/ukraine-refugees-racism

Supplementary references added by the WMO Editorial Team

Joint Declaration by the Federal Republic of Germany and the Republic of Namibia, 2021, and the parliamentary debate on its ratification.

Zimmerer, J., & Zeller, J. (Eds.) (2008). Genocide in German South West Africa: The Colonial War of 1904 to 1908 and Its Aftermath. Merlin Press, London.

Kössler, R., & Melber, H. (2017). Völkermord und Gedenken: Der Genozid an den Herero und Nama in Deutsch Südwestafrika. Brandes und Apsel, Frankfurt.

Frei, N. (1996). Vergangenheitspolitik: Die Anfänge der Bundesrepublik und die NS Vergangenheit. C. H. Beck, München.

Assmann, A. (2016). Shadows of Trauma: Memory and the Politics of Postwar Identity. Fordham University Press, New York.

Rothberg, M. (2009). Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford University Press, Stanford.

Deutscher Museumsbund and the German Lost Art Foundation, guidelines on the handling of collections from colonial contexts and on the return of human remains.

And give us our daily bread: Why food aid has not led and will not lead to food security

How to cite this journal: Author, Date of the post, WMO Conflict Insight, Title of the post, ISSN: 2628 6998, https://worldmediation.org/journal/

ABSTRACT

Since the end of World War II, the International Community has made an effort to fight hunger worldwide. After the 90’s, the outcome looked promising. However, food insecurity levels first became stagnant, and are now on the rise again. This article will argue how food aid cannot eradicate global food insecurity.

KEYWORDS *

Food security, food aid, hunger, agricultural policy, subsidies, import dependency, Global South, food poverty, lobbying, Farm to Fork, right to food, structural inequality

INTRODUCTION

With devastating famines and food shortages after World War II, the International Community made an increasing effort to fight global hunger (Shaw 2007). For the first time, the right to freedom from hunger was established as a human right (Rosenman 1950 cited after Shaw 2007). The FAO and other international organisations were founded to meet that daring challenge. In the 20th century, many milestones were reached: Global food production rose exponentially and could feed now the whole world population, making hunger a problem of distribution rather than production (Serageldin & Landell-Mills 1994). However, hunger stayed prominent, especially in the Global South. Even today, most people suffering from hunger and undernutrition live in Africa and South Asia (Swinnen & Kosec 2023). This is mirrored in my experiences growing up, seeing African children on massive billboards of non-profit organisations, asking for donations to support food aid. Hunger seemed and still seems to be a problem for poor countries, that rely on richer countries for their goodwill in food distribution. But food security is much more complicated than that.

MAIN CORPUS

The political economy of food security

Agricultural policy, which is closely intertwined with food policy and food security, underlies a specific problem other industries do not face: Agricultural production takes time. Because market reactions are only possible with a time lag due to the growth period of agricultural products, it is more difficult for the market to be regulated by supply and demand. This affects all countries, however, the situation becomes more complicated as the agricultural sector is now connected globally and has been for quite some time. In the 20th century, the U.S. and the EU were the most important international players in the agricultural sector and thus controlled grain prices (Schanbacher 2010). The EU agricultural policy was heavily criticised in the late 20th century because of the massive subsidies leading to overproduction and dumping of agricultural products on the global market (Bulmer et al. 2020). Due to the reorganization of the global agricultural market with the U.S. and the EU at the top, countries of the Global South found themselves highly dependent on the two leading actors because of food import dependency (Schanbacher 2010). Also, the industrialization of the agricultural sector in the Global North contributed to climate change (Mbow et al. 2019), which in turn leads to the responsibility of industrialized countries towards countries without an industrialized agricultural sector.

However, countries of the Global South are in a more difficult position due to other factors. First, due to their proximity to the Equator, countries of the Global South already suffer more from the effects of climate change. Natural catastrophes are prone to happen more regularly in these regions with unstable climates (Huq & Adow 2022). Second, in countries of the Global South, armed conflicts are more common (Uppsala Conflict Data Program & Natural Earth 2022). Thus, food policy and food security can easily be neglected by political decision-makers due to the government setting other priorities. People who hunger or starve are usually part of the poorer and more uneducated population. Thus, they do not have a strong lobby to stand up for themselves. Non-profit organisations can administer acute assistance with food aid. However, this dependency on the goodwill of others cannot be a long-term solution for ensuring food security.

Why food aid will not lead to food security

The general public’s contemporary perception of food security leads to several problems. First, as already mentioned in the introduction, food insecurity, and especially hunger, are considered to be a problem of the Global South. This becomes evident as special indices for measuring food insecurity do not even include North America and Europe in their statistics (GHI). But, contrary to this widespread conception, food insecurity is on the rise in North America and Europe. This does not only include the malnutrition of people due to high-calorie, nutrient-poor diets but hunger becomes more prevalent as well. The term “food poverty” (Rost & Lundälv 2021) refers especially in European research to people who are too poor to afford a balanced diet that meets their needs. Researchers argue that hunger is only not as prevalent in European countries due to welfare state systems and the efforts of local food banks (ibid.).

This situation points out the real problem of food insecurity: Structural food insecurity, meaning consistent food insecurity, not food insecurity and famines due to natural catastrophes or other extreme situations, affects poor people, no matter where they live (Gregório et al. 2014). Thus, food insecurity is not a geographical, but rather a global problem that must be tackled by governments in a national and international approach.

Second, there is a structural problem with the global food markets. Food insecure people are often in a situation where they cannot change their situation and are dependent on food aid or food relief programs for several reasons. One of them is the lobbyism of the food industry. Food industries are global players with immense annual revenues. This economic asset can be used, and is used, to influence political decision-makers at national and international level (Lee 2023). One prominent example is the protest against the EU’s Farm to Fork Strategy, which aims for more sustainable food production in the EU and a healthier diet for EU citizens (EU Commission 2020). Other examples include lobbying for domestic initiatives such as import taxes or bio-fuel initiatives which drive up global food prices, in turn weakening food security in food-importing countries (Gillson & Fouad 2015). Thus, citizens are dependent either on the goodwill of governments to pursue a food policy which makes healthy and nutritious food affordable or on the goodwill of international organizations involved in food aid. This food relief, however, is nothing more than symptom management. Governments have a responsibility to ensure human rights for their citizens. Rather than listening to lobbyists, governments must stick to their commitment to achieving and realizing human rights globally. We need a change in global food systems to establish global food markets offering affordable prices for everyone.

SUMMARY *

The article’s argument rests on a single reframing. If enough food is produced to feed everyone, then hunger is not a shortfall to be made up but an outcome of how food is distributed and priced, and aid that supplies the shortfall leaves the mechanism producing it untouched. From this the author draws two consequences that cut against the conventional framing. Structural food insecurity is a condition of poverty rather than of geography, which is why it is now measurable in wealthy countries whose absence from the standard indices conceals it. And the policies that shape access, subsidies, tariffs, biofuel mandates and the trade rules that follow from them, are set through political processes in which those most affected have no representation and the food industry has a great deal.

CONCLUSION

The International Community has been trying for about a century now to end hunger globally and has always failed. Global food insecurity persists and is even on the rise, driven by different factors like climate change and economic instability in the global market. Especially countries in the Global South are affected by this dynamic, which exacerbates the north-south divide.

Therefore, crucial change is needed. Food security is a human right and important for everyone to live self-determined. Thus, policymakers must prioritize the well-being of their citizens over the interests of powerful food industries, promoting sustainable and equitable food systems. It has been possible for several decades to feed the entire world population with agricultural production. It is a moral disgrace that this is still not put into practice today because of economic interests.

POTENTIAL SOLUTION *

The article’s central claim is well established and its most important qualification is worth stating, because it determines what any remedy must address. Sen’s finding that famines occur amid adequate food supply, and that what fails is people’s entitlement to obtain it, is the theoretical foundation for exactly the argument made here. It also carries a consequence the article does not draw out: if the binding constraint is purchasing power rather than availability, then income support, employment and social protection are food policy, and in many settings they work faster and more cheaply than anything done to agricultural markets.

That points toward the most significant development in this field over the past two decades, which the article does not mention and which supports its case directly. Cash and voucher assistance has largely replaced in kind food aid in humanitarian response, because it delivers more value per unit of donor money, supports local markets rather than displacing them, and allows recipients to buy what they actually need. The traditional model the article criticises, in which surplus grain from donor countries is shipped to recipients, was for decades sustained by domestic agricultural and shipping interests in the donor states, and reforming it required overcoming precisely the lobbying the article describes. The reform is incomplete but it demonstrates that such interests can be defeated.

Two structural remedies deserve naming. The Agreement on Agriculture and the subsidy regimes it permits remain the largest single distortion in world food markets, and the negotiations to address them have been deadlocked since 2008, which is a mediation failure as much as a trade one: what blocks agreement is that reform imposes concentrated costs on organised producers and delivers diffuse benefits to unorganised consumers. And the right to food, which the article invokes, is a justiciable right in a growing number of jurisdictions, with courts in India and South Africa having ordered concrete measures on its basis. Framing food insecurity as a rights violation with an available remedy is more actionable than framing it as a moral failure.

Two qualifications strengthen the analysis. Conflict is now the principal driver of acute food crises, ahead of climate and economic factors combined, and the article treats it as one factor among several; the practical implication for this journal’s readers is direct, since access negotiations, ceasefires around harvests and arrangements such as the Black Sea grain corridor are food security instruments operated by mediators. And the position of the Global South is more differentiated than the framing allows: several formerly food importing states have become exporters, and the countries in the most difficult position are typically those combining conflict, currency weakness and import dependence rather than those defined by latitude.

Finally, the article’s observation that hungry people lack a lobby is the most important sentence in it, and it identifies where the work lies. Every remedy discussed here depends on political decisions taken by people who answer to organised constituencies. Producer organisations, consumer bodies, urban food councils and the participatory mechanisms established under national right to food frameworks are how an unorganised interest acquires a voice, and building them is slower and less visible than delivering food. It is also the only thing that changes the outcome the article describes.

* Added by the WMO Editorial Team

REFERENCES

Bulmer, S., Parker, O., Bache, I., George, S. and Burns, C. (2020) Politics in the European Union. Fifth Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

European Commission (2020) Farm to Fork Strategy: For a Fair, Healthy and Environmentally Friendly Food System. Brussels.

Gillson, I. and Fouad, A. (2015) Trade Policy and Food Security: Improving Access to Food in Developing Countries in the Wake of High World Prices. World Bank, Washington, D.C.

Global Hunger Index (GHI) The Power of Youth in Shaping Food Systems, https://www.globalhungerindex.org/

Gregório, M. J., Grace, P. and Costa, A. (2014) Time and Regional Perspectives of Food Insecurity during the Economic Crisis in Portugal, 2011 to 2013. Saúde e Sociedade 23(4): 1127 to 1141.

Huq, S. and Adow, M. (2022) Climate Change Is Devastating the Global South, https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/5/11/climate-change-is-devastating-the-global-south

Lee, C. (2023) How Does Lobbying Impact our Food and Agricultural Policies? https://www.foodunfolded.com/article/how-does-lobbying-impact-our-food-and-agricultural-policies

Mbow, C., Rosenzweig, C., Barioni, L. G., Benton, T. G., Herrero, M., Krishnapillai, M., Liwenga, E., Pradhan, P., Rivera-Ferre, M. G., Sapkota, T., Tubiello, F. N. and Xu, Y. (2019) Food Security. In: Shukla, P. R., Skea, J., Calvo Buendia, E., Masson-Delmotte, V., Pörtner, H. O. and Roberts, D. (eds.) Climate Change and Land: An IPCC Special Report. Cambridge University Press, 437 to 550.

Rost, S. and Lundälv, J. (2021) A Systematic Review of Literature Regarding Food Insecurity in Sweden. Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy 21: 1020 to 1032.

Schanbacher, W. D. (2010) The Politics of Food. Santa Barbara: Praeger Security International.

Serageldin, I. and Landell-Mills, P. (1994) Overcoming Global Hunger. World Bank, Washington, D.C.

Shaw, J. D. (2007) World Food Security: A History since 1945. Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Swinnen, J. and Kosec, K. (2023) The Road to Resilience: Rethinking Responses to Food Crises. In: International Food Policy Research Institute (ed.) Global Food Policy Report 2023, Washington, D.C., 6 to 19.

Uppsala Conflict Data Program and Natural Earth (2022) Deaths in Armed Conflicts Based on Where They Occurred, https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace

Supplementary references added by the WMO Editorial Team

International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, 1966, Article 11, and General Comment No. 12 of the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights on the right to adequate food.

Food and Agriculture Organization, Voluntary Guidelines to Support the Progressive Realization of the Right to Adequate Food, Rome, 2004.

Sen, A. (1981). Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation. Clarendon Press, Oxford.

FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP and WHO, The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World, annual editions, Rome.

Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, Global Report on Food Crises, annual editions.

World Trade Organization, Agreement on Agriculture, 1994, and the Nairobi Ministerial Decision on Export Competition, 2015.

Barrett, C. B., & Maxwell, D. (2005). Food Aid After Fifty Years: Recasting Its Role. Routledge, London.

Devereux, S. (2016). Social Protection for Enhanced Food Security in Sub Saharan Africa. Food Policy, 60, 52 to 62.

Overcoming inherited guilt and collective trauma: How can there be reconciliation after slavery?

How to cite this journal: Author, Date of the post, WMO Conflict Insight, Title of the post, ISSN: 2628 6998, https://worldmediation.org/journal/

ABSTRACT

Slavery during colonial rule stands as one of the most egregious crimes against humanity. Millions were forced into slavery, shaping the economic success of the former European empires as well as the U.S. Yet, the abolition of slavery in the 19th century was not met with apologies or reparations for the enduring horrors endured by former slaves. With this paper, I argue for the need for more apologies from descendants of slave-holding and trading families to finally start the reconciliation process between descendants of slaves and slaveholders and slave traders.

Editorial note: the argument and the assessment of responsibility reflect the author’s own perspective. This journal’s editorial position is neutral. *

KEYWORDS *

Slavery, colonial legacy, reconciliation, apology, reparations, racial inequality, collective responsibility, social identity theory, transitional justice, structural racism, descendants, historical injustice

INTRODUCTION

When Laura Trevelyan, a former Guardian journalist and descendant of a family that owned over 1,000 slaves, publicly apologized for her family’s involvement in slavery and donated £100,000 to the Grenadian educational system, reactions were mixed. While some people felt like “[a] burden that [they] didn’t even know [they were] carrying has been lifted” (Trevelyan 2023), others felt like the sum of reparations was ridiculously low. Trevelyan acknowledged that this was only “a first step” to a long road to reconciliation (ibid.), hoping it sets an example for other families and governments to address their historical roles. This example not only highlights the intricate challenges surrounding the acknowledgment of a seemingly distant past, questioning who should apologize to whom and what constitutes a sincere apology, but also indicates the emotionality of the topic at hand.

MAIN CORPUS

Racial inequality as the legacy of slavery

During colonial rule, innumerable atrocities took place. One of the biggest was the African slave trading system. While reconciliation in post-atrocity situations today receives much attention in the international community and academia, atrocities that occurred under colonial rule and their reconciliation processes remain in the shadows. Despite widespread acceptance of racial inequality in the U.S. today, opinions on the necessity of a reconciliation process regarding slavery vary. One explanation is that while racial inequality is accepted, it is controversial whether slavery is the root cause of that (Reichelmann et al. 2022: 548). Especially white Americans tend to oppose possible apologies or reparation payments for descendants of slaves. This can be explained by Social Identity Theory. “If white Americans believed Black Americans to be deserving of reparations, then they must acknowledge the role of white America in its perpetration” (ibid.: 569). This perception clashes with the pride white Americans feel and want to continue to feel about themselves. However, the need to feel good about oneself does not legitimize one to ignore the responsibility of one’s social group in a former atrocity.

Different studies show that there is a legacy of slavery that puts Black Americans at a disadvantage even today. These links are most visible through the local lens. One example is an analysis of poverty in the contemporary U.S. South which shows that in places rich in history of slavery, Black Americans are at a greater disadvantage compared to non-Hispanic white Americans than in places with a weaker connection to slavery (O’Connell 2012: 728). Another study shows how the legacy of slavery contributes to black-white educational disparities with the establishment of private schools and threat processes related to local racial composition (Reece & O’Connell 2016: 53f).

While recognizing responsibility is not solely dependent on ongoing disadvantages faced by descendants, it can serve as a moral impetus for descendants of perpetrators to confront their past.

The long way to reconciliation

After an atrocity occurs, there is a need for reconciliation to heal the rifts in society. Rebuilding peace after a conflict is always difficult, but atrocities leave a special legacy of “deeply broken social trust and high levels of trauma” behind (Straus 2016: 188). To rebuild that trust, the perpetrators must acknowledge accountability for their wrongdoings. The first step to do so is offering an apology to the former victims. And not just any apology suffices; it must be an apology from the heart to the heart (Brooks 2006: 228). With that apology, which most likely must be repeated to be met with forgiveness, the perpetrator must emphasize the following characteristics: The apology must be honest and with integrity, it must contain the desire to re-establish the victim’s honour and dignity, and a change of behaviour of the perpetrator towards the victim must be noticeable (Hatch 2006: 191). For an apology to be heartfelt, it does not only display personal regret, a plea for forgiveness and hope for a restored relationship, but rather than redeeming oneself and defending oneself for one’s condemned actions, the apology centres on the people harmed by one’s behaviour (ibid.: 202). At the same time, the perpetrator does not only need to apologize to someone, but it is just as important that they apologize for something, namely for the atrocity they committed (Brooks 2006: 225).

But how does one apologize for an atrocity like slavery? And who should apologize? While Trevelyan’s apology for her family’s involvement in slavery is noteworthy and should be viewed as a role model for other families who accumulated wealth by having slaves, acknowledging guilt by heritage can prove difficult because it can shake up the very sense of one’s identity if one must acknowledge the horrors one’s ancestors did. Some U.S. American families still go that way and document their ancestors’ involvement in the slave trading (cf. DeWolf 2008). Even within the families, it is controversial whether an apology is needed. One of the main reasons is that there was no personal involvement (ibid.: 121f, 222). But as a German, I argue that descendants still have a moral obligation to right the wrongs of their ancestors. Even more so if there had not been any attempts of reconciliation at an earlier point. To say that any moral obligations fade as soon as the perpetrators and victims die is an excuse to make life easier and more comfortable and usually is only possible when you belong to the descendants of the perpetrator group, as the descendants of the victim group still suffer from the aftermath of the atrocity.

I also argue that institutions like the state must form apologies, which has already happened in some parts (cf. Hatch 2006). Issuing a representative apology comes with specific difficulties. Hatch (ibid.: 204) even calls the tension ratio between speaking officially and speaking personally a “rhetorical tightrope”. Not only is it difficult to balance the contradiction between expressing personal regret and speaking in an official capacity, but state representatives must think of the difficulties involved in speaking for a collective and the question of inherited guilt or responsibility for ancestors’ wrongs, too (ibid.: 192). Issuing an apology can easily backfire if members of the perpetrator group, or rather their descendants, feel as if guilt is being put on them unjustly, which can lead to hate towards the group of the victims, the descendants of slaves. On the other hand, if the apology does not encompass the necessary depth of contrition, the victim group might feel ridiculed.

Even if one manages to walk the tightrope, it is imperative that to realize reconciliation, apologies for former atrocities do not stand alone but are combined with other mechanisms to rebuild trust and relations between perpetrator and victim group. Whether punitive mechanisms such as criminal trials or non-punitive mechanisms such as reparations or truth commissions are best suited always depends on the local context of the atrocity (Straus 2016: 212f). In the case of dealing with slavery, non-punitive mechanisms seem to be the wiser choice as the directly involved perpetrators have long passed away. Reparations could be direct payments to descendants of slaves or, like in the case of Trevelyan’s family, symbolic reparations in the form of payments for education, scholarships and similar purposes.

SUMMARY *

The article’s argument turns on a question that transitional justice usually avoids: what is owed when everyone directly involved is dead. The author’s answer proceeds in three steps. The harm has not ended, since the research cited traces measurable present day disadvantage to the intensity of slavery in particular places. The reluctance to acknowledge this is itself explicable, since social identity theory predicts that a group will resist a finding that requires it to think worse of itself. And the moral obligation therefore does not lapse with the deaths of the participants, because the beneficiaries of an injustice inherit its advantages along with everything else. From this the author derives a preference for non punitive mechanisms, and a distinction between apologies offered by families, which are personal and voluntary, and apologies offered by states, which speak for a collective that has not consented and which the author acknowledges are correspondingly harder to make well.

CONCLUSION

Contrary to some prevailing political group-thinking strategies, there is no expiry date on issuing apologies, especially when the atrocity’s shadow persists over the victim group. The healing progress of descendants of slaves must begin now. While this is easy for me to say, a white German with no known connections to slaveholding or trading in my family tree, I am aware that as a somewhat ‘uninvolved’ person it can be easy for me to judge others involved. But maybe uninvolved people are needed to push descendants of slaveholders and traders to start dealing with their past. It can be uncomfortable to deal with one’s ugly family past. I do not want to downplay that difficulty. However, in most states with a white majority we believe in the importance of human rights and the equality of all. So it is important that we act according to our beliefs. And that is why unconditional apologies from states and families connected to slave trading or holding past are urgently required. These apologies must be unfiltered, honest, and raw. If there is apprehension about potential backlash, we need increased education and awareness for those who believe that an apology for this atrocity is unnecessary. It is time to shift the focus away from the feelings of the perpetrator group and centre on those who were wronged.

We cannot ignore that racism, stemming from the legacy of the African slave trading system, persists. The rise of right-wing parties and politicians expressing overtly racist views in Europe and North America, even occupying significant offices, should serve as a wake-up call for those who firmly believe in the equality of all individuals. To initiate the reconciliation process, we must begin with sincere apologies and take concrete actions to address structural racism by reforming the system.

POTENTIAL SOLUTION *

The article’s central difficulty is one the field has largely worked out, and naming the resolution strengthens the argument considerably. The objection that no living person is guilty is correct and beside the point, because guilt and responsibility are different things. Guilt attaches to acts and dies with those who committed them; responsibility attaches to positions, and a person who inherits wealth, standing or institutional advantage derived from an injustice occupies a position created by it. On that distinction the demand is not that anyone confess to a crime they did not commit, which is why the language of inherited guilt provokes the backlash the author anticipates, but that beneficiaries acknowledge what they have received. Stated that way the claim is harder to refuse and easier to act on.

What separates apologies that repair from apologies that provoke is well documented and worth setting out, because the article’s call for unfiltered and raw expression is the one point where the research suggests otherwise. Effective apologies name the specific wrong rather than expressing general regret, acknowledge responsibility without qualification, avoid the passive constructions that obscure who did what, and are accompanied by something the recipient did not have before. They are also negotiated rather than announced: the parties who were harmed have a view about what an adequate acknowledgment would contain, and an apology drafted without consulting them frequently misses what mattered most. Where these conditions have been met, as in the German settlement with Namibia over the Herero and Nama, disputes have persisted precisely about which of them were satisfied, particularly the last.

That points to the practical question the article raises and does not resolve, which is who receives an apology when the injured are dead and their descendants are numerous, dispersed and organised in no single body. Practice has developed answers: the CARICOM Reparations Commission speaks for fifteen states on a ten point plan, national commissions have been established in several jurisdictions, and community based bodies have negotiated with universities and churches. Identifying a legitimate counterpart is not merely a procedural step but the point at which a unilateral gesture becomes a process, and this journal would recognise the distinction: a gesture is delivered, a settlement is agreed.

Two additions would round out the picture. The article notes reparations in passing and the concrete forms are worth naming, since the debate is frequently conducted as though only direct cash payments were meant: educational endowments, community investment, land restoration, health programmes and institutional reform have all been used, and the recent settlements by universities and religious bodies in the United States and the United Kingdom offer working models at a scale that families and institutions can actually reach. And the article’s reference to backlash deserves to be treated as a design problem rather than a reason for caution: initiatives framed as remedying a specific documented harm, and accompanied by measures that visibly benefit an entire region rather than one group within it, have encountered markedly less resistance than those framed as collective moral reckoning.

Finally, the author’s reflection on writing as a German with no family connection to slavery is more significant than it appears. The German experience is the standing reference point in every discussion of national apology, and it contains a finding that bears directly on this argument: the substantial reckoning came a generation after the events, driven by the children of those involved rather than by the participants, and it consisted less of statements than of memorials, curricula, restitution and the steady incorporation of the past into ordinary civic life. Apologies mattered within that, and they mattered as part of something sustained. That is the strongest version of the case this article makes.

* Added by the WMO Editorial Team

REFERENCES

Baptist, E. E. (2014) The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. Basic Books.

Brooks, R. L. (2006) The New Patriotism and Apology for Slavery. In: Barkan, E. & Karn, A. (eds.) Taking Wrongs Seriously: Apologies and Reconciliation. Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 213 to 233.

DeWolf, T. N. (2008) Inheriting the Trade: A Northern Family Confronts Its Legacy as the Largest Slave-Trading Dynasty in U.S. History. Boston: Beacon Press.

Hatch, J. B. (2006) Beyond Apologia: Racial Reconciliation and Apologies for Slavery. Western Journal of Communication, Vol. 70(3), pp. 186 to 211.

O’Connell, H. A. (2012) The Impact of Slavery on Racial Inequality in Poverty in the Contemporary U.S. South. Social Forces, Vol. 90(3), pp. 713 to 734.

Reece, R. L. & O’Connell, H. A. (2016) How the Legacy of Slavery and Racial Composition Shape Public School Enrollment in the American South. Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, Vol. 2(1), pp. 42 to 57.

Reichelmann, A. V., Roos, J. M., Hughes, M. (2022) Racial Identity, Reparations, and Modern Views of Justice Concerning Slavery. Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 86(1), pp. 547 to 575.

Straus, S. (2016) Fundamentals of Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention. Washington, D.C.: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Trevelyan, L. (2023) My family owned 1,000 slaves and profited from the trade: this is how I am trying to make amends. The Guardian, March 25. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/25/slaves-trade-amends-grenada-laura-trevelyan

Supplementary references added by the WMO Editorial Team

CARICOM Reparations Commission, Ten Point Plan for Reparatory Justice, 2014.

United Nations Durban Declaration and Programme of Action, World Conference against Racism, 2001.

Joint Declaration by the Federal Republic of Germany and the Republic of Namibia on the Herero and Nama, 2021, and the accompanying reconciliation agreement.

Barkan, E. (2000). The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore.

Nobles, M. (2008). The Politics of Official Apologies. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Lazare, A. (2004). On Apology. Oxford University Press, New York.

Coates, T. (2014). The Case for Reparations. The Atlantic, June.

Universities Studying Slavery consortium and the reports of Georgetown University, the University of Glasgow and the Church of England on historic links to slavery.