Terror, Genocide and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century

    How do we initially define terror, genocide and human rights? What are the problems or limits to these working definitions? Why do ordinary people or political states resort to violence, terror or genocide? How do people and political systems defend human rights, civic values and other people, resist forms of terror and eliminatory violence or fall apart in the process? How do the different literatures and scholarship inform our understanding of how to develop the approaches to the study of these problems? For example, how can archaeology, anthropology, sociology, political science, psychology, philosophy, bioethics or environmental science aid our study of historical phenomena, and how may historical inquiries facilitate reciprocal exchanges in these other disciplines? How do comparative studies of different cases in terms of time and place, different literature, other forms of media and representation illuminate the history of terror, genocide and human rights and enhance our understanding of how and why these phenomena occurred and continue to happen? How do different perspectives of geography, locality, customs, traditions, religious beliefs, political ideology, notions of race, class and gender, violence, war and the individual experiences and collective memories of past events influence the phenomena of terror, genocide and human rights? What is the current state of research in each of these areas and what work needs to be done? And, finally, to what extent can historical research aid how we identify current hotspots for potential terror, genocide and human rights issues and inform our responses in politics, policies, historiography, teaching, research, writing, professional development, public engagement and other creative endeavors? 
    This course is a discussion-oriented seminar that aims to develop working definitions to the historical problems of terror, genocide and human rights. This course also considers different theoretical and methodological approaches to those problems through closer study of primary sources, mixed media and scholarship related to specific cases and then develop a set of comparative questions about the nature of terror, genocide and human rights in world history, the uniqueness of different events, the characteristics they have in common and the ways in which terror, genocide and human rights have changed or continued to exhibit certain ideas, practices and dynamics over time. 
Case studies include, but are not limited to the archaeological record, European colonization, revolutionary France, the United States of America, Armenia, Germany, Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Rumania, Japan, China, Algeria, South Africa, former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Darfur, Iran and Afghanistan.