Larry Diamond, Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, touched base on why democracy is important, revisited events in Iraq, spoke about Russia and other issues in the Q&A with Jay Nordlinger. Listen to the podcast here. 

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The Convention on Genocide defined the term as a variety of “acts against committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such.” Can you take us back to this moment in history—what was the context surrounding the convention and the origin of the term?

On the one hand, the convention reflected the intense lobbying, fervent commitment, and long-time interest of the Polish-Jewish international legal scholar, Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term “genocide” in 1944, after having escaped the Nazi takeover of Poland. On the other, it spoke to the needs of “international society” to outlaw the kinds of crimes committed by the Nazis against national and ethnic groups. In many ways, it was a backward looking document. It took a very long time for it to be ratified by the UN member nations (the U.S. ratified it only in 1988) and to become a part of international law in the way we think about it today. In fact, the convention was mostly forgotten and shelved until the 1990s with the war in Bosnia and the Rwandan Genocide.

What sparked your interest in this topic and inspired you to write this book?

I first began thinking seriously about questions related to genocide during the Balkan Wars of the early and mid-1990s. The murderous events in Bosnia, in particular, really shook me up, since I had spent quite a bit of time in the region as a graduate student and did not expect in the least the severe ethnic tensions that fueled war and genocide.

I tried to think comparatively about the historical phenomenon of genocide, and that led to a series of books about genocide in the twentieth century: Fires of Hatred; Stalin’s Genocides; and A Question of Genocide. After engaging the questions of students and scholarly audiences, I realized that genocide did not belong just to the twentieth century or just to Europe, but rather was the product of the enduring character of human societies. As a result, I started teaching a frosh seminar on “The World History of Genocide,” which, in turn, became the basis for this new book.

This book is really driven by student questions, discussions, and papers from that class. I dedicated the book to my students, many of whom have gone on to study human rights and international affairs at Stanford and beyond. The students really dug into the material and helped me understand how relevant it was to their own lives and their future.

In the book, you explore different cases of genocide throughout history. How has genocide changed over time? In what ways has it stayed the same?

From the beginning of human history, genocide has involved a political entity targeting a specifically designated group of people, sometimes within one’s territory and/or in another territory, and seeking their physical elimination. The motives for killing off a group, in the UN definition “in whole or in part” are less important in this view than the crucial question of intent.

There are several important “moments” in the history of genocide. One might be considered the Spanish conquest of the Americas in the sixteenth century, where the beginnings of “racial” thinking influenced the conquistadores’ massacres of indigenous peoples; another might be considered the development of the modern state following the French Revolution. The state, even in its democratic forms, can give rise to genocide.

The ideologies of communism and fascism in the mid-twentieth centuries played crucial roles in the development of genocide, and the interconnected complex of colonialism and post-colonialism also were important to the development of modern genocide. What scholars classify as “settler genocide” – when thinking about North America, the Antipodes, and Africa – was intimately linked to colonialism.

[[{"fid":"224942","view_mode":"crop_870xauto","fields":{"format":"crop_870xauto","field_file_image_description[und][0][value]":"Book cover for \"Genocide: A World History\"","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Book cover for \"Genocide: A World History\"","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"Book cover for \"Genocide: A World History\"","field_credit[und][0][value]":"","field_caption[und][0][value]":"","field_related_image_aspect[und][0][value]":"","thumbnails":"crop_870xauto"},"type":"media","attributes":{"alt":"Book cover for \\\"Genocide: A World History"","title":"Book cover for \\\"Genocide: A World History"","style":"width: 200px; height: 289px; margin-top: 8px; margin-right: 15px; float: left;","class":"media-element file-crop-870xauto"}}]]What are some of the challenges you’ve observed of reconciliation and forgiveness in societies that have experienced genocide?

Some scholars suggest that the history of genocide is best “forgotten,” as a way to help societies rebuild from the fierce blood-letting that genocide always involves. Revenge for past genocides sometimes provokes new conflicts. Most observers believe, however, that truth telling of one form or another—in courts, in local institutions, in cultural expression, and in historical and public discourse—is the best way to allow societies to recover.

Denial is almost always a part of genocide and its memory, which in turn makes reconciliation and forgiveness extraordinarily difficult. The involvement of international courts in convicting perpetrators of genocide has been, on balance, a positive development during the past quarter century. But the courts are frequently accused by the perpetrator populations of reflecting “victors’ justice” and political one-sidedness, which also impedes reconciliation.

Does your research shed any light on why such horrific events continue to take place, despite efforts to prevent them? Any silver linings or hope for the future?

There has been some empirical work on the incidence of violence and genocide over human history that demonstrates an overall downward trend in the percentage of people who die from violence and mass killing. The argument is that changing international norms about genocide have served to impede political leaders from turning to mass murder as a weapon of dealing with subject groups.

There are warning signs for genocide that range from increasing racism and xenophobia among societies and their political leaders to the ever-present threat of authoritarianism and the construction of police states, which make carrying out mass killing easier than in decentralized and democratic states.

The bottom line is that international institutions, laws, and norms do help impede the eruption of genocidal situations, but there are few guarantees and the international system works very slowly – think about the mass murder of the Yazidi Kurds or the bombardment of Aleppo now – when there is little agreement about how to intercede.

What additional questions did your research raise?

There is a deep gender component to genocide that needs to be explored further. Perpetrators do not treat women and men the same. There are important issues of rape and sexual exploitation involved in genocide, and, especially in the early history of genocide, women are more often than not captured and enslaved, rather than eliminated. The perpetrators themselves are almost always men – though there are frequently also women involved.

There are other dynamics of genocide that need to be studied more carefully. For example, genocide is a process, usually unleashed by war, not a distinct “event” with a beginning and an end. It tends to accelerate to a crescendo and then slows down. It frequently spreads from one targeted people or group to another, with methods that evolve and change over time. The perpetrators “learn” in the process of genocide, which ends up causing much more damage to societies than might be anticipated. These are all very good reasons for interdiction, that is, stopping genocide before it accelerates and spreads.

How do you hope this book will inform discourse or perceptions about the subject?

I define genocide rather more broadly than most scholars, including social and political groups into a concept of genocide that was initially articulated by Raphael Lemkin, but deleted, primarily for political reasons, from the 1948 Genocide Convention itself. This allows us to look at communist genocides (in the Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia), as well as anti-communist ones (in Indonesia, East Timor, and Guatemala.) Approaching genocide in this way also helps us think about genocide as a historical and potential threat to groups within societies that are frequently subjected to stereotypes, de-humanization and “othering,” and sometimes to state discrimination and even mass killing, like homosexuals and the disabled during Nazi Germany.

In the end, I believe that improving our understanding of these processes can help identify warning signs of genocide and deter, if not always prevent, attacks on minority populations of various origins.

This article was originally published in Stanford Global Studies online news on December 8, 2016 and also appears on the Stanford Global Studies Medium page. 

For more information about the book, visit the Oxford University Press website.

Norman Naimark quoted in USA Today News on Aleppo.

The health gap between rich and poor children in developing countires is staggeringly high, but Assistant Professor of Medicine Eran Bendavid found that it is shrinking. In his pilot project, "Empirical Evidence on Wealth Inequality and Health in Developing Countries," Bendavid discovered that since the mid-2000s, life expectancies for children under five are starting to converge. How can we continue to close the gap? Watch to find out.

While Russia poses one of the biggest foreign policy challenges facing the U.S., an opportunity for rapprochement may exist with the incoming administration, several Stanford scholars said Wednesday.

The panel event, “Russia Looking Back and Looking Ahead,” featured Russia experts William J. Perry, Michael McFaul, Siegfried Hecker, and David Holloway from Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation and the Freeman Spogli Institute. The discussion came at a time when American-Russian relations are arguably at their lowest point since the end of the Cold War. On top of this, the Central Intelligence Agency recently concluded that Russia interfered in the U.S. presidential election. Against this backdrop, the Stanford scholars examined both the past and the future of the U.S.-Russia relationship. (Click here to watch a video of the event.)

Amy Zegart, CISAC co-director, said in opening remarks that there is “no more timely moment to be looking at the state of U.S.-Russia affairs than today.”

Perry, a former U.S. Secretary of Defense and director of the Preventive Defense Project at CISAC, said that he hopes Russia does not fall prey to its worst tendencies, the way the Weimar Republic of Germany succumbed to Nazism. Perry pointed out, however, that some bright spots in Russian cooperation have occurred.

“You could never have predicted that was going to work,” he said, referring to the post-Cold War cooperation between the U.S. and Russia in reducing and safeguarding the latter’s nuclear stockpile. There was also collaboration on solving the Bosnian conflict in the 1990s.

“The greatest disappointment is that we let all this slip away,” said Perry, citing the NATO expansion as one trigger effect. “Our greatest challenge is trying to avoid a war with Russia. We’ve gotten to a point where that is a real possibility.”

The Russians, Perry noted, realize they’re outgunned by the U.S. in conventional weapons, so they have made it known they may use tactical nuclear weapons in the event of a war with America.

Perry urges re-engaging with Russia on nuclear issues. The best approach, he said, may be to separate out some problems that may be too difficult so the focus is on nuclear cooperation. Still, he acknowledges he is "profoundly pessimistic,” but what is at stake is the survival of human civilization, so these two countries must find a way to work together. 

Protests and people

McFaul, the director of the Freeman Spogli Institute, recently penned a column urging a bipartisan examination of Russian involvement in the 2016 election.

McFaul explained the Obama Administration’s efforts to engage with Putin’s Russia. He served in the administration during that period that some refer to as an attempted “reset” of Washington’s relationship with Moscow. Some cooperation definitely occurred – the successful raid on Osama Bin Laden would not have happened without Russia’s collaboration, among other examples, he added. “It was an amazing achievement."

Why did the reset end? “It ended because protesting people got in the way of our policy,” he said, noting mass protests in Russia and in Middle Eastern countries that were allies of Putin’s regime.

“We were not imposing our values on the government when I was in office,” said McFaul about his tenure as U.S. ambassador to Russian from 2012 to 2014.

On Trump, McFaul expressed cautious optimism, but described him as exhibiting “mixed-up ends and means,” and Trump seems to suggest everyone “should just get along.” Putin, on the other hand, has very clear strategic priorities, McFaul said. 

“There’s a history of interference,” he said about Russia’s forays into elections here and abroad.

In addition, many issues have connections – such as the Iran nuclear deal and the Russian relationship – that are so complex that the new administration needs to truly understand the broader context, he said.

Prior nuclear agreements - such as Nunn-Lugar – were viewed in Moscow as American intelligence efforts, McFaul said. This reflects Russia’s wariness to talk about nuke issues.

‘A country coming apart’

Hecker, a senior fellow at CISAC and FSI, recently wrote an article about how the recent U.S. election may have opened a window of opportunity on U.S. Russia nuclear cooperation. The idea for the panel originated from the publication of Hecker’s recent book, Doomed to Cooperate.

Hecker recalled his career as the director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where they were faced with helping strengthen the U.S. against Soviet nuclear capabilities, to the years of transition after the Cold War when he led U.S. efforts over a 20-year period to work with Russian scientists on safeguarding loose nukes.

“'They were Russia’s inheritance from Hell,'” he said, quoting a passage in a book by moderator David E. Hoffman, a contributing editor to The Washington Post and Russian expert as well.

The scientists in Russia, however, were heroically motivated to collaborate with American scientists like Hecker in protecting their country from a nuclear catastrophe. “It was like looking in a mirror,” Hecker said about their talents and conscientiousness.

Such scientific collaboration and support from both countries’ governments is a template for future relationships, he said. Unfortunately, that type of cooperation is “being held hostage” by political differences in both countries, said Hecker, who has visited Russia 52 times in 25 years.

“There is no reason we should be enemies,” he said.

Hecker suggests not “demonizing” the Russian people and avoiding imposing American values on those people. Staying out of internal affairs in Russia is critical, too, he said.

‘Not the Soviet Union’

Holloway, a senior fellow at CISAC and FSI, has analyzed the steps taken to shrink the world's nuclear stockpile.

“Russia’s not what people hoped it would become 25 years ago, but still something remains. This is still not the Soviet Union,” said Holloway, pointing out some limited freedoms exist in contemporary Russian society compared to the country’s Stalinist past.

“The failure to integrate Russia into the international system” has created a serious problem, he said. “We’ve had a real downward spiral” since the Obama administration’s attempted reset. “There is a debate about who is to blame,” but that is a complicated debate.

“What is to be done?” asked Holloway. This is the question to ask and answer in order to ascertain ways to improve the relationship. The liberal world order, created by the U.S. in the wake of WWII, may be coming to an end, he said. China and Russia feel they have not been accommodated by such a U.S.-led world order, such as in trade deals and military alliances.

Like Putin, who uses unpredictable tactics in world affairs, Trump, too, seems made from the same template.

“This is not good to have two unpredictable leaders facing each other” with many nuclear weapons at their commands, said Holloway, who recently visited Russia and observed many reactions there about the 2016 election outcome.

Follow CISAC at @StanfordCISAC and www.facebook.com/StanfordCISAC.

MEDIA CONTACT:

Clifton B. Parker, Center for International Security and Cooperation: (650) 725-6488, cbparker@stanford.edu

Editor’s Note: The following article by CISAC's Siegfried S. Hecker is part of a multi-part symposium commissioned by the National Interest and Carnegie Corporation of New York. They asked some of the world’s leading experts about the future of U.S.-Russia relations under President-elect Donald Trump. You can find all of their answers here.

By Siegfried S. Hecker

Nuclear is different. Nuclear energy can electrify the world or destroy it. Cooperation is essential to maximize its benefits and to limit its dangers. President-elect Trump should move swiftly to reestablish U.S.-Russian nuclear cooperation, which has been held hostage to political differences.

Whereas political relations between the United States and Russia have swung from confrontation during the Cold War, to cooperation in its aftermath, and now back to confrontation, combating nuclear risks has required dialogue and at least some modicum of cooperation. In spite of bitter ideological differences during the Cold War, U.S. and Russian leaders took cooperative measures to avoid nuclear confrontation, reduce nuclear stockpiles and limit the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

The collapse of the Soviet Union transformed the global nuclear threat—from potential annihilation of humankind by the enormous nuclear arsenal in the hands of the Soviet government, to the possibility that the new Russian government may lose control of its tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, over one million kilograms of fissile materials, a huge nuclear infrastructure, and the several hundred thousand nuclear experts and workers it had inherited from the Soviet Union.

The safety and security of Russia’s nuclear assets posed an unprecedented challenge for the world as well as for Russia. An equally unprecedented cooperation between Russia and the United States during the past twenty-five years has greatly enhanced the safety and security of Russia’s nuclear complex and helped avoid a nuclear catastrophe.

Although President Putin has reemphasized the role of nuclear weapons in Russia’s security and has suspended or terminated most nuclear cooperation with the United States, President-elect Trump must work with Russia to jointly develop an acceptable path to avoid nuclear confrontation and combat global nuclear dangers. The first order of business must be to develop mutually agreed conditions to ensure strategic stability and avoid a new nuclear arms race.

Whereas nuclear safety and security in Russia’s nuclear complex has improved greatly, these are never-ending quests that require continued collaboration—sharing best practices and lessons learned, cooperating on training, and assisting other countries. Likewise, cooperation to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons and nuclear terrorism is in the interest of both countries. The Iranian nuclear deal is a recent example of what the two countries can achieve by working hand in hand. North Korea is another case that warrants cooperation because interests converge.

The president-elect should also listen closely to Russia’s expressed desire to expand the benefits of the atom—particularly to collaborate on peaceful nuclear technologies and the safe global expansion of nuclear energy.

The U.S. election may have opened a window of opportunity to return U.S.-Russian relations to cooperation. There is no better place to start than with nuclear cooperation.

Siegfried S. Hecker is the author of Doomed to Cooperate, a two-volume compendium of articles on U.S.-Russian nuclear cooperation. Follow him at @SiegfriedHecker.