2 - The Tragedy of Legal Genocide: Colonial Modernity and the Cold War

Addressing the commonsense slippage of Cambodian history with “tragedy” and the fraught politics of naming reflected by the ontological and legal question of what to call the period of Democratic Kampuchea from 1975-1979, this paper engages the contested application of “genocide” in the post-WWII period. Within the context of the Cold War, the 1948 UN Genocide Convention reflected a compromise worked out by delegates representing the most powerful nation-states. Reflecting the limits of what became international law, the Convention displaced the radical possibilities of a global legal order able to respond to the most catastrophic acts of human violence. Failing to address overlapping histories, the legal codification of genocide obscured connections between the Nazi extermination of Jews in Europe and German concentration camps in colonial West Africa in the early 1900s. The Convention also failed to address the policies that inspired Adolf Hitler, which included California’s sterilization laws of the 1920s and Jim Crow segregation in the U.S. South. Interrogating the logics and conditions that produced the “crime of all crimes” in the 1948 UN Genocide Convention, this paper traces the relations of power that make some violences legible as such, while relegating the violence of racialized death and destruction to “collateral damage.”