Tag: Social Death and Ecocide

John Docker excoriates another field — Genocide Studies. Mainstream Genocide Studies has scored a temporary ideological victory by dismissing those who have compellingly showed why the Nakba, in fact the ongoing Nakba should qualify as an example of genocide. Furthermore, the gatekeeper of Genocide Studies have clearly aligned with Zionist Israel by holding a conference on the Hebrew University’s campus in Occupied Jerusalem despite a Palestinian-led call to desist from going ahead. Docker usefully shows how Damian Short’s Redefining Genocide: Settler Colonialism, Social Death and Ecocide resonates with Said’s The Question of Palestine. Short, as explained by Docker, embraces Raphael Lemkin’s definition of genocide as a two-phase process of destruction and replacement constituted by:

… convergent processes that attempt to destroy the foundations of a society so that it can no longer exist as a society; processes that certainly might involve mass killing including massacres, but can also encompass methods of destruction and replacement that engage many dimensions, including the political, social, cultural, linguistic, religious, and economic.