Friday, December 6, 2013
12:00 p.m.
Room 710 Social Science Building
After the Holocaust, the Genocide Convention was aimed explicitly of ridding mankind of this 'odious scourge.' The Convention was, with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, one of the founding documents of the post-Holocaust era; but genocide recurs, and with alarming frequency, across almost every continent. Little has been done to prevent or halt the recurrence of this 'crime of crimes' and very few perpetrators have been brought to justice.
In this lecture, Professor Spencer explores some of the reasons that have been put forward to account for these troubling failures, and reflects on what light our current understandings of the Holocaust can throw on the acute problem of genocide today.
Professor Philip Spencer is Director of the Helen Bamber Centre for the Study of Rights, Conflict and Mass Violence, at Kingston University. The Centre, which he founded in 2004, provides a focus for research and teaching in these areas. It is named in honor of the veteran rights campaigner Helen Bamber, who has devoted her life to the victims of conflicts across the world.
Professor Spencer's own research interests include the Holocaust; comparative genocide; nationalism; and anti-Semitism. He is also director of the university's European Research Department, where the central focus is on European political and cultural identity, with an overall concern for the changing forms, boundaries and future of Europe in the modern world.
