Damien Short

Reconciliation and the Problem of Internal Colonialism

The prevalence of ‘scientific’ racism and social Darwinism in white colonial nations in the late nineteenth century ensured that indigenous peoples were regarded as an alien ‘other’ to national identities based on racism and progress. This outlook gradually changed over time with the aid of socio-historical understanding developed by indigenous and non-indigenous revisionist historians, academics and activists, which sought to explain past and present indigenous/settler relations by placing white colonial nation-states within a critical account of colonialism and racial discrimination. As white settler nations gradually began to accommodate a plurality of ethnic cultures and in that sense become more multicultural, politicians sought to construct national identities based on the imagery of ‘harmonious multiculturalism’. In settler societies, such as Canada and Australia, a significant political obstacle to this was the continued disquiet of indigenous populations. The emerging post-colonial challenge for politicians in such societies was to find a way to include indigenous people in the cultural fabric of the nation which would seem fair and appropriate and therefore serve a legitimising function for the settler state. Recently the now popular peacemaking language of ‘reconciliation’ has been the preferred rhetorical device for this endeavour in Canada and most notably in Australia.1 The aim of this paper is to outline why two dominant understandings of reconciliation as an outcome that have emerged from post-conflict reconciliation processes would be inappropriate goals for a process concerned with genuinely legitimising an internal colonial situation.2 It begins with a general introduction to the concept of reconciliation, discusses the context-specific problems with the dominant understandings and concludes by suggesting an approach to reconciliation which would genuinely decolonise an internal colonial situation.

Reconciliation, Assimilation, and the Indigenous Peoples of Australia

Reconciliation as a peacemaking paradigm emerged as an innovative response to some of the mass atrocities and human rights violations that marked the 20th century. It provided an alternative to traditional state diplomacy and realpolitik that focused on restoring and rebuilding relationships. To that end, those creating reconciliation processes have set themselves the difficult task of laying the foundations for forgiveness through the establishment of truth, acknowledgment of harm, and the provision of appropriate forms of justice. In 1991, the Australian government instigated a process of reconciliation between the indigenous peoples and wider society in order to “address progressively” colonial injustice and its legacy (Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation Act 1991: Preamble). This article seeks to demonstrate, however, that restrictive policy framing and a lack of political will have severely hindered the progress of the Australian reconciliation process. An alternative conceptual approach to settler state and indigenous reconciliation is suggested.

‘A slow industrial genocide’: tar sands and the indigenous peoples of northern Alberta

In this article we discuss the impact of the tar sands development in northern Alberta on the indigenous communities of the Treaty 8 region. While the project has brought income to some, and wealth to the few, its impact on the environment and on the lives of many indigenous groups is profoundly concerning. Their ability to hunt, trap and fish has been severely curtailed and, where it is possible, people are often too fearful of toxins to drink water and eat fish from waterways polluted by the ‘externalities’ of tar sands production. The situation has led some indigenous spokespersons to talk in terms of a slow industrial genocide being perpetrated against them. We begin the article with a discussion of the treaty negotiations which paved the way for tar sands development before moving on to discuss the impacts of modern day tar sands extraction and the applicability of the genocide concept.

Sociology and human rights: confrontations, evasions and new engagements

Sociologists have struggled to negotiate their relationship to human rights, yet human rights are now increasingly the focus of innovative sociological analysis. This opening contribution to ‘Sociology and Human Rights: New Engagements’ analyses how the relationship between sociology and human rights could be better conceptualised and taken forward in the future. The historical development of the sociology of human rights is first examined, with emphasis on the uneasy distancing of sociology from universal rights claims from its inception, and on radical repudiations influenced by Marx. We discuss how in the post-war period T.H. Marshalls work generated analysis of citizenship rights, but only in the past two decades has the sociology of human rights been developed by figures such as Bryan Turner, Lydia Morris and Anthony Woodiwiss. We then introduce the individual contributions to the volume, and explain how they are grouped. We suggest the need to deepen existing analyses of what sociology can offer to the broad field of human rights scholarship, but also, more unusually, that sociologists need to focus more on what human rights related research can bring to sociology, to renew it as a discipline. Subsequent sections take this forward by examining a series of themes including: the relationship between the individual and the social; the need to address inequality; the challenge of social engagement and activism; and the development of interdisciplinarity. We note how authors in the volume contribute to each of these. Finally we conclude by summarising our proposals for future directions in research.

Australian ‘Aboriginal’ Reconciliation: The Latest Phase in the Colonial Project

In the 1990s several countries that had been divided by episodes of mass violence or gross human rights violations instigated projects of national ‘reconciliation’. Reconciliation initiatives sought to provide an alternative to traditional state diplomacy and realpolitik by focusing on restoring and rebuilding relationships in novel and context sensitive ways that promoted state legitimacy, forgiveness and social stability. In 1991 the Australian parliament unanimously passed the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation Act, which heralded the start of a process of reconciliation between the indigenous peoples and wider society. The Preamble to the Act founded the need for a reconciliation process on the injustice of colonial dispossession and on the continuing dispersal of indigenous people from their traditional lands. Yet, as this paper will show, the notion of ‘justice’ was deemed inappropriate from the start, and the resulting process was framed in a nation building discourse that placed a definite ceil...

When sorry isn’t good enough: Official remembrance and reconciliation in Australia

When compared with other reconciliation processes, Australian reconciliation and its acts of official remembrance have received relatively little academic attention, and yet the case raises many important questions for settler societies struggling to come to terms with past misdeeds and the burden of the past in the present. This article places Australian reconciliation in the political context of the campaign for a treaty between Indigenous peoples and the settler state that emerged in the 1980s, the institutionalization of common law Indigenous land rights during the 1990s, and the current ‘intervention’ in the Northern Territory. The nature and trajectory of these political events are at odds with two highly lauded official acts of remembrance made under the rubric of reconciliation, Paul Keating’s Redfern Park speech in 1992, and Kevin Rudd’s formal state apology in 2008. The article argues that such settler state acts of official remembrance and acknowledgement of past injustices, while far from devoid of value, are considerably diminished by the positively colonial, and inherently unjust, contemporary political context in which they were made.

Marx, Lemkin and the genocide–ecocide nexus

A number of studies have shown that ecocide can be a method of genocide if, for example, environmental destruction results in conditions of life that fundamentally threaten a social groups cultural and/or physical existence.1 With the ever-increasing rise of such cases of ecological destruction brought on by the extractive industries, or indirectly induced by anthropogenic climate change, we argue that the field of genocide studies should draw from the rich scholarly tradition of political ecology and environmental sociology. Indeed, it is the contention of the authors that, given the looming threat of runaway climate change in the twenty-first century, the advent of the geological phase classified by geologists and earth scientists as anthropocene2 and the attendant rapid extinction of species, destruction of habitats, ecological collapse and the self-evident dependency of the human race on our biosphere, ecocide (both ‘natural’ and ‘manmade’) will become a primary driver of genocide. It is therefore incumbent upon genocide scholars to attempt a paradigm shift in the greatest traditions of science3 and to cohere a synthesis of the sociology of genocide and environmental sociology into a theoretical apparatus that can illuminate the links between, and uncover the drivers of, ecocide and genocidal social death.4 Following a discussion of both the conceptual and legal nexus between ecocide and genocide, we further contend that capitalist ‘land grabs’ carried out by extractive industries, industrial farms and the like are, through the annexation of indigenous land and the associated ‘externalities’, the principal vectors of ecologically induced genocide when the genos in question is an indigenous people.

Australia: a continuing genocide?

Debates about genocide in Australia have for the most part focussed on past frontier killings and child removal practices. This article, however, focuses on contemporary culturally destructive policies, and the colonial structures that produce them, through the analytical lens of the concept of genocide. The article begins with a discussion of the meaning of cultural genocide, locating the idea firmly in Lemkins work before moving on to engage with the debates around Lemkins distinction between genocide and cultural ‘diffusion.’ In contrast to those scholars who prefer the word ‘ethnocide,’ the underlying conceptual contention is that the term ‘cultural genocide’ simply describes a key method of genocide and should be viewed, without the need for qualification, as genocide. While direct physical killing and genocidal child removal practices may have ceased in Australia, some indigenous activists persuasively contend that genocide is a continuing process in an Australia that has failed to decolonise. Concurring with these views the article argues that the contemporary expression of continuing genocidal relations in Australia can be seen principally, and perversely, in the colonial states official reconciliation process, native title land rights regime and the recent interventionist ‘solutions’ to indigenous ‘problems’ in the Northern Territory.

Genocide and settler colonialism: can a Lemkin-inspired genocide perspective aid our understanding of the Palestinian situation?

This article examines the situation of the Palestinians through the sociological lens of the concept of genocide. Following a recent trend in genocide studies, the article engages with the original theorising of Raphael Lemkin – who coined the term ‘genocide’. These studies have highlighted the association Lemkin made between genocide and colonialism and have applied the genocide concept to settler colonial societies such as Australia. It argues that if Israel is conceivably a settler colonial project then by implication its relationship with the Palestinian people can be analysed through the genocide lens. Whilst some academics and journalists are now tentatively applying terms such as ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ‘genocide’ to describe the events surrounding the creation of the Israeli state, the historical and continuing, cultural and physical, destructive social and political relations involved in the Israel/Palestine conflict is a somewhat neglected potential case study in the field of genocide studies. The objective of this article is to highlight the potential for a Lemkin inspired sociology of genocide in analysing aspects of the Israel/Palestine conflict, through a consideration of the link he made between genocide and colonialism and some of his key ‘techniques of genocide’ as specified in the seminal text Axis Rule in Occupied Europe.

Rape Characterised as Genocide

This article identifies and analyses some of the theoretical implications of rape being subsumed within the international crime of genocide and argues that such an analysis is essential for creating a clearer framework to address rape. Genocide is defined as a violation committed against particular groups. In contrast, rape is conceptualised as a violation of an individual’s sexual autonomy. As such, can rape understood as a violation of an individual’s sexual autonomy be compatible with rape being subsumed within the category of a group violation such as genocide? A key conclusion of this article is that if conceptual space can be created within the crime of genocide to include both the individual and the group, then rape (when categorised as genocide) can operate both as a violation against the group and as a violation against the individual. However, the space allotted to each of the individual and the group can never be equal; the group will always need to occupy the majority of the space, because the central motivation for viewing genocide as a crime is the survival of human groups. When rape is subsumed within genocide, which is conceived, placed and treated as a crime against enumerated groups, its dynamic changes. Rape is no longer simply a violation of an individual. Rape becomes part of a notion developed to protect the group.O presente artigo identifica e analisa algumas das implicacoes teoricas ao tifipicar o estupro como crime internacional de genocidio, bem como sustenta que tal analise seja essencial para a criacao de marcos mais claros para tratar da questao do estupro. Genocidio e definido como violacao perpetrada contra grupos especificos. Em contrapartida, o estupro e conceitualizado como um crime contra a autonomia sexual de um individuo. Sendo assim, a definicao do estupro como uma violacao a liberdade sexual individual seria incompativel com a definicao deste como uma violacao contra todo um grupo, a semelhanca do genocidio? A principal conclusao a que se chega neste artigo e que, se for possivel estabelecer uma concepcao abrangente de genocidio - capaz de englobar tanto a esfera individual, quanto coletiva - o estupro (quando tipificado como genocidio) pode ser compreendido como violacao cometida tanto contra o individuo, quanto contra o grupo. Entretanto, estas duas esferas - individual e coletiva - nunca poderao ocupar o mesmo patamar, uma vez que a protecao de grupos humanos constitui a propria fundamentacao da criminalizacao do genocidio. Ao relacionar o estupro a ideia de genocidio, concebido, situado e tratado como crime contra inumeros grupos, seu cerne muda. Neste sentido, estupro nao podera mais ser compreendido como simples violacao a um individuo - antes, torna-se parte de uma concepcao desenvolvida para a protecao do grupo.Este articulo identifica y analiza algunas de las implicancias teoricas de subsumir el delito de violacion en el crimen de genocidio y sostiene que este analisis es esencial para la creacion de un marco mas claro a fin de hacer frente a tal delito. El genocidio se define como una violacion cometida en contra de determinados grupos. En cambio, el delito de violacion es concebido como un atentado contra la autonomia sexual de una persona. Como tal, ?puede el delito de violacion, entendido como un ataque a la autonomia sexual de un individuo, ser compatible con el delito de violacion subsumido dentro de la categoria de violaciones de derechos que afectan a un grupo como el genocidio? Una conclusion clave de este articulo es que si, dentro del espacio conceptual puede considerarse al delito de genocidio incluyendo tanto al individuo como al grupo, entonces, el delito de violacion (tipificado como genocidio), puede funcionar tanto como una violacion contra el grupo y como una contra el individuo. Sin embargo, el espacio asignado al individuo y al grupo nunca puede ser igual. El grupo siempre necesita ocupar la mayoria del espacio ya que la motivacion central para considerar al genocidio como un crimen es la supervivencia de los grupos humanos. Cuando el delito de violacion es subsumido en el de genocidio, el cual esta concebido como un crimen contra determinados grupos, su dinamica cambia. El delito de violacion ya no es simplemente la afectacion a una persona sino que deviene como parte de un concepto desarrollado para proteger al grupo.