Cultural Genocide

Jeffrey Bachman is Senior Lecturer in Human Rights at American University’s School of International Service in Washington, DC. He is the author of The United States and Genocide: (Re)Defining the Relationship. He is currently working on a new book, The Politics of Genocide: From the Genocide Convention to the Responsibility to Protect, contracted by Rutgers University Press for its Genocide, Political Violence, Human Rights series.

"Jeffrey Bachman and his colleagues are to be commended for this important and significant addition to our growing realization of the importance of cultural genocide in keeping with Raphael Lemkin’s own understanding that it cannot be divorced from physical annihilation or extermination. These essays encompass such diverse geographies as the United States, Brazil. Australia, West Papua, Iraq, Palestine, Canada, but further broaden our framework to include law, both nation-state and international, thus providing readers with a resource from which to carry the larger question of "what constitutes genocide" forward in this 21st century. The time has now come to revisit the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and secure an amendment to now include cultural genocide as well. This text will go a long way towards making that happen." - Steven Leonard Jacobs Professor of Religious Studies and Emeritus Aaron Aronov Endowed Chair of Judaic Studies, The University of Alabama, USA.

• Introduction: Bringing Cultural Genocide into the Mainstream Part I: Cultural Genocide in International Law 1. Raphaël Lemkin: Culture and Cultural Genocide 2. An Historical Perspective: The Exclusion of Cultural Genocide from the Genocide Convention 3. A Modern Perspective: The Current Status of Cultural Genocide Under International Law Part II: Global Manifestations of Cultural Genocide Section One: Settler Colonialism, Forced Assimilation, and Indigenous Genocide 4. Destroying Indigenous Cultures in the United States 5. Genocide and Settler Colonialism: How a Lemkinian Concept of Genocide Informs Our Understanding of the Ongoing Situation of the Guar ani Kaiowá in Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil 6. A Political Economy of Genocide in Australia: The Architecture of Dispossession Then and Now 7. Colonialism and Cold Genocide: The Case of West Papua Section Two: Cultural Destruction 8. Heritage Wars: A Cultural Genocide in Iraq 9. A Century of Cultural Genocide in Palestine 10. The Baha’i Community of Iran: Cultural Genocide and Resilience Section Three: Justice and Restitution 11. Ontological Redress: The Natural and the Material in Transformative Justice for ‘Cultural’ Genocide