Gender Studies Associate Professor Elissa Helms was invited to give a talk on October 6 at the University of Bern, Switzerland as part of the lecture series organized by the Department of Anthropology and Cultural Studies on “The Question of Genocide.” The series, put together in response to student and faculty concerns about genocide being committed by Israel in Gaza, asked speakers to reflect on the concept of genocide through their expertise in various contexts.
Based on her book, Innocence and Victimhood (University of Wisconsin Press, 2013), Professor Helms spoke about the 1992-95 Bosnian war through the lens of gender, explaining the gendered logic of the judgement by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia that genocide was committed in Srebrenica by commanders of the Bosnian Serb Army who specifically targeted men for killing while forcing the rest of the population out. She then discussed other gendered aspects of the Bosnian war that have been argued but not judged by a court to be genocide but “only” war crimes and crimes against humanity, such as mass rapes of Bosnian Muslim women and the detention, torture, and killing of civilians as part of ethnic cleansing campaigns. From its grounding in ethnographic research, the talk emphasized the meaning for survivors and the affected communities of legal judgements and the frequent disconnects between the difficulties of prosecuting genocide and survivors’ search for justice in the face of mass atrocities.