Text

theses

Raphael Lemkin coined the word genocide and led a movement in the United Nations to outlaw the crime in the 1940s. During the 1920s and 1930s, Lemkin worked to establish an international criminal court at the League of Nations, and to criminalize state terror and the repression of national minorities. After the Second World War, Lemkin worked to enshrine the United Nations Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which is now a cornerstone of international humanitarian law. For several decades after the 1940s, however, Lemkin’s accomplishments were ignored, partly because he left nearly 20,000 pages of writings on genocide unpublished, and partly because, in the context of the Cold War, global politics did not value humanitarian law. With the outbreak of genocide in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the 1990s, the Genocide Convention became relevant to world affairs and Lemkin studies enjoyed a renaissance. Yet, until 2007, there were only two monographs written about Lemkin, and one was authored by a Holocaust denier. This dissertation is the first intellectual biography and political history of Lemkin. The argument begins by examining Lemkin’s Polish writings in the 1920s and 30s, and demonstrates that Polish legal, social, and political theory influenced Lemkin’s work on genocide in the 1940s and 1950s. Secondly, the thesis also presents the first scholarly analysis of Lemkin’s magnum opus, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, placing the book in the context of contemporary theorists and into the historiography of Holocaust and genocide studies. The third part of the dissertation uses Lemkin’s nearly 20,000-page archive to show his influence at the Nuremberg trials. Lemkin’s memoirs and papers are used to present a new account of the diplomatic history of the UN Genocide Convention drafting processes, arguing that the US, UK, France, South Africa, Belgium, and Canada, opposed the convention but were out-maneuvered politically by a coalition of smaller states and former colonies, and global social movement Lemkin inspired. The final chapter then uses Lemkin’s manuscripts to elucidate his social and political theory of genocide that he worked on while teaching at Yale and Rutgers universities, but died before he could publish.

ETD_5832

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

Includes vita

by Douglas Irvin-Erickson

doi:10.7282/T3VH5QFF

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.