In this article, I argue that US policy during the Vietnam war, which led to the death of roughly a million Vietnamese civilians and the destruction of much of the South Vietnamese countryside, bears many of the features of a genocide. I assess the Vietnamese case in the context of changing scholarly and legal understandings of genocide, which have come to emphasize the outcomes and evolution of genocidal policy rather than the presence of some kind of master-plan at the outset. In doing so, I focus on the Vietnamese case as one carried out by a geographically distant power employing massive amounts of violence in a sovereign nation. This approach aligns well with current scholarly perspectives because it emphasizes the distinction between high-level decisions-mostly made in Washington, DC-and lower-level decisions made in Saigon and the Vietnamese countryside. In this context, my analysis focuses on policies and approaches such as body count, free-fire zones, the infamous Mere Gook Rule, and, more generally, the unprecedentedly indiscriminate use of everything from bullets and bombs to napalm and defoliants. It underscores that these lower-level policies and practices have a great deal in common with the extermination-based dynamics observed by scholars of comparative genocide in other cases.
Beyond findings in psychiatry and psychology, in the last two decades, the novel field of neuroscience has expanded our purview of brain injury, pain, and trauma-basically, non-lethal forms of violence. Peeking into the brain using state-of-the-art neuroimaging enables us to discern anomalies such as brain lesions, cysts, enlarged sulci, and regions of hypoperfusion (reduced blood flow), among other things, thereby allowing us to infer connections between brain anomalies and behavior. These findings, this paper posits, are highly relevant to genocide scholarship. Scholars have suggested that "mental harm" in Article II(b) of the Genocide Convention be extended to include neuroscientific findings; the most common in the literature being Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), and Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE). Including these in determining short- and long-term, visible and non-visible effects of exposure to mass atrocity and genocide would allow for a more accurate assessment of non-lethal violence on survivors and their families. Moreover, sufferers would be in a stronger position to employ restorative justice comprising legal, medical, and pecuniary means. Despite the excitement over these revelations, a question to ponder are the challenges individuals and institutions would face before they incorporate non-lethal violence derived from neuroscientific findings into genocide scholarship. This paper explores practical, technical, ideological, and legal arguments: (1) neurohype, (2) limitations of neuroimaging, (3) ideological battles, (4) gatekeeping the definition of genocide.
With growing discussion on the state of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) crisis, Tanya Tagaq's breathtaking debut novel Split Tooth tackles the cultural implications of the crisis on Indigenous communities with striking literary prowess. Approaching this text from the perspective of contemporary scholarship on settler-colonial genocide, this article examines the presentation of Indigenous motherhood in the text, drawing connections to ethnographic studies on motherhood in the context of genocide and reproductive exploitation of Indigenous Canadian women. I argue that Tagaq's narrative is indicative of the scrutiny that Indigenous women face when they become mothers under this settler-colonial system through a foregrounding of intergenerational trauma and non-Western conceptualizations of "good motherhood." Moreover, I analyze the figurative language Tagaq uses to communicate her experience, establishing that the narrative itself acts as a form of resistance through the decentering of Eurocentric constructions of idealized motherhood and nurturance.
