Discourses of Mass Violence in Comparative Perspective
Recent & Upcoming
fall 2024 – spring 2025
lecture series
Resistance and Persecution of Young People in Totalitarian Systems
(Widerstand und Verfolgung junger Menschen in totalitären Systemen)
organized by Dominik Markl, featuring (among others) Timothy Williams & Juliane Prade-Weiss
Innsbruck University, 8 October 2024 – 28 January 2025, 18:30-20:00 CET
winter 2024/25
project start
Research Network
The Persistence of Evil:
Analyzing Long-Term Transmissions of Justifications
for Mass Violence
10 October 2024
Workshop @LMU Munich
Feeling Responsible:
Affective Polarization and the Sense of Implication in Academic Debates on Israel/Palestine
co-orgainzed by Dominik Markl, Juliane Prade-Weiss, and Timothy Williams
blog post
Complicity, Past and Present:
Portrayals of Involvement in Mass Violence and Terror
in Documentary Fiction
@TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research
Forum Transregionale Studien (Berlin) & Max Weber Stiftung – Deutsche Geisteswissenschaftliche Institute im Ausland (Bonn)
14 June 2024
Inaugural lecture
Dominik Markl: WATCH "Historiography as a Medium of Survival: From the Hebrew Bible to Leokadia Justman"
(Geschichtsschreibung als Überlebensmedium: Von der Hebräischen Bibel zu Leokadia Justman)
University of Innsbruck, Kaiser-Leopold-Saal, Karl-Rahner-Platz 3
12 June 2024
Inaugural lecture
Juliane Prade-Weiss: "On Participation: Anatomy of a Promise" (Zur Partizipation: Anatomie eines Versprechens)
LMU Munich, Geschwister-Scholl-Pl. 1, A 125
Leokadia Justman's Survival Story: Editon – Analysis – Public Awareness
Project Start 07 March 2024
Innsbruck University,
Principle Investigator: Dominik Markl
in cooperation with Juliane Prade-Weiss
WATCH the 2023–24 lecture series Empire and Violence
Guest Lecture Ariel Glucklich (Georgetown U),
"Anderl von Rinn: Applying System Theory to a Case of Blood Libel",
University of Innsbruck, 23 June 2023
We started discussing the role of blood libels in the context of discourses of mass violence, and we look forward to continuing this conversation with (from left to right) Jennifer Hansen-Glucklich (U of Mary Washington),
Ariel Glucklich (Georgetown U), and Alison Frank Johnson (Harvard U).
Roundtable "Russia - Ukraine. War Over Memory"
at the interdisciplinary conference The Cultural Memory of Mass Violence: Re-Mediation and Pre-Mediation
LMU Munich / zoom, 03 November 2022
conference report in German | in English
Dominik Markl, Astrid Erll, Christoph Thonfeld, Juliane Prade-Weiss, Martin Schulze Wessel, Stephanie Bird
Martin Schulze Wessel (LMU Munich), Astrid Erll (Goethe University Frankfurt), Stephanie Bird (University College London), and Christoph Thonfeld (Dachau Memorial Site) joined us for a discussion of the role of cultural memory in Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
2022 marks the 30th anniversary of a canonical text of memory studies, Jan Assmann’s Das kulturelle Gedächtnis (1992), translated as Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination (2011). And since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, politics and the public have turned to paying attention to the role of cultural memory in the political imagination as the Russian regime has weaponized the Russian cultural memory of the Soviet fight against National Socialism to justify its war of aggression against Ukraine.
Roundtable "Beyond the Law:
Justifications of Mass Violence in Social and Scholarly Discourses"
at the 9th Annual Conference of the Historical Dialogues, Justice & Memory Network:
Beyond Nuremberg: The Global Search for Accountability,
NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies Amsterdam, 10 June 2022
Nanci Adler, A. Dirk Moses, Dominik Markl, Juliane Prade-Weiss, Vladimir Petrovic, Christian Gerlach
Nanci Adler (NIOD/University of Amsterdam), Christian Gerlach (University of Bern), and Dirk Moses (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) joined us for an engaging discussion of justifications of mass violence which transcend and evade the legal sphere.
With the Russian-Ukrainian 2022 war, the role of justifications for warfare and mass violence given by perpetrators and accomplices has drawn public and scholarly attention. Against this backdrop, the discussion re-visited the vocabulary and heuristics of assertions of rightfulness, excuses, neutralizations such as denial, and rationalizations in 20th century conflicts in view of their lasting impact on current memory politics and conflicts.
Interview "Understanding what makes perpetrators tick"
Justifications of mass violence in the Russian war against Ukraine
April 11, 2022, Bucha, Ukraine © IMAGO/ZUMA Wire
Juliane Prade-Weiss in interview with LMU Munich English ‖ German
Workshop Discoursive Constructions of Enmity: Populisms, Conspiracy, Hate
LMU Munich, 11 February 2022, organized by Juliane Prade-Weiss, Dominik Markl & Vladimir Petrovic
conference report at HSozKult
Riccardo Nicolosi (LMU Munich), Vladimir Putins Ukraine-Rhetorik
Ruth Wodak (Wien),
„Rothschild, Soros, Silberstein" – das Revival von antisemitischen Weltverschwörungstheorien
Jonathan Leader Maynard (King's College London),
Rethinking Extremism in Comparative Perspective: Narrative, Enmity and Political War
Juliane Prade-Weiss (LMU Munich), Wut, Schamlosigkeit, Bühne. Feindschaft aufführen
