About the project
The project developed a model for the study of collaboration through an examination of the term over and above the context of WWII. Three different examples of collaboration in the 20th century were examined and efforts made to place them within the framework of genocide. The project focused on the groups that collaborated rather than the groups that sought collaboration, specifically the Kurds in Turkey, Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians in the Baltic area and the Twa in Rwanda. With the help of an interdisciplinary approach, the project contested the validity of the linear explanation of conflict that has been usual in comparative studies of genocide and that depends on the existence of dichotomous systems. In its conclusion, the project relates the collective explanation for participation in the crime to structural discrimination experienced by minority groups. It is asserted that despite the vagueness of the term “collaboration”, it is useful with regard to a bottom-up approach to the study of genocide. The recently developed doctrine of Joint Criminal Enterprise forms a legal basis for further research into the phenomenon of collaboration.
Results
The project was concluded in partnership with Uğur Ümit Üngör (University of Utrecht, the Netherlands) and resulted in an academic article, which was published in Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the end of 2011. The project was presented at a workshop during the IXth biennial conference of the International Association of Genocide Scholars in Buenos Aires, 19–22 July 2011.