"Darfur and the Crime of Genocide": A presentation by John Hagan March 26, 2009

Social Sciences Building, room 1141 (on the eleventh floor).

This talk addresses the research Professor Hagan and his collaborators have based on statistical analyses of the Atrocities Documentation Survey (ADS), a large scale victimization survey initiated by the U.S. State Department and conducted in the refugee camps of Chad. The work unequivocally brings the topic of genocide to criminology while simultaneously delivering a sociologically based criminology to the students of genocide. The work also strengthens previous attempts to consider the state and its agents as potential criminal offenders. Not new to genocide researchers, this notion has not at all been taken seriously by a state-centered criminology that thoroughly envisions the state as a bulwark against crime, but not as a perpetrator itself. The authors dissect the legal definition of genocide, and they use the ADS to prove that the criteria of genocide are fulfilled in the case of Darfur. Finally, Hagan and collaborators show how criminological thought can be enriched by the incorporation of a critical collective framing approach to conceptualize perpetrators and their genocidal intent at micro- and macro-analytical levels.

John Hagan is John D. MacArthur Professor of Sociology and Law at Northwestern University and Co-Director of the Center on Law and Globalization at the American Bar Foundation. He will receive The Stockholm Prize in Criminology on June 23, 2009, in Stockholm for his work on genocide in Darfur and the Balkans. He received the C. Wright Mills Award for Mean Streets: Youth Crime and Homelessness (with Bill McCarthy, 1997) and a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Albert J. Reiss Award for Northern Passage: American Vietnam War Resisters in Canada (2001). He is author most recently of Justice in the Balkans (2003) and of Darfur and the Crime of Genocide (with Wenona Rymond-Richmond, 2009).

Official Website: http://www.ias.umn.edu/collabs08-09/TransitionalJustice.php