Lori Garcia-Alix and Robert K. Hitchcock,  ‘A Report from the Field: The Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples—Implementation and Implications’, Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal 4, 1 (2014).

Over nearly two-and-a-half decades, indigenous peoples and their supporters expended enormous energy on developing a declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples that both protects and promotes their individual and collective rights. The debates surrounding the declaration focused on issues ranging from self- determination to the rights of indigenous peoples to practice their cultures and to participate in decision making. The declaration establishes the requirement for fair and adequate compensation for violations of rights and directly addresses the issues of ethnocide and genocide. The United Nations General Assembly passed the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples on 13 September 2007, with 143 votes in favor, four votes against, and eleven abstentions. Notably, the votes against were cast by Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States. Implementation of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples will be a complex process, especially given that many indigenous communities today are located in places where states, private companies, and individuals are competing for resources, sometimes with deadly results.

Brendan Kane, ‘Introduction: Human Rights and the History of Violence in the Early British Empire’, History 99, 336 (2014).

Specialists on early modern violence and on human rights history have much to gain through collaboration, or at least mutual awareness. Human rights historians are increasingly drawing on studies of early modern violence. However, as contended here, early modernists tend to approach the subject framed by their own geographical areas of interest. As such, we lack an overarching sense of violence and its meanings across the Tudor and Stuart realms and colonies, something that would be of great utility in understanding how developments in the early modern period relate to later ones. In the interests of promoting such broader investigation and comparison, the present essay briefly surveys important aspects of the approach to violence in the English, Irish and Atlantic historiographies, and in the literatures of massacre and of human rights. In doing so, it sets the essays included in this special edition in their historiographical contexts and highlights crucial interventions. It concludes with thoughts not only on how a more comprehensive understanding of violence in the early British empire might be of value to human rights historians, but how the new meta-narrative of human rights history might spur greater comparative work amongst early modernists.

Ben Kiernan, ‘Is “Genocide” an Anachronistic Concept for the Study of Early Modern Mass Killing?’, History 99, 336 (2014).

Is it anachronistic to apply the term ‘genocide’, coined in 1943, to ancient or early modern mass killings, even to those that might fit the mid-twentieth- century definition? Historians must analyse actions and events of the pre-modern era in the context of cultural stipulations discussed at the time, and of knowledge paradigms then available. To assess people’s actions by standards understood in that era, it is important to determine whether a pre-modern understanding of the concept of genocide existed. Long before that term, earlier terms such as ‘general massacre’ conveyed similar meanings, along with four much older, related terms – holocaust, extermination, crimes against humanity, and war crimes – which also conveyed pre-modern concepts of the crimes involved. This essay traces the historical lineage and usage of those terms in European and transnational contexts, and argues that conceptions of genocide long pre-dated the coining of the term. Genocide did occur in early modern times, though it was neither normal practice nor universally permitted and often provoked dissent. The essay concludes that a grasp of the concept and its moral implications long preceded both our word for it and its 1950 legal codification as an international crime. The essay then critiques common misunderstandings of that legal definition: that it refers to the crime’s effect rather than the perpetrator’s intent; that it is too broad for historians to use; that only a state can commit genocide; that it must involve the participation of an entire ethnic group; and that it must be complete, not partial.

According to Bolivia’s foreign minister, David Choquehuanca, the horological initiative is intended to help Bolivians rediscover their indigenous roots.

“We’re in the south and, as we’re trying to recover our identity, the Bolivian government is also recovering its sarawi, which means ‘way’ in Aymara,” he said. “In keeping with our sarawi – or Nan, in Quechua – our clocks should turn to the left.”

Sam Jones and Sara Shahriari for The Guardian.

Sug-In Kweon, ‘Japanese Female Settlers in Colonial Korea: Between the “Benefits” and ‘Constraints’ of Colonial Society’, Social Science Japan Journal (First published online: June 19, 2014).

This paper explores the gendered configurations and practices within the Japanese settler community in colonial Korea. More specifically, it focuses on the experiences of urban middle-class Japanese women. Existing data show that Japanese settler women, as citizens of the metropole, reaped benefits in arenas such as lifestyle, education, occupation, and family life. Their status as women, however, simultaneously subjected them to strict patriarchal and conservative standards. While privileged as colonists, they were publicly marginalized and silenced by the peculiar dynamics created by colonialism and modernity. Based on in-depth interviews and personal memoirs, as well as official archives and statistics, this research examines the forms of modernity that Japanese women experienced in colonial Korea, highlighting both the benefits and constraints that the colonial context offered to the women. These insights will complicate the existing historiography of Japanese colonialism in Korea by unveiling the history of a social group that has rarely been discussed by scholars.

Ivan Sablin, ‘Rearrangement of Indigenous Spaces: Sovietization of the Chauchus and Ankalyns, 1931–1945’, Interventions 16, 4 (2014).

This essay addresses the period when Chukotka, a distant region in the Northeast of the USSR, was incorporated into the state. This was done primarily by rearrangement of indigenous people’s spaces. The establishment of new centres of domination and collectivization was accompanied by a major shift in the official attitude towards the indigenous population of the region, and by the depreciation of their role in the exploitation of natural resources. The reconfiguration of spaces was carried out by means of repressive measures and produced major grievances and resistance among the indigenous population. The Second World War further aggravated the situation. The incorporation of Chukotka into the Soviet state resulted in the disruption of indigenous economies and a major decline in population. The essay relies on the methodology of colonial and postcolonial studies, employing and developing the notion of space reorganization used by Gray, Crush, Neumann and other authors, and Bhabha’s concept of ‘third space’.

Alexander Maxwell & Evan Roberts, ‘The Whangaroa Incident, 16 July 1824 A European–Māori Encounter and Its Many Incarnations’, Journal of Pacific History 49, 1 (2014).

This paper examines an incident in 1824 in which the Ngāti Pou of Whangaroa Harbour (New Zealand) boarded a European ship, holding its crew and three missionaries captive for two hours. During the 19th century the incident was retold approximately 30 times in Europe and America. This paper describes the original incident from primary sources and then discusses how the various incarnations of the story enabled different authors to draw diverse moral lessons. The changing narrative provides a window into various European attitudes towards the Indigenous peoples of New Zealand.

Lauren Benton and Kathryn Walker, ‘Law for the Empire: The Common Law in Colonial America and the Problem of Legal Diversity’, Chicago-Kent Law Review 89, 3 (2014).

no abstract

Stephen Jackson, ‘”In Accord with British Traditions”: The Rise of Compulsory Religious Education in Ontario, Canada, and Victoria, Australia, 1945–50’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History (Published online: 12 Jun 2014).

This article examines the establishment of legally mandated Protestant training in the Australian state of Victoria and the Canadian province of Ontario. Fearing moral decay at home and a menacing world environment seemingly unfavourable to the ‘British way of life’ in the 1940s, educators asserted that religion, and specifically Protestant Christianity, was the only means by which the moral core of their British democracy could be preserved. The teaching of religious instruction was highly controversial in both places. Supporters of the new curriculum believed the religious courses would strengthen the British identity and moral backbone of the Canadian and Australian nations, while opponents argued that imposing religion in the classroom was antithetical to British ideals of freedom and toleration. Educators struggled to reconcile these divergent views on how religion fitted into a wider British identity, and the resulting tension exposed the points of ethnic and cultural fracture that undermined the credibility of Britishness after 1950. The very efforts to impose a unifying sense of Britishness were so controversial and problematic that they ultimately required an alternative understanding of what it meant to be a citizen of Ontario or Victoria.

Jennifer Balint, Julie Evans, and Nesam McMillan, ‘Rethinking Transitional Justice, Redressing Indigenous Harm: A New Conceptual Approach’, International Journal of Transitional Justice (First published online: April 22, 2014).

Transitional justice has become the dominant international framework for redressing mass harm. To date, however, transitional justice has not adequately accounted for past colonial harms and their ongoing effects. How to confront and redress structural harm has been beyond the purview of its framework. Taking ongoing historical and structural harms against indigenous peoples in Australia as a reference point, we draw on the insights of settler colonial theory to propose a new justice model for transitional justice. We argue that a commitment to structural justice will enhance the ability of transitional justice to recognize and address structural injustice in settler colonial and other contexts. By elaborating the concept of structural justice with reference to postcolonial and settler colonial theory, this article sets out to support the development of a more robust theory of transitional justice.