What's in a Name?

The Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights at Claremont McKenna College is a pretty lengthy title. Generally, as most of you know, it is referred to as, simply, "The Holocaust Center." With both its founding director and current director as scholars of the Holocaust and with a library that is around 85% Holocaust-centric, it seems reasonable that the Holocaust focus of the Center's mission would take "center" stage. But perhaps this should be readdressed.

I spent the past two weeks at the International Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies in Toronto, Canada, learning about genocide from a comparative and interdisciplinary standpoint with twenty-five other students from around the world. In the sixty-five hours of classroom time, we looked into the Armenian Genocide, the Nazi Holocaust, the Cambodian Genocide, Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia, and Darfur. We spent time talking genocide and philosophy, international intervention, and preventing genocide. The professors brought in were all top of their field and the students with whom I studied were Ph.D. candidates, museum archivists, play directors, and NGO volunteers. As the youngest and one of two undergraduate students attending, I found myself slightly intimidated but more inspired by my peers in the program.

The main thing I took away from this program, however, was the realization of how important comparing genocides is for future genocide prevention. The trick, of course, is learning to do that while honoring the uniqueness of each victim groups' experience. We study genocide to honor these victims and to understand human experience, but also to understand human capability and hopefully learn to prevent the full capability of destruction from emerging in the form of genocide.

There's a reason our Center has such a long title. Inspired by the horrors of the Holocaust, the founders of this Center sought to create an institution that would address them while also opening up scholarship into other genocides and human rights violations. Acronyms can be complicated and over-used, but as all three elements of this Center's name are important to its mission, perhaps we should consider CSHGHR when referring to it, so as not to belittle pieces of the mission. Or, taking human rights in the positive sense, maybe we should, as Prof. Faggen suggests, emphasize the Human Rights aspect. Increasing human rights is, after all, the goal. Isn't it?

Click here to learn about the International Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies (or IIGHRS)