This paper will address some of the most important patterns in intergroup violence in the title's spatiotemporal 'Raum'. It will focus in particular on the ethno-religious element of such violence, against the backdrop of the modernisation of Europe and adjacent regions. The narrative broadly follows the decline and fall of the old multinational empires, the rise of new nation-states, and then the rise of new empires in Soviet and especially Nazi form. Eschewing a directly comparative approach between, for instance, the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust, it tries to place those events and others in a broader framework in which geopolitics, economics and the role of 'great powers' is to the fore.

Donald Bloxham is Richard Pares Professor of European history at the University of Edinburgh. He is author of The Final Solution: a Genocide (Oxford University Press, 2009); Genocide, The World Wars, and the Unweaving of Europe (Vallentine, Mitchell, 2007), the Raphael Lemkin-prizewinning The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, nationalism, and the destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (OUP, 2005) and Genocide on Trial (OUP, 2001). He is co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies (OUP, 2010) and Political Violence in Twentieth Century Europe (Cambridge UP, 2011). He is in the final stages of completing a manuscript on the role of moral thought in historianship.

Cost : free and open to the public

http://www.international.ucla.edu/cnes

Sponsor(s): Center for Near Eastern Studies, Department of History, Richard Hovannisian Endowed Chair in Modern Armenian History at UCLA