Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2005
Abstract
In this article, I ask: What is the relationship between law and morality in response to mass violence and suffering abroad? How does law shape and determine our moral response to mass death and suffering? We repose in the law itself a desire to define the moral and the ethical parameters of legal-political action. Thus, when faced with mass violence and suffering abroad, law functions as a proxy for morality. The legal prohibition under the Genocide Convention defines morality, or cabins the variety of moral responses into a single and universally applicable ethical-legal norm of response to genocide. The moral response to atrocity is linked to fears and sentiments concerning love and death, community and exclusion. A mass atrocity in another country, motivated by the attempt of a people to cleanse itself of the other within, evokes within us a unique sense of horror, not only because it recalls the Holocaust, but also because it touches on the ambivalence of identity, nationality and belonging. This article offers an analysis of these fraught and ambivalent feelings evoked by instances of genocide, and offers a critique of the rhetoric and genealogy of the word itself and its discursive link to deep-seated apprehensions surrounding the erotics of life, death, identity, and the law.
Recommended Citation
Tawia Baidoe Ansah,
Genocide and the Eroticization of Death: Law, Violence, and Moral Purity
, 14 S. Cal. Interdisc. L.J. 181
(2005).
Available at: https://ecollections.law.fiu.edu/faculty_publications/100
Included in
International Law Commons, Law and Society Commons, Legal Ethics and Professional Responsibility Commons
