Shaping the conscience of mankind. The politics of memory and the commemoration of atrocity crimes at the United Nations

Abstract

In recent decades, an informal hierarchy of gravity appears to have emerged between the different categories of atrocity crime, with genocide now widely perceived as the “crime of crimes”. While this view may seem intuitively appealing, it has been increasingly been challenged on the grounds that it may diminish the perceived gravity of war crimes and crimes against humanity. That said, there is at present a lack of empirical evidence demonstrating that such a hierarchy shapes international political discourse. This project addresses this gap by exploring the representation of atrocity crimes in the commemoration practices of the United Nations. Situated within the conceptual framework of “the politics of memory”, I adopted a mixed-methods research design combining quantitative content analysis and Norman Fairclough’s dialectical-relational approach to critical discourse analysis. My findings suggest that a hierarchy of gravity may indeed emerge as between the categories of atrocity from the UN’s commemoration practices, with genocide both represented far more frequently across the analysed set of commemorative observances than war crimes or crimes against humanity, but also discursively constructed as being of superior gravity. While these findings should be interpreted cautiously, it may nonetheless be suggested that such practices may (re)construct a problematic dissonance between political opinion and legal authority, undermining the communicative force of the legal concepts of war crimes and crimes against humanity exacerbating pre-existing social conflicts.