Megan Manion

Hi. My name is Megan; I am a doctoral candidate in International Relations at the University of Minnesota. I hold fellowships with the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change and the Law School’s Human Rights Center. I am interested in the politics of thoughts and feelings about mass violence and responsibility for it. I study how international criminal law is entangled with and works in service of global racial capitalism. My dissertation considers how and why ordinary people stage people’s tribunals to resist extraordinary violence. I recover tribunals in which a globally resonant resistance consciousness can be heard developing a vision of collective responsibility for racial States continuous and ongoing intent to destroy, or what I call ‘dolus perdere’. I show how racial States have collectively worked to bury the logic of responsiblity imagined by people’s tribunals in legal paperwork that instead elaborates the now hegemonic doctrine of “specific intent” as if the only possibile theory of international criminal liability for Genocide. Through a political ethnography of legal texts documented and archived by the U.N. and dozens of people’s tribunals, I show how the demand for specificity in U.N. genocide tribunals betrays a génocidaire’s epistemology at its core.

I live in the Miní Sóta Makhóčhe, the homelands of the Dakhóta Oyáte, where the University exploits the legal privileges of the ‘land-grant’ scheme to benefit from ongoing genocide against indigenous peoples of Turtle Island. For more information and guidance in confronting the history of the institution, I encourage reading the Truth Report, which was created in collaboration with the Cansa'yapi, Gaa-waabaabiganikaag, Gaa-zagaskwaajimekaag, Mdewakanton, Misi-zaaga'iganiing, Miskwaagamiiwi-Zaagaiganing, Nah-gah-chi-wa-nong, Pezihutazizi Oyáte, Tinta Wita, Zagaakwaandagowininiwag, Gichi-Onigaming Grand.