Criminal trials and memories of mass violence

In the 1990s, amidst the mass violence and international criminal tribunals on Yugoslavia and Rwanda, Sociology and Law Professor and Arsham and Charlotte Ohanessian Chair Joachim Savelsberg decided to turn his sociological attention towards the study of mass violence and human rights, leading him to the Human Rights Program. Born in Germany, 1951, Professor Savelsberg finds that it was “no accident” that his attention would turn to mass violence after experiencing how the Holocaust was silenced and only later came to public attention. He used this biographical trait to examine recurrence of genocide, interventions aimed at preventing mass violence, and how court trials affect the collective memory of genocide. 

Since focusing his sociology of law and criminology scholarship on issues of major human rights violations, Professor Savelsberg has published multiple books. The research for his most recent book, Knowing about Genocide: Armenian Suffering and Epistemic Struggles, was funded in part by the Human Rights Initiative. Released last year, the book aims to understand “if judicial proceedings can color the collective memory of mass genocide.” Inspired by Justice Robert Jackson’s statement at the Nuremberg Trials: “We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow,” Professor Savelsberg seeks to discover how criminal trials capture events of mass violence. But Savelsberg argues that understanding genocide is not solely about the law. His is “a broad sociology of knowledge approach… “See, I look at law, but I do not only look at law. I look at everyday interaction, the millions of conversations that go on in society every day, in which people interrupt each other, encourage each other’s utterances, deny what other people say, silence things. And these millions of everyday interactions construct or result in what people take for granted in social life, including knowledge about mass violence.” 

Savelsberg also investigates “knowledge entrepreneurs,” actors with privileged access to channels of communication and greater levels of influence. The recent book explores how two groups of people (Armenians and Turks) hold distinctly different understandings of the Armenian genocide, even if dominant and state-supported Turkish “knowledge” is opposed to all serious scholarship, and how each group organizes itself to challenge the other side through multiple platforms, including law and politics. He also alludes to how these polarized ideas apply in other realms. “We find this in several areas of social life, that there are two factions that subscribe to totally different understandings of social reality; about climate change, about human reproduction, about all kinds of matters.” He emphasizes both, how different groups hold distinct views of social reality when reflecting on important events, and how their confrontation affects the remembrance of those events. In doing so, he highlights the damage caused by governments that attempt to cover up their human rights violations, leading them into isolation in the global community, and he hints towards the hope of international scholars working to accurately document the history of mass violence.

In 2021, Professor Savelsberg was awarded the Harry J. Kalven, Jr. Prize by the Law and Society Association for "empirical scholarship that has contributed most effectively to the advancement of research in law and society.” The award is given in recognition of the body of scholarly work he has produced over the span of his career, and he is considered an “intellectual pioneer” in the field. The Law and Society Association is composed of legal scholars, sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, and historians who are concerned with how social processes and legal institutions apply law and affect one another. Professor Savelsberg has been presenting papers and attending meetings of the Law and Society Association for several decades, and he has been the editor of the Law and Society Review alongside fellow UMN faculty member and political science professor, Timothy Johnson. Professor Savelsberg states that “the Law and Society Association is one of my academic homes as far as associational life is concerned, and is among the organizations where I go most frequently to present my work”. 

Professor Savelsberg has been a valued presence in the Human Rights Program, and he recently received a second grant from the Human Rights Initiative to work alongside graduate student Nikoleta Sremac to examine the genderization of the memory of mass violence in the former Yugoslavia, specifically Serbia. In fall 2021, Sremac conducted individual and focus group interviews with women about their involvement in political organizing and their memories of the wars in Yugoslavia. Sremac and Savelsberg analyze how women’s memories compare to the official state narrative, and how women find a way to bring forward their voices to the collective conscience. In addition, Professor Savelsberg recently published an article titled “Writing Biography in the Face of Cultural Trauma: Nazi Descent and the Management of Spoiled Identities,” about how the grandchildren of German Nazis cope with the stigma of their families’ histories. Professor Savelsberg also has a longtime interest in how global legal tools interact with national patterns. He is now beginning new work on how Universal Jurisdiction, that is, criminal prosecution for grave violations of human rights, irrespective of the place of perpetration and the nationality of the defendant, affects national and global knowledge about mass atrocity crimes.