Upcoming events

Each year we host a series of free seminars and lectures which is open to graduates, students, staff and members of the public:

Public Lecture, Monday 17 March 2025, 5.30pm

'The global nature of genocide' Dr Caroline Bennett (University of Sussex)

Attenborough Building, Main Campus, Room 101

Using the case study of Cambodia and the Cambodian Genocide (1975-1979), this talk will consider the global nature of genocide and its aftermath, considering how geopolitics enables some mass violence while restricting others. The Cambodian genocide is often positioned as auto-genocide–violence contained within the country’s borders and applied to Khmer by Khmer. However, genocide is never a local affair, no matter how it is retrospectively presented. Globalisation was central to the rise of the Khmer Rouge and their maintenance of power. It was critical to post-genocide society building and the way the Khmer Rouge regime is portrayed and remembered today. As well as thinking about how global interactions influence the path of genocide, this also consider how, in the contemporary world, networks of care extend across time and borders, and global actors become involved in re-politicising those killed (drawing on the work of Zuzanna Dzuiban), thus resisting the work of necropolitics (Mbembe). Therefore, while globalisation is central to genocide happening, it is also critical in caring for those who died, and survivors, afterwards. Considering all these aspects helps us think about the reality of genocide and its effects locally and internationally.

Caroline Bennett is a genocide scholar and Lecturer in Social Anthropology and International Development at the University of Sussex, UK. Her research considers violence and politics, with specific attention to genocide, mass graves and human remains after mass death, and the politics of death and the dead in projects of nation and state building. With a background in forensic anthropology, she also brings a practitioners’ lens to the subject. She has held positions at the University of Kent, Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington (NZ), where she remains an Honorary Research Fellow. She was on the Advisory Board of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, and before starting at Sussex, Director of the All Party Parliamentary Group on the Prevention of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity. Her long-term ethnographic research has concentrated on the Cambodian genocide. Drawing on her background in forensic anthropology, she also works on the treatment of human remains after mass death, including recovery and identification. Her latest publication: The evidentiary potential of art after genocide considers how art can be used in transitional justice courts as social as well as legal proof of genocide.