Beyond the Binary Model: National Security Doctrine in Argentina as a Way of Rethinking Genocide as a Social Practice

DANIEL FEIERSTEIN

Hidden Genocides. Power, Knowledge, Memory

Rutgers University Press

Lugar: New Jersey; Año: 2014; p. 68 - 80

Genocide Studies emerged from a fertile intersection of law, history and social science. However, a shift in emphasis from understanding to prevention has gradually led to the current "binary model" that reduces genocidal social practices to an eternal struggle between Good and Evil in which the only problem is whether the "good-guys" have enough "political will" to neutralize and defeat the "bad-guys". The result has been a growing trivialization of the term genocide since it was coined nearly seventy years ago. A simplistic model has emerged that requires each case of genocide to have one and only one victim and one and only one perpetrator. Victims, perpetrators and accomplices that do not fit the model are ignored or rendered invisible. This paper will show how attempts to prosecute the perpetrators of state terror in Argentina under the Genocide Convention led to a much deeper understanding of genocidal processes in general: the idea that genocide is essentially a partial destruction of the perpetrators own national group, a destruction that is intended to transform the survivors through the annihilation of the victims. The case of Argentina will be discussed less for its intrinsic interest than as a means of understanding and making sense of the powerful and all-embracing effects of genocidal social practices in those societies in which they are implemented. Moreover, this interpretation is already present in Lemkin´s thinking about genocide, and is closely linked to other highly promising approaches to fighting the consequences of genocidal processes, such as that of Lithuanian-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas.