A Response Delayed: Political Science and the Holocaust

Session Submission Type: In-Person Roundtable

Session Description

Since the early 1950s, social scientists have largely ignored the Holocaust. Indeed, as a small indication of this, it was not until 2011, 70 years after the Holocaust began, that the APSA offered the first panel on the topic.
The field has made significant progress in confronting the Holocaust in the ensuing ten years. For a variety of reasons, perceived and real obstacles to political science research on the Holocaust have eroded. New conceptual thinking about the Holocaust as a series of events in different places and at different times (King 2012), in addition to “one big thing,” has led to opportunities to test hypotheses about those events, places, and times.
This roundtable will showcase innovative research that is casting new light on the Holocaust and, at the same time, demonstrating how findings about the Holocaust can deepen our understanding of other important subfields such as political violence, prejudice and inequality, conflict, mobilization, gender, or even broader concerns with state identity or foreign policy.
Confirmed participants in the roundtable will include: Robert Braun (assistant professor, University of California Berkley), Volha Charnysh (assistant professor, MIT), Jeffrey Kopstein (professor, University of California Irvine), Daniel Solomon (Ph.D. candidate, Georgetown), Jelena Subotic (professor, Georgia State University), and Susan Welch (professor, The Pennsylvania State University).
Kopstein’s work addresses mobilization, both of perpetrators and resisters. Braun, Solomon, and Welch have found that data collected for other purposes can be used to good effect to illuminate the Holocaust. Charnysh and Subotic’s work examines the way that the memory of the Holocaust is being used in contemporary political debates. Collectively, the work of these scholars covers a broad geographic expanse of the Holocaust, from Germany and the rest of Western Europe to Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Serbia, and Ukraine.

Sub Unit

• Division 15: European Politics and Society

Chair

• Jeffrey Kopstein University of California, Irvine

Presenters

• Susan Welch The Pennsylvania State University

• Jelena Subotic Georgia State University

• Robert Braun UC Berkeley

• Volha Charnysh Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Daniel Solomon Georgetown University