A. Dirk Moses

Dirk Moses
Born	Anthony Dirk Moses 1967 (age 53–54) Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
Parent(s)	Ingrid Moses John A. Moses
Academic background
Alma mater	University of Queensland University of St Andrews University of Notre Dame University of California, Berkeley
Thesis	The Forty-fivers[1] (2000)
Doctoral advisor	Martin Jay
Academic work
Discipline	History genocide studies
Sub-discipline	History of colonialism history of genocide
Institutions	University of Freiburg University of Sydney European University Institute
Notable ideas	Racial century
Website	dirkmoses.com

Anthony Dirk Moses (born 1967) is an Australian historian specializing in the history of genocide, and intellectual history. He is the Frank Porter Graham Distinguished Professor of Global Human Rights History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.^[2] He is widely regarded as a leading expert on the history of genocide and ethnic cleansing, and on the history of colonialism, especially genocide in colonial contexts. He is known for coining the term racial century in reference to the period 1850–1950.^[3] He is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Genocide Research.

Early Life and Education[]

Dirk Moses is the son of Ingrid Moses, former Chancellor of the University of Canberra, and the noted historian John A. Moses.^[4]

Moses received his Bachelor of Arts degree in history, government, and law at the University of Queensland in 1987, a Master of Philosophy degree in early modern European history at the University of St Andrews in 1989, a Master of Arts degree in modern European history at the University of Notre Dame in 1994, and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in modern European history at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2000.^[5] His dissertation focuses on how West German intellectuals debated the Nazi past and democratic future of their country.

Career[]

From 2000 to 2010 and 2016 to 2020, he taught at the University of Sydney.^[6] In 2004-05 he completed a fellowship at the Charles H. Revson foundation at a Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, where he conducted research for his project “Racial Century: Biopolitics and Genocide in Europe and Its Colonies, 1850-1950.” Between 2011 and 2015, he was detached to the European University Institute as professor of Global and Colonial History.^[7]

In July 2020, Moses was named the Frank Porter Graham Distinguished Professor of Global Human Rights History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has held fellowships at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C; and at the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung in Potsdam as an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Fellow. He was a visiting fellow at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center for Global Constitutionalismin September-October 2019, and senior fellow at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg in Göttingen in winter 2019-20.

He has been senior editor of the Journal of Genocide Research since 2011, and co-edits the War and Genocide book series for Berghahn Books. He is a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of African Military History, Journal of Perpetrator Research, Patterns of Prejudice, Memory Studies, Settler Colonial Studies, Journal of Mass Violence Research, borderland e-journal, and Monitor: Global Intelligence of Racism. He also serves on the advisory boards of the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies, the University College Dublin Centre for War Studies, the Memory Studies Association, and the RePast project, and is a friend of the International State Crime Initiative.

Research[]

Taken as a whole, Moses' work engages in a critical history of modernity on several fronts. Initially he recovered Raphael Lemkin’s broad understanding of genocide and applied it to the ignored case of settler colonialism. In his book German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past (2007) Moses examined the West German phenomenon of “coming to terms with the past,” arguing that it assumed the status of a universal model for liberal internationalism. He has written extensively on the genocides of indigenous peoples in Australia and Canada, and he has integrated the Nazi Third Reich and Holocaust into a global context of empire building and counterinsurgency. This work, particularly the anthology Empire, Colony, Genocide, is widely cited and has helped set new research agendas.

Moses has written extensively about the applicability of the term genocide on Australian Frontier violence and the Holocaust. For instance, he edited Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Aboriginal Children in Australian History (2004). This book collects illustrations of Australian genocide and positions them in a larger universal context (White H, 2005). Moses describes genocide as a “politicized concept that distorts historical understanding through manipulation of truth” (War and Genocide, 2004). He also highlights limitations of the term genocide, suggesting how “historians can deploy it in the service of scholarship” (War and Genocide, 2012). Moses criticizes political figures, for example Keith Windschuttle, who he believes misrepresents evidence to suit his political agenda. Moses shows how colonial violence unfolds by explaining it as form of extreme counterinsurgency.

In 2021 he published The Problems of Genocide; Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression. This book argues that international criminal law as well as genocide remembrance and prevention occlude the strategic logic of mass violence that secured Western global dominance over the past 500 years. The book argues further that the concept of genocide’s proximity to the Holocaust effectively depoliticizes the global understanding of civil war and anti-colonial struggles because it focuses on racial hatred. He argues that “atrocity crimes,” with genocide as the “crime of crimes,” screens out the actual security imperatives that drive state violence.

Generally Moses criticizes older paradigms in genocide studies for being "a moralizing discourse that tried to explain genocide by ascribing evil intentions to political leaders". Instead, he argues, "For reasons of state, leaders of virtually any government can engage in mass violence against civilians to assure the security of their borders and their civilians." What makes such crises genocidal, he says, is "the aspiration for permanent security, which entails the end of politics, namely the rupture of negotiation and compromise with different actors. Permanent security means the destruction or crippling of the perceived threatening other."^[8] He adapted the phrase from Nazi Holocaust perpetrator Otto Ohlendorf, who stated during his trial that he killed Jewish children because otherwise they would grow up to avenge their parents. It was necessary to kill the children to achieve permanent security, Ohlendorf argued.^[9] Moses states that "permanent security is a deeply utopian and sinister imperative", which has not been sufficiently examined by security studies,^[10] and that instead of genocide (which privileges victims of racial murder over other kinds of killings of civilians) "permanent security should be illegal".^[11]

Publications[]

Books[]

• Moses, A. Dirk (2021). The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-009-02832-5.
• Moses, A. Dirk (2007). German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-511-51190-5.

Edited and Co-edited Books[]

• Decolonization, Self-Determination, and the Rise of Global Human Rights Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
• The Holocaust in Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).[1]
• Postcolonial Conflict and the Question of Genocide: The Nigeria-Biafra War, 1967–1970 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018)(with Bart Luttikhuis).
• Colonial Counterinsurgency and Mass Violence: The Dutch Empire in Indonesia (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014).
• The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
• Genocide: Critical Concepts in Historical Studies, six vols. (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010).
• The Modernist Imagination: News Essays in Intellectual History and Critical Theory (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2009).
• Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation and Subaltern Resistance in World History (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2008/paperback 2009).
• Colonialism and Genocide (London: Routledge, 2007/paperback 2008).
• Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004/paperback 2005).

• Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation and Subaltern Resistance in World History (Berghahn 2008/pbk 2009). This book won the H-Soz-Kult Book Prize – Non-European History Category in 2009.^[12]

Selected Articles and Chapters[]

• "Der Katechismus der Deutschen," in: Geschichte der Gegenwart, 23 May 2021.
• Decolonisation, Self-Determination, and the Rise of Global Human Rights Politics (2020).
• “The Nigeria-Biafra War: Postcolonial Conflict and the Question of Genocide, 1967-1970,” in A. Dirk Moses and Lasse Heerten, eds., Postcolonial Conflict and the Question of Genocide: The Nigeria-Biafra War, 1967–1970 (New York and London: Routledge, 2018), 3-43. Written with Lasse Heerten.
• "Empire, Resistance, and Security: International Law and the Transformative Occupation of Palestine." Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, 8:2(2017), 379-409. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/hum.2017.0024
• “Das römische Gespräch in a New Key: Hannah Arendt, Genocide, and the Defense of Republican Civilization," Journal of Modern History, 85:4 (2013), 867-913.
• "Genocide and the Terror of History". Parallax, 17:4(2011), 90-108. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2011.605583
• "Toward a Theory of Critical Genocide Studies." In: Jacques Semelin (ed.), Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence. (2008)(pp. 1-5).
• "Genocide And Settler Society in Australian History." In Dirk Moses (ed.), Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History, (pp. 3-48). New York: Berghahn Books, 2004.
• “Conceptual Blockages and Definitional Dilemmas in the Racial Century: Genocide of Indigenous Peoples and the Holocaust,” Patterns of Prejudice, 36:4 (2002), 7-36. Extracted in Berel Lang and Simone Gigliotti, eds., The Holocaust: A Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 449-63. Reprinted in A. Dirk Moses and Dan Stone, eds., Colonialism and Genocide (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), 148-180.
• “Coming to Terms with the Past in Comparative Perspective: Germany and Australia,” Aboriginal History, 25 (2001), 91-115. Reprinted in Russell West and Anja Schwarz, eds., Polycultural Societies and Discourse: Interdisciplinary Perspectives from Australia and Germany (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007), 1-30.

References[]

External links[]

Dirk Moses' personal website with complete lists of book and article publications as well as full texts of many articles, and links to public engagement news articles.

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