About INoGS

The International Network of Genocide Scholars (INoGS), founded on 14 January 2005 in Berlin, is a non-profit and non-partisan organization to foster scholarly exchange and academic debate on all aspects of genocide. INoGS is open to researchers, teachers and students from all academic disciplines working on genocide and mass violence.

Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959)

Genocide is one of the most horrific crimes in the history of humankind. The term 'genocide' was first coined by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish specialist in international law: "New conceptions require new terms. By 'genocide' we mean the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group". Rarely in history have paradigmatic changes in scholarship been brought about with such few words. Putting the quintessential crime of modernity in only one sentence, Lemkin not only summarized the horrors of the National Socialist crimes, which were still under way, when he wrote them, but also influenced international law.

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People

	President  Jürgen Zimmerer [] joined the History Department, University of Sheffield, in September in 2005. He was educated at the Universities of Regensburg, Oxford and Freiburg, where he received his Ph.D. in 2000. Since then, he taught Modern and African History at the Universities of Kiel and Essen, and held a postdoctoral fellowship of the Portuguese Government at the Universidade de Coimbra. His areas of research include Southern African History, the transnational history of European colonialism, and representations of the imperial world in various European countries (i.e. Germany, Great Britain, Portugal). He is also interested in and published on the relationship between colonialism and National Socialism, on comparative genocide, the politics of coming to terms with a violent or genocidal past in global perspective, and on Portuguese history. He is currently working on a research project on the 'Cold War in the Atlantic Triangle. The USA, Portugal and the dissolution of the Portuguese Empire', and preparing one on 'Imperial Encounters: The Exploration of Africa and its Representation'. He is president of the International Network of Genocide Scholars (INoGS), editor of the Journal of Genocide Research, and an associate editor of the Electronic Encyclopaedia of Genocides and Massacres. He also serves as an editor for (post-)colonial history for Sozial.Geschichte and (post-) colonial history and comparative genocide for H-Soz-u-Kult. He has served as an editor of sehepunkte and of the Newsletter des Arbeitskreises Militärgeschichte.
Photo by Susanne Linderos	Vice-President  Henning Melber (born 1950) [] came in 1967 as a son of German emigrants to Namibia. He joined SWAPO of Namibia in 1974 and was since 1975 prohibited to re-enter Namibia and South Africa until 1989 and 1993 respectively. He graduated at the Freie Universität Berlin in Political Science in 1977 and received a PhD in the same discipline at the University of Bremen, where he also obtained a venia legendi (right to teach) in Development Studies in 1993.  A Senior Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Kassel since 1982, he returned to Namibia as the Director of the Namibian Economic Policy Research Unit (NEPRU) in 1992. In May 2000 he moved as Research Director to the Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala/Sweden, where he is the Executive Director of the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation since November 2006. He served as a vice-president of the European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes (EADI) between 2002 and 2005 and is a board member of the Information Centre on Southern Africa (ISSA) in Bonn since 1983.  He has published widely in the area of African Studies, on racism and  on solidarity as well as liberation movements, in particular on Southern Africa and Namibia (for further details on his previous and current work areas see www.dhf.uu.se and www.nai.uu.se).
	Acting Executive Secretary Nigel Eltringham [] is a social anthropologist. He conducted fieldwork (1998-1999) among the political class in Rwanda and its exiled shadow in Europe.  Accounting for Horror: Post-Genocide Debates in Rwanda (Pluto, 2004) explored how the two constituencies accounted for the 1994 genocide and its aftermath.  Eltringham has continued to explore the dilemmas of explaining/representing mass violence from the position of the situated anthropologist (in The Ethics of Anthropology Debates and Dilemmas, Routledge, 2003); by means of historical analogy (Social Identities Vol. 12, No. 4); and through cinematic reconstruction (Society and Space, Vol. 26, No. 4.).  Since 2005, he has been conducting an ethnographic study of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (Arusha, Tanzania), exploring how actors with diverse prior experience/expectations and distinct institutional locations develop evolving perspectives on the formal procedures, quotidian negotiations and supposed purposes of such institutions.  In addition to exploring the ICTR’s creation of an “historical record” (Journal of Genocide Research, Vol. 11, No. 1); the social negotiation and syncretism of legal practice (New England Journal of International and Comparative Law, Vol. 14, No. 2) and the court as performative space (in Transitional Justice: Global Mechanisms and Local Realities in the Aftermath of Genocide and Mass Violence, 2010), he is preparing a book manuscript based on the ICTR research.  To mark the fifteenth anniversary of the 1994 genocide in 2009, he guest edited a special issue of the Journal of Genocide Research (Vol. 11, No. 1) containing contributions from leading experts on contemporary social relations in Rwanda. http://www.sussex.ac.uk/anthropology/profile158813.html
	Vice Executive Secretary Jan-Bart Gewald (Universiteit Leiden, the Netherlands) is a historian specialized in the social history of Africa. His research has ranged from the ramifications of genocide in Rwanda and Namibia, through to the socio-cultural parameters of trans-desert trade in Africa. In addition, he has conducted research on pan-Africanism in Ghana, spirit possession in the Republic of Niger, Dutch development cooperation, Africa in the context of globalisation, and social history in Eritrea. Furthermore he has a particular interest in archaeology, and has participated in archaeological research in southern Africa.  On a personal note, Jan-Bart grew up in Africa and has lived in Botswana, Congo Kinshasa, Eritrea, Ghana, Namibia, Niger, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. http://www.ascleiden.nl/GetPage.aspx?url=/about/jbgewald
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