Portland, 2022

Hi. My name is Megan, I am a doctoral candidate in Political Science at the University of Minnesota. I hold fellowships with the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change and the Law School’s Human Rights Center. I am interested in the politics of thoughts and feelings about mass violence and responsibility for it. I study how international criminal law is entangled with and works in service of global racial capitalism.

My dissertation considers how and why ordinary people stage people’s tribunals to resist extraordinary violence. I recover tribunals in which a globally resonant resistance consciousness can be heard developing a vision of collective responsibility for racial States’ continuous and ongoing “intent to destroy”, or what I call dolus perdere. I show how racial States have worked collectively since 1945 to bury the logic of responsibility imagined by international people’s tribunals in legal paperwork that instead elaborates the now hegemonic doctrine of “specific intent” as if the proper theory of criminal liability for Genocide.

Through a political ethnography of legal texts documented and archived by the U.N. and dozens of international people’s tribunals, I show how the demand for specificity of intent in U.N. genocide tribunals betrays a génocidaire’s epistemology at its core.