Political Exhumations: Killing Sites in Comparative Perspective

The course discusses the politics and practices of exhumation of individual and mass graves. The problem of exhumations will be considered as a distinct socio-political phenomenon characteristic of contemporary times and related to transitional justice. The course will offer analysis of case studies of political exhumations of victims of the Dirty War in Argentina, ethnic cleansing in former Yugoslavia, the Holocaust, communist violence in Poland, the Rwandan genocide, the Spanish Civil War, and the war in Ukraine. The course will make use of new interpretations of genocide studies, research of mass graves, such as environmental and forensic approaches.