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Scholar Commons > Open Access Journals > GSP > Vol. 20 (2026) > Iss. 1 (2026)

 

Abstract

This article is a testimony on the entanglement of my personal biography, responsibility, and lived experience of genocide denial and, subsequently, developing criminologies of genocide and its denial, based on my formative experiences, ranging from encountering Armenian genocide denial as a student, to dealing with institutional constraints and careerism, to my academic activism, raising awareness about the Gaza genocide, to, finally, prospecting genocide and ecocide in outer space: astrocide. These experiences configure a genealogy of what I term genocidal criminology that unpacks and criticizes criminological knowledge, institutions, and practices that produce genocide (denial), both epistemically and structurally. Essentially, I argue that criminology is inherently genocidenic, capable of enabling and being enabled by silences, complicity, genocidal thinking, and structural denial (of its own genocidality). My testimony should therefore be read as an exercise in reflecting on, as well as generating evidence on, how (my) situated knowledge and moral reckoning are inseparable from criminological analysis of genocide, and the epistemic and institutional choices that can reproduce but also resist criminology’s genocidenics.

First Page

107

Last Page

129

Acknowledgements

I would like thank my friends and colleagues in criminology and genocide studies, specifically, Patrick Pronk, Ton Zwaan, Uğur Ümit Üngör, and Sandra Walklate. Without you, my experiences written about in this essay would have been different, and maybe I would have never become the criminologist I am today.

Dedication

This essay is dedicated to my father, Yaşar Eski, and to the future of criminology. Lest we deny genocide.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.5038/1911-9933.20.1.2106 

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License

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