Dr. Diana Dumitru: CV, titlul şi rezumatul prezentării
Dr. Diana Dumitru: Date biografice
Dr. Dumitru is Assistant Professor at the World History Department, State Pedagogical University from Chisinau, Moldova. In her teaching and research Dr. Dumitru focuses especially on the issues of modern period: Soviet and East European History, Authoritarian Regimes of the 20th Century, and the Romanian Holocaust.
Currently Dr. Dumitru is working on a comparative study of the non-Jewish population’s attitude towards the Holocaust and its victims during the Second World War in Transnistria and Bessarabia. The line of comparison analyses the differences and similarities of the manifestation of these population’s attitudes; as well, it investigates the impact of specific factors on the populations’ reaction to the Holocaust.
To accomplish her project Diana Dumitru was awarded the Rosenzweig Family Fellowship at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum from Washington D.C. (2005-2006). She was also granted a two- year research scholarship by Gerda Henkel Stiftung (Germany) Special Program to Support the Next Generations of Historians in Russia, the Ukraine, Moldova, and Byelorussia (2007-2008). In 2007 Dr. Dumitru was offered a four-month research fellowship at the International Institute for Holocaust Research - Yad Vashem with the support of The Baron Friedrich Carl von Oppenheim Chair for the Study of Racism, Antisemitism, and the Holocaust.
Dr. Dumitru is the author of fifteen articles, including „The Use and Abuse of the Holocaust: Historiography and Politics in Moldova”, Holocaust and Genoside Studies, (Spring 2008, volume 22, p. 49-73).
Titlul prezentării:
Constructing Inter-Ethnic Cooperation and Conflict through the State:
Why Some Peasants Helped and Some Harmed Jews during the Romanian Holocaust
By: Dumitru and Johnson
Overview of Project
This paper seeks to build on Petersen’s (2002) research on the emotional origins of inter-ethnic violence. Petersen proposed four emotional origins – Fear, Resentment, Hatred, Rage – of which he found the most evidence supporting Resentment. This paper builds on Petersen’s work by (i) challenging his conclusions about Resentment (at least for our case study), proposing hatred as a stronger predictor; (ii) expanding the scope to explain inter-ethnic cooperation in addition to violence, something the political science discipline too frequently overlooks; and (iii) explaining the important role that state policies play in constructing conflict and cooperation, which is largely left unexamined by Petersen and others. We present evidence suggesting that societal “hatred” toward an ethnic group can be created and overcome through the use of state nationality policies. We also demonstrate that these policies do more than just overcome “hatred” but can construct enduring inter-ethnic cooperation that lasts beyond the life of the state itself.
The conclusions also challenge Fearon and Laitin’s argument about inter-ethnic cooperation (1996) by backing up one step in the causal chain of conflict. The premise behind Fearon and Laitin’s argument is that informal institutions, such as in-group policing, are needed to regulate behavior of individuals to prevent naturally occurring opportunism from spiraling into socially damaging wide-scale inter-ethnic violence. We argue here, however, that it may be possible to construct inter-ethnic relations such that even when opportunities for unpunished violence arise, little violence will occur. If this is the case, it would obviate the need for internal policing of the type suggested by Fearon and Laitin. In other words, inter-ethnic relations could experience peace not because of formal or informal policing, but because there is a low-level of inter-ethnic animosity to begin with. In fact we present a case where formal institutions actively encouraged inter-ethnic violence at the mass level, yet little was forthcoming, despite a history of such violence. Further, not only do we show an absence of inter-ethnic violence (what Fearon and Laitin oddly call “cooperation”), we are able to detail repeated instances of aid and support from one group to another.
Our argument also problematizes a key, often unstated assumption made by many theories in the ethnic conflict literature: structural theories on inter-ethnic violence such as Varshney’s (2002) or Wilkinson’s (2004) as well as elite manipulation theories of diversionary ethnic war such as Gagnon’s (2006) rely on extant inter-ethnic animosity and then theorize when that animosity is activated to produce violence. We suggest that explaining inter-ethnic conflict should begin by understanding when and how that inter-ethnic animosity exists.
We use the example of Romania during the Holocaust because it provides a unique natural experiment. The territories of Bessarabia and Transnistria, containing a mixed population of Ukrainian, Romanian, Jewish and other ethnic groups, were part of the Russian Empire until 1918, after which Bessarabia joined Romania and Transnistria joined the newly established Soviet Union. Prior to 1918, these territories were subjected to extreme forms of official state antisemitism, including restrictions on employment, residence, mobility, and officially sanctioned or tolerated pogroms against the Jewish population. After 1918, the Bessarabian population continued to live under a similar policy of state-sponsored antisemitism; however, the Transnistrian population received a radically different policy fostered by the Soviet Union that removed all restrictions specifically against Jews, promoted their advancement across all sectors of society, and banned antisemitism in public discourse, persecuting public expressions of antisemitism in the media and elsewhere. In short, the Soviet government during this period promoted a conception of Jewish people as one nation among many within the multi-national Soviet Union, whose members should be treated as equals with all other citizens. This is not to argue that antisemitism was defeated during this period; there is much evidence to suggest that antisemitism still had strong currents in society. However, the state actively persecuted antisemitism and encouraged both integration and equality among the general public, which stands in stark contrast to the Romanian government during this period.
In 1941, Bessarabia and Transnistria were once again rejoined, 23 years after their separation, under the control of the Romanian government, a Nazi ally. It was explicit Romanian policy to detain all Jews within Bessarabia and Transnistria and place them in ghettos within Transnistria. As in other regions occupied by the Nazis, abuse of the Jewish population was extensive, and the Romanian security forces permitted, and in some cases encouraged, local peasants to partake in anti-Jewish victimization. However, our research indicates that there was a remarkable difference between the attitudes of the local gentile population in Bessarabia and Transnistria towards the Jewish population. After reading through over 200 Jewish testimonies, conducting a survey with over 60 current survivors, conducting interviews with both survivors and local gentile peasantry in Bessarabia and Transnistria, and reading archival material from German and Romanian governments, we find that the Bessarabian peasantry was far more likely to commit abusive actions against Jews (e.g., beatings, theft, murder), whereas the Transnistrian population was far more likely to behave in a cooperative manner (e.g., providing food, hiding Jews from persecution). We believe that the pre-war state policies encouraging either animosity or affinity between ethnic groups contributes to our understanding of this outcome.
We also use secondary evidence for further spatial and temporal controls for our cases.
Coding for Cooperation and Conflict
We have strong impressionistic evidence from our sources that more violence was perpetrated by those in Bessarabia than Transnistria. We want to show that the difference is statistically significant. The question is how? We propose to use all written and video testimony as our raw material, and code the activity of each Bessarabian and Transnistrian individual described by Jewish survivors. In other words, our unit of analysis will be gentiles in Bessarabia and Transistria that are described by Jews who survived the Romanian Holocaust. Our dependent variable will be actions towards Jews by gentiles in both regions; if the action is negative (e.g., physical attack) we will give it a negative score on our scale, whereas if it is a positive action (e.g., providing food), we will give it a positive score. The exact scale is discussed below. Our independent variable will be regional location of gentile (will also include a variable for ethnicity, which could be Romanian, Ukrainian, or Russian).
Questions:
1. Any general comments on the methodology and how we have chosen to collect data on our units of analysis?
2. What scale do we use for harm/help committed by peasants? Ideally we will have a scale that includes negative and positive rankings, something like this:
__________________________________________________________
-5 -4 -3 -2 -1 0 1 2 3 4 5
Murder assault theft give hide sacrifice
food to Jew from own
ghettos authorities life to help
But we do not know what to use as an “objective” scale. For the negative side, we propose to rank criminal activities based on a criminal code and sentencing lengths. Much criminology research in the 1960s and 1970s demonstrated a remarkable consensus in society as to the “severity” of crimes (Rossi and Berk 1997). Survey after survey of civilians, including those incarcerated, agreed that, for example, assault was more severe than theft, that rape was more severe than assault, that murder was more severe than assault, etc. We would use this to construct an ordinal variable.
However, what about positive actions? Are some ‘objective’ scales to use?
3. What do we do when one individual commits multiple acts? What if a man is described as having committed a minor assault against a Jewish person, and then proceeds to commit a major assault: do we code that twice or just the most severe act? Any advice welcome.
Dr. Dumitru is Assistant Professor at the World History Department, State Pedagogical University from Chisinau, Moldova. In her teaching and research Dr. Dumitru focuses especially on the issues of modern period: Soviet and East European History, Authoritarian Regimes of the 20th Century, and the Romanian Holocaust.
Currently Dr. Dumitru is working on a comparative study of the non-Jewish population’s attitude towards the Holocaust and its victims during the Second World War in Transnistria and Bessarabia. The line of comparison analyses the differences and similarities of the manifestation of these population’s attitudes; as well, it investigates the impact of specific factors on the populations’ reaction to the Holocaust.
To accomplish her project Diana Dumitru was awarded the Rosenzweig Family Fellowship at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum from Washington D.C. (2005-2006). She was also granted a two- year research scholarship by Gerda Henkel Stiftung (Germany) Special Program to Support the Next Generations of Historians in Russia, the Ukraine, Moldova, and Byelorussia (2007-2008). In 2007 Dr. Dumitru was offered a four-month research fellowship at the International Institute for Holocaust Research - Yad Vashem with the support of The Baron Friedrich Carl von Oppenheim Chair for the Study of Racism, Antisemitism, and the Holocaust.
Dr. Dumitru is the author of fifteen articles, including „The Use and Abuse of the Holocaust: Historiography and Politics in Moldova”, Holocaust and Genoside Studies, (Spring 2008, volume 22, p. 49-73).
Titlul prezentării:
Constructing Inter-Ethnic Cooperation and Conflict through the State:
Why Some Peasants Helped and Some Harmed Jews during the Romanian Holocaust
By: Dumitru and Johnson
Overview of Project
This paper seeks to build on Petersen’s (2002) research on the emotional origins of inter-ethnic violence. Petersen proposed four emotional origins – Fear, Resentment, Hatred, Rage – of which he found the most evidence supporting Resentment. This paper builds on Petersen’s work by (i) challenging his conclusions about Resentment (at least for our case study), proposing hatred as a stronger predictor; (ii) expanding the scope to explain inter-ethnic cooperation in addition to violence, something the political science discipline too frequently overlooks; and (iii) explaining the important role that state policies play in constructing conflict and cooperation, which is largely left unexamined by Petersen and others. We present evidence suggesting that societal “hatred” toward an ethnic group can be created and overcome through the use of state nationality policies. We also demonstrate that these policies do more than just overcome “hatred” but can construct enduring inter-ethnic cooperation that lasts beyond the life of the state itself.
The conclusions also challenge Fearon and Laitin’s argument about inter-ethnic cooperation (1996) by backing up one step in the causal chain of conflict. The premise behind Fearon and Laitin’s argument is that informal institutions, such as in-group policing, are needed to regulate behavior of individuals to prevent naturally occurring opportunism from spiraling into socially damaging wide-scale inter-ethnic violence. We argue here, however, that it may be possible to construct inter-ethnic relations such that even when opportunities for unpunished violence arise, little violence will occur. If this is the case, it would obviate the need for internal policing of the type suggested by Fearon and Laitin. In other words, inter-ethnic relations could experience peace not because of formal or informal policing, but because there is a low-level of inter-ethnic animosity to begin with. In fact we present a case where formal institutions actively encouraged inter-ethnic violence at the mass level, yet little was forthcoming, despite a history of such violence. Further, not only do we show an absence of inter-ethnic violence (what Fearon and Laitin oddly call “cooperation”), we are able to detail repeated instances of aid and support from one group to another.
Our argument also problematizes a key, often unstated assumption made by many theories in the ethnic conflict literature: structural theories on inter-ethnic violence such as Varshney’s (2002) or Wilkinson’s (2004) as well as elite manipulation theories of diversionary ethnic war such as Gagnon’s (2006) rely on extant inter-ethnic animosity and then theorize when that animosity is activated to produce violence. We suggest that explaining inter-ethnic conflict should begin by understanding when and how that inter-ethnic animosity exists.
We use the example of Romania during the Holocaust because it provides a unique natural experiment. The territories of Bessarabia and Transnistria, containing a mixed population of Ukrainian, Romanian, Jewish and other ethnic groups, were part of the Russian Empire until 1918, after which Bessarabia joined Romania and Transnistria joined the newly established Soviet Union. Prior to 1918, these territories were subjected to extreme forms of official state antisemitism, including restrictions on employment, residence, mobility, and officially sanctioned or tolerated pogroms against the Jewish population. After 1918, the Bessarabian population continued to live under a similar policy of state-sponsored antisemitism; however, the Transnistrian population received a radically different policy fostered by the Soviet Union that removed all restrictions specifically against Jews, promoted their advancement across all sectors of society, and banned antisemitism in public discourse, persecuting public expressions of antisemitism in the media and elsewhere. In short, the Soviet government during this period promoted a conception of Jewish people as one nation among many within the multi-national Soviet Union, whose members should be treated as equals with all other citizens. This is not to argue that antisemitism was defeated during this period; there is much evidence to suggest that antisemitism still had strong currents in society. However, the state actively persecuted antisemitism and encouraged both integration and equality among the general public, which stands in stark contrast to the Romanian government during this period.
In 1941, Bessarabia and Transnistria were once again rejoined, 23 years after their separation, under the control of the Romanian government, a Nazi ally. It was explicit Romanian policy to detain all Jews within Bessarabia and Transnistria and place them in ghettos within Transnistria. As in other regions occupied by the Nazis, abuse of the Jewish population was extensive, and the Romanian security forces permitted, and in some cases encouraged, local peasants to partake in anti-Jewish victimization. However, our research indicates that there was a remarkable difference between the attitudes of the local gentile population in Bessarabia and Transnistria towards the Jewish population. After reading through over 200 Jewish testimonies, conducting a survey with over 60 current survivors, conducting interviews with both survivors and local gentile peasantry in Bessarabia and Transnistria, and reading archival material from German and Romanian governments, we find that the Bessarabian peasantry was far more likely to commit abusive actions against Jews (e.g., beatings, theft, murder), whereas the Transnistrian population was far more likely to behave in a cooperative manner (e.g., providing food, hiding Jews from persecution). We believe that the pre-war state policies encouraging either animosity or affinity between ethnic groups contributes to our understanding of this outcome.
We also use secondary evidence for further spatial and temporal controls for our cases.
Coding for Cooperation and Conflict
We have strong impressionistic evidence from our sources that more violence was perpetrated by those in Bessarabia than Transnistria. We want to show that the difference is statistically significant. The question is how? We propose to use all written and video testimony as our raw material, and code the activity of each Bessarabian and Transnistrian individual described by Jewish survivors. In other words, our unit of analysis will be gentiles in Bessarabia and Transistria that are described by Jews who survived the Romanian Holocaust. Our dependent variable will be actions towards Jews by gentiles in both regions; if the action is negative (e.g., physical attack) we will give it a negative score on our scale, whereas if it is a positive action (e.g., providing food), we will give it a positive score. The exact scale is discussed below. Our independent variable will be regional location of gentile (will also include a variable for ethnicity, which could be Romanian, Ukrainian, or Russian).
Questions:
1. Any general comments on the methodology and how we have chosen to collect data on our units of analysis?
2. What scale do we use for harm/help committed by peasants? Ideally we will have a scale that includes negative and positive rankings, something like this:
__________________________________________________________
-5 -4 -3 -2 -1 0 1 2 3 4 5
Murder assault theft give hide sacrifice
food to Jew from own
ghettos authorities life to help
But we do not know what to use as an “objective” scale. For the negative side, we propose to rank criminal activities based on a criminal code and sentencing lengths. Much criminology research in the 1960s and 1970s demonstrated a remarkable consensus in society as to the “severity” of crimes (Rossi and Berk 1997). Survey after survey of civilians, including those incarcerated, agreed that, for example, assault was more severe than theft, that rape was more severe than assault, that murder was more severe than assault, etc. We would use this to construct an ordinal variable.
However, what about positive actions? Are some ‘objective’ scales to use?
3. What do we do when one individual commits multiple acts? What if a man is described as having committed a minor assault against a Jewish person, and then proceeds to commit a major assault: do we code that twice or just the most severe act? Any advice welcome.
Comments
Mulţumesc!
Сu stimă şi mult respect, o fostă studentă