Maureen Hiebert, University of Calgary Rate Professors

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University of Calgary
Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science
My research has focused on collective identity construction in genocide and impediments to genocide. A new research project will look at the role law plays in the perpetration of the crime of genocide. I teach courses in law and politics, genocide studies, law and armed conflict, and comparative politics. I supervised graduate and undergraduate students in the Department of Political Science and the Law and Society Program.
University of Calgary Department of Political Science; Law and Society Program
Associate Professor; Senior Research Fellow and Graduate Director, CMSS
Maureen worked at University of Calgary Department of Political Science; Law and Society Program as a Associate Professor; Senior Research Fellow and Graduate Director, CMSS

Constructing Genocide and Mass Violence: Society, Crisis, Identity
Routledge - Routledge Studies in Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity (series editor, Adam Jones)
In this book I address two closely related questions: what is the process by which the relatively short and violence genocides of the twentieth century and beyond have occurred? Why have these been instances of mass violence genocide and not some other form of repression or violence? I answer these questions by examing the ways in which elite perpetrators of genocide come to reconceptualize the identity of their victims as foreigners and subhumans who pose an overwhelming threat to the "nation," "race," "revolution." Unique to genocide, this threat conception rests with the continued physical existence of the victims rather than any objective power capabilities. So conceived, the only "rational" way left to protect one's own society and state is, from the perpetrator's perspective, the physical extermination of the victim group(s). I test this approach by comparing two dissimilar cases of genocide - the Nazi Final Solution and the Cambodian genocide. The link above allows readers free access (non-downloadable and non-printable) to the entire book for the month of July 2017.