About Scholar’s Corner: In keeping with the objectives of the Zoryan Institute and its subsidiary, the International Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies, Scholar’s Corner is an online platform that aims to provide timely analysis of contemporary and ongoing issues relating to genocide, human rights, crimes against humanity, and related mass atrocities from genocide scholars and practitioners.
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Institute.
By: Prof. William A. Schabas, OC MRIA September 16, 2025: On 16 September 2025, the UN Commission of Inquiry for the Occupied Palestine Territory issued its most expansive, and its most damning, report. In more
Taiwo Bello is an Assistant Professor of African History and an affiliate faculty member in Africana Studies at Oklahoma State University. His research focuses on gender and women’s history, genocide, war, and violence, global Black diaspora history, the history of crime and punishment, and transnational history. He has published widely on the above themes in specialist, multidisciplinary, and area studies journals, including War and Society, The International History Review, the Journal of World History, Gender & History, Africa Today, Journal of Globalization Studies, Canadian Journal of African Studies, War in History, The Journal of Global South Studies, The Canadian Historical Review (CHR), and Journal of History.
Alison MacAulay is a postdoctoral fellow in Historical Studies. Her research focuses on the intersections of history, research methods, and visual culture. Alison’s doctoral research (Filming History: Visual Representations of Rwanda, 1916-2014) focused on this topic in the Rwandan context, and was awarded the 2023 Finlayson Gold Medal and the Canadian Historical Association’s 2023 John Bullen prize for the top dissertation in Canada. Alison’s current research deals with creative research practices, archives, and film as a way to grapple with difficult histories.
Dr. Athena Madan (University of Toronto, 2014) is an Assistant Professor in Social Medicine at the University of Victoria. Her expertise includes healthcare reconstruction in post-conflict and fragile states, therapeutic governance, genocide and human rights, humanitarian intervention, child soldiers, the militarisation of aid, health and war, and election observation. Specific countries of expertise include Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Africa, and Viet Nam. She has worked with Doctors Without Borders, the Carter Center, the UNHCR, the WHO, grassroots NGOs, and provided anti-racist subject matter expertise to provincial governments in Canada. She has also served as an election observer in the DRC and Ukraine.
Neekoo Collett is a doctoral candidate in political science at the University of Toronto, where her research examines the repression of minorities in autocratic states. Her research has been funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada at both the Master's and Doctoral level, and recognized with a Doctoral Fellowship at the Trudeau Centre for Peace, Conflict, and Justice.
Dr. Edita Gzoyan is the Director of the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute Foundation in Yerevan. Her research focuses on the legal aspects of the Armenian Genocide, the history of the First Republic of Armenia and scientometrics, and she has published widely in these fields.
Hazal Halavut is a LA&PS Postdoctoral Fellow at York University. She received her PhD from the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. Her research explores how perpetrators of mass violence live with their history, focusing on the psychic and cultural forms of denial and disavowal that allow violence and its legacies to persist, with particular attention to the Armenian Genocide in Turkey.
