A. Dirk Moses

[9] In July 2020, Moses was named the Frank Porter Graham Distinguished Professor of Global Human Rights History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

In 2004-05 he completed a fellowship at the Charles H. Revson Foundation at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum for his project on “Racial Century: Biopolitics and Genocide in Europe and Its Colonies, 1850-1950.” In 2007 he was an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Fellow at the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung in Potsdam, and in 2010 a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C.

He has written extensively on the genocides of indigenous peoples in Australia and Canada, and he has integrated the Nazi Third Reich and Holocaust into a global context of empire building and counterinsurgency.

In it Moses argues that international criminal law as well as genocide remembrance and prevention occlude the strategic logic of mass violence that secured Western global dominance over the past 500 years.

Moses argues further that the concept of genocide's proximity to the Holocaust effectively depoliticizes the global understanding of civil war and anti-colonial struggles because it focuses on racial hatred.

What makes such crises genocidal, he says, is "the aspiration for permanent security, which entails the end of politics, namely the rupture of negotiation and compromise with different actors.

"[10] He adapted the phrase from Nazi Holocaust perpetrator Otto Ohlendorf, who stated during his trial that he killed Jewish children because otherwise they would grow up to avenge their parents.

[13] In May 2021, Moses returned to his work on German intellectuals with a short article in the Swiss journal Geschichte der Gegenwart, in which he criticized an authoritarian moralization of the Nazi Holocaust that targeted people of colour.

[15] Over the following months many historians and journalists published their thoughts, pro and con, in the pages of German newspapers (especially the Berliner Zeitung and Die Zeit), and in English on the blog New Fascism Syllabus.