In contrast to the European experience, mass violence and war in East Asia was spread over a longer period that spanned the 1930s and 1940s, bringing a seemingly endless cascade of suffering to the continent: beginning with the Manchurian Crisis in 1931 that eventually led into the First Sino-Japanese War, escalating further into mass violence in South Asia that from there widened to an all-out war in the Pacific. With the drop of the nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, mass violence then turned inwards, raging on as civil war in China and finally as civil and first Cold War proxy conflict in Korea (until 1953). National histories, due to their innate limitations, tend to emphasize the isolated nature of these events or, at the most, contextualize them in the larger developments in East Asia. This seminar wants to approach the various instances of war and mass violence from the other direction, i.e. try to understand them as the manifestation of larger patterns and structures that brought about these cascades of suffering to the continent. Thus, while not neglecting to analyse the specific conditions and expressions of mass violence on the ground, as it were, we also want to look at the deeper structures and wider causes that shaped these two decades of suffering which still very much dominate the historical and political discourse between East Asian countries today. close