Adam Jones (Canadian scholar)

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Adam Jones

Adam Jones, Ph.D., is a Canadian scholar whose research focuses on genocide and human rights, gender and international politics, and mass media and political transition. He currently works at the University of British Columbia Okanagan in Kelowna, BC.

Biography

Adam Jones was born in Singapore in 1963, and grew up in England before his family emigrated to Canada in 1970. In 1972, they moved to the Okanagan Valley in south-central British Columbia, and in 1979, Jones returned to Singapore on a two-year scholarship to the United World College of South East Asia (UWCSEA), where he was awarded an International Baccalaureate degree. This was followed by a year (1983-84) studying Mandarin language at East China Normal University in Shanghai, China. He obtained his B.A. in History/International Relations from the University of British Columbia in 1989, and completed a Master's degree in Political Science at McGill University in Montreal (1989-92). In Fall 1992, he returned to the University of British Columbia, working on a Ph.D. in Political Science which was awarded in July 1999.

From 2000 to 2004, he was employed as a professor in the International Studies division of the Center for Research and Teaching in Economics (CIDE) in Mexico City, and also taught part-time at the Colegio de San Luis (COLSAN) in San Luis Potosí. In 2005, he moved to take up a two-year position as Associate Research Fellow in the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University. He joined the Political Science faculty at UBC Okanagan as a tenured Associate Professor in July 2007.

Scholarly research and activism

Jones first became known for his academic and activist work on gender and politics. His output in this field began in 1991 with a long research paper titled "The Globe and Males: The Other Side of Gender Bias in Canada's National Newspaper", published by the Gender Issues Education Foundation (GIEF) in Edmonton, Alberta. Jones credits the director of GIEF, Ferrel M. Christensen, with having encouraged him to adopt an inclusive framing of gender issues. This led in 1994 to an article for the British journal "Gender and Ethnic Conflict in ex-Yugoslavia", in which Jones analyzed the gendered vulnerabilities of both women and men in the Balkans wars. His most widely-cited journal article appeared in 1996 in Review of International Studies (RIS). Titled "Does 'Gender' Make the World Go Round?", it offered a critique of feminist framings of international relations that again emphasized the importance of adopting an inclusive approach to gender issues worldwide. The article was awarded the prize of the British International Studies Association (BISA) for best RIS article of 1996.

In 1999, Jones was inspired by conflicts in Kosovo and East Timor to delve more systematically into gender-selective atrocities against men. The result was the launch in 2000 of a Web-based educational initiative, Gendercide Watch, co-founded with Carla Bergman. Gendercide Watch won numerous Internet awards, has been widely cited in international media, and receives hundreds of thousands of "hits" annually. The project, and an article titled "Gendercide and Genocide" that appeared in Journal of Genocide Research in June 2000, drew on the work of the feminist scholar Mary Anne Warren, who coined the term "gendercide" in her 1985 book of the same name. However, while Warren's theoretical framing allowed for gendercidal killings of both females and males, her emphasis was overwhelmingly on the former, with a special focus on female infanticide and foeticide. In "Gendercide and Genocide," Jones contended that a nuanced gender-inclusive framing of gendercide was preferable, and argued controversially that:

the most vulnerable and consistently targeted population group, through time and around the world today, is non-combatant men of "battle age," roughly 15 to 55 years old. They are nearly universally perceived as the group posing the greatest danger to the conquering force, and are the group most likely to have the repressive apparatus of the state directed against them. The "non-combatant" distinction is also vital. Unlike their armed brethren, these men have no means of defending themselves, and can be detained and exterminated by the thousands or millions.

The Gendercide Watch site compiled some two dozen case-studies, all written by Jones, of gendercide against men and women, including "gendercidal institutions" such as female infanticide and corvee (forced) labor. While most of his subsequent research has focused on men and masculinities, Jones has also devoted substantial time to female vulnerabilities and victimization. The Gendercide Watch case-studies of female infanticide, maternal mortality, and European witch-hunts are all among the highest-ranked Web resources on these subjects, and in 2005 he contributed a chapter on "Gendercidal Institutions against Women and Girls" to the volume Women in an Insecure World, prepared by the Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces (DCAF) in Geneva.

The publication of "Gendercide and Genocide" in Journal of Genocide Research prompted an offer by the Journal's editor, Henry Huttenbach, to publish a special issue on the gendercide theme. This appeared in 2002, with contributions from Evelin Lindner, Oystein Gullvag Holter, Stuart Stein, and David Buchanan, along with a new article by Jones, "Gender and Genocide in Rwanda." In 2004, these materials, supplemented by additional essays from Augusta Del Zotto, R. Charli Carpenter, and Terrell Carver, appeared in book form as Gendercide and Genocide, published by Vanderbilt University Press. In 2006, five years of work culminated in the publication by Zed Books of the edited volume Men of the Global South: A Reader, a wide-ranging and accessible anthology of men and masculinities in the developing world. A collection of Jones's writings on gender issues, titled Gender Inclusive: Essays on Violence, Men, and Feminist International Relations, was published by Routledge early in 2009. A broad selection of Jones's writings on gender is available on the Gender Page of his personal website.

Jones has also maintained a strong interest in broader questions of comparative genocide studies and crimes against humanity. His edited collection Genocide, War Crimes and the West: History and Complicity appeared with Zed Books in 2004, and was praised by Richard S. Falk, Professor Emeritus at Princeton University, as "the most comprehensive treatment of Western responsibility for mass atrocity yet published." In 2006, Routledge published Jones's sole-authored volume, Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction, which University of Delaware Professor Kenneth Campbell declared "the best introductory text available to students of genocide studies" and "likely to become the gold standard by which all subsequent introductions to this enormously important subject will be measured." The accompanying website for Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction, genocidetext.net, includes an extensive Filmography of genocide and crimes against humanity, along with an essay charting Jones's "Personal Journey" into genocide studies. The second edition of Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction is scheduled for publication by Routledge in Summer 2010.

In 2008, Jones published his short work Crimes Against Humanity: A Beginner's Guide with Oneworld in the UK. The same year saw publication of his four-volume collection with Sage Publishers of classic writings in genocide studies, titled simply Genocide. In 2009, Jones's volume co-edited with Nicholas Robins, Genocides by the Oppressed: Subaltern Genocide in Theory and Practice, was published by Indiana University Press. An edited work five years in preparation, Evoking Genocide: Scholars and Activists Describe the Works That Shaped Their Lives, also appeared in 2009 under the imprint of The Key Publishing House in Toronto. His edited volume New Directions in Genocide Research is scheduled for publication in 2010, as is a compilation for Zed Books of progressive writing through the ages, Words to Change the World: The Progressive Reader.

Jones was selected one of Fifty Key Thinkers on the Holocaust and Genocide for the book edited by Paul Bartrop and Steven Jacobs (Routledge, forthcoming 2010). In 2005, he was appointed Senior Book Review Editor of Journal of Genocide Research, a position he continues to hold.

Beyond the subject-areas of comparative genocide studies and gender and politics, Jones has a longstanding interest in issues of mass media and democratization. His Master's thesis at McGill University explored the transformations in the Sandinista party newspaper Barricada during and after the revolutionary era (1979-90) in Nicaragua. This led in 2002 to the publication of his monograph, Beyond the Barricades: Nicaragua and the Struggle for the Sandinista Press, 1979-1998, by Vanderbilt University Press. Comparative research on media transitions around the world underpinned his Ph.D. project at the University of British Columbia, which involved extensive archival research and more than 150 interviews in Managua, Johannesburg, Moscow, and Amman. The resulting dissertation was shortlisted for the Governor-General's Gold Medal, awarded to the outstanding Ph.D. graduate university-wide, and was published in 2002 as The Press in Transition: A Comparative Study of Nicaragua, South Africa, Jordan, and Russia by the German Overseas Institute.

Jones has also published an edited collection of the writings of the international relations scholar Kalevi J. Holsti in Spanish translation (Kal Holsti: Ensayos Escogidos) with his former institution, CIDE, in 2005.

Travel and family

In addition to his academic pursuits, Jones has an abiding passion for travel. He has voyaged in nearly 70 countries on every populated continent, recently completed trips to Romania, Bosnia, Brazil, India, Russia (via the Trans-Siberian Express), and Indochina (Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam). Spain, Morocco, Ghana, and Mali are on the agenda for Summer 2010.

Jones's high-resolution travel photography and photojournalism is freely available for non-commercial and commercial use under a CreativeCommons license, through both Wikimedia Commons and Flickr. The Travel Page of his personal website includes extensive photo galleries and written accounts. His first book of travel photography, Latin American Portraits, was published by The Key Publishing Co. (Toronto) in 2008.

Jones is single/never married, though he is often seen in the company of Griselda Ramirez, a pediatric neurosurgeon based in Mexico City. His parents, Jo and David Jones, are retired and live in Vernon, B.C. Jo is the author of Hobnobbing with a Countess and Other Okanagan Adventures: The Diaries of Alice Barrett Parke (University of British Columbia Press, 2001). His brother, Craig Jones, is a constitutional advisor to the Attorney General of British Columbia in Victoria, B.C. Craig holds a Master of Laws degree from Harvard University, and has published extensively in the legal field.