Redefining Genocide

Settler Colonialism, Social Death and Ecocide

Damien Short

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781783601707
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In this highly controversial and original work, Damien Short systematically rethinks how genocide is and should be defined. Rather than focusing solely on a narrow conception of genocide as direct mass-killing, through close empirical analysis of a number of under-discussed case studies – including Palestine, Sri Lanka, Australia and Alberta, Canada – the book reveals the key role played by settler colonialism, capitalism, finite resources and the ecological crisis in driving genocidal social death on a global scale.

1 | DEFINITIONAL CONUNDRUMS: A SOCIOLOGICAL APPROACH TO GENOCIDE

Introduction: sociology and genocide studies

The discipline of sociology was as slow to engage with Holocaust and genocide studies as it was with the theory and practice of human rights.1 The legacy of classical sociology’s emphasis on ‘value-free’ ‘scientific’ methodology, which precluded normative considerations (Short 2009: 97), was perhaps the main reason why both areas of potential study remained under-explored by sociologists for so long. Back in 1982 Irving Horowitz suggested that when it comes to such things as human rights violations and genocide ‘many sociologists exhibit a studied embarrassment … feeling that intellectual issues posed in such a manner are melodramatic and unfit for scientific discourse’ (Horowitz 1982: 3). Zygmunt Bauman was equally blunt when he commented that ‘phrases like “the sanctity of human life” or “moral duty” sound as alien in a sociology seminar as they do in the smoke-free sanitized rooms of a bureaucratic office’ (Bauman 1990: 9–10). For a time, the dominant view of sociologists working in the field was that the discipline had not been significant in shaping our understanding of genocide as a concept and as a practice.2

In the years prior to serious sociological engagement with genocide studies, the Holocaust came to be seen as a paradigmatic, or even the only true, example of genocide.3 This bias towards the Holocaust, combined with a legal scholarly focus on the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide 1948 (The UN Convention), produced a dominant view of genocide that focused on intentional mass killing of certain groups under the direction of the state.4 Nevertheless, as with the study of human rights, over time sociologists began to make some important contributions to genocide studies. Given that a primary task of the sociologist ‘is the construction of a special kind of general concept’, as Thomas Burger put it, it was not surprising that sociologists sought to engage in the debates over the meaning of genocide.5 Indeed, some of the most frequently cited definitions are from sociological studies dating back to the early 1990s, while sociologist Leo Kuper’s seminal text was published in 1981.6

In the definitional debates the major contentious issues have been: identifying the social groups capable of being victims of genocide, the centrality afforded mass killing, the type of genocidal ‘intent’ required and the exclusion of cultural genocide. Concerning potential victim groups, Alison Palmer, for example, points out the UN Convention ‘definition excludes not only groups such as mentally handicapped or homosexuals, both of whom were targeted for destruction by the Nazis, but also political groups’ (Palmer 2000). Adam Jones in his textbook captured the general consensus that has developed since the 1980s:7 ‘I consider mass killing to be definitional to genocide … in charting my own course, I am wary of labelling as “genocide” cases where mass killing has not occurred’ (Jones 2006: 22).

In the early 1990s two influential sociological studies engaged with the definitional debates and made contributions of lasting significance. In a book on the History and Sociology of Genocide, which emerged from their teaching throughout the 1980s, Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn advanced a now frequently cited definition of genocide that sought to overcome some of the problems associated with defining groups by arguing that it is in fact the perpetrator that defines the victim group in genocides. For Chalk and Jonassohn (1990: Note 7) genocide is: ‘a form of one-sided mass killing in which a state or other authority intends to destroy a group, as that group and membership in it are defined by the perpetrator’.

Many social scientists now formulate their definition of genocide to include any group, be it a political, economic or cultural collectivity, with such groups being defined, as above, by perpetrator selection. In support of this position some authors cite examples from the two most prominent genocides. For example, Alison Palmer argues that during the Nazi genocides it was they who identified who qualified as a Jew or a mentally or physically handicapped person, regardless of the victim’s self-perception (Palmer 2000). While in Rwanda identity cards specified the categories Hutu and Tutsi, such cards presented at checkpoints did not necessarily spare individuals ‘whose skin was a bit too light, who were a bit too tall or whose necks were a bit too long’ (Levene 2005: 80). As Levene suggests, ‘if they looked like Tutsi they might as well be Tutsi. Ultimately, no social or any other science can determine how perpetrators define a group, whether this has some relationship to social reality, or is entirely something which has developed in their own heads’ (ibid.: 80). This definition of victim group is thus infinitely open-ended, allowing for the construction of groups from the paranoid imagination of perpetrators.

Defining genocide in this way allows for the possibility that certain groups may be selected for destruction when prior to this act of selection no such groups existed. Although Chalk and Jonassohn did not draw specifically on labelling theory, their understanding of genocide is certainly informed by its insights. Labelling theory emerged out of the sociology of deviance and was fundamentally based on symbolic interactionist epistemology. Howard Becker’s seminal 1963 work Outsiders (1997 [1963]) is a classic example, which posits that the construction and destruction of enemies (or so-called ‘deviants’) depends on their labelling as such by the powerful (on this point see Fein 1993: 14). As justification for their position Chalk and Jonassohn cite W. I. Thomas’s famous dictum that ‘if people define a situation as real it is real in its consequences’ (Chalk and Jonassohn 1990).

Even so, sociologist Helen Fein, in her seminal special edition of Current Sociology, suggests that the victims of genocide are generally members of previously existing real groups, whether conceived of as collectivities, races or classes, and who acknowledge their existence. In formulating her own definition of genocide, Fein sought to circumvent the problem of excluding certain types of groups by using the term ‘collectivity’. Fein argued that the ‘UNGC definition of genocide can be reconciled with an expanded – but bounded – sociological definition if we focus on how core concepts are related’. Taking the root genus, Fein argued that Raphael Lemkin and the UN framers had in mind ‘basic kinds, classes or sub-families of humanity, persisting units of society’, whose definition should be ‘consistent with our sociological knowledge of both the persistence and construction of group identities in society’ (Fein 1993: 23–4). For Fein the distinctive sociological point is that such groups are usually ascriptive – based on birth rather than choice – often inspire enduring particularistic loyalties, and ‘are the seed-bed of social movements, voluntary associations, congregations and families; in brief they are collectivities’ (ibid.: 23). She thus settled on the following definition: ‘Genocide is sustained purposeful action by a perpetrator to physically destroy a collectivity directly or indirectly, through interdiction of the biological and social reproduction of group members, sustained regardless of the surrender or lack of threat offered by the victim’ (ibid.: 24).

For Fein, then, any social collectivity could be a victim of genocide so long as the offending actions were ‘purposeful’ and ‘physically’ destructive. Such requirements were her attempt at answering two key issues in defining genocide: what should count as sufficient ‘intent to destroy’ and what sorts of action can count as genocidal destruction. As she points out, one of the main problems with the notion of ‘intent to destroy’ is that most authors conflate ‘motive’ with ‘intent’. The words ‘as such’ in the UN Convention are no doubt partly to blame for this confusion as they require that groups be intentionally targeted because of who they are and not for any other reason such as economic gain or self-defence. Given that perpetrators may well have multiple reasons for genocidal action it is not surprising that Fein advocated a more sociologically realistic approach – sustained purposeful action. Under such a formula intent can also be inferred from action, which is entirely consistent with a long-established principle in British common law.8 However, when considering the type of action that counts as genocidal her requirement that a group be ‘physically’ destroyed is sociologically inadequate and at odds with Lemkin’s understanding.

Recent sociological engagement has continued...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Book epigraph
• About the author
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 | Definitional conundrums: a sociological approach to genocide
• 2 | The genocide–ecocide nexus
• 3 | Palestine
• 4 | Sri Lanka
• 5 | Australia
• 6 | Tar sands and the indigenous peoples of northern Alberta
• 7 | Looking to the future: where to from here?
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index