Genocide, Risk and Resilience

An Interdisciplinary Approach

B. Ingelaere, S. Parmentier, B. Ingelaere, S. Parmentier, Kenneth A. Loparo, Kenneth A. Loparo, B. Ingelaere, S. Parmentier, Barbara Segaert, Jacques Haers

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137332431
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This interdisciplinary volume aims to understand the linkages between the origins and aftermaths of genocide. Exploring social dynamics and human behaviour, this collection considers the interplay of various psychological, political, anthropological and historical factors at work in genocidal processes.

Part I
Prevention and Coping: Theoretical Debates and Institutional Frameworks

1

The Concept of Genocide:

What Are We Preventing?

Martin Shaw

The ethical and political commitments that underlie scholarship on the prevention of genocide are more obvious than in other fields. Indeed, the concept of genocide was invented as part of Raphael Lemkin’s ambitious project (1933 and 1944) to criminalise a general class of destructive actions against population groups. Since Lemkin’s campaign was extraordinarily successful, for over sixty years genocide has been defined as an international crime. The United Nations, together with the majority of the world’s states who have ratified the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, are legally bound to ‘prevent and punish’ the acts that have been defined as genocide. We know, however, that this obligation has hardly been fulfilled. Genocide has remained a huge problem of human society during the last sixty years, as the names of countries like Cambodia, Bosnia and Rwanda remind us. While the twentieth century has been called the ‘century of genocide’ (Weitz, 2005), there are those who foresee that the twenty-first century may be just as marred by it (Levene, 2010).

In this chapter I discuss current debates about the ‘concept of genocide’. I shall address the discrepancy between the requirements of international law and the historical experience of millions of new sufferers from genocide, together with the question of how to overcome it, but in a somewhat indirect fashion. This chapter is divided in three parts. I start by discussing the idea of genocide, its meaning and coherence. Second, I discuss the political and cultural context of genocide studies, together with how this leads to simplistic ideas of prevention. Finally, I address how we might adequately locate contemporary dangers of genocide so as to realistically frame the problem of prevention.

The meaning of genocide

As I have explained elsewhere (Shaw, 2007b: 17–36), Lemkin, although driven by his legal objective, laid out a concept of genocide that was essentially historical and sociological, and he later drafted some interesting commentaries on the history of the phenomenon (Docker, 2008; Moses, 2010). The core of his concept was that genocide was organised, multifaceted social destruction, directed primarily against national groups, and he famously distinguished between this and what he called the ‘immediate destruction’, or physical destruction, of these groups. The latter was, in Lemkin’s view, only one method or form of genocide, not the essence of the phenomenon itself (Lemkin, 1944: 79).

In making this distinction, Lemkin opened up what has become the definitional quandary of the genocide studies field. Many subsequent commentators have ignored what William A. Schabas (2000: 25) rightly calls Lemkin’s ‘broad’ definition, and have opted instead for a narrow definition mainly or exclusively in terms of physical destruction (for example, Fein, 1990) or as some put it more directly, ‘mass murder’ (Chalk and Jonassohn, 1990; Charny, 1994).

This definition of the 1948 Genocide Convention and its role in this process is closer to Lemkin’s than to Chalk and Jonassohn’s or Charny’s, and remains relatively broad; it retains Lemkin’s key idea that genocide is deliberate, multifaceted social destruction, involving a relatively wide range of means (not only killing and physical harm but mental harm, too). Crucially, it specified as one means, ‘deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part’. On the one hand, this retained the ‘broad’ idea that group destruction may be caused by ‘conditions of life’ that are inflicted. On the other hand, it introduces the ‘narrow’ idea that destruction is physical rather than social, which provides the cue for the 1990s revisionism (United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, 1948, Article 2).

The status of the UN definition is clearly an important issue for genocide studies. Lawyers have little choice but to regard this definition as foundational, although some (but by no means all) of its inadequacies have been exposed in the jurisprudence of the last two decades, leading to case law that has moved the legal understanding on a little (Schabas, 2000: 131–2). Likewise, students of international politics must take account of the fact that for the UN and the 140 signatory states, the Convention represents the legitimate international framework for responding to genocide.

However it is not clear why other social scientists, historians or philosophers should consider it appropriate to use the UN definition. The divide between broad and narrow approaches, and the many nuances even between definitions that are on the same side of the divide, may explain why scholars sometimes adopt the UN definition as a matter of convenience, but they cannot justify this. Academic knowledge should surely adopt a critical standpoint towards political and legal artefacts. The Convention represents, after all, a political compromise between the victorious powers of the Second World War (which included Stalin’s Soviet Union, clearly a genocidal state) and the other founder members of the UN.

Some of the deficiencies that resulted from these power relations – notably the exclusion of political groups and social classes – are well known. Others are less so, but have proved at least as disabling, especially that as Schabas (2000: 195) points out, ‘the drafters of the Convention quite deliberately resisted attempts to encompass the phenomenon of ethnic cleansing within the punishable acts’. Forced removal was the most common means by which deliberate social destruction was practiced in the 1940s, as it is today (although the perpetrator euphemism, ‘ethnic cleansing’, was not widely adopted until the 1990s). The method was widely used by UN members (not just the USSR), was condoned by the Western powers (the USA and Great Britain) and was even stimulated by the UN’s own policies (notably the partition of Palestine in 1948).

If this was not enough, some of the intellectual baggage of the 1940s that is reflected in the Convention – such as the assumption that racial, national, ethnic and religious ‘groups’ have objective existence rather than being socially constructed (chiefly, as Chalk and Jonassohn, 1990, seminally pointed out, by the approach of the perpetrators) – has been recognised as inadequate in the Rwanda Tribunal. Indeed, it is widely rejected by social scientists, and even Schabas (2000: 109) acknowledges that ‘[d]etermining the meaning of the groups protected by the Convention seems to dictate a degree of subjectivity. It is the offender who defines the individual victim’s status as a member of a group protected by the Convention.’

Even this does not exhaust the Convention’s dubious meaning for genocide research. Crucially, the Convention’s emphasis on acts committed with ‘intent’ to destroy a group, entirely understandable from the point of view of criminal law whose purpose is to define individuals’ responsibilities for their actions, has proved a major liability for the wider study of the phenomenon. The reified legal idea of a grand intention, a ‘dolus specialis’, which must stand behind any action deemed genocidal, has debilitated the field. Although sociologists have attempted to make the understanding of intent more realistic, as in Helen Fein’s (1990: 20) idea that genocide is ‘sustained purposeful action’ and Michael Mann’s (2005) argument that we should be talking about intentions, plural, that undergo change (typically there are plans A, B and C), these reinterpretations have faced an uphill struggle against ingrained legalism.

However the ramifications have been wider than this. The emphasis on intent has given the subjective orientations of one type of actor, ‘perpetrators’, an excessive role in explanations of genocide, leading to the other side of the core genocidal relationships being represented as pure ‘victims’ and third-party actors being characterised as mere ‘bystanders’. This fundamentally unbalances the evaluation of the agency of these three classes of actor, leads to genocide being defined as simply ‘one-sided’ (Chalk and Jonassohn, 1990; Charny, 1994), and in turn blocks recognition of genocide as a form of conflict between two types of actors that typically involves significant action by third parties. At the same time, the definition by intent privileges ideology, and especially racism, in the understanding of genocide, at the expense of more mundane political and especially security factors that are typically powerful (Moses, 2011).

The emphasis on intent thus blocks recognition of genocide as a ‘structural’ phenomenon, linked to certain general patterns. This idea, adumbrated particularly by Australian historians (Barta, 1987; Moses, 2000), in the context of the colonial destruction of indigenous societies, has been regarded as heresy (Fein, 1990). Yet in social science and history in general it is a fundamental understanding that ‘agency’ goes together with ‘structure’, and that explanation must encompass both. Even Max Weber, known for his emphasis on the role of subjective orientations in the sociology of action, was emphatic on the need for structural explanation (Burger, 1987). For Weber, Verstehen was just the first stage of ‘understanding’: yet genocide studies seem to be ‘stuck’ at this stage (Shaw, 2007b: 92).

How should we understand the structures of genocide and the structures that produce genocide? These are large and complex questions, detailed discussion of which is beyond the scope of this contribution. Two fundamental issues can, however, be outlined. First, the structure of genocide as conflict can be most simply defined as the relationship between armed power organisations and the targets of their destructive violence, civilian population groups (for my full definition, see Shaw, 2007b: 155). However this relationship is invariably embedded in larger patterns of (directly) political and military and (usually more indirectly) economic and cultural relationships.

Indeed, while genocide is often seen as fundamentally different from other sorts of social conflict, it is in fact closely related to and typically intertwined with them to the extent that we should recognise it as typically a hybrid phenomenon. Genocide is generally combined with more conventional political and especially armed conflict, and cannot be understood outside these connections (Shaw, 2007a). The study of armed violence against civilians in war has mushroomed in recent years (for a seminal theory and survey, see Kalyvas, 2006), sometimes more or less deliberately avoiding ‘genocide’ terminology (Cohen and Deng, 2009: 20). The danger of prevalent understandings of genocide is that they reinforce a tendency to marginalise genocide theory in understanding contemporary patterns of anti-civilian violence, when in fact it is essential for understanding it that war and genocide are integrated.

Second, the structural context of genocide is usually defined in terms of the domestic relations of a state. Even the mass murder of Jews from all over the Nazis’ European empire, conquered through aggressive international war, has been influentially described as a ‘domestic’ genocide (Melson, 1996). Where international contexts are recognised, they are usually seen as subregional in scope (‘bad neighbourhoods’). Genocide research is then defined as the ‘comparative’ study of serial domestic cases. Clearly comparison is essential, but the idea that our universe of cases is a set of discrete domestic or subregional situations removes questions of larger regional and global contexts. Yet international structures have been increasingly problematised, not only in attempts to define the ‘international system’ as such as the basic causal context (Levene, 2005), but in more specified accounts of macro-historical contexts (for example, Bloxham, 2007). These accounts are important in illuminating relations between local perpetrators and major international actors and institutions, showing how the latter are implicated in producing genocide. The trend should even be seen, I have argued, in terms of a shift from ‘comparative’ to a new ‘international’ genocide studies (Shaw, 2011a).

The political context of genocide studies and simplistic ideas of prevention

I now turn to explanations of the issues that I have identified in genocide studies and their implications for understanding prevention. It is clear that the shift from Lemkin’s broad definition to the narrow definitions of the 1990s follows, to a considerable extent, the changed evaluation of what Lemkin called ‘the Nazi genocide’. Where he saw a broad socially destructive process against a wide range of occupied peoples, increasingly dominant trends in popular and academic consciousness have recognised only the mass murder of the Jews, which is now called ‘the Holocaust’, and utilised this as the benchmark for defining genocide in other cases.

Some have seen in this change a fundamentally instrumental development in Israeli and American political life (Novick, 2000). However the sociologist Jeffrey Alexander (2002 and et. al. 2009) has argued that it was a broader cultural process, in which the Holocaust became (in Durkheimian terms) a ‘sacred evil’. The mass murder of the Jews became the quintessential modern evil, against which all other evil should be set. While one reflection of this was the idea of Holocaust ‘uniqueness’, he argues that a more pervasive (and constructive) tendency was to ‘bridge’ from the Holocaust to recognise other cases of genocide.

It is evident that the field of genocide studies is fundamentally implicated in these cultural (and political) processes. Clearly no one here holds a simple ‘Holocaust uniqueness’ standpoint. Yet the special character of the Holocaust and its relationships to Jewish and Israeli identity are widely invoked, especially whenever the State of Israel is criticised within a perspective on genocide and mass atrocities (Shaw, 2011b). Moreover the sense of bridging from (or more accurately, to) the Holocaust has been central to the field, especially in the ground-breaking and successful efforts to define the destruction of the Armenians as a genocide because of the similarity of this process to the mass murder of the Jews. Moreover these efforts have been mimicked in the efforts of Greek scholar-campaigners to define the Ottoman destruction of Pontic Greek communities as a genocide, because of their similarity and relationship to the Armenian Genocide (Genocide Prevention Now, 2011).

What has happened is that a strong trend in genocide studies has extended the ‘sacred-evil’ character of the Holocaust to ‘genocide’ in general, so that a researcher’s decision to ‘award’ genocide status to an atrocity becomes much more than a normal scholarly categorisation. Genocide recognition becomes a primary aim of scholarship, which is sometimes motivated by the nationalist desire to recognise the victimhood of one’s own people. Even genocide scholars who are not motivated by particularist claims become targets of nationalist campaigning – in recent months the present writer has been invited to write (for a significant fee) a report endorsing one set of genocide claims, and to comment on a campaigning report produced to support another.

While I feel uncomfortable with these approaches, it is indicative that the foremost professional organisation of genocide scholars, the Inter...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Between Risk and Resilience – An Interdisciplinary Dialogue on Genocide
• Part I Prevention and Coping: Theoretical Debates and Institutional Frameworks
• Part II Risk and Resilience: Contextual and Empirical Insights
• Index