Genocide Matters

Ongoing Issues and Emerging Perspectives

Joyce Apsel, Ernesto Verdeja

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415814898
• eBook ISBN: 9781135920203
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Diplomacy & Treaties
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This edited book provides an interdisciplinary overview of recent scholarship in the field of genocide studies. The book examines four main areas:

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• The current state of research on genocide
• New thinking on the categories and methods of mass violence
• Developments in teaching about genocide
• Critical analyses of military humanitarian interventions and post-violence justice and reconciliation

The combination of critical scholarship and innovative approaches to familiar subjects makes this essential reading for all students and scholars in the field of genocide studies.

Chapter 1

Introduction: Genocide Matters

Ongoing issues and emerging perspectives

Joyce Apsel and Ernesto Verdeja

War and atrocity have been subjects of public and scholarly interest from ancient times to the present. However, the use of genocide as a conceptual lens to focus on the targeting of civilian populations for destruction is a modern phenomenon. The term genocide, from the Greek genos (race, tribe), and the Latin caedere (to kill), was coined by Raphael Lemkin in 1944 in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, which described the laws and policies of occupation that resulted in the domination and annihilation of peoples. Some four decades later, Leo Kuper wrote in one of the first works to use the term in its title: “the term is new but the crime is ancient.”¹

The crime is indeed ancient, even as our understanding of the complexity and dynamics of human destructiveness continues to evolve and as further mass violence takes place before our eyes. This volume aims to deepen how we approach and analyze such destruction. The chapters include re-evaluations of earlier studies, debates and trends, analyses of under-researched subjects such as education, sexual violence, and genocide by attrition, and explorations of the challenges and future directions for studying and thinking about genocide.

The Evolution of Genocide as a Field of Study

Scholars began focusing on the mass atrocities inflicted on civilian populations as a separate subject of research after the traumas of World War I and World War II. The mass killings, rapes and other atrocities, as well as the presence of millions of refugees and survivors across Europe following World War II, drove scholars to conduct new studies on the origins, causes and methods of wide-scale violence and human suffering. In their broadest terms, these studies sought to explain the overwhelming violence of the recent past, while also uncovering disappeared peoples and neglected histories of violence and investigating the complexity of patterns of extermination across numerous cases.

Genocide emerged as a field of scholarly inquiry as historians, political scientists and other social scientists began analyzing the causes and methods of Nazi violence in the years after World War II, an interest that was reinforced by public fascination with Nazism and fascism. Nevertheless, this was a slow and uneven process: most early research on genocide was devoted solely (or primarily) to the Nazi extermination of Europe’s Jews, and few studies sought to place the Holocaust in comparison with other cases of mass violence elsewhere in the world. Indeed, in the years after Germany’s defeat scholars and others grappled with how to conceptualize the enormity and specificity of Nazism’s crimes, and it was not until the 1970s that the term “Holocaust” came into wide use to describe what political scientist Raul Hilberg had earlier termed “The Destruction of the European Jews.” Debates about the use and meaning of the term “Holocaust” have continued, with disagreements over whether to include Roma and Sinti, homosexuals and other targeted groups under its umbrella; the term’s applicability to slavery, colonialism and other cases of human destructiveness; and whether the Holocaust was “unique” and what implications this may have for studying other genocides and historic atrocities.²

This early scholarship on the Holocaust examined the ways in which antisemitism and expansionist policies targeted disfavored and despised minorities, from persecution to physical destruction. These works included investigating the origins, sequencing, and dynamics of mass violence, as well as the roles of dehumanizing cultural views and ideologies that facilitated extermination.³ On the one hand, scholarship on the nature and significance of the Holocaust provided areas of research and cross-fertilization that were taken up in subsequent studies of different and comparative cases of genocidal events. In some instances, Holocaust studies served as the model or yardstick for comparisons between one or more cases. For example, studies that showed the similarities between the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust provided an interpretive framework that gave attention to a genocide that had largely been ignored. On the other hand, there was considerable tension between scholars from the 1970s and later who debated the analytical and normative consequences of adopting comparative approaches that often times did not privilege any one case as the defining example of genocide. As this volume makes clear, these debates about studying the Holocaust, or what a number of scholars now refer to as Nazi genocides, have given rise to a complex politics of genocide scholarship that continues today, with debates between some Holocaust scholars and comparativists over the value of comparative scholarship.

From the 1990s on, scholarly perspectives on genocide were transformed as the number of studies of both particular cases and comparative analyses multiplied. Public and academic interest in genocide increased in the face of media coverage during and after the mass atrocities in Rwanda and the Balkans. Scholars and policy analysts, influenced by the growing numbers of non-governmental organizations and expanding scholarship on human rights, began to focus on other cases of atrocity, both historical and contemporary. Path-breaking studies on particular cases such as the Armenian genocide, the Cambodian genocide or other singular events of destruction, which tended to provide historically detailed descriptions of the causes and patterns of mass violence in a particular time and place, were synthesized into broader frameworks in the 1990s, generating a sophisticated literature on comparative theorizing and modeling over the past 20 years. For example, Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn’s important survey course and text, The History and Sociology of Genocide (1990), helped introduce the new comparative approach to the study of genocide. Within two decades, a number of volumes were published that provide world surveys of genocide. Indeed, scholarship has broadened to investigate targeted destruction and violence and their ongoing impact in a range of contexts and times, from colonial policies of elimination to the “national security” doctrines of Latin America.⁴ Today, genocide is receiving greater focus from scholars across the social sciences, and the multidisciplinary field of genocide studies itself is growing rapidly. The institutionalization of genocide studies is reflected in the founding of two comparative studies journals⁵ and the establishment of two international scholarly associations and other institutes focused on studying genocide.⁶ Additionally, the publication of a series of works and analyses on conceptual clarification, necessary conditions, and the various patterns of genocidal violence points to ongoing intellectual and public interest in the subject.

Recent Directions in the Study of Genocide

This focus on genocide over the past 20 years has resulted in important research advances. There are now empirically detailed accounts of the best-known cases, including Armenia, the Holocaust, Cambodia, Rwanda, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as on mass killings in China and the Soviet Union.⁷ Comparative work also continues to mature, with scholars devoting more attention to the role of contingency in the escalation of violence to genocide and developing sophisticated models of the tipping points that explain how sporadic and targeted killings become a widespread and coordinated plan of destruction.⁸ Large databases and quantitative studies on political violence, a mainstay of the civil wars literature, have also deepened our understandings of the general conditions that enable genocide and related forms of violence.⁹ Historians provide empirically rich and nuanced analyses of macro-historical processes and detail the complex interactions between agency and structure in genocide,¹⁰ while psychologists adapt classic and contemporary social psychology research on obedience and scapegoating to explain acculturation to violence and popular support for genocidal elites.¹¹ Political scientists and sociologists employ rational choice and prospect theories of elite strategic action,¹² structuralist analyses of social crises,¹³ and theories of state repression, social stratification, instability and radical ideology to analyze the onset and development of genocide.¹⁴ Anthropologists in turn provide sophisticated readings of cultural norms and practices to explain popular receptivity and resistance to genocidal propaganda and outgrouping.¹⁵ They also largely lead the way in looking at post-genocidal societies and cultures, a subject of study that is expanding across disciplines.¹⁶ Legal scholars and practitioners draw on the social sciences to inform the prosecution of mass crimes, while simultaneously participating in definitional and methodological debates about the meaning and study of genocide.¹⁷ Genocide studies today is an expanding and rich area of research.

Continuing Challenges and Unsettled Questions

Genocide studies as a subfield or field of study (and where and how to place it in relation to other research fields remains an ongoing debate) has in a number of respects come into its own. However, as the chapters in this volume highlight, there remains both a series of continuing unsettled issues as well as new critiques and analytical directions to pursue. These include disputes over the definition and parameters of the term “genocide,” a consequence of ongoing scholarly dissatisfaction with what are viewed as the limitations and biases of the United Nations definition.¹⁸ A number of chapters in this volume (Alexander Hinton on “critical genocide studies” and Roger Smith on rape) point to the importance of understanding how and why certain cases, patterns, and methods were ignored, and explore ways to rethink genocide and its dynamics. In response, scholars continue to develop various alternative definitions with the aim of giving the concept more coherence and analytical leverage.¹⁹ Some analysts adopt a rather restricted view of what qualifies as genocide, focusing only on instances where extermination was driven by an explicit ideology of national purification and cleansing.²⁰ Others are less concerned with ideology as a bounding concept, and attempt to explain large-scale atrocity more generally, such as by focusing on the systematic physical destruction of groups, regardless of group identity or perpetrator motivation,²¹ while others have generated a complex taxonomy of violence that includes urbicide, politicide, ethnic cleansing, murderous cleansing, and even auto-genocide to explain a variety of phenomena that share family resemblances with one another and with the definition laid out in the UN’s 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.²² Further complicating this historiography is the fact that numerous and significant works, such as Michael Mann’s The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing, keep their distance from associating with genocide as a frame of analysis, but analyze the same case studies and processes. These developments reflect new sensitivity to the multiple ways in which mass violence originates and develops, but it also means few scholars use the same operational definitions. Thus they may select different cases for analysis that cohere to their definitions. Variation in case selection in turn makes it difficult to compare alternative causal theories, since these theories focus on a range of different processes and violent outcomes.

The multiplicity of analytical frames and terms means that there is continued disagreement on the relative strengths and weaknesses of different theoretical frameworks.²³ This raises a series of theoretical and empirical research questions: what are the most fruitful advances and findings in comparative research? What lessons can be drawn from various disciplines and methods? What are the limitations and strengths of pursuing single case and multiple case studies? These questions are important not only for developing sound theory, but also for informing effective strategies for the detection and prevention of genocide – that is, for practical efforts at stopping future genocides.

There is also still very little work that attempts to draw connections between genocide research and research on other forms of political violence.²⁴ Contemporary comparative literature tends to examine genocidal outcomes across cases, but not how genocide is related to other kinds of violence more generally. This is a fruitful area for further work, and includes investigating connections with the literatures on civil wars,²⁵ ethnic violence,²⁶ political repression,²⁷ “asymmetric” guerrilla warfare,²⁸ and structural violence.²⁹ How do these various phenomena connect to one another? For example, under what conditions does civil war become genocidal? How are counterinsurgency warfare and genocide related? Does severe structural violence constitute a form of genocide, and if so how? Are there insights that genocide studies can contribute to the study of other forms of violence, and vice versa?

There is no simple response to the problem of definitional proliferation and its consequences, and it is unlikely that scholars and activists will settle on a single definition. The legal definition of genocide in the UN Genocide Convention undoubtedly will continue to be the standard against which alternative definitions and terminologies are put forth. However, conceptual and theoretical variation may in fact shed light on important similarities and differences across cases that would otherwise be missed by demanding a uniform definition. The key is to be clear about our assumptions in defining and explaining genocide, and encourage reflection on what is “left out” in how we conceptualize genocide for research. Scholars are critically interrogating what Alexander Hinton, in his chapter for this volume, describes as the core “canon” of cases in genocide studies: Armenia, the Holocaust, Cambodia, Rwanda, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. They are asking which groups or cases have been largely ignored in earlier research (such as those of indigenous peoples or Biafra, Burundi, East Pakistan, and Indonesia, to name a few), what explains these omissions, and what the analytical and methodological consequences are of decentering this canon. As the field has become internally more pluralistic and heterogeneous, scholars are including historically ignored victim groups in current stud...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• 1. Introduction: Genocide Matters: ongoing issues and emerging perspectives
• 2. Questioning Boundaries: what’s old and what’s new in comparative genocide theory
• 3. Critical Genocide Studies
• 4. Holocaust Studies and Genocide Studies: past, present, and future
• 5. Genocide and the Politics of Rape: historical and psychological perspectives
• 6. Genocide by Attrition: silent and efficient
• 7. Research and Teaching about Genocide: history, challenges and new directions
• 8. Humanitarian Military Intervention After the “Responsibility to Protect”: obstacles and prospects
• 9. Transitional Justice and Genocide
• References
• Index