Sites of Genocide

Adam Jones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781032001517
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000586664
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Human Rights
• Index: Politics & International Relations

"Genocide" may be the most powerful word in the English language. What is the significance and relevance of this formative concept today? In an extraordinarily wide-ranging collection of essays and interviews, Adam Jones, one of the world's leading genocide scholars, explores the uses and controversies surrounding the term that Raphael Lemkin coined during the Second World War to describe and prohibit mass atrocities against defined human groups.

In a style that is learned but always accessible and engaging, Jones addresses key historical and contemporary issues, such as: What were the motivations and proclaimed justifications for genocide in the "long nineteenth century" that shaped our modern world? How can "humanitarian" interventions in genocide avoid sliding into new imperialism? What are the connections between religion and genocide? How can the gender variable in genocide perpetration and victimization be understood? A wide range of historical and contemporary genocides and crimes against humanity, from the eighteenth-century slave rebellion in Haiti to Myanmar's destruction of the Rohingya, and to the forms of structural and systemic violence that Jones argues should be encompassed by any global-historical understanding of genocide.

Sites of Genocide is illustrated with photos from Jones's own collection and other sources. It will be of interest to all students and scholars of human rights and for general readers seeking a point of entry to the rich and provocative debates in comparative genocide studies.

Part 1History and Culture

1Genocide and Global/World HistoryReflections^*

DOI: 10.4324/​9781003172963-3

What do we gain (or lose) by positing a field of “genocide in a global history”? Would you distinguish between global and world history?

I write not as a professional historian but as someone who has fastened leech-like onto the work of those who are. My goal has been, and remains, to develop an understanding of genocide as a terrifyingly regular feature – almost a constant – of world history and probably of human prehistory as well.

Such a world historical understanding is, of course, essential to crafting a “comprehensive introduction” to genocide.¹ I believe it has notable methodological and moral implications as well. It encourages a more sober, reflective and self-critical understanding of genocide as a geographically and historically pervasive phenomenon. Genocide scholars have moved beyond conventionally (and safely) anathematized cases, like the Nazi and Ottoman examples, to encompass most crucially the holocausts inflicted by the West upon indigenous populations. These exterminations laid the foundations of the modern states in which most genocide scholars reside and research. As a field, thanks to early and important contributions by Tony Barta, Ward Churchill, and others, we have been ahead of the academic curve in exploring the skeletons in our own national and cultural closets. Indeed, this has probably been the single most prominent line of research in comparative genocide studies for the past decade or more.

^* Excerpted from Mohamed Adhikari et al., “Genocide and Global and/or World History: Reflections,” Journal of Genocide Research, 20: 1 (2018), pp. 134–53. Journal editor Dirk Moses asked contributors to respond to three questions, italicized in this text, but these were later reduced to the first two; my published answers are reproduced here. I have added the original third query, which I found thought-provoking, and responded especially for this volume.

An encompassing approach, if honest and inclusive, helps to undermine some pernicious myths. It destabilizes notions of civilized/developed versus uncivilized/primitive peoples and erodes the smugness of those who inevitably and egoistically assign themselves to the former category. It also quashes the political correctness evident in simple equations of indigenous = good/victimized and imperialist = bad/victimizer. We find that few “nations” or “peoples” – of course, these are also imagined constructs – are innocent of genocide over the longue durée of their histories. The human drama, usually presented in triumphalist terms, is at least equally a tragedy when viewed from a “world” perspective. It is a narrative of expansion, conquest and subjugation – not only of other “nations” and “peoples,” but of nature and non-human species.

Influenced by the recent work of Yuval Noah Harari,² I have wondered if we need in genocide studies a species history alongside an inevitably anthropocentric “world” or “global” one. Such an approach might allow us to confront our species nature, separate from historical commonalities and comparisons. Insights from psychology, sociology, religious studies, gender studies and the natural/environmental sciences may be of equal or greater relevance in assessing and altering our unique capacity for mass destruction of life, including the self-annihilation of Homo sapiens that we may well experience before this century is out.

Will this involve a revolutionary transformation in our “speciesist” approach to the human, social and indeed natural sciences? Will future generations of genocide scholars – if they exist – pursue a more holistic investigation of human violence and destructiveness?

Will they incorporate the fact that everywhere our species has trodden, it has driven non-human species en masse to extinction or enslavement and now stands poised to commit collective suicide? We are living not only in an epochal moment but very possibly in a terminal one, caught between the pincers of nuclearism and anthropogenic climate change. So far, our cognitive limitations and moral–political complacency have produced only tentative and fragmentary responses – indeed, often compulsively counterproductive ones.

To speak of a “moment” or “epoch” implies a macro-historical framing, and a necessary one if Homo sapiens – along with its component tribes and polities – is to survive. In fashioning and refining this heuristic, is it useful to distinguish between “world” and “global” history? The latter seems to incorporate a deeper understanding of history as a process: specifically, the process of “globalization” that most scholars date to the late fifteenth century, with the formation of the global capitalist economy and attendant scientific revolutions that rapidly eroded the “Here there be monsters” approach to global geography and cartography.

World historical trends in genocide studies have advanced an understanding of genocide's global reach and prevalence and spawned a recognition that genocides can be studied as processes and not merely discrete events. Again, the growing reckoning with western genocides of indigenous peoples worldwide has been critical. The paradigm shift implied by the subtitle of Ward Churchill's radical and magisterial A Little Matter of Genocide – “Holocaust and Denial in the Americas 1492 to the Present”³ – implies that a coherent genocidal process can be traced through centuries of historical time (and denied for as long). Mark Levene's four-volume study, Genocide in the Age of the Nation State and The Crisis of Genocide,⁴ is an exemplar of this approach, and for me, the richest and most expansive study of genocide yet crafted. Per my earlier comments, I doubt it is coincidental that Levene has also been at the vanguard of efforts to incorporate a global–environmental and supra-species perspective in our field.

I confess that I have devoted relatively little attention and study to premodern genocides. In my introductory textbook, I skate over the Neanderthals, biblical narratives, the Roman and Mongol empires and so on in a few pages of Chapter 1 before engaging substantively with the histories of the past half-millennium. Reliable documentation of premodern eras is, of course, a factor. But while I want to at least pay lip-service to Raphael Lemkin's foundational global historical framing, I am guided by a sense that contemporary readers are more likely to be engaged and animated by a focus on the “modern” world, which also allows for connections to be drawn to the “transnational and global social processes” emphasized by Mohamed Adhikari [elsewhere in the forum].

How do you organize this history (or histories) in time and space? What about case selection and temporality? How do other forms of mass violence relate to genocide?

In organizing the case study section of my textbook, I adopted a straightforward chronological scheme. Treatments of Ottoman mass crimes during the First World War, and Stalinist depredations in the Soviet Union, both precede the genocide that remains most iconic in the literature and popular consciousness – the Jewish Holocaust. Right up front in this section, however, is “Genocides of Indigenous Peoples.” This scheme foregrounded genocides that were global in scope and processual in character. Surely, though, it carried the cost of collapsing hugely diverse histories and victimization experiences into an overarching, but also somewhat arbitrary and presumptuous, catchall category.

The challenge of crafting a necessarily non-exhaustive case set for this section remains vexing. Recently, delivering a talk at a genocide conference in Dhaka (see Chapter 6, this volume), I was introduced by Mofidul Hoque, director of the Liberation War Museum that commemorates the 1971 genocide in Bangladesh (Figure 1.1). In a wry aside, Mofidul expressed his hope that in a future edition of my book, Bangladesh would graduate from a supplementary text to a full case-study treatment. I could respond by citing the paucity of research on the Bangladesh case, contrasted with the chapter that it accompanies, on “Bosnia and Kosovo.” But with research on Bangladesh now blooming, and with the destructiveness of the events there surely surpassing that of the Balkans in the 1990s, is this not an ethnocentric and Eurocentric evasion?

FIGURE 1.1 Memorial to victims of the 1971 genocide, outside Srimangal, Bangladesh (March 2014).

Likewise with my classing of Biafra as a “contested case” of genocide, granted only a few paragraphs in the new Chapter 1 (and entirely absent from the first two editions). I was spurred to engage with it by a special double issue of the Journal of Genocide Research, in which contributors did the hard work of documenting the events and analysing them under the comparative-genocide rubric.⁵ There was little to go on earlier. But should Biafra now “graduate” to a supplementary text à la Bangladesh, or a chapter all its own? I have no ready answer, and expect I will be wrestling with my chosen “canon” and prioritization for as long as I prepare new editions of a work that now pushes 900 pages, in which formal case studies occupy only one of four sections. Suffice it to say that my overconfident, even pompous declaration in the first edition – that my “comparative approach … does not elevate particular genocides over others, except to the extent that scale and intensity warrant special attention”⁶ – was ignominiously abandoned for subsequent editions.

With regard to spatiality, I feel we have tended to buttress the prevailing geopolitical order, built on the unit of the nation-state. This has led us to downplay the regional and historical–dialectical–reciprocal dimensions of genocides. Over time, I feel I've managed to destabilize this framing to some small degree. An example is my transnational case study of “indigenous peoples” worldwide, as noted. In a similar vein, the chapter on “The Armenian Genocide” in the first edition became, in the second and third editions, “The Ottoman Destruction of Christian Minorities.” This allowed for more sustained attention to the regional (Ottoman-imperial) aspects of the multifaceted annihilation campaign, notably its targeting of Greek and Assyrian/Chaldean populations along with Armenians.

An initial study of Stalin's genocidal policies in the Soviet Union likewise became a chapter on “Stalin & Mao” in subsequent editions – reflecting the importance of the Soviet precedent to the Maoist variant, their common ideological underpinnings and the even greater scale of human destruction in post-1949 China. Of perhaps greatest relevance is the evolution of my chapter on Rwanda into a treatment of “Genocide in Africa's Great Lakes Region.” Based on a deeper immersion in the histories of the region, I now argue that “The crises, conflicts, and genocides in Burundi, Congo, and Rwanda were mutually constitutive.”⁷

A couple of notable dynamics are at work here. One is methodological, the other political–economic. In an essay for an edited collection on Hidden Genocides (see Chapter 10), I pointed to “the tendency of comparative genocide scholarship, first, to orient itself around an ‘anchoring’ genocide … and second, once anchored, to begin explorations of contiguous analytical and geopolitical territory, including genocidal events that are usually classed as secondary or subsidiary to the anchoring genocide and analyzed in relation to it.” While the “objective scale and severity” of “anchoring” genocides is important in securing their primacy, critical too is whether “resources [are] available to launch public-education campaigns, fund fellowships and endowed chairs,” and so on. “Wider geostrategic or international-political aspects” are also at play. A tendency is evident for scholarship and memorialization/restitution strategies to spread outward over time, inkblot-fashion. As “hidden genocides begin to be investigated and reclaimed,” the intellectual and material resources devoted to them tend to accumulate, “challeng[ing] the existing paradigm and generally prompt[ing] it to shift.”⁸ This is a consummation devoutly to be wished, and one that bolsters the comprehensiveness and nuance of comparative genocide studies.

The relationship of “other forms of mass violence to genocide” would require a lengthy book, or a series of books, to explore properly. I will limit myself to two observations.

First, as I contended earlier, an interdisciplinary “species history” of genocide would need to grapple with the innate destructiveness of Homo sapiens. Incorporating contributions from anthropology, psychology and gender studies, as well as Nancy Scheper-Hughes’ notion of a “genocidal continuum,”⁹ it would acknowledge the marriage of our apparently innate bent for violence and destruction to our s...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Photographs
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Seized of Sorrow
• Part 1 History and Culture
• Part 2 Gendering Genocide
• Coda: What Leads to Genocide?
• Index