Genocide and its Threat to Contemporary International Order

A. Gallagher

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349447596, 9781137280251
• eBook ISBN: 9781137280268
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Bürgerrechte

For far too long the discipline of International Relations has failed to engage with the study of genocide. This is despite the fact that genocide holds a direct relationship with the central concepts of international relations: the state, war, power, and security. This bold, innovative and unique book sets out to tackle this by bringing the concept of genocide into the discipline of IR, via the English School, in order to theorise the relationship between genocide, justice, and order. Drawing on a wide-range of primary and secondary interdisciplinary material from International Relations, Genocide Studies, Security Studies, International Law, History, Politics and Political Theory, this book aims to understand genocide within the context of International Relations and the implications that this has on policymaking. Gallagher identifies the obstacles and challenges involved in bringing the study of genocide into IR and uniquely analyses the impact of genocide on the ordering structure of international society.

1

Introduction

Genocide refers to the destruction of a group. However, if I am not a member of that group, why should I care about its destruction? Traditionally, in answering this controversial question, scholars have tended to espouse universal moral principles when advocating compassion and humanitarian intervention. Genocide, it is claimed, constitutes a crime against humanity. The problem is that such understanding tends to be built on the assumption that humanity exists. For those that refute the idea, the claim that genocide is a crime against humanity is flawed as humanity is nothing more than a word. As Alexander Herzen bluntly stated, ‘The word “humanity” is repugnant; it expresses nothing definite and only adds to the confusion of all remaining concepts a sort of piebald demi-god. What sort of unit is understood by the word “humanity?”’¹ Although this view may seem uncompassionate, the dominance of realism in twentieth-century political discourse has often seen such understanding upheld at the international level. Since realists reject the idea that states have a moral obligation to anyone other than their own citizens, they have tended to oppose genocide prevention as a humanitarian concern that is of little real concern to a state’s national interest. From this perspective genocide prevention remains just another policy option, one that should only be opted for when there are national interests at stake.

This is put into context in Alex Alvarez’s work, Governments, Citizens and Genocide in which the author explains that diplomats ‘are often held hostage to Realpolitik strategies that place a higher value on protecting national security than protecting an oppressed group’.² For instance, in 1975 prior to the Indonesian oppression in East Timor, the Australian ambassador to Indonesia wrote that Australia should assume a ‘pragmatic rather than a principled stand’, because ‘that is what national interest and foreign policy is all about’.³ Such rhetoric was also evident as James Wood, a US Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defence, placed Rwanda-Burundi on a list of potential trouble spots only to be informed by a superior: ‘Take it off the list … US national interest is not involved … we can’t put all these silly humanitarian issues on lists like important problems in the Middle East and North Korea and so on.’⁴ Similarly, as Slobodan Milosevic engineered a process of destruction and dispossession in the former Yugoslavia, George Bush’s secretary of state, James Baker, repeatedly stated: ‘We don’t have a dog in this fight.’⁵ The sentiment expressed in these statements underlines the central point that genocide prevention is not considered to be in a state’s national interest. Because of this, policymakers seem to view genocide prevention as somewhat altruistic and part of an unrealistic foreign policy agenda. As Nicholas J. Wheeler’s seminal study succinctly concludes: ‘state leaders will accept anything other than minimal casualties only if they believe national interests are at stake’.⁶

The point to consider is that genocide is considered to be the ‘crime of crimes’ in international law, yet carries much less political weight than ‘lesser crimes’.⁷ For instance, long-term collective security strategies are adopted when attempting to prevent crimes such as international terrorism, drug trafficking, and piracy at the international level.⁸ This is not to say that such crimes do not have profound implications for international society but to highlight that at present, there is no such long-term collective security strategy when it comes to genocide prevention.⁹ Essentially, it would seem that crimes such as drug trafficking are considered to pose an international threat, by which I mean that, such crimes outstrip the individual security capacity of states who then work collectively to address this security deficit. Accordingly, policymakers perceive that the collective interest furthers the national interest within such specific contexts. The failure of any long-term collective security strategy towards genocide implies that policymakers do not perceive that it poses an international threat in the same way that the aforementioned crimes do. Although policymakers will undoubtedly recognise the horror of genocide and accept that genocide may cause mass migration, which causes regional instability,¹⁰ it is clear that mass migration is not exclusive to genocide which remains a low-priority issue. Such understanding only goes to restate the point that when it comes to genocide prevention, policymakers do not perceive that they have a ‘dog in the fight’ and as a result do not treat the prevention of genocide as a matter of national interest.

This point is fleshed out further in Andrew Hurrell’s analysis War, Violence and Collective Security:¹¹

Although the collective security element in security management has increased, we remain as far away as ever from anything approaching a functioning system of collective security. Peace is not indivisible, and states and their citizens remain unwilling to bear the costs of collective security action in complex and dangerous conflicts in which their national interests are only weakly engaged. It may well be that the horrors of the Rwandan genocide prompted increased normative momentum in areas of human security and the responsibility to protect. But the continued failure of outside states to undertake a collective action in Darfur highlights the continuity of the problem.¹²

The statement underlines the fact that collective security is still in its infancy and that a functioning collective security system remains a long way off. However, the statement also underlines a stark point that despite the post-Cold War normative momentum that underpinned the 2005 UN endorsement of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P): we do not even expect states to collectively confront the crime of genocide because the common perception is that the direct interests of states are not served by engaging in such ‘complex and dangerous conflicts’. Yet while this is true, it is also quite clear that states are willing to engage in such complex and dangerous foreign policy agendas when they perceive that their national interests are at stake. Hurrell therefore also rightly points out that the lack of political will surrounding genocide prevention often stems from the perception held by state elites, that there is no valid link between genocide prevention and the national interest. Thus, as it stands, genocide prevention can be considered a norm in the English School/Constructivist sense of what ought to be done but it cannot be considered a norm in the realist sense of a re-occurring pattern of behaviour as quite simply, it is genocide rather than genocide prevention that remains the norm at the international level. This reality juxtaposes with Hurrell’s understanding and raises a critical question: how do we think about, conceptualise, and understand genocide in International Relations?

The IR dimension

The primary focus of this book is on understanding genocide, from an IR perspective, in order to shed light on how genocide should be conceptualised at the international level. In so doing, it lays the groundwork to answer a series of important interrelated questions: what is the impact of genocide on the current world order? Does genocide pose an international threat to states? How realistic is the realist perspective when it comes to genocide prevention? What is the relationship between genocide prevention and national interest?

At present, the discipline of IR has done little to answer such questioning which reveals the fact that genocide remains a peripheral issue in the discipline of IR. For instance, in his 2001 publication Genocide and the Global Village, Kenneth J. Campbell stated that between 1945 and 1995 neither of the leading IR journals Foreign Affairs or International Affairs published a single article on genocide while International Studies Quarterly published just one within this time period.¹³ While it is difficult to judge this claim without knowing the operational parameters that Campbell upheld when assessing what constituted an article on genocide, when one juxtaposes the frequency of genocide within this time period with the lack of IR interest in it, this omission is startling.¹⁴ In addition to this, Martin Shaw raised the fact that in 1999, Review of International Studies published a special edition journal on the post-Cold War decade which failed to provide any analysis on the Rwandan genocide.¹⁵ Providing some form of context, Tim Dunne and Daniela Kroslak’s aptly titled, ‘Genocide: Knowing What It Is That We Want to Remember, or Forget, or Forgive’ sees the authors claim, ‘The discipline of International Relations needs to forget its habit of selectively describing and explain the past. Instead of taking “family snaps” of human history, we must not forget the blood and immorality.’¹⁶ While there have been a number of articles published by IR scholars on genocide in the last decade, it appears that the habit of selectivity remains prominent. For example, in Karen E. Smith’s 2010 publication Genocide and The Europeans, the author notes: ‘[v]ery little has been written about the attitudes of European governments towards either the 1948 Genocide Convention or genocide in general. In fact, I could only find one article on the views of one European government’.¹⁷ When one considers that this work was published over 60 years after the Genocide Convention, 16 years after the Rwandan genocide, and five years after the genocide in Darfur, one is quite simply lost for words.

Against this backdrop one is left wondering: why is there no body of IR literature on genocide? Two points of contention need to be addressed prior to answering this question. The first is that genocide does not fall within the parameters of what constitutes IR, yet this is difficult to accept when one considers the intrinsic relationship between genocide and the central tenets of IR: war, power, sovereignty, and the state.¹⁸ For instance, in the aptly titled Death by Government, the political scientist R. J. Rummel claimed 169,198,000 people were murdered by governments (1900–87) in acts of what the author labels as ‘democide’.¹⁹ The point here is that the ‘output’ of genocide could not have occurred without the ‘input’ of war, power, the state, and sovereignty (as the latter implies immunity). Indeed, a number of genocide scholars have gone further to claim that genocide is caused by the underlying structure that underpins international society itself. From this perspective, genocide does not represent a fault in the international system but should be understood as a fault of the international system. Yet despite the challenging nature of such thinking, which calls the very nature of what we, as IR scholars, study into question, the discipline has seemingly responded with silence as IR scholars have failed to make any significant contribution despite the efforts of their political science counterparts.²⁰ In sum, the relationship between genocide and the central tenants of IR allow us to refute the claim that the study of genocide falls outside the parameters of the discipline.

This brings us to the second point of contention as critics may claim the discipline of IR has in fact ‘covered genocide’ through its work on human rights and humanitarian intervention. While one can understand such thinking, two problems arise. First, the debates over human rights and humanitarian intervention have engaged with genocide implicitly rather than explicitly.²¹ This has created a discourse that has failed to engage with a wide range of genocide-related issues such as causes, definition, and transitional justice to name just a few. In other words, the discipline has hardly even scratched the surface of the complexities that surround the phenomenon of genocide in international relations. Second, the debate over humanitarian intervention has suffered from a terrible tendency to group different types of conflicts together. For example, IR scholars often raise the post-Cold War humanitarian crises that occurred in Somalia and Rwanda. As a result, they critically fail to differentiate between the fact that Somalia represented a failed state plagued by chaos and anarchy whereas Rwanda represented a genocidal state implementing a process of systematic destruction. Such conflation is explicit in one of the leading texts in the field as Mary Kaldor’s seminal work New and Old Wars places genocide, failed states, terrorism, civil war, and many other types of conflict within the melting pot of ‘new wars’.²² The example illustrates the growing tendency within IR to establish a ‘one size fits all remedy’ despite the fact that the causes of such conflicts and crises will undoubtedly differ. Problematically, if IR scholars simply place all human rights violations within a single melting pot they cannot hope to learn the relevant lessons involved in each.

Having established that genocide does indeed fall within the remit of what constitutes IR, and having highlighted IR’s tendency not to explicitly engage with the study of genocide, the question of why the discipline of IR has failed to study genocide remains unanswered. Attempting to provide an explanation, Campbell’s aforementioned work stipulates:

For far too long, specialists in international law, human rights, humanitarian assistance, international security, peace and conflict resolution, ethnic conflict studies, and regional studies (for example, the Balkans and the Great Lakes region of Central Africa) have blithely assumed that we did not need the genocide scholars to tell us what genocide is. Most of the time we have been wrong! In virtually every case where a think tank, national government, or IGO put together a panel of ‘experts’ to investigate the international community’s failure to stop contemporary genocide, the genocide scholars have been strangely absent.²³

The statement provides a straightforward explanation as it claims that IR scholars have simply assumed that they have a thorough or at least sufficient understanding of genocide and therefore have not sought to engage with genocide scholars, which according to Campbell, has meant that even within the context of interdisciplinary research the discipline of Genocide Studies has found itself marginalised. For Campbell this reflects an ‘intellectual ignorance (and arrogance)’ amongst IR scholars towards genocide.²⁴ The problem with this rationale is that it suggests that IR scholars think that they know what genocide is and therefore go about their everyday business of analysing international relations without listening to genocide scholars, yet to return to Campbell’s aforementioned point regarding the omission of genocide from IR, the fact that IR scholars may hold certain assumptions about genocide does not explain why IR scholars fail to engage with the study of genocide in the first place.

To gauge this, it is important to pause and consider the underlying logic that underpins the discipline of IR itself. As Steve Smith explained in his presidential address to the International Studies Association in 2003:

International Relations tends to ignore conflicts within states, unless they threaten the survival of the discipline’s referent object, the state. Similarly, that referent object is reified at the expense of other possible referent points, most notably the individual and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter: 1 Introduction
• Chapter: 2 Words Matter: Genocide and the Definitional Debate
• Chapter: 3 Genocide and the Three Traditions
• Chapter: 4 Genocide and International Legitimacy
• Chapter: 5 The Impact of Genocide on International Order
• Chapter: 6 The Responsibility to Protect
• Chapter: 7 The Three Traditions Revisited
• Chapter: 8 Conclusion: Answering the ‘East Tennessee Question’
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index