Exploring Complicity

Concept, Cases and Critique

Michael Neu, Robin Dunford, Afxentis Afxentiou

• Editore: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Anno: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781786600639
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Filosofia
• Categoria: Filosofia etica e morale

Questions of complicity emerge within a range of academic disciplines and everyday practices. Using a wide range of case studies, this book explores the concept of and cases of complicity in an interdisciplinary context. It expands orthodox understandings of the concept by including the notion of structural complicity, revealing seemingly inconsequential, everyday forms of complicity; examining different kinds and degrees of individual and collective complicity; and introducing complicity as a lens through which to analyse and critically reflect upon social structures and relations. It also explores complicity through a series of cases emerging from a variety of academic disciplines and professional practices. Its various chapters reflect on, amongst other things, the complicity of politicians, self-proclaimed feminists, health care workers, fictional characters, social movement activists and academic defenders of torture.

Chapter 1

Introducing Complicity

Afxentis Afxentiou, Robin Dunford and Michael Neu

This book emerged from a conference and subsequent workshop on “Complicity”, and the questions about complicity with which we started remain.1 The two positive conclusions we can offer with confidence are these. First, complicity is a valuable and underestimated tool for the analysis and critique of social relations. Second, it would be a mistake to offer a fixed or rigid definition of complicity, let alone one that we could claim to be objectively correct. Any attempt to establish, once and for all, the nature and scope of complicity would do little more than shut down important avenues for critical analysis; and in so doing, it would detract from our ability to imagine effective resistance against the causes of avoidable harms that can be elucidated through the lens of complicity.2 The conceptual exploration and case studies offered in this volume are thus intended to encourage critique and imagination, rather than to offer authoritative pronunciations and abstract analytic truths. In fact, we hope to suggest that there are ways of thinking and writing about complicity which are themselves complicit, particularly if they fail to question the existing political, social and economic order.3

In the next section, on ‘Atomistic Complicity’, we outline an account of complicity according to which law-abiding individuals can walk through life without ever being complicit: as long as they do not break what Thomas Docherty, in his contribution, calls ‘the law of the land’. In the following section, on ‘Broadening Complicity’, we suggest that there are limits to such an account of complicity, and introduce the broader, more critically attentive approach to complicity that unites the chapters in this volume. Through the example of our complicity with wars waged by democratically elected governments, we offer a key argument recurring throughout this book: that reflecting on complicity can operate as a lens through which to understand and recognize our – the editors’, authors’, readers’ and many others’ – role in producing and upholding, and hence being complicit in, social structures that have harmful, indeed often fatal, effects. Critically reflecting on such structural complicity suggests that we are sometimes – perhaps often – forced to be complicit. Non-complicity, as Pam Laidman suggests in her chapter, is not always an option. We can be caught in “complicity dilemmas”: situations in which avoiding one form of complicity results in our becoming complicit in some other way. When confronting a complicity dilemma, however, our thoughts should not simply turn to the question of what is the right thing to do given the miserable circumstances (to which there may be no plausible answer, as hard as we may try to find one); nor should we seek to excuse, justify or perhaps even (secretly) celebrate the “dirty hands” we acquire in choosing the “least bad” option. Rather, such situations should encourage us to think about ways in which we ought to resist, collectively and individually, the social structures and power relations that force us to be complicit in wrongdoing. The remaining two sections – ‘Structural Complicity and the Question of Blame’ and ‘Resistance: Complicity Dilemmas and Anti-Complicity’ – consider these issues in more depth. Throughout this chapter, we also introduce some of the ideas – “structural complicity”, “complicity dilemmas” and “anti-complicity” – that stem from the collective reflections on complicity that have been at the heart of this project.

Atomistic Complicity

How is the law-abiding citizen said to be able to walk through life without ever being complicit? Well, simply by following the rules – both legal rules (to avoid being complicit in a crime) and moral rules (to avoid being complicit in moral wrongdoing). A complicit act contributes, in some way, to wrongdoing. It facilitates wrongdoing, covers it up, or makes it possible in the first place by creating the conditions which enable it to occur. The assumption that is often made here is that the wrongdoing in question is clearly identifiable; indeed, that the wrongdoer is clearly identifiable. The accomplice knows, or ought to know (in the sense that they can reasonably be expected to know), what they are complicit in, and who they are complicit with. They know, or ought to know, that they are involved in the breaking of a legal and/or moral rule, and that this is wrong. And thus their being complicit is intentional, or at least reckless or negligent; it is in some way deliberate. The accomplice has chosen to act in a way which contributes to wrongdoing; or they have refrained from acting in a way which would have thrown a spanner in the wrongdoer’s works – if, of course, they could reasonably be expected to have done so. There is a tacit assumption here: the accomplice could avoid being complicit and walk through life never failing to avoid it. If they do fail, they share responsibility, if not necessarily to the same extent as the main culprit, for the wrong done. They are thus liable to blame, criticism and perhaps punishment.

We take this atomistic account of complicity to be a dominant understanding of complicity in the liberal, democratic state.4 According to this understanding, complicity is an exclusively individual affair. The focus here is on agency, not structure. The question is not, “What structural factors resulted in X being complicit?” Nor is it, “What sorts of complicities arise, and what sorts of complicity might be unavoidable, when individuals operate and interact in particular social structures?” Instead, the question is: “What individual, or group of individuals, was complicit with whom in the violation of which rule?” From this standpoint, complicity’s entire ontological fabric consists of individuals’ involvement in breaking either the law, moral principles or both.

It is instructive here to see the example of an instance of complicity offered by the Oxford English Dictionary: ‘They were accused of complicity in the attempt to overthrow the government.’5 The dictionary does not say: “They were accused of complicity in their government’s war.” Complicity is typically seen as stemming from one’s being involved in the breaking of a particular law, in a deviation from the existing order, but not in the affirmation or reproduction of the existing order – be it legal, economic, social or political. This reflects a very limited perception of complicity, one that disables critics from making any use of the concept that goes beyond blaming individuals. Depending on the methodological lens through which we look at complicity, however, we will come to recognize different sorts of phenomena, ask different sorts of questions about them and assign different sorts of responsibility. This is precisely what this volume is intended to do.

However, we need to issue a warning against declaring a particular methodological approach to be the only epistemic access point for an analysis of complicity. Thinking critically about complicity will be impossible if we keep staring through the same set of lenses: a set that focuses on individuals, law, blame, and that, as Pam Laidman reminds us in her contribution, has a tendency to look back in time, rather than forward. The contributors to this volume all encourage alternative approaches. Our shared work is not to invalidate the atomistic method introduced above; it is to expose it as too narrow for the specific purpose of social critique: while it can help us attribute blame to individuals (which is often the right thing to do), it cannot enable us to expose structures of complicity in which individuals are forced to be complicit, or can hardly avoid being complicit. As a result, it cannot engage in critique that goes beyond blaming and punishing individuals – the ‘bad apples’ in Owen Thomas’s words – for breaking the law or infringing “agreed” moral values.

What all contributors to this volume agree on is that we must dare to delve deeper when thinking about complicity, even when suspecting, or perhaps knowing, that what we will unearth beneath these structures is our very own complicity. Only then might we be able to gain a better understanding not only of complicit ‘bad apples’, but also of the rotten barrels which contain them; the material and social structures that reproduce complicit individuals and force them to be complicit even when they do not intend to be so – and even if they intend not to be so. We take such reflection to be an important condition of informed resistance.

Broadening Complicity

The most straightforward thing one can say about complicity is that it consists in the indirect participation of an agent or a group of agents in wrongdoing.6 Otherwise complicity just seems to be wrongdoing full stop, rather than a particular form of it. One can be involved in such wrongdoing through acting or failing to act. A complicit agent is not the main perpetrator of wrongdoing, but at the same time not sufficiently distant from it to be considered uninvolved. If one is complicit, one makes a contribution to wrongdoing, or one fails to prevent wrongdoing from occurring – assuming this is what one could, and should, have done.

As soon as we unravel this initial understanding of complicity, however, things become less straightforward. What counts as wrongdoing? Is it a necessary condition of being complicit that one engages in such wrongdoing knowingly? And, perhaps most importantly, is it always possible to avoid being complicit? Consider an example: the complicity of a citizenry in their democratically elected government’s waging war on spurious grounds. This is not some fantastical scenario: many of the contributors to, and readers of, this volume are likely to be citizens of a liberal democratic state which regularly engages in such warfare. The 2003 Iraq War – a war in which, as Peter Finn demonstrates, governments became complicit in human rights abuses and violations of International Humanitarian Law (IHL) – is a particularly pertinent example here. If we regularly vote for parties and/or representatives who have a tendency to vote for rather than against bombing people if and when the opportunity arises, and if this opportunity arises with dramatic frequency (both historically and contemporarily in the case of countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom) then we ought to stop voting for them. It is difficult to see in this case how those who have voted a particular bunch of warmongers into office, let alone those who have a historical record of voting warmongers into office, could plausibly claim not to be complicit, unless they publically distance themselves from the bombing campaign – and commit never to vote for the warmongers again.

This is not to suggest that voters can always anticipate these things. It is probably fair to say that German Green Party voters could hardly have foreseen that one of the first moves of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) / Green Party coalition formed in 1998 would be to take part in the bombing of Serbia during the Kosovo “intervention” in 1999.7 But would it not then be the responsibility of such voters to withdraw their support immediately? It is not good enough simply to point out that one’s voting for a party was not meant to signify one’s support for a party’s bellicosity (whether well-documented or recently discovered), but merely for its stance on ecology, gay marriage and animal rights. This shows that it is perfectly conceivable for a decent, law-abiding citizen – what else would a Green Party voter be? – to be complicit in wrongdoing. And German Green Party voters in 1999 knew, or should have known, that they were being complicit.

This leads us to the question of knowledge. An atomistic account of complicity would assume and require that accomplices know, or could reasonably be expected to know, that they are involved in wrongdoing. Similarly, in our example, we have assumed that voters had – or in the case of the German Green Party voters from 1998, were rapidly allowed to gain – relevant knowledge of what was going on, knowledge concerning the past and future policies and practices of the people and parties they were voting in. But what if voters are ignorant, if they simply do not know, or fail to make sense of, the relevant facts? This is a central epistemic question about complicity: the question of whether or not one’s knowledge of being involved in wrongdoing, or one’s being culpably ign...