VIOLENCE AND SECURITY: PARADIGMS AND DEBATES IN PREPARATION FOR THE
FINAL EXAM
Session 8 Readings: Genocide:
“Destroy Them to Save Us”: Theories of Genocide and the Logics of Political Violence
(Scott Straus 2012):
this article investigates the causes, concept, and logic of genocide while suggesting
a set of theoretical propositions and avenues for future research.
genocide should be conceptualized as group-selective, large-scale violence whose
purpose is group destruction. This stands in contrast to violence that is individually
selective or indiscriminate; small-scale and not sustained across time and space;
and whose purpose is repression, communication, or some other outcome short of
group destruction.
In short, the end of the Cold War has produced significantly greater legitimacy and
intellectual ferment around the study of genocide.
what explains variation among countries at risk of genocide? Why do some
situations that have the theoretical ingredients of genocide result in genocide while
others do not? Third, what are the main causal mechanisms that link certain
identified structural conditions to the outcome of genocide? Fourth, what is the
causal ‘‘logic’’ of genocide? Why is genocide and not another outcome the strategic
or policy choice of leaders? And finally, how is genocide related to other forms of
political violence?
The main conclusion is that the intensive study of genocide has yielded two main
clusters of findings and arguments, around war and ideology respectively, as well as
several other important insights.
the most recent scholarship clusters into two main paradigms and several other less
common but important theoretical insights.
the empirical connection between genocide and war is arguably the most robust
empirical finding in the most recent literature: genocides generally occur in wartime
or in response to the threat of armed conflict. That said, there is less consensus on
the causal mechanisms linking war to genocide
a cluster of authors writing recently on genocide emphasize a strong empirical and
theoretical connection to war; in that literature, there are three consistently
articulated causal mechanisms. First, war creates threat and insecurity, which in
turn increase the probability that violence will be used to counter the threat. That is
the core of the strategic perspective that most authors share. Second, war increases
the probability that perceived opponents will be classified as ‘‘enemies,’’ whom in
war one seeks to destroy. War thus changes the categorization of opponents and
alters the range of tactics used against opponents, in particular increasing the
probability that violence and destruction are the choice. Third, war instigates the
use of militarized forms of power (militaries, weaponry, and so forth), which
facilitate lethal violence against perceived enemies.
why are civilian, non-combatant groups targeted, and, second, why is the strategic
objective systematic destruction of civilian groups?
Function of capacity and tactics: in guerilla war, states with weak control, capacity,
and limited information kill civilians en masse because such states cannot separate
civilians from insurgents. The other is a function of preferences: where states do not
value citizens, where they discriminate, they are inclined to target civilians. The
, latter begs the question of what explains preferences or what explains how states
construct enemies.
if genocide is an optimal choice in wartime, why is that choice not more common
than it is? Or, second, why would leaders expect the strategy to succeed, given that
most high-profile past cases yield failure?
leaders who commit genocide are revolutionary; they are animated by visions of
utopia; they harness the state to implement their future; and they imagine a future
with pure, homogenous populations.
Ideology is the ‘‘binding agent,’’ he argues, that connects security fears, to identity,
to quests for purity that involve destroying others to save one’s own community.31
Genocide is, as he describes, when actors ‘‘destroy ‘them’ to save ‘us’
four specific ideological ‘‘obsessions’’ and ‘‘preoccupations’’ that animate genocidal
violence: racism, territorial expansionism, agrarianism or ‘‘cults of cultivation,’’ and
desire to restore purity and order based on imagined antiquity
genocidal violence is more likely when (respectively) organic nationalist, purity-
seeking, revolutionary, or utopian states are in acute crises, especially in war34—a
point to which I return.
the ideological vision of the leadership will shape how a state defines strategic
enemies and strategic objectives, thus indicating which states are likely to respond
to perceived threat with mass violence and which are not.
its origins are not alien to ‘‘civilized’’ society. A second important theoretical insight
in the recent literature is that genocide should be conceptualized as dynamic.
consistent finding in the most recent scholarship is how genocide is rarely the first
choice of leaders, but rather that the choice emerges over time in response to past
failures, events, contingencies, and the actions of one’s opponents
the various arguments point to two foundational elements of a theory of genocide:
a) the phenomenon tends to occur in highly acute crises, in particular war, in which
political authorities deploy mass violence in response to the perceived threats that
they face; and, b) the phenomenon tends to occur when political elites are
committed to ideologies that either create utopian expectations or that define
illegitimate members of a political community in categorical terms. Moreover, the
process of genocide is a dynamic one—the choice of genocide emerges over time
deliberate (intentional) group destruction, and that in turn is the core of most
existing scholarly definitions, including many from the first-generation of genocide
scholarship
Genocide is, in reality, an aggregate of multiple instances of violence that are
repeated in a consistent and systematic fashion. Genocide is also a form of
asymmetric violence in which the perpetrator is, I would argue, the territorially
dominant power
four main logics—what they call motives—of what they call mass political murder.
These include convenience, revenge, fear, and what they call fear of pollution.
‘Convenience’’ is the notion that mass political murder can be a utilitarian or cheap
solution to a particular problem
‘‘Revenge’’ indicates that mass violence emerges out of anger and the desire to
punish, in particular after honor has been violated.
‘‘Fear’’ signifies that mass violence happens when perpetrators fear for their own
survival.
‘‘fear of pollution’’ highlights usually ideological efforts to purify societies.
It is costly and can trigger revenge; conflicting groups can work out modes of
exchange, such as exogamous marriage; conflicting groups can work out codes of
, honor and warfare, which in the modern world could include international
humanitarian and human rights law; there can be material interests that create
economic incentives to reduce conflict; and finally there can be the promotion of
what they term enlightenment: ideas that promote individualism, modesty, and
skepticism
The Slow Violence of Settler Colonialism: Genocide, Attrition, and the Long
Emergency of Invasion (Wakeham 2022):
In the introduction to the 2004 collection Genocide and Settler Society, A. Dirk
Moses noted that scholarship regarding the Australian context has primarily
considered settler colonial genocide in relation to “two phenomena”: (1.) “frontier
violence, mainly in the nineteenth century, and” (2.) “the various policies of
removing Aboriginal children of mixed descent from their families, mainly in the
twentieth century.” 2 While there are certainly exceptions, close to two decades
later, this historical case-specific approach remains prevalent in discussions
regarding genocide in settler colonies, especially when that scholarship addresses
genocide’s legal components
Some academics have argued that settler colonialism is inherently predicated upon
“a relationship of genocide” that renders “the whole [of a settler nation-state’s] …
existence … genocidal.” 5 Others, however, have asserted that such a view is too
“static” and that settler colonialism may be better understood “as a dynamic
process” that can erupt into “genocidal moment[s]”—such as frontier massacres—
when other modes of subjugating Indigenous peoples fail.
although genocidal processes in settler colonial contexts include time-intensive
violence, slower, attritional modes of destruction have often been key to such
assaults on Indigenous group life. This is because the less direct and protracted
nature of these methods enables settler states to deny relations between cause and
effect, naturalize Indigenous “disappearance” through racist narratives of inherent
“Indigenous deficiency,” and thereby sustain fictions of liberal democratic
benevolence
Proactively anticipating objections, the Inquiry addressed the challenge of making
visible “the unique nature of ‘colonial genocide,’” given that it is often “implemented
gradually and intermittently,” resulting in forms “of ‘slow death’.” 20 Such methods
of group destruction, the Inquiry noted, are often deemed insufficient to qualify as
genocide when measured against “the ‘Holocaust prototype’” that privileges “time-
intensive … mass murder” perpetrated via “a uniform national policy spearheaded
by a totalitarian mastermind
“a slow process of annihilation that reflects the unfolding phenomenon of the mass
killing of a protected group rather than the immediate unleashing of violent death.”
24 Such processes may involve “state and non-state policies and practices that
deprive individuals of a specific set of human rights that do not cause immediate
death, but rather lead to the slow … destruction of the group,” such as “forced
displacement, denial of health and healthcare, denial of food, and sexual violence.
While I contend that settler colonialism is inherently genocidal, not all settler state
policies or initiatives are in and of themselves invariably genocidal. Depending on
ideological and historical contingencies, some policies may be genocidal and some
may actually be generated to mitigate harm or at least create the appearance of
doing so
