A research agenda for the economic study of genocide: signposts from the field of conflict economics

In the field of conflict economics there is surprisingly little research on genocide and mass killing relative to war and terrorism, which I call the ‘genocide gap’. This article critically evaluates the potential for scholarship in conflict economics to help fill the gap with new research on economic aspects of mass atrocities. The article begins with an overview of the principal subject matter and methodologies of conflict economics and key interdependencies between economics and conflict. Relatively new civilian atrocity datasets and trends are then evaluated followed by a critical assessment of empirical economic risk factors for mass atrocities. The remainder of the article points to how three richly researched areas in conflict economics can serve as signposts for new quantitative research on economic aspects of genocide and mass killing. The three signposts critically assessed are: (1) empirical study of economic risk factors for civil wars; (2) promise and limits of rational choice theory; and (3) economic consequences of civil wars. This analysis is complemented by a tentative discussion of economic insights derived from a foundational work in genocide studies, Raphael Lemkin's Axis rule in occupied Europe, that could profitably serve as the foundation for future research on the economic study of genocide.     

Genocide Forecasting: Past Accuracy and New Forecasts to 2020

We assess the accuracy of genocide forecasts made by the Atrocity Forecasting Project (AFP) for 2011–15, and present new forecasts for 2016–20. Using data from the United Nations, Genocide Watch and the Political Instability Task Force, we evaluate AFP accuracy. We compare AFP accuracy with that of forecasts from the Genocide Prevention Advisory Network. It is relatively rare in most areas of social science that researchers produce (and make public) future forecasts. It is rarer still to evaluate their accuracy once the future has arrived. AFP five-year forecasts are potentially important for genocide and politicide prevention, and have gained attention from policy makers and news media, but a systematic assessment of their accuracy has not been undertaken previously. Our evaluation of past forecast accuracy, with true-positive rates from thirty-three to fifty per cent, true-negative rates around ninety per cent, and area under the curve (AUC) statistics from .81 to .96, gives an indication of how much confidence should be placed in the 2016–20 forecasts.     

Canada's history wars: indigenous genocide and public memory in the United States,Australia and Canada

In this article, I explore the slow development of a national debate in Canada about genocide in the Indian residential schools, which I compare to earlier ‘history wars’ in Australia and the United States. In the first section I begin with a brief introduction to the history of the IRS system and some of its legacies, as well as attempts at redress. These include financial compensation through the 2006 IRS Settlement Agreement, an official apology and the creation of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which has been a nodal point for articulating claims of genocide. I follow this in the second section with an analysis of the history wars in the United States and Australia over indigenous genocide, before engaging in the third section with debates about genocide in Canada. Overt debates about genocide have been relatively slow in developing, in part because of the creation of a TRC, mandated with collecting the ‘truth’ about the IRS system while similarly engaging in ‘reconciliation’ (a contested term) with settler Canadians. While Canada's history wars may seem slow in getting off the ground, the TRC's more ‘balanced’ approach and wide-ranging engagement with non-Aboriginal societal actors may have a greater effect in stimulating national awareness than in the United States and Australia.     

China's and India's perspectives on military intervention: why Africa but not Syria?

This article addresses the puzzle for students of international relations as to why China and India, two major re-emerging powers in Asia, do not always baulk at military intervention invoked by Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter, while they rhetorically harbour strong reservations about it. The recent cases of Côte d'Ivoire (2011), Libya (2011), Syria (since 2011) and Mali (since 2012) show that both China and India acquiesced in external military intervention in these African countries plunged into brutal civil wars, with only intervention in Syria being rebuffed. By studying how they voted in the United Nations Security Council in 2011–12 and their discourses on intervention, including humanitarian intervention, this article examines why their decisions about intervention in Africa diverged from their decisions regarding intervention in Syria. The authors put forward the thesis that their behaviour can be explained by an interplay between norms and interests, in which they express a common anti-US liberal imperialist stance, shaped by a ‘collective historical trauma' and ‘post-imperial ideology', and demonstrate concerns for state failure and preferences for regional initiatives and political mediation to resolve civil wars.     

‘Just and lawful war’ as genocidal war in the (United States) Northwest Ordinance and Northwest Territory, 1787–1832

This article focuses on the United States Northwest Ordinance of 1787's profession of ‘utmost good faith’ towards Indians and its provision for ‘just and lawful wars’ against them. As interpreted by US officials as they authorized and practised war against native communities in the Northwest Territory from 1787 to 1832, the ‘just and lawful wars’ clause legalized wars of ‘extirpation’ or ‘extermination’, terms synonymous with genocide by most definitions, against native people who resisted US demands that they cede their lands. Although US military operations seldom achieved extirpation, this was due to their ineptness and the success of indigenous strategies rather than an absence of intention. When US military forces did succeed in achieving their objective, the result was massacre, as revealed in the Black Hawk War of 1832. US policy did not call for genocide in the first instance, preferring that Indians embrace the gift of civilization in exchange for their lands. Should Indians reject this display of ‘utmost good faith’, however, US policy legalized genocidal war against them.     

‘And starvation is the grim reaper’: the American Committee to Keep Biafra Alive and the genocide question during the Nigerian civil war, 1968–70

The American Committee to Keep Biafra Alive (ACKBA) was the largest and most influential organization in the United States that formed in response to the Nigerian civil war. While historians have pointed to the committee as an important source of activism that pushed the American government towards supporting more vigorous humanitarian relief, this is the first article to explore the development of the group from its inception and to look specifically at its claims of genocide. Not everyone at the time agreed that the Nigerian government was committing genocide against the people living in the secessionist state of Biafra, and that debate continues today. The ACKBA, appealing to genocide prevention and human rights, argued that the debate about the semantics of genocide got in the way of actually helping those that were suffering from famine as a result of the war. In the process, the committee offered a redefinition of genocide that wedded conceptions of Biafran identity to the Biafran state, which made the maintenance of ‘one Nigeria’, in the eyes of committee members, an act of genocide. In the end, this redefinition of genocide failed to bring more people in the United States towards supporting Biafran secession and might have, in the end, led to more confusion about genocide during the conflict. An analysis of the committee's activism highlights the often tenuous relationship between self-determination and genocide in the developing world and illustrates the growing limits of American political intervention in the global south.     

The Future of International Criminal Evidence in New Wars? The Evolution of the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA)

This article explores the intellectual formation of the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA). It illuminates how the development of the CIJA was an attempt by state and non-state actors to affect the course of international criminal justice in Syria and Iraq. First, this article argues that the CIJA was the result of four factors: the UK Foreign Office’s desire to support human rights activists in Syria; lessons learned from previous international criminal tribunals; attempts by non-state legal practitioners to invent new ways to overcome the gaps and limitations of the international criminal justice system; and the willingness of Syrian civil society to risk their lives and use the law to hold those responsible for mass atrocities to account. Second, the article argues that as non-state actors with a focus on evidence management, the CIJA may represent an innovative approach to investigating mass atrocities, particularly for activists and civil society actors who wish to play a role in evidence management in new wars. Lastly, it shows how the CIJA may work in parallel with international mechanisms, such as the International Criminal Court (ICC) and other inter-state actors, to collect evidence of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide in new wars, particularly when the ICC is unable to do so. This study combines qualitative research with empirical analysis and draws on a range of primary and secondary sources, including a number of interviews conducted with CIJA personnel, former ICC practitioners, and other practitioners in international criminal law.     

Becoming Cleopatra: the forgotten Zionism of Raphael Lemkin

The biography of Raphael Lemkin has emerged of late as a highly contested lieu de memoire in charged political debates in Europe, the United States and the Middle East about the meaning, past and present, of the Holocaust and genocide. At the same time, scholars have attempted to demythologize Lemkin by reinscribing his life into its pre-World War II Polish context. Yet thus far no one has identified the precise political activities and affiliations that shaped Lemkin’s concept of genocide. In this article, I show that Lemkin, far from being a Jewish Bundist, a Polish nationalist or an apolitical cosmopolitan, was an active member of the interwar Polish Zionist movement, from which he drew the ideas that inspired his idea of the crime of genocide. In the first part of this article, I use his published writings from the 1920s and 1930s in Hebrew, Yiddish and Polish to recover a rich Jewish political framework in which his concepts of barbarism and genocide first began to emerge. In the second section, I ask how this crucial dimension of Lemkin’s life and thought vanished from the historical record, and why it has yet to be recovered in spite of the boom in biographical scholarship. Finally, I suggest how the recovery of Lemkin’s Zionism helps to reframe the current political impasse in the historiography of Holocaust and genocide studies.     

Greed and grievance in civil war

While economic agendas have been shown to be an important factor in shaping civil wars, there are several problems with prominent explanations centring on rebel ‘greed’, notably those put forward by Paul Collier. Among these are: the way proxies for ‘greed’ and ‘grievance’ have been used; the lack of attention to links between ‘greed’ and ‘grievance’; and the lack of attention to ‘greed’ among elements associated with counter‐insurgencies. Why has Collier's analysis proven so popular, despite its flaws? I suggest that it represents an attractive over‐simplification with a scientific aura. It achieves a degree of simplicity by excluding many of the most important features of civil wars, even to the extent of asserting that there is no point in asking rebels about their motivations. Furthermore, it is often politically convenient in that it tends to exclude a number of western governments—and (sometimes favoured) governments in poorer countries—from serious scrutiny. By contrast, the emphasis placed by Frances Stewart and her associates on the role of economic and political inequalities between groups offers a more nuanced understanding of how civil wars are caused and shaped, an understanding that is better able to take account of the nature of grievances and of the role of abusive government‐affiliated actors in generating grievances.     

‘The realities of power’: David Stoll and the story of the 1982 Guatemalan genocide

ABSTRACT

In a short opinion piece published in late 2013, anthropologist David Stoll claimed that genocide did not occur in Guatemala under the military dictatorship of José Efraín Ríos Montt (1982–83), that the charges against the former general and his subsequent conviction were unsubstantiated, and that human rights conditions for the country’s Indigenous peoples, including the Ixil population of northern Quiché department, actually improved under his government. By looking at the definition of protected groups under the United Nations Genocide Convention, and such basic notions as perpetrator motives and intent in international humanitarian law, this article will address Stoll’s latest contribution to a ‘counter-narrative by Guatemalans who perceive that their side of the story [was] left out’ of the 2013 genocide trial.     

The reconciliation trap: disputing genocide and the land issue in postwar Guatemala

ABSTRACT

Guatemala’s reconciliation debate is as much about the present and the future as it is about history. In order to highlight its political dimension, I propose to read this controversy through the lens of hegemony theory. It is precisely because of the entwinement of specific political economic interests, centuries-old ethnic conflict and structural racism in Guatemala that charging genocide constitutes a key moment in a fight over power—a fight in which controversies about the politics of history are also expressions of struggle over economic resources and political hegemony. In this light, reconciliation does not appear to be a solution but a trap, set by those who defend their interests against the changes that the Peace Accords and the recommendations of the Historical Clarification Commission demanded. In the first section, I show that one crucial motive for these elites to deny the Guatemalan genocide, besides obvious reasons of historical shame and responsibility, is economic issues, among them the century-old land question. In the following sections I present two seemingly contrary arguments from the political and academic left. One takes apart, from a poststructural perspective, simplifying binary logics of class and ethnic conflict and thus delegitimizes the indigenous and peasant struggle for economic reform in the process. The other proposes a form of universal guilt that also ends up depoliticizing the history of the civil war.     

The modernizing bias of human rights: stories of mass killings and genocide in Central America

This article analyses selected cases of mass killings and genocide during the civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala in the 1980s and the way in which the truth commissions in both countries reframed locally grounded narratives to fit the state-centred language of human rights. Redefining wrongdoings as human rights violations produces stories that communicate poorly with local worldviews because the 'truths' that human rights language proposes disregard local realities and transform local conflicts into a type of 'modern', nationwide struggles. Thus, while the concept of genocide might capture well the horrendous nature of a mass killing, it will also ethnify the conflict. Comparisons between local readings and human rights-based reinterpretations reveal a 'modernizing' or 'Westernizing' bias of international law; the article argues for more awareness about such effects in analysis as well as in policy-making.     

The World Food Programme: a case of benign US policy?1

The World Food Programme (WFP) is currently the largest and arguably one of the most successful of the United Nations Special Agencies, yet there has been little examination of it by international relations scholars since the early 1990s. This article seeks to analyse the normative and political characteristics of the WFP which have contributed to its effectiveness. Among its most significant findings is that American agricultural interests, interpreted through the prism of domestic political norms, have dovetailed with ‘feed-the-hungry’ norms that are projected and implemented by the WFP, resulting in the strong support of the United States for the WFP. This support undermines the perception, promoted by some critics, that the UN is incapable of acting in ways that are compatible with the national interests of the United States and other significant member-states who inherently pursue ‘national interests’ in institutional environments.     

Dealing with ‘genocide’: the ICRC and the UN during the Nigeria–Biafra war, 1967–70

This article examines how international and humanitarian organizations participated and positioned themselves in relation to discourses on genocide during the Nigeria–Biafra war (1967–70). During the first half of the conflict, the powerful Biafran propaganda regularly accused the Nigerian government of genocide against the Biafran population. The article looks at the way in which the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), one of the main humanitarian organizations present on the ground, reacted to Biafran accusations. In doing so, it analyses how information received from delegates in the field were apprehended and used—or not—by the headquarters. It shows that the ICRC attitude towards public denunciation was more nuanced than is often presented. Furthermore, the article sheds light on the involvement of the UN in the promotion of the counter-discourse developed by the Nigerian government to deny the genocide accusations. With a focus on the outcomes in the field, it fathoms the leeway the organization had in this situation—a civil war—and how it used it. The limits of the counter-discourse, illustrated by the persistence of the accusation of genocide by groups like the French doctors, reveal the complexities involved in the usage of this term by relief workers. Finally, in studying the way in which these international and humanitarian organizations dealt with genocide claims, this article contributes to the history of the violence that took place during the war.     

‘Cypriot-led,Cypriot-owned’: Cyprus talks revisited

Cyprus occupies an unenviable position among a group of intractable international conflicts which transcend their national borders and whose resolution has eluded third-party mediation. The Cyprus dispute has preoccupied theorists and practitioners of conflict resolution ever since the United Nations stationed its peacekeeping force on the island in 1964. Even attempts by the United Nations to revitalise the Cyprus talks following the 2004 referendum on the Annan plan have not yielded satisfactory results. For decades, the Cyprus problem has challenged conventional international analysis and defied traditional approaches to negotiation and peacemaking. This article grapples with the question of why this conflict has not been resolved despite endless negotiations. By extrapolating three seemingly distinct variables—Cypriotisation, Europeanisation and post-Kemalism—this article alludes to changes in the conflict's contextual parameters that are conducive to a political settlement.     

European solidarity: a semantic history

Abstract

‘European solidarity’ is one of the most frequently used words in contemporary public discourse, but what does it mean? This article investigates the historical and semantic background of the term in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish since the French Revolution, when ‘solidarity’ became a political keyword for the first time in European history. With the founding of the Holy Alliance in 1815 the idea of ‘European solidarity’ as an instrument for achieving political order on the continent emerged. A historical longitudinal analysis via the Ngram Viewer reveals that the frequency of ‘solidarity’ follows or depends on certain crisis moments in history, such as revolutions, wars or economic troubles. ‘Solidarity’ belongs to the history of emotions and propaganda but is not a stable value system that consolidates political culture. It also seems to play a greater role in the national rather than in the European context. As a European political expression, ‘solidarity’ is not genuinely European but borrowed from the national political vocabulary. Moreover, the article outlines the semantic field of ‘European solidarity’ by showing linkages between ‘solidarity’ and other words.     

Accountability and sexual exploitation and abuse in peace operations

In March 2016, the United Nations Security Council adopted its first resolution devoted entirely to the prevention of peacekeeper sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA) in peace operations. This article examines resolution 2272 by drawing on past practice and the perspective of those at mission sites—namely, Timor-Leste—arguing that the mechanism it establishes—repatriation—is limited in its capacity to prevent SEA and provide justice outcomes. The article demonstrates the pervasive sense of powerlessness regarding SEA and the impunity of those who do perpetrate SEA. The article further situates the issue of SEA by peacekeepers in the post-conflict (gendered) context in which it occurs, arguing that the resolution does not challenge the underlying norms and gendered relations of power that underpin peace operations. Instead, the resolution frames SEA as chiefly an issue of embarrassment for the United Nations and makes scant mention of the populations that peace operations are mandated to protect, as well as the perspectives and needs of victims of SEA.     

Dithering over Darfur? A preliminary review of the international response

The extreme violence against civilian communities in the Sudanese province of Darfur has coincided with the tenth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide. This article makes a preliminary assessment of the international response to Darfur to see how it compares to the denial and delay of ten years ago. The slow evolution of the international community's response is charted from early Chadian efforts at mediation in 2003, the eventual involvement of the UN Security Council in July 2004, the increasing role of the African Union and the US government's conclusion in September 2004 that the violence constitutes genocide. The international community has certainly been too slow and divided in its response in the face of competing political priorities. There were also significant misgivings about a US-led military intervention and considerable Sudanese intransigence and diplomatic skill. Nevertheless, there are important signs that key parts of the United Nations and the international community have worked with a definite post-R wanda consciousness. Important developments have also been made in combining humanitarian and political negotiation while a committed African Union is now in a position to make a real difference. Although late to gather force, international political will and US leadership have been strong. But, like many tragedies before it, Darfur shows that political will is not enough. The choices facing even the most wilful politicians still remain intensely difficult and 'doing something' is not as easy as most NGO press releases imply.     

Managing Dissent in a Post‐genocide Environment: The Challenge of Political Space in Rwanda

This article analyses how political space, defined here as the ability of actors other than the government to critically engage in debate on government policy and practice, is being constituted in post‐genocide Rwanda. Using evidence from interviews with civil society activists and examples from the Rwandan Government's post‐genocide policies, it explores the kind of political space which results from an interplay of potentially competing influences. These include the promotion of a liberal approach to democracy, favoured by many of Rwanda's donors, and a more tightly‐managed and limited transition which is both preferred by and beneficial for the RPF Government. The article shows that although space could be seen in some areas as opening, this trend is hampered by government actions, including legislative and shadow methods, by donor reluctance to pressure the ruling RPF and by fear within civil society of tackling politically sensitive issues. In conclusion, the author suggests that this fear is reinforced by government policies which narrow perceptions of political space, exacerbated by perceived abandonment of civil society by donors, and that in combination these factors pose a long‐term challenge to more openly contested politics in Rwanda.     

Warfare,political identities,and displacement in Spain and Colombia

This paper explores the causes of displacement during civil wars. Recent scholarship has shown that conventional civil wars – those in which forces are relatively balanced – and irregular civil wars – those in which one side is substantially stronger than the other – exhibit different patterns of violence. We hypothesize that, while the mode of violence differs, the form of displacement should be consistent across the wars: displacement is a tactic of war that armed groups use to conquer new territories. By expelling civilians associated with rivals, armed groups improve their odds of gaining control of contested territory. This implies that members of a group are targeted for displacement because of their identity and presumed loyalties. We test the theory using two fine-grained datasets on individuals displaced during a conventional civil war, in Spain (1936–1939), and an irregular civil war, in Colombia (1964–). In both cases, the war cleavage was ideological and reflected in national elections: the locations where political parties received support indicated which populations were sympathetic to rivals. In both civil wars, we observe higher levels of displacement in locations where more sympathizers of rival armed groups reside. The article is the first comparison to our knowledge of the sub-national dynamics of displacement within two different civil wars and it shows that the microfoundations of displacement are similar across types. Finally, the article explains macro-level differences with a coherent micro-level framework.