The effect of economic sanctions on the severity of genocides or politicides

This study examines the effect of economic sanctions on the severity of ongoing instances of genocide or politicide. Research suggests that sanctions exacerbate human rights conditions, yet influential policymakers, human rights advocates and some scholars continue to call for economic sanctions to mitigate ongoing atrocities. Ordered logit analyses of genocides and politicides from 1976 to 2008 reveal that sanctions neither aggravate atrocities, as some of the academic literature expects, nor alleviate them, as assumed by many policymakers and advocates (and some researchers). These findings hold regardless of whether they are measured as the number or presence of sanctions, cost, level of comprehensiveness, duration or whether imposed or administered by an international organization. Threats of sanctions also have no effect on atrocity severity, either on their own or combined with other policy options.     

The limits of oral history: ethics and methodology amid highly politicized research settings

In recent years, oral history has been celebrated by its practitioners for its humanizing potential, and its ability to democratize history by bringing the narratives of people and communities typically absent in the archives into conversation with that of the political and intellectual elites who generally write history. And when dealing with the narratives of ordinary people living in conditions of social and political stability, the value of oral history is unquestionable. However, in recent years, oral historians have increasingly expanded their gaze to consider intimate accounts of extreme human experiences, such as narratives of survival and flight in response to mass atrocities. This shift in academic and practical interests begs the questions: Are there limits to oral historical methods and theory? And if so, what are these limits? This paper begins to address these questions by drawing upon fourteen months of fieldwork in Rwanda and Bosnia-Hercegovina, during which I conducted multiple life history interviews with approximately one hundred survivors, ex-combatants, and perpetrators of genocide and related mass atrocities. I argue that there are limits to the application of oral history, particularly when working amid highly politicized research settings.     

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.     

From heaven to hell in ten days: the genocide trial in Guatemala

ABSTRACT

Latin America leads the world in efforts to prosecute perpetrators of gross violations of human rights in domestic courts. Domestic justice offers a number of advantages to international and hybrid tribunals: proceedings take place in close proximity to the site of the atrocities, facilitating victim participation; they are directed by domestic prosecutors and judges, thus contributing to local buy-in; and they can strengthen rule of law and legitimize fragile transitional democracies. The case of Guatemala appears to contradict such arguments, however, given the overturning of the landmark conviction of former dictator José Efraín Ríos Montt on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity and the ongoing impasse of the proceedings. Drawing on the author’s work as an international observer to the genocide trial, interviews with those directly involved in the case, and comparative research on human rights trials in Latin America, this article suggests an alternative reading. By situating the genocide trial in relation to the broader transitional justice process in Guatemala and in the region more broadly, it argues that current setbacks should be viewed as a backlash to initial transitional justice success that is neither unexpected nor fatal to the accountability process. Second, the article argues that the genocide case is illustrative of a victim-centred approach to human rights prosecutions that hold important lessons for transitional justice theory and practice, and examines the way in which victims of sexual violence were incorporated into prosecutorial strategies and helped to prove that a genocide had taken place in Guatemala. Finally, the article argues that despite the undoing of the genocide verdict, the very fact that the trial took place is historically and politically significant, both for survivors and for the construction of collective memory in Guatemala and Latin America as a whole.     

Bringing Daesh to Justice: What the International Community Can Do

This paper explores the response of the international community to the atrocities perpetrated by Daesh in Syria and Iraq. The paper focuses on the crime of genocide and the recognition of the crime by several international institutions and states. Within this discourse, we argue that the Christian minorities should be included as victims of the Daesh genocide. The paper finds that the international community failed to respond to the Daesh atrocities adequately and explores the legal options to ensure that the Daesh fighters are brought to justice. The paper considers the legacy of previous responses to mass atrocities and explores their plausibility. The paper further scrutinizes the progress made to date to bring Daesh to justice and considers other options how the criminal justice can be achieved.     

Setting the agenda for evidence-based research on ending mass atrocities

The question of how mass atrocities end has been dominated by a normative approach regarding how they ought to end. Arguing that an evidence-based approach to terminate mass atrocities might offer profound insights into theories of mass atrocities as well as policies designed to prevent or end their occurrence, this article outlines the key questions and approaches needed for an evidence-based study of atrocity endings. It draws on theories of genocide, political violence and civil war termination, and presents initial insights from case studies, including the killing of civilians in colonial German Southwest Africa, the Soviet Union, the Nigerian civil war, the Guatemalan civil war, the Nuba Mountains of Sudan and Bosnia-Herzegovina.     

“Genocide is Fascism in Action”: Aron Trainin and Soviet Portrayals of Genocide

ABSTRACT

This article examines the Soviet legal scholar Aron Trainin’s evolving writings on international law. Initially, Trainin formulated aspects of his concept of “crimes against peace” as a sort of Soviet alternative to Raphael Lemkin’s crimes of barbarity and vandalism. Crimes against peace both converged with the larger international movement to outlaw aggressive war, provided a Soviet alternative to proposed international crimes that they believed would threaten Soviet sovereignty, and provided a Soviet response to Lemkin’s proposals to outlaw mass killings. During World War II, Trainin articulated the Nazi extermination of the Jews as “crimes against peaceful civilians,” linking the Nazi atrocities to his concept of crimes against peace. Trainin’s concept of “crimes against peaceful civilians” encompassed the atrocities of the Holocaust while also asserting that the Soviet experience of the war – most notably Soviet sacrifice and suffering – meant that the Soviets should determine how international criminal law punished the war’s perpetrators. After World War II, when it became clear that genocide, rather than “crimes against peace” or “crimes against peaceful civilians,” was becoming the primary concept in international law to understand mass killings, Trainin portrayed the concept of genocide according to the perspective of Soviet propaganda, opposing an international criminal court for genocide, supporting the concept of cultural genocide, and portraying genocide as an inevitable outcome of capitalism. At the same time, Trainin and the Soviets never abandoned his concept of “crimes against peace,” portraying capitalism as inherently bound up with war and genocide. Trainin was the most significant genocide scholar in the Soviet Union, and his work exemplifies both the ways in which Soviet approaches to international law converged with other approaches, and the ways in which the Soviet Union diverged from non-Soviet international law.     

Holocaust Narratives: Second-Generation “Perpetrators” and the Problem of Liminality

Taking “second-generation perpetrators” to refer to the tension between the guilt of the parents who were actively involved in carrying out Nazi atrocities, and the innocence of their offspring, I posit the oscillation between these positions as a form of liminality. Underpinned by the work of Jacques Derrida and Marianne Hirsch, I discuss this form of liminality in relation to concepts of the ghostly, examining the ways in which Holocaust narratives, literary and cinematic, are haunted by the past. I argue that the family conflicts such second-generation narratives present run the risk of displacing the real victims of the Holocaust.     

“Situated Bystandership” During and After the Rwandan Genocide

The dominant account of the Rwandan genocide and its aftermath focuses on victims and perpetrators, and rescapés and génocidaires. Less is known about bystanders, mainly Hutu non-perpetrators, who are held collectively responsible for having witnessed violence without trying to stop the killers or help the victims. This article challenges the homogenous portrayal of the unresponsive bystander group, and introduces the novel concept of “situated bystandership” to draw attention to the proximal and representational contexts that shape bystanders’ responses, roles and positions in society. First, to be a “situated bystander” means to resist the pressure to participate in genocidal violence and to belong to a moral order that is distinct from that of the extremists: the moral world of the ordinary, good-hearted people. Second, Rwandans who are “neither pursuing nor being pursued” occupy multiple roles at different points in time. Many are bystanders to specific episodes of violence and their “acts of non-intervention” shape the course of history. Given the pressure to participate in the genocide, the inaction of bystanders could be considered as passive resistance to the ideology of mass killing. Therefore, in a continuum between victims and perpetrators, bystanders might be positioned closer to the victims than the perpetrators. Third, gacaca is a process through which not only is culpability ascertained but individual innocence is also established. This reconfiguration makes it possible to shift the homogenized perception of Hutu non-perpetrators from the position of the morally guilty bystander group towards that of the individual innocent bystander. In contrast to the tendency to essentialize accounts of violence, homogenize groups and reframe controversial stories to fit political strategies, there is value in standing back and identifying the contexts that shape bystanders’ roles, responses and representations. “Situated bystandership” is a lens through which this objective can be achieved.     

Beyond genocide and ethnic cleansing: demographic surgery as a new way to understand mass violence

This article argues that while ethnic cleansing and genocide are generally recognized as major features of modern history, pitfalls inherent in both concepts make them seriously deficient for purposes of historical understanding, especially because of the legal nature (and relevance) of the term genocide. Both terms carry the risk of accounting only for a part (albeit a major one) of a larger history of mass violence and, by over-emphasizing this part, of contributing to the phenomenon of a posteriori ‘ethnization of history’. The article thus proposes the recourse to the new concept of ‘demographic surgery’—one that is able to account for many different, and yet fundamentally similar, instances of category-based persecution of particular groups of people resulting in their massive displacement and/or killing. Episodes of category-based mass killing and displacements have happened along a number of different lines. In addition to ethnic or racial markers, religious, social and ideological ones—isolated or in combination—have all been politicized and used to identify categories of populations targeted by perpetrators of demographic surgery. Even if it is unlikely that terms like genocide or ethnic cleansing will be jettisoned by future writers on issues of mass violence, the concept of demographic surgery will be useful to scholars who need to group together similar events in order to better understand them.     

Engagement without recognition: the limits of diplomatic interaction with contested states

This article examines the extent to which states are able to interact at an official level with a contested or de facto state—a state that has unilaterally declared independence but is not a member of the United Nations—without being understood to have recognized it. This is an area of increasing interest and relevance to policy‐makers as the number of contested states has grown in recent years. In many cases, interaction may be important for ongoing peace efforts. However, there are also instances when a state is prevented from recognizing the territory in question for specific domestic or foreign policy reasons and so has to find alternative means by which to cooperate. Drawing on several key examples, notably Kosovo and the ‘Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus’, but also with reference to Abkhazia, the article explores the limits of interaction across various different forms of bilateral and multilateral diplomatic activity. As is shown, albeit with some significant provisos, legal theory and historic practice suggest that diplomatic engagement does not constitute recognition if there is no underlying intent to recognize. This means that there is in fact a very high degree of latitude regarding the limits of diplomatic engagement with contested states. This is especially the case in bilateral contexts. Indeed, in some circumstances, the level of engagement can even amount to recognition in all but name.     

Perpetrators: specialization,willingness, group pressure and incentives. Lessons from the Guatemalan acts of genocide

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the perpetrators of acts of genocide, and seeks to understand the construction of a willingness to kill. Based on interviews and archival research, it explores the historical context of the Guatemalan army high command as it planned and launched a series of operations that transformed counterinsurgency into acts of genocide. The research supports the chain of command arguments that were important in the verdict against General Ríos Montt, but also explores military policy and procedures that, from the mid 1970s, laid the groundwork for that transformation. How were young and mostly indigenous and illiterate soldiers, with a low level of indoctrination, transformed into genocidal perpetrators, committing massacres against indigenous peoples and other non-indigenous communities? I argue that the decisive factors were group dynamics, particularly specialization and a complex relationship between incentives and personal ambitions for a career inside the armed forces. There were also other factors, constant for all troops, which contributed to defining the adversary and constructing the willingness to kill, including racism, indoctrination, division of labour and the development of the guerrilla war. The article examines a complex set of interactions running in both directions along the chain of command, but focuses most intensely on the last step in that chain, on those actually involved in the massacres committed in the rural areas.     

A nation destroyed: an existential approach to the distinctive harm of genocide

In this article, I present a critique of existing approaches to the distinctive harm of genocide and offer an alternative approach. I draw on Hannah Arendt’s unique conception of genocide, to suggest an ‘existential’ account of the harm of genocide. For Arendt, the distinctive loss in genocide was not a moral loss, strictly speaking, but rather an existential loss to humanity. By destroying a nation in whole or in part, genocide robs us of a variety of possible ways of experiencing and understanding the world. This approach, I argue, is original and valuable, and merits further consideration by anyone who is interested in the problem of genocide.     

Humanitarianism,genocide and liberalism

The international response to genocide and human rights violations has received increasing attention by scholars in the humanities and social sciences. This article explores the history of the response to mass atrocity by assessing recent work on humanitarianism as an idea and in practice in the West. It argues that the impulse to defend the rights of others historically has been tied up with geopolitical and imperial concerns that shaped European politics. The current embrace of the responsibility to protect, or ‘R2P’, and debates over whether or not to recognize and prosecute perpetrators of past atrocities from the Armenian genocide to Rwanda remain embedded in this longer history of humanitarianism and geopolitics. As recent work on humanitarian intervention, the anti-slavery movement and humanitarianism and foreign policy demonstrates, the pressing need to understand the response to atrocity has called scholars to more fully participate in the contemporary conversation over human rights by exploring its roots in humanitarian practices of the recent and not so recent past. Understanding the history of humanitarianism as it connects both with the history of human rights and liberal ideals offers an important way of reassessing the role of the nation-state and international institutions in responding to human rights crisis. The article concludes by suggesting that scholars move away from the question of the origin of human rights as an idea to focus on historicizing the response to humanitarian crisis in order to problematize the story of the rise of western-led human rights regimes.     

Genocide as Fact and Form

ABSTRACT

In June 2019 Canada's National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls released its final report. This short Reflection focuses on the National Inquiry's supplementary legal analysis, which concerns the law of genocide. I contend that this analysis is correct in holding that the murder and disappearance of large numbers of Indigenous women, girls, and other persons ought to be understood as an ongoing crime facilitated by specific policy choices, legal decisions, and socio-economic structures. I also contend that the systemic, recurrent, and large-scale nature of this crime is best captured by the term “genocide.” I argue that formal legal definitions of “genocide” such as the one offered in the 1948 Genocide Convention, though conceptually clunky, historically contingent, and politically inadequate, are key to illuminating some of the structural forces underlying and animating a range of events that may otherwise appear unrelated. Genocide, the ultimate collectivist crime, is a concept of preponderantly legal origin, which means that serious consideration must be given to its specifically legal definition when trying to determine whether it is justifiable or appropriate to apply it to a given social phenomenon. Its standard legal definition may be unable to do justice to the specificities of different modes of group violence, but its abstract generality is also what enables those who employ it to highlight the intrinsically systemic character of such destruction. Ultimately, I suggest that Canada's genocide “debate” turns on the relation between “law” and “society”—the question, that is, of how precisely a legal definition is to be interpreted and applied under different, and often rapidly changing, social conditions.     

‘The Darroch affair’: Assemblage lines,components, and transformations

This article examines the underresearched role of lines and components in recomposing geopolitical assemblages. It does so by focusing on a single body at the middle of an event to show how its lines of assembling conditioned wider transformations. The event in question – the leaking of confidential diplomatic materials in July 2019 as part of the so-called “Darroch Affair” – opened a massive rift between governing and bureaucratic arms of the UK state. Set in the context of ongoing struggles to recode the transatlantic diplomatic assemblage (TADA) by US and UK governments, Sir Kim Darroch, British Ambassador to the US, was at front and centre of the resulting leaks imbroglio. Using assemblage thinking, I offer an alternative conceptualisation of Darroch's body as distributed across the TADA via structurally complex lines of assembling. I argue the historical trajectories of these lines accelerated assemblage recompositions as the excessiveness of events led to Darroch's body occupying more and more possibility spaces across the TADA. The article considers how the linear complexity of Darroch's body arose, and the consequences of the resulting recompositions of the TADA for its nested diplomatic worlds.     

Military Anxiety and Genocide: Explaining Campaigns of Annihilation (and Their Absence)

When and why do states launch campaigns of genocide against minorities? In 2017, in a violent campaign increasingly described as genocide, the Myanmar military drove almost 700,000 Rohingya from Rakhine State into Bangladesh killing an estimated 6,700 in the first month and an unknown number overall. This assault is particularly puzzling given the international goodwill and economic benefits the regime was accruing since it opened its political system after decades of isolation. Scholars have identified a number of causes of genocide yet this literature requires development in two areas. First, few studies compare cases of genocide with situations of lower level political violence, meaning it is difficult to distinguish between societies that are simply violent from those which are genocidal. Second, despite the central role played by militaries in genocide, most studies have treated the institution as simply a tool of nationalists and other genocidal leaders rather than as actors with their own incentives and fears. In this study, I develop an explanation of genocide that places militaries at its centre. I contend that armed forces sometimes choose genocide during periods of rapid political change when they perceive a serious threat to their political and economic interests or self-appointed status as “guardian of the nation.” My study begins with a comparison between Rakhine State, Myanmar and a similarly volatile region that has avoided genocide, Assam in Northeast India. In a later stage of theory testing I examine another case of genocide, Indonesia in 1965/66.     

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.     

Memory and the everyday landscape of violence in post-genocide Cambodia

This paper addresses the politics of memory in post-genocide Cambodia. Since 1979 genocide has been selectively memorialized in the country, with two sites receiving official commemoration: the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide Crimes and the killing fields at Choeung Ek. However, the Cambodian genocide was not limited to these two sites. Through a case study of two unmarked sites—the Sre Lieu mass grave at Koh Sla Dam and the Kampong Chhnang Airfield—we highlight the salience, and significance, of taking seriously those sites of violence that have not received official commemoration. We argue that the history of Cambodia's genocide, as well as attempts to promote transitional justice, must remain cognizant of how memories and memorials become political resources. In particular, we contend that a focus on the unremarked sites of past violence provides critical insight into our contemporary understandings of the politics of remembering and of forgetting.     

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.