Theoretical Paper: Toward a Theory of Critical Genocide Studies

1 2 3 4 5

 The Liberal Theory of Genocide

The inability of Genocide Studies to predict or interdict genocides is a problem (Moses, 2006), and it is worthwhile considering why. Constituted mainly by social scientists from North America, the field has been dominated by the nomothetic approach that seeks hard knowledge in the form of universal laws with predictive potential. The idiographic approach of historians has not prevailed. Above all, it sought to elucidate a general theory of genocide by identifying the central elements in a genocidal conjuncture in the manner of a mathematical equation. For example, for Helen Fein, a leading figure in the field:

Genocide is viewed theoretically... as a strategy that ruling elites use to resolve real solidarity and legitimacy conflicts or challenges to their interests against victims decreed outside their universe of obligation in situations in which a crisis or opportunity is caused by or blamed on the victim (or victim impedes taking advantage of an opportunity) and the perpetrators believe that they can get away with it (1993: 813. Emphasis added).

As with many of the social sciences, then, the object of inquiry represents a theory rather than investigates the complexities of the cases or how they related to one another. For this reason, the discipline necessarily proceeds comparatively: each country/genocide serves as a mine of information to test overarching concepts, laws, or models. Each case is considered basically independent from the other and is thus available for use as data in a social scientific experiment about the dependent and independent variables. Implicit in this method is a developmental perspective which assumes that social change is endogenetic, i.e., that domestic social structures drive change or that social change is propelled by forces internal to societies. Consequently, the unit of analysis in genocide studies is a society, usually a nation-state.

This approach has yielded impressive insights. Fein, for instance, developed a typology of genocides in which she identified four types: ideological, retributive, developmental or despotic (1990), while Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn distinguished between those that seek to implement an ideology, eliminate a threat (real or perceived), acquire wealth, or spread terror (1990). Others have developed schemata of their own. We have, then, useful categories to compare and contrast genocides. Indeed, to its immense credit, genocide studies has been genuinely comparative, rejecting the rhetoric of Holocaust uniqueness in favor of a broad, ostensibly non-hierarchical approach. For example, Steven T. Katz’s The Holocaust in Historical Context (1994), with its argument about the supposed phenomenological uniqueness of the Holocaust, was roundly condemned as quixotic, even chauvinist.

Theoretical Problems

The theoretical and comparative focus of the field, however, led to a number of problems. For one, the literature became bogged down in rather tedious and ultimately irresolvable definitional debates, which were eventually only settled by disciplinary fiat. Clearly, these debates were unavoidable for one cannot compare cases without a common measure. But for reasons I will suggest shortly, leading genocide scholars took the Holocaust as the paradigm of genocide despite their ostensible rejection of Holocaust uniqueness. Ignoring or rejecting Raphael Lemkin’s own capacious definition, which included non-murderous techniques of genocide, they redefined it as an ideologically-motivated and state-executed program of mass killing. For instance, in their widely used book The History and Sociology of Genocide (1990), Chalk and Jonassohn criticized the UN Convention as inadequate because it omits political and social groups but includes non-lethal forms of group destruction. They wanted to confine genocide to mass killing: it is “a form of one-sided mass killing in which a state or other authority intends to destroy a group, as that group and membership in it are defined by the perpetrator” (1990: 23).

The prolific genocide scholar Barbara Harff echoed this line of thinking when she defined genocide “as a particular form of state terror … mass murder, pre-meditated by some power-wielding group linked with state power.” The background assumption was made explicit in her aside that “The Jewish Holocaust... is employed as the yardstick, the ultimate criterion for assessing the scope, methods, targets, and victims of [other] genocides” (1986: 165-66. Emphasis added). In an influential article, Harff and Ted Gurr followed the trend of excluding the non-lethal techniques of genocide in the UN Convention “because,” as they wrote, “this extends the definition to innumerable instances of groups which have lost their cohesion and identity, but not necessarily their lives” (1988: 360).

The line we should follow was made clear by Chalk when he argued that “we must never forget that the great genocides of the past have been committed by [state] perpetrators who acted in the name of absolutist or utopian ideologies aimed at cleansing and purifying their worlds.” (1994: 58). In its initial incarnation, then, genocide studies was really a version of totalitarianism theory because by definition a genocide—at least a true one—can only be committed by a totalitarian or at least authoritarian state.

Largely forgotten here were the colonial genocides about which Lemkin had written so much in his unpublished writing (McDonnell and Moses, 2005). It is to the lasting credit of Chalk and Jonassohn that they included colonial cases in their well-known anthology, but apart from outsiders like David Stannard in the USA and Tony Barta in Australia, colonial cases were not regarded as particularly interesting or important. There is a blindness at work here that led a prominent historian to concede that although “it was the hand-in-glove pressure of American settlers and the military might deployed by the government of the United States that destroyed large numbers of the American Indians,” this fact revealed nothing about “the nature of American society” (Chalk, 1994: 56-57). If we are searching for what I have elsewhere called “conceptual blockages” in the discipline, here they are (Moses, 2002).

The restriction of the meaning of genocide in this way is not surprising. The Cambodian auto-genocide had occurred at the moment of the foundation of Genocide Studies, and the colonial period had long passed in the Anglophone settler colonies. There was also a Cold War imperative. Most North American genocide scholars are liberals for whom the answer to totalitarianism and genocide is the United States and its willing coalition partners. If the rest of the world were like the US, so the thinking goes, genocide would no longer occur. If the US is guilty of anything it is of sins of omission, as Samantha Power argued in her book, “A Problem from Hell” (2002).

This approach dovetails neatly with the implicit modernization theory in comparative Genocide Studies: genocides occur in societies—“failed states,” we often hear today (eg. Harff, 2003)—that have experienced perverted modernizations. Had they followed the western, preferably the North American, road to modernity, it is implied, they would not have become totalitarian states and perpetrated genocide on their own or neighboring populations. Leaving aside the fact that this rosy view ignores the fate of the Native Americans, it can be identified as an American version of what we historians of Germany recognize immediately as the now highly suspect Sonderweg approach to comparative historical sociology.

Either way the US and, more generally, the West, is regarded as the redeeming power in world affairs, whether as the agent of liberalization or as the cavalry that rescues victims from genocidal elites and their militias in the “Third World.” When Mark Levene suggested otherwise at the fourth biennial “International Association of Genocide Scholars” conference at the University of Minnesota on June 10, 2001, he was rebuked by leaders in the field with the epithets that he was anti-American, “ideological,” and such heresies. Yet how ideological is a position that wants to ignore the genocidal foundation of settler colonies like the US and Australia, and question the theodicy that the westernization of the globe will lead to a world in which genocide has been banished?

Similar problems affect the comparative historical approach so common in the field. It proceeds episodically rather than studying broader and deeper processes. Consider two anthologies that cover the twentieth century: The Specter of Genocide (2003), edited by Robert Gellately and Ben Kiernan, and A Century of Genocide (2003) edited by Samuel Totten, Williams S. Parsons, and Israel Charny. Their chapters present global instances of genocide—the Kiernan/Gellately volume in particular includes cases that customarily receive less attention—but they do not give much of a sense of how they are related to one another except as instances of a definition. An integrated organization on ethnic cleansing is offered by the sociologist Michael Mann in his big work The Dark Side of Democracy. A neo-Weberian, Mann is reluctant to offer a single theory, and instead employs an ensemble of concepts of how nation states negotiate the tension between ethnos and demos, and the problem of national minorities – ranging from assimilation to extermination – to understand how and why states radicalize in the direction of ethnic cleansing and genocide. Like another Weberian, Reinhard Bendix, who wrote on nation and state formation in equally sweeping terms, Mann presents no overarching theory of what drives change and escalation on a global scale. In the end each chapter is a case study in the conventional mode of comparative sociology, in this case utilizing ideal types to categorize the material. Of the Holocaust, he admits that “it had too many peculiarities to fit easily into any general model” (503).

1 2 3 4 5