Why isn't there more violence?

Security Studies

Volumn 13, Issue 3, 2004, Pages 191-203

  Mueller, John ^a,b  

^a National Security Studies   (United States)

^b OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 15944394092     PISSN: 09636412     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09636410490914031     Document Type: Article

References (46)

1. Benjamin Valentino, Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the Twentieth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 32. Valentino does not deal very much with the notion of sanctions as a form of intentional mass killing (though see p. 88). His point about "negative support," however, is illustrated by the lack of reaction in the United States when America's ambassador to the United Nations, Madeleine Albright, appeared on the nation's most popular television newsmagazine, 60 Minutes, on 12 May 1996. Asked whether she thought the deaths of perhaps half a million children caused by u.s.-imposed sanctions on Iraq were "worth it," she replied without disputing the number, "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price - we think the price is worth it." This remarkable assertion, ignored in the United States, became famous in the Arab world.
2. See Andrew Cockburn and Patrick Cockburn, Out of the Ashes: The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), 263.
3. Valentino, Final Solutions, 1-2.
4. See also Rudolph Rummel, Death by Government (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1994).
5. David Ropeik and George Gray, Risk (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), 424.
6. The World Health Organization estimates that road crashes currently kill 1.2 million people a year worldwlde. See www.who.int/mediacentre/ releases/2004/pr24/en (accessed 28 April 2004).
7. The fear of violence, thus, is often much greater than its actuality, and the record with respect to fear about crime suggests that efforts to deal coherently with the risks of terrorism will prove difficult. For example, fear of crime rose notably in the mid-1990s even as statistics were showing that crime was in pronounced decline. When David Dinkins, running for re-election as mayor of New York City, pointed to such numbers, he was accused by A. M. Rosenthal of the New York Times of hiding behind "trivializing statistics" that "are supposed to convince us that crime is going down" ("New York to Clinton," New York Times, 1 October 1993, A31). New Yorkers did eventually come to feel safer from crime, but this was probably less because crime rates actually declined than because atmospherics as graffiti, panhandlers, aggressive windshield washers, and the homeless were banished or hidden from view. In the end, it is not clear how one can deal with the public's often irrational fears about remote dangers. Some people say they prefer dangerous forms of transportation such as the private passenger automobile to safe ones such as commercial airliners because they feel they have more "control." Yet they seem to feel no fear on buses and trains even without having that sense of control and even though derailing a speeding train or crashing a speeding bus are likely to be much easier for a terrorist than downing an airliner - as experience in Israel attests. Furthermore, people tend to be more alarmed by dramatic fatalities - which the 9/11 crashes certainly provided - than by ones that cumulate statistically. Thus the 3,000 deaths of 9/11 inspire far more grief and fear than the 150,000 deaths from auto accidents that have taken place since then. In some respects, fear of terror may be something like playing the lottery except in reverse: the chances of winning the lottery or of dying from terrorism may be microscopic, but for monumental events that are, or seem, random, one can irrelevantly conclude that one's chances are just as good, or as bad, as those of anyone else. The communication of risk, then, is no easy task.
8. On this issue, see John Mueller, "Harbinger or Aberration? A 9/11 Provocation," National Interest (fall 2002): 45-50.
9. More generally, see John Mueller, "Simplicity and Spook: Terrorism and the Dynamics of Threat Exaggeration," International Security Perspectives, forthcoming.
10. See Robert C. Ellickson, Order without Law: How Neighbors Settle Disputes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991);
11. Lawrence H. Keeley, War before Civilization The Myth of the Peaceful Savage (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 178;
12. John Mueller, Quiet Cataclysm: Reflections on Recent Transformation of World Politics (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), ch. 8;
13. John Mueller, Capitalism, Democracy, and Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 38-43.
14. Keeley, War before Civilization, 155. People are also strongly inclined to seek governments that seem to be able to provide that sense of safety, even ones that are reprehensible on other grounds. The power of this appeal should never be underestimated. It is fundamental, and people will in desperation often sacrifice almost anything simply to be able to live in peace. Thus, the Taliban succeeded in Afghanistan, despite their theological extremism, in large part because the population was desperate for a force that could bring order to the country. The Nazis came to power in Germany in considerable part because they seemed likely to be able to deal effectively with the political disorder that was endemic in German streets at the time. People in Turkmenistan willingly support a leader who renames months after himself in part because he appears to have kept them from the violent disorder that has infected nearby Tajikistan. Despite the authoritarian cast of his government, Russia's Vladimir Putin remains highly popular in considerable measure because of the perceived stability that has marked his reign - in vivid contrast with the turmoil of the 1990s.
15. This discussion draws upon John Mueller, The Remnants of War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 112-16.
16. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), 496 (in "Review and Conclusion"). Actually, however, Hobbes had already worked out some of the notions in writings, such as De Civi, that were published before the Civil War.
17. Hobbes, Leviathan, 76-78 (in ch. 13).
18. Robert P. Kraynak, History and Modernity in the Thought of Thomas Hobbes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 148-49.
19. This conclusion may be more Hobbesian than Hobbes, however. Russell Hardin pointed to a passage in which Hobbes noted that "law was brought into the world for nothing else but to limit the natural liberty of particular men, in such manner, as they might not hurt, but assist one another, and join together against a common enemy" Leviathan, 175 (in chap. 26). The suggestion is that the problem is with "particular men" not with the totality of humanity.
20. Miloš Vasi, "The Yugoslav Army and the Post-Yugoslav Armies," in Yugoslavia and After: A Study in Fragmentation, Despair and Rebirth, ed. David A. Dyker and Ivan Vejvoda (London: Longman, 1996), 134;
21. United Nations Commission of Experts, Final Report of the United Nations Commission of Experts Established Pursuant to Security Council Resolution 780 (1992), Annex 111.A Special Forces, ed. M. Cherif Bassiouni (New York: United Nations, 28 December 1994), para. 92, 138.
22. Chris Hedges, "From One Serbian Militia Chief, A Trail of Plunder and Slaughter," New York Times, 25 Match 1996, A1.
23. Mike O'Connor, "Moderate Bosnian Serbs Plot in Secrecy for Unity," New York Times, 31 July 1996, A3.
24. David Rohde, Endgame: The Betrayal and Fall of Srebrenica, Europe's Worst Massacre since World War II (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), xiv, 60, 107-9, 354, 355.
25. Geoffrey Parker, The Dutch Revolt (London: Allen Lane, 1977), 78-79.
26. William Reno, Warlord Politics and African States (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1998), 79.
27. Valentino, Final Solutions, 206.
28. 60 Minutes, CBS, 14 May 2000.
29. Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1999), 109, 368.
30. Mueller, Remnants of War, 100;
31. Valentino, Final Solutions, 37;
32. and Bruce D. Jones, Peacemaking in Rwanda: The Dynamics of Failure (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2001 ), 38-41.
33. Kraynak, History and Modernity, 165, 176, 179.
34. Valentino, Final Solutions, chs. 4, 5.
35. Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1979), 111.
36. On this issue, see also Mueller, Quiet Cataclysm, ch. 2.
37. Waltz, Theory of International Politics, 138, 159.
38. John Mearsheimer, "Back to the Future: Instability in Europe after the Cold War," International Security 15, no. 1 (summer 1990): 12, 45.
39. See also Robert J. Art and Kenneth N. Waltz, "Technology, Strategy, and the Uses of Force" in The Use of Force, ed. Robert J. Art and Kenneth N. Waltz (Lanham: University Press of America, 1983), 3-6.
40. Michael Howard, The Lessons of History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 176.
41. John Keegan, A History of Warfare (New York: Knopf, 1993), 59.
42. Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era (Cambridge: Polity, 1999), 5;
43. Robert Jervis, "Theories of War in an Era of Leading-Power Peace," American Political Science Review 96, no. 1 (Match 2002), 1;
44. and Jeffrey Record, "Collapsed Countries, Casualty Dread, and the New American Way of War," Parameters (summer 2002): 6.
45. See also John Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War (New York: Basic Books, 1989).
46. On this phenomenon, see Mueller, Remnants of War, chs. 7-8.