"Destroy them to save us": Theories of genocide and the logics of political violence

Terrorism and Political Violence

Volumn 24, Issue 4, 2012, Pages 544-560

  Straus, Scott ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN MADISON   (United States)

Author keywords

Conflict processes; Constraint; Genocide; Ideology; Local actors; Mass killing; Negative cases; Periodization; Political violence

Indexed keywords

EID: 84864960789     PISSN: 09546553     EISSN: 15561836     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09546553.2012.700611     Document Type: Article

References (103)

1. Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
2. Madeleine Albright and William Cohen, Preventing Genocide: A Blueprint for U.S. Policymakers (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 2009).
3. Gareth Evans, The Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Once and For All (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2008).
4. Note too that there exists now within the United Nations Secretariat an office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide; in August 2011, U.S. President Barack Obama announced a new policy initiative to prevent genocide and atrocity.
5. Geoffrey Robinson, "If You Leave Us Here We Will Die": How Genocide Was Stopped in East Timor (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).
6. Alexander Hinton, Why Did They Kill? Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005).
7. Ben Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-79 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).
8. Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
9. Lee Ann Fujii, Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009).
10. Christopher Sullivan, "'Those They Identified as the Enemy': An Empirical Analysis of the Use of Genocidal Massacres In a Counter-Insurgency Campaign," Unpublished Manuscript, Department of Political Science, University of Notre Dame, 2010.
11. Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
12. Benjamin Valentino, Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the Twentieth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004).
13. Christian Gerlach, Extremely Violent Societies: Mass Violence in the Twentieth- Century World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
14. Barbara Harff, "No Lessons Learned from the Holocaust? Assessing Risks of Genocide and Political Mass Murder since 1955," American Political Science Review 97, no. 1 (2003): 57-73.
15. Scott Straus, "Second Generation Comparative Research on Genocide," World Politics 57, no. 1 (2007): 476-501.
16. Helen Fein, Accounting for Genocide: National Responses and Jewish Victimization during the Holocaust (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979).
17. Helen Fein, "Genocide: A Sociological Perspective," Current Sociology 38, no. 1 (1990): 1-126.
18. Leo Kuper, Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981).
19. Irving Louis Horowitz, Genocide: State Power and Mass Murder (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1976).
20. Rudolph Rummel, Death by Government (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1994).
21. Ervin Staub, The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
22. Robert Melson, Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
23. Fein 1979 (see note 13 above).
24. The extent of the empirical connection between war and genocide depends to a degree on conceptualization both of the outcome and of armed conflict. Some definitions of the outcome, such as "politicide" (mass killing of political groups), would point to cases that occur outside of armed conflict. Chile or Argentina would be examples. Also true is that how one conceptualizes "armed conflict" or "war" shapes the intuition. In the Communist Cambodian, Soviet, and Chinese cases, for example, murderous agrarian reforms and purges were committed when regime leaders claim they are fighting wars.
25. Benjamin Valentino, Paul Huth, and Dylan Balch-Lindsay, " 'Draining the Sea': Mass Killing and Guerrilla Warfare," International Organization 58 (2004): 375-407.
26. Jay Ulfelder and Benjamin Valentino, Assessing Risks of State-Sponsored Mass Killing (Washington, DC: Political Instability Task Force, 2008), 14.
27. Ibid., 15.
28. The findings echo other quantitative research on mass killing and genocide. Matthew Krain argues "political opportunity structure," in particular armed conflict, is a significant predictor of mass political murder.
29. Matthew Krain, "State-Sponsored Mass Murder: The Onset and Severity of Genocides and Politicides," Journal of Conflict Resolution 41, no. 3 (1997), 331-360.
30. Harff (2003) (see note 11 above) emphasizes upheaval (including war), as well as five other factors (ranging from past atrocity, to autocratic rule, to low trade openness, to exclusionary ideology, and ethnic minority rule).
31. Martin Shaw, War and Genocide: Organized Killing in Modern Society (Cambridge: Polity, 2003).
32. Martin Shaw, What is Genocide? (Cambridge: Polity, 2007).
33. Shaw 2007 (see note 22 above).
34. Manus Midlarsky, The Killing Trap: Genocide in the Twentieth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 94.
35. Jacques Sémelin, Purify and Destroy: The Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide, trans. by Cynthia Shoch (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
36. Scott Straus, The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006).
37. Harff 2003 (see note 11 above).
38. Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 34.
39. Eric Weitz, A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).
40. Ibid., 14.
41. Sémelin 2007 (see note 25 above), 22.
42. Ibid., 48.
43. Kiernan 2007 (see note 28 above), 21.
44. Mann 2005 (see note 8 above), 7.
45. Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1996).
46. Kuper 1981 (see note 13 above).
47. An exception is Harff (2003) (see note 11 above), where autocracy remains significant in her multivariate analysis.
48. Mark Levene, Genocide in the Age of the Nation State (London: I.B. Tauris, 2005), 2 vols.
49. Shaw 2003 (see note 22 above).
50. A. Dirk Moses, ed., Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History (London: Bergahn Books, 2008).
51. See Levene 2005 (see note 37 above)
52. Mann 2005 (see note 8 above)
53. Shaw 2007 (see note 22 above)
54. Straus 2006 (see note 26 above)
55. Valentino 2004 (see note 9 above).
56. James Fearon and David Laitin, "Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War," American Political Science Review 97, no. 1 (2003): 75-90.
57. Stathis Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
58. David Leonard and Scott Straus, Africa's Stalled Development: International Causes and Cures (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2003).
59. Straus 2007 (see note 12 above).
60. Scott Straus, "Contested Meanings and Conflicting Imperatives: A Conceptual Analysis of Genocide," Journal of Genocide Research 3, no. 3 (2001): 349-375.
61. For some recent examples from the literature on civil war and interstate violence, see Kalyvas 2006 (see note 41 above).
62. Alexander Downes, Targeting Civilians in War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008).
63. Jason Lyall, "Are Coethnics More Effective Counterinsurgents? Evidence from the Second Chechen War," American Political Science Review 104, no. 1 (2010): 1-20.
64. Kiernan 2007 (see note 28 above), 605.
65. Shaw 2007 (see note 22 above), 154.
66. Sémelin 2007 (see note 25 above), 382.
67. Kristine Eck and Lisa Hultman, "One-Sided Violence against Civilians in War: Insights from New Fatality Data," Journal of Peace Research 44, no. 2 (2007): 233-246.
68. Gerlach 2010 (see note 10 above).
69. Including in my work, e.g., Straus 2001 (see note 42 above).
70. Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944), 79-81.
71. Fein 1990 (see note 13 above)
72. Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).
73. Elisabeth Wood, "Armed Groups and Sexual Violence: When Is Wartime Rape Rare," Politics and Society 37, no. 1 (2009): 131-162.
74. Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperCollins, 1992).
75. Chalk and Jonassohn as well as Eck and Hultman capture this idea by conceptualizing genocide as "one-sided violence," but that formulation can be misleading in that genocidal violence generally occurs in multi-sided armed conflict.
76. Louise Richardson, What Terrorists Want: Understanding the Enemy, Containing the Threat (New York: Random House, 2006).
77. Kalyvas 2006 (see note 41 above).
78. Ulfelder and Valentino 2008 (see note 20 above).
79. Browning 1992 (see note 53 above).
80. Fujii 2009 (see note 6 above).
81. Straus 2006 (see note 26 above).
82. Richardson 2006 (see note 55 above).
83. The point is consistent with Shaw's 2007 emphasis on seeing genocide as part of a broader pattern of conflict between groups and populations.
84. Kalyvas 2006 (see note 41 above).
85. Kalyvas 2006 (see note 41 above).
86. Richardson 2006 (see note 55 above).
87. William Finnegan, "Silver or Lead," New Yorker, May 31, 2010, 39.
88. Daniel Chirot and Clark McCauley, Why Not Kill Them All? The Logic and Prevention of Mass Political Murder (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).
89. I am pursuing this line of inquiry through an ongoing book-length study of cases of conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa that did or did not result in mass genocidal violence.
90. Wood 2009 (see note 52 above).
91. For more on this question, see Scott Straus, "Retreating from the Brink: Theorizing Mass Violence and the Dynamics of Restrant," Perspectives on Politics 10, no. 2 (2012): 343-362.
92. James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
93. Kalyvas 2006 (see note 41 above).
94. Stathis Kalyvas, "The Ontology of Political Violence," Perspectives on Politics 1, no. 3 (2003): 475-494.
95. Donald Bloxham, The Final Solution: A Genocide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
96. Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939-March 1942 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004).
97. Robinson 2010 (see note 3 above).
98. Fujii 2009 (see note 6 above).
99. Sullivan 2010 (see note 7 above).
100. Bloxham 2005 (see note 5 above).
101. Browning 2004 (see note 69 above).
102. Valentino 2004 (see note 9 above).
103. Mann 2005 (see note 8 above).