Midterm 1: Theory Flashcards
Define Genocide Etimology
- Geno: Race or Tribe
- Cide: Killing
UN Definition of Genocide
Formulation of intent
Goal
Mode of annihilation
target
perpetrator
• Formulation of intent?
Coordinated plan
Must be proven intent on part of perpetrator, cultural destruction or discretion (?) does not count
• Goal of genocide?
Destroy in part or in whole of targeted groups
• What is the mode of annihilation?
destructive “Mass killing conditions, & institutional birth prevention, destruction forcible of culture” child
• Who is the target?:
National groups, ethnic groups, religious groups, racial groups
• Who is the perpetrator?
No clear actor mentioned–> everyone
Lemkin Definition of Genocide
Formulation of intent
Goal
Mode of annihilation
target
perpetrator
• Formulation of Intent?
“coordinated plan.”
• Goal
“aim of annihilating the groups themselves”
• Mode of annihilation
“Mass killing & institutional destruction & personal security”
• Target
“Nation or ethnic group”
• Perpetrator
“Oppressor states”
Problems with these definitions?
Formulation of intent–Jones: actualization of intent however successfully carried out–> same broadness, but also observability could be through coordinated plan or through other ways—> intent can materialize but also captures different forms it can be materialized
Goal: “The Numbers problem”
Mode of annihilation: Genocide could happen without one person being killed, as long as under conditions in which person could be killed
Target: inclusion of racial and religious in UN not lemkin, neither political group, social group, gender
Potential Definition
Actualized intent to physically and violently destroy a group as a whole (including civilians) where the group is constituted as an organic collectivity by the perpetrators.
Why Questions to Ask
- Why this group?
- Why this place and time?
- Why Mass Murder?
HOLOCAUST: Snyder “Bloodlands”
• Double-occupation land (SU and Germans)
• Poles perceive their Jewish neighbors as collaborators with the SU
–> Opportunity for revenger, Deployment Militias
HOLOCAUST: Intenationalism
- Holocaust happened because Hitler intended to kill the Jews early on (redemptive antisemitism)
- Devised a system to do so
- Emigration & concentration temporary stopgaps
- After invasion SU Hitler implemented his plan
HOLOCAUST: Functionalism
- No directives from higher up: Hitler never ordered for Jews to be killed, but
- Local bureaucrats developed local solutions to “Jewish problem” (e.g. in Poland).
- Over time less radical solutions were no longer available and mass killing became an option
HOLOCAUST: Bergen Explains Holocaust
BOTH Internationalism and Functionalism
Hitler made clear what he wanted to do with the Jews.
• Local solutions were created in light of this goal
• Competition between different local actors activated a spiral of radicalization (working towards the Fuhrer).
• Hence it could not have happened without
Hitler’s clear intentions (intentionalist)
Local solutions (functionalist)
Jewish identity vs Armenian identity
Intimate Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogroms on the Eve of the Holocaust by Jason Wittenberg and Jeffrey Kopstein—> • Minority bloc in Poland
United minorities in Poland->gaining autonomy
Zionist leader
Difference: unified several minorities under that banner
• More pogroms in towns with high support for minority block
STRAUSS Readings: Negative Case Studies
Cote d’ivoire or Ivory coast vs. Rwanda? Sources of RESTRAINT
Method of difference: Negative cases (Strauss)
• No sampling on the dependent variable
• Compare cases that vary in outcome to be explained (Genocide)
• Choose case that is very similar but does not experience a genocide
• Trace differences
• Allows one to see how the absence of something matters (restraint)
Straus
• Why did genocide break out in Rwanda but not in Ivory Coast?
• Ivory coast as a negative case:
Very similar on a lot of dimensions–> instability, democratization, war, active militias, political elites condoned violence
On the verge of Genocide
Retreated from the brink BECAUSE: sources of economic restraint and culture of dialogue by leaders
SOME Ways of looking at genocide:
Methods of agreement and Methods of difference
Forces of Constraint Ivory Coast vs. Rwanda (according to Strauss)
Culture of dialogue–> promotes form of tolerance
Economic interests–> more dependent upon exports, would suffer greater economic consequences if commit mass murder
Macro-Level Theories
Question: Why do genocides break out?
Actors:States, nations, elites, global forces
- –> High aggregation level
- –> focuses less on individual cases
Common Explanations of Genocide in methods of agreement
- -> WAR
- –> AGGRESSIVE NATIONALISM
- –> DEMOCRATIZATION
- –> DECLINE
- –> MISMATCH RACE AND SPACE
Violence and human nature:
• William Golding vs. Margaret Mead
• William Golding Lord of the Flies: humans brutal animals hardwired to commit violence, only avoid because of veneer of civilization
• Margaret Mead Coming of Age in Samoa: Men actually good and peaceful —>why we fight war: We invented war and that is what made us killers
Draws on Rouseau
Violence and modernity: Rousseau
- Human nature = good
- Violence created by Property, Ideology, Killing machinery
- War and violence are modern inventions–> governments produce rather than tame violence)
Violence and modernity: Hobbes: 1640 England
• Human nature bad.
• Without a strong authority men would be living in anarchy–>
• Without a constant a strong state of authority war, as if men of every, would against live in every men.
• Need The Leviathan:
–> peaceful need a strong government
—>Nothing in the state of nature, if you would create or produce something people would murder you–> no one has incentive to produce
Structure according to Hobbes
War of all against all–> unhappy life–> individuals give up rights–> formation of state–> cost of disobediance–> individual compliance–> social order
Two paths out of this condition to building state:
Peaceful: Commonwealth institution
Violent: Commonwealth by acquisition (using violence to create order from above)
Bellicist Perspective on war
- -> Wars catalysts for important social change.
- –> Leviathan end result of war
- –>Universities, property rights, courts, democracies
- –>Demands of war create opportunities for innovation and adaptation.
- –> shaped modern society
- –> In the West: war produced STRONG nation-states.
- –>Strong nation-states, after being produced by war, create peace!
State
state is an entity that uses coercion and the threat of force to rule in a given territory.
Monopoly of violence (requires the ability of organized use of violence)
Legitmacy
Nation
a group of people who imagine they share some sort of common identity like a language, a religion, an ethnicity, or common history.
Nation State
state in which a single nation predominates and the legal, social, demographic, and geographic boundaries of the state are connected in important ways to that nation.
State as “Protection Rackets” (Tilly 1985)
Protection Racket—>
• States trade security for revenue
• Seller of security (which they create need for) represents a key threat to the buyer of security.
Main Tasks of Protection Rackets
- Make War: eliminating rival protection rackets
- Control: eliminate rivals inside your territory.
- Protect: eliminate enemies of those who you protect
- Extraction: acquire enough capital, loyalty and soldiers to make war, control, and protect
Strong state and Scientific Knowledge
Strong state and scientific knowledge: self-reinforcing processes:
Strong state can facilitate acquisition of better scientific knowledge
Scientific knowledge produces stronger state
War and Scientific Knowledge:
Scientific revolution—> independent exploration (new guns, new boats, new technologies) —>win more wars–> more power
Protection bracket= incentive to invest in scientific knowledge—> create universities—> creates better weaponry, etc.
Results in decline of religious knowledge and rise in scientific knowledge
War & Taxation
- War requires taxation, legitimates state/racket taxation, means through which to collect taxes: strong army, increase power of state.
- War and taxation reinforce eachother
- Taxes reflect power and legitimacy of the state
Strong state and bureaucracy
Stronger state with more opportunity to invest in resources–> creates bureaucracy
Max Weber on Authority
Bureaucracy–> different way of organizing authority
Authority distinguished from power—> Power: gun to head do something; authority: don’t need threat of force to make do something
Authority relationships in modern societies started shifting fundamentally—> used to be based on tradition (royalty, religion—> appeal to sacred rule appeals to obedience)
Modern Authority–>legally and rationally ordered, No personal master. Obey to roles instead, obey rules and laws, society organized around this
Weber’s ambivalence on bureaucracy
cooperation/integration people.
Magic driven out.–>impersonal, divided up in small tasks, no longer producing only in charge of small piece of production process
• Without a heart->Rationality without morality
No longer interacting with process
• Iron cage.
Bauman: Dark side of bureaucracy
• Claims Bureaucracies are for responsible for rise of genocides–> modern phenomenon
• Holocaust is intertwined with modern civilization
• Bureaucracy was a necessary condition for the Holocaust, i.e. industrial killing –> large coordination needed to make holocaust happen
• Rules, differentiation, routines and authority
—> networks of cooperation
—>distance between perpetrators and victims
—> distance between perpetrators and killing—> don’t see people dying
–_> obedience to authority (follow rules and follow orders)
—> Erode moral behavior
—> Large scale violence can be used without moral considerations–> small piece
Warfare Summed up
producing stronger states, peace??
Nationalism, Bureaucracy, Reason, Commerce, war with STRONG STATE AT CENTER
War and genocide (Weitz)
war intimately linked with genocide
• War–> linked to genocide because…
Battle between at least two groups with opposing goals (in group and outgroup genocide)
Accompanied by violence, victims, devastation
• Consequences of warfare: Both long-term and short term
Nationalism produces:
war and revolutions
Nationalism and Genocide Links
- -> Internal colonialism
- –> External colonialism
- –> Revolution
- –> Nationalist Revolutions
Revolutionary dimensions and genocide (WEITZ)
CREATION OF UTOPIA–> perfect society, population, distinctinction, popular mobilization, breakdown of pre-existing norms
- Promotes ideological Utopia->Outsiders (fall outside of utopia)->Target group
- Mobilization population->Capacity for mobilization of people for collective violence against groups
- Changing authority->Disorder->Opportunity for killing
- Use of force-> Promotion of violence->Mode of annihilation–> acceptance of violence and violent solutions
Commerce and genocide
revolutionary dynamics and resentment
• Rise of social classes
• Inequality
• Conflict over property
• Resentment among losers of modernization
• Social Revolution
–> CREATED NEED FOR RACISM —> scientific revolution—> ideas in scientific discourse that can be adopted and legitimize exploitation/racism
Scientific Revolution and Genocide
UNIVERSAL MANKIND: Darwin: mankind as one species (universal mankind). Positive selection of Individual level mutations.
NO UNIVERSAL MANKIND:
• Spencer: Survival of the Fittest
• Combined Darwin’s insights about individuals to groups and societies.
• Legitimized group hierarchies and domination.
• Galton: Eugenics: selective breeding of the fittest people
IDEATIONAL EXPLANATIONS:
The plural society theory: Leo Kuper
Goldhagen
Kiernan
The plural society theory: Leo Kuper
- Genocides= products of deep societal cleavages
- deep ethnic, religious or economic divisions—-> discrimination, mutual distrust, hatred—->Dehumanization—> violence
Goldhagen and the Holocaust
- distinct German characteristic leads to willingness among German population to kill
- Eliminationist anti-Semitism–> leads to rise in Nazis
- Nazis provide opportunity to participate
INFLUENTIAL FOR POLICY MAKERS
Problems with Goldhagen
• Assumes group boundaries are fixed (ancient hatred)
• Neighbors become killers
How is that possible if hatreds are ancient
• Cleavages are wide spread but genocide actually quite rare
• Timing?
• Does not explain why do groups operate like unfired actors?
Kiernan
1965 killings in Indonesia and killings in East Timor (GENOCIDE)? EXPLAIN DIFFERENCE?
5 Ideational components that shape whether genocide takes place and when 5 ideas come together genocide emerges
1. Racism
2. Religious prejudice
3. Expansionist Narratives
4. Narrative of Decline
5. Myths of cultivation
***ideas of CULTIVATION
Critique of Kiernan
- ->Need to understand where these ideas come from
- -> Narratives and ideas or related to objective changes in society that produce this outcome
ARMENIAN GENOCIDE: MELSON
Social revolution linked to genocide:
- -> Social revolutions are likely to pass through a radical phase in which revolutionary vanguards attempt to destroy their supposed enemies and to create a new political community in line with their ideologies.
- –> Social revolutions create opportunities for movements that had espoused genocide even before the revolution to seize power and to implement their policies.
- -> Regimes opposing revolutions may use genocidal methods not only against their political enemies but against the social groups from which their opponents spring.
Armenian Genocide and Holocaust–MELSON
(1) Despised minorities undergoing rapid social mobilization and adaptation to the modern world
the social mobilization of despised minorities made them targets of genocidal movements
(2) Both imperial regimes were swept away by revolution and war and both were succeeded by revolutionary vanguards who became the perpetrators of the two genocides
revolutions-created the conditions for genocidal movements to come to power and radicalized the views of revolutionary vanguards who had seized power
(3) occurred in the midst of major wars.
wartime facilitated the implementation of genocide as a policy of the state.
BAUMAN THEORY:
• Pillars of modernity—Rationality, technology, industry, bureaucracy—were not incidental but integral to the destruction of European Jews
• Rules, differentiation, routines and authority
Facilitate Large networks of cooperation that killed
Create distance between perpetrators and victims
Create distance between perpetrators and killing—> don’t see people dying
Creates obedience to authority (follow rules and follow orders)
Erode moral behavior
Paradox of civilized barbarity
• Paradox of the civilized barbarian
Modernity->Violence goes down
Modernity->Produces genocide
Valentino on Plural Society theory
severity of cleavages not reliable indicator
War and Genocide WEITZ
• War–> linked to genocide because…
Battle between at least two groups with opposing goals
Accompanied by violence, victims, devastation
• Genocide also need: At least 2 groups
Ingroup-out group dynamics (perpetrator and killer)
• Victims, violence, devastation
**Long and short term consequences of war
Nationalism and genocide
war and revolutions–>
Internal and external colonization:
Revolutionary dimensions (Weitz):
• An utopian ideal to transform society (classless, national) driving revolution
• Mass mobilization of the population–> large groups of people involved
• Transformation of authority structures
• Use of force (but not always)
Nationalist revolutions
Commerce and genocide
Commerce and genocide
Linked to genocide in two ways: revolutionary dynamics and resentment
• Commerce and classes
• Rise of social classes
• Inequality
• Conflict over property
• Resentment among losers of modernization
• Social Revolution
Rise of modern nation state–> created ideas about racism
Commerce provided need for racism
Scientific revolution created ability to exploit and apply racism
Democracy and Genocide: Rummel
• The more people influence decision making the more democratic a country—> the less likely a genocide becomes
Constraints limit violence–> power kills. absolute power kills absolutely
Mann: Dark Side of Democracy –> 3 conditions for peace and what happens if broken?
We the people–> creates US vs. Them
• Under 3 conditions democratization does not fuse with other fault lines and leads to domestic peace (i.e. England) —> needed for it to be peaceful
- Economic development: strong bourgeoisie (middle-class that can carry democracy)
- Strong connections between state and society–> democratic legacies, bureaucracies, free media
- Ethnic homogeneity at the time democratization starts
Democratization and England–>
Strong Bureacracy–> mobile capital, elites want influence–> strong institutional legacy w/ courts–> taxation/ bureaucracy
DEMOCRACY IS ELITE PROJECT
ethnic homogeneity
SNYDER and democratization
NATIONALISM–> unite people
- popular rivalries
- elite persuasion
***exclusionary
Three types of exclusionary nationalism Snyder
ethnic, counterrevolutionary, revolutionary
Ethnic nationalism comes from…
institutional dessert
Snyder: should avoid…
ethnically based federalism and regional autonomy–> bring in speech slowly
Mann: instability that led to genocide
Truly murderous cleansing unexpected, originally unintended, emerging out of unrelated crises like war. Conversely, when states and geopolitics remain stable, even severe ethnic tensions and violence tend to be cyclical and manageable at lesser levels of violence
- Rwanda: fragmenting and factionalizing
- Nazis: newly consolidated, determinedly repressing dissidents and factionalism
- Bosnian and Croatian States: brand-new states, consolidation was very uneven
Disposessive mass killing
Dispossessive mass killing
• “Policies that by design or a by consequence strip large groups of their way of life”
• Often a “final solution”, less extreme solutions have not worked
Reforms
Repression
Forced migration
Deportation
Mass killing
Valentino cause of genocide
STRATEGIC
ARGUMENT: looking for causes of mass killing: should begin with the specific goals and strategies of high political and military leadership, not with broad social or political structures. –> society smaller role–> mass killing rarely neighbor against neighbor
• Impetus for mass killing usually originates from a relatively small group of powerful political or military leaders, not from the desires of the broader society.
• Violence occurs when powerful leaders come to believe it is the most “practical” way to accomplish certain radical goals, counter powerful threats or solve difficult military problems. Broader elements of society need not share these goals or the conviction that mass killing is the best way to achieve
them.
Midlarsky
Consequences of Loss:
1. Refugees–> emotional reaction
2. Blame perceived or actual injury –> loss compensation –> revenge feels goods
3. Those perceived to be at fault also refugees or viewed as comfortable and wealthy–> targeted for massacre or ultimately genocide
*competing for same resource–> and class
4.. Prospect theory: losses valued more highly than gains–> asymmetry
5. Importance of territoriality should not be minimized–> territory=fundamental to state secruit mass brutalities justified in name of state
Risk-taking, minimization of loss, punishment
