Roddy Brett University of St. Andrews October 2017 Session 3: Genocide

(i) Defining Genocide (ii) Factors Driving Genocide (iii) Case Study: Guatemala

Political Evil (Woolfe) ‘the wilful, malevolent and gratuitous death, destruction and suffering inflicted upon innocent people by the leaders of movements and states in their strategic efforts to achieve realizable objectives’

Why do individuals participate in atrocities? intergroup antagonism; frustration-aggression; obedience; opportunism; careerism; coercion; fear; personal connections; cultural frameworks of meaning; psychological disposition (Waller 2007: 135-141; Straus 2015) (multiple motivations)

‘Atrocity-justifying ideologies’ How are victims represented by perpetrators, in contexts of mass atrocity How do narratives and discourses of dehumanisation shape acts of killing Framing victims as inhuman, sub-human or inferior to perpetrators, facilitates and encourages the killing Killing may be legitimated as victims are constructed as external to moral universe of obligations regulating perpetrators and foreign to and a threat against the values of the primary political community Extermination - to purify and cleanse the community Dehumanisation works to justify the violence, often accompanied by the intentional articulation of an ideology of racial hatred against the victim group

UN Definition ‘Any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; 
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; 
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group’.

Straus ‘a complex, confusing, multidimensional, multiplicit concept’, adding that, ‘From its inception… genocide has been an empirical, moral, legal, and political concept. To one person, “genocide” means evil and demands preventive or punitive action by a government; to another, “genocide” carries a circumscribed juridical meaning, while to still others it designates a specific type of mass violence’ (2001: 359).

Diverse Approaches First generation (single causes) Second generation (multiple causes) - who is the actor that carries out the process of annihilation; - who or what constitutes a group and should group identification should remain bound to national, religious, ethnic or racial groups, as the legal definition specifies; - how is annihilation of the respective group carried out? (are the modes of annihilation that are required for genocide to take place limited to (mass) killing?) - what conditions are necessary for genocide to occur (threat)?

‘The perpetrators of genocide sought to find and destroy an other defined not only by skin tone, eye colour or facial features, but also by thoughts, convictions, ceremonies, rituals, narratives and memories carried precariously through time. The perpetrators understood themselves to be destroying something more than a group of individuals; they believed they were up against a world whose difference from their own was so complete that only one of these worlds could survive. For this reason the perpetrator’s actions attacked not only individual lives but also the relational bonds of recognition that held together the Aboriginal world itself’ (Hayden 2016: 119).

Genocide is defined here as a distinctive form of political violence which is group-selective and group-destructive - perpetrated as the result of strategic policy decisions emanating from and with the direct participation of the state, that attempts to inflict maximum damage upon civilian, non-combatant populations, thus differentiating it from the logic and operational objectives of armed conflict, ‘in which the violence is directed against an opponent’s war-making capacity’ (Straus 2015: 9) Whilst killing remains a core constituent element of genocide, the objective of intentional group destruction is not solely contingent upon body count, but rather, may be achieved through the ‘imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor’   It is ‘future-oriented, anticipatory violence’ that seeks to sculpt a future in which a specific social category is absent from the imagined community and founding narrative (Straus 2015: 54).

In contexts of threat and vulnerability, genocide emerges ‘as a radical solution to the perception of un unacceptable, indeed intolerable, historical circumstance’ (2005: 7). Genocide is contingent targeted population needs to be perceived by the state as threatening to it targeted population must be ‘vulnerable to mass murder’ the potential perpetrators must experience or perceive a degree of vulnerability to generate their ‘real or fantasised images’ of a threatening civilian population (2005: 4; 14-15) Midlarsky - ‘Any process that simultaneously increases both threat to the state and its vulnerability, as well as vulnerability of a targeted civilian population, also increases the probability of genocide’