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Second-Generation Comparative Research on Genocide

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Scott Straus
Scott Straus
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin, Madison, [email protected]
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Abstract

Comparative research on the determinants of genocide has surged in recent years, as reflected in the six books under review. The new research makes genocide studies more systematic and theoretical; integrates the topic into mainstream social science disciplines; points to three emerging explanatory paradigms; and yields some surprising cumulative findings. However, the works also reveal significant conceptual, empirical, and methodological problems that limit the comparative enterprise and the search for a general theory. The article argues for an alternative, disaggregated approach that situates genocide within a spectrum of organized violence against civilians and links genocide studies to studies of violence in war.

Type
Review Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 59 , Issue 3 , April 2007 , pp. 476 - 501
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 2007

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References

1 Notably, Fein, Helen, Accounting for Genocide: National Responses andJewish Victimization dur ing the Holocaust (New York: Free Press, 1979)Google Scholar; Kuper, Leo, Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981)Google Scholar; Horowitz, Irving Louis, Genocide: State Power and Mass Murder (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1976)Google Scholar; Staub, Ervin, The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)Google Scholar; Wallimann, Isidor and Dobkowski, Michael, eds., Genocide and the Modern Age: Etiology and Case Studies Mass Death (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987Google Scholar). For a review of much of this literature, see in particular Fein, Helen, “Genocide: A Sociological Perspective,” Current Sociology 38, no. 1 (1990)Google Scholar.

2 In particular, Chalk, Frank and Jonassohn, Kurt, The History and Sociology of Genocide:Analyses and Case Studies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Melson, Robert, Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins ofthe Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992)Google Scholar; and Rummel, Rudolph, Death by Government (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1994)Google Scholar.

3 Fein(fn. 1, 1990), v, 5.

4 Two new journals on genocide have appeared since 2000: Journal of Genocide Research and Genocide Studies and Prevention; an older journal, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, focuses primarily on Holocaust. The associations are the International Association of Genocide Scholars (founded in 1994) and the International Network of Genocide Scholars (founded in 2005). A Library of Congress search of English-language academic studies with the word “genocide” in the title found 155 books published between 1945 and 1990; between 1991 and 2006, the number more than doubled to 369.

5 The case study literature is vast and growing—too large to summarize here. Some representative titles include (by case) Gagnon, V. P., The Myth ofEthnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Mamdani, Mahmood, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Kiernan, Ben, The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–79 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996)Google Scholar; and Prunier, Gerard, Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide (Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell University Press, 2005)Google Scholar. Primarily a collection of case studies in this vein is Gellately, Robert and Kiernan, Ben, eds., The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

6 Naimark, Norman, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

7 Waller, James, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Wilshire, Bruce, Get Em All! Kill Em!: Genocide, Terrorism, Righteous Communities (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2005)Google Scholar

8 Barnett, Michael, Eyewitness to a Genocide: The UnitedNations and Rwanda (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002)Google Scholar; LeBor, Adam, “Complicity with Evil”: The United Nations in the Age of Modern Genocide (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Power, Samantha, “A Problemfrom Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2002)Google Scholar.

9 Harff, Barbara, “No Lessons Learned from the Holocaust? Assessing Risks of Genocide and Political Mass Murder since 1955,” American Political Science Review 97 (February 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and, for an earlier example, Krain, Matthew, “State Sponsored Mass Murder: The Onset and Severity of Genocides and Politicides,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 41 (June 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Indeed, several authors come to the study of genocide as leading scholars of other subjects. Sociologist Michael Mann, for example, is a major theorist of social power, political scientist Manus Mid-larsky of war. Several books are also quite ambitious. Historian Mark Levene is writing a four-volume set, of which the first two volumes are reviewed here. Mann, Midlarsky, and French political scientist Jacques Semelin all have published books that run 450 pages or longer.

11 On the micropolitical turn, see King, , “The Micropolitics of Social Violence,” World Politics 56 (April 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Kalyvas, Stathis, “The Ontology of ‘Political Violence’: Action and Identity in Civil Wars,” Perspectives on Politics 1 (September 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; on quantitative macrolevel research, see Fearon, James and Laitin, David, “Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War,” American Political Science Review 97 (February 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Kuper (fn. 1).

13 Fein (fn. 1, 1979).

14 Charny, Israel, How Can We Commit the Unthinkable? Genocide, the Human Cancer (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1982)Google Scholar.

15 Staub (fn. 1).

16 See, for example, Daniel Goldhagen, who argues that a culture of “eliminationist anti-Semitism” is the root of the Nazi genocide; Goldhagen, , Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Vintage, 1997)Google Scholar.

17 On Bosnia and the fact that much violence happened in the most ethnically intermixed areas of the former Yugoslavia, see Gagnon (fn. 3); on Rwanda, see Straus, Scott, The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006)Google Scholar.

18 Horowitz, , Taking Lives: Genocide and State Power, 4th ed. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1997), 36Google Scholar.

19 Rummel (fn. 2), 1.

20 For example, Gurr, Ted Robert, Why Men Rebel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970)Google Scholar.

21 For an application to Rwanda, see Uvin, Peter, Aiding Violence: The Development Enterprise in Rwanda (West Hartford, Conn.: Kumarian Press, 1998)Google Scholar. In her early work, Barbara Harff emphasized “social upheaval” as a key factor leading to genocide: Harff, , “The Etiology of Genocides,” in Wallimann, Isidor and Dobkowski, Michael, eds., Genocide and the Modern Age: Etiology and Case Studies ofMass Heath (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1987)Google Scholar.

22 For example, Dick de Mildt, In the Name ofthe People: Perpetrators of Genocide in the Reflection of Their Post-War Prosecution in West Germany: The “Euthanasia” and “Aktion Reinhard” Trial Cases (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1996); Browning, Christopher, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Bat-tallion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperCollins, 1991)Google Scholar; Goldhagen (fn. 16); and, on Rwanda, Straus (fn. 17).

23 The book is scheduled for English-language publication as Jacques Sémelin, Purify and Destroy: The Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide, trans. Cynthia Schoch and Philippa Bush (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).

24 For example, Burleigh, Michael and Wippermann, Wolfgang, The Racial State: Germany 1933–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)Google Scholar.

25 Bauman, , Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989)Google Scholar.

26 See various judgments and indictments available on the Web site of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, www.ictr.org.

27 For a review of this debate, see Kershaw, Ian, The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, 4th ed. (London: Arnold, 2000)Google Scholar.

28 For example, see Browning, Christopher, “The Decision-Making Process,” in Stone, Dan, ed., The Historiography ofthe Holocaust (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004)Google Scholar.

29 Melson (fn. 2); and Markusen, Eric, “Genocide and Warfare,” in Strozier, Charles and Flynn, Michael, eds., Genocide, War, and Human Survival (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996)Google Scholar; for a more recent treatment, see Shaw, Martin, War and Genocide: Organized Killing in Modern Society (Cambridge: Polity, 2003)Google Scholar.

30 Lemkin, Raphael, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laivs of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Pro-posalsfor Redress (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944), 79Google Scholar.

31 Straus, Scott, “Contested Meanings and Conflicting Imperatives: A Conceptual Analysis of Genocide,” Journal of Genocide Research 3 (November 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 Valentino, Benjamin, Huth, Paul, and Balch-Lindsay, Dylan, ‘”Draining the Sea’: Mass Killing and Guerrilla Warfare,” International Organization 58 (April 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 See Kalyvas, Stathis, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Varshney, Ashutosh, “Ethnic Conflict and Civil Society: India and Beyond,” World Politics 53 (April 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Weinstein, Jeremy, Inside Rebellion: The Politics ofInsurgent Violence (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Wilkinson, Steven, Votes and Violence: Electoral Competition and Ethnic Riots in India (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar;

34 See fn. 33.

35 As suggested in Straus (fn. 31).