John Prendergast, who has written extensively on Africa generally and lately about Darfur specifically, has an essay worth reading posted at AllAfrica.com, “Can Europe and China Save Darfur?”
Prendergast’s essay addresses global inaction in the face of ongoing genocide in western Sudan, as well as the possibilities for action on the part of the U.S., Europe, and/or China. The following is from the essay:
“What is needed isn't exactly rocket science. I've been working in Africa's crisis zones for 25 years, and contrary to popular perceptions, the continent is ripe with success stories about countries that have been ripped apart by civil war, but have been able to resolve their issues and move on. Mozambique, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Burundi, and others can attest to the formula: a serious peace process combined with the deployment of relevant force works.
“A quartet of President Hu, President Sarkozy, Prime Minister Brown, and President Bush should pursue a peace and protection initiative that would prioritize a peace deal between the regime and rebel groups, and enforce the rapid deployment of the Security Council's authorized multinational forces to Darfur and eastern Chad. They should be prepared to back targeted sanctions in the UN Security Council (President Putin, you are welcome to join in) against anyone - government or rebel - who tries to obstruct these objectives. Not only would Darfur be "saved," but transatlantic and transpacific cooperation would also be enhanced at a time when such multilateralism is desperately needed.”
Showing posts with label genocide. Show all posts
Showing posts with label genocide. Show all posts
Saturday, September 1, 2007
Monday, July 30, 2007
A Round-Up of Recent News and Articles of Interest
Genocide
Asia Times has published a provocative essay by Spengler, “In Defense of Genocide, Redux.” As with Spengler’s earlier essay, “In Defense of Genocide,” this is not actually a defense of genocide, but an essay about the shocking extent to which genocide and potential genocide is denied, ignored, or rationalized away as essentially inconsequential by much of the media, and many policy makers, politicians, and political candidates (see, for example, Barack Obama’s recent comments that genocide would not be a good reason for U.S. troops to remain in Iraq – to me, that would be the one good reason for U.S. troops to remain there – if independent, credible evidence indicated that U.S. troops leaving would result in genocide and that U.S. troops remaining would prevent it).
Anti-Smoking Campaigns and Social Norms Marketing
A recent article on Medical News Today about a study of anti-smoking campaigns targeting youth, “The Secret of Successful Anti-Smoking Ads,” seems to me to give weight to “social norms marketing” strategies (or at least to something similar to them) used by some sociologists, psychologists and others involved with public health education and behavior change campaigns. Social norms marketing tends to emphasize what is “normal” behavior for a target population, the idea being that most people who identify with a particular group want to fit in with their peer group (i.e. social norms marketing is really a form of “enlightened peer pressure).
The following is from the article:
"Some anti-smoking ads are simply ineffective, while others actually make youth more likely to light up. Fortunately, some are successful, and a new University of Georgia study helps explain why.
"Hye-Jin Paek, assistant professor at the UGA Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, found that anti-smoking ads are most effective when they convince youth that their friends are listening to the ads. Otherwise, the ads appear to stimulate the rebellious and curious nature of youth, making them more interested in smoking. Paek and co-author Albert Gunther from the University of Wisconsin-Madison examined data from surveys of nearly 1,700 middle school students, and their results appear in the August issue of the journal Communication Research."
Race and Medical Care
“When it comes to medical care – skin color matters” reports on a study indicating that, at least in a carefully constructed simulated exercise, race can affect the quality of medical care received.
The following is from the article:
“Other studies too have found that whites receive better medical care than blacks and experts agree the information is not new.
“But this one differs in that it is the first to demonstrate the reason for the difference really is racial bias.
“Following their evaluation of the two simulated patients, the doctors were then given an 'implicit association test' designed to reveal a person's unconscious views of blacks and whites.
“Dr. Green says a high score on the bias against African-Americans portion of the test, showed doctors were less likely to provide clot-busting treatment for a heart attack for black patients.”
The Rise and Fall of Woolworth
“Why Woolworth Had to Die” provides a short synopsis of the rise and decline of the Woolworth’s retail chain over the 20th century, but more interestingly, the article provides a decent short overview of changes in communities and marketing over the course of the century in the U.S.
Drugs, Organized Crime, Development, and Journalism in Africa and Mexico
Two recent articles at AllAfrica.com present a troubling picture of recent developments in Sub-Saharan Africa. “Organized Crime Targets Weak States,” presents an overview of recent moves by organized crime, especially syndicates associated with drug smuggling – in particular the movement of cocaine from South America into Europe, to increasingly take up shop in weak states of Sub-Saharan Africa. The article also discusses some of the debilitating effects this can have on economic development, as if the people of Sub-Saharan African nations needed other economic obstacles.
“IFJ condemns threats against two journalists covering drug trafficking,” as its title indicates, covers recent threats made by traffickers against journalists who cover the drug trade with any depth. This presents a troubling parallel with the recent spate of drug-related violence in general, and specifically violence directed against journalists covering the drug trade, in Mexico. For example, see the article “Drug Wars Endanger Mexican Press.”
Chimpanzees and Bipedalism
There has been much in the realm of anthropology news and blogs recently about origins of bipedalism. An article, “Study Sheds Light on Bipedal Walking” at Medical News Today covering a recent study of energetics of upright walking among chimpanzees presents some interesting information.
The following three paragraphs are from the article:
"We were prepared to find that all of the chimps used more energy walking on two legs -- but that finding wouldn't have been as interesting," Sockol said. "What we found was much more telling. For three chimps, bipedalism was more expensive, but for the other two chimps, this wasn't the case. One expended about the same energy walking on two legs as on four. The other used less energy walking upright."
These two chimps had different gaits and anatomy than their knucklewalking peers. And when the researchers examined the early hominid fossil record, they found evidence of these traits -- skeletal characteristics of the hip and hind limb that allow for greater extension of the hind limb -- in some early bipeds.
Taken together, the findings provide support for the hypothesis that anatomical differences affecting gait existed among our earliest apelike ancestors, and that these differences provided the genetic variation natural selection could act on when changes in the environment gave bipeds an advantage over quadrupeds.
Asia Times has published a provocative essay by Spengler, “In Defense of Genocide, Redux.” As with Spengler’s earlier essay, “In Defense of Genocide,” this is not actually a defense of genocide, but an essay about the shocking extent to which genocide and potential genocide is denied, ignored, or rationalized away as essentially inconsequential by much of the media, and many policy makers, politicians, and political candidates (see, for example, Barack Obama’s recent comments that genocide would not be a good reason for U.S. troops to remain in Iraq – to me, that would be the one good reason for U.S. troops to remain there – if independent, credible evidence indicated that U.S. troops leaving would result in genocide and that U.S. troops remaining would prevent it).
Anti-Smoking Campaigns and Social Norms Marketing
A recent article on Medical News Today about a study of anti-smoking campaigns targeting youth, “The Secret of Successful Anti-Smoking Ads,” seems to me to give weight to “social norms marketing” strategies (or at least to something similar to them) used by some sociologists, psychologists and others involved with public health education and behavior change campaigns. Social norms marketing tends to emphasize what is “normal” behavior for a target population, the idea being that most people who identify with a particular group want to fit in with their peer group (i.e. social norms marketing is really a form of “enlightened peer pressure).
The following is from the article:
"Some anti-smoking ads are simply ineffective, while others actually make youth more likely to light up. Fortunately, some are successful, and a new University of Georgia study helps explain why.
"Hye-Jin Paek, assistant professor at the UGA Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, found that anti-smoking ads are most effective when they convince youth that their friends are listening to the ads. Otherwise, the ads appear to stimulate the rebellious and curious nature of youth, making them more interested in smoking. Paek and co-author Albert Gunther from the University of Wisconsin-Madison examined data from surveys of nearly 1,700 middle school students, and their results appear in the August issue of the journal Communication Research."
Race and Medical Care
“When it comes to medical care – skin color matters” reports on a study indicating that, at least in a carefully constructed simulated exercise, race can affect the quality of medical care received.
The following is from the article:
“Other studies too have found that whites receive better medical care than blacks and experts agree the information is not new.
“But this one differs in that it is the first to demonstrate the reason for the difference really is racial bias.
“Following their evaluation of the two simulated patients, the doctors were then given an 'implicit association test' designed to reveal a person's unconscious views of blacks and whites.
“Dr. Green says a high score on the bias against African-Americans portion of the test, showed doctors were less likely to provide clot-busting treatment for a heart attack for black patients.”
The Rise and Fall of Woolworth
“Why Woolworth Had to Die” provides a short synopsis of the rise and decline of the Woolworth’s retail chain over the 20th century, but more interestingly, the article provides a decent short overview of changes in communities and marketing over the course of the century in the U.S.
Drugs, Organized Crime, Development, and Journalism in Africa and Mexico
Two recent articles at AllAfrica.com present a troubling picture of recent developments in Sub-Saharan Africa. “Organized Crime Targets Weak States,” presents an overview of recent moves by organized crime, especially syndicates associated with drug smuggling – in particular the movement of cocaine from South America into Europe, to increasingly take up shop in weak states of Sub-Saharan Africa. The article also discusses some of the debilitating effects this can have on economic development, as if the people of Sub-Saharan African nations needed other economic obstacles.
“IFJ condemns threats against two journalists covering drug trafficking,” as its title indicates, covers recent threats made by traffickers against journalists who cover the drug trade with any depth. This presents a troubling parallel with the recent spate of drug-related violence in general, and specifically violence directed against journalists covering the drug trade, in Mexico. For example, see the article “Drug Wars Endanger Mexican Press.”
Chimpanzees and Bipedalism
There has been much in the realm of anthropology news and blogs recently about origins of bipedalism. An article, “Study Sheds Light on Bipedal Walking” at Medical News Today covering a recent study of energetics of upright walking among chimpanzees presents some interesting information.
The following three paragraphs are from the article:
"We were prepared to find that all of the chimps used more energy walking on two legs -- but that finding wouldn't have been as interesting," Sockol said. "What we found was much more telling. For three chimps, bipedalism was more expensive, but for the other two chimps, this wasn't the case. One expended about the same energy walking on two legs as on four. The other used less energy walking upright."
These two chimps had different gaits and anatomy than their knucklewalking peers. And when the researchers examined the early hominid fossil record, they found evidence of these traits -- skeletal characteristics of the hip and hind limb that allow for greater extension of the hind limb -- in some early bipeds.
Taken together, the findings provide support for the hypothesis that anatomical differences affecting gait existed among our earliest apelike ancestors, and that these differences provided the genetic variation natural selection could act on when changes in the environment gave bipeds an advantage over quadrupeds.
Sunday, June 24, 2007
Shamans, Jazz, and Genocide: On Definitions and Sets
Anyone who has read my blog knows that I discuss a wide variety of topics, from shamanism to jazz to genocide. One key concern I have been focused on is that between discourse and practice, word and object, meaning and world.
Definition is about constituting sets, discerning the characteristics that typify a set of objects, actions, qualities, or relations (nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, conjunctions) and that distinguish that set from others. It is also about mediating language and world.
Intuitively, there are two obvious and opposed approaches to take in defining sets. One is to look first to the world, to describe the qualities of things, actions, relationships. Sets are defined by things sharing similar qualities. This seems a thoroughly empirical approach, though a key problem is that it’s hard to know a priori whether we’re identifying a meaningful or useful set via this approach. Things in the world have myriad qualities, and whether we’re aware or not of it we’re making interpretive choices about which qualities to focus on – which is fine if done critically. In his 1959 critique of anthropology up to that point, “Rethinking Anthropology,” Edmund Leach called upon anthropology to move beyond a “butterfly collecting” approach, where social characteristics such as matrilineal matrilocal complexes or patrivirilocality were collected and assumed meaningful. Leach’s point wasn’t that such descriptions weren’t necessarily meaningful or important but that anthropologists should think much more critically about whether, how, and why such descriptions defined sets.
The opposing approach is to start with language independent of the world (insofar as one can do that – clearly language is always a thing of the world), define a set abstractly and then look to the world to see what fits and what doesn’t. Although he’s not explicit on the point, when Wynton Marsalis says that jazz just went away for a little while in the 1970s (despite the huge success of fusion during that period) he seems to be applying an a priori definition of “jazz” which doesn’t include fusion, thus allowing him to make the claim (See my discussion in “Miles Davis’ Ferrari, or Popularity and Art”). This is an approach to defining sets that always “works,” though the key problem here is that there’s no guarantee that our definitions and sets reflect important empirical relationships between things in the world.
My preference is for a pragmatic approach that stays grounded in empirical observation but with a willingness to open up the empirical to interpretation and exploration by casting it in multiple possible comparative frames and tacking back and forth between observation of the world and abstract definition.
Generally, a good starting point is language as practice, looking at how language is manifested as a thing in the world and how it is used to relate to non-linguistic things in the world. That is, it’s useful to start by looking at how a word is used, looking to see what objects (I use “object” here in the semiotic sense – the “object” could be an object or thing in the vernacular sense, or an action, quality, or relationship) are referred to with it, then to focus on their qualities to abstract a sense of what defines the set – with a willingness then to potentially extend the category to other things sharing in those defining qualities. Some argue that the category “shaman” should be restricted in anthropological analysis to the Siberian contexts in which it was first identified and from which the term comes. I disagree, both because the term has long since escaped that restricted reference in its real usage and more importantly because the quality that defines shamanism in those Siberian contexts is not “Siberian-ness” (after all, what make a shaman a shaman in Siberia cannot be being of Siberia), and the application of the term to a variety of other contexts has been useful in noting important similarities in ritual and spiritual practices in a variety of world settings. (See my earlier post “Shamanism, Fascism, Gulags, and Genocide.”)
A pragmatic approach does not expect that any one quality will be the skeleton key to define the essence of the category, expecting instead as Wittgenstein pointed out that categories will be defined not by single qualities but by overlapping sets of family resemblances. The music of Louis Armstrong and Mahavishnu Orchestra really don’t have much apparent similarity that they should belong to the same set: “jazz.” But both have definite similarities to other music that resembles other music that ultimately connect the two.
Nor does a pragmatic approach assume that any object, practice, action, etc., will fit into only one important set. I regularly teach a course titled “Peoples and Cultures of the World.” When I cover the Sudanic region of Sub-Saharan Africa, a topic that often arises for discussion, sometimes raised by me, sometimes by one of the students, is that of the practice that is variously termed “female genital mutilation,” “female genital modification,” “female genital operation,” etc. The multiplicity of terms indicates the multiplicity of meaning associated with the practice. I try to emphasize to my students that no one of these terms is “wrong” or “right,” but that the choice of term actively shapes our understanding of the category. I further raise a variety of other possible categories, such as “body modification” to indicate that the same practice meaningfully belongs to multiple sets or categories simultaneously. (See my earlier discussion in “Sudan and Cultural Relativism” and “Are Some Cultures Better Than Others?”)
Finally, another advantage of a flexible, pragmatic approach to definition is that it allows sets to evolve. When Marsalis says that jazz “went away,” he not only seems to have an a priori sense of what jazz “is” but the mode of defining also creates a static category which excludes things such as fusion which have strayed too far. It is legitimate to ask how much something can evolve and change and remain part of the original category (and there are no easy answers here). An example from paleoanthropology would perhaps be illustrative. Though there is some debate on the point, two hominid species that are probably our evolutionary ancestors are Homo erectus and Australopithecus afarensis. These are species that still have living descendants – us – so they never went extinct in the same way that hominid species like Australopithecus boisei or Australopithecus robustus – which have no living descendants – did. But though H. Erectus and A. afarensis never went extinct, they are extinct – we evolved from them, but are now something distinct from them. If Marsalis or anyone else claimed that fusion was an evolution from jazz that was no longer jazz, I think I’d disagree, but I could see that point. Still, you’d then have to say that in the 1970s jazz was largely replaced by something that evolved from jazz but was no longer jazz if you wanted to be faithful to the facts.
A flexible approach to definition does not mean that “Anything Goes.”
I do think it’s useful to stretch the category “shamanism” beyond Siberia to apply to a variety of ritual and spiritual practices whereby a practitioner enters an altered state of consciousness and engages in interaction with a variety of supernatural entities, often by voyaging beyond the body. I am equally opposed to stretching the category further to include any practice involving altered states of consciousness, or even simply other ritual and/or spiritual practices involving altered states, such as spirit mediumship. Such an extension waters down the important recognition of similarities in an entire suite of characteristics in Siberian and Native American shamanisms by including a variety of other much less similar phenomena. It might be useful to have a single more general category for anthropological analysis that includes shamans, spirit mediums and any other practices of spiritual altered state (so far as I know, no such general category exists), but calling spirit mediums shamans or vice versa is not analytically useful.
In my previous post, I argued that “Jazz is not America’s Classical Music,” that jazz and classical are distinct musical idioms. Granted, neither is easy to define, though there are loose sets of characteristics that tend to define each. Also, some music is ambiguous in its fit into either category, but the ambiguity of fit for a particular musical example doesn’t mean that the general category is unreal or useless.
Finally, some phenomena are so important and are really so qualitatively distinct from other phenomena that we should be extremely careful in the use of the words we use to refer to them. I have in mind here words like “genocide,” “Holocaust,” “gulag,” or “fascism,” and the historical (and contemporary in the case of “genocide”) phenomena referred to by them. To use just one example, to critique the prison at Guantanamo is fine and important. To compare it to the Soviet gulag system is also fine – the fact that there might be any systematic similarity at all, even if minor in scope is troubling. To call Guantanamo “the American Gulag” implies an empirical parallel belied by the facts and undermines one’s own credibility and the seriousness of both the Soviet Gulag and of Guantanamo now. (See my earlier post “Shamanism, Fascism, Gulags, and Genocide.”)
Definition is about constituting sets, discerning the characteristics that typify a set of objects, actions, qualities, or relations (nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, conjunctions) and that distinguish that set from others. It is also about mediating language and world.
Intuitively, there are two obvious and opposed approaches to take in defining sets. One is to look first to the world, to describe the qualities of things, actions, relationships. Sets are defined by things sharing similar qualities. This seems a thoroughly empirical approach, though a key problem is that it’s hard to know a priori whether we’re identifying a meaningful or useful set via this approach. Things in the world have myriad qualities, and whether we’re aware or not of it we’re making interpretive choices about which qualities to focus on – which is fine if done critically. In his 1959 critique of anthropology up to that point, “Rethinking Anthropology,” Edmund Leach called upon anthropology to move beyond a “butterfly collecting” approach, where social characteristics such as matrilineal matrilocal complexes or patrivirilocality were collected and assumed meaningful. Leach’s point wasn’t that such descriptions weren’t necessarily meaningful or important but that anthropologists should think much more critically about whether, how, and why such descriptions defined sets.
The opposing approach is to start with language independent of the world (insofar as one can do that – clearly language is always a thing of the world), define a set abstractly and then look to the world to see what fits and what doesn’t. Although he’s not explicit on the point, when Wynton Marsalis says that jazz just went away for a little while in the 1970s (despite the huge success of fusion during that period) he seems to be applying an a priori definition of “jazz” which doesn’t include fusion, thus allowing him to make the claim (See my discussion in “Miles Davis’ Ferrari, or Popularity and Art”). This is an approach to defining sets that always “works,” though the key problem here is that there’s no guarantee that our definitions and sets reflect important empirical relationships between things in the world.
My preference is for a pragmatic approach that stays grounded in empirical observation but with a willingness to open up the empirical to interpretation and exploration by casting it in multiple possible comparative frames and tacking back and forth between observation of the world and abstract definition.
Generally, a good starting point is language as practice, looking at how language is manifested as a thing in the world and how it is used to relate to non-linguistic things in the world. That is, it’s useful to start by looking at how a word is used, looking to see what objects (I use “object” here in the semiotic sense – the “object” could be an object or thing in the vernacular sense, or an action, quality, or relationship) are referred to with it, then to focus on their qualities to abstract a sense of what defines the set – with a willingness then to potentially extend the category to other things sharing in those defining qualities. Some argue that the category “shaman” should be restricted in anthropological analysis to the Siberian contexts in which it was first identified and from which the term comes. I disagree, both because the term has long since escaped that restricted reference in its real usage and more importantly because the quality that defines shamanism in those Siberian contexts is not “Siberian-ness” (after all, what make a shaman a shaman in Siberia cannot be being of Siberia), and the application of the term to a variety of other contexts has been useful in noting important similarities in ritual and spiritual practices in a variety of world settings. (See my earlier post “Shamanism, Fascism, Gulags, and Genocide.”)
A pragmatic approach does not expect that any one quality will be the skeleton key to define the essence of the category, expecting instead as Wittgenstein pointed out that categories will be defined not by single qualities but by overlapping sets of family resemblances. The music of Louis Armstrong and Mahavishnu Orchestra really don’t have much apparent similarity that they should belong to the same set: “jazz.” But both have definite similarities to other music that resembles other music that ultimately connect the two.
Nor does a pragmatic approach assume that any object, practice, action, etc., will fit into only one important set. I regularly teach a course titled “Peoples and Cultures of the World.” When I cover the Sudanic region of Sub-Saharan Africa, a topic that often arises for discussion, sometimes raised by me, sometimes by one of the students, is that of the practice that is variously termed “female genital mutilation,” “female genital modification,” “female genital operation,” etc. The multiplicity of terms indicates the multiplicity of meaning associated with the practice. I try to emphasize to my students that no one of these terms is “wrong” or “right,” but that the choice of term actively shapes our understanding of the category. I further raise a variety of other possible categories, such as “body modification” to indicate that the same practice meaningfully belongs to multiple sets or categories simultaneously. (See my earlier discussion in “Sudan and Cultural Relativism” and “Are Some Cultures Better Than Others?”)
Finally, another advantage of a flexible, pragmatic approach to definition is that it allows sets to evolve. When Marsalis says that jazz “went away,” he not only seems to have an a priori sense of what jazz “is” but the mode of defining also creates a static category which excludes things such as fusion which have strayed too far. It is legitimate to ask how much something can evolve and change and remain part of the original category (and there are no easy answers here). An example from paleoanthropology would perhaps be illustrative. Though there is some debate on the point, two hominid species that are probably our evolutionary ancestors are Homo erectus and Australopithecus afarensis. These are species that still have living descendants – us – so they never went extinct in the same way that hominid species like Australopithecus boisei or Australopithecus robustus – which have no living descendants – did. But though H. Erectus and A. afarensis never went extinct, they are extinct – we evolved from them, but are now something distinct from them. If Marsalis or anyone else claimed that fusion was an evolution from jazz that was no longer jazz, I think I’d disagree, but I could see that point. Still, you’d then have to say that in the 1970s jazz was largely replaced by something that evolved from jazz but was no longer jazz if you wanted to be faithful to the facts.
A flexible approach to definition does not mean that “Anything Goes.”
I do think it’s useful to stretch the category “shamanism” beyond Siberia to apply to a variety of ritual and spiritual practices whereby a practitioner enters an altered state of consciousness and engages in interaction with a variety of supernatural entities, often by voyaging beyond the body. I am equally opposed to stretching the category further to include any practice involving altered states of consciousness, or even simply other ritual and/or spiritual practices involving altered states, such as spirit mediumship. Such an extension waters down the important recognition of similarities in an entire suite of characteristics in Siberian and Native American shamanisms by including a variety of other much less similar phenomena. It might be useful to have a single more general category for anthropological analysis that includes shamans, spirit mediums and any other practices of spiritual altered state (so far as I know, no such general category exists), but calling spirit mediums shamans or vice versa is not analytically useful.
In my previous post, I argued that “Jazz is not America’s Classical Music,” that jazz and classical are distinct musical idioms. Granted, neither is easy to define, though there are loose sets of characteristics that tend to define each. Also, some music is ambiguous in its fit into either category, but the ambiguity of fit for a particular musical example doesn’t mean that the general category is unreal or useless.
Finally, some phenomena are so important and are really so qualitatively distinct from other phenomena that we should be extremely careful in the use of the words we use to refer to them. I have in mind here words like “genocide,” “Holocaust,” “gulag,” or “fascism,” and the historical (and contemporary in the case of “genocide”) phenomena referred to by them. To use just one example, to critique the prison at Guantanamo is fine and important. To compare it to the Soviet gulag system is also fine – the fact that there might be any systematic similarity at all, even if minor in scope is troubling. To call Guantanamo “the American Gulag” implies an empirical parallel belied by the facts and undermines one’s own credibility and the seriousness of both the Soviet Gulag and of Guantanamo now. (See my earlier post “Shamanism, Fascism, Gulags, and Genocide.”)
Saturday, June 16, 2007
Sudan and the U.S.: Genocide and the War on Terror
To the extent that the ongoing genocide receives much attention in the press (which is generally not to any great extent), attention is often paid to how China's economic relationship with the Sudanese government limits the ability of the U.N. to engage in strong sanctioning activities against Sudan. China's position vis-a-vis Sudan is a crucial consideration that should not be understated.
Another factor less commonly reported is the U.S. government's conflicted relationship with Sudan, with the Bush administration one of the few around the world that has publicly decried the situation in Darfur and called it genocide (one of the only things I'll give the Bush adminstration credit for), but at the same time the administration sees the government in Khartoum as a critical ally in the War on Terror, largely for having expelled Osama bin Laden and cracked down on Islamic militants after the cruise missile attacks during the Clinton administration.
The Middle East Times has just posted a good overview of the situation: http://www.metimes.com/storyview.php?StoryID=20070616-055135-9519r
Here's one interesting section from the article:
"Marc Lavergne named intelligence chief Salah Abdallah Gosh and Nafi Ali Nafi, one of President Omar Al Beshir's key advisers, as Khartoum's leading strategists on Darfur and who are also well-known in certain Washington circles.
'These people regularly visit Washington and they are in permanent contact with the US, which considers them their special partners,'said Lavergne.
Thomas-Jensen also underscored the fact that Ghosh was flown into the US by private CIA jet for a week-long series of meetings in 2005 with US officials, causing much controversy within the Bush administration.
'By agreeing to divulge everything it has about Bin Laden, Al Qaeda, the Palestinians, Algerian Islamists, and a bunch of other troublemakers in the world, the Sudanese government is providing an enormous service to the US government and is irreplaceable,' said Lavergne.
To placate its critics, Sudan has suggested that Darfur rebels are of the same ilk as Al Qaeda and is seeking to maximize the benefits from its decision to expel Bin Laden and align itself with Washington."
Another factor less commonly reported is the U.S. government's conflicted relationship with Sudan, with the Bush administration one of the few around the world that has publicly decried the situation in Darfur and called it genocide (one of the only things I'll give the Bush adminstration credit for), but at the same time the administration sees the government in Khartoum as a critical ally in the War on Terror, largely for having expelled Osama bin Laden and cracked down on Islamic militants after the cruise missile attacks during the Clinton administration.
The Middle East Times has just posted a good overview of the situation: http://www.metimes.com/storyview.php?StoryID=20070616-055135-9519r
Here's one interesting section from the article:
"Marc Lavergne named intelligence chief Salah Abdallah Gosh and Nafi Ali Nafi, one of President Omar Al Beshir's key advisers, as Khartoum's leading strategists on Darfur and who are also well-known in certain Washington circles.
'These people regularly visit Washington and they are in permanent contact with the US, which considers them their special partners,'said Lavergne.
Thomas-Jensen also underscored the fact that Ghosh was flown into the US by private CIA jet for a week-long series of meetings in 2005 with US officials, causing much controversy within the Bush administration.
'By agreeing to divulge everything it has about Bin Laden, Al Qaeda, the Palestinians, Algerian Islamists, and a bunch of other troublemakers in the world, the Sudanese government is providing an enormous service to the US government and is irreplaceable,' said Lavergne.
To placate its critics, Sudan has suggested that Darfur rebels are of the same ilk as Al Qaeda and is seeking to maximize the benefits from its decision to expel Bin Laden and align itself with Washington."
Saturday, March 17, 2007
Genocide and Hairsplitting
In an earlier post from March 7, I proposed a typology of genocide, ethnic cleansing and other types of mass violence. I want here to visit again the question of the point of such typologizing or making distinctions. I am prompted to do so by the insightful discussion of Adam LeBor in a review of several recent books related to genocide (Taner Akcam’s A Shameful Act: Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility, Benjamin Lieberman’s Terrible Fate: Ethnic Cleansing in the Making of Modern Europe, Michael Mann’s The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing, and Mark Levene’s Genocide in the Age of the Nation State: Volumes I and II) in the March 19, 2007 issue of The Nation.
In addition to evaluating and discussing the books in question, LeBor also expresses exasperation with international proceedings related to genocide, whether with the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia or the continued lack of real coordinated international efforts to end the slaughter in Darfur. Much of his frustration is aimed at hairsplitting over the definition of genocide, for example arguments over whether this or that person was guilty of genocide or ethnic cleansing at Srebrenica or elsewhere, or rulings that genocide occurred at Srebrenica without as yet finding anyone guilty of the charge in that case.
LeBor also insightfully writes of some of the consequences of this style of hairsplitting in a passage I would like to quote at length (parenthetical note added):
“This endless hair-splitting greatly aids states that perpetrate genocide. If nobody knows what genocide is, then how can anyone be guilty of committing it? It detracts from the more important debate of how to stop the ongoing killing in Darfur. Wrongly viewing Darfur through the prism of the Iraq War, much of the left, both in the United States and Europe, seems paralyzed by the fear of being seen to support another overseas adventure. For all its complications (some of which are skillfully laid out in another article in the same issue of The Nation, “The Wars of Sudan” by Alex de Waal) – pre-existing conflicts over water and agricultural land, desertification and arbitrary international borders – the crisis in Darfur is also simple. The Sudanese government is waging a sustained campaign of murder, ethnic cleansing and displacement against the people of Darfur, a campaign extensively documented by the UN, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, among others. The slaughter could be curtailed or even brought to a close without Western military intervention. Such steps might include: deploying UN troops inside Sudan; deploying peacekeepers in Chad to prevent cross-border raids; targeted sanctions on Sudan’s oil industry; targeted sanctions on Sudanese government ministers, army and intelligence officers; using US trade as a weapon to pressure China, Sudan’s main sponsor, to stop the carnage; and even threats to boycott the Beijing Olympics.”
In light of LeBor’s discussion I want to revisit the question of the utility of making distinctions about genocide, ethnic cleansing, and similar phenomena. In short, I will argue that in some contexts, making fine distinctions is important, in other settings largely irrelevant, and in other cases a problem insofar as making distinctions becomes an act of hairsplitting as an end in itself in lieu of acting.
In the case of historical or social science analysis of genocidal or ethnic cleansing contexts, acts of classification and making distinctions are quite useful in coming to the fullest possible understanding of complex phenomena, whether in relation to the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, the current slaughter in Darfur, ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, the historical displacement of Native North Americans, the “Killing Fields” of Cambodia, or any other case of genocide, ethnic cleansing, ethnocide, “classicide” (a term introduced in one of the books reviewed by LeBor, Mann’s The Dark Side of Democracy), or other mass violence.
As I argued in my earlier post, it is also crucial to be able to make distinctions with regard to ongoing events if the international community (if it in any case ever decides to act before it’s too late) is to act effectively. I argued there that since different mass violence events are organized in different ways, understanding the important details and structural elements of an ongoing event is important if intervention is to be useful. For example, a genocide strongly orchestrated and coordinated by a central state government might be stopped effectively via strong military action to eliminate the government coordinating the genocide (e.g. military success by Rwandan Tutsi rebels was the main thing that stopped the Hutu slaughter of Tutsis in Rwanda), whereas a genocide only promoted by and loosely orchestrated by a centralized government might not be ended, or could perhaps be made worse, by the same style of intervention.
Similarly, LeBor says “While the term genocide is modern, the annihilation of one human group by another has occurred at least since biblical times.” True enough, of course, but as LeBor also recognizes, modern genocides occur via modern technology and infrastructure, and that changes at least the scope of potential genocides and the ways they can be organized – Genghis Khan put whole cities to slaughter in some of the most spectacular instances of pre-modern atrocity, but nothing on the scale of the Holocaust, Rwandan Genocide, or Armenian Genocide happened, or could have happened, before the Modern Era.
In one particular sort of way, distinctions between genocide, ethnic cleansing or other mass killing are irrelevant. For those directly or indirectly affected, it might not matter much why they are killed or otherwise affected. I can’t imagine it makes much difference to the slain victims or survivors of Srebrenica or other Bosnian massacre sites whether they suffered through genocide or ethnic cleansing.
As I previously argued, though, when we make distinctions between types of genocide or between genocide and ethnic cleansing, this need not and should not be taken to imply that one sort of phenomenon is more serious than another. All types of mass killing involve the murder of many individual human beings. The fact that genocide and ethnic cleansing might have subtly different motivations or that different genocides are organized and implemented differently doesn’t in any way make one sort more or less serious a crime than another.
So, I’m also exasperated by the sorts of things LeBor mentions. In particular, the act of splitting hairs in lieu of action I find disturbing. Further, I find it problematic to make distinctions between types of mass killing for the purposes of judging one more seriously than another or to judge one incident worthy of action or intervention and another not. That is, what’s wrong with making distinctions between genocide and other phenomena at the Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia or with regard to Darfur is not the act of making distinctions, but using such distinctions as an excuse to not take action in Darfur or to judge one set of killings more leniently than another for Bosnia.
In addition to evaluating and discussing the books in question, LeBor also expresses exasperation with international proceedings related to genocide, whether with the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia or the continued lack of real coordinated international efforts to end the slaughter in Darfur. Much of his frustration is aimed at hairsplitting over the definition of genocide, for example arguments over whether this or that person was guilty of genocide or ethnic cleansing at Srebrenica or elsewhere, or rulings that genocide occurred at Srebrenica without as yet finding anyone guilty of the charge in that case.
LeBor also insightfully writes of some of the consequences of this style of hairsplitting in a passage I would like to quote at length (parenthetical note added):
“This endless hair-splitting greatly aids states that perpetrate genocide. If nobody knows what genocide is, then how can anyone be guilty of committing it? It detracts from the more important debate of how to stop the ongoing killing in Darfur. Wrongly viewing Darfur through the prism of the Iraq War, much of the left, both in the United States and Europe, seems paralyzed by the fear of being seen to support another overseas adventure. For all its complications (some of which are skillfully laid out in another article in the same issue of The Nation, “The Wars of Sudan” by Alex de Waal) – pre-existing conflicts over water and agricultural land, desertification and arbitrary international borders – the crisis in Darfur is also simple. The Sudanese government is waging a sustained campaign of murder, ethnic cleansing and displacement against the people of Darfur, a campaign extensively documented by the UN, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, among others. The slaughter could be curtailed or even brought to a close without Western military intervention. Such steps might include: deploying UN troops inside Sudan; deploying peacekeepers in Chad to prevent cross-border raids; targeted sanctions on Sudan’s oil industry; targeted sanctions on Sudanese government ministers, army and intelligence officers; using US trade as a weapon to pressure China, Sudan’s main sponsor, to stop the carnage; and even threats to boycott the Beijing Olympics.”
In light of LeBor’s discussion I want to revisit the question of the utility of making distinctions about genocide, ethnic cleansing, and similar phenomena. In short, I will argue that in some contexts, making fine distinctions is important, in other settings largely irrelevant, and in other cases a problem insofar as making distinctions becomes an act of hairsplitting as an end in itself in lieu of acting.
In the case of historical or social science analysis of genocidal or ethnic cleansing contexts, acts of classification and making distinctions are quite useful in coming to the fullest possible understanding of complex phenomena, whether in relation to the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, the current slaughter in Darfur, ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, the historical displacement of Native North Americans, the “Killing Fields” of Cambodia, or any other case of genocide, ethnic cleansing, ethnocide, “classicide” (a term introduced in one of the books reviewed by LeBor, Mann’s The Dark Side of Democracy), or other mass violence.
As I argued in my earlier post, it is also crucial to be able to make distinctions with regard to ongoing events if the international community (if it in any case ever decides to act before it’s too late) is to act effectively. I argued there that since different mass violence events are organized in different ways, understanding the important details and structural elements of an ongoing event is important if intervention is to be useful. For example, a genocide strongly orchestrated and coordinated by a central state government might be stopped effectively via strong military action to eliminate the government coordinating the genocide (e.g. military success by Rwandan Tutsi rebels was the main thing that stopped the Hutu slaughter of Tutsis in Rwanda), whereas a genocide only promoted by and loosely orchestrated by a centralized government might not be ended, or could perhaps be made worse, by the same style of intervention.
Similarly, LeBor says “While the term genocide is modern, the annihilation of one human group by another has occurred at least since biblical times.” True enough, of course, but as LeBor also recognizes, modern genocides occur via modern technology and infrastructure, and that changes at least the scope of potential genocides and the ways they can be organized – Genghis Khan put whole cities to slaughter in some of the most spectacular instances of pre-modern atrocity, but nothing on the scale of the Holocaust, Rwandan Genocide, or Armenian Genocide happened, or could have happened, before the Modern Era.
In one particular sort of way, distinctions between genocide, ethnic cleansing or other mass killing are irrelevant. For those directly or indirectly affected, it might not matter much why they are killed or otherwise affected. I can’t imagine it makes much difference to the slain victims or survivors of Srebrenica or other Bosnian massacre sites whether they suffered through genocide or ethnic cleansing.
As I previously argued, though, when we make distinctions between types of genocide or between genocide and ethnic cleansing, this need not and should not be taken to imply that one sort of phenomenon is more serious than another. All types of mass killing involve the murder of many individual human beings. The fact that genocide and ethnic cleansing might have subtly different motivations or that different genocides are organized and implemented differently doesn’t in any way make one sort more or less serious a crime than another.
So, I’m also exasperated by the sorts of things LeBor mentions. In particular, the act of splitting hairs in lieu of action I find disturbing. Further, I find it problematic to make distinctions between types of mass killing for the purposes of judging one more seriously than another or to judge one incident worthy of action or intervention and another not. That is, what’s wrong with making distinctions between genocide and other phenomena at the Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia or with regard to Darfur is not the act of making distinctions, but using such distinctions as an excuse to not take action in Darfur or to judge one set of killings more leniently than another for Bosnia.
Friday, March 9, 2007
Sudan and Cultural Relativism
In recent blog posts, I’ve written on several occasions regarding two contemporary issues that pertain to the national context of Sudan: the genocide in Darfur and female genital modification (a phenomenon not restricted to Sudan, but practiced in varying frequencies throughout the Sudanic region of Sahel zone Sub-Saharan Africa and to some extent in surrounding cultural regions – but at the same time definitely a phenomenon of Sudan, and often practiced there in a form regarded by many as the most extreme example of female genital modification, what Janice Boddy has called, following local usage, “Pharaonic Circumcision,” which entails excision of all external female genitalia and infibulation of the vaginal opening). My question here is whether concepts of cultural relativism apply to either of these situations.
I’ve also written recently about differing conceptions or senses of “cultural relativism.” There are certain elements of cultural relativism that anthropologists in general tend to agree on. First, there is a recognition of the simple reality of different culturally shaped ways to be in the world. There is no single way to be human, and each of our ways of being human is largely influenced by our cultural contexts, and is “culturally relative” to that extent. Second, for ethnographic research, cultural relativism further entails an at least provisional setting aside of moral or ethical judgment of the cultural practices being observed and analyzed in the field context, and an attempt to understand cultural phenomena on their own terms, within their own logic. As Marshall Sahlins has written recently in his book Waiting for Foucault, Still, this is as much a pragmatic and methodological concern as anything. In order to do quality fieldwork, it is necessary to set aside preconceptions (to the extent humanly possible) and to not continually engage in moral judgment of those being studied. Beyond this, there is debate about the sense, meaning, or implications of cultural relativism. For some, the provisional setting aside of moral or ethical judgment or critique becomes an ultimate setting aside of these activities, at least with regard to the practices and premises of cultural contexts other than of one’s own upbringing. For me, cultural relativism does involve a strong inclination towards respect for the practices of other cultures (I think that’s been one of the strongest contributions of the discipline of anthropology to western culture [and other cultures]) and for the self determination and autonomy of others. Further, though, a concern for self determination and autonomy as well as respect for others as equals, for me, necessitates willingness to engage in cross-cultural dialogue and to critique and be critiqued.
But my question here is not so much the content of debates about cultural relativism but whether those debates about cultural relativism and their implications have any bearing on the issues of female genital modification or the genocide in Darfur? My short answer is “yes” to one, and “no” to the other.
Female Genital Modification is a “traditional” practice in most, if not all, of the communities where it is now performed. (I’m aware of the problems of invoking “tradition,” especially when notions of the traditional are used to imply stasis within the practices of a particular community or homogeneity in practice within a community or region. Still, I find the concept useful in referring to practices that have a history within a specific context [often, but not necessarily a long history] and which relate in important ways to many other elements of the culture. I’m respectful of those, like June Nash, who call for us to speak no more of “Tradition” – and we should speak no more of capital-T, static, essentializing “Tradition” – but I would call instead to speak in more complex, interesting ways of “tradition” or “traditional practice.”) It is important to provisionally set aside judgment (at least for those engaging in ethnographic fieldwork on the topic) and to understand the practice in relation to other features of the cultural context on their own terms, even if we ultimately engage in critique and/or support efforts to alter the practice.
The only element of cultural relativism that applies at all to the genocide in Darfur (or any other genocide, ethnic cleansing, or ethnic violence) is perhaps the goal of understanding the phenomenon on its own terms, the better to end it. Other than that, cultural relativism (and any associated notions of national autonomy) is utterly irrelevant in this case. While a certain amount of ethnic tension in Western and Southern Sudan may be “traditional,” genocide is clearly not and violates in the most extreme way possible the respect for diversity, self determination and autonomy on which cultural relativism is based.
I’ve also written recently about differing conceptions or senses of “cultural relativism.” There are certain elements of cultural relativism that anthropologists in general tend to agree on. First, there is a recognition of the simple reality of different culturally shaped ways to be in the world. There is no single way to be human, and each of our ways of being human is largely influenced by our cultural contexts, and is “culturally relative” to that extent. Second, for ethnographic research, cultural relativism further entails an at least provisional setting aside of moral or ethical judgment of the cultural practices being observed and analyzed in the field context, and an attempt to understand cultural phenomena on their own terms, within their own logic. As Marshall Sahlins has written recently in his book Waiting for Foucault, Still, this is as much a pragmatic and methodological concern as anything. In order to do quality fieldwork, it is necessary to set aside preconceptions (to the extent humanly possible) and to not continually engage in moral judgment of those being studied. Beyond this, there is debate about the sense, meaning, or implications of cultural relativism. For some, the provisional setting aside of moral or ethical judgment or critique becomes an ultimate setting aside of these activities, at least with regard to the practices and premises of cultural contexts other than of one’s own upbringing. For me, cultural relativism does involve a strong inclination towards respect for the practices of other cultures (I think that’s been one of the strongest contributions of the discipline of anthropology to western culture [and other cultures]) and for the self determination and autonomy of others. Further, though, a concern for self determination and autonomy as well as respect for others as equals, for me, necessitates willingness to engage in cross-cultural dialogue and to critique and be critiqued.
But my question here is not so much the content of debates about cultural relativism but whether those debates about cultural relativism and their implications have any bearing on the issues of female genital modification or the genocide in Darfur? My short answer is “yes” to one, and “no” to the other.
Female Genital Modification is a “traditional” practice in most, if not all, of the communities where it is now performed. (I’m aware of the problems of invoking “tradition,” especially when notions of the traditional are used to imply stasis within the practices of a particular community or homogeneity in practice within a community or region. Still, I find the concept useful in referring to practices that have a history within a specific context [often, but not necessarily a long history] and which relate in important ways to many other elements of the culture. I’m respectful of those, like June Nash, who call for us to speak no more of “Tradition” – and we should speak no more of capital-T, static, essentializing “Tradition” – but I would call instead to speak in more complex, interesting ways of “tradition” or “traditional practice.”) It is important to provisionally set aside judgment (at least for those engaging in ethnographic fieldwork on the topic) and to understand the practice in relation to other features of the cultural context on their own terms, even if we ultimately engage in critique and/or support efforts to alter the practice.
The only element of cultural relativism that applies at all to the genocide in Darfur (or any other genocide, ethnic cleansing, or ethnic violence) is perhaps the goal of understanding the phenomenon on its own terms, the better to end it. Other than that, cultural relativism (and any associated notions of national autonomy) is utterly irrelevant in this case. While a certain amount of ethnic tension in Western and Southern Sudan may be “traditional,” genocide is clearly not and violates in the most extreme way possible the respect for diversity, self determination and autonomy on which cultural relativism is based.
Wednesday, March 7, 2007
A Typology of Genocide
I am prompted to consider whether there are different types of genocides by three things: (1) having recently read Jean Hatzfeld’s book Machete Season; (2) a recent class discussion in a course I am currently teaching on Native North American cultures; and (3) the continued dithering and lack of action on the part of the U.N. with regard to the ethnic violence and massacres in the Darfur region of Sudan and now also neighboring portions of Chad and the Central African Republic.
(1) Hatzfeld’s book Machete Season is a harrowing read, based as it is on interviews with Hutu killers who participated directly in the Tutsi genocide in Rwanda in the mid 1990s. Hatzfeld had previously conducted interviews and written about Tutsi survivors of that genocide. He also has written about instances of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. In Machete Season He makes a distinction between genocide and ethnic cleansing. He also carefully makes clear that labeling the events in Bosnia “ethnic cleansing” rather than “genocide” is in no way intended to diminish the significance of the abuse heaped upon specific individuals and communities. Rather it is to recognize a difference in the way that events played out in Bosnia and Rwanda, as well as a difference in the motivations and coordination of the killers.
One key difference between the two cases concerns who was killed. In Bosnia, ethnic cleansing involved the removal of Bosniak Muslims from Serb dominated areas, including large scale massacres at some sites, such as Srebrenica. Such massacres focused on men. Men and older boys were killed wholesale, while women and children, when killed, were killed more randomly. Rape was perpetrated commonly, but not necessarily systematically, on Bosniak women (which doesn’t at all minimize its effects or horror, but simply describes the practice). Hatzfeld argues that the intent (and the result in some areas) was to drive out the Bosniaks, to brutalize them, to diminish their capability to retaliate, but did stop short of attempting to completely eliminate the Bosniaks as a group. It is this that prompts Hatzfeld to say this was something subtly different from genocide.
In the Rwandan case, the evidence from the Tutsi survivors, Hutu killers, and material remains makes clear that Tutsis, regardless of gender or age, were massacred wholesale. The goal was not to drive them out but to completely eliminate them.
(2) In a recent class discussion in my current course on Native North American cultures, where the specific discussion focused on effects of European and Euro-American interactions with Native Americans, the issue arose whether there had been a Native American genocide. After careful discussion, a number of conclusions were reached. First, the consensus of the class was that whether there was genocide in this case depended on whether we define it in terms of the sorts of effects that result from an interaction or in terms of the motivations influencing the actions of one side.
If genocide is defined in terms of effects (a legitimate starting point, though not the route I would choose, because it entails only ever being able to identify genocide after the fact, after the results are in), then there clearly was a Native American genocide. In terms of absolute numbers and population proportions, the consequences of European-Native American interaction were more deadly for Native Americans than was the case for any of the 20th – 21st century genocides, due to a combination of disease, violence, and enslavement.
The consensus of the class (with some respectful and respected dissenters) was that genocide should be defined more on the basis of motivations of those doing the killing. When so defined, in most cases we see something slightly different from genocide and more like ethnic cleansing in the Native American case. There were many massacres of Native American populations, just as in Bosnia, but rarely were they systematic in intent or practice, i.e. rarely were they systematic attempts to wipe out a whole group. There seems overall (despite the more clearly genocidal intent of some individuals, like General Sherman who tried to adapt the total war techniques he had pioneered during the Civil War to genocidal endeavors in the American West) to have been an attempt to move Native Americans away (e.g. the Trail of Tears and the whole reservation system) and later to assimilate them forcefully through institutions like Indian Boarding Schools. To use a current technical anthropological term, there was systematic “ethnocide” in European-Native American interactions, and there was frequent and often extreme violence (there was perhaps even genocide in specific cases), but taken overall, something a little different than genocide occurred (and as in the Bosnian ethnic cleansing case, saying genocide didn’t occur doesn’t make it better, but simply describes the situation). (If we shift our historical gaze south of the United States, in most of Latin America, there was not even an attempt to move Native Americans out of the way [except in parts of Argentina and Chile] – not because of a particularly nobler attitude towards Native Americans, but because the Spanish and Portuguese wanted to use their labor.)
(3) Some senior U.S. administration officials have labeled the events on the ground in Darfur and surrounding regions genocide, but to date the U.N. has refrained from doing so. This is partly no doubt out of cynical self interest on the part of some countries, such as China, with an interest in cultivating economic and political ties with the Sudanese government, partly reluctance to use that term, because under the U.N.’s charter, “genocide” would require strong action, but also arguably because some don’t quite see the events as genocide. I would label these events genocide, but I would also recognize that events in Darfur (and for that matter the events of the early 20th century Armenian genocide) are a bit different than those of the Holocaust or the Rwandan genocide.
Therefore, I would propose the following categories for considering genocide and related practice: state sponsored and coordinated genocide, state promoted – locally coordinated genocide, and ethnic cleansing.
State Sponsored and Coordinated Genocide
This is the sort of instance many have in mind when they think of “genocide,” and as I argued above may be part of the reason that some at the U.N. are uncomfortable labeling the Darfur situation a genocide (because it doesn’t – at least not systematically – fit into this type of genocide, and also as I said above, many states have other, less legitimate reasons, to resist the labeling of genocide).
The two most prominent examples of states sponsored and coordinated genocide are the Jewish Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide. There are some important differences between these two cases (which will always be the case with any two distinct members of any sort of type or category): the Holocaust was administered largely through gassings and machine guns, the Rwandan genocide largely through machetes (through there was plenty of machine gunning in Rwanda, and plenty of stabbing and slashing in the Holocaust); while Jews in Germany and Tutsis in Rwanda were both minority ethnic groups, Jews in Germany were largely unknown at a personal level to many Germans, whereas most every Rwandan Hutu was on familiar terms with at least a handful of local Tutsis (which meant that the Rwandan genocide was more intimate; the Holocaust in places like Poland and Lithuania often took on a similar quality); the Holocaust in Germany (but not in places like Poland or the Baltic states) had an urban character, as German Jews were almost exclusively an urban ethnic minority there, while all of Rwandan society has a rural character (as Hatzfeld describes, even Kigali, which is a large city, has the character of many, many rural communities juxtaposed next to one another), with Tutsis despised by many Hutus because of their association of Tutsis with cattle breeding and greater wealth. So, to place the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide in the same category is not to suggest they are the same through and through.
They do have important similarities, though. Most importantly, they were both strongly associated with the state apparatus in their implementation. The state promoted overtly the mass killing of a particular ethnic minority. (This was more clearly the case in Rwanda, but there was plenty of explicit promotion of killing Jews in public statements by Hitler and others, including quite obviously in Mein Kampf.) Further, the genocides were centrally coordinated by the state. This was perhaps more elaborate (and well known) for the Holocaust, but also occurred through the use of radio communication for coordination and the use of the interahamwe militia to implement genocide at the local level (as is made clear in Hatzfeld’s book) in the Rwandan case. This isn’t to suggest that there wasn’t also plenty of local initiative taken to participate in the two genocides in ways not directly promoted and coordinated by the state – there’s plenty of evidence in both cases of things like Hutu villagers seeking out their former neighbors in hiding to kill them, even when not directly coerced to do so by the interahamwe, or Polish or Lithuanian peasants helping German units track local Jewish residents, sometimes even participating directly in the mass killings, or German soldiers volunteering to participate in military units, such as the einsatzgruppen, designed to do nothing more than track down and kill Jews. The overall quality of these two genocides, though, is of a state apparatus being channeled toward attempting to efficiently and systematically wipe out a particular ethnic group (really ethnic and other social groups in the case of the Holocaust, since vast numbers of Roma and a much smaller, but proportionally large, number of homosexuals were also targeted and killed).
The fact that the state was so intimately involved in these two instances makes them quite unusual. Really the only other such example I can readily think of is the German attempt to wipe out the Herero people in the German colony of Southwestern Africa (now Namibia) in the early 20th century. Several historians have discussed this episode as a sort of warm up for the Holocaust, which among other things pioneered the concentration camp as a tool in mass murder and genocide (the Germans probably borrowed the idea of the concentration camp from the British use of such camps in South Africa during the Boer War, and the earliest instance of the modern concentration camp was probably the Confederate prison at Andersonville, Georgia which housed Union prisoners of war during the American Civil War, but the camps housing Herero inmates were the first channeled to genocidal purposes).
State Promoted – Locally Coordinated Genocide
Both the current massacres in Darfur and the Armenian genocide in the early 20th century represent definite genocides. In both cases there is or was a definite attempt to wipe out particular ethnic groups, Armenians in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire or the Fur and related black, non-Arab ethnic groups in Darfur, Sudan. The character of these genocides is different from that of the Holocaust or Rwanda, though. For the most part, the state is or was not the primary direct perpetrator but played mainly the role of instigator (exceptions include things like Sudanese military planes attacking communities in Darfur under the guise of attacking rebels). The Sudanese state is not completely lying when it claims to not be engaged in massacres – it is mainly the janjaweed militias who commit the atrocities, but there’s plenty of evidence to indicate state support (material and ideological) of the janjaweed. The Turkish state is not completely lying when it claims things like, “It was the Kurds who killed the Armenians” – in many cases, Kurds were involved in killing Armenians, but so were lots more Turks.
It’s important to recognize differences in organization and implementation of genocides because these differences require different responses. If the world at large through the U.N. were to ever decide to take action in Darfur before it’s too late to bother (something about which I’m quite skeptical and pessimistic, but also hopeful), the strategies and tactics called for would be different than if the world at large through the U.N. had ever gotten around to deciding to take action in Rwanda. In Rwanda, the military defeat of the Hutu-dominated army and government (and by the end of the genocide simply the Hutu army and government) by Tutsi rebels essentially ended the genocide. There had been some local initiative and coordination of specific maneuvers during the genocide, but these had been minor in scope and fell apart almost instantaneously with the defeat of the state. It’s not at all clear that the same would apply to Darfur. The fact that the state is involved, but mainly indirectly, means that things like sanctions or warfare against the Sudanese state might or might not be sufficient to end the genocide. With the first sort of genocide described above, the international response that would be appropriate is clear (even if the international community has never responded in this way) – end the state that is directly perpetrating genocide and you end the genocide. With this second type of more diffuse and localized genocide, while I would argue that it is still necessary to intervene powerfully in some way with the state in question, it’s not so clear that this would even be close to sufficient in order to end these types of genocide (in fact, the Armenian genocide continued well past the 1915 date normally associated with the genocide, even as the Ottoman state was crumbling at the end of World War I). If anything, a response involving very strong economic and political sanctions seems more likely to be effective than military action with this sort of genocide. Strong sanctions would give the Sudanese government at least some incentive to use the direct and indirect influence on the janjaweed to stop the killings; toppling the Sudanese government would more likely lead to a chaotic situation where no one would have much influence of the janjaweed.
Ethnic Cleansing
I would apply the term “ethnic cleansing” for situations that have strong analogous qualities to the context of the term's original use, Bosnia. That is, ethnic cleansing refers to situations which are not genocide because they do not involve the systematic attempt to eliminate an ethnic group altogether but which do involve a systematic attempt to remove an ethnic group from a particular context or area. This may involve ethnocide (the attempt the eliminate an ethnicity [as opposed to the people who comprise the ethnic group] through forced assimilation), such as with Indian boarding schools; it may involve large massacres, as in both the Bosnian and Native American contexts; it may involve targeted killings of members of a particular ethnic group, as in the sectarian violence in Iraq, the current situation that comes closest to fitting into the category of ethnic cleansing, though to be technical, the Iraqi situation would be more “sectarian cleansing;” but in each of these cases, this is not genocide. For the individuals killed or otherwise directly affected, ethnic cleansing is no less tragic or devastating than either type of genocide, so saying that ethnic cleansing is not genocide is not at all to suggest it is a less serious crime and horror, but to say that it is simply a slightly different kind of crime and horror, involving different motivations and strategies.
As with genocide, a further distinction could be made between ethnic cleansing that is both instigated and coordinated by a state apparatus and that which is locally coordinated and not centrally controlled. The Native North American case is obviously not a single case, but many contexts over a period of centuries. The Trail of Tears and many other instances of Indian Removal were state instigated and implemented. Many, perhaps most, massacres of Native Americans were locally initiated, sometimes with the state having helped to foster a situation of violence or acquiescing to violence, and sometimes not.
Other Mass Violence
Genocide and ethnic cleansing are not the only types of mass violence. Warfare in general involves mass violence, but it generally doesn’t involve the targeting of specific social groups beyond enemy militaries. The 20th century development of total war (which was being experimented with at least as early as the American Civil War), especially during World War II, brought troubling changes to this, as most of the major powers involved in that war engaged in military tactics which didn’t just kill large numbers of civilians collaterally but specifically targeted them as a way of undermining the total society. In most cases, while egregiously violating standards of human rights later formalized, these actions could not be easily regarded as genocide, ethnic cleansing, or even particularly motivated by ethnicity, but in a few cases, ethnicity does seem to have played a role. This seems to be the case in the Japanese atrocities in Nanjing, and I have found greatly troubling the U.S. fire bombing of every Japanese city and most every Japanese town (as well as the fact that far more attention has been paid to the fire bombing of a much smaller number of German communities and cities – which was horrific in its own right – but which entailed far fewer total German than Japanese deaths).
Other instances of mass violence don’t really fit in the discussion of ethnic violence of any sort because clearly not ethnically motivated, but do have some analogous qualities in terms of their implementation and the fact that they involve systematic killings and violence directed at specific selected social groups or individuals. For example, the Stalinist purges and gulag system or the “Killing Fields” of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, while not genocide, involved mass internments and killings instigated and coordinated directly by the state apparatus and have some analogous qualities to the Holocaust or the Rwandan genocide.
Why Distinguish between Different sorts of Mass Violence?
First, making accurate distinctions gives you a greater ability to make subtle arguments, and to avoid exaggeration or mischaracterization. When Amnesty International referred to Guantanamo as an “American Gulag,” they engaged in serious exaggeration which undermined the credibility of their own research and reporting. You don’t need to call it the “Gulag” in order to take accusations of impropriety at Guantanamo seriously. When I heard someone refer to Israeli military actions in Lebanon in the summer of 2006 as “genocide,” I couldn’t take seriously anything else she had to say about the matter. It’s not that I didn’t find any of Israel’s military actions troubling, but there was nothing particularly “genocidal” about Israeli actions.
Second, distinguishing between different sorts of practice can be pragmatically important. Since not all genocides or examples of mass ethnic violence work the same way, we don’t fully understand them if we don’t make such distinctions. While no genocide or ethnic cleansing will ever be easy to respond to – either in understanding what an appropriate response would be or in implementing that response, and while no amount of understanding will alone provide the political will necessary to appropriately respond, lack of full understanding will almost certainly doom any response, no matter how well intentioned, to failure.
(1) Hatzfeld’s book Machete Season is a harrowing read, based as it is on interviews with Hutu killers who participated directly in the Tutsi genocide in Rwanda in the mid 1990s. Hatzfeld had previously conducted interviews and written about Tutsi survivors of that genocide. He also has written about instances of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. In Machete Season He makes a distinction between genocide and ethnic cleansing. He also carefully makes clear that labeling the events in Bosnia “ethnic cleansing” rather than “genocide” is in no way intended to diminish the significance of the abuse heaped upon specific individuals and communities. Rather it is to recognize a difference in the way that events played out in Bosnia and Rwanda, as well as a difference in the motivations and coordination of the killers.
One key difference between the two cases concerns who was killed. In Bosnia, ethnic cleansing involved the removal of Bosniak Muslims from Serb dominated areas, including large scale massacres at some sites, such as Srebrenica. Such massacres focused on men. Men and older boys were killed wholesale, while women and children, when killed, were killed more randomly. Rape was perpetrated commonly, but not necessarily systematically, on Bosniak women (which doesn’t at all minimize its effects or horror, but simply describes the practice). Hatzfeld argues that the intent (and the result in some areas) was to drive out the Bosniaks, to brutalize them, to diminish their capability to retaliate, but did stop short of attempting to completely eliminate the Bosniaks as a group. It is this that prompts Hatzfeld to say this was something subtly different from genocide.
In the Rwandan case, the evidence from the Tutsi survivors, Hutu killers, and material remains makes clear that Tutsis, regardless of gender or age, were massacred wholesale. The goal was not to drive them out but to completely eliminate them.
(2) In a recent class discussion in my current course on Native North American cultures, where the specific discussion focused on effects of European and Euro-American interactions with Native Americans, the issue arose whether there had been a Native American genocide. After careful discussion, a number of conclusions were reached. First, the consensus of the class was that whether there was genocide in this case depended on whether we define it in terms of the sorts of effects that result from an interaction or in terms of the motivations influencing the actions of one side.
If genocide is defined in terms of effects (a legitimate starting point, though not the route I would choose, because it entails only ever being able to identify genocide after the fact, after the results are in), then there clearly was a Native American genocide. In terms of absolute numbers and population proportions, the consequences of European-Native American interaction were more deadly for Native Americans than was the case for any of the 20th – 21st century genocides, due to a combination of disease, violence, and enslavement.
The consensus of the class (with some respectful and respected dissenters) was that genocide should be defined more on the basis of motivations of those doing the killing. When so defined, in most cases we see something slightly different from genocide and more like ethnic cleansing in the Native American case. There were many massacres of Native American populations, just as in Bosnia, but rarely were they systematic in intent or practice, i.e. rarely were they systematic attempts to wipe out a whole group. There seems overall (despite the more clearly genocidal intent of some individuals, like General Sherman who tried to adapt the total war techniques he had pioneered during the Civil War to genocidal endeavors in the American West) to have been an attempt to move Native Americans away (e.g. the Trail of Tears and the whole reservation system) and later to assimilate them forcefully through institutions like Indian Boarding Schools. To use a current technical anthropological term, there was systematic “ethnocide” in European-Native American interactions, and there was frequent and often extreme violence (there was perhaps even genocide in specific cases), but taken overall, something a little different than genocide occurred (and as in the Bosnian ethnic cleansing case, saying genocide didn’t occur doesn’t make it better, but simply describes the situation). (If we shift our historical gaze south of the United States, in most of Latin America, there was not even an attempt to move Native Americans out of the way [except in parts of Argentina and Chile] – not because of a particularly nobler attitude towards Native Americans, but because the Spanish and Portuguese wanted to use their labor.)
(3) Some senior U.S. administration officials have labeled the events on the ground in Darfur and surrounding regions genocide, but to date the U.N. has refrained from doing so. This is partly no doubt out of cynical self interest on the part of some countries, such as China, with an interest in cultivating economic and political ties with the Sudanese government, partly reluctance to use that term, because under the U.N.’s charter, “genocide” would require strong action, but also arguably because some don’t quite see the events as genocide. I would label these events genocide, but I would also recognize that events in Darfur (and for that matter the events of the early 20th century Armenian genocide) are a bit different than those of the Holocaust or the Rwandan genocide.
Therefore, I would propose the following categories for considering genocide and related practice: state sponsored and coordinated genocide, state promoted – locally coordinated genocide, and ethnic cleansing.
State Sponsored and Coordinated Genocide
This is the sort of instance many have in mind when they think of “genocide,” and as I argued above may be part of the reason that some at the U.N. are uncomfortable labeling the Darfur situation a genocide (because it doesn’t – at least not systematically – fit into this type of genocide, and also as I said above, many states have other, less legitimate reasons, to resist the labeling of genocide).
The two most prominent examples of states sponsored and coordinated genocide are the Jewish Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide. There are some important differences between these two cases (which will always be the case with any two distinct members of any sort of type or category): the Holocaust was administered largely through gassings and machine guns, the Rwandan genocide largely through machetes (through there was plenty of machine gunning in Rwanda, and plenty of stabbing and slashing in the Holocaust); while Jews in Germany and Tutsis in Rwanda were both minority ethnic groups, Jews in Germany were largely unknown at a personal level to many Germans, whereas most every Rwandan Hutu was on familiar terms with at least a handful of local Tutsis (which meant that the Rwandan genocide was more intimate; the Holocaust in places like Poland and Lithuania often took on a similar quality); the Holocaust in Germany (but not in places like Poland or the Baltic states) had an urban character, as German Jews were almost exclusively an urban ethnic minority there, while all of Rwandan society has a rural character (as Hatzfeld describes, even Kigali, which is a large city, has the character of many, many rural communities juxtaposed next to one another), with Tutsis despised by many Hutus because of their association of Tutsis with cattle breeding and greater wealth. So, to place the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide in the same category is not to suggest they are the same through and through.
They do have important similarities, though. Most importantly, they were both strongly associated with the state apparatus in their implementation. The state promoted overtly the mass killing of a particular ethnic minority. (This was more clearly the case in Rwanda, but there was plenty of explicit promotion of killing Jews in public statements by Hitler and others, including quite obviously in Mein Kampf.) Further, the genocides were centrally coordinated by the state. This was perhaps more elaborate (and well known) for the Holocaust, but also occurred through the use of radio communication for coordination and the use of the interahamwe militia to implement genocide at the local level (as is made clear in Hatzfeld’s book) in the Rwandan case. This isn’t to suggest that there wasn’t also plenty of local initiative taken to participate in the two genocides in ways not directly promoted and coordinated by the state – there’s plenty of evidence in both cases of things like Hutu villagers seeking out their former neighbors in hiding to kill them, even when not directly coerced to do so by the interahamwe, or Polish or Lithuanian peasants helping German units track local Jewish residents, sometimes even participating directly in the mass killings, or German soldiers volunteering to participate in military units, such as the einsatzgruppen, designed to do nothing more than track down and kill Jews. The overall quality of these two genocides, though, is of a state apparatus being channeled toward attempting to efficiently and systematically wipe out a particular ethnic group (really ethnic and other social groups in the case of the Holocaust, since vast numbers of Roma and a much smaller, but proportionally large, number of homosexuals were also targeted and killed).
The fact that the state was so intimately involved in these two instances makes them quite unusual. Really the only other such example I can readily think of is the German attempt to wipe out the Herero people in the German colony of Southwestern Africa (now Namibia) in the early 20th century. Several historians have discussed this episode as a sort of warm up for the Holocaust, which among other things pioneered the concentration camp as a tool in mass murder and genocide (the Germans probably borrowed the idea of the concentration camp from the British use of such camps in South Africa during the Boer War, and the earliest instance of the modern concentration camp was probably the Confederate prison at Andersonville, Georgia which housed Union prisoners of war during the American Civil War, but the camps housing Herero inmates were the first channeled to genocidal purposes).
State Promoted – Locally Coordinated Genocide
Both the current massacres in Darfur and the Armenian genocide in the early 20th century represent definite genocides. In both cases there is or was a definite attempt to wipe out particular ethnic groups, Armenians in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire or the Fur and related black, non-Arab ethnic groups in Darfur, Sudan. The character of these genocides is different from that of the Holocaust or Rwanda, though. For the most part, the state is or was not the primary direct perpetrator but played mainly the role of instigator (exceptions include things like Sudanese military planes attacking communities in Darfur under the guise of attacking rebels). The Sudanese state is not completely lying when it claims to not be engaged in massacres – it is mainly the janjaweed militias who commit the atrocities, but there’s plenty of evidence to indicate state support (material and ideological) of the janjaweed. The Turkish state is not completely lying when it claims things like, “It was the Kurds who killed the Armenians” – in many cases, Kurds were involved in killing Armenians, but so were lots more Turks.
It’s important to recognize differences in organization and implementation of genocides because these differences require different responses. If the world at large through the U.N. were to ever decide to take action in Darfur before it’s too late to bother (something about which I’m quite skeptical and pessimistic, but also hopeful), the strategies and tactics called for would be different than if the world at large through the U.N. had ever gotten around to deciding to take action in Rwanda. In Rwanda, the military defeat of the Hutu-dominated army and government (and by the end of the genocide simply the Hutu army and government) by Tutsi rebels essentially ended the genocide. There had been some local initiative and coordination of specific maneuvers during the genocide, but these had been minor in scope and fell apart almost instantaneously with the defeat of the state. It’s not at all clear that the same would apply to Darfur. The fact that the state is involved, but mainly indirectly, means that things like sanctions or warfare against the Sudanese state might or might not be sufficient to end the genocide. With the first sort of genocide described above, the international response that would be appropriate is clear (even if the international community has never responded in this way) – end the state that is directly perpetrating genocide and you end the genocide. With this second type of more diffuse and localized genocide, while I would argue that it is still necessary to intervene powerfully in some way with the state in question, it’s not so clear that this would even be close to sufficient in order to end these types of genocide (in fact, the Armenian genocide continued well past the 1915 date normally associated with the genocide, even as the Ottoman state was crumbling at the end of World War I). If anything, a response involving very strong economic and political sanctions seems more likely to be effective than military action with this sort of genocide. Strong sanctions would give the Sudanese government at least some incentive to use the direct and indirect influence on the janjaweed to stop the killings; toppling the Sudanese government would more likely lead to a chaotic situation where no one would have much influence of the janjaweed.
Ethnic Cleansing
I would apply the term “ethnic cleansing” for situations that have strong analogous qualities to the context of the term's original use, Bosnia. That is, ethnic cleansing refers to situations which are not genocide because they do not involve the systematic attempt to eliminate an ethnic group altogether but which do involve a systematic attempt to remove an ethnic group from a particular context or area. This may involve ethnocide (the attempt the eliminate an ethnicity [as opposed to the people who comprise the ethnic group] through forced assimilation), such as with Indian boarding schools; it may involve large massacres, as in both the Bosnian and Native American contexts; it may involve targeted killings of members of a particular ethnic group, as in the sectarian violence in Iraq, the current situation that comes closest to fitting into the category of ethnic cleansing, though to be technical, the Iraqi situation would be more “sectarian cleansing;” but in each of these cases, this is not genocide. For the individuals killed or otherwise directly affected, ethnic cleansing is no less tragic or devastating than either type of genocide, so saying that ethnic cleansing is not genocide is not at all to suggest it is a less serious crime and horror, but to say that it is simply a slightly different kind of crime and horror, involving different motivations and strategies.
As with genocide, a further distinction could be made between ethnic cleansing that is both instigated and coordinated by a state apparatus and that which is locally coordinated and not centrally controlled. The Native North American case is obviously not a single case, but many contexts over a period of centuries. The Trail of Tears and many other instances of Indian Removal were state instigated and implemented. Many, perhaps most, massacres of Native Americans were locally initiated, sometimes with the state having helped to foster a situation of violence or acquiescing to violence, and sometimes not.
Other Mass Violence
Genocide and ethnic cleansing are not the only types of mass violence. Warfare in general involves mass violence, but it generally doesn’t involve the targeting of specific social groups beyond enemy militaries. The 20th century development of total war (which was being experimented with at least as early as the American Civil War), especially during World War II, brought troubling changes to this, as most of the major powers involved in that war engaged in military tactics which didn’t just kill large numbers of civilians collaterally but specifically targeted them as a way of undermining the total society. In most cases, while egregiously violating standards of human rights later formalized, these actions could not be easily regarded as genocide, ethnic cleansing, or even particularly motivated by ethnicity, but in a few cases, ethnicity does seem to have played a role. This seems to be the case in the Japanese atrocities in Nanjing, and I have found greatly troubling the U.S. fire bombing of every Japanese city and most every Japanese town (as well as the fact that far more attention has been paid to the fire bombing of a much smaller number of German communities and cities – which was horrific in its own right – but which entailed far fewer total German than Japanese deaths).
Other instances of mass violence don’t really fit in the discussion of ethnic violence of any sort because clearly not ethnically motivated, but do have some analogous qualities in terms of their implementation and the fact that they involve systematic killings and violence directed at specific selected social groups or individuals. For example, the Stalinist purges and gulag system or the “Killing Fields” of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, while not genocide, involved mass internments and killings instigated and coordinated directly by the state apparatus and have some analogous qualities to the Holocaust or the Rwandan genocide.
Why Distinguish between Different sorts of Mass Violence?
First, making accurate distinctions gives you a greater ability to make subtle arguments, and to avoid exaggeration or mischaracterization. When Amnesty International referred to Guantanamo as an “American Gulag,” they engaged in serious exaggeration which undermined the credibility of their own research and reporting. You don’t need to call it the “Gulag” in order to take accusations of impropriety at Guantanamo seriously. When I heard someone refer to Israeli military actions in Lebanon in the summer of 2006 as “genocide,” I couldn’t take seriously anything else she had to say about the matter. It’s not that I didn’t find any of Israel’s military actions troubling, but there was nothing particularly “genocidal” about Israeli actions.
Second, distinguishing between different sorts of practice can be pragmatically important. Since not all genocides or examples of mass ethnic violence work the same way, we don’t fully understand them if we don’t make such distinctions. While no genocide or ethnic cleansing will ever be easy to respond to – either in understanding what an appropriate response would be or in implementing that response, and while no amount of understanding will alone provide the political will necessary to appropriately respond, lack of full understanding will almost certainly doom any response, no matter how well intentioned, to failure.
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