What is Genocide? – By Shaw, M

Shaw, M. What is Genocide? Polity Press 2007 232 pp. £55.00 (hardback) £15.99 (paperback) Genocide is a highly charged term. Recent controversies surrounding the Armenian Genocide and Turkish culpabilities thereof are only the most recent testimony to the contested nature of the concept and the place of genocide in the history of modernity. That even signatories to a Turkish petition calling for the proclamation of an apology by the Turkish state cannot use the term ‘genocide’, but refer instead to the Armenian ‘catastrophe’ reinforces the politically charged salience of the term. While existing legal frameworks such as the Genocide Convention and the Rome Statute are aimed to confer the term universal meaning, its continued contestation underscores the fact that, legal interpretations aside, the history of discourses on genocide affirm its status not simply as a legal term, but a highly political one as well. Following a Weberian method, Martin Shaw seeks to move beyond such controversies in providing what he calls a ‘model’ or the ‘ideal type’ conceptualization thereby laying the ground for a sociologically informed perspective that can potentially have general application. The aim is to move debates around genocide beyond the particularity of the Holocaust and to locate genocidal action within the context of violent political conflict. Reading through Shaw's text and its review of the literature, genocide appears as the intentional act of a perpetrator or set of perpetrators, it is the unintended consequence of a series of actions and interactions that result in the wilful destruction of entire groups and communities, and it is situational, located in structures of conflict, enabling conditions that turn intent into deed. While other sociological treatments of the subject have focused on the conditions of modernity, as in Bauman, or on genocide and war, as in Mann, Shaw's approach, by contrast, is to focus on the decision-making process, interpreting genocide as a strategy of conflict. Starting with Theodor Lemkin's original definition of the concept, moving through its various contested uses, Shaw's aim is to provide a general explanation of genocide, one that does not rely purely on the intentions of the perpetrators, or on outcomes, but rather weaves both into the sociological matrix of conflict and its constituent animosities, tactics, strategies and relationships. Shaw's conclusion is that genocide constitutes ‘violent social conflict’ where civilian populations come to be defined as enemies, the destruction of which aims to target their economic social and political power. Read within the sociological tradition, Shaw clearly seeks to add an element of the new to a powerful ground already laid by the likes of Zygmunt Bauman and Michael Mann. While the book is clearly written in textbook format, in that it devotes its chapters to conceptualization and review of existing approaches, it nevertheless expresses the ambition to make an original contribution to sociological treatments of the subject. Its contribution as a text that might be useful pedagogically is beyond question, however, some doubt must be raised in relation to its status as an original contribution beyond Mann's treatment of the subject, and specifically to how particular groups and communities come to be targets of the extremes of violence, from ethnic cleansing to outright genocide. There is, however, a more fundamental issue that must be raised in relation to Shaw's text. Where Mann provides a distinctly historical understanding of the specificities of particular situations wherein entire groups of civilians have been targeted on the basis of ethnicity, Shaw's epistemological focus is on the general explanation. Where there is intricacy and nuance in the former, there is much by way of simplistic generality in the latter. This is all the more regrettable in that what is achieved in the first part of the book, namely a historically sensitive treatment of the subject and its historical, legal, and sociological interpretations, comes to be lost in the second part, where the historical is sacrificed in the name of the ideal model, and one that is simply defined in strategic terms. Reading Shaw, it is difficult to distinguish between violence that targets civilians, and genocide, where such populations are targeted on distinctly racialized grounds, no longer considered as political enemies, with history and agency, but framed in discursive and institutional practices, in distinctly corporeal, biological terms. The ideal model is rendered more problematic when it becomes apparent that it is informed by a reading of the present, wherein genocidal action is more likely to take place in the so-called ‘non-western’ world (p.159). The complicities in total war of recent western interventions, in the targeting of civilians and their infrastructure, not to mention the material and ideological sustenance conferred to regimes complicit in the targeting of civilians at mass scale, appear to challenge such dichotomous representations of global violence, specifically when taken from the viewpoint of those targeted. The point about the concept, ‘genocide’ and its ‘application’ or otherwise to particular contexts, is that it will always be politically charged, situated in cultural and historic contexts. What might be ‘accidental’ to some might be interpreted as deliberate targeting to others, especially those targeted. Similarly, in relation to the systematic killing of categories of a population, what might be ‘catastrophic’ to some is ‘genocidal’ to others. While a universally agreed upon definition of genocide is desirable juridically, the sociological challenge is exactly to delve into how the universal emerges despite the odds, or indeed how it comes to be contested

Genocide · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Turkish · Islamic Studies and History · Law · Philosophy · Political Conflict and Governance · Turkey's Politics and Society