This week I’ve gotten seriously into writing up, in as definitive a way as possible, the findings of the research project I’ve been working on, off and on, for the last three years, the “Project on Violence and its Legacies: A Challenge for Global Policy” (the VAIL project).
Between all the notes I have on the four larger and numerous minor research trips I’ve made in the past three years, and the mounds of smaller notes, Post-Its, and other comments I’ve accrued on all the readings I’ve amassed– well, I certainly have enough material for at least one book!
The thing is, though, I don’t have all the funding I’d been seeking, in order to pull all my findings together into a big, heavily theoretical study of the topic. But that’s okay. I have a couple of months of funding. So I’ll take the material I already have, and start writing what I can. It will be more empricial, more experiential than the tome I’d originally been thinking of…
But that’s not all bad, either. Maybe this way it’ll be more accessible and can gain a wider readership. And the interview material and other empirical stuff that I have is already informed by a lot of heavy cerebration and theoretical reading. So at this point, I really just need to trust the material I have in hand. And what unbelievable riches I do have! So many note-books stuffed with interviews and personal notes– from Rwanda, from the ICTR in Arusha, from Mozambique, and from South Africa.
Well, knowing I have all this material is one thing. Trusting the logic of the “story” to reveal itself to me is another; but in a sense I know it will happen. Yesterday afternoon, I did find myself sitting at a complete writer’s block, and I tried to force myself to write by setting down some definitional sentences on the nature of atrocious violence, which is, after all, my subject. Those sentences weren’t wasted (though I immediately threw them out this morning.) They served to start focusing my mind where it needed to go.
Along the way there, I wrote,
- I want to suggest a two-proposition jumping-off point for the present enquiry, proposing: firstly, that virtually no atrocities are committed ?out of the blue?, that is without building on an existing basis of inter-group wounding, hurt, and resentment; and secondly, that though the past 150 years have seen a considerable development of atrocity law along with (more recently) that of institutions designed to enforce this body of law, these same years have also seen a steady continuation (or even escalation) of the commission of atrocities…
Well, you can see why I had to throw this highly theoretical and pretentious stuff out this morning! Writing like that is NOT a way to entice any decent kind of reader into one’s text… But still, the ideas I was starting to explore there were interesting and important ones. (And as I said, nothing is ever wasted– especially not when you can paste it into a blog the very next day!)
But the latter paradox I mentioned in that fragment is very thought-provoking. I took the 150-year purview, because that takes us back to the very dawn of modern-day atrocity law– the meeting in Geneva in around 1863 when the first “laws of war” were adopted. At that time, though, two aspects of the development were noteworthy. Firstly, the circle of those powers that signed the successive treaties and agreements was at first almost totally restricted to European-origin powers– that is, European governments plus those of Canada, Australia, the U.S., etc., or, over time, colonial governments from South America. In other words, it was still mainly a “white man’s club” sort of arrangement. By the end of the 19th century, I think Japan, Iran, and Thailand had all been admitted. But that was about it, in terms of states parties to those agreements.
The other noteworthy aspect of the development of the “laws of war” was that even while those norms were taking root regarding the way European-origin governments agreed to treat each other in times of war, these very same governments were rocketing ahead with no holds barred in their continued pursuit of colonial empires on other continents, and they evidently felt constrained not one bit by all the “Geneva Conventions” and the “Hague Conventions” and whatnot, in the way they continued to treat the native peoples of those distant continents. For example, in November 1884, 13 european countries and the USA all sent ambassadors to Berlin to participate in a three-month conference whose avowed intention (and achievement) was to divide up the land-mass of continental Africa amongst themselves. Once that had been achieved, the “winners” in that process went ahead and started exploiting their booty… It has been estimated that over the 23 years that followed 1885, King Leopold of Belgium maintained a forced-labor regime in Congo that killed some 10 million of that area’s 23 million people.
Outlawed by the “laws of war” of that time? No, because they did not apply to totally disfranchised Africans.
(That history, which has been very effectively pulled together in Adam Hochschild’s book King Leopold’s Ghost, made it kind of hard for me to take the Belgian government seriously when– in the aftermath of the notable failures that belgian “peacekeeping forces” showed during the 1994 genocide in Congo’s neighbor, Rwanda– it passed a law grandiosely asserting that henceforth Belgium asserted the right to try anyone who committed any heinous atrocity anywhere in the world… The law has more recently been repealed.)
Well, anyway, thank goodness that in more recent decades, the whole body of international atrocities law has acquired something like a more universal purview. But I really don’t want to forget its strongly European cultural origin… This same kind of cultural/philosophical skewing applies to many aspects of the modern international “system”, including the present-day state system itself, along with things like the “Universal” Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, the development of many international human-rights norms, the whole definition of genocide, etc.
I do remember once when I mentioned the European cultural skewing of the content of the UDHR to someone, forget who, she or he countered by saying, “But that can’t be so: the commission of seven people who drafted it included someone from West Asia and someone from China…”
Well yes, perhaps. But the person from West Asia was Charles Malik, who became (or was at the time?) Lebanon’s Foreign Minister. He was an extremely westernized person, a Christian, and scarecly “represented” his whole part of the world in the UDHR drafting discussions. (I encountered Malik in Lebanon nearly 30 years later, when he was a crusty, extremist old leader in a highly racist and inflammatory grouping of anti-Palestinian politicians called the “Lebanese Front.” If he was not in any real sense in 1948 a representative of the Arab world in the UDHR drafting discussions, by the time I knew him he was not an able representative of the UDHR’s ideals, either….)
Anyway, back to the whole question of trying to define what constitutes an atrocity. yesterday when I was trying to do that, I idly thought, well why not see what there is in the current literature and I went to Amazon and had a fabulous surprise. They have this powerful new tool up and running called “Search in the Book”. So once I was in there, I just typed “twentieth century atrocities” into the Search field, and there came back to me some 900 or so listings– including not just the books with my search terms in their titles, but also all the books in Amazon’s ever-growing data-base in which my search terms were ever mentioned close together in the text, too. (And then, they show you a PDF version of the three pages or so around each such mention, so you can see it in context.)
What a tool!
One of the first of the books in the list was The Atrocity Paradigm by noted feminist philosopher Claudia Card. Fabulous! I rushed right on over to U.Va. library and got it out. I know– from what I learned from Amazon– that she has some very thought-provoking passages there on the nature of atrocity.
One thing I had started to mull over was the question of intentionality. I mean, I think we can all agree that the Holocaust was an atrcoty, or the rwandan genocide of 1994. Card lists the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I would agree with that, though the intentionality there was a little less directly aimed toward ACTUALLY killing those people. They were, more like, completely foreseeable collateral casualties of Truman’s determination to use the bomb in an eye-catching sort of way.
Okay, how about the mass starvations that Mao’s Great Leap Forward of 1959 imposed on the Chinese people? Or the politically-caused famine that happened under British auspices in Bengal in 1943-44, whose casualties Amartyea Sen estimated at “closer to three million than 1.5 million”? Yes, in a real sense I think all these politically driven events can usefully be described as atrocities, though the issue of intentionality is becoming more and more diffuse with each step.
So then, how about the big famines of the 1970s in the Sahel region of Africa, which had many political elements amongst their causes?
Or, how about the scores of millions of quite avoidable deaths that occur every year in poor parts of the world in our present era, that are the quite foreseeable result of the strangling trade policies imposed on poor countries by the IMF and the World Bank?
I have long had a fascination with the difference between death by intention and death by inattention. If it is your baby who’s dying of a basically avoidable disease because IMF policies forced your government to strip away its social safety net, the question of whether those political events took place through intention or inattentiopn probably isn’t very important. At one level, all the efforts by the rich world to impose glaringly unfair trade rules and IMF restrictions on the poor countries should clearly be described as atrocious.
Well, you can see, I’m not really getting anywhere in particular here. Mainly doodling with some of these ideas. But I like using the blog for this! It serves as a personal archive for me, even if no other person has read this far in this particular post.
But if you have read this far and have any comments or thoughts on the above, then please–for goodness sake!– post your comments here and help me think this stuff through.
OK – a few comments, not least to prove that somebody read through the post:
1) on the rising level of atrocities over the past 150 years. I’m no historian, but I’m fairly dubious about this. Have you come across a good analysis? Instinctively, I’d say that the impression comes from:
a) more having been written about recent history
b) a general increase in the scale at which things happen. Many small atrocities count as much as a few massive ones
2) Death by attention vs. death by inattention is really important. I don’t have time to think through my own views on it, but I would love to see this extended a little further, to take in issues like
– avoidability (e.g. countries could, in theory, ignore the IMF, look after healthcare, and become international outcastes for the sake of their citizens)
– intentionality, you mentioned. Can this be taken further, to understanding? e.g. in hiroshima, killing civilians was not the intention, but everybody understood that it would happen. You could make a case that the world (at least initially) didn’t understand that ‘shock therapy’ would do so much harm to social services in the post-soviet countries.
Dan, thanks so much for being here, on this particular Comments board. Wow! Someone did read it! (And hey, maybe George W. Bush is pondering over the moral complexities explored in this very post, as I sit here, and we don’t even know about it… )
About whether the commission of atrocities escalated or just merely “continued” over the time-period I was looking at, I tend to agree with you that sticking with “continued” is better. Especially if you (a) look at the deaths, mutilations etc inflicted and indirectly caused by colonial expansion on at least three continents in the latter part of the 19th century, or perhaps even more so if you (b) take that number of atrocity-caused deaths as a proportion of the extant world population at that time. Not sure why one would do the latter, but it’s another thought.
About intention/inattention etc., I’ve started reading the Claudia Card book I mentioned. In it, she uses the concept of “atrocity” as a paradigm of evil, which seems to be her primary focus. Personally, I shy from discussions of evil since I think the word carries ways too much metaphysical baggage. Why not just discuss atrocities qua atrocities? Still, I have found it easy enough to strip away her veneer of “evil” talk to find some solid oak on atrocities underneath. (Kill that metaphor!)
So on p.16, she writes, “an evil is harm that is (1) reasonably foreseeable (or appreciable) and (2) culpably inflicted (or tolerated, aggravated, or maintained), and that (3) deprives, or seriously risks depriving, others of the basics that are necessary to make life possible and tolerable or decent (or to make a death decent).” I think this a pretty good definition of atrocity. I like each of the three points separately, and I like the combination of them.
What do you think?
I do agree with you that the idea of intentionality needs to be explored further. There is a difference between the quite intentional extermination of a genocide and the widespread killing that happened at Hiroshima. The killing AS SUCH was not the intention at Hiroshima– it was a means to the end of “Shock and Awe” (q.v. this post). For example, if a group of (civilian) people had sought to escape the fireball of Hiroshima and had had a way to do so, I don’t think for a moment that the US Navy would have herded them back into its path.
But then, there is at least one further degree of difference between Hiroshima and the example you cite, viz., “shock therapy” for the former Soviet Union. One moment’s thought –and there must, honestly, have been many of them–would have indicated to Truman, Stimson, etc that if the bomb succeeded at Hiroshima as they hoped, then it would lead to massive casualties among that whole area’s civilian population. (Plus, it detonated as per its design some 300 or 600 meters above the ground, precisely to maximize the blast effects… ) In comparison with that, the bad effects of Jeffrey Sachs’ “shock therapy” were far less easily appreciable.
So, using Card’s definition, I would say that the degree of culpability in many of these cases is related to the degree of foreseeability. (Intentionality–a good part of the mens rea— being folded in as a part of what she calls culpability.)
Anyway, Dan, what do you do that brings you to an interest in these things?
Thanks for replying, Helena!
I think I agree on the definition of atrocity, although I’d like to add some qualification on balancing actions against their alternatives. For example military action to prevent genocide may cause massive damage, but can still be – depending on circumstances – justifiable insofar as it prevents greater harm.
As for myself, I’m a university student at present. I don’t really have much background to talk about atrocities. The closest I’ve come is being involved in a group called the ‘campaign against sanctions on Iraq’, (we’re now in the process of reforming ourselves as an Iraq information/solidarity group). I’ve spent some time on wondering how great is the moral culpability for a policy of sanctions which contributed to several hundred thousand deaths, but did so by indirect economic processes, and by giving a dictator a stick to beat the people with. And while this is terrible, there’s also the problem of devaluing terms like ‘atrocity’ and ‘genocide’. If they come to be seen as words that can be applied everywhere for political reasons then they lose their power to mobilise pressure.
Sorry, that’s another vague, rambling comment. I suspect you have a much clearer take on the concepts – I look forward to reading some more of your posts.
Since I started entering discussions of culpability and intentionality I’ve always steered towards the legal rather than the moral arguments, primarily because the discussion itself is usually held in the hopes by at least one participant that international law will provide a means for holding those accountable accountable and to help prevent future atrocity.
Thusly, the legal distinction between murder by intent and murder by gross negligence is what matters, more so than any moralistic arguments, and that distinction is minimal, and often enough simply non-existent. Thus spaketh my lawyer, who then asked if I was planning on killing somebody.
Iraq sanctions aren’t, I think, a very useful borderline example. The declassified documents revealing the premeditation of the destruction of Iraq’s water supply should be enough to demonstrate intention. What with DOD documents parading among inner planners with declarations like “FULL DEGRADATION OF THE WATER TREATMENT SYSTEM PROBABLY WILL TAKE AT LEAST ANOTHER 6 MONTHS” and all.
For the Bush administration to claim that it did not intend to destroy the water supply, knowing full well that they were destroying the water supply, would be largely irrelevant in the prosecution of the crime. Proving foreknowledge of the consequences proves negligence with regard to those consequences.
That’s an interesting point, buermann, but I don’t think the legal situation is as simple as you make out. The UN Genocide convention defines genocide in these terms:
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
The key problem in the case of Iraq is exactly what is meant by intent, and whether ‘gross negligence’ or ‘collateral damage’ can be included in that. Joy Gordon wrote a long analysis of this in the context of Iraq, in which she concludes that:
the conception of genocide contained in the
Convention has nothing to say about whole categories of atrocities,
including some that are deliberate and planned and where the actor
knowingly inflicts massive, indiscriminate human damage. There is often a
compelling argument for this exclusion: even where the harm is deliberate
and massive, aren
Hey, Buermann, I’m glad to see that you, too, have joined our lengthy discussion here.
I tend to agree with you about the value of the legal definition of gross negligence (recklessness, or whatever). But w/ respect to the broader discussion of genocide, I want to note that genocide is only one form of legally-defined (or of conceivable atrocity. And conducting discussions of intent by reference to genocide is particularly problematic since to prove a charge of genocide, under all available definitions, one has to prove a double intentionality. That is, first the prosecutor has to prove the normal mens rea w/ rgd to the offense– killing, extermination or whatever, or conspiracy to engage in same– and then in addition she has to prove that that act was carried out with the intention to destroy, in whole or in part, the members of one of the protected types of group.
Genocide is, however, far from being the only type of “atrocity” that is recognized in and actionable under international law. In Art. 5 the Rome Treaty, four types of crime are defined as actionable:
(a) The crime of genocide;
(b) Crimes against humanity;
(c) War crimes;
(d) The crime of aggression.
Regarding the last of these– a “crime” which has its antecedent in the Nuremberg Tribunal’s category of “crimes against the peace”–there is as yet no definition. (Surprise, surprise.) In para 2 of Art. 5, the treaty spells out that the ICC will exercise jurisdiction over it “once a provision is adopted in accordance with articles 121 and 123 defining the crime and setting out the conditions under which the Court shall exercise jurisdiction with respect to this crime.”
Nowehere in the body of international law instruments is genocide accorded any primacy of ranking over war crimes or crimes against humanity. They are all viewed in the texts as equally important. Joy Gordon seems, however, to concur in the widespread notion that genocide is the most serious. ICTY prosecutor Carla Del Ponte, likes to go around describing genocide as “the crime of crimes.” But war crimes and crimes against humanity are just as bad!
In the Rome Treaty definition of crimes against humanity, the bad actions (murder, extermination, etc.) have to be carried out “as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack” (Art. 7). This is significantly different from the definition used for the Statutes of the Nuremberg Tribunal or ICTY or ICTR, and again adds an additional layer of proof (proof of “knowledge of the [widespread or systematic] attack”) onto the normal kind of proof…
Anyway, I guess my main point is that there are other forms of atrocity in addition to genocide.
God, I’m tired. Been working all day except for regular 3-mile run in late afternoon. And I have somethng else I want to post onto the main blog.
I have read the above discussion. I have worked for years on the question of economic sanctions as a crime under international law and as human rights violations. Some of my writings are on http://www.juscogens.org.
I would be happy to exchange views with members of this blog regarding the applicability of the Statute of the ICC to economic oppression, defined as wilful measures likely to subject a civilian population to, or maintain it in, humane conditions of existence.
Kindly, Elias Davidsson edavid@simnet.is
Ethics is not necessarily the handmaiden of theology.
Ideas on Earth are badges of friendship or enmity.