Handbook of War Studies III: The Intrastate Dimension

Genocide Studies: Large N, Small N, and Policy Specificity

Genocide Studies: Large N, Small N, and Policy Speci‹city manus i. midlarsky With the onset of the Rwandan genocide in 1994 and the more recent genocidal activities in Darfur, the world has once again confronted the unthinkable—the attempted or actual annihilation of a distinct group of people. The exemplar of twentieth-century genocides, the Holocaust, was presumably so horri‹c as never to be repeated. Yet the systematic mass murders in Srebrenica, those in Africa, and even the contemplation of murderous ethnic cleansing in Poland at the end of World War II after the defeat of the Nazis (Gross 2006), remind us that unmitigated brutality is part of the human condition. Why that is so is the subject of this chapter. First, I review earlier studies by historians, sociologists, psychologists, and political scientists for their distinctive contributions to understanding the onset and magnitude (severity) of genocides. I compare contributions by large-N and small-N analyses along with their de‹nitions of genocide. I then develop and apply the theory of loss as a progenitor of genocide to the three most deadly genocides of the twentieth century (including the behavior of German allies during World War II), as well as the more recent genocides of Srebrenica and Darfur, and the genocide of Vietnamese within the Cambodian politicide. I examine Darfur more fully in the section on genocide prevention. I then consider relationships between war and genocide, followed by contributions of this literature to genocide prevention. 280 Earlier Studies The preponderance of research in the ‹eld of genocide studies has been by professional historians, almost always on a single case of genocide, most frequently the Holocaust. And, until now, this is as it should have been. Even the Holocaust, as by far the most extensive genocide of the twentieth century, had received very little attention from historians until the Eichmann trial in Israel and the virtually simultaneous publication of Raul Hilberg’s (1961; 3rd ed., 2003) magisterial study of the Holocaust in the early 1960s. Only then, and with the gradual disappearance of the generation of German perpetrators, as well as the even more recent end of the Cold War, did historians, especially German ones, take a serious interest in the Holocaust. The passing of the survivors also has quickened the pace of Holocaust research, before their oral testimony and the writing of their memoirs will no longer be added to the store of evidence. Even a basic issue such as the timing of Hitler’s decision to murder all of Europe ’s Jews, not just those in the Soviet Union presumably infected with the Bolshevik bacillus, has only received a modicum of consensus among historians in the past several years. Interestingly, this issue will arise later in connection with the uses of theory. Among historians, two basic approaches have been taken to understanding the annihilation of European Jewry, in some ways the most puzzling of genocides because of its magnitude and the absence of identi‹able Jewish provocation. The ‹rst is the “intentionalist” (Dawidowicz 1986; Jäckel 1981; Fleming 1984), which posits an ultimate intention on the part of Hitler and his henchmen to destroy all of Europe’s Jews. The second is the “functionalist” argument (Fraenkel 1941; Neumann 1942; Broszat 1981), which points to the coercive build-up (by the Germans) of Jewish populations in unsanitary ghettos that were not only disease prone but required the material support of the occupying German forces, as the root cause. With so many “unwanted” Jews excluded from the economy and the bickering between bureaucratic agencies of the Third Reich over the ultimate responsibility for their welfare, the decision to liquidate them was made. Neither of these two explanations, nor others such as Friedländer’s (1997, 2007) more recent emphasis on “redemptive anti-Semitism,” explains the essentially dynamic circumstance of the increasing propensity to murder Jews as World War II progressed. In other words, some recent research, especially my own, seeks to explore the transition from genociGenocide Studies 281 dal behavior—the tendency to massacre some people having a particular ethnoreligious identity—to genocide itself, wherein the murder is systematically extended to include all people with that identity. This distinction is not merely a matter of de‹nitional semantics, for the lives of millions of people were forfeited in the transition from the more limited behavior to the far more extensive one. Massacres can be used to terrorize...