Reigns of Terror (review)

This reviewer shares with the author of Reigns of Terror a concern with her topic, an interest in comparative historical sociology, and substantive research on the "dirty war" that ravaged Argentina in the late 1970s. These are at least three reasons why I welcome Prof. Marchak's contribution and consider it an important piece of work. At a time when the word "terror" is used by power holders with studied imprecision, and, in the United States, cloaks a strategy of internal and external fear mongering, it behooves specialized scholars to distinguish the anti-state actions of invisible terrorist networks from the terror sponsored by states — central and peripheral alike — either in retaliation, in response to real or perceived crises, or as a tool of imperial hegemony.

Reigns of Terror argues that states engage in wholesale violence against their own populations, or segments thereof, when they cannot cope with structural constraints imposed on them by internal developments or external pressures. The challenges may be social (as in the case of rapid mobilization), political (as in the case of decision-making paralysis), demographic, economic, or environmental. As states are incapable of day-to-day governance, they move forward to another mode of direct domination through violence. This violence leads them to commit crimes against humanity, like genocide (the collective elimination of people on the basis of ethnicity or belief), or what Marchak calls "politicide" (the elimination of whole social categories based on other, political or ideological, criteria).

The first six chapters of the book are interpretive. They explore different kinds of crimes against humanity committed by states. Marchak attempts to synthesize the state of knowledge in the field of terror studies in a series of propositions which together constitute a "theory of the middle range" (to use the old Merton expresssion) of state-sponsored terror. The theory is not tight. It does not cover all possible aspects of the subject, but it does supply an algorithmic tree of the necessary conditions, the causes, and the processes that lead to human rights abuses of gross dimensions. This way of proceeding, or logic of explanation, has policy implications. Marchak's intent is to provide international policy makers with a diagnostic tool to identify looming crises and therefore to intervene accordingly. Thus, the test of this middle-range theory is designed as essentially pragmatic. The difficulty with this approach, however, is that it is not much more than a check list of relevant variables (the role of the armed forces in states, racism and identity, class and territory, culture and ideology, citizen participation, etc.) which does not specify a hierarchy between them, their interconnections, or the overall logic of the set. As a result, the predictive or prognostic value of the propositions in the book is indeed limited.

If the first part of the book is interpretive and diagnostic, the second is illustrative. It consists of nine brief case studies, culled from existing research done by Marchak and others, on the most egregious 20th-century cases of genocide and politicide. The cases are: The Ottoman Empire, the USSR, Nazi Germany, Burundi and Rwanda, Chile, Cambodia, Argentina, and Yugoslavia. Marchak seeks to show that "while the causes are similar, the methods of extermination and the consequences may be entirely dissimilar, encased as they are in the contexts of time and place." I concur with the author's theoretical and methodological bias in favor of structural "mapping" and with her quest of a delicate balance between the idiographic approach of case studies and the nomothetic search for regularities, through comparison and induction. But in the end, the unique richness of the cases trumps the generalizations, and the connection between the two segments of the book remains loose.

Does the book succeed in its ambitious goals? Partly, it does. Its greatest contribution is its most disturbing finding, namely that the most brutal acts of state against segments of the civilian population appear as rational to power holders. But power holders do not act in a vacuum. To engage in gross crimes against humanity they...