Extremely Violent Societies: Mass Violence in the Twentieth-Century World (review)

In this book, Gerlach contributes to the continuing debates among historians and social scientists about how to approach, define, and analyze the destruction of civilian populations during the twentieth century—genocide, crimes against humanity, mass atrocity, mass killing, massacres, ethnic cleansing, etc. Gerlach also introduces his own category, extremely violent societies. Gerlach’s investigation stresses social dynamics, supplementing political with social history as a corrective to the many studies that feature top-down analyses of mass violence. He explains extremely violent societies as “formations where various population groups become victims of massive physical violence, in which, acting together with organs of the state, diverse social groups participate for a multitude of reasons” (1). Emphasizing the “multi-causal” nature and mass participation of such violence, Gerlach argues for the necessity to “inquire into the entire social process of which mass violence is a part, the relationship between structural and physical violence, between direct violence and dynamic shifts in inequality, and between social groups and state organs” (3).

His broad approach is reflected in a use of disparate case studies and a range of techniques and structures of violence. Part I, “Participatory Violence,” discusses mass slaughter in Indonesia (1965 to 1966) and the slaughter of the Armenians (1915 to 1923). Part II, “The Crisis of Society,” examines mass violence and famine in Bangladesh (1971 to 1977), sustainable violence—strategic resettlement, militias, and other factors under the category of development—and Greek society (from 1912 to 1974), particularly during the Nazi occupation.

The first chapter expands on his article—“Extremely Violent Societies: An Alternative to the Concept of Genocide,” Journal of Genocide Research, VIII (2006), 455–471—which generated substantial scholarly debate. Gerlach’s approach is to critique genocide scholarship to justify his own conception of “extremely violent societies.” He defends introducing this broad, new concept to describe mass destruction of civilians by taking aim at the limitations inherent in the term genocide (as well as ethnic cleansing, war crimes, massacre, etc. [291, n. 12]). He views genocide studies in particular as too narrow and ideological, lacking empirical rigor, and betraying activist/intent bias, among other shortcomings.

Although some of Gerlach’s criticisms have merit, he does not provide the premises and presuppositions behind his approach, and his broad outlook downplays the role of ideology and the importance of distinctions between different types of violence. Nor does he sufficiently acknowledge and integrate new research in anthropology, law, sociology, political science, and other disciplines. For example, he ignores the crucial interplay between genocide as a legal concept and a subject of scholarship. He points to the narrow understanding of “intent” in genocide scholars’ search for a plan, their reliance on elites, etc., but he leaves out the recent interplay between scholarship and judicial proceedings that explicates the “intent to destroy,” as well as the range and complexity of destructive processes.

Methodology is a crucial issue in the study of mass violence. Gerlach’s category of extremely violent societies purports to address “the lack of an empirical foundation” in genocide studies (7). His emphasis on societies in crisis, dynamic processes of destruction, etc., in fact continues and builds on new directions going on across disciplines in the scholarship of mass violence. The author supports “dense description” derived from “a large pool of primary documents as well as secondary sources” in trying to counter simplistic reductionist accounts and competing nationalist narratives about mass violence (8). He concedes, however, that such resources are not always available. In three of his five case studies—Indonesia, East Pakistan/Bangladesh, and Turkey—documentation is either inaccessible or nonexistent. Hence, he turns to the records of foreign diplomats and other observers, as well as secondary sources. His extensive, frequently annotated documentation (192 pages in length) provides a valuable resource for further research. Unfortunately, Gerlach does not discuss the methodological challenges of comparative or interdisciplinary analysis in any depth, such as relying on secondary sources...