Building a Non-Genocidal Society

Christopher Powell is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Manitoba. He can be reached by email at chris.powell@ad.umanitoba.ca, or on the web at http://tinyurl.com/cjpuofm.

On 9 December 1948, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 260, the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. This was the high-water mark of Raphael Lemkin’s success as an activist. He had campaigned strenuously for this convention that criminalised an act to which in 1944 he was the first to give a name.¹ Lemkin spent the rest of his life working, with marginal success, to bring genocide into public awareness. His unfinished Encyclopedia of Genocide details genocides committed by colonists in the Americas, and his other writings discuss the atrocities of imperial powers in Africa and of the Soviet Union.² But these were not the crimes of a defeated and humiliated enemy; they were the crimes of the reigning lords of the earth. A determined moral entrepreneur, Lemkin spent the last years of his life working furiously on behalf of his concept but did not live to see its maturation. When Lemkin died in 1959, only the Nazi Holocaust had obtained widespread and durable recognition as an example of genocide.

The Stakes

By the 1990s, however, the concept of genocide had broadened to become a category. Chalk and Jonassohn’s landmark work discusses twenty case-studies ranging from antiquity to the contemporary period, and indicates that this list is not exhaustive.³ Some scholars continued to defend vigorously the uniqueness of the Shoah,⁴ but the atrocities in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia made this position harder to sustain. Genocide had become a thing that had happened many times and that continued to happen—no longer a unique historical trauma but a recurring feature of the modern world.

 

Meanwhile, Indigenous writers had since the 1970s been using the term “genocide” to refer to the destruction of their societies by colonial powers, whether or not mass killing had taken place.⁵ As of today, this usage is gaining scholarly traction, with profound consequences for our understanding of the scale of genocide. Prior to the explosion of European colonialism, the earth contained thousands of distinct cultural groups. Some of these have been extinguished; many more have been severely damaged and struggle to survive. This damage results from economic dispossession and the deliberate suppression or dismantling of the social structures constitutive of group life, backed or at least sanctioned by the coercive powers of settler states, as well as from direct physical assault and murder. If these forms of destruction can legitimately be seen as residing within the category of genocide, then the modern world contains not just dozens but hundreds or even thousands of genocides, many of them ongoing today. Far from being a singular historical trauma, the Shoah appears only as one especially acute manifestation of a systematic problem endemic to Western modernity, a symptom of the very processes by which that modernity has been constructed.

 

If genocide is ancient, modernity’s effect on it has been to give it a new form. And yet modernity has also given us the movement to abolish genocide. Seen against the immense backdrop of colonial violence, Lemkin’s project appears less as the inevitable flowering of modernity’s teleological movement towards enlightenment, and more as the redemptive half of a fierce dialectical contradiction. The genocidal and anti-genocidal tendencies of modernity are equally authentic expressions of its underlying structural dynamics—symptoms of a social formation at war with itself.

The Problem

What does it mean to treat genocide as a systematic problem? The American sociologist Talcott Parsons defined social systems in terms of self-reproducing patterns of action.⁶ Parsons built on Durkheim’s insight that there are certain ways of acting which an individual experiences as objective because the individual confronts them as pre-given, as independent of one’s own personal volition. This quality pertains to social norms and established roles of all kinds, from the most quotidian (becoming a member of a sewing club) to the most elevated (being a head of state). Parsons rejected the proposition, found in Durkheim’s earlier work, that these patterns existed outside of the individual, and instead followed Weber in conceptualising social structure as immanent to human action.⁷ However, the important point is that for Parsons, action tends to organise itself into complexes which in turn make up functionally interdependent institutions of self-integrating, self-perpetuating wholes, which are societies. In these terms, we can ask of any particular social structure—and genocide, for all its seemingly chaotic quality, is a structured social process—whether it operates counter to the normal self-reproducing mechanisms of the society or whether it arises from those very mechanisms and contributes to the ongoing production and reproduction of the social order. In other words, we can ask whether genocide is pathological or normal, not for individuals (since it is obviously pathological for individuals) but for the social systems out of which it emerges.

 

It would be preferable, to say the least, to find that genocide is a pathology of modern civilisation and not a feature of its normal functioning. This would mean that to eliminate genocide we need only continue to refine and extend the developmental tendencies that are already dominant in our societies. Distressingly, however, several types of evidence weigh against this conclusion. The sheer prevalence of genocide is one of these. Another is the fact that, when genocide happens, it tends to be institutionalised as a moral obligation.⁸ It is not simply that genocidaires rationalise their actions, but that participants are motivated to genocide, in part, not only by compulsion by also by a sense of duty, of service to the group or to a higher calling. Moral sentiments express deeply embedded structural features of group life; the construction and mobilisation of genocidal moralities would not be feasible if the impulse towards genocide could not call upon normative habits present in normal life. And most damningly, genocide has all too often played a constructive role in the formation of modern societies.⁹ The failure of the Third Reich to achieve its imperial goals can easily distract us from the fact that, from Languedoc to the Vendée to the Belgian Congo to the length and breadth of the Americas, genocides have been successful means for political elites to expand their power, and have played an integral role in state formation. To put it baldly, the modern state would not exist in its current form without genocide.

 

This analysis presents us with an extremely uncomfortable choice. We could accept that genocide is endemic to the contemporary social order, and lower our anti-genocidal aspirations to the level of merely trying to minimise its worst or most spectacular excesses. Or, to abolish genocide comprehensively, we can turn our efforts to the daunting task of reconstructing society from the inside out and from the ground up.

The Setting

On what ground does this labour take place? If genocide is constitutive of the modern state, then, conversely, the state would seem to be the institutional site for the production and mobilisation of genocidal violence. However, non-state actors play important roles in many genocides, especially on the frontiers of expanding colonial societies. And even the most centrally planned, elite-driven genocides rely on the mobilisation or at least the acquiescence of non-elite subjects. To understand the complex relationship between the state and genocide in a way that lets us think towards a non-genocidal society, we must examine the social roots of state power itself.

 

What the state appears to be differs according to one’s relation to it. For those who perceive themselves as enfranchised, who can identify themselves with the sovereign and with the exercise of state power, the state appears as a solution. It enforces the social contract; it acts as the organ of collective social thought; it secures and distributes public goods. For those alienated from state power, who do not identify with its exercise, it appears as a problem: as an instrument of class domination, or of patriarchy, or racial supremacy, or as a force of domination unto itself. In functional terms, it’s possible to see the state as both a problem and a solution simultaneously: a problem for which it is itself the solution, a solution which reproduces the problem. In saying this, however, I am using the words “functional”, “problem”, and “solution” in non-standard ways.

 

The word “function” and the concept of functionality are overladen with value-judgements, so that usually when we say something is functional we mean also that it is beneficial, a usage given sociological rigour by Merton.¹⁰ However, there is another, quite useful way of speaking about functions suggested by, although not entirely articulated in, one of Parsons’s early essays.¹¹ Since what is functional for a social system is different from what is functional for an individual human being, we can understand the social function of an action or of a complex of actions as its tendency to contribute to the continuation of the social order that produced it. Likewise, a functional problem for a social system is any dynamic force with the potential to dissolve that order, and a functional solution is a structural relationship which “solves” the problem by integrating it into society, making it functional.

 

In this sense, genocide concerns two crucial social problems: the problem of violence and the problem of difference. In modern Western civilisation, the state “solves” both of these problems in the sense of providing institutionalised processes for organising these dynamic forces into a self-perpetuating continuity. It organises violence through its relative monopoly of the means of military and police force, and it organises difference through the mechanisms of government. However, the state’s control of force and its regulation of difference are always far from complete, and the expressions of state power vary widely. To understand why state power sometimes finds expression in genocide, at other times in anti-genocidal action, and sometimes both simultaneously, we must step beyond synchronic functional analysis to a historical account of the state as a social formation.

The Civilising Process

From the blood-soaked field of battle to the blunting of knives at the dinner-table, Norbert Elias traces the intertwined transformations of political authority and personal subjectivity which combine to form what he calls “the civilising process”.¹² To explain how the modes of conduct which Westerners regard as “civilised” have become socially dominant throughout the world, Elias adopts a relational and processual sociological methodology. Rather than viewing social order as the product of a structured resolution of functional imperatives which arise ahistorically from the nature of social action as such, Elias explains order as a perceptible pattern in an ongoing process of transformation. For Elias, society resembles not a game of chess, a succession of static arrangements of structural elements, but more a dance, its very nature constituted through motion. And rather than society and individuals existing separately from one another, as distinct systems of action, both society as a whole and individual human beings are constituted through relations. “No man is an island”, indeed, for Elias, because every human life depends upon and happens through complex dynamic networks of relations among actors. Elias calls these networks “figurations”; a figuration is a network of relations, but a network that is always and already in the process of change. The phenomenon of social order is thus reframed; order is not the reproduction of a relatively stable set of social structures from one moment to the next, but the continuity through time of a process of relational transformation characterised by a particular developmental tendency. Society does not exist apart from individuals, but in the relational processes that pass among and through individuals. Likewise, individuals do not exist apart from society; the essential human condition is not being but being-with-others, and each person embodies a unique articulation of the complex figurational history of his or her entire social setting.

 

Elias applies this method to the history of Western civilisation by tracing two long-term historical transformations in Western European peoples. The first of these is the development of modern etiquette—or, more broadly, of the ensemble of ways of regulating and expressing bodily impulses of which etiquette is the formalised expression. This transformation goes deeper than the elaboration of social rules; changes in the way people eat, carry themselves, deal with mucus and other bodily secretions, and in how they express emotions point to a fundamental transformation in Western societies of individuals’ relations to their bodies and those of others and to their embodied feelings of taste, revulsion, and shame. The direction of this change is away from a mode of conduct which privileges the passionate and spontaneous expression of affect and a comparative lack of revulsion or stigma associated with bodily functions, towards conduct in which affective displays are increasingly moderated and many aspects of the body are enmeshed in complex social mores. Elias calls the overall direction of this transformation an increase in “the social constraint to self-constraint”.

 

The second transformation is the formation of sovereign states. This process began in the thirteenth century, when the centrifugal dispersion of political authority in Western Europe following the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire had reached its fullest extent and local knights enjoyed almost complete autarky. As more powerful regional lords began to conquer and subdue the knights, binding them in relations of personal dependence, a monopolistic control over the use of violence began to re-emerge. This monopolisation intensified from the seventeenth century onwards as sovereigns began to strip the landed aristocracy of any real military function (although this development occurred unevenly and did not take place in Germany until the twentieth century, for example). This transformation of warlords into courtiers further facilitated the development of the relation of sovereignty from a relation of personal dominance by the sovereign as an individual over his most powerful subjects as individuals, to a relation of institutional domination in which the sovereigns themselves could be replaced, reduced to symbolic functions, or dispensed with altogether without a radical alteration of the whole configuration.

 

Elias argues that these two developments are intimately interconnected. On the one hand, the monopolisation of the means of force by the sovereign has profound effects on individual subjectivity through a transformation of habitus. Habitus is the complex of acquired dispositions and intuitive knowledge that individuals use to navigate their everyday and everynight lives. When social order was maintained through the personal use of violence by a geographically dispersed and disunited class of autarkic warlords, elite subjects were constrained to be able to mobilise sudden and violent expressions of passion, and there was little social incentive towards the refinement of manners. But as warlords became subjects and then courtiers, these same elites were prevented from using direct physical force to resolve social conflicts, and channelled their social antagonisms into more calculated, mediated expressions and more stylised modes of competition. In the process, bodily dispositions changed, so that people became more sensitive to subtler forms of violence and also more repulsed by socially stigmatised expressions of embodiment. By forcibly removing overt physical violence from the conduct of everyday life, the monopolisation of military force by sovereigns both enabled and required subjects to take greater account of, and be more sensitive towards, the interests and the feelings of others—even when this sensitivity was manifested in ruthless competition for social privilege.

 

On the other hand, the social constraint to self-constraint enabled sovereignty to establish and deepen itself. If the aristocrats could not become habituated to their dependence on the sovereign, then sovereignty would always be in jeopardy. And the deepening of this habituation, entwined with the cultivation of symbolic rather than physical means of pursuing and resolving social conflicts, enabled the extension of government into ever-wider domains of the social. Disciplinary power, as described by Foucault, depends upon and further extends the same social constraint to self-constraint portrayed in Elias’s account of Renaissance courtiers, disseminating throughout society the fine network of power relations and the associated forms of conduct which emerged out of the sovereign’s dominance over his most immediate challengers.

 

Both the sovereign state and “civilised” subjectivity, then, are expressions of this very long-term figurational development, the civilising process. What does this imply for understanding genocide? Characteristically, Elias explains genocide not as a catastrophic reversal of the civilising process—but one made possible by its very advance.¹³ The violence of the Nazi regime, for instance, results in his account from the comparatively recent subjugation of the military aristocracy to the sovereign and the consequent impulse of militarism in the German middle-class habitus, along with the weaker development of the social constraint to self-constraint, which made German subjects less individuated than their British or French counterparts, more oriented to collective effervescence and authoritarianism. This readiness to collective violence was triggered by the weakening of state sovereignty following military defeat in the Great War and the imposition of the fragile and illegitimate Weimar Republic, intensified by the severe economic privations of the post-war period. Like an eddy that forms around an obstacle in a river, the civilising process, Elias argues, met an obstruction and went into reverse.

Deconstructing Civilisation

The above account has its merits, but it is too comforting for comfort. Elias succeeds in explaining both the state and modern subjectivity as the products of historical social relations. He shows how a particular form of consciousness—the mindset in which the values of Western modernity are self-evidently universal and salutary—emerges from the working-out over time of a material relation, the relation of direct physical force. But he accepts uncritically the claims that civilised Western subjects make about themselves: that they really are more non-violent, more law-governed, more humane than their less civilised Others. This implies a very flattering story for the middle-class white subjects of liberal–democratic societies: that people such as themselves are, on the whole, the best type of people in the world; that the social forces that have gone into making them who they are benefit humanity as a whole and should be encouraged; and that where violence and cruelty still exist in the world this is only because those same social forces have been insufficiently developed or have been thrown into reverse by reaction with some obstacle. To explain the violence of colonialism, committed by civilised peoples in the name of civilisation and in ways that extend the institutional structures of Western modernity, some followers of Elias have elaborated on his account of decivilising processes or proposed the notion of a “dyscivilising” process.¹⁴ But these accounts have a “no true Scotsman” quality in which the violence of Western civilisation happens only because Westerners are not civilised enough, not yet. To become less violent, they imply, the world needs yet more civilisation.

 

And yet Elias’s theory contains within itself the elements of an altogether different account. We can uncover this account by reading his texts deconstructively, finding those points at which his theory subverts the binary opposition it poses between civilisation and barbarism. The first of these appears in Elias’s account of the material infrastructure of the civilising process at the macroscopic level of state formation. The civilising process involves the monopolisation of the means of military (and police) violence by sovereign states. This monopolisation not only centralises violence, but increases the capacity for it. To defend their monopolies against one another, states invest in the continual improvement of their own military capacities. Through the largely unintended and uncontrolled dynamics of arms races, the destructive capacity of the state system as a whole has progressed from that which can be mobilised by a few professional warriors aided by mobs of peasant conscripts to a global arsenal of thermonuclear weapons capable of destroying all life on the planet. If we consider not only the actualisation of violence but the social capacity for violence, then the civilising process does not so much dispel violence as reproduce it on an expanding scale. This expansion of the material means of violence (including not only technology but training and social co-ordination) has made possible the staggering scale and intensity of the mass atrocities of the past century. As the capacity for violence mobilised by states exceeds exponentially the capacity for counter-violence of their comparatively unarmed and unorganised subjects, mass murder becomes easier.

 

At the level of habitus shaped by the social constraint to self-constraint, the civilising process does not dispel violence but defers it, moving it downwards and outwards through hierarchical social relations while postponing it into the future. In its historical genesis, the social constraint to self-constraint depends on the sovereign’s capacity for violence against subjects, and on the sovereign’s dependence on subjects for the services they provide. The knight defeated on the battlefield submits, defers, to become a vassal fighting on behalf of the sovereign, a lord enforcing the sovereign’s social order, a courtier waging politics with minimal recourse to violence, and ultimately a citizen whose relation to the violence of the state is, in theory, entirely mediated by the symbolic apparatus of democratic representation and bureaucratised law. And yet the struggles for domination that once took place through bodies on a battlefield are not abated, but transmuted into new forms. “Physical clashes, wars and feuds diminish,” and anything recalling them disappears from view. But “at the same time the battlefield is, in a sense, moved within. Part of the tensions and passions that were earlier directly released in the struggle of man and man, must now be worked out within the human being”.¹⁵ The stakes of this battlefield are, in one sense, what they always were: the social existence of the subject. But as the civilising process advances, this social existence is threatened less by direct physical combat and more by competition for social esteem. The social constraint to self-constraint is enforced by shame.

 

Shame, in the figurational account, is much more than a painful emotion: it is at once an objective loss of social standing, and a subjective internalisation of that loss. It is, simultaneously, the loss of a part of one’s social existence, and a loss of part of one’s self.

 

The conflict expressed in shame–fear is not merely a conflict of the individual with prevalent social opinion; the individual’s behaviour has brought him into conflict with the part of himself that represents this social opinion. It is a conflict within his own personality; he recognizes himself as inferior. He fears the loss of the love or respect of others ... Their attitude has precipitated an attitude within him that he automatically adopts towards himself.¹⁶

 

Shame occurs through tangible harms such as the loss of the economic resources necessary to perform one’s established social self or loss of autonomy through subordination to another, or through straightforward humiliation. It also occurs through subtle, intangible harms, such as the slight but keenly felt loss of esteem that results from a breach in etiquette. Shame enforces social norms great and small, maintaining solidarity among society’s members and also maintaining social hierarchies. This enormously important phenomenon—called “the master emotion of everyday life” by one sociologist¹⁷—operates as the most elementary organising force of social order. Shame (and its obverse, pride) integrates individuals’ sense of personal identity with their sense of who they are as members of society; it weaves ideas, feelings, perceptions, knowledge about the groups to which one belongs into the subject’s sense of his or her own individual existence, and vice-versa. This may be a universal phenomenon of human social life, but the civilising process organises it in a particular way: into hierarchically ordered collectivities in which social worth—and hence moral worth—varies according to the ability of subjects to identify themselves with the figure (actual or symbolic) of the sovereign.

 

This conjoining of identity and worth happens through a process of deferentiation.¹⁸ In a moment of social conflict, in which the social existence of the contesting parties is at stake (in whole or in part), one party surrenders and thereby defers to the other in order to prevent further harm to themselves. This may happen at any scale of social action: between nations at war or between individuals at the dinner table. This deferral establishes a relation of deference. Since all relations exist as processes, this relation of deference is fluid and must either be constantly renewed or else challenged at some point in the future. Thus, the physical or symbolic violence involved in the conflict is not dispelled but deferred into the future. And this deferral establishes a social difference between the two parties, in the form of a fleeting or durable inequality of worth. This process of deference/deferral/difference constitutes a relation of deferentiation, giving structure and meaning to the social world in a manner analogous to the operation of différance in texts. Relations of deferentiation permeate and connect the entire figuration of modern nation-state societies, culminating in the institution of the sovereign, the socially organised capacity for physical violence. The network structure of these relations defines the relative moral worth of members of society and defines, crucially, who is decisively outside the “universe of obligation”. That is, deferentiation defines who may be subject without restraint to the social capacity for violence.

 

Most of the time, the circulation of pride and shame through relations of deferentiation inhibits the social potential for violence. Individuals and groups protect themselves from the sovereign’s violence through a combination of the services they offer and their capacity to withhold those services in the face of coercion. Modern states tend to pursue a sparing, economical use of force on their subjects in order to maximise the latter’s active and nominally voluntary contributions, economic or otherwise, to the social enterprise. But the incentives that maintain this balance do not always apply. Likewise, the more that subjects identify themselves—not just subjectively, but performatively—with the figure of the sovereign, the more protected they are from his violence; conversely, the less that violence against an individual or group constitutes a violence against the collective subject of society, the easier it is to commit. Lastly, the relative balance of force between subjects and the sovereign can vary from comparative accountability to comparative impunity, and this, too, varies among different types of subjects. Interest, identity, and impunity combine to determine the state’s actual capacity for violence. When subjects can no longer serve the sovereign’s interests, conform to his identity, or oppose his impunity, the deferral of violence stops and the deferred violence of the social order comes crashing down as genocide.¹⁹

The Non-Genocidal Society

I have argued that Western civilisation is genocidal; that is, it is possessed of the capacity for and propensity towards genocide through its very constitution. Two qualifications are necessary. The first is that this is not unique to Western civilisation. Other civilisations have produced genocides, and it is to be assumed that a detailed examination of the constitutive relations of classical Chinese or Mayan or Mediterranean civilisations would reveal genocidal forces at work there as well. I have focused on the modern Western civilising process because its key institutional formation, the sovereign state, has covered the globe. In this sense, although cultural values may vary between, say, the members of Euro-American societies and their various Oriental others, there is only one civilisational form on the earth today which organises the political dimension of what Immanuel Wallerstein calls the modern world-system,²⁰ and it is from within this civilisational form that we must construct a solution to genocide if we can.

 

Second, this civilisation that produces genocides also produces a movement against genocide. The values of enlightenment and universal human rights that motivate us to campaign against genocide do exist; they merely express one side of the dialectical contradiction at the heart of the civilising process, the other side of which finds its expression in oppression, political violence, and genocide. The movement to abolish genocide is thus ultimately a movement towards radical social transformation, a movement to construct a society whose form, if realised, will supersede that of the sovereign state. In making what may appear a utopian claim, I am asserting both that it is possible to abolish genocide and that it cannot be done entirely within the existing institutional apparatus of global politics. And yet it is within the existing order that one must begin.

 

The predominant focus of genocide activists has been on the development of norms and institutions in international politics to prevent outbreaks of genocidal violence and to punish legally the perpetrators of genocides. Aside from the deterrent function of legal justice itself, the main focus in prevention is on the development of an early-warning system to identify situations headed towards genocide and the deployment of appropriate and effective international interventions to avert genocide or to halt genocidal violence once it has broken out. Pre-emptive interventions are commonly held to include diplomatic pressure on states and political and economic support for civil-society actors, as well as the prospect of armed humanitarian intervention. This project of constructing a system of discrete interventions targeted at preventing clearly identifiable and spatio-temporally bounded genocidal events tends to reduce genocide to mass murder and to neglect the cultural dimensions of genocide, but in other respects it is a straightforward extension of Lemkin’s norm-entrepreneurship. It enjoys the support of many genocide scholars as well as a number of civil-society organisations and has gained traction in policy circles; we may fairly call this the standard model for building the non-genocidal society.

 

The standard model faces criticisms from two complementary positions. The first concerns the modernity of genocide. Although genocide has occurred throughout recorded history, most genocide scholars recognise that genocide has taken on qualitatively distinct properties in modernity—even that it is in some way an expression of tendencies integral to Western modernity, or the modern nation-state in particular. This raises the concern that to “try to counter modernity itself seems somewhat quixotic”.²¹ The implication here is that modernity and its connection to genocide need to be understood more deeply for a truly effective solution to emerge.

 

The second criticism arises from analyses that see genocide as an expression of colonialism. In recent years, some genocide scholars, especially those sensitive to the extent and variety of genocides against indigenous peoples, have been inclined to perceive (Western) colonialism as the concrete historical force connecting the differing genocides of the modern era.²² This gives rise to the criticism that humanitarian intervention itself may operate as a tool of colonial aggression, a means for states to legitimate the pursuit of their national interests at the expense of equality and democracy in the global polity. Even a proponent of the standard model like Samuel Totten warns that “a tremendous amount of work needs to be done to overcome realpolitik”,²³ suggesting the depth of social transformation that must be achieved for anti-genocidal politics to become genuinely effective. Synthesising these critiques, Henry Theriault argues that “the problem of genocide is deep and foundational, and extirpating it requires a substantial reworking of our present reality”.²⁴

 

The model of genocide as a product of the contradictions of deferentiation suggests lines along which this substantial reworking could take place. If genocide is the instantiation of deferred violence, made possible by the coincidence of interest, identity, and impunity, then genocide can be opposed in the short term along any or all of these three axes: by affecting the costs and benefits of genocidal and non-genocidal action; by fostering moral identification with the victims; or by reducing the impunity of states to commit violence. The standard model addresses all of these possibilities to varying degrees. But in the long term the production of non-genocidal society involves the production of non-deferential social relations, both at the macro level of relations among social collectivities and at the micro level of relations among individual subjects. This means the production of ways of resolving political differences that do not rely on the subordination of actors to a superior authority, whether directly to a person or group or indirectly to an abstract norm whose ultimate sanction lies in the power of the sovereign. In other words, the non-genocidal society is a society of effective practical equality among human beings.

 

Movements to construct this society already exist. The human rights movement and movements against the arms trade directly oppose the impunity of states to commit physical violence. Pierre Sané has argued for the realisation of human rights as a means to prevent genocide, claiming:

 

None of the human rights tragedies of recent years was unpredictable or unavoidable ... The problem is not a lack of early warning, but a lack of early action … [O]nly by protecting all human rights everywhere, every day, will we render the debate over humanitarian intervention obsolete.²⁵

 

Sané observes that one cannot commit genocide without first violating other human rights. If we understand human rights as a tool or a tactic employed by subjects to oppose the solidarity of the state or as an expression of the “global solidarity of the governed”,²⁶ then the end result of a successful human rights movement will be not simply the instantiation of a new set of norms but the transformation of power relations among human beings. Likewise, the movement to oppose the global arms trade directly addresses the degree of mechanised violence available to states—and to contenders for sovereign power—in their struggles with one another.

 

More broadly, the labour movement, feminism, anti-racism, gay rights, and other movements on behalf of oppressed groups and minorities work to oppose the structural violence of economic and status inequality. These movements counteract deferentiation either directly by challenging the deferential quality of various kinds of identity–difference relations, or indirectly through their effects in reducing economic inequality. Greater economic equality provides subjects with greater material means to assert themselves in social relations. Likewise, ecological movements defend not only the lives of non-human beings and systems, but the material infrastructure for human social production. Many forms of ecological destruction disproportionately affect the quality of life of people already living in poverty. In this respect, ecological degradation exacerbates the material effects of inequalities of wealth, income, and social status, and ecological movements oppose this increase of material inequality. Ecological degradation has been directly linked to political violence, and of course economic motives are important to all kinds of political violence, including genocide. Structural violence, whether ecological or directly economic, feeds into the system of deferred violence generated by relations of deferentiation. Social movements that successfully oppose structural violence and replace it with comparatively greater economic equity can be expected to diminish the violence of the civilising process.

 

A third type of pacifying effect which some civil-society movements are pursuing is the reduction of symbolic violence in the process of political decision-making itself. The most visible expressions of this pursuit have been the adoption of decision-making by consensus and of lateral organising strategies without established organisational hierarchies. In North America, these tactics emerged from feminist movements in the 1970s, were adopted by anarchist anti-globalisation protesters in the late 1990s, and have had their most prominent recent expression in the Occupy movement.

 

In terms of the analysis presented earlier in this paper, these efforts towards radically egalitarian collective political action constitute an attempt to resolve political difference and generate effective social solidarity without recourse to the symbolic violence of deferentiation. Symbolic violence works at the micro-level of the social constraint to self-constraint, shaping habitus by imposing categories of perception and action which naturalise particular relations of domination. Ideologies and practices of sexism, racism, heteronormativity, ableism, and the like, constitute symbolic violence in this sense. At its core, symbolic violence may be said to impose on the subject a sense of one’s own self as having inferior value to the selfhood of other subjects. In this regard, symbolic violence is a naturalised form of shame, a shame that often may not be experienced subjectively as shame.

 

Feminist and subsequent efforts at the non-hierarchical organising of social movements emerged out of a concern to remove all residual sexism, racism, and other forms of normalised social inequality from the internal process of movement decision-making. Movement actors have in this way directly addressed important forms of deferentiation. They have also raised the possibility of a more ambitious transformation. The ultimate expression of symbolic violence is, arguably, the naturalisation of the idea of domination itself—the assumption that the dominance–subordination relation is necessary for the resolution of social difference and thereby for political life as such. The radically democratic aspirations of some contemporary social-movement actors directly challenge this ubiquitous and seemingly unassailable assumption. The future of the non-genocidal society may hinge on the success of this challenge.

 

Of course, this radical project has very substantial problems to resolve before it can begin to function as a general model for political society. Social movements exist as voluntary associations, and can rely on a certain level of pre-existing ideological commitment from those who choose to participate in them. Their practical effectiveness is disputed; indeed, some authors have accused the new social movements of sacrificing the achievement of concrete goals in favour of an endless preoccupation with process. It is possible even for consensus-based decision-making to involve its own forms of coercion and exclusion, and hence symbolic violence.

 

Most of all, civil-society associations presuppose the relatively pacified social spaces policed by the sovereign state for the basis of physical safety from which they recruit and organise, and they depend on the institution of law to protect themselves from the violence of the state itself. They are not capable of substituting for the force of the sovereign an alternative force capable of protecting the substantive social equality which they seek. This last problem, although serious, is not surprising. A dialectical understanding of the civilising process implies that the particular social formation which is modern civilisation cannot simply be abolished, but must be superseded; its successor must be constructed from within its structures. That it is not yet clear how this will happen does not mean that the task is impossible.

Conclusion

Constructing a non-genocidal society is a work of radical social transformation. Genocide in the modern era has its roots in the very constitution of society, in the civilising process which has generated both the sovereign state and the sovereign individual subject. This process is contradictory, producing both pacified social relations and new forms of violence. The movement to oppose genocide and the stubborn persistence of genocide in the modern world are both expressions of the same social formation. Current strategies to oppose genocide through early detection and diplomatic or military intervention may be indispensable for the foreseeable future, but they entail their own hazards and will not in themselves suffice to abolish genocide. This abolition, if it happens, will involve the generation of a form of political society not premised on the maintenance of social deference by the sovereign state’s military monopoly. As utopian as this alternative social order may seem, rudimentary elements of its constitution are being developed by movements in civil society to oppose physical, structural, and symbolic violence. The movement for a non-genocidal society is thus continuous with movements for a more fundamentally equal global social order.

 

The problem of genocide is, at its heart, a problem of difference. Despite its many accomplishments, modern civilisation has not managed to disentangle difference from violence, and so difference remains charged with danger: every instance of difference is charged with the possibility of violence, a violence held at bay only through the ongoing performance of relations of domination and deference. Non-sovereign identities are perpetually subject to the threat of social exclusion from the zones of safety established by state societies, and the formation of modernity has involved a very substantial erasure of socio-cultural difference through the genocidal spasms of extreme nationalism and the more systematically genocidal effects of colonialism. As the modern world-system gives rise to a genuinely global society, as the boundaries of nation-states make less and less difference to the formation of cultural and social norms, questions of difference will become even more acute. Will the world society which has begun to form be one possessed of a single culture, all others having been erased through assimilation or genocide? Or will human beings continue to engage in multiple cultures, multiple “ways of world-making”, coexisting peacefully? This question defines the ultimate stakes for the ambitious project of constructing a non-genocidal society.

 

Endnotes

1. Lemkin’s coinage and definition of the term “genocide” are to be found in chapter 9 of his Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Division of International Law, 1944), pp. 79–95.

 

2. For Lemkin on colonial and imperial genocides, see the following articles in the Journal of Genocide Research 7, no. 4 (2005): Michael A. McDonnell and A. Dirk Moses, “Raphael Lemkin as Historian of Genocide in the Americas”, pp. 501–29; Dominik J. Schaller, “Raphael Lemkin’s View of European Colonial Rule in Africa: Between Condemnation and Admiration”, pp. 531–8; Anton Weiss-Wendt, “Hostage of Politics: Raphael Lemkin on ‘Soviet Genocide’ ”, pp. 551–9.

 

3. Frank Robert Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).

 

4. Most notably Steven Katz, but also Lucy Dawidowicz, Emil Fackenheim, Deborah Lipstadt, Michael Marrus, and for a time, Yehuda Bauer. For a summary of the debate see Alan S. Rosenbaum, ed., Is the Holocaust Unique? Perspectives on Comparative Genocide (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2001).

 

5. See, for example, Robert Davis and Mark Zannis, The Genocide Machine in Canada: The Pacification of the North (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1973); Harold Cardinal, The Unjust Society: The Tragedy of Canada’s Indians (Edmonton: M. G. Hurtig Ltd., 1969); Eric Robinson and Henry Bird Quinney, The Infested Blanket: Canada’s Constitution—Genocide of Indian Nations (Winnipeg: Queenston House Publishing Co., 1985).

 

6. Talcott Parsons, The Social System (New York: Free Press, 1951).

 

7. Talcott Parsons, The Structure of Social Action (New York: McGraw Hill, 1937).

 

8. See Christopher Powell, “Genocidal Moralities: A Critique”, in New Directions in Genocide Research, ed. Adam Jones (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 37–54.

 

9. See Christopher Powell, Barbaric Civilization: A Critical Sociology of Genocide (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011).

 

10. Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure (Glencoe, Ill: Free Press, 1967).

 

11. Talcott Parsons, “The Present Position and Prospects of Systematic Theory in Sociology”, in Essays in Sociological Theory: Pure and Applied (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1949), pp. 17–41.

 

12. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners and State Formation and Civilization, rev. ed., trans. E. Jephcott (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).

 

13. Norbert Elias, The Germans, trans. E. Dunning and S. Mennell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).

 

14. Robert van Krieken, “The Barbarism of Civilization: Cultural Genocide and the ‘Stolen Generations’ ”, British Journal of Sociology 50, no. 2 (1999), pp. 297–315; Abram de Swaan, “Dyscivilization, Mass Extermination and the State”, Theory, Culture & Society 18, no. 2–3 (2001), pp. 265–76.

 

15. Elias, The Civilizing Process, p. 375.

 

16. Ibid., p. 415.

 

17. Thomas J. Scheff and Suzanne M. Retzinger, “Shame as the Master Emotion of Everyday Life”, Journal of Mundane Behavior 1, no. 3 (2000), pp. 303–24.

 

18. Powell, Barbaric Civilization, pp. 149–55.

 

19. Ibid., pp. 159–62.

 

20. Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Rise and Future Demise of the World Capitalist System: Concepts for Comparative Analysis”, Comparative Studies in Society and History 16, no. 4 (1974), pp. 387–415.

 

21. Thomas Cushman, “Is Genocide Preventable? Some Theoretical Considerations”, Journal of Genocide Research 5, no. 4 (2003), p. 541.

 

22. See, for example, A. Dirk Moses and Dan Stone, eds., Colonialism and Genocide (London: Taylor & Francis, 2008).

 

23. Samuel Totten, “The State and Future of Genocide Studies and Prevention: An Overview and Analysis of Some Key Issues”, Genocide Studies and Prevention 6, no. 3 (winter 2011), p. 221.

 

24. Henry C. Theriault, “Against the Grain: Critical Reflections on the State and Future of Genocide Scholarship”, Genocide Studies and Prevention 7, no. 1 (spring 2012), p. 141.

 

25. Pierre Sané, “Foreword”, in Amnesty International Annual Report 2000 (London: Amnesty International Publications, 2000), p. 9.

 

26. Michel Foucault, “Confronting Governments: Human Rights”, in Power, vol. 3 of Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, ed. J. D. Faubion (New York: New Press, 2000), pp. 474–5.