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Ideology and Mass Killing
Ideology and Mass Killing
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Acknowledgements
This book would not exist, let alone have taken anything like its
eventual form, were it not for the support and assistance of dozens
of friends and colleagues. In the first years of working on this
project, two of the leading figures in the Department of Politics and
International Relations at the University of Oxford inspired and
guided my research. The first was Elizabeth Frazer, who served as
both my master’s and doctoral supervisor. It’s very hard to put into
words the depth and breadth of both Liz’s intellect and her
contribution to my life as an academic. She has exerted a major
influence over my understandings of politics, violence, and ideology,
and offered me great feedback on several sections of the book. But
more than that, being supervised by Liz hugely improved my ability
to think and the care and depth with which I thought about theory,
argument, and method as a politics researcher. Like so many at the
University of Oxford, I cannot adequately repay her. Second, I owe a
huge debt to Jennifer Welsh, who as Professor of International
Relations at Oxford initiated my scholarly engagement with
international relations research on atrocities, norms, and ideas. In
her subsequent roles as United Nations Special Advisor for the
Responsibility to Protect, Professor of International Relations at the
European University Institute, and Chair in Global Governance and
Security at McGill University, Jennifer offered me much feedback and
encouraged me to develop the normative and preventive implications
of my research. My work owes a huge debt to her insight, advice,
and scholarship, and I feel immensely privileged to know her.
Beyond Liz and Jennifer, I owe so much to Thomas (Tad) Homer-
Dixon, who has been a source of inspiration, advice, and intellectual
engagement since I first met him in Oxford in April 2012. Tad took a
major leap of faith in inviting me to join a network of researchers
interested in ideology based at the University of Waterloo, Ontario,
and he and that network have tremendously enriched my thinking.
Beyond that, Tad has become a great friend, and was immensely
generous in reading half the book manuscript and giving me
invaluable feedback. I cannot thank him enough. I extend that
thanks, moreover, to all those scholars Tad brought together to
create such exciting conversations as part of the Ideological Conflict
Project at the University of Waterloo, in particular Marisa Beck, Esra
Çudahar, Scott Janzwood, David Last, Matto Mildenberger, Manjana
Milkoreit, Steven Mock, Jinelle Piereder, Steve Quilley, Tobias
Schröder, and Paul Thagard. My appreciation also goes to the
Balsillie School of International Affairs and the Waterloo Institute for
Complexity and Innovation for hosting and supporting our
discussions.
Many scholars at the University of Oxford have offered sustained
input and encouragement for my research. I am profoundly indebted
to Michael Freeden—both for offering me so much advice and
support over the years, and more obviously for his preeminent
scholarship on ideology, which transformed my understanding of the
topic. I’m similarly grateful to Martin Ceadel, who gave me great
support in my first years at New College, Oxford; to Andrea Ruggeri,
with whom I had much intellectual engagement surrounding our
overlapping research agendas on ideology and armed conflict; and
to Stathis Kalyvas, who gave me much encouragement for the
research project and tremendously invigorated the conflict studies
community at Oxford. I have also gained a lot from broader
engagement with Janina Dill, Todd Hall, Dominic Johnson, Juan
Masullo, and Matt Zelina, and owe thanks to the organizers and
members of the ‘Global Ideas’ workshop at Oxford: David Priestland,
Faridah Zaman, Paul Betts, Dace Dzenovska, Faisal Devji, and Yaacov
Yadgar. I owe both professional and intellectual debts to Hugo Slim
and Martin Shaw, who acted as my examiners for my doctorate and
gave me much input and encouragement for the whole project. The
influence of their work is frequently visible in the pages that follow.
The first stage of research for this book was conducted during my
doctorate at Oxford funded by a research grant from the Arts and
Humanities Research Council, and extended into a Junior Research
Fellowship at New College, and a Departmental Lectureship at
Oxford’s Department of Politics and International Relations. All three
institutions also have my deep gratitude. I’m incredibly appreciative
to Oxford University Press and my editor Dominic Byatt for
publishing the book, and for showing immense patience when I
decided to heavily rework some of the research between 2019 and
2021. My thanks also go to three anonymous referees, who offered
supportive and detailed feedback on the original book proposal.
Beyond Oxford, numerous leading scholars have been incredibly
generous in giving various forms of support to my work. My own
understanding of mass killing, and the role of ideology in it, is
tremendously influenced by the pioneering work of Scott Straus, who
has given me invaluable advice and feedback on the project and the
draft manuscript. I am also grateful to the support of Lee Ann Fujii,
whose work reshaped my thinking about political violence, who
offered me encouragement and input into my work in the short time
I knew her, and whose unexpected death in March 2018 devastated
me, as it did the discipline of political science. I am profoundly
indebted to both the research and assistance of a broader group of
scholars—many of whom have become great friends—who offered
feedback on chapters of the manuscript or in other ways gave key
input and support to my research. I therefore offer huge thanks to
Gary Ackerman, Alex Bellamy, Susan Benesch, Donald Bloxham,
Rachel Brown, Zeynep Bulutgil, Sabina Čehajić-Clancy, Coline
Covington, Alan Cromartie, Lesley-Ann Daniels, Lorne Dawson, Mark
Drumbl, Jonathan Glover, Barbora Hola, Erin Jessee, Siniša
Malešević, Dominik Markl, Omar McDoom, Theo McLauchlin,
Elisabeth Hope Murray, Hollie Nyseth Brehm, Emily Paddon, Vladimir
Petrovic, Juliane Prade-Weiss, Scott Sagan, Lee Seymour, David
Simon, Savina Sirik, Timea Spitka, Abbey Steele, Sidney Tarrow, Kai
Thaler, Benjamin Valentino, Manuel Vogt, Sri Wahyuningroem, and
Elisabeth Jean Wood. My thanks also to the numerous members of
the International Association of Genocide Scholars, International
Network of Genocide Scholars, Conflict Research Society,
International Studies Association, and American Political Science
Association, as well as attendees at a wide range of other
workshops, for their comments on presentations of my work. Thanks
also to Sadia Fatima Hameed and all members of the Dangerous
Speech Network convened by Wellspring Advisors for providing an
invaluable forum for discussing the dynamics of extreme violence
and atrocity prevention.
It’s been a delight over the last year of the book project to have
joined King’s College London, and I’m extremely grateful to several
new colleagues for reading and/or discussing parts of the book—
Samueldi Canio, Robin Douglass, Shaun Hargreaves-Heap, Colin
Jennings, Steven Klein, and John Meadowcroft—as well as to Adrian
Blau for his constant support. I’m also privileged over the last five
years to have played a role in supervising three terrific doctoral
students—Leah Owen, Paola Solimena, and Angharad Jones-Buxton
—from whom I have learnt so much, and who have all made me a
better scholar. I also thank all the friends who have read parts of the
book and supported me on the long journey of writing it, particularly
Ezgi Aydin, Noémi Blome, Caroline Crepin, Blake Ewing, Ryan
Hanley, Irina Herb, Jeff Howard, Helena Ivanov, Katie Mann,
Rhiannon Neilsen, and Willa Rae Witherow-Culpepper. I’m especially
grateful to Lise Butler, for holding me together through the tough
times and bringing endless fun and friendship to the good times; to
Will Jones, for always making the world seem that much more
interesting; to Raphael Lefevre, who offered feedback on several
sections of the book, and spent many hours with me discussing
ideology and helping me develop my ideas; to Matt Longo, for
pushing me to be my best and making Amsterdam almost a second
home; to Timothy Williams, for his faith in me and for his generosity
in going through almost half the book with detailed comments; and
to Alex Worsnip, for making me a better thinker and bringing so
many years of adventure into my life. Finally, there are no adequate
words to express my thanks to my parents, Carol Leader and Michael
Maynard: for reading and offering feedback on entire drafts of the
book, for giving me constant support on the journey of writing it,
and above all, for raising me in an environment where it was always
good to be curious, and always safe to be wrong.
Contents
List of Figures
1. Introduction
1.1 The Puzzle of Mass Killing
1.2 Ideology and Its Critics
A Neo-Ideological Perspective
Advancing the Debate
1.3 Elaborating the Argument
Conceptualizing ‘Mass Killing’ and ‘Ideology’
Ideology, Perpetrator Coalitions, and Political Crisis
On Method
1.4 Plan of the Book
2. Clarifying Ideology
2.1 What Are Ideologies?
Narrow Conceptualizations
Broad Conceptualizations
2.2 How Do Ideologies Influence Behaviour?
Internalized Ideology: Commitment and Adoption
Ideological Structures: Conformity and Instrumentalization
Infrastructural Diversity
2.3 Conclusion
5. Stalinist Repression
5.1 Overview
5.2 Explaining the Rise of Stalinism
Marxism, Leninism, and the Early Soviet Union
Stalinist Radicalization
5.3 Stalinism and Repressive Mass Killing
The Stalinist Elite
The Rank-and-File of Stalinist Violence
Publicly Justifying Stalinist Repression
5.4 Conclusion
9. Conclusion
9.1 The Role of Ideology in Mass Killing
9.2 Moving Forward
9.3 Prediction and Prevention
9.4 The Problem of Extremism and Atrocity
Methodological Appendix
Comparative Historical Analysis
Studying Ideas and Violence
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
List of Figures
Since the start of the twentieth century, between eighty million and
two hundred million people have died in mass killings: large-scale
coordinated campaigns of lethal violence which systematically target
civilians.1 These mass killings have taken many forms: from
genocides to major terrorist campaigns and from aerial
bombardments to massacres by paramilitary organizations. They
have occurred on every continent bar Antarctica: from the Holocaust
in Europe to Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China, and from mass
violence against the indigenous peoples of the Americas and
Australasia to the Rwandan Genocide in central Africa. Such
organized killing of civilians represents one of the deadliest
categories of political violence, its victims heavily outnumbering the
thirty-four million soldiers who died in twentieth-century battlefield
warfare.2 While there has been some recent decline in mass killings,
they continue to recur.3 In 2003, the Darfur region of Sudan was
subjected to the twenty-first century’s first major genocide, with
300,000 killed, while mass killings have also scarred Iraq, Syria,
Myanmar, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and numerous
other states since the turn of the millennium.4 These campaigns
involve the most absolute violations of victims’ human rights, and
constitute the severest ‘atrocity crimes’ in international law.5
Why do mass killings occur? How do human beings come to
initiate, participate in, and support such atrocities against unarmed
men, women, and children? In popular commentary, films, and
media coverage, three rough-and-ready answers to these questions
are common. First, the perpetrators are often presented as either
individually insane—as psychopaths and sadists—or as whipped up
into a kind of social madness of collective rage and hatred.6 Second,
mass killings are sometimes thought to expose humanity’s innately
aggressive and destructive nature. When the restraints of law and
order are peeled away, it is suggested, this innate propensity
towards violence is unleashed.7 Finally, it is sometimes suggested
that perpetrators of mass killing are simply acting under coercion.8
As members of totalitarian societies or harsh military or paramilitary
organizations, they kill because they themselves have the threat of
death hanging over them should they disobey.
These explanations might seem superficially plausible, but five
decades of scholarship on mass killings has shown all three to be
inaccurate. Mental illness or mindless rage amongst perpetrators of
organized violence is rare. In fact, as the psychologist James Waller
puts it: ‘it is ordinary people, like you and me, who commit genocide
and mass killing’.9 Although disturbing, this should not really be
surprising. Mass killing generally requires the support or
acquiescence of substantial sections of societies over periods of
months or years.10 It is unlikely that this number of people could be
psychologically abnormal in any meaningful sense, or successfully
participate in sustained coordinated violence while consumed by
blind rage. Indeed, the organizations that recruit perpetrators of
mass killing, such as secret police departments, state militaries, and
insurgent groups, sometimes go to great lengths to weed out
psychopaths, sadists, and uncontrollably hate-fuelled individuals
from their ranks.11
Modern research also refutes claims that human beings are
innately predisposed to violence.12 If anything, as psychologists
Rebecca Littman and Elizabeth Levy Paluck summarize, ‘military
history and scientific evidence show that most people avoid
physically harming others, even at personal cost’.13 Even in war,
when there are overwhelming reasons to kill in order to stay alive,
soldiers often struggle to do so. This is not a matter of cowardice:
such soldiers often run immense personal risks, even throwing
themselves on grenades, to aid comrades.14 But they struggle to fire
their weapons at the enemy, and often suffer serious trauma for
doing so. If mass killings were really produced by innate human
destructiveness, moreover, they should occur in almost all instances
of war and social breakdown. Yet, while mass killings are tragically
recurrent across world history, most periods of war and upheaval
pass by without them.15 Rather than an uncontrolled consequence of
human nature, then, mass killings are what the historian Christopher
Browning terms ‘atrocity by policy’: organized collective campaigns
deliberately implemented by certain people, at certain times.16
The third popular explanation, that killers are simply coerced, is
not quite so misguided. Organizers of mass killing do deploy forceful
coercion to suppress opposition, and sometimes to compel people to
participate in violence. Nevertheless, in research on over a hundred
years of modern mass killings, only a small minority of perpetrators
seem to have reluctantly obeyed orders to kill issued on pain of
death.17 Even the most powerful totalitarian regimes in history have
generally been unable to micromanage violence through coercion
alone, relying instead on considerable support and willing
compliance from their subordinates and broader populations.18
Where perpetrators are coerced, moreover, this remains only a
partial explanation, because campaigns of mass killing are not
coercive ‘all the way up’. Someone (and usually not just one person)
has to decide that violence is the right course to take, and many
others have to decide to support them. Coercion does not explain
such decisions.
The inadequacy of these rough-and-ready explanations generates
the central puzzle of mass killing. Mass killings are widely thought to
be morally abhorrent, and typically involve acts (such as the killing of
children) that run against established cultural norms across the
world. The violence is typically psychologically arduous, at least
initially, for those who carry it out. Perhaps most puzzlingly of all,
mass killings often seem irrational for the very regimes and groups
that perpetrate them. In the Soviet Union in the 1930s, Joseph
Stalin’s Great Terror included a large-scale purge of the Red Army
which left it desperately weakened in the face of Nazi invasion four
years later. In 1970s Guatemala, the military regime responded to a
left-wing guerrilla insurgency with brutal massacres of the country’s
indigenous Maya communities, prompting many Maya to join the
guerrillas and thereby strengthening the insurgency. Sometimes
mass killings prove disastrous for perpetrators by antagonizing other
states and encouraging outside intervention, as in Khmer Rouge
Cambodia in 1979, or in recent ISIS atrocities in Iraq and Syria. Even
when not clearly self-defeating, mass killings are risky courses of
action, almost always wildly disproportionate to any actual
challenges their perpetrators face, and target individuals who
present no obvious threat. So why do they occur? Why do certain
political leaders initiate these policies of extreme violence? Why do
their subordinates willingly implement them? Why do broader
sectors of society support or acquiesce to the violence? These are
the questions I seek to address in this book.
A Neo-Ideological Perspective
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