What Is Genocide by Shaw Martin;

Author:Shaw, Martin;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Polity Press
Published: 2015-06-01T00:00:00+00:00

However, first it is important to see how genocide scholars have responded to the difficulties of ‘intention’ that Barta highlighted. Fein argues that sociologists may have ‘needlessly confused the meaning of intent’. She insists on a more usual understanding, distinguished once more from motive: ‘Intent or purposeful action – or inaction – is not the same in law or everyday language as either motive or function. An actor performs an act, we say, with intent if there are foreseeable ends or consequences: for what purpose is different from why or for what motive is the act designed.’20 She proposes, therefore, ‘the sociological concept of purposeful action’ as a ‘bridge’ between the legal concept of intent and a broader understanding.21 Moses also argues that ‘we need to rethink the concept of intention’. He argues that we should follow Berel Lang’s suggestion that we conceive intention ‘internally’: ‘Intentions, he observes, possess no ontological status prior to their realization . . . . Intentions, in fact, are observable only in the unfolding of acts themselves. Complex organizations and also individuals “discover” their intentions in the process of acting in certain contexts.’22 Intentions are not, therefore, ‘ulterior’ to action, in the way that most lawyers conceive, nor are they necessarily fully explicit even in the moment of action.

The plurality of intentions in Moses’s proposal is also important. If intentions develop through action, they change as it changes, typically in response to changing situations. Not surprisingly, historians and sociologists often emphasize the incremental nature of decision-making in genocide: policies develop over time and adapt to changing circumstances (as is normal in policy formation).23 It is not necessarily, or even usually, the case that an entire historical episode of genocide, over many months or even years, can be explained by a singular ‘decision’, ‘intention’ or even ‘motive’. Mann argues that ‘[m]ost accounts of murderous cleansing, especially genocide, are over-organized and over-premeditated. Early events, early decisions are too often read back from the ghastly known end result.’24 From his case studies, he concludes: ‘Murderous cleansing is rarely the original intent of perpetrators. . . . Murderous cleansing typically emerges as a kind of Plan C, developed only after the first two responses to a perceived ethnic threat fail . . . . To understand the outcome, we must analyze the unintended consequences of a series of interactions yielding escalation.’25 This argument does not, however, ‘downplay intentionality’ (as Mann unnecessarily concedes26), but only the unrealistic, absolutist version of intentionality prevalent in genocide studies. As he states, genocide ‘is intentional’,27 in Fein’s sense of involving purposeful action, but since mass murder is ‘never the initial solution devised by ethnonationalists, . . . we must be able to reconstruct the successive flow of their goals.’28

Because the singular concept is not plausible, a complex, situational account is the only way to continue making sense of the intentional element. Collective actors who commit genocide are engaged in political and military struggles; their aims and policies are necessarily complex and evolve according to the exigencies of the conflicts in which they are involved.

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