Abstract
Forms of collective violence such as riots and ethnic cleansing pose an analytical challenge to social science for the political plenitude inherent in categories of collective violence makes it very difficult to separate facts and values. In political theory wars are distinguished from other forms of collective violence on the principle that states, which are recognized collective entities in international law, declare war on each other and are expected to conduct these wars under the rubric of contractual rules. This formulation reflects the privileged position that states apportion to themselves as entities that have control over legitimate violence. In the course of this chapter I will argue that there is a slippage between the various categories that we use to describe collective violence.2 However, instead of trying to delineate which kind of discrete reality each category corresponds to I suggest we shift our attention to the conditions under which one or the other term comes to signal a state of crisis. I argue that indeterminacy of reference is not incidental to the slippage between different terms such as riots, ethnic cleansing, or even genocide but is a result of the way that assemblages of actors, institutions and discursive forms are actualized. One important corollary of this formulation is that we need to pay close attention to all forms of collective violence and the related practices of the state since these carry the potential of being transformed into ethnic cleansing and into genocide. An alarmist perspective, as Lawrence Langer has argued, is better than ‘business as usual’ in addressing forms of violence that can acquire lethal forms if not addressed critically and in a timely fashion.3
I am grateful to my friends and colleagues Roma Chatterji, Jane Guyer, Naveeda Khan, Deepak Mehta, Deborah Poole and Pamela Reynolds for conversations and comments on the issues discussed in this chapter. I thank Dan Stone for his patience and as always, Ranendra Das for his amazing insights.
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Notes
J. Spencer, ‘Collective Violence’, in The Oxford India Companion to Sociology and Social Anthropology, ed., V. Das (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 1564–81.
L. L. Langer, ‘The Alarmed Vision: Social Suffering and the Holocaust Atrocity’, in Social Suffering, eds, A. Kleinman, V. Das and M. Lock (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 47–67.
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See C. A. Bayly, ‘The Pre-History of “Communalism”? Religious Conflict in India, 1700–1860’, Modern Asia Studies, 19, 2 (1985), 177–203
R. Chatterji and D. Mehta, Living with Violence (Delhi: Routledge, 2007)
I. Copeland, ‘The Further Shores of Partition: Ethnic Cleansing in Rajasthan, 1947’, Past and Present, 160 (1998), 203–31
S. Das Communal Riots in Bengal, 1908–1947 Oxford University Press Delhi 1991
G. Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in North India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990).
G. Shah, ‘The 1969 Communal Riots in Ahmadabad: A Case Study’, in Communal Riots in Post-Independence India, ed., A. A. Engineer (Delhi: Sangam Publications, 1984), p. 175.
M. Gaborieu, ‘From Al-Baruni to Jinnah: Idiom, Ritual, and Ideology in the Hindu-Muslim Confrontations in South Asia’, Anthropology Today, 13 (1985), 7–14.
C. Joshi, ‘Bonds of Community, Ties of Religion: Kanpur Textile Workers in the early Twentieth Century’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 22, 3 (1985), 251–80.
see D. Chakrabarty, ‘Communal Riots and Labour: Bengal’s Jute Mill-Hands in the 1890s’, in Mirrors of Violence: Communities, Riots and Survivors in South Asia, ed., V. Das (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990), 146–85.
J. Masselos, ‘Power in the Bombay “Mohalla”, 1904–1915: An Initial Exploration into the World of the Indian Urban Muslim’, South Asia, 6 (1975–76), 75–95; idem., The City in Action: Bombay Struggles for Power (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007).
Cf. S. Freitag, Collective Action and Community: Public Arenas and the Emergence of Communalism in North India (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989).
See P. Brass, The Production of Hindu-Muslim Violence in Contemporary India (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2003)
S. J. Tambiah, Leveling Crowds: Ethnonationalist Conflicts and Collective Violence in South Asia (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996).
P. Kloos, ‘A Turning Point? From Civil Struggle to Civil War in Sri Lanka’, in Anthropology of Violence and Conflict, eds, B. E. Schmidt and I. W. Schroder (New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 176–97.
A. G. Hopkins, ‘Quasi States, Weak States, and the Partition of Africa’, Review of International Studies, 26 (2000), 311–20
M. Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).
D. Abubakar, ‘Ethnic identity, democratization and the Future of the African State: Lessons from Nigeria’, African Issues, 29, 1–2 (2001), 31–6
E. I. Odugu, ‘The Issue of Ethnicity and Democratization in Africa: Towards the Millennium’, Journal of Black Studies, 29, 6 (1999), 790–808.
H. Glickman, ed., Ethnic Conflict and Democratization in Africa (Atlanta, GA: The African Studies Association Press, 1995).
N. Glazer and D. P. Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1963).
M. L. Gross, ‘Restructuring Ethnic Paradigms: From Premodern to Postmodern Perspectives’, Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism, 23, 12 (1996), 51–65.
C. Geertz, ed., Old Societies and New States (New York: The Free Press, 1963); idem., ‘What is the State if it is not a Sovereign?’, Current Anthropology, 45 (2004), 577–93.
V. Das and D. Poole, ‘State and its Margins: Comparative Ethnographies’, in Anthropology in the Margins of the State, eds, V. Das and D. Poole (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 2004), pp. 3–35.
A. Mbembe, ‘At the Edge of the World: Boundaries, Territoriality and Sovereignty in Africa’, Public Culture, 12, 1 (2000), 259–84.
See especially A. I. Asiwaju, ‘Borderlands in Africa: A Comparative Research Perspective with General Reference to Western Europe’, Journal of Borderland Studies, 8, 2 (1993), 1–12
P. Nugent and A. I. Asiwaju, eds, African Boundaries: Barriers, Conduits and Opportunities (London: Printer Publications, 1996) for the diverse ways in which the notion of boundaries operates in African societies.
See A. Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006)
A. Basu, ‘When Local Riots are Not Merely Local: Bringing the State Back In. Bijnor 1988–92’, Economic and Political Weekly, 26 (1994), 2605–21
T. B. Hansen, Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001).
See Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers; R. M. Hayden, ‘Imagined Communities and Real Victims: Self-Determination and Ethnic Cleansing in Yugoslavia’, American Ethnologist, 23, 4 (1996), 783–801
L. Malvern, A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in Rwanda’s Genocide (London: Zed Books, 2000)
S. Woodward, Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War (Washington, DC: Brookings Institute, 1995).
A. Nekrich, The Punished Peoples: The Deportation and Fate of Soviet Minorities at the End of the Second World War (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978).
A. Weiner, ‘Nature, Nurture and Memory in a Socialist Utopia: Delineating the Soviet Socio-Ethnic Body in the Age of Socialism’, American Historical Review, 104, 4 (1999), 1114–55.
K. Ray, ‘Reparation and De-territorialization: Maeskhetian Turks’ Conception of Home’, Journal of Refugee Studies, 13, 4 (2000), 391–414.
A. R. Gualiteri, Conscience and Coercion: Ahmadi Muslims and Orthodoxy in Pakistan (Ontario: Guernica Editions, 1989)
A. M. Khan, ‘Persecution of the Ahmadiyya Community under International Law and International Relations’, Harvard Human Rights Journal, 16 (2003), 217–44.
G. Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide, 1959–1994 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).
N. Khan, ‘Trespasses of the State: Ministering the Copyright to Theological Dilemmas’, Bare Acts: Sarai Reader, 5 (Delhi: Center for the Study of Developing Societies, 2005), pp. 178–89.
A. A. Engineer, The Gujarat Carnage (Delhi: Orient Longman, 2003)
S. Vardarajan, ed., Gujarat: The Making of a Tragedy (Delhi: Penguin, 2002).
V. Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006).
M. D. Toft, The Geography of Ethnic Violence: Identity, Interests and the Indivisibility of Territory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 34.
S. Haokip, Identity, Conflict and Nationalism: The Naga and Kuki Peoples of Northeast India and Northwest Burma (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2003).
D. E. Ludden, Making India Hindu: Religion, Community and the Politics of Democracy in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996).
For a subtle analysis of the way that Hindu mythic symbols provide the resources for critiquing the propaganda of the Hindutva parties and the violence unleashed in Gujarat see M. S. Singh, ‘Religious Iconography, Violence, and the Making of a Series’, Domains, 3 (2007), 38–66.
A. Varshney (with A. I. Wilkinson), Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002).
P. Brass, Theft of an Idol: Text and Context in the Representation of Collective Violence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).
See P. B. Mehta, ‘Ethnicity, Nationalism and Violence in South Asia: Review Article, Pacific Affairs, 36 (2003) for an elegant critique of this view.
See especially Das, Life and Words; S. Kakar, The Colors of Violence: Cultural Identities, Religion and Conflict (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996)
A. Nandy, S. Trivedi, S. Mayaram and A. Yagnik, Creating a Nationality: The Ramjanmabhumi Movement and the Fear of the Self (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998).
A. Bell-Fialkoff, ‘A Brief History of Ethnic Cleansing’, Foreign Affairs, 72, 3 (1993), 110–20; idem., Ethnic Cleansing (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996).
Naimark, Fires of Hatred. The question of earlier injustices done to Serbs is a vexed one and has generated much controversy; see R. M. Hayden, ‘Schindler’s Fate: Genocide, Ethnic Cleansing and Population Transfers’, Slavic Review, 55, 4 (1996), 727–48
idem., ‘Imagined Communities and Real Victims’; S. Woodward, ‘Genocide or Partition: Two Sides of the Same Coin’, Slavic Review, 55, 4 (1996), 755–61. Since the Serbs used the rhetoric of historical injuries to Serbs to mobilize sentiments against the Croats and the Bosnian Muslims, and this fed into the real escalation of atrocities against Muslims, there seems to be no moral language available to talk of the Serb loss of lives. This is one consequence of using a totalizing model to speak of ethnic identity that it leaves little room for discussing intragroup differences.
G. Aly, P. Chroust and C. Pross, eds, Cleansing the Fatherland: Nazi Medicine and Racial Hygiene (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994)
R. N. Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).
See K. Kooning, ‘Armed Actors, Violence and Democracy in Latin America in the 1990s: Introductory Notes’, Bulletin of Latin American Research, 20, 4 (2001), 401–8
M. Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)
D. Petrovic, ‘Ethnic Cleansing: An Attempt at Methodology’, European Journal of International Law, (1994) for examples that connect military cleansing with the idea of ethnic cleansing.
Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy; M. Shaw, War and Genocide: Organized Killing in Modern Society (London: Polity Press, 2003).
M. Mamdani, ‘A Brief History of Genocide’, Transition, 10, 3 (2001), 26–47.
H. Bley, Southwest Africa under German Rule, 1894–1914 (London: Heinemann, 1971).
R. Kumar, ‘The Troubled History of Partition’, Foreign Affairs, 76, 1 (1997), 22–34.
P. G. Roeder, ‘Soviet Federalism and Ethnic Mobilization’, World Politics, 43, 2 (1991), 196–232.
The close link between modernity and the totalistic character of violence against a targeted group has been made by many scholars including most famously Z. Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989). Yet, it seems to me that the specificity of colonial wars, cold war related wars and now the war on terrorism needs to be accounted for. According to The Human Security Report (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), the single most important factor in the decline of wars since 1942 is the end of colonial wars. The region in which the maximum death toll has happened in the 1990s is sub Saharan Africa though it is the indirect deaths of war through disease and malnutrition that contribute to this momentous violence.
A. Destexhe, Rwanda and Genocide in the Twentieth Century (London: Pluto Press, 1994)
H. M. Hintjens, ‘Explaining the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda’, The Journal of Modern African Studies, 37, 2 (1999), 241–86
Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers; P. Uvin, ‘Prejudice, Crisis and Genocide in Rwanda’, African Studies Review, 40 (1997), 91–115.
C. Card, ‘Genocide and Social Death’, Hypatia, 18, 1 (2005), 63–79.
S. K. Fisher, ‘Occupation of the Womb: Forced Impregnation as Genocide’, Duke Law Journal, 46, 1 (1996), 91–133.
B. Allen, Rape Warfare: The Hidden Genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
A. Nekrich, The Punished Peoples: The Deportation and Fate of Soviet Minorities at the End of the Second World War (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978).
A. Weiner, ‘Nature, Nurture and Memory in a Socialist Utopia: Delineating the Soviet Socio-Ethnic Body in the Age of Socialism’, American Historical Review, 104, 4 (1999), 1114–55.
K. Ray, ‘Reparation and De-territorialization: Maeskhetian Turks’ Conception of Home’, Journal of Refugee Studies, 13, 4 (2000), 391–414.
A. R. Gualiteri, Conscience and Coercion: Ahmadi Muslims and Orthodoxy in Pakistan (Ontario: Guernica Editions, 1989)
A. M. Khan, ‘Persecution of the Ahmadiyya Community under International Law and International Relations’, Harvard Human Rights Journal, 16 (2003), 217–44.
G. Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide, 1959–1994 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).
N. Khan, ‘Trespasses of the State: Ministering the Copyright to Theological Dilemmas’, Bare Acts: Sarai Reader, 5 (Delhi: Center for the Study of Developing Societies, 2005), pp. 178–89.
A. A. Engineer, The Gujarat Carnage (Delhi: Orient Longman, 2003)
S. Vardarajan, ed., Gujarat: The Making of a Tragedy (Delhi: Penguin, 2002).
V. Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006).
M. D. Toft, The Geography of Ethnic Violence: Identity, Interests and the Indivisibility of Territory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 34.
S. Haokip, Identity, Conflict and Nationalism: The Naga and Kuki Peoples of Northeast India and Northwest Burma (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2003).
D. E. Ludden, Making India Hindu: Religion, Community and the Politics of Democracy in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996).
For a subtle analysis of the way that Hindu mythic symbols provide the resources for critiquing the propaganda of the Hindutva parties and the violence unleashed in Gujarat see M. S. Singh, ‘Religious Iconography, Violence, and the Making of a Series’, Domains, 3 (2007), 38–66.
A. Varshney (with A. I. Wilkinson), Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002).
P. Brass, Theft of an Idol: Text and Context in the Representation of Collective Violence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).
See P. B. Mehta, ‘Ethnicity, Nationalism and Violence in South Asia: Review Article, Pacific Affairs, 36 (2003) for an elegant critique of this view.
See especially Das, Life and Words; S. Kakar, The Colors of Violence: Cultural Identities, Religion and Conflict (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996)
A. Nandy, S. Trivedi, S. Mayaram and A. Yagnik, Creating a Nationality: The Ramjanmabhumi Movement and the Fear of the Self (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998).
A. Bell-Fialkoff, ‘A Brief History of Ethnic Cleansing’, Foreign Affairs, 72, 3 (1993), 110–20
idem., Ethnic Cleansing (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996).
Naimark, Fires of Hatred. The question of earlier injustices done to Serbs is a vexed one and has generated much controversy; see R. M. Hayden, ‘Schindler’s Fate: Genocide, Ethnic Cleansing and Population Transfers’, Slavic Review, 55, 4 (1996), 727–48
S. Woodward, ‘Genocide or Partition: Two Sides of the Same Coin’, Slavic Review, 55, 4 (1996), 755–61. Since the Serbs used the rhetoric of historical injuries to Serbs to mobilize sentiments against the Croats and the Bosnian Muslims, and this fed into the real escalation of atrocities against Muslims, there seems to be no moral language available to talk of the Serb loss of lives. This is one consequence of using a totalizing model to speak of ethnic identity that it leaves little room for discussing intragroup differences.
G. Aly, P. Chroust and C. Pross, eds, Cleansing the Fatherland: Nazi Medicine and Racial Hygiene (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994)
R. N. Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).
See K. Kooning, ‘Armed Actors, Violence and Democracy in Latin America in the 1990s: Introductory Notes’, Bulletin of Latin American Research, 20, 4 (2001), 401–8
M. Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)
D. Petrovic, ‘Ethnic Cleansing: An Attempt at Methodology’, European Journal of International Law, (1994) for examples that connect military cleansing with the idea of ethnic cleansing.
Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy; M. Shaw, War and Genocide: Organized Killing in Modern Society (London: Polity Press, 2003).
M. Mamdani, ‘A Brief History of Genocide’, Transition, 10, 3 (2001), 26–47.
H. Bley, Southwest Africa under German Rule, 1894–1914 (London: Heinemann, 1971).
R. Kumar, ‘The Troubled History of Partition’, Foreign Affairs, 76, 1 (1997), 22–34.
P. G. Roeder, ‘Soviet Federalism and Ethnic Mobilization’, World Politics, 43, 2 (1991), 196–232.
A. Destexhe, Rwanda and Genocide in the Twentieth Century (London: Pluto Press, 1994)
H. M. Hintjens, ‘Explaining the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda’, The Journal of Modern African Studies, 37, 2 (1999), 241–86
Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers; P. Uvin, ‘Prejudice, Crisis and Genocide in Rwanda’, African Studies Review, 40 (1997), 91–115.
C. Card, ‘Genocide and Social Death’, Hypatia, 18, 1 (2005), 63–79.
S. K. Fisher, ‘Occupation of the Womb: Forced Impregnation as Genocide’, Duke Law Journal, 46, 1 (1996), 91–133.
B. Allen, Rape Warfare: The Hidden Genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
N. Mookherjee, A Lot of History: Sexual Violence, Public Memory, and the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971 (unpublished PhD dissertation, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, no date); Y. Saikia, ‘Beyond the Archive of Silence: Narratives of Violence of the 1971 Liberation War of Bangladesh’, History Workshop Journal, 58 (2004), 275–87.
U. Butalia, The Other Side of Silence (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998)
U. Menon and K. Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition (New Brunswick, NJ: Rugers University Press, 1998); Das, Life and Words.
See especially M. Shaw, What is Genocide? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007).
Department of State, ‘Legal Analysis of 1994 Genocide in Rwanda’, The American Journal of International Law, 96, 1 (2002), 258–62.
S. Z. Buckley, ‘Remembering to Forget: Chosen Amnesia as a Strategy for Local Co-Existence in Post-Genocide Rwanda’, Africa, 76, 2 (2006), 131–50
S. Stockman, ‘The People’s Court: Crime and Punishment in Rwanda’, Transition, 9, 4 (2000), 20–41.
R. Kumar, Divide and Fall? Bosnia in the Annals of Partition (London: Verso, 1997); Woodward, Balkan Tragedy.
Mbembe, ‘At the Edge of the World’; C. Nordstrom, Shadows of War: Violence, Power, and International Profiteering in the Twenty-First Century (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004).
C. C. Taylor, Sacrifice as Terror: The Rwandan Genocide of 1994 (Oxford: Berg, 1999).
E. D. Gordy, The Culture of Power in Serbia: Nationalism and the Destruction of Alternatives (Philadelphia, PA: Penn State University Press, 1999).
M. Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
See Das, Life and Words; S. Hunt, This was Not Our War: Women Reclaiming the Peace (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004)
U. Menon, ‘Do Women Participate in Riots? Explaining the Notion of “Militancy” among Hindu Women’, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, 9, 1 (2003), 20–51.
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Das, V. (2008). Collective Violence and the Shifting Categories of Communal Riots, Ethnic Cleansing and Genocide. In: Stone, D. (eds) The Historiography of Genocide. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230297784_5
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