Abstract
In making the case for genocide as a cultural phenomenon rather than simply physical extermination, Damien Short views economic extractivism as ‘ecologically induced genocide’.
Undermining the integrity of extant indigenous cultures, contemporary extractivism continues a long-term process associated with settler colonialism. This involves the occupation of cultural territory and the imposition of settler law at the expense of the viability of indigenous cultures, including their landed relations. Referring to such encroachment as ‘legal harm’, Short embraces a ‘green criminology’ approach to genocide via ecocide.
Short argues that settler territorial intrusions disrupt socio-ecological relations of extant cultures, such that ‘ecocide is a method of genocide’. He draws on a thesis of Raphael Lemkin, who inspired the United Nations (UN) Genocide Convention (1948), noting that while the Holocaust experience overshadowed understandings of genocide, Lemkin’s preparatory work in the 1930s was more robust in linking genocide and colonialism. Subsequently, in the early 21st century, scholars have recovered Lemkin’s thesis at a time of urgent, large-scale extractivism. Short comments, ‘the rush to scrape the bottom of the fossil fuel barrel is creating a perfect storm for current and future human rights abuses, with ecocidal and genocidal consequences’ (p. 8).
In order to substantiate this thesis, Short deploys four case studies of occupied cultures: the Palestinians, the Sri Lankan Tamils, Australian Aborigines and the First Nations in Canada’s Province of Alberta. The ordering of these cases underscores his current concern, namely, that tar sands extractivism in Alberta portends continuing ecocidal impacts on indigenous cultures as extreme energy and mineral exploration intensifies in the coming decades. A White Australian himself, Short collaborates with fellow researchers Haifa Rashed, Vinay Prakash and Jennifer Huseman, in writing the chapters on Palestine, Sri Lanka and Canada, respectively. Research involves fieldwork and participant observation with interviews and conversations, and textual analysis of official policy documents. Short maintains that settler colonialism is best examined as a structure rather than an event, where processes of dispossession in each case amount to degrees of social death for the indigenous cultures concerned. Thus, drawing on Lemkin, he represents genocide as combining ‘barbarity’ (extermination) with ‘vandalism’ (destruction of culture), as the outcome of imposition of the oppressor’s culture or ‘national pattern’, even as the oppressed population remains on the occupied territory.
While most narratives of cultural dispossession refer to land confiscation and/or land degradation, these are complemented in Redefining Genocide with accounts of other rights violations, such as the removal of reference to the ‘Nakba’ (the catastrophe of establishment of the Israeli state in 1948) from textbooks for Palestinian children in Israel. Noting an ongoing Nakba, Short cites leaked diplomatic cables from Israeli officials to the United States stating that Israel ‘intended “to keep the Gazan economy on the brink of collapse without quite pushing it over the edge”’ (p. 78). Furthermore, he references severe food insecurity in the Occupied Territories, given Israeli seizure of Palestinian farmland and closure of local and international markets – concluding that
given the economic restrictions and their impact on the health and lives of the Palestinians … it is possible to consider this as “genocide” under Lemkin’s understanding of the term as well as under Article 2(c) of the UN Genocide Convention. (p. 79)
Such repression extends to Palestinians living in East Jerusalem, so that for Short Nakba continues a process of settler colonialism where ‘the concept of genocide is clearly relevant to how we should understand the Israeli/Palestinian situation’ (p. 74).
Each case study is of course different in process and texture, but ‘land grabbing’ is common to each. In Sri Lanka, Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism, drawing on ancient texts, justifies Sinhalese colonialism against Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority (descendants of plantation labourers brought there from Southern India by the British). Sinhalese occupation of Tamil regions began in British Ceylon in the 1930s, and following independence, the Sinhalese government deployed land colonization and pogroms to ‘supplant’ (in Lemkin’s terms) Tamil culture, provoking a period of violent civil war, which ended in 2009. Since then, the Sinhalese military has intensified occupation of Tamil land, centralized control over agricultural markets, accompanied by a scorched earth destruction of forest and mangrove areas to impose what Short calls a ‘neoliberal “development” agenda’ (p. 126) of population displacement and establishment of high-value export cropping – effectively carrying out ‘ecologically induced genocide’.
The Australian case is unique insofar as settler colonization (1788) occurred without any formal dialogue or treaties between settlers and indigenous people. Aboriginal land rights remained unacknowledged until the Native Title Act of 1993, stemming from the famous Mabo decision, whereby the High Court rejected the (settler) concept of terra nullius in favour of the common law doctrine of Aboriginal title. Even so, a powerful mining lobby has managed to empower the federal government to limit indigenous rights to negotiate, rather than veto, future developments on their land – notably coal seam gas fracking and continued mining. While many generations of Aborigines have been displaced to urban peripheries, via a long-term genocidal process of displacement and child abduction, Short emphasizes that his argument of genocide today refers to those 250 groups who ‘retain a cultural connection to land and who still live, or wish to live, primarily in accordance with indigenous laws and customs’ (p. 128). Confirming his notion of ‘ecologically induced genocide’, these groups face a future in which neoliberal capitalism’s imperative ‘to secure more and more ever scarcer resources, and the process of extreme energy, is a guarantee that the issue of land rights and opening up of indigenous lands to development will never go away’ (p. 140).
Short views the Alberta tar sands as the ‘poster child of extreme energy, the epitome of scraping the bottom of the barrel’ and likely to ‘threaten the survival of us all’ (p. 159). This final case study is exemplary in retracing the ‘genocidal logic’ associated with ‘the elimination of Indian peoples in order to gain access to their territory for the purposes of resource extraction’ (p. 161). In this case of settler colonialism, treaties established with the natives removed their ‘underlying title’ to their lands via material exchanges of cash and hunting and fishing equipment. As Short notes, ‘native peoples did not know what the treaties signified to the whites, especially seeing as so many had no concept of private, let alone, state, property’ (p. 168). Not only did Indians not realize they were surrendering their rights, but also the contemporary Canadian government plays a ‘colonial trick’ by blaming the British Crown for extinguishing ‘aboriginal title’. Short’s treatment of the impact of tar sands development, as ‘biological warfare’, is salutary in emphasizing not only the loss of land rights, but the loss of forests and the toxification of rivers, lakes and wetlands upon which indigenous communities depend for their continued existence, noting that such processes ‘in and of themselves beget and require further acts of genocide’ (p. 172).
The cumulative effect of these four case studies is to refocus our understanding of genocide as cultural demolition by various means, with a common core of land alienation by occupation and ecosystem degradation. Short’s hope for this book is that it will strengthen a theory of ‘genocide’ that includes recognition of the role of ecological destruction. Ultimately, he works from a political economy/ecology perspective: declaring that ‘a global economy is extractive, it gives nothing back’ (p. 193). His brief concluding chapters make clear that this book serves perhaps two purposes. First is the rehabilitation of Lemkin’s recognition that genocide has a powerful cultural dimension – and Short confirms this with his four quite distinct cases of ecocidal occupation. Second is the progression through the cases of growing magnitudes of despoliation of Earth, with the Alberta tar sands symbolizing a planetary ecocidal logic. This may seem at first like a conceptual leap, but if recognized as a historicization of ‘civilising’ occupations, this study offers a powerful indictment of modern capitalist development and its now perilous disruption of agrarian cultures and earthly cycles. Short concludes, ‘“Civilization” will continue to immiserate the vast majority of human life and ecosystems until we have witnessed incalculable extinction events inevitably leading to our own, unless we put a stop to it very soon’ (p. 197). How we will accomplish this is left to the imagination, but re-appropriating ‘genocide’ as global tendency offers a potent stimulus to action.