Abstract
Sociologists were among the first to refine the concept of genocide. However, the main theoretical debates of the sociological tradition have made little impact on the growing genocide field. Christopher Powell sets out to rectify this weakness in a work that critically transforms Norbert Elias’ idea of the ‘civilizing process’, to propose a ‘relational’ sociology as the most appropriate frame for understanding genocide. Echoing Michel Foucault, Zygmunt Bauman, Michael Mann and the historian Dirk Moses, he ‘explains how genocides can result from the normal functioning of Western civilization’ (p. 3), concluding that ‘the civilizing process can produce, and be produced through, … civilizing genocides’ (p. 12, italics in original). Thus, barbarism is not the opposite of civilization: rather ‘every advance of the civilizing process reproduces barbarism (or the objective and subjective conditions of violence) on an increased scale’ (p. 11). Overall, what we have is a ‘barbarizing-civilizing process’ (p. 12) and a ‘Eurocentric barbaric civilization’ that has now gone global (p. 159).
The core of this book is conceptual and theoretical. Genocide, ‘the essentially contested concept par excellence’ (p. 67), has been defined in either subjectivist ways, centred on ‘intent’, marginalizing victim experience, or ‘objectivist’ ways, centring on the formal qualities of events like the facts of mass killing. Likewise, the ‘groups’ that are destroyed in genocide are either defined in terms of their subjective identity or seen naturalistically as having objective existence. Neither approach is adequate: ‘groups are neither objective nor subjective, being composed of relations among people’ (p. 80), so what is destroyed in genocide are these social relations. Indeed, relations between perpetrator and victims mean that genocide (in Powell’s redefinition) ‘is an identity-difference relation of violent obliteration’ (p. 84), involving the attempt to ‘destroy completely’ or to ‘blot out or erase’ a certain identity.
Powell maps some major theoretical cleavages in sociology on to these problems of defining and explaining genocide. Criticizing Weber, he argues that ‘an entirely subjectivist account of social action is not sufficient to the task …’ (p. 31). (I think this is a misreading: Weber pointed the way to the need for structural explanation, so that accounts of subjective orientations, obtained through Verstehen, were only the first stage.) Durkheimian objectivism leads to the conclusion that genocide is moral, normal and functional. Only the ‘relational sociology’ of Elias, centred on processual ‘figurations’ (or structures) and identifying ‘dynamic networks of power relations’, is sufficient to the task. Yet while Elias supplies the materials for an account of the contradictory side of the civilizing process, he lacks the ‘critical’ approach which will enable us to grasp this side (here Marx, whom Powell also considers a relational theorist, may help).
Powell therefore proposes a radically ‘deconstructive’ reading of Elias. In this account, ‘[t]he possibility of genocide results from social relations operating along three dimensions: identity-difference, … impunity-interdependence, … and interest-indifference’ (p. 12). In order to develop the idea of ‘civilizing genocide’, he takes from Elias the centrality of the territorial sovereign state with its monopoly of violence. This account of ‘civilizing’ genocide certainly cuts with the grain of recent research: not only is it true that ‘every nation-state in the Western hemisphere has grown in part through a genocide or genocides against the Indigenous inhabitants of their present territories’ (p. 5); but the homogenization of European states has also involved considerable genocide, as much new work has shown.
However, Powell is weaker on how and when violent identity ‘obliteration’ develops from state homogenization, suggesting the limits of the abstract level of theoretical argument that Powell develops. The second half of the book is based on six loosely paired case studies, which are useful in themselves but don’t really extend the overall argument. The pairing of medieval Languedoc and 1980s Guatemala, for example, suggests some thematic connections but – as in many of the abstracted comparisons that make up comparative genocide studies – the marginalizing of the radical differences of historical context reduces their significance. It would have been more pertinent to develop a nuanced historical-sociological narrative of modern genocide from its medieval roots.
Such a narrative might also have exposed the limits of the rather one-dimensional story of the ‘barbarizing-civilizing process’. Powell acknowledges that ‘not all genocides, historically or today, can be explained as products of this figuration’ (p. 159). However, in this absence of any discussion of the differences between ‘civilizing’ and other genocides, this covering statement is not very helpful. An obvious issue is that this ‘deconstructed Elias’ account would still appear to privilege the sovereign state as the source of genocide, and there is now a lot of work that suggests the importance of other actors; it is not clear how Powell would accommodate these.
Powell has opened up social theory to the problem of genocide. His conceptual and theoretical arguments, made in a very clear and accessible fashion, deserve to be widely discussed.