Abstract
In this profound book, Lee Ann Fujii asks why ordinary people sometimes engage in gratuitous, collective, “extralethal” violence against their neighbors, including public lynching, public rape, torture, and humiliation of victims before killing; the public mutilation of corpses; and the later display of body parts. Given its risks and costs, why engage in such violence—violence that may be counterproductive to overarching goals?
To address this puzzle, Fujii explores a category of violence she terms “violent display,” violence that is performed for an audience, usually in public spaces. She does so through detailed analysis of specific events of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, lynching of African Americans in the United States, and genocide in Rwanda. The inclusion of lynching in the United States is both compelling and important as it deflects any possible presumption on the part of readers from the global North that violent display occurs “over there.”
Fujii shows how violent display is an assertion of a preferred social order through the redrawing (or reconfirming) of social categories in order to resolve ambiguous boundaries of ethnic and racial difference or to respond to transgressions of those boundaries. It reaffirms the salience of the social order’s categories by “inscribing” racial/ethnic hierarchies not just on the body of the immediate victim but on others from the victim’s social group, for whom that body also stands.
Throughout the book, Fujii draws on field research in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Maryland’s Eastern Shore (birthplace of abolitionists Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass), as well as various archives, to illustrate how participants staged an episode of violent display as a performance toward a new social order (the “main attraction”).
She draws on this core concept—violent display as a performance—to analyze the history and earlier events leading up to each episode (the “rehearsal”), as well as other episodes of violent display in less public settings (“sideshows”), and the subsequent deployment of bodies toward a dominant narrative (“aftermath”). And in the “intermission,” she describes the challenges of carrying out field research in the aftermath of violence. It includes an exemplary analysis of her own positionality, a demonstration that obstacles encountered during field research are themselves a form of data, and a discussion of the importance of narrative silences and revisions.
Other scholars of political violence have noted that political violence is in some settings a social process, but few have focused on the theoretical and empirical implications of approaching violence as a performance—that is, a social process for performers and for their audience—and none with Fujii’s depth of insight. I discuss below three contributions it makes to scholarly understanding of political violence. 1
Violence as a transformative social process
Fujii analyzes violent display as a collective effort to stage violence. Participants construct the performance, stage the event—making decisions about lighting, positioning, and costumes—assume roles, and craft the event’s escalating arc, always taking care to project to the audience (both onlookers and other participants). She shows how through performing identities and narratives central to the asserted political order (e.g., what it means to be a “real” Serb), participants—often ordinary people—enact the new political order through their production of the atrocious event.
This enactment of the new order transforms participants, both the cast who directly participate and also onlookers, she argues. It socializes through participation: violence is an extreme learning-through-doing activity. Those in star roles achieve new social status and power (nobodies become somebodies). Fujii insists that the transformative power of violent display stems in part from the fact that it is embodied: it is the experience of hearing, smelling, as well as seeing violence that transforms participants.
Further, it transforms those unwillingly or unwittingly drawn into the event as well as those intentionally participating. The expressive participation of those watching—their laughing, cheering, and encouraging the cast—also socializes the audience to the new political order. All participants—even those merely watching—experience the renewal of their dominance over the victim’s social category through the ritualized subordination of the person victimized.
Violent display thus brings alive the new political order for participants and their audience, not just for the targeted community. Her insights about violent display as a transformative social process that generates shared meanings and identities are also relevant for other forms of violence.
On violence as a dynamic process
Show Time also contributes to the literature that opens up the “black box” of organizations that engage in violence, including state militaries, rebel organizations, local militias, gangs, and vigilante groups. Most scholars working in this vein approach the internal dynamics of such organizations though principal-agent models that emphasize the differences in preferences and information between commanders and combatants, and the institutions that (to varying degree) mitigate those differences. The approach focuses on vertical relationships.
In contrast, Show Time adds to approaches that also emphasize horizontal social dynamics. This theme is already present in work on gang rape, hazing, and the horizontal socialization of combatants into violence, including violence that is neither authorized nor ordered by leaders, but driven by peer dynamics among participants. In the case of violent display, Fujii argues that roles emerge from the social interactions of participants and change as the script emerges and evolves.
This insight that violence may draw on emergent and contingent roles and improvisation merits exploration in these other settings. The torture of prisoners by US servicemen at Abu Ghraib comes to mind as a case ripe for the kind of performative analysis Fujii carries out of the Omarska prison camp.
On violence that transforms the meaning and boundaries of ethnic and racial categories
Show Time makes another major contribution in its analysis of how violent display transforms ethnic and racial categories. Scholarly work on violence in many disciplines emphasizes that the purpose of much violence is to enforce social boundaries by punishing their transgression.
Fujii makes a more subtle argument: violent display is also constitutive of those boundaries and their meaning. Violent display transforms the meaning of ethnic and racial categories and also (sometimes) the boundaries of those categories, as when those who fail to participate with their coethnic perpetrators thereby no longer count as real members of their ethnic group. In short, participation in violence becomes the basis of belonging, supplanting hitherto accepted bases of belonging.
Fujii’s contribution builds on her understanding of the meaning, categories, and boundaries of ethnic and racial difference, particularly their variation over time and space. Local meanings and practices are varied, malleable, and ambiguous, despite state and other elite efforts to fix them. Families may be mixed, friendships may cross boundaries, and kids often play together without having yet learnt the rules of who gets to inflict and who has to endure subordination.
It is from that ambiguity that violent display draws its power when “harnessed” to a political project. Precisely because who is who is not always obvious and because some people break the rules, violent display resolves ambiguity by sharpening the salience of boundaries for the violent and victimized communities alike—and asserting those boundaries as not just of difference, but of racial and ethnic hierarchy.
In the final chapter, Fujii finds some solace in this malleability and ambiguity. Violent display despite its power is uneven in its imposition of the categories and boundaries of the new political order. And that order may not endure. Even violence cannot prevent some members of the dominant group from crossing boundaries and breaking norms, thereby violating the new political order by allying with those enduring violence and subordination. Social engineering through violence can therefore never succeed because it cannot keep everyone on the “right” side of the line for long, Fujii insists.
Show Time makes an original, generative, and fundamental contribution to our understanding of political violence through its theory of violent display as a performance. It also raises a compelling research agenda, including extensions beyond settings of ethnic conflict. Under what conditions does violent display contribute to a new political order that endures? Given its usefulness in consolidating a new political order, what explains why some insurgent organizations do not engage in violent display? Among those organizations (like the Islamic State) that do, does it have constitutive as well as communicative effects? And how do the effects on observers of violent display disseminated via social media differ from those who experience in person?