Journal of Genocide Research (2007), 9(3),

September, 461– 473

DOCUMENTS AND DISCUSSION

The general hybridity of war and

genocide
MARTIN SHAW

Should genocide studies be considered a part of war studies? This question could
easily be considered provocative: just when the community of genocide scholars is
achieving critical mass and recognition within the larger academic community, it
may seem perverse to bring its intellectual autonomy into question. Readers may
be relieved, then, to discover that this article will not propose the subordination of
genocide to war studies, especially not in the form that war studies are generally
conceived. However, I shall argue that the problems of genocide and war are so
intimately linked that we need to see them within a common frame. The impli-
cations of this case are not just that genocide scholars need to recognize the mani-
fold linkages of our subject matter to the larger field of armed conflict, a subject on
which some work has already been done within the field. They are also that war
studies need to be radically reconfigured, to recognize genocide as a major ten-
dency of modern war.
I shall argue therefore that the development of genocide studies should be seen
not just as an end in itself, but as the source of a critical thrust that should unsettle
studies of armed conflict, and indeed the human and social sciences in general, for
which genocide should no longer remain a marginal issue. Genocide studies
should challenge the view, common even among our fellow scholars, that
genocide is a giant social aberration, uniquely horrifying but fortunately rare
and confined to a very few cases (such as the Holocaust, Armenia, Cambodia
and Rwanda). Genocide studies need to place on the wider social-scientific
agenda the prospect that genocide may constitute a widespread potential of
contemporary armed conflict, and hence that—while genocide is indeed a
deviant form—it may also be a general danger arising from the central place
that armed conflict assumes in modern society.
I shall also propose in this article that, while genocide studies should indeed
avoid “confusing scholarship with politics,” as the editor of this journal has

ISSN 1462-3528 print; ISSN 1469-9494 online/07/030461-13 # 2007 Research Network in Genocide Studies
DOI: 10.1080/14623520701584281
DOCUMENTS AND DISCUSSION

recently warned,1 we cannot avoid engaging with the frequent issues that arise in
public debate about whether particular conflicts constitute genocide. So
widespread is the misconception that a given conflict can only be either war or
genocide that genocide scholars have no choice but to explain how often the two
are combined in one way or another, so that the phenomenon of genocidal war is
probably the most common form of genocide and a very common form of war.
Mahmood Mamdani has recently pointed out, for example, that
The similarities between Iraq and Darfur are remarkable. The estimate of the number of civi-
lians killed over the past three years is roughly similar. The killers are mostly paramilitaries,
closely linked to the official military, which is said to be their main source of arms. The
victims too are by and large identified as members of groups, rather than targeted as individ-
uals. But the violence in the two places is named differently. In Iraq, it is said to be a cycle of
insurgency and counter-insurgency; in Darfur, it is called genocide.
He went on to ask, reasonably, “Why the difference? Who does the naming? Who
is being named? What difference does it make?”2 But the line of argument that he
built on these questions did less to challenge the naming of Iraq as “civil war” than
that of Darfur as “genocide”; indeed his critique of the latter case led towards a
questioning of the genocide concept itself. And this may be a general problem
for genocide studies: since the most common form of genocide denial (by perpe-
trators, international organizations and scholars) is the claim that a given conflict
constitutes “only war,” we have little choice but to enter into the debate or see our
subject matter dissolved. And of course “war or genocide” is often if not usually a
false dichotomy. Full understanding of conflicts will only be achieved by simul-
taneously distinguishing and showing the relationships of the two. And yet this
problem, which was clearly present in the origin of the idea of genocide, has
not been generally resolved in an intellectually coherent manner in genocide
(still less, war) studies; which is one reason why it is difficult for scholars to
address the often confused public debates on the issue.

War and the origins of the genocide idea

It is obvious that the origins of the idea of genocide lie within contexts of war.
Raphaël Lemkin’s early preoccupation with “barbarity” reflected recent experi-
ences like the Ottoman destruction of the Armenians, during the First World
War; his articulation of the concept of “genocide” was part of his critique of
Axis Rule in Occupied Europe during the Second.3 Lemkin’s concern was to estab-
lish genocide as a general crime, subsuming many acts that constituted particular
crimes under the laws of war and other codes (his approach was very different
from that of many legal authorities today who treat genocide itself as a particular
crime alongside war crimes and crimes against humanity). He framed his case in
terms of inadequacies in the laws of war, especially where they concerned
occupation. It was almost as an afterthought that he extended his case beyond
the war context: “Moreover we should not overlook the fact that genocide is a
problem not only of war but also of peace. . . . An international multilateral

462
 DOCUMENTS AND DISCUSSION

treaty should provide for the introduction, not only in the constitution but also in
the criminal code of each country, of provisions protecting minority groups from
oppression because of their nationhood, religion, or race.”4
Lemkin grappled with the tension that genocide was clearly not “normal”
warfare, or merely an excess of war, but a criminal enterprise that went beyond
it. He later proclaimed, “Genocide is not war! It is more dangerous than war!”5
And yet he could only demarcate genocide, an illegitimate extension of warfare,
in relation to legitimate war:
Genocide is the antithesis of the Rousseau –Portalis Doctrine,6 which may be regarded as
implicit in the Hague Regulations. This doctrine holds that war is directed against sovereigns
and armies, not against subjects and civilians. In its modern application in civilized society,
the doctrine means that war is conducted against states and armed forces and not against
populations. It required a long period of evolution to mark the way from wars of extermina-
tion, which occurred in ancient times and in the Middle Ages, to the conception of wars as
being essentially limited to activities against armies and states.7
This seminal statement pinpointed the fact that identifying genocide as criminality
distinct from war still depended on the modern distinction between “civilized” and
“uncivilized” warfare. Only by distinguishing “sovereigns and armies” from “sub-
jects and civilians” could genocide be delimited from war. Although genocide was
a crime sui generis, which might occur at least exceptionally in “peacetime”
outside more conventional warfare, it was a modern form of the historic “wars
of extermination.” As Mark Levene puts it: “The whole thrust of Lemkin’s con-
ceptualization . . . suggests a phenomenon which does not simply take place
within a war context but is itself a form of warfare.”8

The separation of the law of genocide from the law of war

The first legal use of “genocide” also drew heavily on the problematic of war. At
the Nuremberg Tribunal, the four Allied powers “insisted upon a nexus between
the war itself and the atrocities committed by the Nazis against their own
Jewish populations. It was on this basis, and this basis alone, that they considered
themselves entitled to contemplate prosecution.”9 Thus as the Allies developed
their plans to prosecute Nazi leaders in 1945, Robert Jackson, head of the
United States delegation, argued: “The reason that this extermination of Jews
and destruction of the rights of minorities becomes an international concern is
this: it was part of a plan for making an illegal war.”10 Other delegates questioned
the tightness of this connection, but it was in this context that Nazi leaders were
tried for these crimes at Nuremberg. The International Military Tribunal arraigned
the defendants for genocide “against the civilian populations of certain occupied
territories.”11 The Tribunal’s judgment documented the emergence of genocidal
policies before as well as during the war, but noted the Prosecution’s central
contention concerning their connections with aggressive war.
However, in the United Nations’ drafting of what became the Genocide
Convention, genocide began to be defined outside the context of war. Thus

463
DOCUMENTS AND DISCUSSION

Resolution 96(I) of the General Assembly (1946) defined genocide as “a denial of

the right of existence of entire human groups, as homicide is the denial of the right
to live of individual human beings.”12 As William Schabas noted, this eliminated
“any nexus between genocide and armed conflict,” in his view the “unfortunate
legacy of the Nuremberg jurisprudence.”13 Article I of the Genocide Convention
(1948) explicitly designated genocide as a crime “whether committed in time of
peace or in time of war.”14 Indeed, the most striking fact about the Convention
was its separation of genocide from war. In one sense, this was entirely valid:
clearly genocide was not ordinary warfare and it was conceivable that it could
occur outside pre-existing contexts of warfare. However, the major instances of
genocide had clearly taken place in the context of war and militarization. This
has remained an overwhelming empirical trend15: not surprisingly, the revival
of the law of genocide in the 1990s, especially by the International Criminal
Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia, was closely entwined with the implementation
of the laws of war.

Linked meanings in the concepts of genocide and war

Moreover, the legal separation of genocide from war left unresolved the more
general conceptual questions for social science and history: what are the connec-
tions of war and genocide in terms of their meanings, and in terms of causation?
Genocide has generally been defined by its subjective meaning for perpetrators,
understood as the intention to “destroy” social groups. But what does this
(ideal-typical) representation of genocidal intentions mean? Many genocide scho-
lars have tended to narrow “destruction” down to the “physical” destruction or
killing of the individual members of a group. However, it is clear that a
“group” of people (the little-defined term denotes, in effect, any type of collectiv-
ity which is attacked as such) is not a physical organism in the way that an indi-
vidual human being is—in this sense, the analogy in the 1946 resolution, quoted
above, is inappropriate. A collectivity or population is defined by the social
relations that link the individuals who make it up. Therefore the “destruction”
of a collectivity cannot be effected simply by the bodily destruction of its individ-
ual members. Such destruction implies rather the destruction of their social
relations, institutions, and ways of life. Lemkin was very clear on the difference
between the social “destruction” which defined genocide, and the “immediate
(physical) destruction” of the members a group which was only one of the
forms of this destruction.16 Nevertheless, and on this Lemkin was not so clear,
it does seem that the idea of social destruction—as distinct from, for example,
repression, subordination, domination or control—must involve violence (in its
many forms: not just killing) or its threat.
How is this meaning of genocide connected to war? The first thing that should
strike us is that war, too, has been classically defined by the idea of “destroying” an
enemy. For Clausewitz, for example, war is about the destruction of the enemy’s
power, and above all its will to resist.17 The difference from genocide is that the
enemy is understood as another state or armed organization, rather than a social

464
 DOCUMENTS AND DISCUSSION

collectivity. And the “power” that is to be destroyed is primarily military and

political, not social and cultural. But otherwise the logic of destruction is the
same: the dismantling, through violence and its threat, of what constitutes the
power of the enemy, both in general and specifically that which sustain its capacity
for resistance. Killing plays a central part in war, but the logic of war in general
does not dictate killing all of the enemy’s troops: rather killing is a means,
along with others, directed to the aim of destroying power. This is very much in
line with Lemkin’s original understanding of genocide as a comprehensive
“attack” on the social life of the target peoples. Violent means in general and
killing in particular mark off genocide, like war, from non-violent political and
social conflict, but just as in war it does not follow that genocide means universal
killing.

Linkages in the internal structures of genocide and armed conflict

These linked meanings help explain why armed conflict between power organiz-
ations has the general potential to generate genocide: the idea of the enemy to be
destroyed can be transferred from opposing armed powers to their linked social
groups, and ultimately to other social groups. But another linkage is that the
distinction between the two types of violent conflict depends, as Lemkin saw,
on the modern distinction between “sovereigns and armies” on the one hand
and “subjects and civilians” on the other. Without the categories of “combatants”
and “civilians,” derived from the modern understanding of warfare, we could not
distinguish genocide from conventional war. Indeed the civilian category is, in the
end, crucial to genocide studies: what all the historical and possible targets of
genocide have in common is not the particular types of identity (ethnic, national,
class, gender, etc.) for which they are targeted, but the fact that the individuals and
groups targeted are predominantly civilians. It is this that decisively separates
genocide from normal war.18
Moreover, the importance of these common categories underlines the
overlapping structures of power relations in war and in genocide as forms of
armed conflict. In both cases the primary actors are armed power organiz-
ations—states, regimes, parties, armies, militia, etc. In both cases the key power
relations are not just those between actors of this type, but also include their
relations with civilian society. According to the theory of war, the relations of
armed power to civilians are secondary to the conflict, and are in principle non-
violent. Yet in reality the relations between armed power actors and civilians
are always important, in that civilian society supplies the men, materiel and
social support for the former. And of course they often become violent, as
armed actors target those whom they see as supporting the armed enemy. Thus
considered sociologically rather than in terms of strategic fictions, the structure
of armed conflict generally contains combatant– civilian as well as inter-comba-
tant relationships. Thus the structure of genocide, as a conflict between armed
power organizations and largely unarmed civilian populations, is only a variant
of the general structure of armed conflict, distinguished by the fact that in genocide

465
DOCUMENTS AND DISCUSSION

armed power targets violence directly at the unarmed, considered as an enemy in

themselves rather than an extension of the armed enemy. And of course genocide
does not remain a pure combatant– civilian conflict, but generally tends to
partially even up into combatant– combatant conflict, either because a section
of the targeted civilian population arms for resistance, and/or because of the
intervention of third-party armed actors on the side of the threatened civilian
population.

War as the most direct structural context of genocide

These interior linkages between war and genocide reflect important elements of
the exterior, causal contexts of genocide. Clearly the causes of genocide, in
general and in particular, are varied. In terms of the main classifications of
social action utilized by social scientists and historians, they are economic,
cultural and political as well as military. Given the diversity of causes, it might
be thought fruitless to argue about the priority of particular types. Yet Mamdani
has expressed a widespread critique “of those who tend to accent the economic
and the cultural in the understanding of the genocide.” He argues “that their
explanation obscures the moment of decision, of choice, as if human action,
even—or, shall I say, particularly—at its most dastardly or heroic, can be
explained by necessity alone.”19 Since genocide constitutes a class of violent
action, the most direct explanation must come from the structural context in
which decisions about such action are made, namely, politics, which can therefore
be seen as mobilizing the more indirect cultural and economic causes. In line with
this, Michael Mann suggests that explanations must be “essentially political.”20
For him, genocide is the product of (contingent) escalations in political conflict,
which turn it towards violence and killing, and cannot be explained directly by
underlying cultural, economic or even political conflicts.
Yet by the same logic that prioritizes the political over the economic and
cultural as the direct causal context of genocide, it can be argued that military
contexts are generally more directly instrumental than narrowly political contexts
in leading to genocide. Or to put it another way, it is when political conflicts
become violent or military that genocide is most likely to result. Thus Mann
may have incorrectly identified the primary locus of genocide among his four
types of power. Indeed he emphasizes the contingency of violent outcomes, claim-
ing that “truly murderous cleansing” emerges “out of unrelated crises like war.”21
The last phrase is a giveaway: as so often in the sociological tradition (although
less often in Mann’s work22) war is seen as an exogenous variable, an almost
accidental destabilizer of ongoing political processes, giving the push to elites
to radicalize and pursue mass murder.23 But wars are hardly “unrelated” in
reality: genocidal powers are often fighting conventional wars against states or
armed movements to which target populations are believed to be linked. Perpetra-
tor regimes, even when not fighting conventional wars, are generally highly
militarized—this was a key to how they homogenize and centralize power so as

466
 DOCUMENTS AND DISCUSSION

to pursue concerted anti-civilian violence. Even “democratic” settlers are

ubiquitously armed. There is nothing accidental about the role of war in genocide.
Many of Mann’s own arguments point in this direction. He recognizes that
because military power is “socially organized, concentrated lethal violence,” it
“proves decisive in the later stages of the worst cases of ethnic cleansing.
Armies, police forces, and irregular extrastate paramilitaries are the main agencies
. . .” He foregrounds “escalation” (originally a concept of war) in accounting for
the development of murderous crises, and although some escalation is narrowly
political, much is military. Indeed
Most 20th-century cases . . . occurred during wars or during the chaotic transfer from war to
peace. . . . Ideologically tinged wars reduce shared rules and convert civilians into enemies.
. . . Civil wars and wars of secession with a strong ethnic component are dangerous for ethnic
groups trapped behind enemy lines. The lure towards murderous ethnic cleansing increases
when it can be accomplished at low military cost, with little fear of retaliation. . . . Military
campaigns may generate tactical lure towards atrocities against civilians that were not orig-
inally intended. . . . Guerrilla warfare lures guerrillas to kill civilians. . . . These . . . are all
features of military power that may produce murderous cleansing.24

The diversity of military contexts

Mann’s summary goes some way to suggest that it is not just one type of military
context that is conducive to genocide. Certainly the logic of modern total war can
be seen as particularly predisposing towards genocidal policies. Thus Eric
Markusen and David Kopf pointed out that the relationship between genocide
and modern warfare is much closer than some scholars have been willing to admit:
First, war produces widespread psychological and social disequilibrium . . . Second, govern-
ments engaged in total war . . . tend to become more centralized, secret, and powerful . . .
Third, the government at war can utilize the military forces for the perpetration of genocide.
Fourth . . . conditions of war significantly increase . . . the vulnerability of the governmentally
targeted victim groups . . . Finally, . . . modern war creates a climate of moral and psychologi-
cal . . . desensitization that increases popular tolerance of cruelty.25
Crucially, total war, since it depends on the more or less “total” economic,
political and ideological participation of supporting populations, leads to systema-
tic targeting of civilians as a way of defeating the armed enemy. Total social
mobilization produces total social destruction: it is this combination that makes
this type of war “total,”26 but also “degenerate.” This type of war is clearly
closely related to genocide yet remains distinct from it—insofar as civilian target-
ing remains a strategic and tactical decision subordinate to the aim of defeating the
enemy state, as in the case of British and US bombing of Germany and Japan in the
Second World War.27
Total warfare becomes directly genocidal when the destruction of the enemy
civilian society becomes an end in itself, as it did during the Japanese invasion
of China and the German invasions of Poland and the Soviet Union. As Jürgen
Zimmerer shows, Nazi aims in the conquest of Eastern Europe involved the

467
DOCUMENTS AND DISCUSSION

colonization and radical reshaping of society.28 The Soviet Union had similar aims
in its conquest of western Poland in 1939 in alliance with Nazi Germany, ulti-
mately consolidated after 1945 in combination with the new eastern European
governments and with the blessing of the Allies, leading to brutal mass expulsions
of German civilians across the region.29
This genocidal tendency of total war is increased when guerrilla war is
involved. Guerrilla war is effectively a secondary type of total war, since
also involves the same tendencies towards total mobilization and destruction.
Guerrillas often see national, ethnic or class groups supporting the existing state
or occupier as enemies, while counterinsurgency frequently targets the civilian
society mobilized by the guerrillas—indeed genocidal policies are often justified
by claims about the resistance activities, real and imagined, of sections of the
target population. Moreover, a counterinsurgency logic often frequently dictates
targeting within genocide, with adult males seen as potential resisters on the
part of the target community.
However, total war is not the only context in which war tends to become
genocidal. In more limited wars, too, genocidal developments are common. In
colonial wars, the conquered population is often seen as inferior: while many colo-
nizations involve subordination rather than destruction, colonizing plans may
include the elimination or drastic reduction of the conquered society. While “colo-
nialism does not necessarily issue in genocide”—there is no “overdetermined
link”30—the profound connections between the two phenomena can be specified
both in terms of the initial radicalism of the colonizing goals and in terms of
the dynamics of conquest and resistance.

Genocidal war
The literature on recent limited wars, in the “post-colonial” era, has also empha-
sized genocidal developments. Thus Mary Kaldor’s influential argument that
many contemporary wars are simultaneously interstate and civil, involving a
new parasitic (rather than mobilizing) political economy and new types of parami-
litary forces, also sees “new wars” as about “identity politics,” targeting ethnic
groups and cosmopolitan urban communities in the name of ethnic nationalism.31
Although she doesn’t use the language of genocide, it is clear the evolving type of
limited war which she analyses, primarily through the lens of Bosnia-
Herzegovina, is one which genocidal “ethnic cleansing” is an essential part.
In such cases, it doesn’t make much sense to talk about “war” and “genocide” as
separate events. There are separate literatures of the “Bosnian war” and the
“Bosnian ethnic cleansing/genocide,” but these were not separate historical pro-
cesses. There were certainly wars between Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian armies
and militias, as well as genocidal “cleansings” by Serbian and Croatian nationalist
forces. But these were two sides of a single main pattern of conflict, in which
Serbian forces (the nationalist party, the government it established, local auth-
orities, the Bosnian-Serbian army, nationalist militia from Serbia, and behind all
these the Serbian regime of Slobodan Milošević) attempted to conquer as large

468
 DOCUMENTS AND DISCUSSION

a part of Bosnia as possible and destroy the non-Serb populations in the areas they
controlled. On the other side of the conflict, Bosnian-Muslim, Croat and
cosmopolitan populations, with Bosnian and Croatian parties, governments,
local authorities and armies, resisted. In this case, genocide was a major war
aim on the side of the genocidists, in terms of which other aims, such as territorial
expansion, made sense. Likewise resistance to genocide was the aim was the aim
of the opposing forces. For the perpetrators, the genocide required conquest; for
the victim communities, armed resistance. In these senses war was much a neces-
sity for genocide and resistance as genocide was the rationale for war. In cases like
this the languages of war and genocide come together: while we can analyse dis-
tinct military and genocidal processes, the conflict as a whole is best described by
the term “genocidal war.”

Counter-genocidal war
The major complication so far omitted from the description of the Bosnian conflict
was that for a time Croatian forces pursued similar policies to those of the
Serbians, against the Bosnian Muslims, for example, in Mostar, leading to a
second, overlapping, war/genocide. Of the major political-military forces
involved, only the Bosnian government did not pursue directly genocidal policies,
and even it was compromised by its tacit endorsement of the flight of large parts of
the Serb population. Indeed considering the post-Yugoslav conflicts as a whole,
we can see that while Serbian forces were the prime movers and perpetrators of
genocidal war, most other forces were implicated not only in resistance to geno-
cide but also in counter-genocidal war of their own. Thus Croatian forces, resisters
to Serbian “cleansing” in eastern Slavonia in 1991, became perpetrators not only
in Mostar in 1993 but also against Serbs when they reconquered the Serbian
“Krajina” in 1995. Elements of the Kosovo Liberation Army, organizer of
armed resistance against Serbian repression and genocide in Kosovo in
1998 –99, were implicated in the subsequent expulsions of Serbs from the
province.
This kind of conflict, in which one genocidal episode is perpetrated (at least in
part) as retaliation for another in which the perpetrators’ group were seen as
victims of the group now targeted, leads to cycles of what René Lemarchand
has called “counter-genocide.”32 As he suggests, this kind of relationship can be
seen in the Great Lakes region, connecting the 1994 Rwanda genocide (mainly
against Tutsis) with the 1972 Burundi genocide (against Hutus). Another
example, an essay by Philippe R. Girard suggests, is the cycle of colonial
slavery, counter-colonial genocide, and colonial genocide in Haiti at the beginning
of the nineteenth century.33 Whereas in total wars like World War II, genocidal
episodes have amounted to only a part of the general pattern of (albeit degenerate)
war, in these cases war has become generally genocidal with most if not all actors
practicing war genocidally. Yet in these cases it is still important to distinguish
war and genocide in principle, not only to distinguish resistance from genocide,

469
DOCUMENTS AND DISCUSSION

but also to acknowledge the possibilities for international military interventions to

protect victims of genocide.

Genocidal terrorism?
This discussion has shown something of the breadth and depth of the relationships
of war and genocide. In principle any form of military action can be considered
genocidal if a civilian social group is attacked as an enemy in itself, whose
destruction is a distinct policy goal, rather than instrumentally as a means of
attacking an armed enemy. In this sense, terrorism too can be genocidal, and an
editorial in this journal34 was mistaken to rule out this possibility in principle,
even if it was correct in arguing that most contemporary terrorism should not be
simplistically labelled genocidal.
Further consideration of this argument will be generally instructive for our
handling of war/genocide relationships. In his editorial, Jürgen Zimmerer
argued that
by most accepted definitions, the two terms are mutually exclusive. . . . there is broad agree-
ment that the primary aim of genocide is to eradicate an entire group of people. Victims are
selected because they belong to those groups . . . the purpose is the destruction of the group as
such. Terrorism, however, is the opposite. Its aim is selective murder, even mass murder as
on 9/11, but not primarily with the aim of eradicating the group as such, but of intimidating
it. According to definitions used by both UN and USA bodies, the main purpose of terrorism
is intimidation in order to influence the politics of the nation and/or state. The population is
terrorized by selective acts of violence, in order to achieve a political or ideological goal. . . .
Genocide and terrorism are therefore categorically different. This becomes even more
obvious if one looks at the question of perpetrators. Genocide is commonly conceived as
a crime perpetrated by a state or state-like actor. Terrorism is just the opposite. Al-Qaeda
might be (or have been) powerful, with a wide-reaching network, but they are not a state-
like actor. If they were, their “acts of terrorism” would have to be labelled “acts of war,”
as violence between sovereign states is normally termed.35
This argument correctly identifies terrorism as a method of armed struggle based
on producing fear among civilians, normally in order to attack a state and influence
state policies. Therefore, terrorism generally attacks civilians instrumentally, not
because it aims to destroy them as members of a particular social group. In this
sense terrorism is a form of war—again, degenerate because it is directed
against civilians rather than the armed enemy itself—rather than genocide. The
editorial is wrong, therefore, not in denying the generally genocidal character of
terrorism but in identifying war too narrowly with states. Clearly, considered
sociologically, not only recognized states but many other organizations engage
in war. Terrorism is a type of war undertaken by militarily weak organizations
that rely on spectacular propaganda rather than direct military engagement with
the enemy’s armed forces.
However, this is not the end of this discussion. While terrorism in general, and
al-Qaeda’s attacks on the USA, UK, Spain, Turkey, Indonesia, etc., and Hamas’
suicide-bombings in Israel in particular, can be seen in the above light, as

470
 DOCUMENTS AND DISCUSSION

armed propaganda and not genocide, some aspects of the same organizations’
campaigns do have relationships to genocide. First, these groups are often rhetori-
cally genocidal, threatening Westerners (“Crusaders”) and Israelis (and sometimes
Jews) as such, as well as the USA and other Western states. Of course this geno-
cidal rhetoric is not sufficient to establish a concrete genocidal intention in actions
like 9/11, but it should put us on our guard for developments in which genocidal
thought may lead to genocidal action. Second, and more importantly, some of the
actions of these and related groups have gone beyond armed propaganda informed
by genocidal rhetoric to actual genocidal massacres. The attacks on Christian
populations in Pakistan are one example. Another which has been more widely
noted is the al-Qaeda-led campaign of violence against Shia Muslims in Iraq.
The repeated massacres at Shia holy places and in Shia neighbourhoods have
been more than attempts to pressurize the USA or the Shia-led Iraqi government
and to provoke the Shi’ite armed groups into civil war. They have also been
designed to terrorize Shia Muslims into leaving significant parts of Iraq, and so
directly to destroy significant parts of the Shia community. And of course they
have succeeded in provoking some Shi’ite militia into retaliatory massacres, so
that there is now a counter-genocidal cycle of massacres in several areas of Iraq.
Zimmerer was correct to argue that “genocide and terrorism are highly complex
phenomena and ambiguous terms. To conflate both terms obfuscates matters much
more than it enlightens them. . . . More than anything else, genocide studies
requires terminological, methodological and theoretical clarity.” Yet he was
wrong to conclude that “Genocidal terrorism” is just one example of political
and media jargon entering the academic discipline, which we have to avoid.36
The close relationships to genocide of virtually all forms of modern war mean
that we cannot rule out such categorical combinations. On the contrary, hybrid
forms of war and genocide are the general rule.

The challenge to war studies

Thus hybridity casts a shadow over all forms of war. Even manifestly non-
genocidal campaigns may bring genocidal conflict in their wake. The US-led inva-
sion of Iraq in 2003 was not genocidal, yet the openings for al-Qaeda and the
Sunni– Shia conflict that it (predictably) created have led to genocidal massacres:
it can be considered a causal factor in these atrocities. The NATO war on Serbia in
1999 was actually an anti-genocidal campaign (even if the word “genocide” was
not used), designed to halt the genocidal massacres of Kosovo Albanians by
Serbian forces. Yet because it was fought from the air and allowed Serbian
power free reign on the ground, it actually provoked Serbia into much larger
massacres in a campaign to terrorize the majority of Albanians out of Kosovo
altogether. Although Albanians do not blame NATO for these massacres,
because the war successfully restored the population to their home territory,
clearly the relationship of war and genocide in this conflict was more complex
than that simple political equation would suggest.

471
DOCUMENTS AND DISCUSSION

Because Western leaders, generals and strategists are far from genocidal in their
intentions, and frame their campaigns in terms of “saving” civilians from author-
itarian power and “minimizing” civilian casualties, strategic studies in the West
have great difficulty in facing these problems of genocide that lurk indirectly
even in Western warfare. War studies as a field remains resolutely focused on
the military as an organization, its methods and the dynamics of conflict
between armed actors. The implications of war for civilians have made more
headway in the parallel field of security studies, but in neither is the war – genocide
connection a popular theme. As I discovered when I challenged a strategic thinker,
Colin Gray, on the issue in the Review of International Studies, the issue is likely
to generate more heat than light.37 Yet on any serious account of the range of con-
temporary armed conflicts, let alone the history of the “century of total war,” it is
difficult to deny the centrality of the genocide question. Scholars of genocide can
make, indeed are making, a major contribution to shifting the understanding of
armed conflict in general, but it is essential that we clarify our own understandings
of the connections first.

Notes and References

1 Jürgen Zimmerer, “From the Editors: genocidal terrorism? A plea for conceptual clarity,” Journal of
Genocide Research, Vol 8, No 4, 2006, p 379.
2 Mahmood Mamdani, “The politics of naming: genocide, civil war, insurgency,” London Review of Books, Vol
29, No 5, 2007. Available at: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n05/mamd01_.html.
3 Raphaël Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (New York: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,
1944).
4 Ibid, p 93.
5 Lemkin, quoted by Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell (London: Flamingo, 2003), p 51.
6 So named after the restatement by the early nineteenth-century jurist Jean-Étienne-Marie Portalis of the ideas
of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
7 Lemkin, Axis Rule, p 80.
8 Mark Levene, Genocide in the Age of the Nation State: Volume 1. The Meaning of Genocide (London: I. B.
Tauris, 2005), p 51. See also my War and Genocide, Chapter 2 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003).
9 William Schabas, Genocide in International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p 34.
10 Quoted in ibid, p 35.
11 France et al. v. Goering et al. (1946), cited in ibid, pp 37–38.
12 Ibid, p 45.
13 Ibid, p 46.
14 Ibid, p 73.
15 Shaw, War and Genocide, Table 2.1, pp 42–43.
16 Lemkin, Axis Rule, p 79; see my discussion in What is Genocide? (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), Chapter 2.
17 Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Michael Howard and Peter Paret, eds (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1976).
18 See my discussion in What is Genocide?, Chapter 8, “The missing concept: the civilian category and its social
meaning.”
19 Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), p 2.
20 Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2005), p 5.
21 Mann, The Dark Side, p 7. Emphasis added.
22 Mann is the major social theorist who has been most insistent on distinguishing military from political power
as a major type of power: see The Sources of Social Power, Vol 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1986), pp 10–11.
23 See my Dialectics of War (London: Pluto, 1988), Chapter 1, for a critique of this tendency in sociology.

472
 DOCUMENTS AND DISCUSSION

24 Mann, The Dark Side, p 32. Norman Naimark similarly identifies war as the major context of “ethnic
cleansing”: Fires of Hatred (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), pp 187, 188.
25 Eric Markusen and David Kopf, The Holocaust and Strategic Bombing: Genocide and Total War in the
Twentieth Century (Boulder: Westview, 1995), pp 78 –79.
26 Shaw, Dialectics of War, Chapter 3.
27 Shaw, War and Genocide, Chapter 2.
28 Jürgen Zimmerer, “ The birth of the Ostland out of the spirit of colonialism: a post-colonial perspective on the
Nazi policy of conquest and extermination,” in Dirk A. Moses and Dan Stone, eds, Colonialism and Genocide
(London: Routledge, 2007), pp 101 –123.
29 Alfred de Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam: The Anglo-Americans and the Expulsion of the Germans, 2nd edn
(London: Routledge, Kegan and Paul, 1979).
30 Dirk A. Moses and Dan Stone, “Introduction,” in Colonialism and Genocide, pp vii–viii.
31 Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organized Warfare in the Global Age (Cambridge: Polity, 1999).
32 René Lemarchand, “Genocide in the Great Lakes: which genocide? Whose genocide?,” Yale University
Genocide Studies Program Working Papers, New Haven, 1998.
33 Philippe R. Girard, “Caribbean genocide: racial war in Haiti, 1802– 4,” in Dirk A. Moses and Dan Stone, eds,
Colonialism and Genocide (London: Routledge, 2007), pp 42 –65.
34 Zimmerer, “From the Editors.”
35 Ibid, p 380.
36 Ibid, p 381.
37 Martin Shaw, “Strategy and slaughter,” Review of International Studies, Vol 29, No 2, 2003, pp 269–278, and
Gray’s reply in the same issue.

473