Mohamed Adhikari - Civilian-Driven Violence and the Genocide of Indigenous Peoples in Settler Societies

Existing studies of settler colonial genocides explicitly consider the roles of metropolitan and colonial states, and their military forces in the perpetration of exterminatory violence in settler colonial situations, yet rarely pay specific attention to the dynamics around civilian-driven mass violence against indigenous peoples. In many cases, however, civilians were major, if not the main, perpetrators of such violence. The focus of this book is thus on the role of civilians as perpetrators of exterminatory violence and on those elements within settler colonial situations that promoted mass violence on their part.

Mohamed Adhikari is Emeritus Associate Professor in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. His books include Not White Enough, Not Black Enough: Racial Identity in South Africas Coloured Community (2005) and Burdened by Race: Coloured Identities in Southern Africa (2009).

First published 2021

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ISBN: 978-0-367-85891-9 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-032-04813-0 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-1-003-01555-0 (ebk)

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The seed for this book was planted about a decade and a half ago when I first became interested in genocide studies. Having read about the iconic twentieth-century mass killings, where the role of the state as perpetrator looms large, I was intrigued by Tony Bartas idea that with the colonisation of Australia, relations of genocide were embedded in the very encounter between coloniser and indigene and that government policy was of secondary importance. Later, when my interest turned specifically to settler genocides, I realised that although Tonys insight was intrinsic to genocide in settler colonial situations, scholars in neither genocide studies nor settler colonial studies had applied his insights in meaningful ways. In analyses of settler genocides the emphasis has almost automatically and largely been on the doings of colonial and metropolitan states and their representatives. While some scholars did point to the insurgent character of frontier settler communities, there was little sustained analysis or reflection on the specific dynamic behind civilian-driven violence in settler genocides, on how such violence articulated with state-driven initiatives and imperatives, and on how civilians organised themselves to attack or destroy Indigenous societies. Because the issue is of fundamental importance to the broader scholarly project of mapping and understanding settler genocides, I thought that an edited volume on the subject would be useful. So, a huge thank-you to Tony Barta, whose seminal chapter provided the spark that lit this fire. It is a great pity that I was unable to twist his arm into contributing a chapter to this volume!

Barta T. 2000. Relations of genocide: Land and lives in the colonisation of Australia, in Genocide and the Modern Age: Etiology and Case Studies of Mass Death, eds. I. Walliman & M. Dobkowski. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 237251.