Scott Straus - Making and Unmaking Nations: War, Leadership, and Genocide in Modern Africa
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- Book:Making and Unmaking Nations: War, Leadership, and Genocide in Modern Africa
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In Making and Unmaking Nations, Scott Straus seeks to explain why and how genocide takes placeand, perhaps more important, how it has been avoided in places where it may have seemed likely or even inevitable. To solve that puzzle, he examines postcolonial Africa, analyzing countries in which genocide occurred and where it could have but did not. Why have there not been other Rwandas? Straus finds that deep-rooted ideologieshow leaders make their nationsshape strategies of violence and are central to what leads to or away from genocide. Other critical factors include the dynamics of war, the role of restraint, and the interaction between national and local actors in the staging of campaigns of large-scale violence.Grounded in Strauss extensive fieldwork in contemporary Africa, the study of major twentieth-century cases of genocide, and the literature on genocide and political violence, Making and Unmaking Nations centers on cogent analyses of three nongenocide cases (Cte dIvoire, Mali, and Senegal) and two in which genocide took place (Rwanda and Sudan). Strauss empirical analysis is based in part on an original database of presidential speeches from 1960 to 2005. The book also includes a broad-gauge analysis of all major cases of large-scale violence in Africa since decolonization. Strauss insights into the causes of genocide will inform the study of political violence as well as giving policymakers and nongovernmental organizations valuable tools for the future.
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Barbara Krasner
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MAKING AND UNMAKING NATIONS
War, Leadership, and Genocide in Modern Africa
S COTT S TRAUS
CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS
Ithaca and London
Ithaca and London
For Sadie and Solomon, Dad and Bruce
C ONTENTS
P REFACE
To my surprise, this book is about the legacy of ideas and the ways in which ideas about politics and political community sometimes make the unimaginable seem righteous.
Ever since I was a journalist covering the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide in the mid-1990s, I have sought to understand how and why states and citizens dedicate themselves to mass violence against human populations.
In my book on the Rwandan genocide, I investigated the question at the local level. What drove perpetrators? How did mobilization to commit violence occur? With answers to those questions, I sought to build an explanation of how and why the Rwandan genocide happened. Ideology was not a big part of my story. I found that war mattered a huge amount, as did the strength of Rwandas state and widespread awareness of ethnic categories.
In this book, however, I ask different questions. The main one is: Why do some major crises, usually involving armed conflict, escalate to genocide, while other, similar crises do not? To my mind, asking the negative question of why genocide does not happen is essential to answering the positive question of why genocide does happen.
The question requires a shift of focus from local actors to national ones. To that end, I have investigated the question in two main ways. First, I isolate a logic of genocide and seek to distinguish it from the logics of other forms of political violence. Why would state leaders ever think that genocide is the right course of action? Second, I compare five countries in depthRwanda, Sudan, Mali, Cte dIvoire, and Senegaland multiple other countries more superficially. In both instances, my main purpose is to build, rather than to test, theory. I want to understand how such violence became possible, and I had no a priori answer.
My conclusions are nonetheless unexpected. I come away convinced that the key to solving the puzzle is how leaders frame threats and define goals. Leaders in different crises employ different constructs about whom they are fighting and what they are fighting to achieve. Those ideas in turn shape leaders strategies of violence, making a logic of genocide imaginable in some cases and less imaginable in others.
The origins of genocide are, to be sure, a lot more complicated than leaders mental constructs. Genocide is an extreme form of violence that becomes a reality only during deep crises, especially wars, and only after a process of escalation. Leaders need to galvanize and sustain far-flung operations of violence involving multiple actors. These and other factors matter, as I discuss in the book. But I conclude that to explain variationto explain why countries with similar crises experience different outcomesthe role of ideology is essential.
The sources of ideology are notoriously difficult to pin down. I take a view that history delivers a package of available ideas and that material conditions constrain the range of available options but also that prominent leaders have some autonomy in synthesizing and developing particular ideologies. In that way, I assign importance to leaders, and, as far as Africa is concerned, I place particular emphasis on the lasting legacy of the first generation of leaders.
For genocide, the key issue is how leaders define the primary political community and the main project of the state. Ideologies that identify a specific category of people as the main population whose interests the state promotes are the ideologies that are most prone to genocide. I call these ideas founding narratives in that they tell a fundamental story about the character and purpose of a state.
The risk of genocide increases when state leaders associate a significant material threat, generally a military one, with a category of people that differs from the primary political community. In such situations, state leaders are more likely to define the enemy as a social category and victory over the enemy as destruction of that social category. By contrast, in places where the primary political community is not defined in terms of one social category over another, that logic is difficult to imagine and sustain.
My story about the origins of genocide assigns importance to political agency. Leaders make crucial decisions at critical historical junctures about how to frame the founding narratives of the state. Moreover, elites in later time periods face the same choicethey can choose to abandon, challenge, or follow the founding narratives that precede them. Every choice is not equal. Moving away from a founding narrative can be politically costly, but nonetheless there is a degree of autonomy in decision-making.
My explanation is elite-centric. However, genocide is not just an elite story. Genocide requires local-level actors to identify, sort, and often inflict violence against civilian groups. Some joint coordination between national and local actorswhether in a formal, centralized way or in a more informal, decentralized wayis necessary for large-scale violence against civilians to take place.
The book has some other, related implications. For example, I come away unconvinced that genocide is a fully conceived strategy. To be sure, there are exceptions, such as the later stages of the Holocaust where detailed planning to exterminate the Jews and other groups took place. But in most cases genocide is the expression of a particular logic of violence. Leaders typically do not sit down and map out extermination as the best way to retain power. Rather, they say, in effect: We face a major threat from some malicious group, and we have to do whatever it takes to defeat them. In other words, the search for a genocide plan or conspiracyas scholars and international criminal justice lawyers frequently dois likely to mislead. I am not saying that the violence in these cases is not deliberate, systematic, widespread, organized, and exterminatory. It is genocide. But the end goal may be vague even to those who unleash the violence.
Finally, this is a book not only about genocide and political violence but also about Africa. Pairing violence with Africa might seem to reinforce a stereotype of a continent where atrocity and conflict run amok. But Africa is not exceptionally violent, and there is significant variation across the continent in terms of the frequency and intensity of violence. Africa is not monolithic.
More importantly, I credit the visions of some leaders who crafted ultimately positive paths for their countries. Contemporary scholars and policy-makers tend to downplay leadership and ideology as vacuous or superficial; given the generally poor outcomes across the continent in the 1970s and 1980s many now disparage the first three decades of African political development. Even though this is a book about genocide, I beg to disagree.
I have worked on this book for a long time, and I have incurred many debts as a result. I start by acknowledging how much I learned from those I interviewed in the field. I took several trips to Cte dIvoire, especially, but also to Mali and Senegal, and I tried to take seriously what smart Ivoirians, Malians, and Senegalese told me. I can remember one interview in particular with a since-deceased Ivoirian intellectual, Bernard Zadi, in which he told me that genocide would never happen in Cte dIvoire. Why, I pressed? Because, he said, the countrys first president had over and over again emphasized the values of tolerance, and those values had permeated the countrys political culture. At the timeon one of my first visits to Cte dIvoireI thought that Professor Zadis ideas were interesting but old-fashioned. But I kept thinking about it; I kept interviewing more Ivoirians; I came back to speak with him; I traveled to other countries; I thought about my experiences in Rwanda and Sudan and my knowledge of other cases, such as the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, the former Yugoslavia, and Cambodia. In the end, I have come to believe that Professor Zadi was incredibly insightful. And Id like to recognize not only his wisdom but also the wisdom of all those who answered my many questions.
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