BOOK REVIEW

Genocide, risk and resilience: An interdisciplinary approach, edited byBert Ingelaere, Stephan Parmentier, Jacques Haers and Barbara Segaert.Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. x + 231 pp. £65.00 (hardback). ISBN978 0 230 24376 7.

One would hardly expect a volume on genocide to make for easy reading. Notonly does the subject matter push our understanding of humanity to its limits, butsince the early 1990s the developing field of genocide studies has evolved primarilywithin a legal framework (with some notable exceptions). This edited volume bucksthat trend. It provides a series of relatively short, pithy chapters by scholars in polit-ical science, history, law, philosophy, anthropology, and theology, and therebystretches the bounds of scholarship on genocide.

The volume as a whole seeks to blur the distinctions between risk and resilience,prevention and coping, and origins and aftermaths, and focuses not only on the de-structive vision of genocide, but also on the multiple and often localized forms of re-sistance and recovery that are typically overlooked. It is this emphasis on resistanceand mitigating factors that really breaks new ground. Furthermore, the strength ofthe book lies not only in what it does, but what it does not do: it does not compart-mentalize Africa as a site of particular violence, and it is not driven by rights lan-guage and agendas. It therefore allows us to draw parallels between differentcontexts and historical periods in which the ‘otherness’ of Africa, and the multiplepolicy agendas associated with it, is not the starting point for analysis.

The first section of the book sets up a theoretical framework for a series of casestudies in the second section. Martin Shaw’s opening chapter sets the tone by pro-moting a broad definition of genocide, seeking to wrest debate out of a relativelynarrow legal arena favoured by international human rights interlocutors. As heargues, broadening our approach beyond a legal definition of genocide should allowfor a more nuanced engagement, not least in a context in which the adoption of theGenocide Convention has not had ‘any discernable influence on the incidence ofgenocide’ (p. 30). For anyone sceptical about the motivation behind the concept ofthe Responsibility to Protect (R2P) and its potential to justify military intervention,right from the start the volume takes the discussion into a broader and more flexibledisciplinary arena.

This new opening invites René Lemarchand, in Chapter 2, to conclude thatwhile the costs of translating ends into policy are well understood, the issue of howto define an agenda ‘inspired by an ethic of responsibility’ is far more complex.‘Exactly how to navigate between the two, without surrendering to moral absolutismor indifference, is where the real challenge lies for human rights activists and policymakers’ (p. 47).

Stephen McLoughlin and Deborah Mayersen develop this idea (Chapter 3) bytalking about the dangers inherent in an approach that focuses exclusively on theroot causes of genocide and overlooks the mechanisms that limit violence. As their

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argument implies, over-simplified analyses lead to over-simplified prescriptionsbased on a misdiagnosis of the problem. They argue that while ‘mass atrocity risklists’ might have some value for early warning, in practice they ignore factors thatprevent mass atrocity from taking place. This formulaic approach, they argue, hascontributed to a dearth of research about ‘mitigating and protective factors that mayeffectively prevent genocide in many of the at-risk nations on the list’ (p. 59).

The case studies build on these ideas, incorporating issues that have wider rele-vance than the places they represent. They cover genocidal violence in disparatelocations including Bosnia, Armenia, Poland, and Rwanda, and deal both with epi-sodes of genocide that tend to be relegated to history, as well as those that remaincontemporary and raw. Chris Jones (Chapter 9), in the context of the French re-sponse to the crisis in Bosnia, talks of how humanitarianism, where it fails to chal-lenge the economic and political context in which genocide takes place, canreinforce the political system that allowed it to happen. Ugur Ümit Üngör (Chapter 11)considers the relationship between genocide and property transfer, or dispossession,and hones in on the interaction between national policies and local dynamics.

Most notably, Ingelaere, in the final chapter, presents a concise analysis ofRwanda’s gacaca courts. He highlights two deficiencies in the process: the inabilityof the courts to deal with the broader context of violence in which the genocide tookplace (including violence associated with the civil war, revenge killings by Tutsi civi-lians, and crimes committed by the Rwandan Patriotic Army that seized power in1994), and the disjuncture between popularly embodied experiences and under-standings of the conflict and government-controlled narratives on the past. As aresult, ‘The gacaca process created a mass of hidden death and unexpressed grie-vances under the surface of daily life. As a self-fulfilling prophecy it might have per-petuated what it was supposedly eradicating – ethnic subcultures’ (p. 212). Thestrength of his analysis lies in its empirical basis, which draws on 30 months of fieldresearch between 2005 and 2012. In a context in which wider debates and positionson Rwanda are highly fraught, it provides a powerful contribution to this discussionand creates a strong platform for understanding ongoing tensions not only withinRwanda but also in the broader region.

Ingelaere’s findings therefore encapsulate many of the strengths of the book,which demonstrate the dangers inherent in an exclusive focus on genocide as a crim-inal act without taking into consideration the broader cultural, social, and politicalcontext in which it takes place. Furthermore, freed from the constraints of analysinggenocide within a primarily legal paradigm, the book asks us to question not onlywhy genocide takes place, but why it does not.

International Refugee Rights Initiative LUCY HOVILlucy@hovil.co.uk

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