ABSTRACT
Structural approaches to the causes-of-war question rest on an assumption of rational agency, often represented as the basis for strategic decision-making by political elites. This does not, however, tell us why it is rational for “ordinary people,” the people whose lives and property are put at risk, whose towns and villages become battlefields, and whose loved ones will die, to carry out the violence of war. War may or may not be rational from the perspective of elites. It may strengthen or erode their hold on power, if that is what we mean by rational, or they may obtain personal economic gains for themselves, their families, and friends, if that is what we mean by rational. But elites do not fight wars. Violence may also be “rational” for criminals whose exploits create a lucrative black market for stolen and contraband goods. But for the millions who become internally and internationally displaced persons and the hundreds of thousands of victims and families of victims raped, tortured, and murdered, wasn’t the war, in ex-Yugoslavia anyway, at least as emotional as it was rational? How is it that ordinary people are persuaded to act on the wishes of elites, rational, strategic, or otherwise? There is a point in the course of political violence when the experience and climate of violence creates and sustains its own logic without regard for either the rationality of “strategic thinking” or the primordial imperatives of “ethnic conflict.”1 This is more likely to happen when the locus of violence is decentered, lacking organization and a clear line of command and responsibility, as in exYugoslavia or Rwanda.2 This is partly Goldhagen’s point-that many “ordinary” Germans willingly and voluntarily engaged in acts of inhumanity, including murder, against Jews, with little or no authoritative or official prompting.3 Once violence is experienced personally, however, its emotional underpinnings are laid bare, and perhaps the only real question then is whether one will remain content, and restrained, in the role of victim, or not. In 1997 I heard the story of one
young woman who finally found her way to a rape crisis program in Zagreb. She had been captured and imprisoned by Serb soldiers at the age of fourteen. During six months of captivity, she was repeatedly raped, including sexual assaults involving penetration with the barrel of a rifle. At first, she said, she had no idea why she was released after six months rather than killed, though she guessed that her captors expected that her trauma would suffice to send her family fleeing their home, never to return to the site containing the memory of such unimaginable horrors. She was not content to be a victim, however, and upon release she became a “soldier” in this “ethnic war,” and, by her own admission was driven by rage to “kill as many Serbs as possible” over the next year as the war continued. At the age of sixteen, after seeking treatment in Zagreb, she emigrated to the United States.4 So what should we say, from her perspective, or from the perspective of her perpetrators and later her victims, was the “cause” of war?
