Rulers as mass murderers: Political institutions and human insecurity

Mass killings orchestrated by rulers can be traced back to the beginnings of history. Even in the twentieth century – an age of carpet bombing, blitzkrieg, and two atomic bomb attacks – the dominant threat to human security has not been the perpetrators of interstate violence, but governments engaged in attacks on their own civilian population. The dreadful litany of cases of genocide and politicide in the second half of the twentieth century includes inter alia: Suharto’s Indonesia 1965 (Dwyer and Santikarma, 2003); Mao’s China 1958-1961 and 1966-1969 (Chang and Halliday, 2005); Rios Montt’s Guatemala 1981-1983 (Grandin, 2003); and Pol Pot’s Kampuchea (Midlarsky, 2005).