ABSTRACT
To date, most scholarly research on violent ethnic cleansing and genocide has focused on its legal and ethical dimensions and been driven by the attempt to legally define a particular form of crime and to seek the allocation of responsibility. Rather than the allocation of blame and responsibility, the sociologist’s central questions regarding murderous ethnic cleansing are rather different in asking ‘how, why and when do genocides happen?’ in particular places and at particular times. As social scientists we are concerned then with understanding and explaining the social logic of these collective processes in terms of their origins, trajectories and outcomes. A key theme of the chapter concerns the degree to which the organized brutality of murderous ethnic violence represents the ‘dark side’ of both mass democracy and the nation-state specifically, and of rationalizing modernity more generally (see Chapter 3 above). This chapter also examines how such phenomena as murderous ethnic cleansing ‘test’ the value of the core concepts and premises of the classical sociological imagination developed across the first five chapters. It is now widely acknowledged that ‘crimes against humanity’ such as genocide and large-scale, violent ‘state crimes’ have until recently been largely ignored by, or more accurately bracketed out, of the mainstream criminological research enterprise. In the first part of the chapter the developing body of criminological theory and research, both ‘critical’ and ‘mainstream’, which seeks to break the traditional ‘disciplinary silence’ in criminology on state crime, atrocity crimes and genocide is assessed. In the second part of the chapter, key contributions from historical and figurational sociology on murderous ethnic cleansing and genocides are then examined. In particular, Michael Mann’s (2005) comparative and developmental sociology of murderous ethnic cleansing is assessed. It is argued that Mann’s work (to date ignored in the criminological literature) makes a major contribution to the radical rethinking of the current debate on modernity, state crime and genocide across sociology and criminology. The chapter ends by examining contributions from process-sociology to understanding the implications of Nazism and the Holocaust for testing, and possibly refuting, Elias’ theory of the European civilizing process. Overall, it is concluded that criminological research-theorizing into collective violence and the often brutal territorial (re)ordering of populations in nation-states has much to gain from deploying and adapting the conceptual programme of the classical sociological imagination. At the same time, the empirical contribution of current criminological scholarship into atrocity crimes, state crimes and mass lethal violence also needs to be acknowledged and embedded in the under-developed debate in sociology on collective violence. As a result of this two-way process of learning we would be able to move towards the intellectual ‘rapprochement’ between sociology and criminology for which Chapter 1 argued.
