t h e ca m b r i d g e w o r ld h i s t o r y o f

VIOLENCE

This book explores one of the most intractable problems of

human existence – our propensity to inflict violence. It provides
readers with case studies of political, social, economic, religious,
structural and interpersonal violence from across the entire globe
since 1800. It also examines the changing representations of
violence in diverse media and the cultural significance of its
commemoration. Together, the chapters provide in-depth
understanding of the ways that humans have perpetrated
violence, justified its use, attempted to contain its spread and
narrated the stories of its impacts. Readers also gain insight into
the mechanisms by which the parameters about the acceptable
limits to and locations of violence have dramatically altered over
the course of a few decades. Leading experts from around the
world have pooled their knowledge to provide concise,
authoritative examinations of the complex phenomenon of
human violence. Annotated bibliographies provide overviews of
the shape of the research field.

LOUISE EDWARDS is Scientia Professor of Chinese History at the

University of New South Wales, Sydney. Her research explores
women in politics in China and Asia and gendered cultures of war in
China, as well as Chinese literature and intellectual history. Her most
recent sole-authored books include Gender Politics and Democracy:
Women’s Suffrage in China (2008), Women Warriors and Wartime Spies
of China (2016) and Citizens of Beauty: Drawing Democratic Dreams in
Republican China (2020). Professor Edwards is a Fellow of the Australian
Academy of the Social Sciences, the Australian Academy of the
Humanities and the Hong Kong Academy of the Humanities.
N I G E L P E N N is Professor of History at the University of Cape Town.
He has written about the impact of colonialism on the Khoisan
societies of southern Africa and on the nature of early colonial
society in both the Dutch and the British periods. He is the co-editor
of several books including Written Culture in a Colonial Context: Africa
and the Americas, 1500–1900 (with Adrien Delmas 2011, 2012) and most
recently Science, Africa and Europe: Processing Information and Creating
Knowledge (with Martin Lengwiler and Patrick Harries, 2019). Among
his sole-authored books is The Forgotten Frontier: Colonist and Khoisan on
the Cape’s Northern Frontier in the Eighteenth Century (2005).
JAY WINTER is Charles J. Stille Professor of History Emeritus at Yale
University. He is a specialist on World War I and its impact on the
twentieth century, and the author or co-author of Socialism and the
Challenge of War: Ideas and Politics in Britain, 1912–18; Sites of Memory,
Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History; The Great
War and the Shaping of the 20th Century: Rene Cassin and the Rights of
Man; and most recently, War beyond Words: Languages of Remembrance
from the Great War to the Present. He received honorary doctorates
from the University of Graz, the University of Paris-VIII, and the
Katholieke University of Leuven. He is a founder of the Research
Centre of the Historial de la Grande Guerre, at Péronne, Somme,
France.
 t h e ca m b r i d g e h i s t o r y of
VIOLENCE
General Editors
Philip Dwyer, University of Newcastle, New South Wales
Joy Damousi, University of Melbourne

This four-volume Cambridge World History of Violence is the first

collection of its kind to look at violence across different periods of
human history and different regions of the world. It capitalises on
the growing scholarly interest in the history of violence, which is
emerging as one of the key intellectual issues of our time. The
volumes take into account the latest scholarship in the field and
comprise the work of nearly 140 scholars, who have contributed
substantial chapters to provide an authoritative treatment of
violence from a multiplicity of perspectives. The collection thus
offers the reader a wide-ranging thematic treatment of the
historical contexts of different types of violence, as well as
a compendium of experience shared by peoples across time.

VOLUME I
The Prehistoric and Ancient Worlds
edited by garrett g. fagan, linda fibiger, mark hudson and
matthew trundle

VOLUME II
500–1500 C E
edited by matthew s. gordon, richard w. kaeuper and
harriet zurndorfer

VOLUME III
1500–1800 C E
edited by robert antony, stuart carroll and
caroline dodds pennock

VOLUME IV
1800 to the Present
edited by louise edwards, nigel penn and jay winter
 THE CAMBRIDGE
WORLD HISTORY OF
VIOLENCE
*

VOLUME IV
1800 to the Present
*

Edited by
LOUISE EDWARDS
University of New South Wales, Sydney
NIGEL PENN
University of Cape Town
JAY WINTER
Yale University
 University Printing House, Cambridge C B 2 8B S, United Kingdom
One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, N Y 10006, USA
477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, V I C 3207, Australia
314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre,
New Delhi – 110025, India
79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of
education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence.

www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107151567
D O I: 10.1017/9781316585023

© Cambridge University Press 2020

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2020
Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd, Padstow Cornwall
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.
Four-volume set I S B N 978-1-316-62688-7 Hardback
Volume I I S B N 978-1-107-12012-9 Hardback
Volume I I I S B N 978-1-107-15638-8 Hardback
Volume I I I I S B N 978-1-107-11911-6 Hardback
Volume I V I S B N 978-1-107-15156-7 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of
URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
 t h e ca m b r i d g e w o r ld h i s t o r y o f
VIOLENCE

This book explores one of the most intractable problems of

human existence – our propensity to inflict violence. It provides
readers with case studies of political, social, economic, religious,
structural and interpersonal violence from across the entire globe
since 1800. It also examines the changing representations of
violence in diverse media and the cultural significance of its
commemoration. Together, the chapters provide in-depth
understanding of the ways that humans have perpetrated
violence, justified its use, attempted to contain its spread and
narrated the stories of its impacts. Readers also gain insight into
the mechanisms by which the parameters about the acceptable
limits to and locations of violence have dramatically altered over
the course of a few decades. Leading experts from around the
world have pooled their knowledge to provide concise,
authoritative examinations of the complex phenomenon of
human violence. Annotated bibliographies provide overviews of
the shape of the research field.

LOUISE EDWARDS is Scientia Professor of Chinese History at the

University of New South Wales, Sydney. Her research explores
women in politics in China and Asia and gendered cultures of war in
China, as well as Chinese literature and intellectual history. Her most
recent sole-authored books include Gender Politics and Democracy:
Women’s Suffrage in China (2008), Women Warriors and Wartime Spies
of China (2016) and Citizens of Beauty: Drawing Democratic Dreams in
Republican China (2020). Professor Edwards is a Fellow of the Australian
Academy of the Social Sciences, the Australian Academy of the
Humanities and the Hong Kong Academy of the Humanities.
N I G E L P E N N is Professor of History at the University of Cape Town.
He has written about the impact of colonialism on the Khoisan
societies of southern Africa and on the nature of early colonial
society in both the Dutch and the British periods. He is the co-editor
of several books including Written Culture in a Colonial Context: Africa
and the Americas, 1500–1900 (with Adrien Delmas 2011, 2012) and most
recently Science, Africa and Europe: Processing Information and Creating
Knowledge (with Martin Lengwiler and Patrick Harries, 2019). Among
his sole-authored books is The Forgotten Frontier: Colonist and Khoisan on
the Cape’s Northern Frontier in the Eighteenth Century (2005).
JAY WINTER is Charles J. Stille Professor of History Emeritus at Yale
University. He is a specialist on World War I and its impact on the
twentieth century, and the author or co-author of Socialism and the
Challenge of War: Ideas and Politics in Britain, 1912–18; Sites of Memory,
Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History; The Great
War and the Shaping of the 20th Century: Rene Cassin and the Rights of
Man; and most recently, War beyond Words: Languages of Remembrance
from the Great War to the Present. He received honorary doctorates
from the University of Graz, the University of Paris-VIII, and the
Katholieke University of Leuven. He is a founder of the Research
Centre of the Historial de la Grande Guerre, at Péronne, Somme,
France.
 t h e ca m b r i d g e h i s t o r y of
VIOLENCE
General Editors
Philip Dwyer, University of Newcastle, New South Wales
Joy Damousi, University of Melbourne

This four-volume Cambridge World History of Violence is the first

collection of its kind to look at violence across different periods of
human history and different regions of the world. It capitalises on
the growing scholarly interest in the history of violence, which is
emerging as one of the key intellectual issues of our time. The
volumes take into account the latest scholarship in the field and
comprise the work of nearly 140 scholars, who have contributed
substantial chapters to provide an authoritative treatment of
violence from a multiplicity of perspectives. The collection thus
offers the reader a wide-ranging thematic treatment of the
historical contexts of different types of violence, as well as
a compendium of experience shared by peoples across time.

VOLUME I
The Prehistoric and Ancient Worlds
edited by garrett g. fagan, linda fibiger, mark hudson and
matthew trundle

VOLUME II
500–1500 C E
edited by matthew s. gordon, richard w. kaeuper and
harriet zurndorfer

VOLUME III
1500–1800 C E
edited by robert antony, stuart carroll and
caroline dodds pennock

VOLUME IV
1800 to the Present
edited by louise edwards, nigel penn and jay winter
 THE CAMBRIDGE
WORLD HISTORY OF
VIOLENCE
*

VOLUME IV
1800 to the Present
*

Edited by
LOUISE EDWARDS
University of New South Wales, Sydney
NIGEL PENN
University of Cape Town
JAY WINTER
Yale University
 University Printing House, Cambridge C B 2 8B S, United Kingdom
One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, N Y 10006, USA
477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, V I C 3207, Australia
314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre,
New Delhi – 110025, India
79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of
education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence.

www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107151567
D O I: 10.1017/9781316585023

© Cambridge University Press 2020

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2020
Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd, Padstow Cornwall
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.
Four-volume set I S B N 978-1-316-62688-7 Hardback
Volume I I S B N 978-1-107-12012-9 Hardback
Volume I I I S B N 978-1-107-15638-8 Hardback
Volume I I I I S B N 978-1-107-11911-6 Hardback
Volume I V I S B N 978-1-107-15156-7 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of
URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
 t h e ca m b r i d g e w o r ld h i s t o r y o f
VIOLENCE

This book explores one of the most intractable problems of

human existence – our propensity to inflict violence. It provides
readers with case studies of political, social, economic, religious,
structural and interpersonal violence from across the entire globe
since 1800. It also examines the changing representations of
violence in diverse media and the cultural significance of its
commemoration. Together, the chapters provide in-depth
understanding of the ways that humans have perpetrated
violence, justified its use, attempted to contain its spread and
narrated the stories of its impacts. Readers also gain insight into
the mechanisms by which the parameters about the acceptable
limits to and locations of violence have dramatically altered over
the course of a few decades. Leading experts from around the
world have pooled their knowledge to provide concise,
authoritative examinations of the complex phenomenon of
human violence. Annotated bibliographies provide overviews of
the shape of the research field.

LOUISE EDWARDS is Scientia Professor of Chinese History at the

University of New South Wales, Sydney. Her research explores
women in politics in China and Asia and gendered cultures of war in
China, as well as Chinese literature and intellectual history. Her most
recent sole-authored books include Gender Politics and Democracy:
Women’s Suffrage in China (2008), Women Warriors and Wartime Spies
of China (2016) and Citizens of Beauty: Drawing Democratic Dreams in
Republican China (2020). Professor Edwards is a Fellow of the Australian
Academy of the Social Sciences, the Australian Academy of the
Humanities and the Hong Kong Academy of the Humanities.
N I G E L P E N N is Professor of History at the University of Cape Town.
He has written about the impact of colonialism on the Khoisan
societies of southern Africa and on the nature of early colonial
society in both the Dutch and the British periods. He is the co-editor
of several books including Written Culture in a Colonial Context: Africa
and the Americas, 1500–1900 (with Adrien Delmas 2011, 2012) and most
recently Science, Africa and Europe: Processing Information and Creating
Knowledge (with Martin Lengwiler and Patrick Harries, 2019). Among
his sole-authored books is The Forgotten Frontier: Colonist and Khoisan on
the Cape’s Northern Frontier in the Eighteenth Century (2005).
JAY WINTER is Charles J. Stille Professor of History Emeritus at Yale
University. He is a specialist on World War I and its impact on the
twentieth century, and the author or co-author of Socialism and the
Challenge of War: Ideas and Politics in Britain, 1912–18; Sites of Memory,
Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History; The Great
War and the Shaping of the 20th Century: Rene Cassin and the Rights of
Man; and most recently, War beyond Words: Languages of Remembrance
from the Great War to the Present. He received honorary doctorates
from the University of Graz, the University of Paris-VIII, and the
Katholieke University of Leuven. He is a founder of the Research
Centre of the Historial de la Grande Guerre, at Péronne, Somme,
France.
 t h e ca m b r i d g e h i s t o r y of
VIOLENCE
General Editors
Philip Dwyer, University of Newcastle, New South Wales
Joy Damousi, University of Melbourne

This four-volume Cambridge World History of Violence is the first

collection of its kind to look at violence across different periods of
human history and different regions of the world. It capitalises on
the growing scholarly interest in the history of violence, which is
emerging as one of the key intellectual issues of our time. The
volumes take into account the latest scholarship in the field and
comprise the work of nearly 140 scholars, who have contributed
substantial chapters to provide an authoritative treatment of
violence from a multiplicity of perspectives. The collection thus
offers the reader a wide-ranging thematic treatment of the
historical contexts of different types of violence, as well as
a compendium of experience shared by peoples across time.

VOLUME I
The Prehistoric and Ancient Worlds
edited by garrett g. fagan, linda fibiger, mark hudson and
matthew trundle

VOLUME II
500–1500 C E
edited by matthew s. gordon, richard w. kaeuper and
harriet zurndorfer

VOLUME III
1500–1800 C E
edited by robert antony, stuart carroll and
caroline dodds pennock

VOLUME IV
1800 to the Present
edited by louise edwards, nigel penn and jay winter
 THE CAMBRIDGE
WORLD HISTORY OF
VIOLENCE
*

VOLUME IV
1800 to the Present
*

Edited by
LOUISE EDWARDS
University of New South Wales, Sydney
NIGEL PENN
University of Cape Town
JAY WINTER
Yale University
 University Printing House, Cambridge C B 2 8B S, United Kingdom
One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, N Y 10006, USA
477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, V I C 3207, Australia
314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre,
New Delhi – 110025, India
79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of
education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence.

www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107151567
D O I: 10.1017/9781316585023

© Cambridge University Press 2020

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2020
Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd, Padstow Cornwall
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.
Four-volume set I S B N 978-1-316-62688-7 Hardback
Volume I I S B N 978-1-107-12012-9 Hardback
Volume I I I S B N 978-1-107-15638-8 Hardback
Volume I I I I S B N 978-1-107-11911-6 Hardback
Volume I V I S B N 978-1-107-15156-7 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of
URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
 t h e ca m b r i d g e w o r ld h i s t o r y o f
VIOLENCE

This book explores one of the most intractable problems of

human existence – our propensity to inflict violence. It provides
readers with case studies of political, social, economic, religious,
structural and interpersonal violence from across the entire globe
since 1800. It also examines the changing representations of
violence in diverse media and the cultural significance of its
commemoration. Together, the chapters provide in-depth
understanding of the ways that humans have perpetrated
violence, justified its use, attempted to contain its spread and
narrated the stories of its impacts. Readers also gain insight into
the mechanisms by which the parameters about the acceptable
limits to and locations of violence have dramatically altered over
the course of a few decades. Leading experts from around the
world have pooled their knowledge to provide concise,
authoritative examinations of the complex phenomenon of
human violence. Annotated bibliographies provide overviews of
the shape of the research field.

LOUISE EDWARDS is Scientia Professor of Chinese History at the

University of New South Wales, Sydney. Her research explores
women in politics in China and Asia and gendered cultures of war in
China, as well as Chinese literature and intellectual history. Her most
recent sole-authored books include Gender Politics and Democracy:
Women’s Suffrage in China (2008), Women Warriors and Wartime Spies
of China (2016) and Citizens of Beauty: Drawing Democratic Dreams in
Republican China (2020). Professor Edwards is a Fellow of the Australian
Academy of the Social Sciences, the Australian Academy of the
Humanities and the Hong Kong Academy of the Humanities.
N I G E L P E N N is Professor of History at the University of Cape Town.
He has written about the impact of colonialism on the Khoisan
societies of southern Africa and on the nature of early colonial
society in both the Dutch and the British periods. He is the co-editor
of several books including Written Culture in a Colonial Context: Africa
and the Americas, 1500–1900 (with Adrien Delmas 2011, 2012) and most
recently Science, Africa and Europe: Processing Information and Creating
Knowledge (with Martin Lengwiler and Patrick Harries, 2019). Among
his sole-authored books is The Forgotten Frontier: Colonist and Khoisan on
the Cape’s Northern Frontier in the Eighteenth Century (2005).
JAY WINTER is Charles J. Stille Professor of History Emeritus at Yale
University. He is a specialist on World War I and its impact on the
twentieth century, and the author or co-author of Socialism and the
Challenge of War: Ideas and Politics in Britain, 1912–18; Sites of Memory,
Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History; The Great
War and the Shaping of the 20th Century: Rene Cassin and the Rights of
Man; and most recently, War beyond Words: Languages of Remembrance
from the Great War to the Present. He received honorary doctorates
from the University of Graz, the University of Paris-VIII, and the
Katholieke University of Leuven. He is a founder of the Research
Centre of the Historial de la Grande Guerre, at Péronne, Somme,
France.
 t h e ca m b r i d g e h i s t o r y of
VIOLENCE
General Editors
Philip Dwyer, University of Newcastle, New South Wales
Joy Damousi, University of Melbourne

This four-volume Cambridge World History of Violence is the first

collection of its kind to look at violence across different periods of
human history and different regions of the world. It capitalises on
the growing scholarly interest in the history of violence, which is
emerging as one of the key intellectual issues of our time. The
volumes take into account the latest scholarship in the field and
comprise the work of nearly 140 scholars, who have contributed
substantial chapters to provide an authoritative treatment of
violence from a multiplicity of perspectives. The collection thus
offers the reader a wide-ranging thematic treatment of the
historical contexts of different types of violence, as well as
a compendium of experience shared by peoples across time.

VOLUME I
The Prehistoric and Ancient Worlds
edited by garrett g. fagan, linda fibiger, mark hudson and
matthew trundle

VOLUME II
500–1500 C E
edited by matthew s. gordon, richard w. kaeuper and
harriet zurndorfer

VOLUME III
1500–1800 C E
edited by robert antony, stuart carroll and
caroline dodds pennock

VOLUME IV
1800 to the Present
edited by louise edwards, nigel penn and jay winter
 THE CAMBRIDGE
WORLD HISTORY OF
VIOLENCE
*

VOLUME IV
1800 to the Present
*

Edited by
LOUISE EDWARDS
University of New South Wales, Sydney
NIGEL PENN
University of Cape Town
JAY WINTER
Yale University
 University Printing House, Cambridge C B 2 8B S, United Kingdom
One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, N Y 10006, USA
477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, V I C 3207, Australia
314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre,
New Delhi – 110025, India
79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of
education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence.

www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107151567
D O I: 10.1017/9781316585023

© Cambridge University Press 2020

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2020
Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd, Padstow Cornwall
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.
Four-volume set I S B N 978-1-316-62688-7 Hardback
Volume I I S B N 978-1-107-12012-9 Hardback
Volume I I I S B N 978-1-107-15638-8 Hardback
Volume I I I I S B N 978-1-107-11911-6 Hardback
Volume I V I S B N 978-1-107-15156-7 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of
URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
 Contents

List of Figures and Maps page xi

List of Contributors to Volume I V xii

Introduction to Volume IV 1
louise edwards (university of new south wales, sydney),
nigel penn (university of cape town) and jay winter
(yale university)

part i
RACE, RELIGION AND NATIONALISM 19

1 . Empires and Indigenous Worlds: Violence and the Pacific Ocean,

1760 to 1930s 21
patricia o’brien (école des hautes études en sciences
sociales)

2 . Heresy and Banditry: Religious Violence in China since 1850 41

thomas david dubois (fudan university development
institute)

3 . Violence, Non-Violence, the State and the Nation: India, 1858–1958 68

kama maclean (university of new south wales) and
benjamin zachariah (university of trier)

4 . Racial Violence in the United States since the Civil War 88

jason morgan ward (emory university)

5 . Religion and Violence in Modern South Asia 110

mark juergensmeyer (university of california)

6 . Coercion and Violence in the Middle East 125

hamit bozarslan (école des hautes études en sciences
sociales)

vii
 Contents

part ii
INTIMATE AND GENDERED VIOLENCE 145

7 . A Global History of Sexual Violence 147

joanna bourke (birkbeck college, university of london)

8 . Sexual Violence against Children: A Global Perspective 168

lisa featherstone (university of queensland)

9 . Homicide in a Global Perspective: Between Marginalisation

and Resurgence 187
pieter spierenburg (erasmus university, rotterdam)

10 . Violence and Sport, 1800–2000 207

emma griffin (university of east anglia)

part iii
WARFARE, COLONIALISM AND EMPIRE
IN THE MODERN WORLD 225

11 . Frontier Violence in the Nineteenth-Century British Empire 227

amanda nettelbeck (university of adelaide, australia)
and lyndall ryan (university of newcastle, australia)

12 . Genealogies of Modern Violence: Arendt and Imperialism

in Africa, 1830–1914 246
benjamin claude brower (university of texas at austin)

13 . Religious Dynamics and the Politics of Violence in the Late

Ottoman and Post-Ottoman Levant 263
hans-lukas kieser (university of newcastle, australia,
and university of zurich)

14 . Violence and the First World War 286

bruno cabanes (ohio state university)

15 . Witnessing and Fighting Nazi Violence during World War II 304

jochen hellbeck (rutgers university)

16 . Violence and the Japanese Empire 326

takashi yoshida (western michigan university)

viii
 Contents

part iv
THE STATE, REVOLUTION AND
SOCIAL CHANGE 345

17 . Change and Continuity in Collective Violence in France, 1780–1880 347

peter mcphee (university of melbourne) and jeremy teow
(princeton university)

18 . Geographies of Genocide: The European Rimlands, 1912–1948 367

mark levene (university of southampton)

19 . Concentration Camps 386

dan stone (royal holloway, university of london)

20 . Violence in Revolutionary China, 1949–1963 408

zhou xun (university of essex)

21 . Anti-Communist Violence in Indonesia, 1965–1966 427

gerry van klinken (university of amsterdam)

22 . The Violence of the Cold War 449

heonik kwon (trinity college, university of cambridge)

23 . Quotidian Violence in the French Empire, 1890–1940 468

james p. daughton (stanford university)

24 . Violence, the State and Revolution in Latin America 490

robert h. holden (old dominion university, norfolk,
virginia)

25 . Structural Violence during the Cambodian Genocide, 1975–1979 510

james a.tyner (kent state university)

26 . The Origins of Modern Terrorism 532

randall d. law (birmingham-southern college,
birmingham, alabama)

ix
 Contents

part v
REPRESENTATIONS AND CONSTRUCTIONS OF
VIOLENCE 559

27 . Criminal Violence and Culture in Europe 561

clive emsley (open university)

28 . Extreme Violence in Western Cinema 580

james kendrick (baylor university)

29 . Representing Violence through Media 598

jolyon mitchell (university of edinburgh)

30 . ‘Never Forget that This Has Happened’: Remembering and Forgetting

Violence 616
joy damousi (university of melbourne), jordana
silverstein (university of melbourne) and mary tomsic
(university of melbourne)

Index 637

x
 Figures and Maps

Figures
2.1 Qing troops storming the Taiping capital of Nanjing. Universal Images
Group / Getty Images. page 48
2.2 ‘Starving people looting grain’. Universal Images Group / Getty Images. 54
2.3 Boxers in Beijing, 1900. Universal Images Group / Getty Images. 55
2.4 Looting of the Catholic church in Shenyang, 1900. Universal History
Archive / Getty Images. 57
2.5 Execution of a Boxer in Beijing. Universal Images Group / Getty Images. 58
2.6 Propaganda serial depicting the crimes of the Way of Penetrating Unity.
Xinsheng Wanbao, April 1951, reproduced in DuBois, Sacred Village, p. 136.
Author’s collection. 61
2.7 A 2011 protest by members of Falungong in Copenhagen. Francis
Dean / Getty Images. 64
3.1 J. C. Hill, ‘The Shirted and the Shirtless’, Auckland Star, New Zealand, 1931.
From GandhiServe.org. 79
Map
2.1 Late Qing China, showing the approximate location of major religious
rebellions. Drawn by the author. page 44

xi
 Contributors to Volume I V

HA M I T BO Z A R S L A N is Director of Studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences

Sociales, Paris.

JO A N N A BO U R K E is Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London.

BE N J A M I N CL A U D E BR O W E R is Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at

Austin.

BR U N O CA B A N E S holds the Donald G. & Mary A. Dunn Chair in Modern Military History
at Ohio State University.

JO Y DA M O U S I is Professor of History at the University of Melbourne.

JA M E S P. DA U G H T O N is Associate Professor of Modern European History at Stanford

University.

TH O M A S DA V I D DU BO I S is Visiting Research Fellow at the Fudan University

Development Institute, Shanghai.

LO U I S E ED W A R D S is Scientia Professor of Chinese History at the University of New South

Wales, Australia.

CL I V E EM S L E Y is Emeritus Professor of History at the Open University in Britain.

LI S A FE A T H E R S T O N E is Associate Professor in Australian History at the University of

Queensland.

EM M A GR I F F I N is Professor of History at the University of East Anglia.

JO C H E N HE L L B E C K is Distinguished Professor of History at Rutgers University.

RO B E R T H. HO L D E N is Professor of Latin American History at Old Dominion University

in Norfolk, Virginia.

xii
 List of Contributors to Volume I V

MA R K JU E R G E N S M E Y E R is Professor of Sociology and Global Studies and Founding

Director of the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies at the University of
California, Santa Barbara.

JA M E S KE N D R I C K is Professor of Film and Digital Media at Baylor University.

HA N S -LU K A S KI E S E R is Associate Professor in the Centre for the Study of Violence at the
University of Newcastle, Australia and Adjunct Professor of History at the University of
Zurich, Switzerland.

HE O N I K KW O N is a professorial senior research fellow at Trinity College in the University

of Cambridge.

RA N D A L L D. LA W is Professor of History at Birmingham-Southern College in

Birmingham, Alabama.

MA R K LE V E N E is Reader in Comparative History at the University of Southampton.

KA M A MA C L E A N is Associate Professor of South Asian and World History at the

University of New South Wales, Sydney.

PE T E R MC P H E E is Emeritus Professor at the University of Melbourne.

JO L Y O N MI T C H E L L is Professor of Communications, Arts and Religion and DI R E C T O R of

the Centre for Theology and Public Issues at the University of Edinburgh.

AM A N D A NE T T E L B E C K is Professor of History at the University of Adelaide, Australia.

PA T R I C I A O’BR I E N is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow in the School of

History at the Australian National University.

NI G E L PE N N is Professor of History at the University of Cape Town.

LY N D A L L RY A N is Conjoint Professor of History in the Centre for the Study of Violence at

the University of Newcastle, Australia.

JO R D A N A SI L V E R S T E I N is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Historical

and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne.

PI E T E R SP I E R E N B U R G was formerly Professor of Historical Criminology at Erasmus

University, Rotterdam.

DA N ST O N E is Professor of Modern History and Director of the Holocaust Research

Institute at Royal Holloway, University of London.

xiii
 List of Contributors to Volume I V

JE R E M Y TE O W is a graduate student in the Department of History at Princeton University.

MA R Y TO M S I C is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Historical and Political

Studies at the University of Melbourne.

JA M E S A. TY N E R is a professor in the Department of Geography at Kent State University.

GE R R Y vA N KL I N K E N is a Senior Researcher at the Royal Netherlands Institute of

Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV), Leiden, and Professor of Southeast
Asian History at the University of Amsterdam.

JA Y WI N T E R is the Charles J. Stille Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University.

JA S O N MO R G A N WA R D is Professor of History at Emory University.

TA K A S H I YO S H I D A is Professor of History and Director of the Michitoshi Soga Japan

Center at Western Michigan University.

BE N J A M I N ZA C H A R I A H is a historian at the University of Trier.

ZH O U XU N is a Reader in Modern History at the University of Essex.

xiv
 Introduction to Volume IV
louise edwards, nigel penn and jay winter

Technology and Violence

The two centuries from 1800 to the present day are marked by the increasing
efficiency of the means by which humans inflict violence. The myriad causes
of violence differ little, if at all, from the other periods analysed in the first
three volumes of this collection – greed, envy, lust, anger, vanity and shame
produce interpersonal violence while differences in race, language, religion,
class or creed are common prompts justifying mass-scale violence. The novel
aspect of the years explored in this volume largely revolves around the
impact on violence of technological advances. The energy unleashed in the
Industrial Revolution spurred the rapid growth in technologies supporting
the execution, organisation, annotation and representation of violence from
1800. The digital revolution of the late twentieth and early twenty-first
centuries accelerated many of these trends with the advent of the capacity
to move information instantaneously around the globe. This volume exam-
ines the impacts of this technology-enhanced efficiency with its large-scale
acts of violence – mass deaths in minutes – hitherto unseen in human history.
It also tracks the ways that increased access to stories of and information
about violence has changed public perceptions of the parameters of legit-
imate violence at both the mass and the interpersonal level. The decreasing
public appetite for violence exists simultaneously with expanding, new forms
of leisure which have rendered representations of violence banal.
Technological advances in transportation and weaponry gave European
powers with expansionist aspirations the capacity to consolidate their hold on
vast swathes of other people’s lands in the nineteenth century. The great
empires that had typified new forms of global organisation in the centuries
1500–1800 (discussed in Volume I I I) appeared set to continue in the nineteenth
century with these new tools of travel and force. Technological change

1
 LOUISE EDWARDS, NIGEL PENN, JAY WINTER

facilitated a rapid expansion in the geographies of empire. The entire South

Asian subcontinent came firmly under Britain’s control through the 1800s,
while the French extended their control over territory in North, West and
Central Africa, in countries as diverse as present-day Algeria, Senegal, Mali,
Cameroon and Madagascar during this same century. The advance of mili-
tary technology was so dramatic that, where in 1800 conflicts were fought
with hand-held swords or bayonets and manually primed cannon, by the
2000s heat-seeking missiles and armed robots called drones are commonplace
in inter-state conflicts. Scientific advances produced efficiencies in warfare
such that 240,000 people could be destroyed by just two nuclear bombs in
Hiroshima and Nagasaki only three decades after aeroplanes first featured in
conflict. At the start of the 1800s, belligerents faced each other before attack,
while our current conflicts are conducted from computers on desktops
thousands of miles away from the target zone. As controllers of robots
perpetrate long-distance violence, light-weight, rapid fire, semi-automatic
guns designed for military conflict are brought into American schools to
settle petty, personal scores in fits of youthful rage – warzone equipment has
become a violent ‘personal accessory’.
The techniques and technologies developed through the 1800s and 1900s in
the consolidation of empires would later be used by resistance and national
liberation movements to expel the colonisers or overthrow oppressive
regimes in the twentieth century. Russian Marxists disrupted centuries of
monarchical rule in 1917, inspired by liberationist ideals that underpinned
their willingness to use violence to achieve political goals. Colonised peoples,
undergirded with modern weaponry and mass communication tools,
produced independent nations with new geographic borders – polities that
were created, built and defended with varying degrees of violence. As
empires disintegrated, the authority to wield violence increasingly accrued
to the nation state. Nationalism emerged as a powerful new form of patri-
otism that would spur both the formation of new nation states and attacks on
rivals for the land, resources and peoples therein.
New methods of recording and organising societies, coupled with the
advances in communication technologies, allowed all forms of governments –
monarchies, democracies, dictatorships and socialists – to extend their vio-
lence to larger and larger sections of their populations. Populations, counted
and categorised, could be forcibly relocated, corralled in monitored zones,
moved into workcamps, or simply executed with a speed hitherto unseen in
human history. In Germany and Poland during World War II, somewhere in
the region of 8 million Jews and Romas were identified, documented and

2
 Introduction to Volume IV

killed in newly designed facilities that pumped poisonous gas into locked
chambers. The work of modern scientists, architects and bureaucrats com-
bined to decimate specific populations in carefully planned strategies that
took years to develop but once operationalised were brutal in their efficiency.
Technologies were essential to the deployment of the power of the
modern state as that institution held claim to the legitimate use of violence.
In the twentieth century, states became killing machines with a reach they
had never had before. This required not only machines but dedicated cadres
to use them. In the extreme cases – Stalin’s Russia, Hitler’s Germany and Pol
Pot’s Cambodia – violence against enemies within and without created the
conditions for the stability of the regime itself. Without sequential paroxysms
of violence, these regimes would have collapsed. Thus, the modern state
came to devour itself.
The records and artefacts of eugenicist policies would later be used as
evidence to punish perpetrators for violence in war crimes courts and reconci-
liation tribunals – starting in earnest after World War II. International law,
backed up by the victors’ military might, emerged as an important new
technology in the International Military Tribunal’s Nuremberg Trials from
1945 and for the Far East in 1946.1 These international military courts deter-
mined both the scope of new violence – the execution of convicted war
criminals – as well as the parameters around future violence by formulating
the acceptable limits of warfare on both troops, prisoners of war (POWs) and
civilians. The brutality uncovered in these post-World War II tribunals stood as
evidence of the failure of the earlier Hague and Geneva Conventions, that had
been written and rewritten over the decades from 1899 with the goal of
protecting civilians and POWs and limiting the use of biochemical weapons.
New technologies for killing, it had been hoped, could be mitigated by new
technologies of multilateral legal agreements.
The newly available records of mass violence in the twentieth century
prompted the formulation of new rules designed to constrain violence and
set parameters around its legitimate use – led by a new global organisation, the
United Nations (UN). Global legal frameworks that outline appropriate beha-
viours between warring countries, for securing justice after outbreaks of
violence and for individuals within systems empowered to inflict violence,
are now the norm. The operations of the UN’s peacekeeping forces along with

1 Sandra Wilson, Robert Cribb, Beatrice Trefalt and Dean Aszkielowicz, Japanese War
Criminals: The Politics of Justice after the Second World War (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2017); Kevin Jon Heller, The Nuremberg Military Tribunals and the
Origins of International Criminal Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

3
 LOUISE EDWARDS, NIGEL PENN, JAY WINTER

international weapons monitoring agencies, from the second half of the

twentieth century, are emblematic of the global organisation’s attempts to
monitor and constrain violence. Outbreaks of mass violence are now framed as
‘failures’ of the UN and presented as evidence of the limits of its efficacy. The
limits of UN power were evident in the most ghastly of ways during the
massacres of Tutsi by the Hutu-led government in Rwanda in 1994 and of
Bosnian Muslim men in former Yugoslavia in 1995, in which between 500,000
and 1 million Rwandans and 8,000 Bosnian men and boys were killed, respec-
tively. The massacre in Srebrenica of these men and boys represented just
a small fraction of the death toll of Bosnians during this war. Both massacres
occurred despite a UN presence. Nonetheless, the UN as a forum has nego-
tiated the reduction of numerous inter-state tensions around the globe through
diplomatic pressure in the seventy years of its existence and it remains the
dominant voice for the peaceful resolution of conflict.
The establishment of these new global norms through the UN and the
technology of international law not only delineated boundaries for beha-
viours between nation states but also provided protection for human beings
as individuals. The new discourses of human rights as universal reminded
nation states, but also organisations within those states, of their obligations to
all people and their fundamental equality. Human rights became a shield for
citizens against their own states as well as against the depredations of others.
Laws echoing these principles diffused into national documentation and
institutions, and served as constraints on hitherto legitimate interpersonal
violence inflicted by elders on their children, husbands on their wives or
employers on their workers. In the early twenty-first century, in many
societies around the world, violence of any sort is regarded as a path of last
resort and the least desirable option. The abolition of the death penalty,
which gained momentum in nation states from the mid twentieth century as
ideas of reform rather than revenge infused the justice systems, is indicative
of this trend.
Advances in printing press technologies during the 1800s gave us the
capacity to mass-produce daily newspapers with photographs and propa-
ganda posters of greater colour and design complexity. The emergence of
the camera would provide first image and then sound so that people could
see and hear real or imaginary violence. Later, the emergence of digital
technologies using the internet made text, image, sound and data instantly
available all around the globe on a wider array of smaller and smaller devices.
At the start of the 1800s ordinary people were not offered this daily diet of
diverse horrors occurring elsewhere or in other periods to other people –

4
 Introduction to Volume IV

violence was known directly only through personal experience or eyewitness

accounts.
The advances in technology led to the emergence of a professional cohort of
journalists who would provide content for the pages – including sensational
stories of violence. Once the long-distance telegraph became widespread in the
1850s, journalists working in one part of the globe were able to post stories to
another instantly. This capacity to transmit information, and to print and then
disseminate stories, would proceed apace through the nineteenth and twen-
tieth centuries, bringing more and more people into contact with knowledge
about actual or confected violent acts committed by individuals, groups or
military forces. Violence was no longer limited to one’s personal experience,
and awareness of the horrors of war and the miseries of soldiers as described by
journalists in situ, rather than novelists in armchairs, changed popular views
about when, where and to what extent violence was ‘appropriate’.
But these new communication technologies would also produce
a concomitant increase in misinformation designed to sway popular opinion
to support violent acts. By the mid 1800s, propaganda spread through news-
papers and magazines was actively used to justify the violence of which readers
were increasingly becoming aware thanks to the same medium. For example,
British colonialism in South Asia gained widespread popular support after false
newspaper reports of English women and girls being raped at the hands of
Indians resisting the takeover of their land in the 1857 Indian Rebellion.
Through the twentieth century, propaganda would reach new heights in the
world wars with governments establishing special units charged with informa-
tion management in all conflicts – such as the USA’s Office of War
Information, the UK’s Ministry of Information, and Japan’s Information and
Propaganda Department. The Third Reich in Germany established a Ministry
of Propaganda, with the infamous Joseph Goebbels at its head, charged with
creating in the public mind a cohort of domestic enemies and later foreign ones
to advance support for the war. Legitimating international violence now
required a strong narrative in order to gain public support, since new technol-
ogies gave many groups access to the public sphere.
By the second decade of the twenty-first century, people all over the world
had access to a 24-hour media cycle that presented a smorgasbord of violence
in graphic, multimedia formats through small hand-held devices. The wide
array of means available for people to view, hear and participate in violence –
real and representational – is unparalleled in human history. Social media
websites, streamed video clips and podcasts flow through the internet to even
remote parts of the world. This wave builds from earlier leaps in technology

5
 LOUISE EDWARDS, NIGEL PENN, JAY WINTER

dissemination which similarly carried stories of violence directly to indivi-

duals – the mid-twentieth-century technologies of broadcast television, radio,
and documentary and feature films continued a tradition set in the nine-
teenth-century boom in print media of newspapers, posters, brochures and
magazines. This plethora of media technologies provided popular access to
vast numbers of stories and images of violence – sometimes unspeakable and
horrific and at other times mundane. Human access to increasing volumes of
representations of historic and current violence is a key feature of the years
from 1800 onwards.
The capacity of communication technologies to promote the use of
violence has not diminished in the twenty-first century, but both the increas-
ing public awareness of the consequences of violence and the very real
capacity of major military powers, like the USA and Russia, to destroy the
world multiple times over with weapons of mass destruction in their nuclear
arsenals has reduced the popular appetite for violent solutions and reinvigo-
rated the disarmament activism that started in the 1960s and 1970s.2 The
expanding middle classes sought to distance themselves from personal
experience of violence as rapidly as they were vicariously experiencing it in
the media. They were also instrumental in struggling to rid their worlds of
violence through pressing for cultural and legal changes that would make
actual violence punishable.

The Rise of the Individual and Tensions

with Institutional Structures
The years from 1800 are also marked by the rising power of the individual vis-
à-vis a host of institutional structures – religious authorities, governments of
all forms, workplaces and families. As the decades progressed the individual
attained greater autonomy and wider rights of personhood. The individual
human increasingly secured rights from interference by others and rights to
be free from violence inflicted by others. This trend would reach a climax in
the twentieth century as legal systems around the world recognised each
person’s right to bodily integrity. Each change in the cultures underpinning
the perpetration of violence produced a concomitant change in the power
structures of the institutions affected.

2 John Borrie, ‘Humanitarian Reframing of Nuclear Weapons and the Logic of a Ban’,
International Affairs 90.3 (2014), 625–46. In 2017 the International Campaign to Abolish
Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

6
 Introduction to Volume IV

Legislation to criminalise domestic violence empowered wives relative to

their husbands, daughters-in-law relative to parents-in-law, and children
relative to elders. Parallel legislation provided sanctions against those using
violence against animals. The banning of caning and strapping in schools
gave students increased dignity relative to their teachers and seniors. Bans on
beatings of workers changed factories and farms as bosses came to recognise
that their employees were not their property. Each of these shifts would
occur at different times in different legal jurisdictions but the trend over the
course of the centuries was inexorable – interpersonal violence inflicted by
the powerful over the less powerful was no longer acceptable. In its place
emerged the notion that the powerful had a duty of care and a responsibility
not to use violence, even when it was within their means, if they sought
respect for their status. Violence became the mark of the ‘out of control’
individual, the person without dignity, as the decades from the mid twentieth
century progressed.
Just as class struggles sought to equalise power between the working
classes and the elites, and nationalist struggles sought power from colonial
rulers, the global women’s movement fought against patriarchal social and
familial systems that had rendered women effectively the property of men.
In so doing, they broke many of the taboos around sex and brought the
problems of sexual violence to public attention. Over the course of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries sexual violence against women would
emerge as a crime against the woman, rather than a shame for her and her
male family member. In nations like Afghanistan, India, Pakistan and
Jordan, the struggle to recognise women’s integrity over their own sexu-
ality continues as honour killings – where women are killed by family
members for the shame their rape or adultery brings to the family – still
occur.
Debate continues to rage around the issue of prostitution and pornogra-
phy and whether these phenomena are violence against women or simply
acts of choice. The slippage between wartime prostitution and sexual slavery
is made evident in Caroline Norma’s study of the Japanese military’s ‘comfort
women’ throughout the Asia-Pacific theatre in World War II.3 The mass rape
of women by invading forces that has been documented as occurring in
almost all the conflicts of the past 200 years is exposed and challenged as
illegitimate. Since 2008, rape within war has been regarded as a war crime

3 Caroline Norma, The Japanese Comfort Women and Sexual Slavery during the China and
Pacific Wars (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).

7
 LOUISE EDWARDS, NIGEL PENN, JAY WINTER

within the UN’s Resolution 1820 on wartime sexual violence; signatory states
are required to take actions to educate troops and punish perpetrators.
Women’s reproductive capacities are recognised in this legislation, with
mass rape being identified as genocidal where it meets the UN’s definition
of ‘intent to destroy’.4 Preventing violence against women remains a key
global goal for the twenty-first century as NGOs, governments and commu-
nity groups mobilise, but a key stumbling block is the role that women play as
symbols of family or national honour – a role that has often stripped them of
individual rights to bodily integrity. It has also made sexual violence against
women a theme ripe for exploitation in wartime propaganda.5
While women fought to gain independence from fathers and husbands,
children too were gaining their rights as individual human beings to be free
from violence both inside and outside the family. The late twentieth and
early twenty-first centuries have been rocked by scandals and court cases
involving clergy from a range of religious orders who have perpetrated
systemic child sex abuse. Orphanages, children’s homes, juvenile justice
institutions and hospitals have all faced the shame of media and judicial
attention as well as the financial consequences of their sometimes sustained
abuse – beatings, starvation, rape and torture – inflicted on children in their
care in the absence of parents. Children are no longer regarded as legitimate
objects of an adult’s violent tendencies.
Changes in the perceptions of the causes of interpersonal violence in
the decades from 1800 produced new ideas about punishment and pre-
vention. Prisons are conceived of as places of reform and rehabilitation.
Perpetrators are framed as products of society-wide failings. Where in
previous centuries violent criminal behaviour might be explained by
possession by evil spirits like the devil, by the mid twentieth century
such anti-social acts by individuals would be understood as emerging from
poverty, abuse and inequality. The roots of violence are no longer
spiritual failings but sociological ones. Accordingly, governments have
set about providing programmes of education, food, health and public
facilities as mechanisms for preventing violence and in order to bring
more people into middle-class lifestyles.

4 Resolution 1820 declared that: ‘rape and other forms of sexual violence can constitute
war crimes, crimes against humanity or a constitutive act with respect to genocide’.
United Nations Security Council [UNSC], ‘Resolution 1820’, 19 June 2008, Article 4.
5 See Louise Edwards, ‘Drawing Sexual Violence in Wartime China: Anti-Japanese
Propaganda Cartoons’, Journal of Asian Studies 72.3 (2013), 563–86.

8
 Introduction to Volume IV

Changing Justifications for Violence

The hundred years from 1800 saw an unprecedented expansion in violence as
an arm of European colonialism. The building of competing European
empires justified this violence to sometimes dubious home populations on
the grounds of uplifting, improving, saving and civilising humans deemed to
be living in ‘inferior’ or ‘misguided’ cultures. The punishment and death of ‘a
few’ was understood to be vital to the uplift of ‘the many’. Rapacious
plantation owners, traders and merchants found surprising common bonds
with Christian missionaries and military forces in the endeavour of Empire.
Sometimes uncomfortable alliances, in which each strategically ignored the
brutality the other inflicted on colonised peoples, resulted in catastrophes of
epic proportions. Men of the Christian cloth had supped regularly with slave
owners – the former pacifying with promises of eternal salvation while the
latter wielded large sticks.6
An exemplar of this confluence was the so-called Congo Free State (1885–
1908), operating as a corporate state run solely by King Leopold of Belgium.
Leopold’s state was ‘free’ of tax on international trade while local people
endured various forms of slavery, forced labour and land grabs, and were
tithed in the form of rubber. As with many other European colonies, the
Congo Free State was ostensibly a Christian charitable venture, but ulti-
mately became infamous for the violence Leopold’s agents inflicted on the
people.7 The so-called ‘Congo Horrors’ came to light from the late 1890s. In
1904, Roger Casement (1864–1916) issued an eponymous Report detailing in
forty pages the atrocities for the UK parliament. Congolese who failed to
deliver their rubber quotas faced execution or mutilation. The chopping off
of hands was a common punishment and Leopold’s soldiers took severed
hands as proof of their enforcement. Sometimes amputated hands were taken
in lieu of rubber. In the Congo Free State, the ‘righteousness’ of royalty,
plantation farming, free trade, Christianity and military might combined to
inflict now-infamous miseries on the people of Congo. In a mere two
decades, somewhere between 5 and 10 million people lost their lives directly
from violence or indirectly through disease and privation produced alongside
the Free State’s policies.

6 Diana Paton, ‘Punishment, Crime and the Bodies of Slaves in Eighteenth-Century

Jamaica’, Journal of Social History 34.4 (2011), 923–54.
7 Nancy Rose Hunt, A Nervous State: Violence, Remedies and Reverie in Colonial Congo
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).

9
 LOUISE EDWARDS, NIGEL PENN, JAY WINTER

Ideals of the liberty and equality of all people had been building from
the European Enlightenment and the anti-slavery movement of the late
1700s and were consolidated in the 1800s. The major beneficiaries of this
forced labour system acquiesced in the abolitionist cause over the course
of the first half of the nineteenth century. The United States joined this
global trend in 1865 after its own bitter Civil War (1861–5) in which around
700,000 people died in the violence spurred by the questions of slavery and
race equality. In dismantling slavery, some of the foundations justifying
European colonialism were weakened as well. The supremacy of the
white races over all others was challenged – the right to exert power
required more subtle justifications. Saving souls, making ‘productive’ use
of wasted land and opening the world to free trade became common
justifications for inflicting violence on less powerful groups. The prestige
newly accruing to science and technology gave rise to Social Darwinism,
such that, even with the abolition of slavery, the belief in a race hierarchy
(with whites at the top) continued through the first half of the twentieth
century. This ‘scientific’ position led to abominations such as the removal
of mixed-race children from their parents in Australia between 1910 and
1970 – now known as ‘The Stolen Generations’.8 Under the control of the
state, these children became effectively slaves in households and farms
around Australia – their wages held in accounts that they struggled to
access – experiencing beatings, abuse and rapes common to African slaves
a century earlier in the South of the USA. The process of uplifting and
civilising ‘revolved around essentially violent policies and practices’.9
From the mid 1900s, patience with European dominance was wearing thin
even in localities where colonialism had not been quite as egregiously brutal
as in the Congo Free State. The twentieth-century independence movements
led to the formation of new nation states in which the violence of European
colonisation was echoed in the independence struggles that pushed the
Europeans out. Nationalist independence leaders sought legitimacy for
their violence through narratives of ‘overthrowing oppressors’, ‘equality’,
‘freedom’ and ‘self-determination’. Older rivalries between tribal or language
groups were submerged, sometimes temporarily, in the fight to expel the
Europeans. In South Asia, Britain negotiated the independence of India and
East and West Pakistan along a major religious divide between Hindus and

8 Anna Haebich, ‘Forgetting Indigenous Histories: Cases from the History of Australia’s
Stolen Generations’, Journal of Social History 44.4 (2001), 1033–46.
9 Robert van Krieken, ‘The Barbarism of Civilisation: Cultural Genocide and the “Stolen
Generations”’, British Journal of Sociology 50.2 (1999), 297–315.

10
 Introduction to Volume IV

Muslims. The violent partition of Pakistan from India in 1947 resulted in

the deaths of around a million people and the rape of around 75,000 women.
At other times, the ‘political anxiety’ of the weak state resulted in a leap to
a violent rather than a negotiated solution. Post-independence Nigeria almost
immediately faced a civil war (1967–70) as the region of Biafra dominated by
the Igbo people sought to secede from the new multi-ethnic, multi-religious
nation. But, in Ukoha Ukiwo’s words, it was state violence rather than
cultural divisions that triggered the secession attempt, and it is state violence
that has brewed ethnic nationalism ever since.10 In the conflict and accom-
panying siege, around 100,000 military deaths and an estimated 2 million
civilian deaths through starvation occurred.
Eventually, as these newly independent nations consolidated their
social and political systems, national ‘traditions’ were invented to give
meaning and unity to the oftentimes disparate groups that attained
citizenship. The nation-state adorned itself in flags, anthems, pledges
and constitutions communicated through national education and broad-
casting systems. The defence of each of these symbols of national unity
and sovereign power became the spur for violence directed externally
and internally.

Nation States Claiming a Monopoly on ‘Legitimate’

Violence
Over the course of the twentieth century, the nation state became the
premier site for the ‘legitimate’ exercise of violence – primarily through the
armies, police, judicial systems and security apparatus that consolidated
within each bordered realm. The nation state abrogated for itself the right
to control the systems of violence within its borders and to defend itself
through violent means from external threat or internal dissent. In many cases
the boundary between legitimate and illegitimate became so porous as to
make any violence used by the state appear legitimate.
Secessionist movements are commonly violently suppressed as the
nation defends its territory. The suppression of separatist groups, such as
the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in the southern Philippines or the United
Liberation Movement for West Papua in the western extension of
Indonesia, are two ongoing instances where state apparatus and

10 Ukoha Ukiwo, ‘Violence, Identity Mobilization and the Reimagining of Biafra’, Africa
Development 34.1 (2009), 9–30.

11
 LOUISE EDWARDS, NIGEL PENN, JAY WINTER

secessionists are involved in varying degrees of violence. The expulsion of

European colonial powers did not, to the Moro peoples or West Papuans,
mark the end of colonialism in toto. A different group simply assumed the
role of oppressor and invoked the integrity of the Nation instead of the
Empire. In some cases, ethnic groups with claims to rights to nationhood
struggle against multiple nation states. The Kurds’ armed struggle for an
independent Kurdistan requires assault on Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria. In
the struggle in Ireland to gain liberation from Britain, Roger Casement,
aforementioned feted author of the landmark report on the atrocities in the
Congo Free State, was executed in 1916 for high treason when he supported
the Irish Republican movement in Ireland’s struggle to break away from
Britain. Once knighted for his service to the British Foreign Office, and
internationally famous for his work on colonial atrocities in Congo and the
Amazon Basin, Casement tragically himself became a victim of Britain’s
defence of its colonial territories.
In newly founded states of former colonies, national development pro-
grammes gained totemic status. The expulsion of the colonisers or the suppres-
sion of foreign and domestic foes gave new national leaders responsibility for
the improved livelihoods promised in the process of mobilising people to join
their cause. Managing expectations of newly liberated populations sometimes
required the exercise of force. New political ideologies produced bureaucracies
and institutional structures that would perpetrate violence in the name of
progress, development and national advancement. A new ideology of ‘devel-
opment and economic advance’ emerged and was used to justify numerous
acts of physical, bureaucratic and institutional violence. Sometimes ‘develop-
ment’ projects simply saw a transfer of wealth from colonial elites to ‘indepen-
dence elites’. The revolutionary socialism of China’s Great Leap Forward
aimed to produce prosperity for millions of Chinese but instead emboldened
a newly empowered phalanx of cadre to beat, starve and humiliate millions of
Chinese farmers, ultimately producing a famine that would kill millions – all
justified by the national goal of surpassing the West and ‘achieving socialism in
one generation’. Earlier, Stalin’s socialist-inspired collectivisation programme
had similarly devastated the Soviet Union. The Cambodian Killing Fields
resulted in 2 million deaths and emerged from a calculated bureaucratic
structural violence carefully planned and documented – four years in which
new agricultural and social policies reduced the one-time rice bowl of the
Mekong to a site of unimaginable terror.
The rise of the nation state altered the power of religious leaders. Religious
authorities had in previous centuries pronounced the legitimacy of their right

12
 Introduction to Volume IV

to use violence, but their one-time power would be subsumed under the
control of the nation state – which often presented itself as either multi-
religious or secular. Sometimes the nation state would make use of religious
difference to achieve political ends – such as in the case of the Burmese
Buddhist majority in Myanmar seeking to expel the Muslim Rohingya in the
2010s; or in the case of the Buddhist majority in Sri Lanka seeking to crush
ethnic Tamil separatists whose campaign for a separate state between 1983
and 2009 threatened the integrity of the Sri Lankan state. During the Pacific
War in the mid twentieth century, Japanese military authorities used Shinto
and its devotion to the Emperor as a spur for their invasion of China and
Southeast Asia.
Religious authorities seeking to exercise their power through violence
need some form of state sponsorship. In rare cases, they capture the appara-
tus of the state and use its bureaucratic structures to exert violence of an
ancient kind, the Taliban’s establishment of the Islamic Emirate of
Afghanistan (1996–2001) being the most extreme example of this phenom-
enon. Their Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice
enforced a rigid version of Islamic law upon the population, who were
subjected to floggings, mutilations, amputations and public executions.
Internal enemies also became the focus of the nation-state security appa-
ratus. National governments inspired by both Marxism and fascism applied
threats of violence and actual violence on citizens of their lands. Death
squads, purges, torture and terror became integral to preserving the stability
on which the nation state’s prosperity putatively depended. The hundreds of
thousands of people who ‘disappeared’ or were jailed in Central and South
America from the 1970s are still mourned by mothers and grandmothers in
mass protests. Famous among these are the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in
Argentina and the Ladies in White in Cuba whose persistent, peaceful
protests contrast with the obduracy of the state apparatuses’ violence.
Early in the twenty-first century the nation state’s control over religious
contestants for power faces a transnational challenge in the rise of Islamic
State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL or ISIS). ISIL sought to establish a religious
caliphate that stretched across Iraq and Syria through militarised warfare and
invited Muslims the world over to participate through military action in the
Levant, but also in singular acts of terrorism wherever they may be in the
world. The threat of terrorism in the twenty-first century has allowed state
security apparatuses around the world to extend their powers of surveillance
over populations in their jurisdiction. The nation state’s fear of transnational
activism is not new to the twenty-first century. In the early twentieth

13
 LOUISE EDWARDS, NIGEL PENN, JAY WINTER

century, Europe was pricked by fears of ‘the bomb throwers’ – anarchists –

whose political agenda specifically identified the nation state as a target for ad
hoc violence. But in the twenty-first century the extension of security and
surveillance technology gives the state unprecedented reach into the lives of
ordinary people, whose acquiescence with their reducing freedoms emerges
from their overarching desire to be free from random violence. The nation
state promises to be the vehicle for their personal safety. The spectacular
horror of hijacked passenger jets smashing into skyscrapers in New York in
September 2001 marked a new phase in the popular perception of violence
and expectations of the state’s duty to protect.
The power of ideologies to globalise, as manifest in twenty-first-century
terrorism, was evident half a century earlier in the major rift between ‘com-
munism and capitalism’ – otherwise known as the Cold War of 1945–89. The
power struggle between the USSR and the USA was played out in myriad
proxy international and civil wars resulting in millions of deaths. On the surface
these wars appeared to be generated variously by local tribal differences or
regional religious grievances, but without the support of the USSR or the USA
many of the wars that have plunged post-1945 Asia, Africa and the Middle East
into chaos would have been much briefer affairs. This battle of ideological
giants was also apparent in the CIA’s Operation Condor between 1968 and 1989
in which right-wing governments throughout South America gained CIA
technical, military and financial support to suppress left-wing or left-leaning
groups.11 Dictators like Chile’s Augusto Pinochet assumed power after a US-
backed military coup, overthrowing a democratically elected socialist govern-
ment led by Salvador Allende. General Pinochet’s regime lasted from 1973 to
1990 and was a classic example of the two branches of the state, the military and
the political, combining to brutal effect.

Vicarious Violence – Killing as Leisure

and Engendering Empathy
Between 1800 and the present, more and more people have come to know of
violence through various forms of media. Those same media also came to
form a record of the diverse ways that humans could inflict violence – an
archive was emerging that in its expanding form became a tool for combating

11 J. Patrice McSherry, Predatory States: Operation Condor and Covert War in Latin America
(Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005); Barbara Zanchetta, ‘Between Cold War
Imperatives and State-Sponsored Terrorism: The United States and “Operation
Condor”’, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 39.12 (2016), 1084–102.

14
 Introduction to Volume IV

violence and punishing perpetrators. A wide range of types of large-scale and

interpersonal violence is now presented in both news and leisure media as
well as commemorative sites. Individual stories of suffering and survival
personalise large-scale violence – people with hopes and dreams emerge
from the carnage of piles of dead in the garnering of viewers’ empathy and
emotional connection. An individual’s experience of the pain of torture or
suffering of loss is narrated sometimes for commercial gain, at other times for
educational and moral goals and at yet others for solemn commemoration.
As the technology capable of representing violence gained greater reach into
people’s lives – through cinema, television and video games from the twentieth
century – representations of violence were often thought to be a cause of
violence. Popular concern about the link between acts of violence and the
consumption of murder and gore in cinema or First-Person Shooter video
games emerged alongside the spread of these technologies. In response govern-
ments and national censorship boards introduced ratings that were designed to
alert consumers to the various gradients of violent or sexual content in the films,
television programmes or games they were about to watch or purchase.
Children, it was felt, were particularly vulnerable to harm from viewing explicit
violence because their capacity to distinguish fact from fiction was less sophisti-
cated than that of teenage or adult consumers. But it remains unclear whether
the steady diet of media violence and gamified killing inures adults to violence as
well. Different national censorship boards establish different limits based on their
perceptions of how much violence is too much, how much gore is too much for
the average person. But representations of violence have been a feature of
popular culture for centuries, as has the public appetite for vicariously experien-
cing ghastly details of crimes and punishment. The technological shifts of the
twentieth century, however, meant that people were increasingly able to view or
participate in increasingly realistic representations. In the twenty-first century,
the arrival of Virtual Reality positions participants in three-dimensional worlds
complete with audio accompaniment as they kill, and risk being killed, in
simulated combat scenarios. Regulation and law are brought in to control
what might well be a limitless capacity for humans to watch extreme violence
being inflicted on other people and other animals in pursuit of leisure.
Commemoration of conflict through state-sponsored construction of mem-
orials, museums, obelisks and cemeteries has continued apace around the world
but was particularly widespread in the aftermath of the world wars of the
twentieth century. These sites are major military tourist attractions in the
expanding leisure travel industry that has accompanied the rise, and increasing
accessibility, of mass transport technologies of jetliners and high-speed trains.

15
 LOUISE EDWARDS, NIGEL PENN, JAY WINTER

The political functions of these sites of commemoration are generally to reassert

the validity and legitimacy of the particular nation state that funded the
construction: the national war memorials around the world pay respect to the
people who lost their lives in the formation of the defence of that state. For
example, the Monument to the National People’s Heroes in the heart of
Beijing’s Tiananmen Square was built in 1958 and is decorated with crucial
stages in the struggle to achieve the formation of the People’s Republic of
China.12 Monuments are built to serve very modern political purposes, for
example in the case of the opening in 1985 of the Nanjing Massacre Museum
to commemorate the 300,000 victims of Japan’s invasion and occupation of that
city in 1937. Earlier PRC governments, inspired by Maoist revolutionary zeal and
dedicated to building good relationships with Japan for strategic and financial
reasons, had not formally commemorated the massacre with a museum.13 Since
Mao’s death, nationalism and patriotism based around commemorating the
War of Resistance against Japan have been a central legitimising rhetoric for the
PRC government, buttressing Marxism that had been tarnished by the chaos
and hardship generated by the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural
Revolution. But monuments, by their very solidity, often outlast the nation
state that built them. Mussolini’s fascist Italy constructed the Palazzo della
Civiltà Italiana in 1942 and engraved it with his words announcing Italy’s
invasion of Ethiopia. The building, along with a range of other fascist architec-
tural pieces, is regarded as another of the remarkable relics Italy houses on its soil
from the ancient Romans onwards, rather than as a symbol of fascism per se.14
Monuments constructed by losers in conflicts and the inclusion of enemy
forces in parades have been contentious around the world. Japanese minis-
terial visits to the Yasukuni Shrine honouring wartime dead, including Class
A war criminals, elicits formal diplomatic protest from Chinese and Korean
governments.15 The Australian veterans’ association, the Returned Service
League, agreed in 2006 to allow descendants of First World War Turks to join
the veterans’ parade on ANZAC Day, but did not extend the endorsement to
Germans, Japanese, Italian or North Vietnamese. The latter ‘were a dreaded

12 Wu Hung, ‘Tiananmen Square: A Political History of Monuments’, Representations 35

(Summer 1991), 84–117.
13 Yang Daqing, ‘Convergence of Divergence? Recent Historical Writings on the Rape of
Nanjing’, American Historical Review 104.3 (1999), 842–65; James Reilly, ‘China’s History
Activists and the War of Resistance against Japan’, Asian Survey 44.2 (2004), 276–94.
14 Hannah Molone, ‘Legacies of Fascism: Architecture, Heritage and Memory in
Contemporary Italy’, Modern Italy 22.4 (2017), 445–70.
15 See Akiko Takenaka, Yasukuni Shrine: History, Memory and Japan’s Unending Postwar
(Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015).

16
 Introduction to Volume IV

enemy that was despised by the Australian veterans’, where the Turks ‘were
a very honourable enemy’.16
Only rarely do nation states commemorate the victims of the violence that
occurred in the building of their states. The settler colonial nations of Australia,
New Zealand, Canada and the United States fund memorials to their soldiers
who fought wars in foreign lands, and have museums of settler society life, but
have few if any memorials to resistance wars by Indigenous peoples whose land
was being ‘settled’. The politics of commemoration is evident in a comparison
of the South Dakota twin sites of Mount Rushmore National Memorial and the
Wounded Knee Memorial. The former is an icon of the nation state, the United
States, with massive carved profiles of four past presidents standing majestically
in the Black Hills. Unveiled in 1936, the site was built to ‘communicate the
founding, expansion, preservation and unification of the United States’; it is now
a major commercial and tourist hub.17 The neighbouring Wounded Knee
Massacre Memorial commemorates the massacre of over 300 unarmed men,
women and children from the Lakota tribe in 1890. Twenty of the soldiers that
participated in the massacre were awarded Medals of Honour by the US Army.
The monument is a local initiative by Lakota people and only a few hundred
people visit it each year.18 The enormous size of Mount Rushmore stands in
dramatic contrast to the humble structures at Wounded Knee; where the
former celebrates the nation state, the latter stands as criticism of the hypocrisy
of the peaceful change implied in the term ‘settlement’.
The vast majority of war memorials built around the world are products of
civil society and not the state. States do not remember or mourn; groups of
people do so in public, frequently through their own initiatives. The collec-
tive memory of violence is the memory of collectives, and not primarily of
the state. There are substantial differences between commemorations of
violence by states which have dominated civil society, like the Soviet
Union, and states which are less active than civil society, like Britain.
Between the two extremes, most monuments to violence arise from and
are paid for by people in small groups who do the work of remembrance.
Equally, the cultural sector is active in the production of poems, paintings,
sculptures, novels, blogs and films that narrate histories of violence, both

16 RSL Major-General David McLachlan, cited in Carolyn Webb, ‘Anzac March Open to
“Johnny Turk” – but That’s It’, The Age, 12 April 2006.
17 Gutzon Borglum, ‘Mount Rushmore National Memorial South Dakota – History and
Culture’, www.nps.gov/moru/learn/historyculture/index.htm.
18 Sacred Ground, directed by Tim Gruenewald and Ludwig Schmidtpeter, 2015, www
.sacredgroundfilm.com.

17
 LOUISE EDWARDS, NIGEL PENN, JAY WINTER

wartime and peacetime. These are frequently powerful critiques of the

official commemorative projects managed by states.19
From the 1970s, commemoration of the victims of the Holocaust became
iconic, in that the forms of remembrance of those who disappeared in Nazi-
dominated Europe from 1939 to 1945 were adapted to represent those who
disappeared in later conflicts, including those that states like Argentina and
Chile waged against their own people during Operation Condor. What is
now termed multi-dimensional memory today links the victims of violence
and genocide in different parts of the world.
There is a scholarly consensus on many of the themes explored in this
volume. Industrialisation radically increased the capacity of the state to impose
its will, through violence if necessary, on subject populations. Genocide was the
direct outcome of the civilianisation of war. Dictators waged war on their own
populations because of the supposed disloyalty of targeted groups or because of
their identification with subversive movements. Prisons worldwide still hold
such ‘enemies’ of the state, and despite international accords against the use of
torture, interrogation specialists operate today, as they did a century ago,
effectively outside the law. Wartime violence affected patterns of violence in
peacetime. Repressing the horrors of war made it easier to draw a veil over
violence in families, schools, churches and orphanages. Slowly, the silence
surrounding the sexual abuse of women and children is breaking. Since the
1970s, popular transnational human rights movements have emerged to protect
individuals from violence, even when the writ of the state lies behind it. Yet, as
many chapters herein show, who controls the state controls the instruments of
violence. Has economic growth and the spread of technology made the world
more peaceable? On balance, the answer must be no. The violence done to the
poor through economic inequality is no less now than it was a century ago. The
social relations of violence are framed today just as much by power and wealth
as they were in 1920. And, while we make no assessment of any rise or fall in
violence in the absolute numbers impacted, we are not convinced, contra the
controversial book by Pinker, that violence has cast less of a pall over human
affairs than it did in previous centuries. There is little reason to believe that the
world our grandchildren will inherit will be any different from our own.20

19 See, for example, Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in
European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
20 Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York:
Viking, 2011). For a rebuttal of the Pinker thesis see Philip Dwyer and Mark Micale,
‘History, Violence, and Steven Pinker’, Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 44.1
(2018), 1–5.

18
 part i
*

RACE, RELIGION
AND NATIONALISM
 1
Empires and Indigenous Worlds:
Violence and the Pacific Ocean, 1760 to
1930s
patricia o’brien
In April 1864, two men again witnessed the terrible price of war. Watching
the battle at the redoubt of Te Morere on the western coast of New Zealand
just to the north of the fledgling British settlement of New Plymouth were Te
Whiti O Rongomai and Tohu Kākahi. They watched as Māori fighters,
defending their lands against a settler invasion, clashed with British troops.
The dramatic backdrop to this battle was the mighty mountain, Taranaki,
that had endowed this corner of the British Empire with stunningly rich
volcanic soils, made fertile with soaking rains. Over the four years preceding
the battle at Te Morere, Māori communities had been attacked and looted,
and people had been forced to move inland, their country seized by settlers
intent on making these prized Māori lands their own. This became known as
the First Taranaki War: it devastated Māori. The battle at Te Morere was one
theatre of the war that wracked Taranaki. In turn, it was one part of the New
Zealand Wars that convulsed that country over seven decades from the 1840s
through to the final killings in 1916 when the last Māori community holding
out against government control was raided in the east of New Zealand’s
North Island.1 Faced with an ongoing assault by British forces, Te Whiti and
Tohu took a course few had taken to that point, a course that would reshape
the history of violence in this quadrant of the Pacific Ocean and beyond.2
The violent convulsions in nineteenth-century New Zealand were part of
a long, storied history of colonial violence in the Pacific that stretched back
nearly four centuries. Over this long period, in this very diffuse and diverse
region, violence took many localised forms. Yet there were clear patterns that
sparked and sustained it in the colonial history made between the multitude

1 James Belich, Paradise Reforged: A History of New Zealanders from the 1880s to the Year 2000
(Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2001), p. 194.
2 Hazel Riseborough, ‘A New Kind of Resistance: Parihaka and the Struggle for Peace’, in
Kelvin Day (ed.), Contested Ground Te Whenua I Tohea: The Taranaki Wars 1860–1881
(Wellington: Huia Press, 2010), pp. 230–53, at 231–2.

21
 PATRICIA O’BRIEN

of Indigenous peoples that populated the vast region and the colonial peoples
that entered the region beginning in the early sixteenth century. This chapter
offers a reading of how violence was prominent and ever present in this
history. It covers the historical expanse from the earliest Pacific imperial phases
to the 1930s, just prior to the greatest cataclysm of violence in the region: World
War II. Over this long period, technologies, ideologies and conditions altered
the history of violence, as happened in other colonial theatres that were deeply
integrated with the Pacific from the outset. Yet it took five centuries to
integrate the entire region into global systems. As a consequence, first encoun-
ters between Indigenous and colonial peoples, where violence often set
a course for future relations, played out repeatedly across the region and across
time, beginning in the early sixteenth century and ending, arguably, in the 1930s
in the New Guinea Highlands. Violence in the colonial Pacific was also
profoundly shaped by immense asymmetries of power and population sizes,
vast distances and the great diversity of human and natural geographies that
evolved and altered across this historical expanse.
European imperial history in the Pacific commenced seventeen years after
the Treaty of Tordesillas was brokered in 1494. The first consequence of this
papal licence for Spanish and Portuguese domination of the New World was
felt in the Pacific region in 1511 when Portuguese forces conquered Muslim
rulers in the trading hub of Malacca. At Malacca, the Portuguese set
a gruesome precedent displaying the imperial methods they would deploy
to establish future imperial nodes in the region. After they crushed resistant
potentates the Portuguese would conduct ‘a general massacre of innocent
dependents of . . . vanquished’ rulers. Their methods were bloody, brutal and
steeled with the righteous imperatives of the Crusades against ‘infidels’;
Christian conversion as well as commanding resources – especially
Indigenous labour – were their aims. The Portuguese proved adept at
blending religious motives with imperial ones to conquer and covet lands,
resources and souls in the string of colonies they established through South-
East and North-East Asia.3
Ferdinard Magellan, who was at the conquest of Malacca in 1511 when he
was serving Portugal, later switched allegiance to Spain and commanded the
Spanish imperial fleet that set out from Europe in 1519. The Magellan voyage
took place within months of Hernán Cortés’s forces launching their devastat-
ing campaign against the Aztec Empire in Mexico. European imperialism was

3 D. R. Sar Desai, ‘The Portuguese Administration of Malacca’, Journal of Southeast Asian

History 10.3 (1969), 501–12, at 503.

22
 Empires and Indigenous Worlds

still relatively new when Magellan entered the Pacific after navigating around
the treacherous southern tip of South America. Magellan and the crews
under his command were unaware of the great vulnerabilities they would
then face. The rigours of travelling immense distances across open ocean
presented further challenges as Magellan and his crews found out. The
extreme conditions Magellan’s voyage encountered included near starvation
and suffering from the ravages of scurvy following their arduous voyage that
was stalled in the Doldrums. When the voyage finally made landfall in
present-day Micronesia, the confrontation with the island’s Indigenous peo-
ple, the Chamorros of Guam, soon descended into violence when they ‘stole’
from the Spanish ships. This led to conflict in which a number of islanders
were killed. After the carnage, some of Magellan’s crew feasted on the bodies
of Ladrones Islanders, the ‘Island of Thieves’ as the Spanish named them, in
the false hope they would be cured of scurvy. When the voyagers landed on
the island of Mactan in today’s Philippines, the commander hastily offered his
military services in a fight between two local rivals. Magellan would become
the first of a number of lionised Europeans, blinded by hubris and superiority,
who did not return from the Pacific.4 He was quickly killed in the skirmish.
Despite Magellan’s demise, the ‘Islands of the West’, as the islands of
Micronesia became known, were rapidly enveloped in the immense trade
conducted by treasure ships carrying American silver west and Chinese goods
east that plied the ocean between Manila and Acapulco.5 What took place
there echoed the fate of Indigenous peoples in the Americas. Bartolomé de
Las Casas’s account of the ‘cruel massacres and slaughters’ of ‘innocent
people’ in the Caribbean Islands and the American mainland, in his 1656
work The Tears of the Indians, also rang true for Indigenes of these Pacific
islands.6 Las Casas condemned so-called Christians for the staggering death
toll, enslavement of survivors of all ages and gender, and the ravishment of
women in the Americas. These practices were replicated in Spain’s
Micronesian islands despite staunch resistance movements in the early
years.7 Though Magellan and many successors perished in the course of

4 Antonio Pigafetta, Magellan’s Voyage: A Narrative Account of the First Circumnavigation, ed.
and trans. R. A. Skelton (New York: Dover, 1994), pp. 57–90
5 Nicholas P. Cushner, The Isles of the West: Early Spanish Voyages to the Philippines, 1521–1564
(Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1966).
6 Bartolomé de Las Casas, Tears of the Indians: Being an Historical and True Account of the
Cruel Massacres and Slaughters of Above Twenty Millions of Innocent Peoples by the Spaniards
(Williamstown: John Lilburne Company, 1970).
7 Rodrigue Lévesque (ed.), History of Micronesia: A Collection of Documentary Sources
(Gatineau: Lévesque, 1992–2002).

23
 PATRICIA O’BRIEN

Europe’s colonial enterprises in the Pacific, the cost of violence from the
sixteenth century onwards was borne disproportionately – on a vast scale –
by the Pacific’s Indigenous peoples.
Back in Te Whiti and Tohu’s homeland, the first imperial contact came in
the form of Dutch explorers who would give the islands the name New
Zealand. Dutch forays into the wider Pacific closely followed their supplant-
ing of the Portuguese in Malacca in 1641, a victory that strengthened their
colonial position greatly throughout the region. Forty years prior to their
conquest at Malacca, the Dutch East India Company was increasingly dom-
inating the spice trade and the Spice Islands from the hub of Batavia (Jakarta).
Further north, the Dutch secured exclusive commercial access to Japan when
all other foreigners, especially Christians, were violently driven out or under-
ground during the Tokugawa Shogunate that commenced in 1604 and iso-
lated Japan for almost 250 years.8
One year after the Dutch capture of Malacca, explorer Abel Tasman
became the first European to ‘discover’ New Zealand. The first meeting
between the Dutch and Māori in December 1642 resulted in the deaths of four
Dutchmen and the retaliatory shooting of a Māori man. Tasman named the
place where this bloody first contact took place ‘Murderers Bay’, marking it
always with memories of this first collision of worlds.9 Subsequent sporadic
contact between Dutch explorers in the Pacific and Indigenous people
repeated this pattern of violence, making bloodshed the norm in Pacific
first encounters.
The Dutch differed markedly from their Iberian predecessors, with sub-
stantially more emphasis on trade than religious conversion. Commerce
mattered above all else, giving the Dutch significant advantages as local
peoples supported their campaigns to the detriment of the Portuguese in
South and East Asia.10 Though they were more restrained than their Iberian
forebears, violence was by no means absent from Dutch colonialism. Slavery
networks and other forms of impoverishment and exploitation of local
peoples were also a component of Dutch imperial activity. So was the use
of brute force. Throughout their colonial rule of the East Indies, the Dutch
fought a war of conquest against the Achenese in northern Sumatra who

8 Andrew Gordon, A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2014).
9 Anne Salmond, Two Worlds: First Meetings between Maori and Europeans 1642–1772
(Auckland: Viking, 1991).
10 S. Arasaratnam, ‘Some Notes on the Dutch in Malacca and the Indo-Malayan Trade
1641–1670’, Journal of Southeast Asian History 10.3 (1969), 480–90.

24
 Empires and Indigenous Worlds

sought to maintain their historic autonomy. Both sides waged violent attacks,
with the Dutch eventually gaining the upper hand in the late nineteenth
century after they launched a determined military effort against the Achenese
Sultanate. In an attempt finally to crush a routed opponent, the Dutch
launched a ‘pacification’ expedition to put an end to Achenese resistance
once and for all, the Dutch hoped. Dutch forces killed over 3,000 mainly
women and children in the 1900–3 Gayo Expedition. The Achenese Sultanate
surrendered in 1903 but Achenese resistance continued throughout the Dutch
colonial era (that essentially was ended by the Japanese wartime occupation),
with the Dutch deploying rough justice in return.11
From the first European encounter with the Dutch in 1642 to the midst of
the British settler invasion in the 1860s, New Zealand and its wider, inter-
connected region witnessed much violence. For Te Whiti and Tohu, the
weight of this long history of entangled beliefs, tactics and ambitions inspired
a vastly different response. Las Casas cited the ‘eye for an eye’ philosophy
espoused in Deuteronomy 29.15 as the guiding principle of the sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century Iberian colonisers against New World Indigenes.12 In
diametric opposition, Te Whiti and Tohu fashioned a non-violent response
to the pressures of colonialism they called a ‘fighting peace’.13 In this
approach, the multiple ravages of colonialism would be met not with the
sword (or the main weapon of the 1860s, the gun) but by disruption of settler
society’s order – ploughing up fields, cutting fences and challenging a violent
foe with acts of largesse that undermined European claims of superiority and
amplified the monstrosities of colonial violence. Moral victories mattered as
much as military ones in this equation. Due to Te Whiti and Tohu, the Māori
community of Parihaka in Taranaki took a different course by fashioning the
non-violent message of Christ into an anti-colonial tactic by Indigenous
peoples. Te Whiti and Tohu’s response stood diametrically opposed to the
version of Christianity carried forth particularly by the Portuguese and the
Spanish that had licensed violence to wrest power, land and other resources
from Indigenes. This contest was cast as a struggle of ‘civilisation’ against
‘savagery’. The colonial arsenal of ideas and stereotypes embedded in the
notions of ‘civilised’ and ‘savage’ served many purposes.

11 Anthony Reid, ‘Colonial Transformation: A Bitter Legacy’, in Anthony Reid (ed.),

Verandah of Violence: The Background to the Aceh Problem (Singapore: Singapore
University Press, 2006), pp. 96–108.
12 See title page of Las Casas, Tears of the Indians.
13 Riseborough, ‘New Kind of Resistance’, p. 231; Rachel Buchanan, The Parihaka Album:
Lest We Forget (Auckland: Huia Press, 2009).

25
 PATRICIA O’BRIEN

The coming of Europeans into the Pacific did not, of course, commence
the history of violence in the region. Warrior cultures pre-existed and
postdated the European era. Local histories attest to this past, as does
a vast array of weaponry and other artefacts, like armour fashioned from
coconut fibre used in the Kiribati Islands. In the Sāmoan islands, for instance,
rival groups regularly battled when deaths of revered chiefs sparked struggles
for succession. It is a fair claim that violence was part of a pre-European
Pacific, but one enduring colonial legacy has been reconstructions of pre-
European Pacific history that have regularly placed violence at the epicentre
of pre-European historical forces in the region. In the absence of evidence,
Western explorers and recent scholars have postulated violent episodes that
predated sustained European contact in the Pacific Ocean. The island of Rapa
Nui (Easter Island) has been a particularly favoured location for theories
about violence, Indigenous communities and their history. These Rapa Nui
theories posit that in the construction and movement of the immense stone
statues (moai) that are emblematic of the island’s cultural heritage were
quests for power that precipitated environmental destruction to the point
of societal collapse, culminating in an apocalyptic episode of violence. These
theories, based on certain readings of explorers’ accounts and some archae-
ological evidence, are also laced with stereotypes of Indigenous masculinities
where violence is depicted as the dominating, uncontrollable racial instinct.14
Though Rapa Nui is one microcosmic component of the Pacific, ideas about
innate cultural tendencies of the Pacific’s Indigenes towards violence – the
essence of constructions of male ‘savagery’ – have fed into remarkably
consistent and simplistic colonial narratives across the centuries. Violence,
particularly in the form of cannibalism and the brutalisation of women, took
on alarming and disproportionate dimensions in Western imaginings of the
region as a whole.
Explorer accounts of the late eighteenth century were largely responsible
for proliferating tales of the Pacific that were hair-raising and deeply intri-
guing in the same instance. British naval captain James Cook, arguably the
most important of many Enlightenment voyagers who traversed the Pacific
from the 1760s, did more than any other explorer to add to the geographic
and conceptual maps of the Pacific. From the first voyage accounts,
Europeans spun tales heavy with stereotypes that emphasised the seemingly
ready access of European travellers to exotic women that many voyagers,

14 Steven T. Fischer, Island at the End of the World: The Turbulent History of Easter Island
(London: Reaktion Books, 2005); Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or
Succeed (New York: Penguin, 2005), chapter 2.

26
 Empires and Indigenous Worlds

especially French ones, felt embodied figures from classical mythology.

These same accounts emphasised the mercurial natures of Indigenous men
who often resorted to random acts of violence against European crews
spurred by jealousy and a sense of ownership over women.15 This supposed
racial trait was at the heart of stories emanating from the community found
on Pitcairn Island in 1808. The hybrid community, comprised of Tahitian
women and one remaining British man, were the remnants of the group
founded by the infamous HMS Bounty mutineers, Tahitian men and Tahitian
women. In the years after the mutineers disappeared into the Pacific in 1789
and before their discovery twenty years later, every man on the island was
killed violently: a sequence of bloodletting sparked by the Tahitian men’s
jealousy over women, according to the one surviving white man’s account.16
The acts of Europeans in violent encounters have had less cultural reso-
nance until the relatively recent project of postcolonial historical rewriting
where the standpoint shifted to take account of Indigenous experiences and
perspectives. In this historical reading, European violence has been given
more attention and attributed with being the reason for the legendary sexual
accommodations Europeans experienced. For instance, when the British
Wallis voyage bombarded the island of Tahiti for several days in 1767 with
their ship’s guns (a reaction to Tahitian men having pelted the crew with
rocks), a legendary sexual encounter commenced. Subsequent European
crews benefited from this initial assertion of Europe’s asymmetrical power
in Tahiti, an assertion repeated in myriad locales throughout the region as the
Spanish had done centuries before in Micronesia.
Captain Cook arrived at Tahiti two years after the Wallis voyage’s naval
bombardment. The sexual welcome and the tropical environs of Pacific
islands stood in diametric opposition to the harsh realities of life aboard
European ships where physical discipline and deprivation were the order of
the day. As Cook became increasingly familiar with the Pacific and frustrated
by acts such as theft of equipment by islanders (like Magellan long before
him), he began meting out severe punishments to people beyond his crews.
For infractions against crew and his ships’ property Cook had ears sliced off,
leaders held captive and people shot. In 1779, after he again tried to take
a chief hostage in order to secure the return of a stolen long boat at
Kealakekua Bay in Hawai‘i, Cook was killed, stabbed in the back, during
a chaotic early morning melee. Cook’s body was taken and possibly

15 Patricia O’Brien, The Pacific Muse: Exotic Femininity and the Colonial Pacific (Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 2006), chapter 2.
16 Ibid., pp. 122–9.

27
 PATRICIA O’BRIEN

consumed, though a few parts were eventually returned to the British. In

revenge, Cook’s crew resorted to punishments of torching boats and villages,
killing people, decapitating the corpses and displaying severed heads on
spikes.17 Like Magellan, Cook was lionised, or more accurately deified, for
his imperial deeds while Hawai‘ian chiefs were cast as malevolent violent
murderers. Cook’s violent deeds were erased from European memory until
recent times, but not those of the Pacific’s Indigenous peoples.
One of Cook’s most contested legacies of European contact with the
Pacific was the transmission of disease. The great captain himself despaired
that his crews had commercialised women’s sexuality and spread sexually
transmitted disease throughout the islands. Cook knew this consequence of
his voyages was devastating: a form of colonial violence that caused untold
harm for generations to come.18 After Cook, Indigenous populations were
scourged by other imported diseases, like smallpox, that wreaked havoc in
this newest New World, as it had in older ones.
After Cook, European encounters in the Pacific surged. This surge brought
new forms and increased levels of contact, as well as new forms of violence.
The Pacific became dotted with refreshment ports for crews, almost always
men, plying the ocean for resources. Sandalwood harvesting required con-
siderable negotiation with local peoples. Many a European man found
himself in a dangerous predicament, isolated in a remote location and
beholden to local laws and rulers who valued such men when they had
utility, particularly when they possessed military knowledge and prowess. In
the eastern Pacific, where the first sandalwood rushes took place, a European
presence had the effect of elevating certain groups over others. This sparked
new waves of fighting among rival Indigenous groups.19 The end result in the
Tahitian islands was the rise of one dominant ruling family, the Pomare
family. In Hawai‘i, the Kamehameha family, beneficiaries of new economies
in those islands created by sandalwood, rose up and also vanquished their
rivals. The Kamehamehas then united the Hawai‘ian Islands under their
monarchial rule that dominated the political landscape of Hawai‘i for nearly
a century before the US annexation of the group in 1898.

17 See Cook voyage accounts In J. C. Beaglehole (ed.), The Journals of Captain James Cook on
his Voyages of Discovery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), particularly vol.
I I I, part 2, pp. 561–3.
18 Ibid., vol. I I, pp. 174–5.
19 Dorothy Shineberg, They Came for Sandalwood: A Study of the Sandalwood Trade in South-
West Pacific 1830–1865 (Melbourne: University of Melbourne Press, 1967); Greg Dening
(ed.), The Marquesan Journal of Edward Robarts 1797–1824 (Canberra: ANU Press, 1974);
O’Brien, Pacific Muse, chapter 3.

28
 Empires and Indigenous Worlds

For the resource rushes where the bodies of whales, seals and otters were
the quarry, violence was an ever-present tool and consequence of the
activities of thousands of male crew members scattered throughout
the region on sea and land. Not only was there the inherent violence of the
hunt, but whaling produced many marauding crews that drastically altered
life in port towns like Kororareka in northern New Zealand, Lahiana and
Honolulu in Hawai‘i, Papeete in Tahiti and Apia in Sāmoa. All these port
towns vied for the dubious honour of being the ‘hell hole’ of the Pacific. In
these towns, Indigenous law and custom were greatly strained by thriving
markets for sex, guns and alcohol, as well as less salacious forms of refresh-
ment like food and water. Yet the groups who controlled lands around these
ports, as in the case of the Pomares and Kamehamehas, were the ones who
were rapidly empowered against traditional foes.20
In New Zealand, the Nga Puhi, who controlled the whaling hub of
Kororareka, shifted the practice of capturing vanquished enemies according
to the new conditions. From the early nineteenth century, young women
enslaved by internecine warfare appeared among the ranks of women parti-
cipating in the sex trade.21 In exchange for sex, the Nga Puhi acquired guns
that wreaked havoc on rival groups. The infusion of guns into traditional
warfare in northern New Zealand was hastened by the international travels
of Hongi Hika that were organised by Britain to curry favour with this Māori
leader. Hongi Hika was showered with gifts in Britain that he then traded en
route home for a cache of weapons in the fledgling British colony of Sydney
in 1820. After his return to New Zealand, warfare erupted throughout north-
ern New Zealand, resulting in the bloodiest fighting the country has seen to
this day. The so-called Musket Wars (1820–40) may have claimed as many as
20,000 lives and redrew the demographic and political map of the Māori with
far-reaching consequences.
The other actors in New Zealand’s bloody and dramatic surge in violence
in the early nineteenth century were British Protestant missionaries. As with
clergy in the Spanish and Portuguese Pacific colonies, missionaries from
Britain and the USA, and later French Catholic priests, were beginning to
impact the course of history from 1797. In this year, British missionary activity
began when a vessel loaded with men intent on bringing the light of Christian
teaching sailed to the Pacific to proselytise to the many peoples depicted,
often alarmingly to those with Christian sensibilities, in earlier voyager

20 Caroline Ralston, Grasshuts and Warehouses: Pacific Beach Communities of the Nineteenth
Century (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1978).
21 Belich, Making Peoples, pp. 153–4.

29
 PATRICIA O’BRIEN

accounts. Many of these Protestant missionary pioneers were caught up in

the warfare sparked by the early sandalwood rushes and fled to the Sydney
colony.
In Hawai‘i, New England missionaries gained favour with the
Kamehameha family, particularly through the figure of Ka’ahumanu, the
favoured wife of King Kamehameha II. In 1825 she imposed a new legal and
moral code shaped by Protestant teachings. The most contentious aspect of
this new code was the restriction on the trade in sex between local women
and whaling crews. Not long after the imposition of this new moral code, an
American whaling ship opened fire on the missionary’s residence in Lahiana.
The crew was incensed at missionary meddling in the privileges crews had
come to expect.22
Not all whaling crews resorted to such open violence against missionaries,
but throughout the Pacific in the nineteenth century there were countless
brash challenges to traditional and new laws that impinged on the activities of
European crews. The question of law, jurisdiction and how to capture, try
and punish perpetrators of violence became an ever-present polemic. The
lawless conduct of European crews pricked the consciences of many. In 1792,
British captain George Vancouver had the task of returning two young
Hawai‘ian women to their homeland after he discovered them aboard
a vessel he encountered on the north-west American coast. The two
women had been kidnapped and became caught up in the trade in otter
furs for the China market. Vancouver felt it was his duty to return the women
to their homeland as an act of gallantry. He could do nothing to punish the
perpetrators. Vancouver was witness to a phenomenon that was going to
cause havoc in the coming years as the mistreatment of Indigenous peoples
surged with the increased colonial traffic in the Pacific.23
Many Indigenous peoples took matters into their own hands and meted
out punishments on perpetrators or on those unfortunate enough to be the
next to encounter aggrieved groups after an incident of mistreatment. In the
infamous case of the 1809 attack on the passengers of the Boyd, again in New
Zealand, little attention was given to the cause of local Māori anger that
resulted in most of the people on board the vessel being killed and then eaten.
The incident, sparked by the flogging of a young local chief who was
travelling on the vessel, sent shock waves through the British Empire.
Whalers brutally avenged the killings, sparking ongoing fighting
between Māori and Europeans. As well as the price of many lives lost, the

22 O’Brien, Pacific Muse, p. 109. 23 Ibid., pp. 120–1.

30
 Empires and Indigenous Worlds

alarming events around the Boyd deeply impacted ideas about the Māori and
other Pacific peoples at the time when contact in the region was growing
exponentially. Being well armed and on high alert for Indigenous ‘treachery’
and ‘barbarity’ became the order of the day, sparking further cycles of violent
revenge.24
This situation concerned British authorities in Sydney. This was the colony
established in 1788 as a penal settlement, a new society embedded with
numerous forms of state-sanctioned brutality as a means to impose order
in this far-flung British outpost. This martial society also deployed violence as
a tool of colonialism to vanquish local Indigenous peoples.25 The uses of
violence and the application of British law within Australia spurred constant
tension. Colonial authorities also faced the ongoing dilemma of how to
project British law to shipping and crews in the islands in the hope of
tempering the alarming rates of mistreatment of local peoples at the hands
of European crews.26 Operating a court system with witness testimony over
such a diffuse area proved impossible. Successive governors issued declara-
tions from Sydney that proved equally ineffective in altering the incidence of
violence. In the 1830s, Evangelicals in Britain gathered together a litany of
atrocities committed throughout the Pacific by European men deemed by
the missionaries ‘the dregs of humanity’ that became evidence in
a parliamentary inquiry in London. The resolution to the long-running
inquiry was to institute a more proactive system of protection where mis-
sionaries, with their supposed moral rectitude, would temper the sordid
working-class male culture lubricated by alcohol, licentiousness and aggres-
sion considered a scourge on peoples throughout the region.27
The concern of British Evangelicals in the 1830s was significantly not
extended to Chinese people. At the very same time that missionaries were
wringing their hands about the suffering caused by British colonialism upon
Indigenous populations in the Pacific, multitudes of Chinese were suffering
the deleterious effects of the British opium traffic and other aggressive British

24 Ian Macdonald, The True and Terrible Story of the Boyd Massacre (Narrabeen: Ian
Macdonald, 2005).
25 See Chapter 11 in this volume; Grace Karskens, The Colony: A History of Early Sydney
(Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2010); Benjamin Madley, ‘From Terror to Genocide:
Britain’s Tasmanian Penal Colony and Australia’s History Wars’, Journal of British
Studies 47 (2008), 77–106.
26 Patricia O’Brien, ‘Think of Me as a Woman: Queen Pomare of Tahiti and
Anglo-French Imperial Contest in the 1940s Pacific’, Gender and History 18.1 (2006),
108–29; Lisa Ford, ‘Law’, in David Armitage and Alison Bashford (eds.), Pacific Histories:
Ocean, Land, People (New York: Palgrave, 2014), pp. 216–36.
27 O’Brien, Pacific Muse, pp. 138–40.

31
 PATRICIA O’BRIEN

manoeuvres. Reinforced by its vastly superior naval power, Britain aimed to

destabilise China and gain immense commercial and imperial benefits in the
Opium Wars that culminated in the 1842 Treaty of Nanking, in which Britain
was awarded territory and immense reparations that had an untold impact on
the course of Chinese history to follow.
Britain’s belligerent tactics against the Chinese government were repli-
cated elsewhere around the region at this time. The French, after being
excluded from their most desired site for a Pacific colony in southern New
Zealand (after Māori signed the Treaty of Waitangi with the British crown in
1840), turned their attention to the eastern islands of Polynesia. In 1842, using
classic gunboat diplomacy, the French forced the annexation of Tahiti and
surrounding islands and then the Marquesas Islands later in the same year.
Tahiti, ruled by Queen Pomare IV, acquiesced to French demands under
threats of violence. Following their conquest of a large swath of eastern
Polynesian islands, the French turned their attention to the western Pacific
islands of New Caledonia. Here they established a penal settlement where
various rebels from Paris were sent to labour in the new French colony. The
French also commenced a settler assault against the Indigenous Kanak
peoples, seizing their lands violently so that agricultural enterprises could
take root there. In the 1870s, the economic focus shifted to mining, and with it
came another layer of violent history surrounding the recruitment and labour
of workers from French possessions in Indochina and other surrounding
Pacific islands.28
Following the lead of Britain and France, the US naval captain Matthew
Perry targeted the isolated regime of the Tokugawa Shogunate in Japan that
stood accused of violently mistreating shipwrecked American whalers in the
1850s. With China’s recent crushing defeat by Britain providing a bitter object
lesson about the perils of confronting a modern imperial state, Japan
acquiesced to US demands but set about modernising and militarising at
a stunning pace. In a matter of decades, Japan defeated imperial China and
imperial Russia, two events inconceivable a few short years before. Japan
continued to mimic Western imperial nations, coveting overseas territories
and foreign resources, and increasingly expanding their control over foreign
populations. As with European imperial powers before them, Japan deployed
numerous forms of violence to suppress peoples absorbed into their newly

28 Brij Lal, Doug Munro and Edward D. Beechert (eds.), Plantation Workers: Resistance and
Accommodation (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1993); Adrian Muckle, Specters
of Violence in a Colonial Context: New Caledonia (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press,
2012).

32
 Empires and Indigenous Worlds

acquired territories. As their power increased, Japan’s use of violence did too,
reaching notoriously brutal levels against Koreans (Korea was annexed in
1905) and Chinese once the Second Sino-Japanese War erupted in 1937. Sexual
violence against women and its institutionalisation in military brothels, an
idea directly borrowed from British and French imperial armies, were the
most shocking dimensions of Japanese violence. Enslaving populations for
their labour was also widespread, but this had a long, storied history in the
Pacific before Japan embarked on its imperial era. Sexual violence against
women also had a long, highly charged history.
Harnessing the labour of colonised peoples was a preoccupation of all
colonial powers across the tropical Pacific in the second half of the nineteenth
century, as plantations spread out from South-East Asia where they had
already been established by the Dutch. As with plantation economies in
older colonial regions, the perennial problem of finding labourers to work
tropical plantations bedevilled the Pacific region. Exploitation, mistreatment
and violence shadowed plantations wherever they were established at
a varied pace across the region. The dominant pattern of acquiring labourers
was to bring in foreigners who would work estates carved from lands
acquired from Indigenous owners. These land transactions had their own
fraught histories of deception and exploitation that often resulted in an
exacerbation of tensions between Indigenous groups and colonial land buyers
that regularly erupted into violent confrontation. Plantations also allowed
a power base for new groups to take root that invariably challenged extant
political norms, often leading to violent outcomes.
The most dramatic example of how plantation economics disrupted
Indigenous worlds was Hawai‘i. The Great Māhele of 1848 monetised land,
facilitating its rapid transfer from Indigenous possession to that of planters,
the majority of whom hailed from the United States.29 Within four decades,
two thirds of all land had passed into haole (white) hands, driving the creation
of an elite planter class. Many in this new Hawaiian planter class were
descendants of the New England missionaries who established Christianity
in the islands from 1820.30 Hawaiʻi rapidly became a factory of sugar produc-
tion powered by its volcanic soils and the labour of people from China,
Portugal and then, at the end of the nineteenth century, Korea, the Caribbean

29 Lilikalā Kame’eleihiwa, Native Lands and Foreign Desires (Honolulu: Bishop Museum
Press, 1992); Jonathon Kay Kamakawiwo’ole Osorio, Dismembering Lāhui: A History of
the Hawaiian Nation to 1887 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2002), chapter 3.
30 Gary Okihiro, Cane Fires: The Anti-Japanese Movement in Hawaii 1865–1945 (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1991), pp. 6–7.

33
 PATRICIA O’BRIEN

island of Puerto Rico and, most problematic as far as the USA was concerned,
Japan. The rapid economic ascent of haole planters came at the expense of
Indigenous Hawai‘ians. Every aspect of their culture and lives was adversely
impacted by this profound shift from possession to dispossession in a few
decades. Change was forced by haole using the threat of military power.
A new constitution that stripped the Hawai‘ian monarchy of power was
dubbed the Bayonet Constitution because of the overt use of these tactics to
compel King Kalakaua to sign it into law, as he did under duress in 1887. The
ending of Indigenous governance was achieved when planters seized power
from Queen Liliʻuokalani in 1893, imprisoning her and threatening force.
Despite a determined uprising of the queen’s supporters around Honolulu in
1895, the island group was annexed by the USA in 1898.
The Hawaiian islands were a great prize for the USA. Their strategic
importance was unquestioned, allowing the USA to augment its naval
power in the Pacific Ocean exponentially. The acquisition of the islands
was not an unmitigated advantage, however. Leading figures, like
Theodore Roosevelt, questioned the impact of the large population of
Japanese in the islands upon the American nation. These fears about
a numerous and culturally distinct minority were framed within the rising
power of Japan; Roosevelt and others worried where the loyalties of
Hawaiian Japanese would lie if the two new Pacific powers clashed. These
fears grew through the first three decades of the twentieth century, with
Hawai‘i being described as the ‘Restless Rampart’ on the eve of the World
War II.31
The threat of war secured the Hawaiian islands for the United States.
Other significant territorial gains in the Pacific for the USA were won by war,
namely the Philippines and Guam. Defeating Spain in 1898, the USA ended
the long Spanish imperial era in these countries commenced by Magellan in
the early sixteenth century. In order to oust the Spanish, the USA supported
Filipino independence fighters who were promised self-rule. The USA
reneged on this arrangement and began fighting Filipinos, crushing hopes
that the USA was indeed a liberator and not another colonial power deploy-
ing the same methods of enforcing domination through overwhelming dis-
plays of force and brutality.32
Elsewhere in the Pacific, plantations also caused great disruption.
Indentured labourers recruited from the western Pacific islands manned

31 Joseph Barber, Hawaii: Restless Rampart (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1941).

32 Brian McAllister Linn, The U.S. Army and Counterinsurgency in the Philippine War,
1899–1902 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989).

34
 Empires and Indigenous Worlds

sugar plantations in Northern Queensland. Though some of these workers

came voluntarily, many were ‘blackbirded’ or kidnapped by unscrupulous
operators who plied the islands for young men, and, to a far lesser extent,
women. As with violent whaling crews, who triggered cycles of violence
between islanders and foreigners, it was well recognised after about a decade
of this trade (1870s) that blackbirders were having a similar impact on inciting
deadly violence. Humanitarians in the 1870s became concerned that black-
birding and the deplorable conditions labourers faced in Queensland equated
to slavery, a practice supposedly outlawed in the British Empire in the 1830s.
On top of concerns about the mode in which workers were recruited,
humanitarians focused on the treatment of workers and their extraordinarily
high mortality rates. The use of the whip to drive workers or punish those
who resisted authority was also a source of concern, still being debated as late
as the 1930s by Australian colonial administrators.33
The shift to a plantation economy in Sāmoa involved all of these elements.
The rapid acquisition of land by foreigners intent on establishing copra
plantations was staggering. One land speculator – Frank Cornwall who was
a former printer with the London Missionary Society – alone bought some
300,000 acres in a few years (over 40 per cent of all Sāmoan land). He was also
involved in labour recruiting, plying the Gilbert Islands (present-day Kiribati)
for labourers. Like Pacific island labourers on the sugar plantations in
Queensland (who were mostly recruited from the western Pacific island
groups of the Solomons and Vanuatu), these labourers’ mortality rates
were alarmingly high.34 There were many unsavoury characters involved
in labour recruiting, such as the so-called last pirate of the Pacific, Bully
Hayes, who like Cornwall plied the Gilbert Islands for labourers for Sāmoan
plantations. American-born Hayes became notorious for defrauding, swind-
ling and terrorising the Indigenous communities he raided. His brutal ways
finally caught up with him when one of his crew killed him during a dispute
and dumped his body into the Pacific: a killing, like so many before and after
it in the course of Pacific colonial history, not pursued by courts.
Back in Sāmoa, where Hayes was survived by a wife and children (he
reputedly had many of both dotted around the islands), the transfer of such
vast amounts of land out of Sāmoan hands in such short spaces of time ignited
more warfare between rival groups. The introduction of guns meant that
warfare was ferocious and of unprecedented lethality. Sāmoa was wracked by

33 Patricia O’Brien, ‘Remaking Australia’s Colonial Culture? White Australia and its
Papuan Frontier 1901–1940’, Australian Historical Studies 40.1 (2009), 96–112.
34 Lal et al. (eds.), Plantation Workers, p. 111.

35
 PATRICIA O’BRIEN

civil war throughout the 1870s to the turn of the century, with brief periods of
uneasy peace. Into this toxic mix entered three imperial powers – the USA,
Britain and Germany. German nationals spearheaded the plantation econ-
omy but all three powers laid claim to the Sāmoan islands, picking sides in the
civil war to advance their imperial ambitions and, in the late 1880s, investing
heavily in asserting their perceived rights.35 The apex of all these forces came
in 1889 when each power stationed naval assets in Apia Harbour in a show of
imperial resolve. Nature conjured up a hurricane of legendary proportions;
numerous vessels were destroyed in the tempest, and many seamen
drowned, adding to the death toll incurred in gaining power in Sāmoa.
A peace was brokered with the three powers in Berlin, but it only held for
a decade, before civil war again erupted. To resolve the intractable Sāmoan
problem, the islands were finally partitioned in 1899. Germany secured the
western islands and the USA the eastern ones.
Though initially Pacific islanders made up the ranks of plantation workers
in Sāmoa, Chinese indentured servants would dominate during most of
Sāmoa’s plantation history up to World War II. The experience of Chinese
here replicated that of plantation workers elsewhere in the Pacific. They were
driven hard, had few rights, were highly vulnerable to physical abuses and
suffered higher levels of disease. As with Chinese in other Pacific polities,
these labourers were heavily associated in the minds of their many vocal
detractors with depravity, opium traffic and violent interpersonal crime.
Also, their presence in Sāmoa was seen as problematic, as it was in other
Pacific societies. Fears about miscegenation were paramount. This vision of
Chinese in Sāmoa was exacerbated after the First World War erupted in
September 1914, as this was largely seen as imperilling the numerically
vulnerable white race.36
The First World War began relatively bloodlessly in the Pacific. The first
order of business for nations allied to Britain was to secure Germany’s Pacific
territories. New Zealand occupied German Sāmoa without a shot being fired.
Australia had a brief battle before German forces surrendered in German
New Guinea, and Australia gained additional territory on the island of New
Guinea, adding to the Territory of Papua controlled by Australia from 1906.

35 Paul Kennedy, The Samoan Tangle: A Study in Anglo-American Relations 1878–1900 (St
Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2011); Malama Meleisea, The Making of Modern
Samoa: Traditional Authority and Colonial Administration in the History of Western Samoa
(Suva: Institute of Pacific Studies, 1987).
36 Nancy Y. W. Tom, The Chinese in Samoa 1875–2015: The Dragon Came from Afar (Apia:
Samoa Historical and Cultural Trust, 2015).

36
 Empires and Indigenous Worlds

Japan took the expansive islands of German Micronesia, gaining another

immense addition to its rapidly expanding territory.
Australia’s military occupation of New Guinea, even for a nation largely
inured by a long history of settler violence that was still manifest in northern
Australia at this time, attracted significant attention for its brutality.37 The
war’s end and the shift to a mandates system overseen by the League of
Nations in 1921 did little to ameliorate the situation. In fact levels of violence
worsened. In New Guinea, a gold rush in 1926 saw the influx of large numbers
of white men, many of whom were armed and trained veterans of the First
World War, into remote regions where contact with the outside world had
been minimal, or in some instances non-existent. Like first encounters in the
Pacific since the sixteenth century, these meetings were often violent, with
white men armed with the latest military hardware combating local peoples,
who were more numerous and knowledgeable about the terrain but armed
only with spears. The cycles of violence and retribution that had marked the
Pacific’s colonial history from the start were replicated. In one instance on the
island of New Britain, violence was sparked by the ‘mistreatment’ (that is,
rape) of local women, a common cause of outrage avenged through violence
against colonial men. In this case, aggrieved local men killed Australian gold
prospectors, and Australian colonial authorities retaliated with a punitive
expedition that was armed with the weapons of industrial warfare: a machine
gun and grenades. For Australia, the undeniable levels of violence in their
mandate came with uncomfortable international scrutiny. Despite the inci-
dence and acceptance of violence in both national and international govern-
ing bodies like the League of Nations, the rhetoric of enlightened imperialism
was given lip service. This paternalistic philosophy espoused restraint in the
use of force, but the entrenched methods of colonial rule proved impossible
to dislodge.38
These tensions about violence and enlightened colonialism after the First
World War also gripped New Zealand.39 Like Australia, veterans from the
war flooded the colonial ranks of New Zealand’s mandate in Sāmoa. These
veterans faced a hostile populace incensed at New Zealand’s maladministra-
tion during the influenza epidemic in 1918. Incompetent officials permitted

37 Claude Rowley, The Australians in German New Guinea 1914–1921 (Melbourne:

Melbourne University Press, 1958).
38 Patricia O’Brien, ‘The 1926 Nakanai Massacre: Australian Colonial Violence in New
Guinea in a Global Context’, Australian Historical Studies 43.2 (2012), 191–209.
39 Patricia O’Brien, Tautai: Sāmoa, World History and the life of Ta’isi O. F. Nelson
(Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2017).

37
 PATRICIA O’BRIEN

the disease into the islands with devastating results: over one quarter of the
population perished. Coupled with this recent history, New Zealand con-
tinued to blunder in its relations with local leaders, sparking a resistance
movement named the Mau. It is another great irony of this long history of
colonial violence in the Pacific that when Sāmoans rose up and confronted
a colonial regime stoked by the hyper-violence of the First World War they
chose to pursue non-violent resistance. Sāmoans adopted the philosophy of
non-violence directly from Te Whiti and Tohu who had likewise confronted
colonial New Zealand in Taranaki four decades earlier. New Zealand autho-
rities and their supporters in Britain and the League of Nations struggled with
ways to challenge peaceful Sāmoans who enmired the colonial administra-
tion and caused international embarrassment and, worst of all to many
authorities, severely damaged ‘European prestige’. Some leaders were
troubled by the spectacle of using traditional forms of salutary punishment
against unruly colonial charges; others were not. Eventually the latter won
out and in late 1929 New Zealand forces fired into a peaceful protest march on
the streets of Apia. Though New Zealand suffered few repercussions at the
time, for such was the stomach for violent acts that reinforced colonial order,
this massacre still resonates to this day.40
For all the violence that had shaped Pacific history since the sixteenth
century, nothing compared to what was unleashed in the course of World
War II. Commencing with Japanese aggression in Korea and China, the war
would ravage the whole region, from the remotest islands to its densest
population centres. New technologies expanded the scope of violence – aerial
attacks, new artillery and, at the war’s end, atomic bombs – unleashing new
horrors on an unprecedented scale. The war was transformative but not
a complete break with the past. In many ways, forms of violence that had
been used to commandeer lands and resources, including human bodies for
sex and labour, continued. So too did the asymmetries of military power and
population sizes that had been such a central feature of histories of violence in
the Pacific since the sixteenth century.

Bibliographical Essay
Historians of violence in the colonial Pacific have had ready access to a colossal body of
published works. Any studies on this topic should commence by consulting the immense
work by Rodrigue Lévesque (ed.), History of Micronesia: A Collection of Documentary Sources

40 Patricia O’Brien, ‘Ta’isi O. F. Nelson and Sir Maui Pomare: Sāmoans and Māori
Reunited’, Journal of Pacific History 49.1 (2014), 1–24.

38
 Empires and Indigenous Worlds

(Gatineau: Lévesque Publications, 1992–2002). Lévesque’s twenty-volume work mines the

documentary history of the earliest colonial era of the Spanish in Micronesia that bears on
the interconnected history of the Spanish Philippines. Violence, in many of its forms, is an
ever-present feature in this literature though some works have more relevance or
popularity than others, such as the accounts by English buccaneer and circumnavigator
William Dampier, who authored the classic work A New Voyage Round the World in 1697.
Within the extensive historiography of Pacific exploration and encounter, works inspired
by the Cook voyages alone are numerous.
The bedrock of the many scholarly treatments of the Cook voyages since the 1950s is the
landmark work of J. C. Beaglehole who compiled and annotated the voyage journals of
James Cook and other principals and lower-ranking chroniclers of Cook’s three epic
voyages in five volumes: The Journals of Captain James Cook (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1955). Subsequent historians have worked over these sources, with
some having problematised the inherent violence within these accounts more than
others. In O. H. K. Spate’s sweeping three-volume masterwork, The Pacific since
Magellan (Canberra: Australian National University Press): vol. I, The Spanish Lake (1979),
vol. I I, Monopolists and Freebooters (1983) and vol. I I I, Paradise Found and Lost (1988), violence
is a consistent feature in the Pacific colonial histories he recounted. Spate’s focus on the era
after colonial contact entails details of colonial conquest, piracy, encounters and
explorations. Other historians, such as Deryk Scarr in his The History of the Pacific
Islands: Kingdoms of the Reefs (Melbourne: Macmillan, 1990) and A History of the Pacific
Islands: Passages through Tropical Time (Richmond: Curzon, 2001), likewise feature violence
as a driver of Pacific history, especially in the era after colonial contact commences in the
form of resource-harvesting industries like whaling, sealing and tortoise-shell collecting,
and colonial settlements. Scarr paid more attention to Indigenous histories than Spate and
so tracked how colonial forces reshaped power dynamics within Indigenous worlds.
Since the 1990s histories have attempted to tell a story about violence from Indigenous
perspectives. For instance, Anne Salmond’s Two Worlds: First Meetings between Maori and
Europeans, 1642–1772 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1992) attempted to do this
from the viewpoint of New Zealand’s Māori. The scholarly tsunami created by the intense
debates sparked by Gananath Obeyesekere’s The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European
Mythmaking in the Pacific (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992) and
Marshall Sahlins’s How Natives Think: About Captain Cook, for Example (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1995) plumbed not only the circumstances surrounding the
killing of Captain Cook in Hawai‘i but also the politics of scholarly position and the
limitations of Western scholarly enterprise. For scholars interested in violence in its
colonial context, these debates and their ramifications were considerable. For Hawaiian
scholar and activist Haunani-Kay Trask in her provocative work From a Native Daughter:
Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawai‘i (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1999),
colonial violence was redefined, expanded and given renewed contemporary relevance
in current debates about Indigenous rights. Trask also homed in on the politics of gender
and how central violence towards women was in the forging of Pacific empires. This
theme was highlighted in works by Teresia Teaiwa, notably ‘Bikinis and Other S/pacific
N/oceans’, Contemporary Pacific 6.1 (1994), 87–109, and Patricia O’Brien’s The Pacific Muse:
Exotic Femininity and the Colonial Pacific (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006), as
well as in the works of Margaret Jolly, including her co-edited work with

39
 PATRICIA O’BRIEN

Serge Tcherkézoff and Darrell Tryon, Oceanic Encounters: Exchange, Desire, Violence
(Canberra: ANU E Press, 2009). Recently David Igler has recognised the prominent
place of violence in Pacific colonial history in his ‘Hardly Pacific: Violence and Death in
the Great Ocean’, Pacific Historical Review 84.1 (2015), 1–18. More specifically, a special
edition of the journal Colonialism and the Colonial History 18.1 (2017), ‘“Rough Justice”:
Punitive Expeditions in Oceania’, edited by Chris Ballard and Bronwen Douglas, again
signals a growing interest of scholars in violence as a historical frame of Pacific colonial
history.

40
 2
Heresy and Banditry: Religious Violence
in China since 1850
thomas david dubois

At its peak in the mid eighteenth century, the Chinese Qing dynasty
(1644–1911) was arguably the world’s strongest, wealthiest and most flour-
ishing polity. Within half a century it was showing signs of demographic
and social strain, and by the 1850s its very existence was challenged by the
Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace (Taiping tianguo), a religious rebellion
that occupied much of the southern half of the country, bringing destruc-
tion on a scale that eclipsed by a factor of twenty the entire mortality of the
American Civil War. Even after that rebellion had been suppressed, similar
movements, arising out of poverty and dislocation, and often expressing
variations on the same religious themes, would continue to break out
across China for the remainder of the nineteenth century. The spectre of
militarised religion would haunt governments of the subsequent Republic
of China (1912–49, continued on Taiwan) and People’s Republic of China
(founded 1949), so much so that they would continue to react violently
against religious movements as recently as the 1999 campaign against
Falungong.

Religious Violence and its Suppression

Qing law outlined a wide-ranging list of religious offences, demanding
strangulation or exile for any who ‘pretend to summon noxious spirits,
compose charms, chant incantations over water, perform spirit writing and
pray to sages . . . [those] who deceptively appear to be engaged in good
works; and arouse and mislead the common people’.1 The breadth of this
statute, copied almost word for word from the code of the preceding Ming
dynasty (1368–1644), itself suggests the interests of the imperial state in

1 Jiang Yonglin, The Mandate of Heaven and The Great Ming Code (Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 2011), pp. 58–67.

41
 THOMAS DAVID DUBOIS

controlling religion, and, conversely, the wide diversity of phenomena that

might be characterised as religious violence.
Defining religion in expansive terms, we may consider these expressions of
religious violence broadly in three categories.2 The first is the violent sup-
pression by the imperial state of threats to its moral and spiritual hegemony.
As evinced in the calendar of rituals for the emperor and his ministers to
thank Heaven (Tian) for the blessings of agriculture, the imperial state took
literally its injunction to act both as the Son of Heaven and as the one and
only linchpin in the moral universe. It could brook no pretenders to this
claim. The emergence anywhere in the realm of parallel magic, unauthorised
ritual or strange portents was no mere annoyance, but rather an existential
threat to the legitimacy of the dynasty, and one that would justly be dealt
with in the harshest terms.
The second was violence that was mobilised or aided by religion.
Ordinary acts of banditry and criminal violence drew upon a pervasive
tradition of protective magic, such as the use of charms, ashes and blessed
water, as well as various dietary, ritual and martial arts techniques that
promised to render the user invulnerable to harm. Religious ritual also
provided the bond that held together legal structured organisations such as
lineages, as well as illegal ones, such as sworn brotherhoods. From
a law-and-order perspective, such organisations could cut two ways.
Intergenerational lineages provided stability and structure to rural society,
but could also resort to violence in protecting or expanding their economic
interests. Sworn brotherhoods, often characterised as ‘secret societies’, in
fact included a wide spectrum that ranged from criminal organisations to
self-protection societies, the latter being especially important to vulnerable
populations such as masons, soldiers, silver or coal miners, barge pullers or
porters. Like lineages, these populations developed an internal hierarchy
and identity around rituals and deities, often unique ones, and, like them,
used the structure created by ritual to enable these groups to mobilise to
defend themselves and their interests.3
The third and most direct expression is violence that was directly insti-
gated by what Qing law would have regarded as ‘perverse’ (xie) religious

2 On this topic, see Thomas David DuBois, ‘The Transformation of Religion in East and
Southeast Asia – Paradigmatic Change in Regional Perspective’, in DuBois (ed.), Casting
Faiths: Imperialism and the Transformation of Religion in East and Southeast Asia
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 1–22.
3 Ma Xisha, ‘The Evolution of the Luo Teaching and the Formation of Green Gang’, in
Ma Xisha and Meng Huiying (eds.), Popular Religion and Shamanism (Leiden: Brill, 2011),
pp. 167–206.

42
 Heresy and Banditry

ideas, notably the tradition of millenarianism that circulated freely within

popular religious thought. Millenarian themes, such as the notion of sacred
time, ran deep within the established orthodox traditions of Confucianism,
Daoism and Buddhism. Over time, these three traditions merged into
a popular eschatology based around a deity called the Eternal Venerable
Mother (Wusheng laomu, a name that connotes escape from the cycle of birth
and death), who sought the salvation of mankind before the end of the world
at the close of the current epoch. This sort of eschatology combined familiar
elements – demon quelling, the quest for post-mortem salvation, the fruition
of sacred time and the moral justness of the universe – and variations on this
same theme were ubiquitous in everyday ritual life across China. Ideas about
the violent destruction of the current world intertwined with other religious
beliefs, remaining submerged under ordinary circumstances, but ready to
emerge in times of stress.
Qing rulers were acutely aware of the growing danger of religious mili-
tarisation. Occasional mass panics about sorcery and uncontrolled dark magic
had already arisen nationwide as threats to both sacred and public order. (See
Map 2.1.) One such outbreak in 1768 became sufficiently widespread as to
warrant the personal attention of the Qianlong emperor (r. 1735–96), who was
frustrated at the apparent unwillingness of local officials to take the threat
seriously. He was right to be concerned. That outbreak was followed in 1774
by a small rebellion in Shandong province that, although easily suppressed,
nevertheless revealed a more widespread use of the same worrying themes:
the use of charms, incantations and rituals intended to protect rebel troops.
From 1796 to 1804, the so-called White Lotus Rebellions raged across numer-
ous provinces of central China, fed both by economic difficulties and by
prophecies of a new age. Soon thereafter, the Eight Trigrams Uprising of 1813
broke out in the suburbs of Beijing. This rebellion not only managed briefly
to reach the Forbidden City itself, but, perhaps more menacingly, its leaders
included figures who claimed to be the Maitreya Buddha and the true heir of
the long-deposed Ming throne, the two themes of apocalyptic fervour and
political sedition.4
The rapid escalation of religious violence was without question prompted
by the equally precipitous decline of internal conditions. The 1799 death of
the long-reigning Qianlong emperor initiated a century of weak imperial

4 Philip A. Kuhn, Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1990); Susan Naquin, Millenarian Rebellion in China: The Eight Trigrams
Uprising of 1813 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976); Barend ter Haar, The White
Lotus Teachings in Chinese Religious History (Leiden: Brill, 1992), pp. 250–61.

43
 THOMAS DAVID DUBOIS

Mongolia
Xinjiang
Zhili
Yellow R
iv. Beijing KOREA
Ga Tianjin
ns
u
Boxer
Shandong
Yellow Cliff Mountain YELLOW
Dungan SEA
Nian
Shanxi
Nanjing
Shanghai
White Hankou
Anqing
Tibet
Sichuan Lotus
iv.
ts eR Taiping
ng
Ya

Panthay
Yunnan Zijing Mountain
Guangxi
BURMA
(Brit.) Hong Kong (Brit.)
ANNAM (Fr.)

External boundary Internal boundary

0 500 1000 km
Initial Taiping advance, 1850–1853

Map 2.1 Late Qing China, showing the approximate location of major religious rebellions.

governance, compounding pressing challenges in trade and foreign relations.5

The greatest problem was demographic: after a century of steady population
growth, China had by 1800 largely exhausted its ability to colonise new
agrarian frontiers. Continued population growth (from roughly 295 million
in 1800 to 430 million in 1850) was thus accomplished by increasing pressure
on existing land resources. The brunt of these trends was borne disproportio-
nately by those at the bottom, who responded by emigrating, or by living
more precariously (for example by colonising lands such as floodplains). In
the worst cases, demographic stress pushed peasants to life and death deci-
sions. As ritual propriety required families to produce at least one male heir,
many at the edge of subsistence were forced to sell female children, or simply

5 The Qianlong emperor had formally abdicated three years earlier, but in fact retained
much of his former power.

44
 Heresy and Banditry

leave newborn girls to die. Over time, millions of these individual decisions
added up to produce a massive gender imbalance (with some counties in
northern China reporting as many as 1.56 males for every female). With no
hope of marriage or of producing an heir, these millions of extra men,
referred to colloquially as ‘bare branches’ (guang gun) on the family tree,
would become a massive destabilising force in late Qing society. It would not
take much to push them to violence. Religion would provide the catalyst.

Taiping Rebellion
The smaller rebellions of the mid-Qing were a foreshadowing of the massive
explosion of religious violence that broke out in the second half of the
nineteenth century. The first and greatest of these events occurred in the
mountainous southern province of Guangxi. It began with the career of
Hong Xiuquan (1814–64), who, like so many thousands of other aspirants,
had spent much of his life training and studying to take the imperial
Confucian examinations, the gateway to a lucrative and prestigious position
in the imperial bureaucracy. Competition for these positions was extremely
intense, and after four attempts Hong had still not passed the shengyuan
licentiate, the bar for entry into the ranks of the literati. It was at this point
that he decided to act on a fever dream that he had had some time earlier. In
this dream, Hong had met an old man who gave him a sword and com-
manded him to cast out demons (two motifs from Daoist exorcistic practice)
and a younger man, who referred to Hong as his younger brother. Drawing
on a missionary tract that he had received some years earlier, Hong inter-
preted these two figures to be the Christian God and Jesus, respectively, and
took the dream as a sign to start a religious movement that became known as
the ‘Teaching of the God Worshippers’ (bai shangdi jiao). During the late
1840s, he and about 10,000 of his followers left their homes and moved to
remote Zijing Mountain. Alarmed by the group’s growth and its secrecy, the
local Qing garrison (the Green Standard Army) launched an ill-fated assault
on the community in 1850. The heavily militarised and well-organised com-
munity easily repulsed the Qing troops, and beheaded the commander. Now
in open rebellion, the society abandoned any pretence of Qing loyalty,
growing their hair long in contravention to the requirement that all men
shave the top of the head in Manchu style, and earning the movement the
nickname of the ‘hairy rebels’ (fa fei). Early in 1851, Hong completed the act of
rebellion by proclaiming the foundation of a new kingdom, the Heavenly
Kingdom of Great Peace (Taiping tianguo). Over the next two years, the

45
 THOMAS DAVID DUBOIS

armies of the Taipings (as Anglophone contemporaries came to term the

movement) campaigned across a swath of southern China, easily defeating
demoralised Qing troops, and growing in number with each victory. In 1853,
they captured the city of Nanjing, which they renamed as Tianjing, literally
the ‘Heavenly Capital’ of the new kingdom.
The unique beliefs and meteoric rise of the Taipings raise the ques-
tions of how deeply religion shaped the movement and how violent was
their religion. The initial attraction of the movement was clearly shaped
by the difficult conditions of life in mountainous Guangxi, a rough area
of illegal mines, timber forests and ethnic division (Hong himself was
a minority Hakka), where state influence and protection were only
occasionally in evidence. Religious brotherhoods thrived in areas like
this, and the appeal to the downtrodden remained a prominent attrac-
tion as the movement advanced. Peasant grievances were immediately
reflected in the utopian promises that the Taipings made: redistribution
of land, food to all who labour, the expulsion of the foreign Qing
dynasty and restoration of the just and natural order. Such promises
were stock features of peasant rebellions as early the second century
CE, when an identically named millennial kingdom was established in
the south-west.6 At the same time, Hong’s unique religious ideas per-
vaded the movement’s numerous public statements. While still on
Zijing Mountain, the movement banned a series of vices including
opium, concubinage and prostitution, as well as women’s footbinding,
a Han Chinese custom that was not shared by the Hakka. More
important, the place of Hong as the Heavenly Sovereign and of the
movement as the legitimate government of China was always portrayed
in terms of dispelling evil, punishing demons and serving the will of the
Heavenly Father. Taiping propaganda portrayed the foundation of the
eternal realm as a divine command, and thus a responsibility from
which none could shrink. An 1852 proclamation to the people of
Hunan was typical of the rhetoric of the movement, casting the struggle
in Manichean terms of absolute good and evil, in which the Manchu
Qing were literal demons:
Our Chinese empire has now received the great favor of the Great God who
has ordered our Sovereign, the Heavenly King, to rule; how can the occupa-
tion and prolonged misrule of the Manchu barbarians be permitted to

6 Terry F. Kleeman, Great Perfection: Religion and Ethnicity in a Chinese Millennial Kingdom
(Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1998).

46
 Heresy and Banditry

continue? You gentlemen have for generations resided in China; who among
you is not a Child of God? If you can uphold Heaven in destroying the
demons . . . you shall be a hero without compare in the mortal world, and in
the heaven you shall receive glory without bounds. If instead you cling to
your delusions, protect the false and reject the true, in life you will be
a barbarian and in death a barbarian demon. Between obedience and
disobedience there is a great principle.7

The Taiping advance was not just a military assault, it was also
a chastisement of the institutions of the Qing. Once in power, the Taiping
state maintained its face of uncompromising puritanism, but also became
rent by internal division and a constant need for resources. As a result, the
‘Great Peace’ was anything but peaceful. The Taiping capital was beset by
struggles between the subordinate commanders known as the ‘Five Kings’,
and devolved into an ‘arena of carnage, greed and paranoia’. Suspicious of
a plot by the ‘Eastern King’ Yang Xiuqing, Hong ordered an attack on Yang
and his entourage, initiating two weeks of slaughter in which 20,000 were
killed. Foreign observers were initially intrigued by reports of a Christian
rebellion, but such interest was short-lived. Beyond the problem of Hong’s
own beliefs, it became clear that the Taiping state was bad for business.
Unwilling to accept the Taiping ban on the opium trade, British and French
representatives in Shanghai quickly turned against the movement, even
going as far as to provide the support of mercenary troops. But even with
such help, suppression of the Taipings was far beyond the capabilities of
regular Qing forces, and eventually led to the formation of new types of
locally led and financed units, most notably the ‘Ever Victorious’ Hunan
Army of Zeng Guofan.8 Military action began in 1860 and ended with the
capture and sacking of the capital in 1864 (Figure 2.1). Hong Xiuquan himself
had died of food poisoning before the final collapse of his movement.
Victorious Qing troops disinterred his corpse, which they cremated and
then shot out of a cannon, thereby denying a resting place to his spirit.
The death total of the rebellion is extremely difficult to calculate. The
conservative estimate of 20 million people killed would make it by far
the deadliest event of the nineteenth century, vastly more so than either
the Napoleonic Wars or the American Civil War. But the real number may

7 ‘Proclamation by Imperial Sanction’ (banxing zhaoshu), in Franz H. Michael and

Zhongli Zhang, The Taiping Rebellion: History and Documents, vol. I I (Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 1971), p. 148.
8 Philip A. Kuhn, ‘The Taiping Rebellion’, in John K. Fairbank (ed.), The Cambridge History
of China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 264–317, at 295.

47
Figure 2.1 Qing troops storming the Taiping capital of Nanjing. The lower left-hand corner shows the tactic of driving cattle set on fire to burst
the city gates.
 Heresy and Banditry

have been much higher. The siege and capture of fortified cities was often
followed by an orgy of recriminatory slaughter of the civilian population, and
some important cities such as Anqing changed hands multiple times. Beyond
the violence of the rebellion and its suppression, the destruction of supply
routes, market towns and rice fields decimated an already precarious coun-
tryside, sending waves of refugees (and with them an outbreak of cholera)
into safe havens such as Shanghai. The combined effect of these disasters
completely depopulated vast swaths of one of China’s most productive
agricultural regions. In 1855, Guangde County in southern Anhui had
a population of nearly 310,000. Ten years later, just over 5,000 remained,
and within a generation newly arrived migrants would come to make up five
out of six of the county’s residents. Even with repopulation policies in place,
the region was slow to recover. The 1953 population of four central provinces
(Zhejiang, Anhui, Jiangsu and Jiangxi) was still nearly 20 million lower than it
had been a century earlier.9

Taiping Contemporaries
The suppression of the Taiping Rebellion placed a strain on the Qing finances
and military from which it was never able to recover. This burden left the
dynasty not only less able to respond militarily to the breakdown of social
order, but also less able to exercise routine governance of the sort that would
stabilise society. As the dynasty entered into a period of steep decline, it
increasingly neglected tasks such as dredging flood-prone rivers or delivering
relief supplies, further exacerbating the stress of continued population rise.
Official neglect allowed crises such as the North China Famine (1876–9) to
become far more deadly than they would have under better circumstances.10
As a result, the spiral of social dislocation and organised violence continued
to accelerate throughout the remainder of the century. At roughly the same
time the Taiping were emerging from Guangxi, armed bands known as Nian
(the name most likely refers to skeins of twisted paper, although the precise
provenance remains a matter of dispute) were organising in Huaibei, another
impoverished region that spanned a tangle of provincial borders. While

9 Ho Ping-to, Studies in the Population of China, 1368–1953 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 1959), pp. 153–8, 236–47.
10 Xiao Lingbo, Huang Huan and Wei Zhudeng, ‘Huabei 1743–1744 nian yu 1876–1878 nian
hanzai zhong de zhengfu liangshi diaodu yu shehui houguo duibi’ [Comparison of
Governmental Grain Transfer and Social Consequences during the North China
Droughts of 1743–1744 and 1876–1878], Zaihai xue 27.1 (2012), 101–6.

49
 THOMAS DAVID DUBOIS

earlier interpretations emphasised the connection of the Nian Rebellion

(1851–68) to an internally coherent White Lotus tradition, scholars since the
1980s have moved away from the idea that an existing religious tradition
drove the formation of the Nian, and have instead come to see the movement
as an opportunistic extension of the banditry that was endemic to the area.
The distraction of Qing forces by the Taiping suppression gave these bandit
gangs (and the communities that supported them) an opportunity to develop
into a proper military force, which aimed less to expand their power territo-
rially than to keep the Qing from returning. However, while the Nian may
not have been driven by religion in the same way as the millenarian Taipings,
religion should not be discounted entirely. As were other violent brother-
hoods such as the Triads or the Heaven and Earth Society (Tiandihui), the
Nian military was structured around a tradition of narrative, lore, rituals and
blood oaths.11 Long after the Nian themselves were suppressed, this region
would remain known for organised violence.12
A far less compromising dynamic was at work in the 1866 conflagration of
the Yellow Cliff Teaching (Huangya jiao) in nearby Shandong Province.
Originally a school of syncretic Confucianism called the Great Ancient
(Taigu), the movement formed into a community of disciples who (in part as
a measure of protection against Nian incursions) sold their property and
relocated to a stronghold at the foot of the Yellow Cliff Mountain. There the
community of a few hundred families developed the belief that previous
teachers lived among them as immortals, and practised a strict regimen of
prayer and ritual. Provincial authorities watched these developments with
alarm. Governor Yan Jingming characterised the group as the ‘intersection of
heresy and banditry’ (xiejiao tong fei), and, beyond the usual charges of holding
lewd nocturnal rituals and practising illicit magic, claimed that the community
was storing up weapons.13 Convinced that danger from the group was too
great to ignore, Yan sent in a contingent of troops to force them to disperse,
attacking the community and burning it to the ground. Leaders and their
families were killed in the ensuing battle and fire, as were hundreds of
followers who tried to defend the community. Rather than surrender, many
of the remaining followers committed suicide, bringing the total death toll to

11 David Ownby, Brotherhoods and Secret Societies in Early and Mid-Qing China: The
Formation of a Tradition (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).
12 Elizabeth J. Perry, Rebels and Revolutionaries in North China, 1845–1945 (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1980).
13 Han Bingfang, ‘The Taigu School and Yellow Cliff Teaching: Another Case of
Transformation from Confucian Academic Group to Religious Sect’, in Ma and
Meng (eds.), Popular Religion and Shamanism, p. 208.

50
 Heresy and Banditry

thousands. Decades later, many of Yan’s fellow literati continued to defend the
teaching and criticise his mishandling of the situation.

Muslim Rebellions
The distraction of the Qing military provided an opportunity for two
additional uprisings, one in the south-west and one in the north-west.
These ethnically diverse regions sat on the frontier of the empire, with
many areas under the mediated administration of native chieftains. Among
the area’s distinct groups were Chinese Muslims (often known as Hui),
most of whom dated their arrival to or after the influx of Central Asian
Muslims during the Mongol rule of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries,
and were scattered unevenly throughout the region. Muslims were an
important minority in Yunnan, the mountainous south-west province
bordering Burma, where they engaged in trade, and came as migrants to
work the rich copper and silver mines. Further north, the newly conquered
territory of Xinjiang bordered areas of concentrated Muslim settlement in
Gansu and Shanxi.
Violence in these areas grew out of a confluence of factors that included
poverty, dislocation, and grudges against neighbours and local officials, that
were energised, organised and ignited by religion and religious identity. The
so-called Panthay Rebellion in Yunnan followed a rise in ethnic conflicts, and
was sparked by a dispute between Han and Hui Muslims, growing into
a desire to annihilate the region’s Hui population. A spiral of mutual recri-
minations escalated into a massacre of 8,000 Muslims in 1856 by Han militias
and garrison troops, and from there into an anti-Qing movement that
captured the city of Kunming before being suppressed by arriving forces
under the command of defecting fellow Muslim Ma Rulong (1832–91). The
first of the north-west rebellions (known to contemporaries as the Dungan,
a corruption of the Chinese dong Gan, meaning Eastern Gansu) developed in
the 1860s when local militias that formed in the wake of the Taiping
Rebellion, along with Hui contingents in the Qing military, began turning
on each other in waves of reprisals. Out of this, Yaqub beg (1820–77) declared
a Kingdom of Kashgaria, which fell into disarray and was ultimately crushed
by the Qing forces under the general Zuo Zongtang (1812–85). Thirty years
later, the same region would again erupt into violence.
Like the Taiping Rebellion, the Muslim rebellions of the nineteenth
century are striking for their sheer brutality. The rise and suppression of
the smaller Panthay Rebellion resulted in a million killed, while ten years of

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warfare in the north-west may have been as deadly as the Taiping Rebellion
itself. Equally striking was the scale of violence against civilians, including the
recriminatory slaughter of entire villages and towns. The violence itself did
not always follow simple ethnic lines. Both the rebel and the suppressing
armies were ethnically mixed, and the Hui themselves were internally very
diverse, representing different customs, sects of Islam and lineages. Islam
itself played a greater role in the north, where Muslims constituted a larger
proportion of the population, and kept closer ties to currents and allies in
Central Asia, but that role changed over time. The northern rebellion did
come to view itself as a ‘holy war’, but in addition to violence between Han
and Hui, much blood was shed by Muslims who were divided by tribal or
ethnic loyalties, or by such ‘ritual minutiae’ as beard length or pronunciation
of the vocalisation of Sufi devotions. Nevertheless, the largest-scale violence
did eventually take the form of what would now be called ethnic cleansing.
The slaughter of Muslims that followed the capture of the Panthay capital of
Dali left the roads ‘ankle deep in blood’. From the dead, soldiers cut more
than 10,000 pairs of ears – enough to fill twenty-four large baskets. The
rebellions of the north-west were started by rumours of Qing plans to
massacre Muslims. The shifting waves of violence took as their goal first
the eradication of Han Chinese, followed by a suppression that sought
through exile or murder to remove the Hui from entire regions.14

Christian Mission and the Boxer Uprising

Christianity was not new to nineteenth-century China. Nestorian
Christianity first reached China via the Silk Road during the Tang dynasty
(618–907), and Iberian Catholicism arrived by sea in the sixteenth century.
Following a conflict over Catholic refusal to adhere to Confucian ritual
proscriptions, Christian mission was banned in 1732, but was again allowed
as a provision of the Treaty of Tianjin in 1858. Once so opened, China quickly
received a large and diverse influx of Christian missionaries, both Catholic
and Protestant. As had been the case during the earlier period of Iberian
Catholicism, mission was frequently bound to national interest, producing

14 Hodong Kim, Holy War in China: The Muslim Rebellion and State in Chinese Central Asia,
1864–1877 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), pp. 4, 60–71, 74–136; David
G. Atwill, The Chinese Sultanate: Islam, Ethnicity, and the Panthay Rebellion in Southwest
China, 1856–1873 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), pp. 34–47, 91–2, 183;
Jonathan Lipman, Familiar Strangers: A History of Muslims in Northwest China (Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 1997), p. 74.

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 Heresy and Banditry

a network of rivalries among competing missions and with local elites and
religious figures such as Buddhist monks. Unlike the earlier period, this new
reintroduction of mission came at a time of Qing dynastic decline, and the
increasingly aggressive search by foreign powers for special concessions and
spheres of interest within China. Some missions were bystanders to these
events; others were willing antagonists. Many missionaries and diplomats felt
that their aggressive defence of the Christians was a fair response to official
xenophobia; others were unapologetic in their ambition to seed conflict that
would result in diplomatic gain. As China’s position continued to deteriorate
during the last decade of the nineteenth century, local officials were cau-
tioned to avoid such conflict at all costs.
It is difficult to characterise simply the reasons behind Christian conversion, or
the hostility that was felt against the religion. While most Catholic and
Protestant missions set standards of knowledge and behaviour for new converts,
it was not uncommon for one to accuse the other of accepting converts with
more enthusiasm than care. More serious charges came from suspicious
Chinese, who accused the missionaries of sorcery. Missionaries used their
diplomatic leverage to protect their charges in civil and criminal disputes,
creating deep grudges against the Chinese Christians. The Christians themselves
frequently exacerbated these divisions by refusing to participate in village rituals.
Often entire families would convert to Christianity, thus bringing religious
difference into lineage feuds and conflicts that went back decades or longer.
These forces could come together with deadly results. In 1870, a mob
gathered at the French church in Tianjin, enraged by rumours that
Catholic nuns were kidnapping Chinese children and using their eyes
and organs to make potions (the nuns did in fact offer a cash payment
to people who brought dying children to the church for baptism). Sent
to calm the situation, the bellicose French consul instead shot the
magistrate’s assistant (possibly by accident), prompting the crowd to
attack the church, killing the diplomats, priests and nuns, as well as
a number of Russian bystanders and about forty Chinese Christians.
The brewing tensions reached a peak in the Boxer Uprising of 1900.
For a number of years, the North China Plain had been afflicted by
drought (Figure 2.2), a condition that many interpreted as Heaven’s
displeasure at the spread of the foreign religion. This sentiment spread
through the countryside through religious and martial arts networks,
including one style of boxing called Plum Flower Fist (Meihua quan).
Along with fighting techniques, these networks spread the techniques of
direct possession, by which young men of a pure heart could be directly

53
 THOMAS DAVID DUBOIS

Figure 2.2 ‘Starving people looting grain’. This woodcut image from around 1900 hints at
the severity of the drought in northern China, and suggests the role of poverty and natural
disasters in driving events like the Boxer Uprising.

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 Heresy and Banditry

Figure 2.3 Boxers in Beijing, 1900.

possessed by martial deities such as Guan Gong, or by apotheosised

literary figures like the Monkey King, Sun Wukong, from the classic
Journey to the West. So possessed, these young men would be invulner-
able to bullets (daoqiang buru) and ready to enter battle against the
foreigners. Still without a leader, the movement consisted of bands of
men like the ones shown in Figure 2.3 who began converging on the
foreign enclaves in Tianjin and Beijing. The movement called itself the
Society of Righteousness and Harmony (Yihe tuan). Seeing their pench-
ant for martial arts display, the foreigners dubbed them Boxers.
A smaller force consisting solely of women, particularly pre-pubescent
girls, was called the Red Lanterns Shining (Hongdeng zhao), and was
credited with a variety of magical powers, including the ability to fly,
and to destroy armies and buildings with a wave of their fans.
The rise of the Boxer movement coincided with and exacerbated chaos in
the Qing court. In 1900, the Empress Dowager Cixi (1835–1908), who had
revealed herself to be the true power in Beijing, reversed her earlier policy of
suppressing the Boxers, and instead supported them, issuing a demand for all
foreigners to leave China. Doubting her assurances of protection, the

55
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foreigners chose instead to defend the legations while waiting for relief from
the 20,000-strong Eight Nation Expeditionary Force that reached Beijing on
14 August. Many local Christians did the same, barricading themselves into
stoutly constructed and easily defensible churches. Provincial officials acted
on their own volition: the Shanxi governor Yuxian (1842–1901) assured his
infamy by offering protection to fifty-four local missionaries and then having
them slaughtered inside the government compound.15 Others, such as
Shandong governor Yuan Shikai (1859–1916), ignored the order to support
the Boxers, and others (particularly Muslim units in the army) were from the
outset hostile to the movement.
Although the Boxers are remembered as anti-foreign, the violence of the
movement and its suppression were directed mainly at Chinese. While the
missionary press justly lamented the deaths of their own, the number of
Chinese Christians killed was far higher, perhaps as many as 30,000 (Figure 2.4).
As was so often the case, the unrest presented an opportunity to settle old grudges
violently. The missionary doctor Arthur Peill recounted how Boxers in southern
Zhili (modern Hebei) turned against a cluster of Muslim villages: ‘Hundreds of
Boxers surrounded these unsuspecting villages, and slaughtered their inhabitants
to the number of almost a thousand people, massacring men, women and
children without distinction. Babies were thrown up into the air and caught on
the points of spears and so on.’16
The suppression was equally brutal (Figure 2.5). Both foreign troops and
Qing units were unsparing in their recriminations against Boxer areas.
Villagers and townsfolk who had been unable to challenge the Boxers during
the movement’s rise took the opportunity to exact revenge. Foreign troops
added to the chaos by engaging in large-scale looting of cultural treasures.
Although no admirers of the Boxers, first-hand witnesses such as Peill were
nevertheless appalled at the indiscriminate violence visited by wave after wave
of attacks inflicted on villages that in many cases were only tangentially
connected with the movement.
As was the case with the Taipings, the violence both of and against the
Boxers was intertwined with religion on many levels. Boxer practices echoed
prevalent beliefs in magical invulnerability, incarnated the gods of the pop-
ular pantheon, and anticipated a world renewal that was at least inspired by
the eschatology of the Eternal Venerable Mother. But in many cases, such as

15 This event is discussed in detail in Anthony Clark, Heaven in Conflict: Franciscans and the
Boxer Uprising in Shanxi (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015), pp. 101–27.
16 A. D. Peill and J. Peill, The Beloved Physician of Tsang Chou: Life-Work and Letters
(London: Livingstone Press, London Missionary Society, 1922), p. 90.

56
 Heresy and Banditry

Figure 2.4 Looting of the Catholic church in Shenyang, 1900. Somewhat unusually for
foreign images, this drawing highlights the murder of Chinese Christians, rather than
missionaries.

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 THOMAS DAVID DUBOIS

Figure 2.5 Execution of a Boxer in Beijing. Public executions and the display of mutilated
corpses aimed to dispel any remaining rumours of Boxer magic.

attacks on neighbours or employers, the breakdown of order simply provided

an excuse to settle long-held scores.

Religious Violence in the Early Twentieth Century

The early twentieth century was a period of significant turmoil, but relatively
little organised violence by or against religion. Although there were small-
scale uprisings by religious groups, such as the Vast Yang (Hong yang) and
Yellow Yang (Huang yang) teachings, most of the violence was a reaction to
the continued decline in public security.17 The doddering Qing regime finally
fell in 1911, and China was formally declared a Republic early the next year.
For a time, the Republic existed in name only; China was in fact divided
among competing militarists until the first incomplete military unification
under the Nanjing government in 1927. In response to the pressures of
insecurity and the often exploitative nature of various powerholders (includ-
ing the Nanjing regime itself), local society organised and militarised under
a number of different networks. Armed groups that had once fed into the
Boxers, such as the Red Spears (Hongqiang hui), the Golden Armour (Jinzhong

17 Shengjing shibao, 30 March 1913, 15 January 1919.

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 Heresy and Banditry

zhao) and the Big Sword Society (Dadao hui), remained a force in local society,
occasionally coming to blows with the forces of the central government,
regional warlords or each other. Much of the violence was concentrated in
places like Huaibei, Shandong and the north-east, all of which were known
for popular militarisation. Like the Nian, these groups relied on rituals,
protective magic and blood oaths, but were not religious in motivation.
These networks grew as the Chinese security situation deteriorated, particu-
larly during the chaos of the Japanese occupation (which gradually expanded
between 1931 and 1945).
Is there value in treating the growing communist insurgency during this
period as a religious rebellion, or at least subjecting it to the same analytical
criteria? The religious violence of the nineteenth century had encompassed an
extremely diverse array of phenomena: it included influences and variations on
the existing eschatology of the Eternal Venerable Mother, but also from
Christianity and Islam; it sometimes sought to protect a private group, and
at others to transform the world by hastening some culmination of sacred
time. The one constant would seem to be social stress, to which religion
provides intellectual coherence and organisational form. Such would have
been the view of the Chinese communists themselves, which took seriously
Marx’s view of religion not simply as a sedation of social discontent (that is, the
‘opiate of the masses’), but also as the seed of proto-revolution, a flawed but
expedient method of organising and expressing class interests. The Chinese
communists saw two dangers in religious violence: the first was that violence
against religion might galvanise the forces of reaction, as had been the case in
the early Soviet Union. The Chinese Communist Party, which in the 1920s
shifted its organisational emphasis from the cities to the countryside, was thus
emphatic that cadres should speak out against religion but not be seen to
oppose it violently. The greater danger was that religious rebellion would
serve as an imperfect substitute for, and thus sap the strength of, genuine
revolution. While the communists saw a kinship with the grievances cham-
pioned by groups such as the Taipings, they were also very keen to distance
themselves from that legacy, not only of apocalyptic and superstitious belief,
but also of rebellion in the absence of a revolutionary programme.

Religious Violence in the People’s Republic

The communists would continue their fraught relationship with religion
after 1949, the year they declared victory in their war with the Nanjing
regime and founded the People’s Republic of China. This new era

59
 THOMAS DAVID DUBOIS

would initiate new challenges both for and by religion. While techni-
cally the new regime proclaimed its commitment to uphold the freedom
of religious belief, the complicated history of foreign mission and reli-
gious militarisation ensured that this promise would come with numer-
ous and moving caveats. The first hint of a crisis came late in 1949,
when local governments began preparing to move against groups they
considered politically suspect, most notably a teaching called the Way of
Penetrating Unity (Yiguandao). By June of the following year, directives
for a national campaign against the group were being coordinated at
a national level, and by the beginning of 1951 a coordinated propaganda
drive was unleashed. The suppression of the Way of Penetrating Unity
coincided with a series of other events, including a drive to demonise
and expel the Catholic missionaries (Protestants were generally spared
charges of criminality, but were nevertheless repatriated a few years
later), and a national campaign to ‘Suppress the Reactionaries’ (zhenya
fangeming) that reflected the radicalisation of the Korean War.18
The violence of this suppression was both actual and symbolic. The cam-
paign set the tone for the place of religion in the People’s Republic: it ridiculed
the religious beliefs of the Way of Penetrating Unity, but accompanying film
and newspaper propaganda (Figure 2.6) also levied against it stock charges of
theft, rape and treason for supposedly having collaborated with the Japanese
occupation. This campaign probably resulted in 2–3 million killed. Many of the
campaigns victims were prominent religious figures, but recalling the cost of
attempts by the early Soviet Union to suppress the Russian Orthodox Church,
the Chinese Communist Party did not publicise the violence. Only a small
number of devotees were tried as ‘class enemies’, and formally sentenced to
death – 263 out of nearly 42,000 members in one county near Tianjin –
although in reality many more would die as a result of overwork and privation
while in the ‘custody of the masses’.19 The Party was especially keen to ensure
that the campaign would not be perceived as a general purge against religion.
Buddhist and Protestant leaders were recruited or misquoted to add their
criticism to the campaign, specifically that groups such as the Way of
Penetrating Unity were traitors both to the nation and, more tellingly, to the

18 Thomas David DuBois, The Sacred Village: Social Change and Religious Life in Rural North
China (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2005), pp. 138–51.
19 According to the formulaic class analysis used by these campaigns, only about
5 per cent of society are ‘enemies of the people’, and thus beyond rehabilitation.
Generally, it was only this small group that was officially sentenced to execution,
representing a small fraction of actual deaths. See ibid., pp. 204–6.

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Figure 2.6 Propaganda serial depicting the crimes of the Way of Penetrating Unity. In this
scene, the wife of a hapless convert is beaten (and eventually killed) by a religious leader.
The scowling woman at the right is Sun Suzhen, wife of the teaching’s founder. Xinsheng
Wanbao, April 1951.

real purpose of religion. A theme seen as early as the Ming anti-sorcery statute,
charges were levied primarily against leaders, who counted among their
crimes the wilful deceit of their gullible followers. The suppression of the
Way of Penetrating Unity not only expelled the group (as well as a number of
smaller groups), but also was an important expression of stylised violence.
Similar campaigns would be repeated both against the remainder of the group
itself (long after the movement had been broken, old members continued to be
brought out and publicly ‘struggled’ as an act of political theatre), and against
other class enemies, both real and imagined.
Along China’s ethnic frontiers, religion represented a stratum of entrenched
interests to be tamed or pulverised. In places like Inner Mongolia and Tibet,
lamaseries were often the largest landholders, and had for centuries been vital
centres of wealth and economic activity. The greatest problem with the lamas,
or the Muslim leaders in places like Xinjiang, was not their religion as such, but
rather their considerable political authority, one that appealed specifically to
non-Chinese populations in regions where the new government was

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conspicuously weak. Even having granted nominal self-rule to ethnic ‘auton-

omous regions’ within the sovereign state of the People’s Republic, it was very
unlikely that the new government would leave these competing structures
intact. From the early 1950s, cadres began identifying and removing trouble-
some leaders, often on pretence of criminal or lewd behaviour, although, as
with the campaign against the Way of Penetrating Unity, care was taken to
avoid the appearance of a general purge. The fears of the state were made
reality in 1959, when a wave of ethnic uprisings near Tibet escalated into
protests and eventually a full revolt in Lhasa. The Chinese People’s Liberation
Army quickly and brutally suppressed the poorly armed rebels, many of whom
were in fact monks, burning and looting numerous monasteries and prompt-
ing the flight across the Himalayas of the Dalai Lama and roughly 80,000
monks and ethnic Tibetans.
Conversely, it is not implausible to consider that communism itself, and
in particular the personality cult that developed around Mao Zedong in the
1960s, became the de facto national religion. It is easy to discern phenom-
enological similarities between Maoism and the external characteristics of
religion: central reliance on a sacred text (the Quotations of Mao Zedong,
popularly known as the ‘Little Red Book’), rituals of worship, ecstatic
devotion and an intense drive to proselytise. We might then ask in what
ways the history of religious utopianism shaped expectations of the com-
munist ‘high tide’, and in particular whether it provoked or predestined the
violent extremism of events like the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution
(the actual movement lasted only from 1966 to 1969, but is often taken to
include the years until Mao Zedong’s death in 1976). One point of similarity
is with prevailing patterns of utopianism. Like the various incarnations of
religious millenarianism, Maoism clearly represented a culmination of
sacred time, and, like the Yellow Cliff Teaching or the Boxer movement,
placed paramount importance on ideological purity. Viewed in this way,
the extremism of the Cultural Revolution period, with its routine victimisa-
tion and outright murder of those labelled as enemies of the revolution, as
well as internecine struggles between groups of ideologically charged
youths, was perhaps the most destructive episode of religious violence of
China’s twentieth century.20

20 For a thoughtful summary of scholarly estimates of the death toll of these events, see
Song Yongyi, ‘Chronology of Mass Killings during the Chinese Cultural Revolution
(1966–1976)’, Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence, published 25 August 2011, www
.massviolence.org/Chronology-of-Mass-Killings-during-the-Chinese-Cultural.

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The years following Mao’s death were marked by an emphasis on

economic growth, political stability, and strong determination to avoid
the ideological extremism of previous decades. This policy shift included
the gradual rehabilitation of religion, a process that began in 1982, with the
promulgation of the document ‘Basic Viewpoint and Policy on the
Religious Question during Our Country’s Socialist Period’ (also known as
Document 19). This document departed from an earlier orthodoxy by
stating that religion could in fact be a socially progressive force, particularly
in the cultures of national minorities such as the Muslim Hui and Buddhist
Tibetans and Mongolians. By the 1990s, religion was making what appeared
to be an overt return to public life. Conspicuous state support for accepted
religion (which is allowed within the confines of politically controlled
‘patriotic associations’ of five religions: Buddhism, Islam, Daoism, and
Protestant and Catholic Christianity) was again on the rise. More tellingly,
formerly banned popular festivals were again being organised, often on
a very large scale.21
This apparent resurgence was halted with the onset of the campaign
against Falungong (Dharma Wheel Practice) in 1999. Falungong had formed
during the early 1990s as a school of qigong (meditation and concentration
exercises), and spread during the national qigong craze, ending the decade
with a nationwide following and a desire for formal recognition. In
April 1999, approximately 10,000 practitioners staged a peaceful protest out-
side the government compound at Zhongnanhai in Beijing, so alarming
President Jiang Zemin that he took a personal interest in the eradication of
the movement. Beginning that summer (which, perhaps not coincidentally,
marked the ten-year anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre), the Chinese
government initiated a coordinated series of arrests and detention of
Falungong leaders, along with a massive propaganda campaign that (remi-
niscent of the 1951 campaign against the Way of Penetrating Unity) labelled
the group as both criminal and superstitious, a danger both to China and to
socialism. The veracity of the Chinese government’s claims aside, the group
has proven extremely difficult to dislodge. Not only has Falungong retained
a core following inside China, it has also spread overseas, out of the grasp of
the Chinese government. The repression of the group inside China has been
characterised by violence, both the brutal treatment of followers subjected to
government rehabilitation, and the reported self-immolation by Falungong

21 Chi Zhen and Thomas DuBois, ‘Opiate of the Masses with Chinese Characteristics:
Recent Chinese Scholarship on the Meaning and Future of Religion’, in Lü Daji and
Gong Xuezeng (eds.), Marxism and Religion (Leiden: Brill, 2014), pp. 1–12.

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 THOMAS DAVID DUBOIS

Figure 2.7 A 2011 protest by members of Falungong in Copenhagen.

protestors that state sources say demonstrates the inhumanity of the group’s
brainwashing. (Falungong itself says that such events were staged.) The
overseas following of Falungong has lobbied relentlessly for censure of the
Chinese government based specifically on the brutality of this persecution
(Figure 2.7). Materials displayed and distributed at the group’s protests and
public petition drives highlight charges of forced labour, organ harvesting,
torture and mass murder, often accompanied by graphic displays of beaten,
injured and mutilated bodies. These items sometimes feature more promi-
nently than does the teaching of the group itself, suggesting the degree to
which persecution has become central to the group’s identity.
It is not implausible that official hostility towards Falungong was driven by
the same fears and attitudes that motivated the earlier imperial regimes to
ban the propagation of ‘perverse’ religion. Beyond Falungong specifically,
well-placed scholars in China have put forward the opinion that even see-
mingly benign New Religious Movements are dangerously incompatible
with modern society.22 Such attitudes were seemingly justified with the rise
of a small but virulent strain of teachings such as the True Jesus (Zhen Yesu)

22 Gao Shining, ‘A Tentative Analysis of the Relationship Existing between Modernization

and New Religions’, in Lü and Gong (eds.), Marxism and Religion, pp. 134–55.

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Church. Also known as the Eastern Lightning (Dongshan), this group is an

extreme offshoot of Pentecostal Christianity, and teaches that Jesus has been
reincarnated in China as one of the group’s female leaders. Despite being
banned, the group is extremely aggressive in its proselytisation, and exerts
tight control over its members, as evinced by the 2014 bludgeoning to death
of an unwilling convert in a McDonalds restaurant in the coastal city of
Yantai. In response, the Chinese security apparatus made approximately 1,000
arrests, and sentenced to execution at least five of the perpetrators.

Conclusion and Future Prospects

Late in 2016, the Chinese government made public the planned revisions to
its ten-year-old Religious Services Law.23 This law governs the acceptable
practice and parameters of religion, and the proposed revisions revealed
a growing concern with issues such as fraud and online recruiting, but far
less so with religious violence. Apart from the standard injunction that ‘no
organisation or individual shall use religion to harm national security, disrupt
social order, impair the health of citizens or interfere with the national
educational system, or otherwise harm national interests, public interests
and the legitimate rights and interests of citizens’, there is little to suggest that
the Chinese government currently sees any existential threat in religion or
religious violence, at least no threat that is unique to religion. This stance is
not surprising. Although imperial era Chinese regimes may have understood
the danger of religion in intrinsic terms (the fear, for example, that rebel
invincibility magic might actually work), the predominant political concern
since at least the time of the Boxer debacle has been the ability of religion to
organise and energise people who are already marginalised, violent or
disaffected. Certainly this would be the view of China’s current government,
which is externally confident that religious violence, and religion itself, will
fall away as Chinese society grows ever more wealthy and stable.
But even now, such confidence is not absolute. China does remain highly
concerned about ethnic violence carried out through or in the name of
religion, particularly Islam, and keeps exceedingly close guard over any
manner of religious education, or communication with potentially restive
Muslim regions such as Xinjiang. It also keeps the threat of religious violence
available as a potential policy card of its own. Whatever threats it may or may

23 A translation and side-by-side comparison of the old and new laws is available at www
.academia.edu/28414977/Chinas_Religion_Law_2005_vs._2016.

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not continue to see in groups like Falungong, the Chinese government

certainly recognises the ancillary benefits of its own past campaigns against
evil cults, and would undoubtedly be able to produce a similar threat, if the
need again arose.

Bibliographical Essay
The first stop for any topic relating to violence in China is the excellent ‘Violence in
Chinese Culture’ bibliography maintained online by Barend ter Haar, http://faculty
.orinst.ox.ac.uk/terhaar/violence.htm. More broadly, see also the chapters in Stephan
N. Harrell and Jonathan Lipman (eds.), Violence in China: Essays in Culture and
Counterculture (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990).
The legal regulation of religion both before and during the nineteenth century is
introduced in Yonglin Jiang, The Mandate of Heaven and the Great Ming Code (Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 2011) and Edward Farmer, Zhu Yuanzhang and Early
Ming Legislation: The Reordering of Chinese Society Following the Era of Mongol Rule, Sinica
Leidensia 34 (Leiden: Brill, 1995). The step-by-step reaction of the mid-Qing to a religious
threat is expertly outlined in Philip A. Kuhn, Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). Much of the content of this chapter is
discussed in greater detail in Thomas David DuBois, Religion and the Making of Modern East
Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
The most authoritative short account of the Taiping Rebellion remains Philip A. Kuhn,
‘The Taiping Rebellion’, in John K. Fairbank (ed.), The Cambridge History of China
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 264–317. Other influential works
include Jonathan Spence, God’s Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan
(New York: W.W. Norton, 1996). More recently, Stephen R. Platt has written specifically on
the declining years of the rebellion, and its inability to hold on to its early gains: Autumn in
the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 2012). Of specific interest is the multivolume collection of expertly
compiled and translated documents, Franz H. Michael and Zhongli Zhang (eds.), The
Taiping Rebellion: History and Documents (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966–71).
On the larger outbreak of White Lotus style millenarianism, see Susan Naquin,
Millenarian Rebellion in China: The Eight Trigrams Uprising of 1813 (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1976). Although this book and her subsequent Shantung Rebellion: The
Wang Lun Uprising of 1774 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981) record events that took
place before the mid nineteenth century, both capture perfectly the interplay of beliefs,
rumours and ideals that continued to coalesce in religious violence over the century.
Sweeping overviews of the period may be found in Shao Yong, Zhongguo huidaomen
[Chinese Sectarians] (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1997) and Qin Baoqi,
Qingmo Minchu mimi shehui de tuibian (The Late Qing and Early Republican Decline of Secret
Societies) (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 2001).
Richard Shek traces the progress of smaller-scale outbreaks of violence in two
important articles: ‘The Revolt of the Zaili, Jindan Sects in Rehe (Jehol), 1891’, Modern
China 6.2 (1980), 161–96, and ‘Millenarianism without Rebellion: The Huangtiandao in

66
 Heresy and Banditry

North China’, Modern China 8.3 (1982), 305–36. On the 1891 rebellion, see also
Cecily McCaffrey, ‘From Chaos to a New Order: Rebellion and Ethnic Regulation in
Late Qing Inner Mongolia’, Modern China 37.5 (2011), 528–56.
The volume Popular Religion and Shamanism edited by Ma Xisha and Meng Huiying
(Brill Religious Studies in Contemporary China Collection 1, Leiden: Brill, 2011) presents
the translated work of a number of important Chinese scholars, including classic articles
by Han Bingfang on the Yellow Cliff Teaching, Lu Yao on the origins of the Society of
Righteousness and Harmony, and Zhou Yumin on the early relationship between the
Society of Righteousness and Harmony and the Way of Penetrating Unity.
On the Muslim rebellions, see Hodong Kim, Holy War in China: The Muslim Rebellion and
State in Chinese Central Asia, 1864–1877 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), David
G. Atwill, The Chinese Sultanate: Islam, Ethnicity, and the Panthay Rebellion in Southwest China,
1856–1873 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005) and Jonathan Lipman, Familiar Strangers:
A History of Muslims in Northwest China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997).
In English, the two classic accounts of the origins of the Boxer Uprising are
Joseph Esherick, The Origins of the Boxer Uprising (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1987) and Paul A. Cohen, History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). A volume edited by Robert Bickers and
R. G. Tiedemann expands this field to include both Chinese and foreign perspectives on the
progress and suppression of the movement: The Boxers, China, and the World (Lanham;
Rowman & Littlefield, 2007).
Much has been written on the development of religion in the early twentieth century
but, as yet, little on violence by or against religion specifically. On the 1951 campaign
against the Way of Penetrating Unity, see Thomas David DuBois, The Sacred Village: Social
Change and Religious Life in Rural North China (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press,
2005), pp. 127–51. On the development of official attitudes towards religion in the People’s
Republic, see the essays in Lü Daji and Gong Xuezeng (eds.), Marxism and Religion (Brill
Religious Studies in Contemporary China Collection 4, Leiden: Brill, 2014). The
interpretation of Marxism or Maoism as religion was first raised by Joseph Kitagawa in
1974. For recent analysis, see David E. Apter, ‘Bearing Witness: Maoism as Religion’,
Copenhagen Journal of Asian Studies 22.1 (2006), 5–37, and Mark Gamsa, ‘The Religious
Dimension of Politics in Maoist China’, Religion Compass 3.3 (2009), 459–70.
On the resurgence of qigong since the 1980s, see David A. Palmer, Qigong Fever: Body,
Science, and Utopia in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). On Falungong
specifically, see David Ownby, Falun Gong and the Future of China (Oxford: Oxford
University Press 2008) and Benjamin Penny, The Religion of Falun Gong (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2012). On the early history of the True Jesus Church, see
Melissa Wei-tsing Inouye, ‘Miraculous Modernity: Charismatic Traditions and
Trajectories within Chinese Protestant Christianity’, in Jan Kiely, Vincent Goossaert and
John Lagerwey (eds.), Modern Chinese Religion, vol. I I, 1850–2015 (Leiden: Brill, 2015), pp.
884–919. On the mutated resurgence of one branch as the violent Eastern Lightning, see
Emily Dunn, ‘“Cult”, Church, and the CCP: Introducing Eastern Lightning’, Modern China
35.1 (2009), 96–119.

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 3
Violence, Non-Violence, the State
and the Nation: India, 1858–1958
kama maclean and benjamin zachariah

This chapter provides an overview of the role of violence in the opera-

tions of the colonial state in India, with reflections on how its various
explicit and implicit modalities defined imperialism, shaped anti-
colonialism, constructed concepts of the nation, hardened communal
identities, and informed the constitution and practices of the early
independent Indian state, which sought to inherit the ‘legitimate mono-
poly of violence’ from its predecessor. Accepting the narratives encoded
into colonial accounts of the Raj, which tell of the triumphant establish-
ment of pax Britannica in a turbulent subcontinent, will not do; nor will
a narrow conceptualisation of violence as pure physical force explain the
longevity of Her (and, after the death of Queen Victoria, His) Majesty’s
Government in India. A list of different modalities of violence evident in
India would include, but not be limited to: the manifest violence in
warfare; military or police action; the establishment of the rule of law,
which legitimised and sanitised state violence and delegitimised Indian
resistance; the prevalence of interpersonal ‘white’ violence (in the form
of everyday cuffs and aggressions meted out by Britons to Indian sub-
jects); the displays of force that were encoded into pageantry and
ceremonial exhibitions of power that formed the very culture of the
Raj; and the structural violence that resulted from the reorientation of
the Indian economy for British profit. These modalities were pervasive,
overlapping and mutually reinforcing.
We interpret violence broadly but not expansively, reading its presence or
effects in a number of explicit and implicit state projects. Our aim is to
highlight the dialectic between colonial coercion in its various guises and
the formation of Indian nationalism and its other, ‘communalism’, a term
used extensively in South Asian studies to describe the mobilisation of ethnic
and especially religious identities, frequently ending in conflict. Such
a framework helps to explain how it was that an avowedly non-violent

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 Violence, Non-Violence, the State and the Nation

nationalist movement managed to deliver an independence that was marred

by the extraordinary violence of partition.
There are good reasons to be sceptical of British pretensions to use physical
violence as only a last resort and in exceptional circumstances, but it is
equally important to interrogate presumptions that the Indian anti-colonial
movement was both singular, and singularly non-violent. There were many
different strains and ideologies that informed Indian nationalism, and much
questioning of the viability of non-violence as a political strategy. Incidents of
political violence by Indian revolutionary groups targeted at British interests
in the subcontinent threw Gandhian non-violence into stark relief, rendering
Gandhi a viable political leader in the eyes of the British.1 Moments of
political violence by revolutionary organisations – construed as ‘terrorists’
by the British – were often directly inspired by acts of state violence in its
different modalities.
Until recently, there has been surprisingly little emphasis on the violent
nature of colonialism in British India,2 or, for that matter, on the strains of
violence in Indian anti-colonialism. This is perhaps a product of the early
dominance of British historiography in South Asian Studies, which tended to
focus on liberal strains within the colonial state. It may also be the case that an
over-reliance by historians on the administrative records generated by the
Government of India in the colonial archive – embedded in discourses that
justified or elided incidents of state violence as exceptional – has frustrated
scholarly interrogation of violence in British India. Recent methodological
interventions and the broadening of the field of South Asian Studies have
opened up fresh concerns and concepts of what constitutes an archive,
throwing up new evidence that provides a very different narrative of imperi-
alism in the subcontinent. In 1947, the independent state inherited many of
the mechanisms of violence of the colonial state that preceded it: an irony,
given the nature of nationalist critique that questioned the legitimacy of
a state that relied extensively upon the use of force.

Legitimate and Illegitimate Violence

Although British legal codes intoned that the Government of India ‘was
established by law’, the colonial state in India was established amid

1 Kama Maclean, A Revolutionary History of Interwar India: Violence, Image, Voice and Text
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Benjamin Zachariah, Gandhi (London:
Routledge, forthcoming).
2 Jonathan Saha, ‘Everyday Violence in British India’, History Compass 9.11 (2011), 844–53.

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 KAMA MACLEAN AND BENJAMIN ZACHARIAH

extraordinary violence in 1858. The assumption of power in British territories

in India by the crown followed what historians agree was the most significant
revolt against the excesses of the East India Company – the rebellion of 1857 –
following the mutiny of Indian troops in the Company’s army in north India,
which catalysed a wide spectrum of opposition to the British presence. The
British victory over rebels and insurgents in warfare that was marked by an
unrestrained ferocity cemented its monopoly on violence, identified by
Weber as the hallmark of the state.3 Significantly, this established an equation
of violence as unidirectional, meted out by Britons and their agents on Indian
subjects. If and when Indians resorted to violence in response and attacked
Britons, this was construed as an illegitimate ‘outrage’ or ‘revolt’ (depending
on the scale) and an unjustifiable inversion of the nature of things.4
Whenever the dominance of the state was violently challenged by Indians,
this was construed as illegal, which in turn justified the full disciplinary
apparatus of the state, including detention and execution. By 1860, inciting
disaffection with the state even by word would become illegal, according to
Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code, inviting a lengthy and punitive prison
sentence – although colonial officials found this remarkably hard to enforce,
given the vagueness of the law.
At the same time, eruptions of ‘native’ violence were crucial to justify state
repression, including the costs of maintaining an extensive army, which early
nationalists deplored. Military charges were the largest single budget item in
British India, accounting for between 40 and 50 per cent of government
expenditure in the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries.5 Moreover,
incidents of native rebellion were frequently used to bolster arguments that
Indians were politically immature and incapable of self-governance. Just as
the Black Hole of Calcutta had been deployed as a justificatory narrative to
support the aggressive expansionism of the East India Company, the rebel-
lion in 1857 provided fresh and equally selective lessons to provide the basis
for further subjugation, not only in India, but in the British Empire at large.
During the Mutiny, anything short of brutal and summary execution of

3 Max Weber, ‘Politics as a Vocation’, in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (eds.), From Max
Weber: Essays in Sociology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946).
4 Kama Maclean, ‘The Art of Panicking Quietly: British Expatriate Responses to
“Terrorist Outrages” in India, 1912–33’, in Harald Fischer-Tiné (ed.), Anxieties, Fear and
Panic in Colonial Settings: Empires on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (London: Palgrave,
2016), pp. 135–67.
5 Douglas Peers, ‘State, Power and Colonialism’, in Douglas Peers and Nandini Gooptu
(eds.), India and the British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 16–43,
at 19.

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 Violence, Non-Violence, the State and the Nation

Indian suspects was construed as a weakness that was not becoming of an

empire.6 The string of atrocity stories arising from the 1857 rebellion came
lavishly illustrated, forming the matrix of late nineteenth-century colonial
culture in the form of novels, newspapers, memoirs and (later) film. These
perpetuated an instructive undercurrent of fear, of what might happen if
power were not assertively maintained, and a consequent rationale for
repressive activities against Indian subjects, thereby simultaneously justifying
state violence and applauding the state’s restraint.
The sanitised language that would later be used to describe the ‘pacifica-
tion’ of post-rebellion north India was revealing of an awareness that while
violence was indispensable in times of crisis, it could not be relied upon to
maintain stability. This was especially so given the skewed ratio of Briton to
Indian in the subcontinent, and the evident fragility of loyalties in the army.
While the ratio of Briton to Indian in the British Indian Army was increased
after 1857, the reliance on Indians to serve in repressive institutions such as the
army, the police and prisons would remain. In the army in particular, this was
tempered by a regimental ‘divide-and-rule’ policy in which ethnically or
religiously selected regiments could be called upon to fire upon fellow
Indians of other ethnic or religious denominations.7 This reliance on colla-
borative repression became increasingly problematic, especially as anti-
colonial organisations began to expand in the twentieth century. Until the
challenge of mass nationalism in the twentieth century, the military would
only be deployed in a limited fashion, in localised, small-scale peasant con-
flicts, or in overseas wars or imperial conflicts, where Indian revenues
financed additional imperial manpower, most notably in the two world
wars. The colonial state would work over the next fifty years to establish
a more elaborate framework of coercion, enabling apologists to maintain that
Britain had not established a military state in India.8
Despite the insinuation that 1857 constituted the greatest single challenge
to British rule, there were regular rebellions against British authority. These
rebellions were dismissed as the rabble-rousing of uninformed peasants, from
the Deccan riots of the 1890s to the Moplah Rebellion of the 1920s. Yet these,
and earlier violent movements like the Santal Rebellion of the 1850s, left

6 William Howard Russell, My Indian Mutiny Diary (London: Cassell, 1957 [1860]);
Crispin Bates and Marina Carter (eds.), Mutiny at the Margins: Global Perspectives (New
Delhi: Sage, 2013).
7 Gajendra Singh, The Testimonies of Indian Soldiers and Two World Wars: Between Self and
Sepoy (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014).
8 John Seeley, ‘How We Conquered India’, in his The Expansion of England: Two Courses of
Instruction (London: Macmillan, 1883), pp. 197–216, at 200.

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 KAMA MACLEAN AND BENJAMIN ZACHARIAH

a paper trail of memorials and petitions to the colonial government outlining

the oppression of excessive taxation, rent-hungry landlords protected by the
colonial administration, and arbitrary miscarriages of justice. Thus, the dis-
empowered and the illiterate (at least in English, the language of the colonial
state) were not as voiceless as often assumed by historians. They were able to
find spokesmen who would put their grievances into words, before peaceful
options were exhausted and violence broke out, with the certainty of failure
and death, in some cases mediated by the millenarian hope of invulnerability
provided against firearms by divine intervention against moral and social
injustice.9

The Power/Knowledge Nexus

In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, forms of power/knowl-
edge and bureaucratic strategies informed by such knowledge began to
legitimate colonial domination, largely precluding the need for force.
Anthropological theories were applied to Indian castes and tribes in an
attempt to predict loyalty and perfidy based on a range of racial and/or
physical characteristics. These theories were deeply problematic, framed
within Orientalist assumptions and presuming as they did that Indian
subjects could be reduced to a series of group identities according to
caste, religion or region. And yet they informed a range of government
projects, from the restructuring of the army by recruiting only ‘martial
races’ to ensure fealty, to the pre-emptive punishment that was enshrined in
the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871. Ethnographic assessments were intimately
tied to the census, which sought to enumerate, control and presage the
behaviours of India’s castes, tribes and races. The subsequent persecution of
and use of violence (seen as ‘reasonable force’) against newly defined
‘savage’ elements in British India demonstrated that knowledge was more
than merely discursive. Technologies of the state such as the census, which
by 1891 had become decennial, broke up the population into relatively
manageable units, aggregated along the lines of region, caste, religion and
gender; and regulations that demarcated sections of the population as
‘criminal tribes’, believed to be inherently prone to violence, thieving and
plunder, justified a variety of punitive measures. Prisons were sites of

9 Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1983).

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 Violence, Non-Violence, the State and the Nation

intense violence against the person of the prisoner, ranging from murder of
inmates to torture to various forms of sensory deprivation.10
One of the most protracted debates about British imperialism in the
subcontinent revolves around the degree to which the Indian economy was
reorganised to ensure British profit.11 Economic mismanagement formed the
basis of Indian accusations about ‘unBritish rule’ in the late nineteenth
century.12 While this critique was initially mounted in rather abstract
terms, it can be related to a process that has recently been identified by
scholars as structural violence, in which the manipulation of social and
economic structures by governments results in the deprivation of the condi-
tions necessary to sustain longevity of life. Mike Davis’s devastating critique
of imperial famines in India as ‘late Victorian holocausts’ provides a sobering
account of mundane government protocols, provocative for its comparison
of the Raj to the Nazi state, in its perpetration of mass death by economic
policy.13 This challenges prevalent Victorian imagery of British India as an
Oriental melange of Kipling, tiger hunts and princes, but in fact these icons
too can be seen as reflecting state violence. Much of Kipling’s work, for
example, is set against the backdrop of some sort of military aggression.
‘Gunga Din’, Kipling’s classic ode to a water-carrier who was ‘belted and
flayed’ by the soldiers he served, for example describes the exploits of
a British regiment advancing into hostile territory.

Implicit and Symbolic Violence

The righteousness of state violence remained a key element in the system of
control over British India, even when it was reserved. Implicit or latent
violence was strategically displayed across the Indian urban landscape in
the form of commemoration and pageantry. The visual display of violence
passed or violence tamed was an effective form of intimidation. Among
these, we might count the prominent display of the cannon, Zam-zammah,

10 See Clare Anderson, The Indian Uprising of 1857–8: Prisons, Prisoners and Rebellion
(London: Anthem Press, 2007); Bernard Cohn, ‘The Census, Social Structure and
Objectification in South Asia’, in An Anthropologist among the Historians (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 224–54.
11 See, for example, Latika Chaudhari et al. (eds.), A New Economic History of Colonial India
(London: Routledge, 2016).
12 Dadabhai Naororji, Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (London: Sonnenschein, 1901);
Bipan Chandra, The Rise and Growth of Economic Nationalism in India (New Delhi:
People’s Publishing House, 1966).
13 Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World
(London: Verso, 2001), p. 311.

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 KAMA MACLEAN AND BENJAMIN ZACHARIAH

described by Kipling in Kim as the ‘fire-breathing dragon’ that served as the

emblem of power for rulers of the Punjab, decommissioned by the British
after its capture; or the erection of statues of British mutiny ‘heroes’, includ-
ing men responsible for ordering sadistic, summary executions; or the con-
struction of memorials in Indian urban spaces to Britons murdered during the
rebellion. All of these served as perpetual reminders of the power vested in
the colonial state, and of what it had done before and might do if provoked.
Such prominent reminders were intended to breed compliance in subjects,
although by the early twentieth century these symbols merely served to
provoke. A prominent statue of General Neill in Madras became the focus of
a Gandhian protest in 1927. Its removal was one of the first acts of the
provincial Congress government in 1937, leading to animated indignation in
the conservative British media and the House of Commons as an act that was
‘offensive to all Europeans in India’.14 Memorials to the Black Hole of
Calcutta have been twice relocated, in 1940 from the prominent Dalhousie
Square to the relative ignominy of a nearby churchyard.15 Many Indians
wrote feelingly of the quotidian humiliation involved in walking past
a statue of John Lawrence outside the High Court in Lahore, the script on
whose plinth rhetorically demanded of passers-by: ‘Will you be governed by
the pen or the sword?’16 The relationship between the two, of course, was
intimate: as Walter Benjamin noted, ‘law-making is power-making, and to
that extent, an immediate manifestation of violence’.17
The co-option of elites, most spectacularly evidenced by the containment
of the heads of Princely States showcased at various durbars and ceremonies
in Delhi and in London, became a staple of imperial spectacle.18 The implicit
violence in a durbar ceremony, replete with its structured parades of regi-
ments, cavalry and cannon, is most starkly evident in Pathé footage of the
1911 Delhi Durbar. The grammar of such displays would be later reproduced
in the Independence and Republic Day parades of the independent Indian

14 ‘Removal of General Neill’s Statue’, IOR /L /PJ/7/1380, citing discussions in the

House of Commons, 29 November 1937.
15 Partha Chatterjee, The Black Hole of Empire: History of a Global Practice of Power
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), p. 6.
16 Laksmi Devi, Bhavishya, ‘Note on the Press for the week ending August 8, 1931’,
National Archives of India, Home Political 4/22/1931, p. 22.
17 Walter Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’, in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms and
Autobiograpical Writings, ed. and trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken
Books, 1978), p. 295.
18 Bernard Cohn, ‘Representing Authority in Victorian India’, in Eric Hobsbawm and
Terence Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1993), pp. 165–210.

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 Violence, Non-Violence, the State and the Nation

state, indicating that the existence of potential force was in the nature of
a display of stateness. The other cliché of imperial culture in India – tiger
hunting – was extensively fetishised, representing the symbolic domination
of the empire over an exotic and ferocious apex predator that typified the
many dangers lurking in the Indian landscape. Tiger hunting not only had the
advantage of a historical connection with Mughal nobility, and therefore
traditions of kingship in the subcontinent, but also afforded young men the
‘training to allow them to deal better with crises such as the Mutiny’, when
restraint was the order of the day.19

Law and Violence

The colonial state, with its claims to introduce peace, reform, good govern-
ance and rule of law to the subcontinent, could not plausibly justify driving
such a project at the barrel of a gun. The rule of law provided an ostensibly
colour-blind framework that served to justify and elide the ‘white violence’
that pervaded social and labour relations between Indians and Britons. Up
until the early 1900s, errant servants might be thrashed, and in the event of
the servant’s death judicial findings would routinely blame the fatality on the
weakness of the Indian body, and the tendency of the native spleen to rupture
at the slightest provocation.20 The prevalence of interpersonal and interracial
violence in British India provides an important subtext to the controversy
sparked by the Ilbert Bill, a proposed amendment to the Criminal Procedure
Code allowing Indian judges and juries to trial European criminals in 1883.
Mass protests by the British expatriate community in India, accustomed to
the liberal use of interpersonal violence in the name of protecting British
women, led to its withdrawal.21 The episode has long been held to be
a defining moment in Indian nationalism, leading to the formation of the
Indian National Congress in 1885, the organisation that by the early twentieth
century would form the backbone of the independence movement.
The tendency in contemporary Britain to view the empire with nostalgia
has meant that attempts to highlight the everyday violence of the Raj have
been resisted vehemently by both conservative academics and members of

19 Anand S. Pandian, ‘Predatory Care: The Imperial Hunt in Mughal and British India’,
Historical Sociology 14.1 (2001), 79–107, at 83.
20 Jordanna Bailkin, ‘The Boot and the Spleen: When Was Murder Possible in British
India?’, Comparative Studies in History and Society 48.2 (2006), 462–93.
21 Elizabeth Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India: White Violence and the Rule of Law
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 97.

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 KAMA MACLEAN AND BENJAMIN ZACHARIAH

the public, many of them descendants of families who were invested in the
Raj and who remain alert to the deconstruction of colonial mythologies. Bart
Moore-Gilbert’s candid family memoir, dealing with shocking revelations of
the culture of police violence perpetuated by his father as an officer in India, is
a useful corrective.22

Excessive Force and the Crisis of Colonialism

The use of explicit and extreme force was an indication that the hegemonic
power of the state was not functioning. It was moments of breakdown in the
state’s overt restraint on the use of violence that indicated its instability and
weakness, and provided the most powerful incentives to anti-colonial senti-
ments and mobilisation. One specific instance was the passing of the Rowlatt
Act (1919) at the end of the First World War, which aimed to extend special
wartime powers that restricted civil liberties into peacetime, as a means of
quelling postwar unrest. Containing the resulting protests in the Punjab,
a province hit hard by the effects of World War I, led to the invocation of
martial law. With restraints removed, General Dyer ordered his troops to
open fire on a peaceful crowd of thousands assembled to celebrate a festival
in an enclosed park in Amritsar on 13 April 1919. The Jallianwalla Bagh
massacre, as it came to be known, was a defining moment in the history of
the colonial state in India, when the implicit threat of violence contained in
the various mechanisms of colonial control became all too explicit. The need
to resort to such excessive violence demonstrated the fragility of the state’s
hegemony, opening the floodgates of criticism, undermining moderate
nationalist hopes for a negotiation of a better position for India in the imperial
order as a consequence of her loyalty during the First World War, and
leading to the first of Gandhi’s mass mobilisations, the Non-Cooperation
Movement.
This moment of crisis for the Raj was therefore one brought about by its
own violence. In a subsequent commission of inquiry, Dyer’s actions were
construed as an aberration by a government unwilling to concede or imagine
alternatives to the use of physical force. However, Dyer’s actions are better
seen as a ‘pathology of a system, rather than of an individual’.23 The Congress
mounted an inquiry of its own, in the process rhetorically constituting itself

22 Bart Moore-Gilbert, The Setting Sun: A Memoir of Empire and Family Secrets (London:
Verso, 2014), p. 118.
23 Derek Sayer, ‘British Reaction to the Amritsar Massacre, 1919–20’, Past & Present 131
(1991), 130–64, at 134.

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 Violence, Non-Violence, the State and the Nation

as an alternative government; its report indicted the government and its

report on a number of counts, detailing endemic violence and daily humilia-
tions suffered by the people of the Punjab. Dyer was part of an emerging
pattern towards arbitrary and collective punishment as a form of coercion in
British India, as the state began to weaken after the First World War.24

The Interwar Moment: Violence versus

Non-Violence
The after-effects of the First World War led to a substantial escalation in
nationalist activity in India. The Rowlatt Satyagraha was called by Gandhi in
protest at the extension of wartime powers to peace, and it was these protests
that led to the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre in 1919. The Non-Cooperation
Movement in 1921–2 foregrounded the state’s extreme violence as a show of
weakness: state violence actually worked to strengthen the moment of
Gandhian ‘non-violence’. Their mutual dependence is clear from the circle
of events: and the Non-Cooperation Movement cited ‘the Khilafat wrongs’
(the post-First World War treatment of Turkey by the Allies) and ‘the Punjab
wrongs’ (the collective abuses following the declaration of martial law in the
province in 1919) as the basis of the movement. Yet Gandhi abruptly with-
drew from the movement just as it was building momentum, following an
incident in a small town in the United Provinces in 1922, when protesters
retaliated against police violence in Chauri Chaura, killing twenty-three
Indian police officers. Gandhi was promptly arrested, and upon his release
spent much of the next six years in his ashram, to concentrate on what he saw
as his constructive programme to reform a community of Indians who would
be worthy of independence. Crucially, the power of non-violence relied upon
state violence, as was clear from Gandhi’s emphasis on martyrdom (through
the deaths of activists following state imprisonment or confrontation); other-
wise the staging of a moral confrontation did not work.25
Gandhi re-emerged onto the political scene in late 1928, at a time when anti-
colonial violence had begun to dominate both nationalist and state attention.
A revolutionary movement came to the fore of national politics in late 1928 in
north India, following the assassination of a British policeman who had taken
part in an attack on a non-violent protest against the Simon Commission in

24 Taylor C. Sherman, State Violence and Punishment in India (London: Routledge, 2012),
p. 36.
25 Kathryn Tidrick, Gandhi: A Political and Spiritual Life (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006), pp.
175–6.

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 KAMA MACLEAN AND BENJAMIN ZACHARIAH

Lahore, which led to the death of a prominent Congress leader. Acts of colonial
police brutality, the assassins declared, would not go unavenged; non-violence
could not be taken for granted. A sharp rise in political violence directed at
Britons followed, as lone individuals followed the example of revolutionary
organisations who aimed to use violence to galvanise nationalist opinion in their
favour. This violence was seen by its protagonists, a rather articulate group of
young men who wrote and published in defence of their actions, not as
individual acts of heroism, which they ultimately considered futile, but as the
basis for a wider mass organisation that was unwilling to compromise with
British rule. A number of these revolutionaries were reading the literature of
a spectrum of leftist thought, relating their own life-worlds and politics to these
ideologies. This included a nascent communist movement, which the govern-
ment sought to define and isolate as foreign-funded and alien to India, in the
process ironically drawing more attention to Marxist thought.26 Moreover,
many revolutionaries, and some ostensibly on the side of non-violence, under-
stood that for non-violent agitation to be effective, its alternative, violence, had
to be existent.27 The public celebration of those accused of political violence
prompted the British to craft a special ordinance under emergency provisions to
allow for ‘terrorists’ to be tried in absentia and away from the scrutiny of the
media, denying them the publicity they had enjoyed, and enabling them to be
sentenced to death or awarded life imprisonment.
The Civil Disobedience Movement (1930–4), often thought of as
Gandhi’s second non-violent mass campaign, can therefore be seen as his
strategy for reorienting political energies away from anti-colonial violence.
The presence of violence on the political spectrum in the interwar years
served to highlight Gandhi’s desirability as a political opponent and inter-
locutor. In 1931, he emerged as a viable political leader (as opposed to the
leader of a seditious movement), eligible to meet and to ‘parley on equal
terms’ (as Winston Churchill indignantly scoffed) with the Viceroy, and later
with the King himself. This is starkly highlighted by poems and cartoons
published at the time of Gandhi’s visit to London for the second Round Table
Conference, in which he was depicted toothless and shirtless; a stark contrast
to his European radical or fascist contemporaries, arrayed in shirts marked
black, brown, red and green (Figure 3.1). The British endorsement of Gandhi

26 Franziska Roy and Benjamin Zachariah, ‘Meerut and a Hanging: “Young India”,
Popular Socialism and the Dynamics of Imperialism’, Comparative Studies of South
Asia, Africa and the Middle East 33.3 (2013), 360–77.
27 Kama Maclean, ‘Revolution and Revelation: or, When Is History Too Soon?’, South
Asia 39.3 (2016), 678–94.

78
 Violence, Non-Violence, the State and the Nation

Figure 3.1 J. C. Hill, ‘The Shirted and the Shirtless’, Auckland Star, New Zealand, 1931.

as a mediating figure, and of non-violence as a legitimate form of anti-colonial

action, rendered political violence all the more illegitimate. In this respect,
during the interwar years, the government of India and Gandhi seem indis-
tinguishable in their insistence on non-violence.
The importance of appearances and visibility is crucial in understanding the
operation and the limits of state violence in British India. The success of non-
violence as a political strategy in the interwar years can in some measure be
explained by the performativity of satyagraha, crucial to which was the concept
of a global audience for the media. A peaceful protest of Sikhs at Guru Ka Bagh
in Amritsar in 1922 was met with police brutality, captured on film by an
American cinematographer, A. L. Varges – a testament to photography’s
capacity to ‘poison’ the state by producing devastating images of evidence.28
The Salt March, which concluded with the clubbing of Indian volunteers by
police in Dharasana, was covered by an American journalist, Webb Miller; his
coverage is generally credited for winning American sympathy for Gandhi’s
politics.29

28 Christopher Pinney, The Coming of Photography to India (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 2008), pp. 92–3.
29 Brian Martin, Justice Ignited: The Dynamics of Backfire (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield,
2007).

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 KAMA MACLEAN AND BENJAMIN ZACHARIAH

The Indian National Congress – formerly a loose organisation that accom-

modated a range of political opinion – substantially tightened in the interwar
years, as Gandhi sought to dominate the movement while increasingly
organising along essentially religious lines. Gandhi, compelled to include in
his movement persons of lower-caste origins, referred to in a patronising
manner as ‘harijans’ or ‘children of god’, was unable to include Muslims
within a Hindu-inflected rhetoric of belonging. Many of his movements
made conditions of everyday life, even survival, difficult or impossible –
akin to upper-caste denial of water and food to lower castes – making the
claims of non-violence difficult to justify.30

Communalism: Ethnic Violence in South Asia

Often read in opposition to nationalism, communalism is probably more
usefully seen as setting the boundaries of the nation in a way that challenges
the hegemonic view of the nation. In the context of colonial India, it almost
invariably refers to separate visions of nationhood as defined by Hindu and
Muslim political actors, and the extent to which these are fuelled or furthered
by violence between the two communities. Explorations into the psychology
of the colonised, who are forced to come to terms with the humiliations of
colonialism, are to some extent helpful in understanding the compulsions of
internecine violence. Frantz Fanon writes compellingly that violence ‘frees
the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it
makes him fearless and restores his self-respect’.31 He also argues that the
apparent invincibility of the colonial power promotes a redirection of vio-
lence inwards within the colonised society, leading the colonised to turn on
one another.32 Fanon sees this as a direct substitution for confrontation
against the colonial state; however, the separation between colonial oppres-
sor and internal other/oppressor isn’t always clear in India. With anti-
colonial violence effectively delegitimised by both Gandhi and government,
the competition for dominance and redress for the humiliations of colonial-
ism was redirected towards internal others. However, in Gandhian and

30 Gandhi himself admitted that social boycott could be a form of unwarranted coercion,
and in 1922 had referred to its ‘summary use’ as ‘unpardonable violence’, and tried to
prescribe humane limits to its use. Gandhi: Selected Writings, ed. Ronald Duncan
(New York: Dover, 2005), pp. 80–2.
31 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press,
2004 [1963]), p. 51.
32 Ibid., pp. 17–18; Penderel Moon, Strangers in India (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock,
1945), chapter 5.

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 Violence, Non-Violence, the State and the Nation

Congress mobilisational tactics, exploitation or oppression of Indians by

Indians was consistently underplayed or glossed over, and class, caste or
religious conflicts were not simply the result of some sort of false conscious-
ness, but were as genuine as any grievances against colonial rule, and in many
cases more immediate.
The rise in communal violence from the 1920s is therefore not simply the
outcome of an over-reliance by the Congress on religious tropes in its
mobilisation,33 of the self-interested machinations of religious leaders34 or of
British divide and rule policies.35 It was also a corollary of the braking of the
nationalist movement by Gandhi’s insistence on non-violence in the interwar
years. In more direct terms, as various groups positioned themselves in an
anti-colonial struggle, it was also apparent that what was at stake was the
ability to control a future state, to win a future conflict in a fundamentally
conflicted society and to decide on who would primarily belong to that state.
To that end, mobilisation in the interwar years, in common with much of the
rest of the world, took the form of organising, training, and as far as possible
arming, paramilitary groups ostensibly charged with ‘social service’ work as
‘volunteers’, but in effect creating sectarian private armies to create commu-
nal quasi-states or states-in-waiting, challenging the state’s monopoly of
violence.36 Gandhi himself spoke of the ‘military discipline’ demanded of
Congress volunteers, and allowed those who ran the Congress’s volunteer
corps to train on military lines. Gandhi had made recruitment speeches for
the British Indian Army during the First World War, and he maintained that
non-violence could only be practised by those who were capable of violence,
rather than those who abstained from violence simply because they were
weak.37
While the dialectic of violence established between white ruler and brown
subject seems relatively straightforward, the uncomfortable fact remains
that, by the early twentieth century, a substantial measure of state violence
inflicted upon the Indian body by coercive forces such as the police was
inflicted by Indians serving in those forces. Revolutionary groups explicitly

33 William Gould, Hindu Nationalism and the Language of Politics in Late Colonial India
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
34 Paul Brass, The Production of Hindu–Muslim Violence in Contemporary India (Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 2003).
35 Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘Religion and Identity in India’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 20.2 (1997),
325–44.
36 Franziska Roy, ‘Youth, Volunteer Organisations and National Discipline in India,
1918–1947’, unpublished PhD thesis, Warwick University, 2013.
37 Judith Steihm, ‘Nonviolence Is Two’, Sociological Inquiry 38.1 (1968), 23–30.

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 KAMA MACLEAN AND BENJAMIN ZACHARIAH

targeted Indians working for the state, appealing to them to leave the colonial
services. On 23 April 1930, a Garhwali regiment ordered to fire on a protesting
crowd in Peshawar refused to do so, and was court martialled, constituting
a worrying new trend for the Government of India.38 Gandhi, who might
have been expected to endorse this decision, responded by denouncing the
Garhwali regiment: imagine, he argued, if when India had a national govern-
ment they similarly refused to do their duty to the state.39
In the face of the pressures of mass nationalist organisation and escalating
ethnic tensions, the response of the state became less predictable, leading to
‘tacitly permitted transgressions’ of conventions about the use of force, such as
whipping, lathi (baton) charges and so on.40 A political compromise of sorts
seemed to have been reached in the Government of India Act of 1935, which
devolved provincial authority to Indians (barring a clause that would reap-
propriate authority to a British-controlled centre in case of emergency),
thereby also devolving a part of state violence to ‘nationalists’ of various
descriptions, as the policing of provincial disorder fell to these governments.
The majority of governments established in the provinces of British India
following the elections in 1937 had Congress-led ministries: seven out of eleven,
with another two in coalition, leaving only Bengal and the Punjab with non-
Congress governments. The left flank of the Congress was often then the only
opposition to the Congress governments in power which, dominated by Indian
business interests, were invested in order and did the job of the colonial state by
controlling ‘subversives’ and ‘seditionists’ (often their own Congress collea-
gues) by imprisoning them.41 When the Congress governments resigned in
protest at being drawn into the war without consultation in 1939, Gandhi wrote
that it was a rescue of sorts for the Congress, bringing Congress factions
together again and covering ‘the fact that we were falling to pieces’.42

From the Second World War to the Post-Partition

State(s)
The stalemate of 1939 continued till 1942, with sections of the British govern-
ment in London and Delhi and the Congress left manoeuvring to find

38 Letter from Viceroy to King, 30 April 1930. British Library, Mss Eur C 152/2.
39 ‘Speech at Chharwada’, 26 April 1930, Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi.
40 Sherman, State Violence, p. 10.
41 Claude Markovits, Indian Business and Nationalist Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002); Basudev Chatterji, Trade, Tariffs and Empire (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1992).
42 Benjamin Zachariah, Nehru (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 105.

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a formula that would make the Congress’s cooperation in the war effort
possible, given that this was seen as a war against a rising fascist coalition,
which would be far more dangerous to India than a weakened British
imperialism. With negotiations failing, in August 1942 the Congress launched
the Quit India Movement, the leadership were imprisoned and therefore
unable to control any emerging movement. The ensuing movement was
relatively spontaneous, led, if at all, by a secondary level of local underground
leaders. The movement was therefore neither Gandhian nor non-violent.
Under conditions of wartime media censorship and governmental emer-
gency powers, it was repressed with immense state violence, including aerial
bombardment and machine gunning of civilian populations, with no impact
on world opinion. However, once again the use of excess force by the
colonial government was widely seen by the Indian populace as evidence,
especially after the fall of Singapore and Burma and the return to India of the
migrant working population from South-East Asia, that the British Raj was
on the verge of collapse.43 Significantly, after the suppression of the Quit India
Movement, military authorities treated India not as an ally but as an occupied
territory for the rest of the war, and the new Viceroy who arrived in 1943,
Lord Wavell, called for a viable withdrawal plan after the war.44
As the war came to an end, demobilised troops mixed with disenchanted
workers as the wartime expansion of employment contracted. The aftermath
of the Quit India Movement and the disruptions of the war years had left
a legacy of violence. The call for a separate state of Pakistan had been raised in
1940 with British encouragement, as a bargain made with Muslim parties,
now represented by the Muslim League, in return for loyalty during the war.
Now, as the politics of British withdrawal began to play out, general inse-
curity fanned violence of all kinds, and demobilised soldiers in recruitment
areas were armed and ready to join the existing militia. The perceived
persecution of members of the Indian National Army (INA), composed of
deserters from the British Indian Army and of recruits among civilians in
Japanese-occupied areas of Asia, led to further unrest.
In November 1945 and February 1946 there were serious anti-European
and anti-Eurasian riots in Calcutta. In February 1946, the Royal Indian Navy
mutinied, protesting, among other things, against differential pay rates for its
white and Indian members. This mutiny made it clear that the armed forces

43 Sanjoy Bhattacharya, Propaganda and Information in Eastern India, 1939–1945: A Necessary

Weapon of War (Richmond: Curzon Press, 1996).
44 Penderel Moon (ed.), Wavell: The Viceroy’s Journal (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1997).

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 KAMA MACLEAN AND BENJAMIN ZACHARIAH

could no longer be relied upon to underpin British rule. By August 1946,

violence had taken a different turn, the anti-colonial solidarities of February
giving way to communal violence. Following an ambiguous Muslim League
call to ‘Direct Action’ and Bengal premier H. S. Suhrawardy’s provocative
remarks in his speech on 16 August in Calcutta, sporadic violence began with
Muslims looting shops, only to discover that neighbourhoods had organised
local ‘defence groups’ and militia in anticipation of violence. Because vio-
lence had been anticipated from Muslims, these defence groups were largely
Hindu, although they were organised according to localities rather than in
a massive collective communal organisation. Insecurity had bred violence,
defence turned easily into offence, and many more Muslims than Hindus died
in the three days of violence that followed in Calcutta. In October, violence
spread to Noakhali, where the slogan ‘We Want Revenge for Calcutta’ was
heard, but violence was largely muted in comparison to Calcutta and to
subsequent events, restricted to what amounted to a local act of revenge
against a Hindu zamindar; the rioters were mostly content to humiliate
Hindus ritually. Then the violence spread to the north and west of India,
and any question of restraint was quickly lost. These forces were exacerbated
by the structural violence of the 1942 Bengal famine, whose after-effects
enhanced ethnic tensions in Calcutta in 1946, which in turn leant legitimacy
to the forces demanding partition.45 Thus, one modality of violence bled into
and enhanced others, leaving a destabilised civil and political order in an India
that the British urgently wished to withdraw from.
Recent historiography of partition violence draws on oral testimonies that
speak of collective madness, and the suddenness and incomprehensibility of
violence; but in this case, memories lie.46 What was essentially a communal
war of succession for the control of the state took place against the backdrop
of an anticipated partition and the creation of Pakistan, whose impending
boundaries were kept secret until 15 August 1947. This level of uncertainty
was greatly destabilising, and in anticipation of partition many areas tried to
cleanse themselves of their minorities. The western parts of the country were
the worst affected – the Punjab was a region with ready access to arms due to
its high levels of army recruitment – and organised massacres of Hindus and

45 Janam Mukherjee, Hungry Bengal: War, Famine and the End of Empire (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2015).
46 Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices in the Partition of India (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2000); Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin, Borders & Boundaries:
Women in India’s Partition (New Bruswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998);
Gyanendra Pandey, Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

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 Violence, Non-Violence, the State and the Nation

Sikhs by Muslims and of Muslims by Hindus and Sikhs, accompanied by

gratuitous mutilations of bodies, by rapes, abductions, and communities
killing their own women to protect their ‘honour’ rather than have them
‘defiled’ by the enemy, continued well past the date of actual transfer of
power. A scramble for property, and for the displacement of persons from
territories to render them Hindu- or Sikh-majority areas, was often organised
by paramilitary groups like the Akalis and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh;
similar dynamics can be discerned in western Punjab, with the support of the
Muslim National Guards.47 Meanwhile, the emerging independent state,
with Jawaharlal Nehru as prime minister of an interim government from
September 1946, accepted the use of colonial-style collective fines and firing
upon crowds from the air as ways of restoring peace.48 Casualties from the
period of partition and post-partition violence have been estimated at
between 200,000 and 800,000.49

State Violence and Continuities, 1946–1958

The post-independence state can be seen to be taking shape before the colonial
state completed its withdrawal, but in the process it is important to see
violence as the driving force behind the compromise between a retreating
and increasingly vulnerable colonial state and those elites competing for
succession. The ‘war of succession’ that was Partition meant that the new
states of India and Pakistan were forged not from non-violence, but from the
extremes of popular violence that led to the new states maintaining much of
the repressive machinery of the predecessor state. From this matrix, a number
of insurgencies were born, some of which continue to threaten the nation-
state. Faced with irregular forces supported by the new state of Pakistan at his
borders, the Maharaja of Kashmir signed an ‘instrument of accession’ to India.
In the case of the state of Hyderabad, its princely ruler wanted to join Pakistan,
but with geopolitics decidedly against him, the matter was similarly decided by
the Indian army. The army conducted a ‘police action’, suppressing
a communist-led movement at the same time. A Naga Insurgency continued
throughout the 1950s. The long-standing legacy of colonial-style legislation is

47 Franziska Roy and Ali Raza, ‘In the Name of Self Defence: The Second World and the
Politics of Paramilitary Groups in British India ca. 1939–46’, paper presented at Kellogg
College, University of Oxford, 21–22 September 2013.
48 Zachariah, Nehru, chapter 5.
49 Mushirul Hasan, ‘Introduction’, in The Partition Omnibus (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2005), p. xxiv.

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 KAMA MACLEAN AND BENJAMIN ZACHARIAH

the Armed Forces Special Powers Act of 1958, still in operation in many states
in the north-east, and since 1990 extended to Kashmir. The Act grants immu-
nity from prosecution to armed forces personnel, and effectively places areas
under a perpetual state of emergency, suspending basic civil liberties in the
manner of the Rowlatt Act before it.
The post-independence state thus relied on violence being administered in
particular regions and for particular times as states of exception emerged. In
the writing of Giorgio Agamben via Carl Schmitt, the state is implicitly,
through being able to administer and decide upon the state of exception,
a concentration camp.50 Historians would insist on a distinction between
a philosophical argument about a sovereign rule of exception that turns states
into the equivalent of concentration camps, and actually existing states
whose use of exceptional powers has not achieved camp-like dimensions.
In the newly independent India, the army was deployed to control unruly and
recalcitrant populations of the new nation state’s peripheries, first in the
north-eastern region of Assam, forcibly incorporating a number of ‘tribal’
minorities, some of which resisted incorporation into the new state, and over
time in Kashmir, similar to Pakistan on the North-West Frontier.
The postcolonial state was faced with the same central questions as its
predecessor colonial state: does the monopoly of violence remain legitimate
if the frequent use of violence becomes necessary? And does an excessive use
of violence, in turn, lead to the loss of that monopoly? The question remains
open as to whether the frequent resort to exceptional forms of state violence
is indicative of a loss of legitimacy, or if it is merely an indicator of the
hegemony of the state. But part of our argument is that state violence is not
always explicit. A state built on the premise of a civilising mission or good
governance is undermined if it must resort to extreme repression in order to
maintain its hegemony. By reading the existence of state violence across
a range of modalities – epistemological, implicit, symbolic or structural – we
highlight ways in which dominance was maintained in British India. It is
important to be sensitive to invisible forms of violence, for their effective
operation frequently precludes more overt manifestations, which by the mid
twentieth century precipitated a crisis of legitimacy.

50 Giorgio Agamben (trans. Kevin Attell), State of Exception (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 2005).

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 Violence, Non-Violence, the State and the Nation

Bibliographical Essay
The historiography of violence in India remains separated into thematic specialisations,
with an overview of different forms of state and non-state violence not yet available, and
the themes not able to speak to one another. A few exceptions are to be found in as yet
unpublished essays or PhD theses, and/or in larger works.
The historiography of the rebellion of 1857–8 has been revised in a multivolume project
edited by Crispin Bates et al., Mutiny at the Margins (New Delhi: Sage, 2013–16).
Thomas Metcalf, The Aftermath of Revolt: India, 1857–1870 (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1964) provides an overview of institutional arrangements for state violence of the
British Indian state at its inception.
Jonathan Saha provides a useful historiographical overview in ‘Histories of Everyday
Violence in British India’, History Compass, 9.11 (2011), 844–53. The intimate relationship
between law and violence is explained in Jordana Bailkin, ‘The Boot and Spleen: When
Was Murder Possible in British India?’, Comparative Studies in History and Society 48.2
(2006), 462–93. A fresh conceptualisation of how state violence constituted an extensive
‘coercive network’ in colonial India is to be found in Taylor C. Sherman, State Violence and
Punishment in India (London: Routledge, 2010). The close relationship between violence
and non-violence, and in particular the reliance of non-violence on the existence of
political violence as the basis of its bargaining power, is explored in Kama Maclean,
A Revolutionary History of Interwar India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), and
further in Benjamin Zachariah, Gandhi (London: Routledge, forthcoming).
The rise of communal violence from the late nineteenth to the twentieth century
tended to be viewed as the product of colonial policies – symptomatically, see
Gyanendra Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1990) – or as a result of more primordial identities, see
Sudhir Kakar, The Colors of Violence: Cultural Identities, Religion and Conflict (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1996). Regional studies show instigation of violence by the
police against Hindus, and/or the move from an overlap of class and community in the
structure of a rioting crowd to organised forms of violence: see for instance Suranjan Das,
Communal Riots in Bengal 1905–1947 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991) and Sulagna
Roy, ‘Communal Conflict in Bengal, 1930–1947’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of
Cambridge, 1999. The contrast between spontaneity and organisation in riots or pogroms
has been a continuing theme in the historiography of independent India.
Studies on the impact of the violence of total war in the subcontinent begin to
demonstrate the overlapping of different modalities of violence: see Janam Mukherjee,
Hungry Bengal: War, Famine and the End of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
The longer-term roots of organised violence that manifested itself around Partition can be
seen in Franziska Roy, ‘Youth, Volunteer Organisations and National Discipline in India,
1918–1947’, unpublished PhD thesis, Warwick Unversity, 2013. Continuities of colonial
measures of state violence can be glimpsed in Duncan McDuie-Ra, ‘Fifty-Year
Disturbance: The Armed Forces Special Powers Act and Exceptionalism in a South
Asian Periphery’, Contemporary South Asia 17.3 (2009), 255–70.

87
 4
Racial Violence in the United States
since the Civil War
jason morgan ward

In 2018, a national memorial to victims of lynching opened in

Montgomery, Alabama. The culmination of years of research, advocacy
and planning by the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), the memorial consists
of 800 columns – one for each county where EJI researchers have
documented at least one killing – and individual inscriptions for each
of the more than 4,000 lynching victims recorded in the EJI’s heralded
2015 report, Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror.
Situated on a bluff, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice will
overlook the EJI’s planned museum, ‘From Enslavement to Mass
Incarceration’, which will house the nation’s largest collection of lynch-
ing data as well as exhibits that trace the broader consequences and
legacies of racial violence.
This current moment of memorialisation calls for a broader reckoning
with racial violence in modern America. The pioneering work of EJI and
other advocacy groups demonstrates an increasingly ambitious and sophis-
ticated approach to documenting this bloody history. The EJI memorial and
museum, located in the original capital of the Confederacy and built within
a few hundred yards of a former slave market, emphasise a legacy of
brutality and oppression that reaches back centuries. Furthermore, the EJI
lynching report acknowledges the national reach of mob violence and
highlights campaigns of racial terror, such as the lynching of hundreds of
Mexican nationals and Mexican Americans in the south-western border-
lands, that have received less public attention. Yet while the bloodshed has
transcended regional boundaries and targeted a variety of vulnerable popu-
lations, the current campaign for memorialisation reveals the difficulties
inherent in telling a national narrative of racial violence in modern
America. The challenges are considerable, but the need has never been
more urgent.

88
 Racial Violence in the United States since the Civil War

Racial violence is at once the most prominent form of political violence in

American history and the most difficult to synthesise.1 Scholars and activists
have compared the patterns of violence committed against racial and ethnic
groups in various regions of the country and drawn parallels between the
racial motivations of American violence at home and abroad, yet such
analysis runs the risk of oversimplification. Racial violence is widespread,
yet it is also diffuse and protean in nature. In the late nineteenth century,
terror campaigns targeted emancipated African Americans in the South,
Chinese merchants and labourers in the Pacific and Intermountain West,
and Mexicans in the south-western borderlands. As the United States govern-
ment emerged from the Civil War eager to consolidate its grip on the
western frontier and extend its global reach, racialised violence against
Indigenous peoples at home and abroad defied generalisation. Racial violence
transcended borders, yet it did not originate in a particular time or place, nor
did it ‘spread’ from one region to another. Indeed, if any key theme links the
histories of racial violence in America, it is the ongoing process of encounter
and adaption. White supremacy has proven remarkably durable and dynamic
even as its brutal logic has maintained a deadly consistency.

The Reconstruction of White Supremacy

in Post-Civil War America
Racial violence undergirds and enables other forms of discrimination and
oppression, forcing scholars and activists alike to expand the very definition
of what is violent. The question of what makes racial violence modern is a bit less
thorny. The American Civil War was a watershed moment for racial violence
in the United States, and for good reason. Historian Richard Hofstadter, in
a prescient essay on American violence, argued that the resolutions of the
nation’s major wars have influenced the scope and character of the domestic
violence that followed in their respective wakes. He contrasts the American
Revolution, which settled the question of independence and ushered in several
decades of ‘relative social peace’, with a far bloodier Civil War that ‘left an
extraordinary inheritance of bitterness and lethal passion that has not yet
ended’. Any serious student of racial violence could poke holes in
Hofstadter’s characterisation of the early nineteenth century as ‘one of the
least violent periods in our domestic history’. Nevertheless, his characterisation

1 Beverly Gage, ‘Terrorism and the American Experience: A State of the Field’, Journal of
American History 98 (June 2011), 73–94, at 87.

89
 JASON MORGAN WARD

of the Civil War as a cataclysmic clash driven by questions of freedom and

equality largely left unresolved helps to explain why a war to end slavery
unleashed a century and a half of persistent racial violence.2
To be sure, the imperative to maintain white domination, fuelled by the
pervasive fear of black insurgency, predated the Civil War.3 However,
expressions of violence that had plagued America in the antebellum era,
such as urban rioting and vigilantism, took on an increasingly racial character
in the post-Civil War era. Forerunners of post-Civil War lynch mobs had
tarred and feathered loyalists in the Revolutionary era, and nativist rioters
had torched Catholic churches and schools in northern cities, but ‘modern’
mob violence focused increasingly on perceived threats to the racial status
quo. While this violence transcended any particular region and targeted
a variety of racial groups, the white supremacist counter-revolution that
swept the South after the Civil War captured national attention and trans-
formed the political landscape of modern America. White supremacists in
the post-Civil War South inherited the fears of black insurrection from
predecessors who responded to the threat of slave revolts with draconian
measures. Having lived through a war that precipitated the emancipation of
enslaved blacks, and faced with the proposition of a postwar Reconstruction,
white supremacists lamented a society turned on its head and utilised
counter-revolutionary methods to take power back. That these men, and
millions more across the nation, had lived through a civil war that spurred
a domestic arms race and familiarised a generation with military tactics only
heightened the destructive potential of modern racial violence.
Reconstruction historians have increasingly emphasised the fundamental
role of violence in quashing interracial democracy in the South. Early studies
of the era, many written under the tutelage of Columbia University historian
William Archibald Dunning, characterised white supremacist violence as an
unfortunate yet inexorable response to venal and inept interracial regimes.
Depictions of a ‘tragic era’ of Yankee carpetbaggers, traitorous scallywags and
‘Negro domination’ reached popular audiences via films, novels and text-
books that celebrated the overthrow of Reconstruction as a noble crusade.
Later ‘revisionist’ histories, which emphasised the accomplishments of
Republican governments across the South, largely placed the blame for this

2 Richard Hofstadter, ‘Reflections on Violence in the United States’, in

Richard Hofstadter and Mike Wallace (eds.), American Violence: A Documentary History
(New York: Vintage, 1970), pp. 3–43, at 36–7.
3 Richard Maxwell Brown, Strain of Violence: Historical Studies of American Violence and
Vigilantism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. viii.

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‘unfinished revolution’ – to quote from the title of Eric Foner’s peerless

history of Reconstruction – at the feet of an increasingly ambivalent northern
public and its representatives in Washington. Yet unrelenting white suprema-
cist violence not only sapped northern political will but also eviscerated shaky
Republican coalitions through an increasingly organised reign of terror. This
counter-revolution gained steam as white supremacist Democrats, working in
close coordination with their paramilitary auxiliaries, ‘redeemed’ state govern-
ments from Republican control. The campaign peaked in Mississippi in 1875,
when a coordinated campaign by the White Line and other pro-Democrat
groups attacked black political rallies, assassinated Republican officials and
terrorised polling places. The brutal campaign, vividly documented in a two-
volume, 2,000-page congressional report, fatally crippled the Republican coali-
tion in the state with the largest black majority in the South. The following year,
‘Red Shirt’ militias in South Carolina followed the ‘Mississippi Plan’ and toppled
one of the last pro-Reconstruction regimes in the region.4
By neutralising the threat of black politics, the Redeemers claimed to have
settled the question of white supremacy – their sine qua non for racial peace. Yet
just as the end of the Civil War failed to pacify the South, the fall of
Reconstruction failed to quell racial violence or stamp out the volatile anxieties
that fuelled it. Sexual violence against black women, and fear of black attacks
on white women, undergirded the politics of white supremacy from
Reconstruction onward. As Hannah Rosen has argued, ‘a discourse of rape
and criminality’ justified attacks on black men even as white supremacists
continued patterns of abuse and exploitation that reached back to slavery. In
the post-Reconstruction era, white supremacist regimes sanctioned ‘gendered
racial terror’, as historian Sarah Haley argues, as a tool of punishment and
domination. Many white women rallied behind white supremacists precisely
because of the protection from the mythical ‘black rapist’ they offered. Yet the
hypocrisy of this gendered culture of violence, which simultaneously idealised
and degraded womanhood along racial lines, also propelled resistance from
anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells to civil rights icon Rosa Parks.5

4 For histories of Reconstruction that emphasise the fundamental importance of white

supremacist violence, see Allen W. Trelease, White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy
and Southern Reconstruction (New York: Harper & Row, 1971); George C. Rable, But There
Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction (Athens: University of
Georgia Press, 1984).
5 Hannah Rosen, Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning
of Race in the Postemancipation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2009); Sarah Haley, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow
Modernity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), p. 3;
Crystal Feimster, Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching

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 JASON MORGAN WARD

The overthrow of Reconstruction and the institutionalisation of disfranch-

isement and segregation in the South proceeded apace with a broader cam-
paign for white supremacy that spanned the continent. While the racial
brutality that pervaded American life in the late nineteenth century is often
compartmentalised into tidy regional, racial and ethnic categories, perceptive
scholars have focused on when and where these narratives of violence inter-
sect. Particularly compelling is the convergence of the white supremacist
counter-revolution in the post-Civil War South with the brutal subjugation
of Indigenous peoples in the American West. As the nation neared its hun-
dredth birthday in 1876, and Reconstruction teetered on the brink of collapse,
news reached the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia that several thousand
Plains Indians had routed cavalrymen under the command of George
Armstrong Custer at Little Big Horn. While the nation reeled from this bloody
yet temporary setback to continental consolidation, white supremacists in
Hamburg, South Carolina, massacred black militiamen and townspeople
who had gathered for a Fourth of July parade. Fifteen years later, and just
a few weeks after Mississippi delegates gathered for a constitutional conven-
tion that effectively disfranchised black citizens by erecting the gauntlet of
voting restrictions, the massacre of scores of men, women and children at
Wounded Knee – perpetrated by the same cavalry regiment routed at Little
Big Horn – punctuated a decades-long campaign to stamp out Indian resis-
tance. Throughout the latter stages of the Indian Wars, many of the Union
veterans who had fought to crush the Confederacy and worked to protect the
rights of freed people during Reconstruction sensed no contradiction between
their prior missions and their crusade to subdue the American West.
Rather than view the retreat from the promise of Reconstruction and the
conquest of the Plains Indians as contradictory, historian Daniel Sharfstein
outlines a broader trajectory – a ‘pivot from emancipation to Jim Crow and
empire’ – for racialised violence in modern America. The rapid industrialisa-
tion of post-Civil War America, spurred by the bloody consolidation of the
frontier and fuelled by immigrant labour, unleashed a wave of violence
aimed at those deemed unassimilable in a whitening West. From the
Pacific Coast to the Rocky Mountains, anti-Chinese violence ranged from
arson and murder to armed expulsions. As in the Reconstruction-era South,
officials out West euphemistically characterised the larger-scale outbreaks as
riots. Yet when white miners in Rock Springs, Wyoming, destroyed

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), p. 187; Danielle McGuire, At the Dark
End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance – A New History of the Civil Rights
Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (New York: Vintage, 2010).

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 Racial Violence in the United States since the Civil War

a neighbouring Chinese mining camp in a rampage that left at least twenty-

eight dead, and when mobs in Seattle and Tacoma expelled hundreds of
Chinese residents – all within a span of twelve months in 1885–6 – the
violence more closely resembled an ethnic cleansing. This bloody campaign
of harassment and intimidation, which extended to other Asian immigrant
groups in subsequent decades, reflected the interplay between racial violence
and racist policy. Occurring just a few years after the United States Congress
passed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the mob violence in Wyoming and
Washington dramatised how legislation grounded in racial hostility sanc-
tioned ongoing persecution. Moreover, the anti-Chinese campaign provides
yet another example of the national reach and brutal logic of white supre-
macist politics. The bipartisan support for the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first
significant restriction on immigration in American history, reflected
a growing national consensus regarding race, civilisation and civic fitness.6

Enforcing the Colour Line at Home and Abroad

By the turn of the century, this rejection of Reconstruction’s egalitarian
promise portended consequences for America’s foreign rivals and colonial
subjects. The United States’ emergence as a global power, a narrative too
often disconnected from domestic struggles over race and citizenship, had
profound implications for patterns of racial violence at home and abroad.
Prescient observers like W. E. B. Du Bois, the pre-eminent black intellectual
of his generation, recognised this critical continuity. Three years before his
1903 pronouncement that ‘the problem of the 20th century is the problem of
the colour line’, Du Bois declared in his presidential address to the American
Negro Academy that ‘the colour line belts the world’.7 Thanks to its recent
triumph over Spain, the United States controlled a swath of territorial spoils
that stretched halfway around the globe. Prior patterns of racial violence
informed American attempts to subdue their far-flung acquisitions.
Imperialists and anti-imperialists alike drew parallels between the violent
subjugation of Native Americans and the attempts to subdue Filipinos,
Cubans and Puerto Ricans. In the Philippines, the campaign to quash

6 Daniel J. Sharfstein, Thunder in the Mountains: Chief Joseph, Oliver Otis Howard, and the
Nez Perce War (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017), p. xiv; Jean Pfaelzer, Driven Out: The
Forgotten War against Chinese Americans (New York: Random House, 2007);
Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 360.
7 Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States and the Philippines
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), p. 13.

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 JASON MORGAN WARD

a nationalist rebellion against American occupation reflected the global reach

of American racial violence. Yet while Americans drew the colour line in
blood, the ‘race war’ in the Philippines was not simply an ‘export’ of white
supremacy campaigns, Indian Wars and anti-Chinese purges back home.
‘While race helped organize and justify U.S. colonial violence’, historian
Paul Kramer contends, ‘imperial processes also remade U.S. racial forma-
tions.’ As Americans racialised Filipinos, they rationalised race war.
Interpreting Filipino guerrilla tactics as proof of ‘savagery’, and drawing on
the lessons of ‘Injun warfare’, the American military tortured prisoners,
launched scorched-earth campaigns, and implemented ‘reconcentration’
policies that led to tens of thousands of civilian deaths. American troops,
many of whom initially disparaged Filipino insurgents as ‘niggers’, soon
embraced a novel epithet for a new racial adversary – the gu-gu.8
As the United States extended the colour line to its new territorial posses-
sions, white supremacists in the South codified segregation and disfranchise-
ment one state at a time. Racial violence fuelled this campaign, and followed
in its wake. Following the lead of the delegates to Mississippi’s 1890 constitu-
tional convention, who adopted poll taxes, literacy tests and the ‘under-
standing clause’ as barriers to black voting, state legislatures across the
South adopted a dizzying array of disfranchisement laws. A resurgent wave
of race riots and mob killings facilitated this process. In North Carolina,
a ‘Fusion’ movement of black Republicans and white Populists stood in the
way of white supremacist Democrats’ Jim Crow agenda. In order to wrest
power back from this interracial coalition, the Democrats launched
a campaign of racial propaganda and organised terror that peaked with an
1898 massacre in the port city of Wilmington. Over the next two years, North
Carolina legislators followed Mississippi’s lead in adopting disfranchisement
schemes that they hoped, as one architect of the white supremacy campaign
put it, ‘had settled the Negro question for all times’. In 1906, white mobs
rampaged through the black neighbourhoods of Atlanta. As in North
Carolina, a racially charged political climate and press reports of black attacks
on white women portended a final barrage of white supremacist legislation.

8 Paul A. Kramer, ‘Race Making and Colonial Violence in the US Empire: The Philippine–
American War as Race War’, Diplomatic History 30.2 (2006), 169–210, at 185; Stuart
Creighton Miller, ‘Benevolent Assimilation’: The American Conquest of the Philippines,
1899–1903 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), p. 179; Paul A. Kramer, The Blood
of Government: Race, Empire, the United States and the Philippines (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 2006), pp. 89, 124–30; Michael Fellman, In the Name of God and
Country: Reconsidering Terrorism in American History (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2009), pp. 214–15.

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 Racial Violence in the United States since the Civil War

With its 1908 adoption of the literacy test, Georgia capped off a two-decade
campaign to force black southerners out of civic life.9
As in the earlier campaign to overthrow Reconstruction and the push for
Chinese exclusion, the architects of the turn-of-the-century white supremacy
campaigns utilised violence for political ends and argued that their political
solutions would mitigate future bloodshed. Yet, just as the most notorious
attacks on Chinese communities occurred after the passage of the Exclusion
Act, southern mob violence persisted in the wake of the late nineteenth-century
white supremacy campaigns. With the rise of Jim Crow, lynching became the
most persistent and virulent weapon for white supremacists intent on quashing
any perceived threat to the racial status quo. While this peculiarly American
tradition of mob violence traced its roots to the Revolutionary era and vigilante
notions of ‘frontier justice’, lynching had become an increasingly regional and
racial phenomenon by the end of the nineteenth century. After 1885, the last year
where white victims outnumbered black in the Tuskegee Institute’s pioneering
lynching database, the overwhelming majority of killings occurred at the hands
of white mobs in the American South. In 1892 alone, Tuskegee recorded over 160
lynchings of black Americans. In 1895, the Mississippi-born journalist Ida B. Wells
documented in graphic detail the surge in anti-black killings over the previous
three years. In addition to coupling the rise of Jim Crow to the surge in
lynchings, Wells documented and challenged the sexually charged fears stoked
by the white supremacy campaigns that lived on in the mobs that tortured,
castrated, burned and executed victims with impunity.10
Southern lynchings frequently took the form of public spectacle, with
hundreds and even thousands gathering to watch the killings. As many as
10,000 onlookers converged on Paris, Texas, 1893 to watch relatives of
a murdered white girl torture her alleged killer with hot irons. Mob leaders
then soaked the execution platform – emblazoned with the word ‘Justice’ –
with oil and set it ablaze. Onlookers later sifted through the ashes for body
parts and scraps of wood to sell as souvenirs. As with dozens of similar
spectacle lynchings that occurred in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, photographs of the lynching circulated as mementos. The highly

9 Jason Morgan Ward, Defending White Democracy: The Making of a Segregationist Movement
and the Remaking of Racial Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), p.
2; David Cecelski and Timothy B. Tyson (eds.), Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race
Riot of 1898 and its Legacy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
10 Michael James Pfeifer, Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1874–1947 (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 2004); Pfeifer, The Roots of Rough Justice: Origins of American
Lynching (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011); Philip Dray, At the Hands of Persons
Unknown: The Lynching of Black America (New York: Random House, 2002), p. viii.

95
 JASON MORGAN WARD

ritualistic nature of Jim Crow era lynchings captured the imagination of

contemporary observers, who argued that the South’s distinct mix of funda-
mentalist Christianity and a ‘Lost Cause’ ideology rooted in the bloody soil of
Reconstruction had birthed a distinctively American form of racial violence.
‘After the trauma of Appomattox’, sociologist Orlando Patterson argues, ‘the
Southern community had to be restored in the most extreme compact of
blood, and its God propitiated in the most extreme form of sacrifice known to
man.’ The recurring themes of sacrifice, crucifixion and redemption – a word
that bore a specific and evocative meaning for white southerners who lived
through Reconstruction – persisted in the pronouncements of lynching’s
staunchest advocates and most ardent foes.11

Violence, Migration and Protest Politics in Jim

Crow America
As lynching concentrated in the South in the early Jim Crow era, mob
violence outside the region demonstrated a broader willingness to counter
perceived threats to white power and privilege. When black southerners
migrated north, due in no small part to surging racial terrorism, they
encountered whites who traded in rumour-mongering and sexual anxieties
that frequently proved as volatile as those of their southern counterparts. In
the first decade of the twentieth century, accusations of murder and rape
sparked anti-black riots in industrial centres across Ohio and Indiana. Then, in
1908, as Springfield, Illinois – final resting place of Abraham Lincoln – pre-
pared to celebrate the Great Emancipator’s hundredth birthday, white mobs
tore through the city’s black neighbourhoods after demanding that police
turn over two black prisoners. Flush with black migrants from the South,
Illinois’s capital city reeled from a ‘riot’ that portended a national racial crisis.
In response, white and black reformers convened in New York to organise
the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Citing ‘the
spread of lawless attacks upon the Negro, North, South, and West’, the
organisers drafted a call for a national conference to address anti-black
persecution. ‘No other nation, civilized or savage, burns its criminals’, Ida
B. Wells-Barnett declared in an address to attendees. ‘Only under the Stars
and Stripes is the human holocaust possible.’12

11 Orlando Patterson, Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries

(New York: Civitas, 1999), p. 215; Amy Louise Wood, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing
Racial Violence in America, 1890–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2009).
12 Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown, pp. 167–72.

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 Racial Violence in the United States since the Civil War

The NAACP’s moderate organisers shied away from Wells-Barnett’s con-

demnation of the United States’ ‘National Crime’, but the organisation
reflected reformers’ conviction that black migration had nationalised mob
violence. While northern mobs lynched black victims suspected of crimes or
social transgressions, the spread of large-scale ‘race riots’ evoked earlier
patterns of racial violence. From white supremacist political violence in the
South to anti-Chinese purges in the West, the term riot belied the organised
and intentional nature of northern racial violence. As contemporary obser-
vers dissected the anatomy of these disturbances, clear patterns emerged. In
Springfield and elsewhere, whites initiated violence in response to perceived
threats from blacks. Frequently, rumours of black criminality and sexual
predation played a crucial role in aggravating tensions and intensifying
violence. While the term riot suggests randomness and spontaneity, such
disturbances occurred most often during periods of economic and social
turmoil. A riot involves mutual culpability and belligerence, but urban racial
violence almost always occurred within black neighbourhoods. Finally, while
the ‘race riot’ emerged as the northern counterpart to southern mob vio-
lence, outbreaks of racial violence in the urban North provided cover for
targeted killings that fit the profile of a Jim Crow lynching.
As the Great Migration blurred patterns of anti-black violence, the lynching
of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the south-western borderlands chal-
lenged the notion that black mobility had nationalised racial strife. Indeed, the
fluidity and volatility of life along the southern border spurred a renewed wave
of mob violence in the second decade of the twentieth century. After the
discovery of the ‘Plan de San Diego’, a manifesto drafted by imprisoned
revolutionaries in northern Mexico and circulated on both sides of the Rio
Grande, Texas Rangers and vigilantes killed hundreds and displaced thousands
more in their search for suspected insurgents. The massacre in South Texas
marked the bloodiest episode in a decades-long reign of terror that historians
William Carrigan and Clive Webb deem ‘comparable, at least on a per capita
basis, to the mob violence suffered by African Americans’. The relative
inattention to anti-Mexican violence reflects the binary approach of early anti-
lynching activists, who classified documented victims simply as black or white.
Yet mob violence against Mexicans in the United States also underscores the
international and diplomatic dimensions of American racial violence. Black
activist groups appealed to state and federal government institutions for action,
while foreign nationals could also seek recourse through diplomatic officials. In
the case of Chinese victims of riots and purges in the West, diplomatic protest
resulted in damage suits. By World War I, when questions of international

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reputation carried unprecedented weight in Washington, consular inquiries

into anti-Mexican mob violence yielded results.13
Global conflict had broader consequences for racial violence. War mobi-
lisation accelerated black migration to industrial centres, where whites
responded with a wave of urban unrest that dwarfed earlier race riots. Two
months after the United States entered the war, in July 1917, white mobs in
East St. Louis massacred as many as 200 black citizens. Just weeks before,
striking aluminium plant workers had blamed black migrants for threatening
their jobs and declared their city ‘a white man’s town’. The following year, as
white southerners fretted about an exodus of black workers and the immi-
nent return of emboldened black veterans, the annual lynching count nearly
doubled from the previous year. By Armistice Day, November 1918, the
Tuskegee Institute had tallied over one hundred wartime lynchings in less
than twenty months. As the nation transitioned from war to peace, a potent
mix of racism and anti-radicalism fuelled a wave of violence remembered as
the ‘Red Summer’ of 1919. Deadly outbreaks in Chicago, Washington, DC,
and a dozen additional northern cities followed earlier patterns of urban
unrest, but surging mob violence across the South blurred the lines between
‘race riots’ and lynchings. In the Arkansas Delta, shots exchanged between
snooping white officials and attendees at a black sharecroppers’ union meet-
ing sparked a massacre that left over 200 black Arkansans dead. Dubbed
a ‘race riot’ and blamed on an imminent black insurrection by white news-
papers, the mass lynching echoed the fears of subversion and indiscriminate
carnage still raging in South Texas.14
The Great War also accelerated movements against racial violence,
although these campaigns encountered considerable ambivalence. A few
weeks after the East St. Louis riot, the NAACP organised a Silent Protest
Parade of 10,000 men, women and children in New York City. The year
before, the organisation had formed an anti-lynching committee after a brutal
spectacle lynching in Waco, Texas. Confronted with a wartime surge in racial
violence, the NAACP multiplied its membership and lobbied the first south-
ern-born president since Reconstruction to speak out against lynching. By
contrasting Woodrow Wilson’s crusade to ‘make the world safe for

13 Benjamin H. Johnson, Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and its Bloody
Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003),
p. 120; William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb, Forgotten Dead: Mob Violence against
Mexicans in the United States, 1848–1928 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013),
pp. 1–4, 128–58.
14 Cameron McWhirter, Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black
America (New York: Henry Holt, 2011).

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 Racial Violence in the United States since the Civil War

democracy’ with white supremacist violence at home, civil rights activists

hoped to compel federal intervention on behalf of vulnerable minorities.
Publicity, in the form of daring investigations and searing exposés, fuelled this
anti-lynching campaign. Rooted in a tradition of bearing witness to the racial
violence that attended emancipation and Reconstruction, as well as the
muckraking ethos of Progressive reformers, the anti-lynching crusade gained
considerable momentum during World War I. Walter F. White, the blonde-
haired and blue-eyed son of light-skinned black Atlantans, passed as a white
man to investigate lynchings in Georgia, Tennessee and Mississippi during his
first year as an NAACP staffer in 1918. His reports on these atrocities, which
included the torture and mutilation of at least three pregnant women, pierced
the veil of deflection and apologia that clouded the ‘official’ white accounts of
Jim Crow lynchings. White completed his undercover investigations just in
time to insert his findings into the NAACP’s landmark report, Thirty Years of
Lynching, 1889–1918, which documented 3,229 lynchings in just over one
hundred pages of print.15
The wartime anti-lynching push also demonstrated the growing traction of
the first nationally viable civil rights campaign of the twentieth century. With
southern black migrants pouring into industrial centres across the North,
urban politicians felt at least some pressure to acknowledge their concerns. In
1918, Missouri congressman Leonidas Dyer, a Republican who represented
St. Louis’s largest black enclaves, introduced the first federal anti-lynching bill
in American history. Over the next two decades, every congressional sponsor
of federal anti-lynching legislation represented a northern or western state
with a growing black constituency. The following year, the NAACP followed
the publication of Thirty Years of Lynching with a National Conference on
Lynching. The May 1919 gathering featured former Republican presidential
candidate and United States Supreme Court justice Charles Evans Hughes, as
well as a carefully recruited contingent of southern white lynching critics –
including ex-governors from Georgia and Alabama. The conference, which
packed New York City’s Carnegie Hall, reflected the national resonance of an
anti-lynching movement just weeks before a surge of postwar violence
revealed the national reach of a white supremacist backlash.

15 Robert L. Zangrando, The NAACP Crusade against Lynching, 1909–1950 (Philadelphia:

Temple University Press, 1980), pp. 37, 48; Patricia Sullivan, Lift Every Voice: The NAACP
and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: New Press, 2009), p. 75; Kidada
E. Williams, They Left Great Marks on Me: African American Testimonies of Racial Violence
from Emancipation to World War I (New York: New York University Press, 2012), pp. 3–4.

99
 JASON MORGAN WARD

Red Summer and the postwar ‘return to normalcy’ underscored the mixed
legacy of World War I for racial violence. While the rate of documented
lynchings declined steadily during the 1920s, massacres in Tulsa, Oklahoma
(1921) and Rosewood, Florida (1923) razed entire communities and claimed
dozens of black lives. The rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan, inspired by the
glorification of Reconstruction era racial terrorism in D. W. Griffith’s 1915
blockbuster Birth of a Nation, harnessed the reactionary politics of the 1920s
and mainstreamed the Invisible Empire’s violent agenda. With a national
membership that peaked at 3–5 million, the Klan reflected the broader appeal
and brutal logic of nativist politics. New immigration restrictions favoured
northern Europeans over the predominantly Catholic and Jewish arrivals
from southern and eastern Europe and severely restricted or banned outright
immigration from Asia and Africa. As in the late nineteenth century, violence
presaged the nativist backlash and normalised persecution in its wake. In
California, attacks on Filipino, Japanese and South Asian residents spiked in
the years before and after the inaction of stricter immigration policies. Yet
just as the wartime spike in lynchings proceeded apace with the surging
NAACP membership, the postwar nativist backlash inspired organisation and
advocacy. From the reorganisation and expansion of the Chinese American
Citizens Alliance in the 1910s and 1920s to the founding of the Japanese
American Citizens League (JACL) and the League of United Latin
American Citizens (LULAC) – both in 1929 – persecuted communities
invoked citizenship as an antidote to racial violence.
The interwar years demonstrated the fractious and complex nature of
campaigns against racial violence. LULAC, for example, distanced itself
from black activists in a calculated appeal to Mexican Americans’ white
racial identity. As Carrigan and Webb argue, this strategic move ‘exposes
the limitations and lost opportunities of anti-lynching protest’.16 The
NAACP’s efforts to cultivate interracial alliances below the Mason–Dixon
line bore fruit with the founding in 1930 of the Association of Southern
Women for the Prevention of Lynching (ASWPL), a coalition of white
reformers who rejected the myth that mob violence was necessary to
protect them from black rapists. Yet while anti-lynching groups shared
strategies of publicity and political persuasion, they failed to coalesce
around a common agenda or even a uniform definition of lynching.
While the ASWPL’s white, middle-class leadership appealed to local and
state officials, founder Jessie Daniel Ames shied away from the NAACP’s

16 Carrigan and Webb, Forgotten Dead, p. 125.

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 Racial Violence in the United States since the Civil War

push for federal anti-lynching legislation. The NAACP also clashed with
more radical black activists who challenged the organisation’s anti-lynching
strategy and offered a broader, more systemic definition of mob violence.
When Alabama authorities condemned nine black youths to death for
allegedly raping two white women in 1931, the communist-backed
International Labor Defense (ILD) mounted a national fundraising and
publicity campaign on behalf of the Scottsboro Boys. As the ILD pamphlet
Lynching Negro Children in Southern Courts suggests, radical activists framed
mob violence as a weapon of economic exploitation that blurred the lines of
extra-legal and state-sanctioned punishment.17
The New Deal era dramatised the success and shortcomings of anti-
lynching activism. After two decades of failed attempts, and just days after
a brutal blowtorch lynching of two black Mississippians grabbed national
headlines, the United States House of Representatives passed a federal anti-
lynching bill in 1937 by a three-to-one margin. Yet when the Senate convened
in January of the following year, southern Democrats launched a seven-week
filibuster – the longest in five decades – to kill the legislation. Invoking white
supremacy and ‘local control’, southern senators warned that federal inter-
vention in lynchings would provide, as Mississippi’s Theodore Bilbo put it,
‘the entering wedge to the bill of civil rights and social equality by the
Negroes’. Fearful of alienating his southern base, President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt avoided any public discussion of lynching. Despite congressional
inaction and executive ambivalence, some activists pointed to a dramatic
decline in documented lynchings as proof that protests and publicity had
forced southern officials to rein in racial violence. The apparent demise of
lynching posed a strategic dilemma for activists who struggled to maintain
political momentum and convince the public that racial violence posed an
ongoing threat. As the NAACP warned in its 1940 pamphlet Lynching Goes
Underground, white vigilantes continued to kill under cover of darkness, in
smaller numbers, and frequently in concert with law enforcement officials.
Despite her strategic differences with the NAACP, ASWPL founder Jessie
Daniel Ames echoed the warning that the ‘changing character of lynching’
posed a significant threat to a nation engaged in a global struggle against

17 Jacqueline Dowd Hall, Revolt against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women’s
Campaign against Lynching, rev. edn (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993);
Christopher Waldrep, African Americans Confront Lynching: Strategies of Resistance from
the Civil War to the Civil Rights Era (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008);
Rebecca Hill, Men, Mobs, and Law: Anti-Lynching and Labor Defense in U.S. Radical
History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), pp. 232–3.

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 JASON MORGAN WARD

fascism. ‘The aftermath of the First World War,’ she warned, ‘gives evidence
of what the backwash from war can bring.’18

Racial Violence, American Diplomacy and the Rise

of the Civil Rights Movement
The United States’ entry into World War II bore out Ames’s fears of another
racial backlash, but the diplomatic implications of that violence proved more
compelling than during the First World War. Even before Pearl Harbor, civil
rights activists warned federal officials that the Axis powers would exploit
American racial violence to embarrass the United States and undermine the
Allied war effort. At a 1940 hearing on a new anti-lynching bill, the NAACP’s
Walter White quoted a Nazi newspaper that characterised American treat-
ment of blacks as less humane than German treatment of Jews. The diplo-
matic stakes of racial violence probably weighed on the Roosevelt
administration’s halting prewar actions, from prewar establishment of
a civil rights unit within the Justice Department to a Federal Bureau of
Investigation (FBI) inquiry into the 1940 killing of a Tennessee NAACP
official. When a Missouri mob lynched and burned black murder suspect
Cleo Wright in early 1942, just weeks after the Japanese attack on Pearl
Harbor, the head of the Justice Department’s new Civil Rights Section
echoed the NAACP’s earlier warning that wartime lynchings were ‘a matter
of international importance and a subject of Axis propaganda’. While
Wright’s brutal murder, which harkened back to the spectacle lynchings of
earlier decades, and subsequent wartime lynchings prompted federal inves-
tigations, none resulted in a successful prosecution.19
A little more than two decades removed from Red Summer, wartime
mobilisation and migration demonstrated how rapid economic and demo-
graphic change could aggravate racial conflict. Across the South, anxious
whites spread fantastic rumours of black rebellion, many of which revolved
around emboldened black soldiers accosting white women and arguing with
white men. As in World War I, uniformed black servicemen proved especially
susceptible to racial attacks. In Mobile, Alabama, a shipbuilding centre bursting

18 Ward, Defending White Democracy, p. 29; NAACP, Lynching Goes Underground

(New York: NAACP, 1940); Jessie Daniel Ames, The Changing Character of Lynching:
Review of Lynching, 1931–1941 (Atlanta: Commission on Interracial Cooperation, 1942),
p. ix.
19 Victor W. Rotnem, ‘The Federal Civil Right “Not to be Lynched”’, Washington
University Law Quarterly 28 (February 1943), 57–73.

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with wartime migrants, the 1942 killing of a black soldier by a white bus driver
nearly sparked an NAACP-sponsored bus boycott. The following year, a wave
of racial clashes swept through the nation’s industrial hubs. A three-day riot in
Detroit left thirty-four dead and more than 400 injured. The same month,
white locals and off-duty servicemen in Los Angeles attacked dozens of
Mexican, Filipino and black youths clad in baggy zoot suits. Like the anti-
black violence that marked most wartime riots, the Zoot Suit Riots dramatised
the potent mix of racial resentments and mass migration that fuelled broader
attacks on racial and ethnic minorities. The forced relocation and internment
of Japanese Americans underscored how state-sanctioned discrimination legit-
imised a broader campaign of harassment and exploitation that predated and
outlasted the war emergency.
Ultimately, the postwar stand-off with the Soviet Union motivated federal
officials more than the struggle against the Axis. A postwar wave of racist
brutality, which included a police attack that blinded black veteran Isaac
Woodard in South Carolina, an execution-style quadruple lynching in
Georgia, and a string of attacks on black voters during primaries in Georgia
and Mississippi, prompted the formation of the National Emergency
Committee against Mob Violence. Compelled by reports of gruesome racial
attacks, Harry S. Truman appointed a presidential committee in late 1946 to
study domestic racial problems and offer recommendations. The following
summer, he became the first US president to address the annual conference of
the NAACP. The report of the President’s Committee on Civil Rights,
released in late 1947, emphasised postwar racial violence and warned that
the Soviet Union would ‘shamelessly’ exploit domestic racial strife in the
global struggle for hearts and minds. Based on the recommendations of his
civil rights committee, Truman unveiled a ten-point civil rights programme
that included federal penalties for lynching and compensation for Japanese
Americans interned during World War II. While Truman’s proposals
extended beyond the most brutal excesses of white supremacy, anti-
lynching historian Robert Zangrando rightly concludes that ‘the recurrent
phenomenon of racist violence’ prompted his unprecedented actions.20
The diplomatic exigencies of the Cold War, as well as demographic and
political trends decades in the making, help to explain why the 1955 lynching

20 Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 18–46; President’s Committee on
Civil Rights, To Secure These Rights: The Report of the President’s Committee on Civil Rights
(Washington, DC: GPO, 1947), p. 147; Zangrando, NAACP Crusade against Lynching, pp.
184–5.

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 JASON MORGAN WARD

of Emmett Till became the most famous incident of racial violence in modern
American history. The brutal Mississippi killing, allegedly in retaliation for
Till’s advances on a young white cashier, reflected the long shadow of the
black rapist myth and the white southerner’s fierce resistance to racial
change. Till’s abduction and brutalisation by the white relatives of his accuser
also confirmed anti-lynching advocates’ predictions that racial killings would
persist in more secretive forms. Occurring just months after local whites
organised the segregationist Citizens’ Councils in response to the Supreme
Court’s Brown decision, the seemingly apolitical murder foreshadowed assas-
sinations of local black activists across Mississippi. Till’s open-casket funeral
in his home city of Chicago, a political, cultural and media hub of black
America, dramatised a longstanding tradition of bearing witness and harnes-
sing publicity to call the nation to action. Mamie Till-Bradley ‘wanted the
world to see’ her son’s bloated and brutalised corpse, and no other image did
as much to underscore the moral and geopolitical stakes of the American civil
rights struggle.21

Racial Violence and Government Response

in the Civil Rights Era and Beyond
Racial violence alone did not launch the civil rights movement, but the
fundamental brutality of white supremacy shaped its philosophy and tactics.
Non-violent direct action, from the student-led Freedom Rides and sit-ins to
mass demonstrations led by Martin Luther King, Jr., anticipated and amplified
white supremacist violence for an international audience. By exposing the
brutal and frequently state-sanctioned resistance to racial equality, movement
strategists aimed to compel federal intervention and force congressional
action. Violence informed the movement’s targets as well as tactics, as demon-
strated by a series of confrontations in Alabama and Mississippi that precipi-
tated the passage of landmark civil rights legislation. Movement leaders chose
Birmingham for a 1963 protest campaign due in large part to the city’s violent
reputation. Dubbed ‘Bombingham’ due to some fifty dynamite attacks on
black homes and churches since the end of World War II, the city also
underscored the interplay between racial terrorism and the official violence
sanctioned by its police chief, Eugene ‘Bull’ Connor. The year after Connor
turned firehoses and dogs on black youths, hundreds of northern volunteers
poured into Mississippi knowing that they might not survive the ’64 Freedom

21 Timothy B. Tyson, The Blood of Emmett Till (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017).

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Project. On a lonely dirt road in Neshoba County, three civil rights volunteers –
two northern whites and one black Mississippian – died at the hands of
Klansmen and local police. By summer’s end Congress had passed the Civil
Rights Act and, after the Alabama Highway Patrol’s assault on marchers at
Selma’s Edmund Pettis Bridge in early 1965, the Voting Rights Act.22
Anti-civil rights violence exposed the tensions and contradictions inher-
ent in a white supremacist movement steeped in generations of blood.
Robert Patterson, leader of the segregationist Citizens’ Council, claimed he
would ‘gladly lay down [his] life to prevent mongrelization’ yet distanced
his organisation from the Ku Klux Klan’s brutal reputation and murderous
tactics. The bombing campaigns that spread from Birmingham to cities and
towns across the South – particularly attacks on houses of worship –
compelled many segregationists to disavow racial terrorism. Even the
resurgent Klan’s various factions diverged in tactics and strategy, with the
United Klans of America (UKA) prioritising public rallies and membership
drives while the secretive Mississippi White Knights – the organisation
implicated in the 1964 Neshoba killings – earned notoriety for their excep-
tional brutality. Ultimately, white ambivalence towards racial terrorism
forced pragmatic political officials to soften their defiant stand against
civil rights, yet the distinction between violent and non-violent resistance
remained blurry as hostility towards racial change continued to shape
policy and political culture.23
Ironically, political and academic interest in the nation’s violent past
surged not in response to white terrorism but rather in the wake of urban
riots, campus unrest and the civil rights movement’s perceived turn towards
violence in the late 1960s. Cries of ‘Black Power’ and images of armed Black
Panthers fuelled popular fears of a rebellion aimed at whites. The organisa-
tion of the Brown Berets by Chicano youth in southern California, subse-
quent armed demonstrations by the American Indian Movement, and the
embrace of ‘power’ politics by a diverse array of marginalised groups
prompted concerns that historical perpetrators had become contemporary

22 Glenn T. Eskew, But for Birmingham: The Local and National Movements in the Civil Rights
Struggle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), pp. 53–83; William
Bradford Huie, Three Lives for Mississippi (New York: WCC Books, 1965); Mississippi
Black Paper (New York: Random House, 1965).
23 John Bartlow Martin, The Deep South Says ‘Never’ (New York: Ballantine Books, 1957),
pp. 1–2; Joseph Crespino, In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative
Counterrevolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), pp. 108–72;
David Cunningham, ‘Shades of Civil Rights Violence: Reconsidering the Ku Klux
Klan in Mississippi’, in Ted Ownby (ed.),The Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi
(Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013), pp. 180–203.

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targets of ‘racial violence’. Those fears found official sanction in a campaign

of police repression, from local raids on militant groups to the Federal Bureau
of Investigation’s covert Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), but
also in federally commissioned research. The National Commission on the
Causes and Prevention of Violence, established by Lyndon Baines Johnson
after the Kerner Commission’s 1968 report on urban riots, included a task
force to study the history of American violence. Directed by historians Hugh
Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr, the academic committee’s far-ranging
report showcased eminent scholars grappling with the nature and definition
of racial violence. Recent urban ‘uprisings’ compelled the prominent sociol-
ogist Morris Janowitz to assess whether black rioting portended ‘collective
racial violence’ against whites. However, civil rights scholars August Meier
and Elliott Rudwick traced a deep history of black self-defence and acknowl-
edged scattered calls for retaliatory violence and armed revolution among
black revolutionary groups. Nevertheless, they concluded, ‘The advocacy
and use of violence as a deliberate program for solving the problems of racial
discrimination remains thus far, at least, in the realm of fantasy; and there it is
likely to remain.’ Despite fears of an anti-white uprising, the scholarly under-
standing of racial violence as a historical force driven by the political,
economic and social imperatives of white supremacy survived the popular
and political backlash to the ‘power’ movements.24
Racial violence in recent decades has echoed the white supremacist
tactics of previous generations and adapted to undermine changes wrought
by the civil rights revolution. Great Society immigration reforms that
abolished quotas and bans based on national origin, as well as an aggressive
Cold War foreign policy that created a wave of refugees from South-East
Asia, broadened white supremacists’ range of targets. In the 1970s,
Klansmen firebombed school buses in Michigan to undermine school
desegregation, conducted armed border patrols in the south-west, and set
fire to the shrimp boats operated by resettled Vietnamese refugees along
the Gulf Coast. In November 1979, emboldened Klansmen and neo-Nazis
gunned down white and black protesters in Greensboro, North Carolina, in
broad daylight and with news cameras rolling. This new wave of racial
violence echoed a tradition of white supremacist violence that melded
apocalyptic racism and revolutionary tactics. The 1981 lynching of

24 Morris Janowitz, ‘Patterns of Collective Racial Violence’, pp. 317–39, and August Meier
and Elliot Rudwick, ‘Black Violence in the 20th Century: A Study in Rhetoric and
Retaliation’, pp. 307–316, both in Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr (eds.),
Violence in America: Historical and Comparative Perspectives (Washington, DC: GPO, 1969).

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Michael Donald by Alabama Klansmen, the 1988 murder of Ethiopian

student Mulugeta Seraw by Portland skinheads, the 1998 dragging death
of black Texan James Byrd, and the 2015 Charleston church shootings all
reflected the racial terrorists’ belief that their vanguard tactics could spark
a race war that might again redeem the nation.25
Rather than the last gasps of white supremacy, these recent attacks under-
score the urgency of examining the ways racial violence has shaped American
history and infused ongoing conflicts over pluralism and democracy in the
twenty-first century. ‘Unlike almost any other object of historical study’, Karl
Jacoby contends, ‘violence simultaneously destroys and creates history.’ As
the most pervasive form of political violence in the American past, racial
violence leaves behind a bloody trail for historians to follow. Yet the urge to
forget, as evidenced in ongoing debates over who and what Americans see fit
to carve in granite and cast in bronze, remains strong. Historians continue to
expand our understanding of racial violence and the attendant ills – from
sexual and gendered violence to poverty and mass incarceration – that white
supremacy continues to reinforce. And the inherent violence of our racial
present, from politics to policing, underscores the urgent need to confront
the lessons of the past.26

Bibliographical Essay
As scholarly interest in violence surged in the wake of the civil rights era, histories of racial
violence figured prominently. Richard Hofstadter, who edited American Violence:
A Documentary History (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), devoted the longest of the
book’s eight parts – as well as individual entries in most of the other sections – to racial
violence. In Strain of Violence: Historical Studies of American Violence and Vigilantism (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1975), Richard Maxwell Brown echoed and extended Hofstadter’s
claim that American violence in general, and modern racial violence in particular, had
been ‘devoted to preserving the status quo’.
Historians of the Reconstruction era took this premise to heart. See Allen W. Trelease,
White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction (New York: Harper &
Row, 1971) and George C. Rable, But There Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of
Reconstruction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984) for examples of this renewed
emphasis on the ideology and tactics of racial violence. For more recent examples, see
Nicholas Lemann, Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War (New York: Farrar, Straus, &
Giroux, 2006) and Beyond Redemption: Race, Violence, and the American South after the Civil

25 Kathleen Below, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary
America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).
26 Karl Jacoby, Shadows at Dawn: An Apache Massacre and the Violence of History (New York:
Penguin, 2008).

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War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). For the role of violence in the rise of Jim
Crow, see Timothy Tyson and David Cecelski (eds.), Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington
Race Riot of 1898 and its Legacy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998) and
Steve Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1999).
Histories of racial violence outside of the South have also thrived in recent decades,
with significant attention to Native American, Chinese and Mexican populations. For
a narrative and analytical bridge between Reconstruction and frontier violence, see
Daniel Sharfstein, Thunder in the Mountains: Chief Joseph, Oliver Otis Howard, and the Nez
Perce War (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017). For an account of violence against Native
Americans in the post-Civil War era, see Karl Jacoby, Shadows at Dawn: An Apache Massacre
and the Violence of History (New York: Penguin, 2008). On anti-Chinese violence, see
Jean Pfaelzer, Driven Out: The Forgotten War against Chinese Americans (New York:
Random House, 2007) and Beth Lew-Williams, The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion,
and the Making of the Alien in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).
For studies of racialised violence and American foreign policy, see Paul A. Kramer, The
Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States and the Philippines (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Mary Renda, Taking Haiti: Military Occupation
and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001);
John Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon,
1986).
Studies of racial violence in the Jim Crow era are extensive. For surveys of lynching
since Reconstruction, see Stewart E. Tolnay and E. M. Beck, A Festival of Violence: An
Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995);
Philip Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America
(New York: Random House, 2002) and Michael James Pfeifer, Rough Justice: Lynching
and American Society, 1874–1947 (Urbana: University of Illinois, 2004). Pfeiffer has also
edited collections on lynching outside of the South and mob violence around the world.
See also state-level and comparative studies by W. Fitzhugh Brundage, William
Carrigan, Bruce Baker, Terrence Finnegan and Tameka Bradley Hobbs. For work on
racial violence in the south-western borderlands, see Benjamin Heber Johnson,
Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans
into Americans (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003) and Monica Martinez Munoz,
The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2018).
For histories of resistance to racial violence, see Jacquelyn Dowd, Revolt against Chivalry:
Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women’s Campaign against Lynching (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1979); Robert L. Zangrando, The NAACP Crusade against Lynching,
1909–1950 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980); Christopher Waldrep, African
Americans Confront Lynching: Strategies of Resistance from the Civil War to the Civil Rights
Era (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008); Kidada E. Williams, They Left Great Marks on
Me: African American Testimonies of Racial Violence from Emancipation to World War I
(New York: New York University Press, 2012). Like Williams, a surge of recent
scholarship probes the intersection of racial and sexual violence from Reconstruction to
the civil rights era. See Hannah Rosen, Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual
Violence, and the Meaning of Race in the Postemancipation South (Chapel Hill: University of

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North Carolina Press, 2009); Crystal Feimster, Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of
Rape and Lynching (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Danielle McGuire,
At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance – A New History of the Civil
Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (New York: Vintage, 2010).
Scholarship on racial violence and resistance from the civil rights era to the present is
extensive, though violence is less prominent as a central theme. For works that focus
extensively on racial violence, see David Chalmers, Backfire: How the Ku Klux Klan Helped
the Civil Rights Movement (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003); Lance Hill, The
Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 2004); Akinyele Omowale Umoja, We Will Shoot Back: Armed
Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement (New York: New York University Press,
2013). For work on racial extremism in recent decades see Michael Barkun, Religion and the
Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement. (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1996) and Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement
and Paramilitary America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).

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 5
Religion and Violence in Modern
South Asia
mark juergensmeyer

Though the rise of religious violence has been a global phenomenon in the
modern period, perhaps nowhere is the arena of competition among contest-
ing religious and secular politics greater than in South Asia. Recent decades
have seen violence related to the rise of Hindu nationalism movements in
India, the Muslim Taliban in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, the militant
Khalistan movement of Sikhs in India’s Punjab, and Buddhism nationalism in
Sri Lanka and elsewhere in the region. These movements have competed in
the context of a secular political order that was the legacy of British colonial
rule, once embraced by founding leaders such as Pakistan’s Muhammad Ali
Jinnah and India’s Jawaharlal Nehru, who advocated the nationalism of
‘secularism and socialism’. Though each of these political ideologies has its
own history and internal dynamics, each is also related to the others. They
have arisen as mutual responses to one another and to the global influences
of colonialism, transnational religion and globalisation that have buffeted
South Asian politics in recent years.

The Sikh Attempt to Create a Religious State

In the 1980s, a sizable section of the young Sikh population in the rural
areas of the north-west Indian state of Punjab became embroiled in
a violent confrontation with the Indian government led by the Sikh
activist Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale.1 Bhindranwale was a rural
preacher who spoke with the conviction of someone who knew the
details of his religious heritage. He said that the great battles of Sikh
history were being repeated in the present day. Like then, the present
confrontation was ‘a struggle . . . for our faith, for the Sikh nation, for

1 Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), pp. 85–102.

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the oppressed’.2 Rather than politicising religion, Bhindranwale was religio-

nising politics. The confrontation between his group of angry Sikhs and the
Indian government was not just a clash of political views, it was war. And
more than war, it was cosmic confrontation, the battle of good versus evil,
right against wrong, religion against anti-religion. Bhindranwale would
recount the great battles of Sikh tradition, the heroic sacrifice and martyr-
dom of early Sikh leaders when confronted with the military force of the
Moghul Empire, and by implication suggest that those legendary times
were alive once more. He and his followers saw their own struggle in
grand historical terms; it was a transhistorical conflict of order versus chaos.
They saw themselves engaged in not just a political conflict but also
a defence of the whole of Sikh culture and civilisation. For these reasons
they were willing to kill to defend their position. And they were willing to
die for it.
The Sikh uprising in the 1980s, though violent and dramatic, was not the
only time that Sikhs had been politically active in the Punjab. In the 1960s, for
instance, another Sikh leader, Sant Fateh Singh, threatened to immolate
himself in a vat of boiling oil on the roof of the Akal Takht, one of the
main buildings in the precincts of the Harmandir Sahib, also known as the
Golden Temple, which is the Sikhs’ central shrine, located in the city of
Amritsar. Sant Fateh Singh never carried out his threat, but the demands of
the moment were met. The Indian state of Punjab was carved into three
states, so that in the smaller state of Punjab that remained, Sikhs were in the
majority. It was a concession by the central government that was intended to
solve the Sikh problem once and for all.
This turned out not to be the case. The Sikh militancy in the 1980s was in
some ways a repeat of the early movement, but it was also significantly
different, in at least two ways. It was more strident, more violent; and its
vehemence was aimed against the secular state. The aim was not just to
secure more political power for the Sikh community but to reject the secular
authority of the Indian government. Hinduism as a religion was not the
target, even though some Hindu leaders were seen as cooperative with the
state’s position, and therefore worthy of attack in the eyes of the Sikh
militants. The explicit goal was to reject the legitimacy of the secular state.
Though there was controversy within the movement as to what should
replace it, many Sikhs who supported the movement thought that its success

2 Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, ‘Two Lectures on July 19, 1983 and September 20, 1983’,
trans. Ranbir Singh Sandhu (distributed by the Sikh Religious and Educational Trust,
Dublin, Ohio, 1983), p. 2.

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 MARK JUERGENSMEYER

would lead to the creation of a new religious nation. The proposed new Sikh
state was dubbed Khalistan – the land of the Sikh community, the Khalsa.
Bhindranwale, the most prominent spokesperson for the movement, said
that he was neither for nor against the idea of Khalistan. But clearly he and his
followers wanted a new political order, one that would be based on religion
rather than secularism.
It may seem preposterous that a religious community could claim the
status of nationhood. Where could the Sikhs have got such a remarkable
idea? The European Enlightenment model of the nation state presumes
a stance of secular detachment from religion. And yet, for the Sikhs, examples
of religious nationalism were close at hand. They needed to look no further
away than the country that formed the western borders of the Punjab:
Pakistan.

The Invention of Religious Politics in South Asia

Perhaps the most momentous political event in South Asia in the twen-
tieth century was not independence and the withdrawal of British rule,
but the political partition of the subcontinent into two rival states: India
and Pakistan. Hundreds of thousands were killed in the violent upheavals
created during the partition, and more were killed in the battles between
the two wings of Pakistan – East and West – in the emergence of
a separate East Pakistan, renamed Bangladesh. Perhaps inadvertently,
the retreating colonial rule of Great Britain consciously participated in
the creation of new national entities based on religion. This event has
done more to spur the notion of religious politics and the ugly reality of
religious violence that have accompanied separatist movements of
Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus and Buddhists in the subcontinent than anything
else in recent history.
The year following independence and the partition of the subcontinent
was a time of massacre after massacre. Trains arriving in India from Pakistan
carried loads of corpses of passengers slaughtered on the journey that they
hoped would bring them to safety. Similar numbers of Hindus, Muslims and
Sikhs were killed as they attempted to disengage from their homelands and
join the throngs of refugees that gathered in Karachi and Dacca on the
Pakistan sides and in Delhi and Calcutta on the Indian side. Though the
numbers are disputed, the figures often quoted about this tragic shift of
population is 14 million people uprooted, 10 million sent into refugee
camps, and over a million killed.

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One of the interesting features of this tragic episode is that it is not clear
that partition had to happen. There had not previously been a strong
groundswell of support for a Muslim-dominated state. There were some
lone voices calling for an independent Muslim state earlier in the twentieth
century, notably that of the poet Muhammad Iqbal, which he expressed in
the 1930 meeting of the Muslim League; but most leaders in the League
desired a semi-autonomous region in a united India, and according to one
historian, Ayesha Jalal, Jinnah raised the issue of an independent Pakistan
largely as a threat, a kind of bargaining chip to gain what he really wanted,
a semi-autonomous state.3 Jinnah’s rival Muslim organisation, the Unionist
Party in the Punjab, was adamantly opposed to secession. Interestingly, the
most articulate voices from the religious right were also opposed to the idea
of a separate Muslim state. Maulana Abul Ala Maududi, the best-known
Muslim political thinker in the region, adopted a position much like that of
Said Qutb in Egypt. Maududi regarded the Western concept of the nation-
state as non-Islamic, and feared that a secular state, even one comprised
largely of Muslims, would be antithetical to the religious community of
devout Muslims. Eventually Maududi joined Pakistan after it was created,
and helped to form a new Muslim political party, the Jamaat-e Islami, which
continues today to be a voice for Muslim interests in Pakistan.
So if there was no huge demand for a separate Muslim Pakistan in the
subcontinent, where did the idea come from? One might argue that it came
from the Muslim political tradition over the centuries, but that is not quite
true either. Although Muslim history is full of strong political leaders, caliphs
who led armies and empires, there is not really a precedent for the modern
idea of a religious nation state. In fact, the idea of the nation state – the notion
that there is such a thing as a natural national community in a geographical
region that supports a state apparatus which is responsible to it – is a foreign
idea. Specifically it is a European idea, and the introduction of the concept of
national community – and the role of religious affiliation within it – was
exported by the British to South Asia and, for that matter, to much of the rest
of the world.
In an interesting book, Enlightenment in the Colony, a UCLA scholar of
comparative literature, Aamir Mufti, argues that the British helped to invent
the idea of religious minorities in India.4 Mufti’s point is that, although Muslims

3 Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League, and the Demand for Pakistan
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
4 Aamir Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial
Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).

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 MARK JUERGENSMEYER

in South Asia were in the numerical minority over the centuries, ever since
Moghul rule brought Islam to the subcontinent, they did not think of them-
selves as minorities. Nor were they treated as minorities within a society that
was unselfconsciously pluralistic. Traditional Indian society has encompassed
a variety of religious communities, and the tradition that we know as
‘Hinduism’ has been a congeries of different sects and lineages of teachers
and teachings that vary widely from one another. Muslims, Sikhs, Christians,
Jains and other religious communities fit easily into this pattern of religious
diversity.
According to Mufti, the process of secular nation-building in Europe has
gone hand in hand with the conceptualisation of a national culture that
marginalises some religious and ethnic communities in the process of creat-
ing the idea of a unified national culture. In doing so, the byproduct of this
nationalist paradigm is the invention of the notion of ‘minorities’ as
a problem. The paradigmatic case in Europe is the ‘Jewish question’, in
which Jews do not fit into the idea of cultural consensus in emerging modern
national communities. Adolf Hitler’s infamous ‘final solution’ to the Jewish
problem was an attempt at cultural and physical extermination.
Alternatively, the British solution at the end of World War II was to help
create the modern state of Israel as one that would provide a national
homeland for the Jews.
Mufti argues that this idea is transported to South Asia where both British
and Indian nationalist leaders identify the national culture with Hinduism, as
they imagine that, as in European nations, the national culture of India
should be part of one homogeneous religious entity. This way of thinking
makes Muslims a minority, and like the Jews in Europe they create a problem
for the building of a modern national community. In Mufti’s examination of
the literature in Britain as well as the literature produced by Indian writers in
English, Hindi and Urdu languages, he finds that this notion of Muslim
minority identity as a problem creeps into writing about nation-building in
the subcontinent in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. No surprise,
then, that Jinnah – the urbane, London-trained leader of the Muslims – as
well as the cosmopolitan Nehru would think of modern nation-building as
one of homogeneous cultural unity in a way that would naturally exclude
minorities such as Muslims. Nehru’s 1946 book, Discovery of India, chronicles
his own self-discovery of the unity of India’s past, implicitly a cultural as well
as a political unity. No wonder that Jinnah thought that his Muslims would be
uncomfortable in such a nation, and no wonder, also, that the British
Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, would instinctively understand the logic of

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having a separate nation for a nation-sized minority. The formation of

Pakistan became for South Asian Muslims what the creation of Israel had
been for European Jews.
The idea of the modern nation state is a part of the world’s inheritance
from the European Enlightenment, in which religion plays a somewhat
paradoxical role. While Enlightenment thinkers such as John Locke regarded
political institutions as secular – free from the taint of religious influence –
they thought of the culture of a national community as unified, a unity that
often involved common religious beliefs. According to the Berkeley sociol-
ogist John Lie, in an arresting book, Modern Peoplehood, the concept of
a national community, or ‘peoplehood’, is one of the major constructs of
the Enlightenment’s understanding of modernity.5 The modern nation is
inconceivable, Lie argues, without it. The very notion of a national commu-
nity needs the glue of culture, including religion, to hold it together.
Both Pakistan’s Jinnah and India’s Nehru bought into the European idea
that national communities were formed with a homogeneous culture. They
also accepted the Enlightenment notion that national governments should be
secular – free from the influence of sectarian bias or religious authority. To
Jinnah, this meant that South Asian Muslims constituted a distinct nation
within the subcontinent, and this warranted their being granted a semi-
autonomous region, or, failing that, their own separate nation state of
Pakistan. But the dapper Jinnah, ever dressed in a European-style business
suit, was insistent that the government of the new Pakistan would be similar
to European states – that is, secular.
Nehru also accepted the European notion of a culturally homogeneous
nation with a secular government, but he interpreted both of those concepts
somewhat differently than from Jinnah. Nehru’s description of India’s cul-
tural unity in Discovery of India seemed to many Muslims to be very Hindu,
but Nehru thought of it as Indic – not narrowly Hindu but a part of a united
cultural tradition. He did not think that it privileged Hindu or any other set of
religious beliefs. In his mind, Indian culture embraced Islam as well as
Hinduism. His notion of secularism, therefore, was a matter not just of
keeping religious influences out of government but also of treating all
religious communities equally and in a fair-minded way. It was precisely
for this reason that Nehru thought that the Muslims should be a part of India
and not separate from it.

5 John Lie, Modern Peoplehood (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).

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In fact, neither Jinnah nor Nehru’s European notions of national culture

and secular government had much connection to traditional ways of thinking
about religion and politics in India’s history. The concept of a national
community is non-existent in India’s early history, as it was in most societies,
including European ones, before the eighteenth century. There were caliphs
and kings, princes and emperors, who ruled on the basis of power, not the
consent of the governed. Even so, however, they were expected to uphold
certain moral standards in their conduct of governing. In traditional India,
there is the notion that kings are expected to come from military castes that
have their own ethical codes of conduct. Moreover, the king of a realm is
expected to rule on behalf of dharma, the moral order that undergirds all of
society. The image that is presented in ancient scriptures is that of a king
upholding the ‘white umbrella’ of moral righteousness over the people. But
these rulers are not in any narrow sense religious.
The same can be said of the Mughal rulers, a lineage of Muslim emperors
who reigned over much of the subcontinent from roughly the sixteenth to
the middle of the nineteenth centuries. Though a quarter of the Indian
population converted to Islam during this period, and Muslim holy sites
were often privileged over Hindu ones, the imperial rule was hardly
a theocratic state. One of the greatest of the Mughal rulers, Akbar, in the
latter half of the sixteenth century created his own court religion that was
dismissive of orthodox Islam and meant to be compatible with all faiths.
Famously, Akbar is said to have welcomed theologians and thinkers from
all religious persuasions to enter into philosophic discussions in his
chambers.
British colonial rule was secular, of course, but the colonial government
maintained an ambivalent relationship to the hordes of Christian mission-
aries who had the run of India during its rule. Many of the British officers
regarded them as a nuisance. But others regarded them as an extension of the
civilising influence of the British rule. Christian hospitals and educational
institutions were especially welcomed as efforts to serve Indian society and
bring the benefits of Western civilisation to South Asian shores. The inheri-
tors of British rule in South Asia – Nehru and Jinnah – carried on this tradition
of secular government with a benign, but wary, attitude towards religious
authorities and organisations. Each regarded religious extremists and true
believers as potentially dangerous. But each also regarded religion, as an
ingredient of the cultural homogeneity that made India and Pakistan distinc-
tive national communities, to be absolutely essential. And that laid the
groundwork for the religious violence of recent centuries.

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The trajectory of religious politics in India and Pakistan after independence

in 1947 is different from what either Nehru or Jinnah expected. In both cases,
religion burst out of the confines in which they thought it had been con-
tained, as elements of a homogeneous national culture, into direct and often
violent participation in politics.

Muslim Violence in Pakistan

In Pakistan, successive political leaders increasingly found religion to be
a useful rallying point for national unity. It also provided a built-in network
of support from Muslim religious authorities and activists. Perhaps no poli-
tical leader in Pakistan did more to pander to conservative Muslim support
than Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, who led the country from 1977 to 1988 after
instituting a coup against his mentor, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Zia established
sharia law, outlawed marginal and heretical religious movements, and sub-
sidised the Mujahadeen movement against a Soviet-backed government in
neighbouring Afghanistan. Though the numbers of votes gained by Muslim
religious parties in Pakistan have consistently been very small, since the time
of Zia the parties’ influence in the government has been disproportionately
large.
One legacy of the Zia regime has been the covert Pakistani support for
extremist Muslim political movements in Afghanistan. First the Mujahadeen
and then the Taliban movements have been secretly supported by elements
of the Pakistan military and intelligence services. The ideas of the Taliban are
related to the Deoband Muslim reform movement in South Asia that
attempted to purify and standardise the teachings and practices of Islam.
Groups such as the Taliban interpreted this reform movement in a rigid and
uncompromising way. The movement was not only an agent of religious
standardisation, however; it became the political wing of the Pashtun tribal
community, large numbers of which were within Pakistan’s own western
borders. Mollifying the Taliban, then, was a way of currying favour with the
critical Pashtun community.
In the twenty-first century, religious violence has persisted in Pakistan and
Bangladesh, and in some regions of Pakistan the extremism of Muslim
political groups led to violent confrontations and acts of terrorism.
Following the US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in 2001, many of
the leading forces of the Afghan Taliban came across the border to Pashtun-
dominated areas of Pakistan along the Afghan border, especially in
Baluchistan. A new Pakistan-based Taliban emerged, responsible for

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a series of attacks on Pakistan political leaders, including presidential candi-

date Benazir Bhutto in 2007. The Taliban rebounded from its defeat in the
invasion of the United States coalition forces in 2001, and asserted a major
role in Afghan politics through violent encounters and terrorist attacks that
confounded the attempts of the United States to withdraw its troops from
Afghanistan almost two decades later. The Taliban and its affiliates, such as
the extremist Haqqani network, controlled much of the Pashtun and other
tribal regions of western Pakistan as well as most of eastern Afghanistan.

Hindu Nationalist Violence in India

At the same time that Pakistan was developing a more strident Muslim
political posture, religious nationalism was also surfacing within India, as
we have seen with the rise of a Sikh separatist movement in the 1980s. But
violence has accompanied the religious nationalism of Hindus as well.
In some ways, the emergence of the Bharitiya Janata Party (BJP) was the
re-emergence of a religious strand of Indian nationalism that extended back
to the early part of the twentieth century. One of the early voices for Indian
independence came from Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, who founded the
Hindu Mahasabha, and advocated a concept of Hindu culture which he
called Hindutva as being the basis of Indian national identity. He once entered
into a debate with Mohandas Gandhi over the efficacy of using violence in the
struggle for India’s freedom.6 Despite Savarkar’s efforts, Hindu nationalism
was not a major element in India’s nationalist movement. After indepen-
dence, several political parties took up the banner of support for Hindu
causes, notably the Jan Sangh, but it was not until the 1990s that a new
movement of religious consciousness led to spectacular political successes for
the BJP.
The BJP was officially launched in 1980 out of the remnants of previous
Hindu-oriented political parties.7 It did not gain strength, however, until the
1990s with the events that led up to the violent attack on a Muslim mosque
said to be located on the site of the birthplace of the Hindu god Ram in the
town of Ayodhya. Religious activists associated with the sectarian Hindu
organisations, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak
Sangh, championed the destruction of the mosque in order to liberate the
grounds from Muslim associations. Though archaeologists questioned the

6 Mark Juergensmeyer, ‘Gandhi vs. Terrorism’, Daedalus 136.1 (2007), 30–9.

7 Bruce Graham, Hindu Nationalism and Indian Politics: The Origins and Development of the
Bharatiya Jana Sangh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

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authenticity of the assertion, and many questioned whether a spiritual entity

such as a god actually had a birthplace, the site became a matter of religious
contention, fuelled by political rhetoric. It was the secular Congress Party,
after all, that allowed the mosque to continue to exist on that spot. Though
the Indian government said that it was protecting the site in the name of
secularism – which in India meant the equal protection of all religious
communities – the BJP political response was that the Congress’s position
was ‘pseudo-secularism’ that in fact masked the privileging of minority
communities such as Muslims over the interests of Hindus. (Even after the
creation of Pakistan, the numbers of Muslims remaining in India were
15 per cent of the population, enough to constitute a significant electoral
base of votes, and a reason for politicians to curry the Muslims’ favour.)
In 1992 a mob of over 100,000 angry Hindus convened in Ayodhya,
attacked the mosque with improvised tools, and rendered it to dust. The
BJP capitalised on this sentiment of Hindu nationalism, and employing
Savarkar’s concept of Hindutva as the bedrock of Hindu nationalist culture,
launched a series of political campaigns. The elections brought the BJP into
positions of power in the legislatures of several states, and from 1998 to 2004 it
was the dominant party in a national coalition that ruled India, and the BJP
leader, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, became India’s prime minister. In 2014 and again
in 2019 national elections returned the BJP to power under the leadership of
Narendra Modi, and the BJP was able to rule without the need for a coalition
with other parties. If one considers the BJP to be a movement of religious
nationalism, it quite likely has had the largest following of any such move-
ment in world history, and was one of the most politically successful. Violent
protests, however, have followed in the wake of its electoral successes.
A violent past also clouds the leadership role of Prime Minister Narendra
Modi. When he was chief minister of the Indian state of Gujarat in 2002, Modi
is said to have encouraged Hindu mobs to kill over a thousand innocent
Muslims in neighborhoods at the edge of the city of Ahmedabad. Thousands
more were injured, and tens of thousands fled the city in fear. Though official
investigations and judicial proceedings cleared Modi of any direct involve-
ment in the massacre, accounts of Modi’s encouragement that were included
in reports by Human Rights Watch and other non-governmental organisa-
tions were sufficient for the governments of the United Kingdom and the
United States to ban Modi from entering their countries until he became
elected prime minister in 2014, when he was greeted as a head of state.
One of his political allies, however, did not get off so easily. Seven years
after the 2002 massacre, Maya Kodnani was convicted for what the judge in

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the specially designated court described as her role as being the ‘kingpin’ and
‘one of the principal conspirators’ of the assault; he then sentenced her to
twenty-eight years in prison.8 Like Modi, she had been raised in a household
dominated by the ideology of the Hindu nationalist movement, the Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS, the ‘national volunteer organisation’), and at the
time of the 2002 massacre she was a legislator in the Gujarat Legislative
Assembly and a member of Modi’s political party, the BJP. Though rumours
of her role in the massacre persisted after 2002, five years later Modi named
her to his cabinet as minister for women and child development, a role
appropriate to her profession as a gynaecologist. She stepped down from
the position at the time of her trial and conviction, which Modi’s government
did not contest.
Whether the 2002 Gujarat massacre was an act of terrorism, and whether
government officials – including possibly Modi himself – can be described as
terrorists, are contested issues. There is no doubt about the basic facts of the
case, however: perhaps as many as 2,500 innocent Muslim men, women and
children were hacked to death, stabbed, raped and burned alive by angry
Hindu mobs. It has often been referred to as a ‘riot’, but this implies an equal
amount of violence from both religious communities, and in this case the
Muslims were almost entirely the victims of angry Hindus. Some scholars
have called it a ‘pogrom’, implying that Hindu political leaders deliberately
planned and conducted the act.9 Still others have described it as ‘religious
violence’, or a ‘massacre’. Martha Nussbaum has called it ‘ethnic cleansing’,
adding that it was ‘premeditated’ and ‘carried out with the complicity of the
state government and officers of the law’.10 Whatever it was called, however,
it was one of the most horrifying events in India’s recent political history.

Buddhist Violence in Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Bhutan

and Tibet
Though one does not often think of Buddhism as a religious culture that
supports political activism and violence, strong movements of religious
politics have surfaced in several of South Asia’s Buddhist nations that have

8 Mukul Sinha, ‘Gujarat Riots: The Death Dance at Naroda Patiya’, in the website Truth
of Gujarat, 2 August 2013.
9 Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi, Pogrom in Gujarat: Hindu Nationalism and Anti-Muslim
Violence in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).
10 Martha Nussbaum, The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India’s Future
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), pp. 50–1.

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had a violent edge. In Sri Lanka, Buddhist monks supported movements

resisting the government’s concessions to Tamil Hindus and Christians in the
northern portion of the country, claiming that Sri Lanka should be
a Sinhalese Buddhist state. A Buddhist monk assassinated Prime Minister
Bandaranaike in 1959. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, a new
movement emerged with a programme of violent aggression against the
Muslim minority community in Sri Lanka. Bodu Bala Sena (BBS) movement,
led by a firebrand monk, Galagoda Aththe Gnanasara, raised the spectre of
global Muslim terrorism in order to promote fear against the small and
peaceful Muslim community in Sri Lanka. Following the 2019 Easter attacks
on Christian churches by a handful of Muslim extremists associated with the
Islamic State, Buddhist-fomented attacks increased on Muslim communities
throughout the country.
In another Theravada Buddhist country of South Asia, Buddhism has also
been an instrument of protest and revolt. In the country of Myanmar,
formerly known as Burma, Buddhist monks were at the forefront of protests
against the autocratic military rule. In 2012, a new movement developed that
was strikingly similar to the anti-Muslim rhetoric of Sri Lanka’s BBS move-
ment. In the Myanmar case, it was linked to long-standing tensions between
Burmese and the Muslim minority community of Rohingya in Rakhine state.
Some Burmese activists claimed that the increase in the Muslim population
would soon make them the majority, and riots ensued, with killings on both
sides. This tension spread throughout the country in a spiral of anti-Muslim
activism, fanned by the rhetoric of activist monks like Ashin Wirathu from
Mandalay. The government responded to the anti-Muslim sentiment with
a series of enactments that greatly restricted the rights of Rohingya within
Myanmar, essentially making them citizens without a country. In 2015, some
25,000 Rohingya set sail on crowded boats seeking asylum in surrounding
countries. It is estimated that hundreds died attempting to reach shore in
Thailand, Indonesia or Malaysia.
In the tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, the longing for a Buddhist state
was realised. An almost theocratic alliance among the monarchial, monastic
and elected branches of power in Bhutan led to an enormous amount of
government support for Buddhist institutions and sites, and established
a rigid code of behaviour that mandated that all citizens wear traditional
clothing and maintain their homes in traditional styles. Non-Buddhist
Nepalese Hindus were forcibly removed from Bhutan, an act of ethnic
cleansing that expelled 15 per cent of Bhutan’s population. Many of these
exiled ethnic Nepalese were driven into refugee camps in India and Nepal.

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In Tibet, monks protesting the loss of cultural autonomy and the steady
increase of Han Chinese presence in the region clashed with the Chinese
military. Often, despite the Dalai Lama’s admonition to adopt only non-
violent tactics, Tibetan Buddhist monks were aggressors in the conflict. From
the Chinese perspective, the Tibetans challenged the notion of China’s
sovereignty. From the Tibetan perspective, China was attempting to under-
cut the national cultural integrity of Tibet. The old issue of the role of religion
in defining a national community was once more the central issue.

South Asian Violence in Global Perspective

These movements of religious politics and their accompanying incidents of
violence have persisted in what has come to be called the global era of the
twenty-first century. It is a period in world history in which transnational forces
challenge national institutions and communities, and in which the very notion
of the nation state as the prime unit of world political order is being reassessed.
A critical aspect of contemporary globalisation is the de-nationalisation of
demographic communities. Today everyone can live everywhere, and they
often do. It is a phenomenon that affects the established societies of Europe as
well as emerging nations of South Asia.
Religion is often part of these far-flung globalised political discussions. And
it can also be a factor in the immigrant communities’ responses to their
situations. In some cases the sense of alienation that immigrants experience is
overcome by identifying with a struggle for a religious or ethnic nationalism
back home. Paradoxically, the support for such movements can be even
stronger in the diaspora than in the homeland. This was often the case with
the Sikh Khalistan movement, which was monetarily supported by Sikh
communities in the USA and the UK, where the symbols of the movement
were created. The first currency printed in the name of Khalistan, for
instance, was minted in England. The BJP also received widespread support
from Hindus living abroad. Sri Lankans living abroad supported both sides of
the struggle in Sri Lanka, especially in the UK, where Sinhalese Buddhists
supported one side and Sri Lankan Tamils supported the other.
The global diaspora of ethnic and religious communities has also created
something of a global backlash. Often the voices of support for such right-
wing protests are strident; occasionally their political strength is substantial;
and on some tragic occasions the rhetoric moves some desperate extremists
to violent actions, even terrorism. An attack in the United States in 2012 was
aimed at a gurdwara (a Sikh temple) in the suburbs of Milwaukee, where

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a member of a racist Christian subculture killed seven, including himself. The

killer, Wade Michael Page, thought he was preserving a pure American
culture in the face of multicultural globalism. Ironically it was Sikhs – who
in the 1980s were attacking the secular state of India to create their own
religiously pure homeland – who were the targets of this Christian terrorist in
America who saw them as a problem in his own notion of national purity.
Thus the South Asian experience with religious politics – interesting in its
own right – also is instructive about the rise of religious violence globally in
the decades at the end of the twentieth and the start of the twenty-first
centuries. Secularism as an ideology has not been seen as a neutral actor, it
seems, either in South Asia or in other parts of the world where religious
politics have often emerged as a response to what are perceived to be
attempts to remove traditional aspects of religious culture from the public
sphere. Hence the rise of religious politics in South Asia tells us much about
this particular moment of late modernity, where it may well be not so much
a passing fancy as a bellwether of new postmodern and postsecular identities
and new forms of imagined transnational publics in a shifting global order
that tragically is often violent.

Bibliographical Essay
For religion and violence in South Asia in general, a starting point might be the classic
study of riots in South Asia, Stanley Tambiah’s Leveling Crowds: Ethno-Nationalist Conflicts
and Collective Violence in South Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), which
compares Muslim riots in Pakistan, Hindu riots in India and Buddhist riots in Sri Lanka.
For the Hindu tradition, a good diversity of perspectives is found in the collection of essays
in Veena Das (ed.), Mirrors of Violence: Communities, Riots and Survivors in South Asia
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), and the chapter on Indian terrorism in
Ashis Nandy, The Savage Freud and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
The violent aspects of Hindu nationalism are explored in Ashutosh Varshney, Ethnic
Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2002), Sikata Banerjee, Warriors in Politics: Hindu Nationalism, Violence, and the Shiv Sena in
India (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999) and Martha Nussbaum, The Clash Within:
Democracy, Religious Violence, and India’s Future (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2009). For the Gujarat massacre in particular, see Ornit Shani, Communalism, Caste
and Hindu Nationalism: The Violence in Gujarat (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2007), and Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi, Pogrom in Gujarat: Hindu Nationalism and Anti-Muslim
Violence in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).
Studies of violence in Sikhism are mostly related to the Khalistan movement in the
1980s, including the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984. The most revealing study,
based on insider interviews, is Cynthia Keppley Mahmood, Fighting for Faith and Nation:
Dialogues with Sikh Militants (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997). See also

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interviews with Khalistan supporters in Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The
Global Rise of Religious Violence, 4th edn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017). For
the events leading up to the assassination of Indira Gandhi see Ritu Sarin, The Assassination
of Indira Gandhi (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1990), and Mark Tully and Satish Jacob,
Amritsar: Mrs. Gandhi’s Last Battle (London: Pan Books, 1985).
Works on Muslim violence in Pakistan and Afghanistan are largely concerned with the
rise of the Taliban and other jihadi groups in the first decades of the twenty-first century.
The best book on the Afghan Taliban is Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil, and
Fundamentalism in Central Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); see also
Peter Marsden, The Taliban: War, Religion, and the New World Order in Afghanistan
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). The role of religion in the violent rhetoric of
the Pakistan Taliban is explored in Mona Kanwal Sheikh, Guardians of God: Inside the
Religious Mind of the Pakistani Taliban (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Regarding
communal violence in the partition of South Asia that created the independent states of
India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, see the biography of Pakistan’s founder, Muhammad Ali
Jinnah, by Stanley Wolpert, and a contrasting view by Ayesha Jalal, and the more recent
analysis of the partition by Gyanendra Pandey, Remembering Partition: Violence,
Nationalism, and History in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
For violence in the Theravada Buddhist countries of Sri Lanka and Myanmar, see the
previously mentioned book by Stanley Tambiah, Leveling Crowds, as well as his Sri Lanka:
Ethnic Fratricide and the Dismantling of Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1991) and Buddhism Betrayed? Religion, Politics, and Violence in Sri Lanka (Berkeley:
University of Chicago Press, 1992). The Buddhist–Muslim communal violence in
Myanmar is covered in Matthew Walton and Susan Hayward, Contesting Buddhist
Narratives: Democratization, Nationalism, and Communal Violence in Myanmar (Honolulu:
East West Center, 2014). For Buddhist violence in general, including the South Asian cases,
see the essays in Michael Jerryson and Mark Juergensmeyer (eds.), Buddhist Warfare
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

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 6
Coercion and Violence in the Middle East
hamit bozarslan

Coercion and violence have played a decisive role in the shaping of the
Middle East and affected all aspects of social life throughout the post-
Second World War decades. Although they have always been related to
political, social or economic issues, class, generation, gender or ethnic and
sectarian relations, or regional and ‘international relations’ and wars, they
have also created new and widely autonomous dynamics. If each historical
period had its peculiar forms of violence, the continuity of violence as
a phenomenon has nevertheless given birth to a cumulative process of
brutalisation of the societies.
The classical approaches in historical and political sociology, which use
either the theory of resource mobilisation or that of relative deprivation, may
be useful in order to understand the pre-1979/80 forms of violence in the
region, but not the ones observed since this turning point, and particularly
the self-sacrificial violence which has become quite commonplace since
the Second Palestinian Intifada (2000–4) and 9/11. This is also true as far as
comparative perspectives are considered: if they allow us to understand the
formation of ‘terror in the mind of God’ in many parts of the world during
recent decades,1 they cannot explain the scale of post-9/11 violence and its
aestheticised cruelties. Scholars thus reach the limits of what one could call
phenomenological approaches, a fact that may explain the very small number
of academic works on the issue of violence in the Middle East compared to
those devoted to other parts of the world such as Latin America.
In the Middle East, as elsewhere, there is a strong relation between
violence and criminalisation of political, ethnic and sectarian conflicts. In
most parts of the region, the power-holders not only preserved the Islamic
political doctrine which, since its elaboration between the seventh and tenth

1 Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).

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centuries, prohibited internal dissent and promoted absolute obedience to

the state, but also adhered, implicitly if not explicitly, to Social Darwinism.
They have aimed at the formation of organically integrated, conflict-less
‘national’ bodies. If they legitimised themselves by unifying, nationalist,
‘socialist’ or Islamist da’was (‘call’, ‘cause’), they have also often confiscated
power on behalf of some ethnic, sectarian, tribal or regionalist group with
a strong asabiyya (‘group-solidarity’) and excluded wide sections of society.
Even in the strongly integrated countries such as Egypt and Tunisia, where
one can hardly mention any autonomous asabiyya, power has always been
monopolised by tiny elites excluding large sectors of society.

Off-Limits Issues
Given the limits of this chapter, I will not be able to deal here with the issue of
violence in the supra-territorial Palestinian and trans-border Kurdish spaces in the
Middle East. It is, however, important to mention that the creation of the state of
Israel in 1948 and the ‘Six-Day War’ in 1967 have changed the face of the region
and transformed the Palestinian issue into a most salient one. The Palestinian
non-state actors, who won a quasi-state form in the refugee camps, played an
important role in Jordan before the kingdom’s massive repression during the
famous Black September clampdown in 1970, and in Lebanon before the Israeli
invasion of 1982 which constrained the PLO to take refuge in Tunisia. The
Palestinian camps also hosted non-Palestinian militants, among them members
of the German Red Army Faction and the Japanese Red Army.2 ‘Palestine within’
also played a political role during the First Intifada (1987–93), which included riots
by Palestinian youth and women activists, and the Second Intifada (2000–4),
which has made suicide bombings as the main tool of violence commonplace.
Together with South Yemen, where a ‘socialist Republic’ survived between 1967
and 1990, the Palestinian supra-national space had been dominated by left-wing
movements until the mid 1980s, before hosting Islamist actors such as Hamas.
As far as Kurdistan is concerned, it became the theatre of uprisings in
Turkey, Iran and Iraq in the 1920s–1940s and has been almost constantly in
a state of violence since the 1961 Barzani rebellion in Iraq. During the 1980s
and 1990s, the Kurdish conflict claimed more than 200,000 lives. Left-wing
movements have been dominant in Kurdistan and, although challenged by
Islamist actors, still enjoy a hegemonic position in the political landscape.

2 J. Croitoru, Der Märtyrer als Waffe: Dis historischen Wurzeln des Selbstmordattentats
(Munich: Carl Hanser, 2003), pp. 73–5.

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This chapter will also leave aside the issue of political violence in some
parts of the Middle East, to start with in pre-1979/80 Turkey3 and Iran. In the
former, violence started in the wake of the 1968 contest between left- and
right-wing groups, but also had a communitarian, Sunni-Alevi aspect. In Iran,
the left-wing guerrilla movement, which amplified itself throughout the
1970s, was one of the factors preparing the ground for the 1979 revolution,
which will be mentioned later on. In both countries, as well as in Morocco,
which hosted a left-wing guerrilla movement,4 violence remained confined,
mainly, within the ‘national’ boundaries. That was not the case in the long-
lasting guerrilla warfare in Dhofar (1963–76) as well as in the intra-Yemeni war
which involved Great Britain, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

Historical Cycles of the Twentieth Century

and the Issue of Violence
In this chapter I will suggest that the issue of violence in the Middle East has
been determined by specific features of different historical cycles the region
went through. Each cycle started as a consequence of violent ruptures that
exerted a destructive and restructuring impact well beyond one single coun-
try. Each was also dominated by a specific ideological and political ‘micro-
climate’ and bore the fingerprints of a given generation. The first cycle, which
began with the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in 1918 and the partition of
its Arab provinces, lasted until the foundation of the state of Israel.
The second cycle covered the thirty-year period from 1948 to 1979. The
third cycle, which I have analysed elsewhere,5 started in 1979 with the
Camp David Agreements and recognition of Israel by Egypt, the Iranian
revolution, the Islamist uprising in Mecca and the occupation of Afghanistan
by the Red Army. The most recent cycle opened with the Arab revolutionary
contests of 2011 and their disruptive effects in some countries since then.
During the first cycle, violence took the form of anti-mandate/anti-
colonial or anti-settlements riots in Iraq, Syria, Egypt and Palestine. Except
in Egypt, where political movements and trade unions had a notable pre-
sence, the other uprisings were launched by tribal categories or large coali-
tions, including the Shia clergy, some pro-Kurdish or pro-Druze forces, or

3 Cf. Hamit Bozarslan, ‘Le phénomène milicien: une composante de la violence politique
en Turquie des années 70’, Turcica 31 (1999), 185–244.
4 Mehdi Benounna, Héros sans gloire: échec d’une révolution 1963–1973 (Casablanca: Tarek,
2002).
5 ‘Revisiting the Middle East’s 1979’, Economy and Society 41.4 (2012), 558–67.

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urban elites. In Palestine, many urban dynasties, hamulas (‘enlarged families’)

and the religious establishment became sources of the revolts of the 1930s.
One should however bear in mind that, although they were difficult to deal
with, the majority of the old social classes and tribal sheikhdoms ultimately
accepted cooperation with the rules of the Mandatory system.6 In contrast, the
Arab intelligentsia maintained a high level of mobilisation even after the
revolts. Before the First World War, this intelligentsia did not necessarily
adhere to a nationalist ideology, but it was radicalised after the execution of
some Arab dignitaries by Cemal Pasha, the Ottoman proconsul for Syria, in
1916. After the war and the formation of the new states, nationalism became
the dominant political current within this generationally renewed category.
With some few exceptions, the intelligentsia did not switch to violence; but it
was highly influenced by European radical right-wing ideas and forms of
mobilisation. Movements such as the Umayyad Brigades in Syria, al-
Futuwwah (‘The Youth’) in Iraq and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt took
the shape of paramilitary organisations. In Iraq, the only country that estab-
lished a ‘national army’ in the wake of its independence, the ideas of this
intelligentsia also influenced the military. In particular Bakr Sidqi, who in 1936
organised the first coup d’état in the history of the Arab countries – the 1941
coup of al-Gaylani – also bore the hallmark of right-wing ideas.
The second historical cycle, which lasted from 1948 to 1979, was marked by
a revolutionary crisis in many parts of what would come to be known as the
Third World. But in the Middle East, the creation of Israel was seen as a new
amputation of Arab lands and unleashed a long process of radicalisation. In
a context in which the Arab world was divided along Cold War lines, the
defeat of the Arab armies could but give birth to violent internal reactions
which adopted left-wing mottoes and themes, but were also influenced by
Social Darwinism.
The trauma following the Arab defeat by Israel put an end to the very ideal
of democracy in the Arab Middle East. It is true that elections took place in
Iraq and Syria in the 1950s, but as Nasser put it bluntly, the ‘bourgeois’
democracy was henceforth perceived as a Trojan horse aiming at the division
of the Middle East and as a rule of ‘feudal’ strata over society.7 While
authoritarianism was accepted as the only way of uniting the state and the

6 Nadine Méouchy and Peter Sluglett (eds.), The British and French Mandates in
Comparative Perspectives / Les Mandats français et anglais dans une perspective comparative
(Leiden: Brill, 2004).
7 Adeed Dawisha, The Second Arab Awakening: Revolution, Democracy and the Islamic
Challenge from Tunis to Damascus (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013), p. 72.

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nation and resolving the social and national questions through the concentra-
tion of power, violence became synonymous with ‘national resistance’. As the
killing of the Jordanian King Abdallah, the Syrian president Husni al-Zaim and
the Egyptian prime minister al-Nuqrashi Pasha attested, violence was before
everything else internal, targeting mainly the ‘betrayers’; but the revolutionary
crisis in Egypt and in Syria and the intifada in pre-1958 Iraq demonstrated that it
could also be applied to wider popular contests. The post-1948 crisis led to
a series of military coups and to the establishment of new and in some cases
extremely brutal ‘revolutionary’ regimes in Egypt (1952), Syria (1948, 1963, 1966,
1970) and Iraq (1958, 1963, 1966, 1968), and later on in Libya (1969) which,
together with independent Algeria (1961), formed the so-called Arab progres-
sive bloc. Under these new powers, political language itself was brutalised. For
instance, Iraqi TV after 1968 left no doubt about the future coercive praxis of
the new regime: ‘the great and immortal squares of Iraq shall be filled up with
corpses of traitors and spies! Just wait!’8
There is no doubt that Middle Eastern violent conflicts were, at least
partly, linked to the Cold War alignments of some countries such as Egypt,
Iraq and Syria with the Soviet Union, and of the others, namely Saudi Arabia,
Iran and Turkey, with the Western bloc. The contests which took place then
could partly be explained by the diffusion of left-wing ideas which exerted an
almost hegemonic impact across the ‘Tri-Continental region’. This was not
only the name of an organisation which was founded in Havana in 1967, but
as importantly a world-wide regime of subjectivity, a political grammar
which spread itself throughout Latin America, Africa and Asia. One can in
fact easily compare the aesthetics and vocabulary of the Middle Eastern
violence of the 1950s–1960s with those of other parts of the world during
the same period, replete with a fetishism of armed struggle and revolutionary
organisation on behalf of an imagined ‘united people’.
Sociologically speaking, one could consider the military and civilian intel-
ligentsia as the main actors of contest and violence in the Middle East of these
decades. These strata, which included many students, young lawyers, engi-
neers, officers and what one could call the literati, constituted the ‘inter-
mediary elite’ of these societies; they had an operational knowledge of the
world and were also able to extrapolate from science to social issues. But they
were not the sole actors of contestation on the Arab scene: the plebian strata
also emerged as political actors between the 1950s and 1970s to replace the

8 Quoted in Thabit A. J. Abdullah, Iraq since 1989: Dictatorship, Imperialism and Chaos
(London: Zed Books, 2006), p. 29.

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intelligentsia almost entirely in the following decades as the core of contesta-

tion. Their ascent went hand-in-hand with the reinforcement of some for-
merly marginal parties such as the Communist Party and the Ba’ath, and
a generational renewal in many parts of the Middle East. Nasser, son of
a modest postman, was only 34 when he took power in 1952, and Arafat,
another symbolic figure, only 30 when he became a world-renowned figure
of Palestinian struggle. The revolutionary fidai (‘the one who sacrifices him/
herself’), who had much to share with guerrilleros across the world, imagined
him/herself as in charge of a ‘historical mission’. That mission was not only
to mark a decisive break with the past Ottoman and mandate/colonial legacy
and the corruption of the present, but also to offer a new horizon to Arab
societies, regenerated by resistance and by an act of ‘re-foundation’.
Although socially marginal, the Islamist movement also went through
a process of radicalisation during these decades. The Muslim Brotherhood,
whose leader Hassan al-Banna had been killed in 1949, participated in the
insurrectional violence of the turn of the 1950s. Towards the end of this
decade, Sayyid Qotb, the organisation’s most prominent intellectual (exe-
cuted in 1966 at the age of 60), abandoned the legacy of the seventh- to tenth-
century legists as well as al-Banna’s policy of ‘re-Islamisation through reform’
and justified the use of violence within the dar al-islam.

1979: The Turning Point of the Middle East

Towards the end of the 1970s, the left-wing movements were dominant, but
also in deep crisis. In Syria and in Iraq, power was seized by a tiny clique,
which constantly fragmented in a brutal process of ‘purification’. Instead of
the former utopias of social and national emancipation, these societies had
henceforth to face cruel dictatorships and warmongers. The Egypt of Anwar
al-Sadat (assassinated in 1981) was ruled by what one could define as
a kleptomaniac. The Gaddafi regime in Libya, which gradually switched
from pan-Arabism to pan-Africanism, had been transformed into
a grotesque but highly repressive dictatorship. As far as the non-state-
sponsored, i.e. ‘communist’, left was concerned, it was simply incapable of
broadening its social base. The Palestinian movement not only failed to
‘liberate’ Palestine, but also went through a process of internal fragmenta-
tion, and has been either repressed or manipulated by the major Arab states.
Hafez al-Assad, who abandoned the Palestinian actors during the Black
September crackdown in Jordan in 1970, when he was commanding the
Syrian armed forces, intervened actively in the Lebanese civil war, not in

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order to support the Palestinian fighters but to repress them, namely in the
Tel al-Zaatar camp in 1976.
However, the crisis of the left took place while the Middle East was still in
a revolutionary moment, a fact that differentiated it from many other parts of
the world. In spite of the Sandinista revolution of 1979 and the following civil
wars in Latin America, the 1980s represented the years of world-wide de-
radicalisation. In Europe, for instance, the left-wing movements which
advocated violence lost all credibility after the murder of the former Italian
prime minister Aldo Moro in 1978. In the Middle East, in contrast, the
revolutionary and ‘anti-imperialist’ passions were still alive, but could not
be satisfied any longer by left-wing discourse and mobilisation. Islamism,
whose motto was Islam al hal (‘Islam is the solution’), could thus impose itself
as the new revolutionary alternative. Many Arab intellectuals were indeed
keen to ‘revolutionize Islam as a prolongation of a nationalist project’,9
contributing thus to transforming Islamism into the ‘hegemonic syntax’10
of the new historical cycle of the Middle East.
The major events which took place in 1979 were in no way related to each
other. Recognition of Israel by Egypt was the outcome of a long process of
rapprochement between Cairo and Washington. This act of ‘betrayal’ to the
‘resistance front’ was a deadly blow to ‘Arab socialism’. The occupation of
Afghanistan by the Soviet Army, which had more to do with internal conflicts
within the pro-Soviet regime of Hafizullah Amin than with world-wide geopo-
litical competition, created the feeling that Moscow was taking the path of the
Western capitals as a new imperialist force. In contrast, the occupation of the
Ka’ba in Mecca by a small Islamist group led by a Mahdist figure called
Juhayman al-Otaybi (executed in 1980) seemed to suggest that Sunni Islam,
which was represented until then as a regional pawn of Washington, could in
reality have strong revolutionary and anti-Western potential. As far as the most
dramatic event of the year, the Iranian revolution, was concerned, it was the
outcome of a year-long contest, tremendously reinforced by the participation of
the Shia clergy and the bazaris. The involvement of these strata transformed the
revolution into an extremely radical and yet ultra-conservative one.
These events were totally disconnected from each other, but in a context
in which the left was losing ground, they could easily interact and project
Islamism onto the new revolutionary horizon. The assassination of President
al-Sadat in Egypt in 1981 and the Islamist uprising of Hama in Syria the

9 Quoted in Michelle L. Browers, Political Ideology in the Arab World: Accommodation and
Transformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 23.
10 For this concept, cf. Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London: Sage, 1995).

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following year11 were at once consequences and new manifestations of

a region-wide radical Islamism. More importantly, through its prolongation
via the Iran–Iraq War, the Afghan jihad and the Lebanese civil war, reconfi-
gured by Iranian involvement in the Lebanese Shia community, the year 1979
produced some long-lasting effects. The Israeli invasion of Lebanon in
June 1982, which destroyed militarily the PLO (Palestinian Liberation
Organization) of Arafat, but at the same time reinforced the newly founded
Shia Hezbollah, has further contributed to the dying out of left-wing move-
ments. Already by the mid 1980s, radical Islamist movements which found
their inspirations in the person of Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian religious
figure who acted as the ideologue of the Afghan jihad (killed in 1989), began
to exert a decisive role in the Palestinian camps in this country.
These three wars, and state coercion in countries such Iraq and Syria,
which reached an unprecedented level,12 claimed more than a million lives
and provoked the internal and external displacement of many other millions.
The Palestinian camps in the Middle East, which were an exception in the
world of the 1950s–1970s, became a model for other refugee communities. As
importantly, in contrast to the 1967 and 1973 Yom Kippur wars, during these
new wars the violence of regular armies and security forces and the violence
of non-state actors widely interacted throughout the region. The first con-
sequence of this evolution was the organisation of a military transhumance
from many parts of the Arab countries to Peshawar and/or the Afghan front.
In fact, the Afghan War gave birth to a dark romanticism, attracting some
35,000 young men from different geographical, sociological and economic
backgrounds. Some of these militants (Bin Laden, the very wealthy Zawahiri
and the very poor al-Zarkawi, al-Suri, al-Libyi, etc.) remained active until
around 2010. The second consequence was that the frontiers, which accord-
ing to the 1648 Westphalian model constituted ‘bordered power containers’,13
were transformed into zones producing violence. The Islamist actors were
not the only ones to take part in this evolution: Palestinian organisations,
Kurdish fighters from Iran, Iraq and Turkey, Iranian opposition groups or
Iraqi Shia movements were also involved, both in the armed transhumance

11 Raphael Lefevre, Ashes of Hama: Muslim Brotherhood in Syria (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2013).
12 Cf. for the Iraqi case, Dina Rizk Khoury, Iraq in Wartime: Soldiering, Martyrdom, and
Remembrance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) and for Lebanon, Franck
Mermier and Christophe Varin (eds.), Mémoires de guerre au Liban (1975–1990) (Arles:
Sindbad, 2010).
13 Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1987), p. 120.

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of this period and in the production of border-area violence. As a combined

consequence of these factors, new figures such as chehid (martyr), mudjahids
or urban militiaman replaced the Palestinian fidai model in the Middle
Eastern imaginary and praxis of violence and constituted the symbols of
wide-scale violence for the decades to come.
One of the most important outcomes of the post-1979 evolution in the
region was that Peshawar and Teheran imposed themselves as Sunni and
Shia ‘model-producers’ for almost the entire Arab world – and well beyond –
at the expense of other models, be they Western, Soviet or Arab ones. The
previous left-wing references vanished almost totally in the region, the
former ‘Tri-Continental region’ making way for a narrowed but still highly
hypothetical Islamic universalism. The generation of Arafat and Leyla
Khaled, the well-known Palestinian hijacker, and Nasser, al-Assad and
Saddam Hussein, marked the emergence of young militants who had
a military-virile body language redolent of ‘oldness’ and the past. In contrast,
the new generations of militants found their leaders in the old figures such as
Ayatollah Khomeini, who was 80 when the Iranian revolution took place,
and later on the Palestinian Sheikh Yassin (1937–2004). Living proofs of
authenticity and loyalty to the sacred causes, these new leaders called on
the generation of their grandchildren to accomplish sacrificial and self-
sacrificial forms of violence to keep the ‘cause’ alive.

The Conflicts of the 1990s

The three wars of the 1980s ended towards the end of the decade, when the
Cold War was also coming to its close. After the fall of the military regimes in
Latin America at the beginning of the 1980s and that of the Soviet bloc in 1989,
many observers thought the Middle East would also experience a process of
democratisation. Similarly, the failure of the Iranian model and the instability
of postwar Afghanistan seemed to indicate a weakening of Islamism as a radical
strategy. The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, followed by a new ‘Gulf War’
(2 August 1990 to 28 February 1991), and violence and wars in the peripheries of
the Muslim world such as Bosnia, Chechnya and Tajikistan, however, created
the conditions for a new wave of violence, which lasted throughout the 1990s.
Although Islamism constituted only one of the components of these local
conflicts, they were seen as parts of one single jihadist chain. The collapse of
the state in Somalia and the military coups of Omar al-Bashir in Sudan (1989
and 1993) also offered to jihadi fighters new spaces of protection, where they
could gain military experience, and interact with each other.

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The main fields of struggle of the 1990s, however, were located in the Arab
world itself: in Egypt and Algeria. In Egypt, where public opinion was
radicalised in response to the Mubarak regime’s unconditional cooperation
with the USA in the 1991 war, the repression of the pacific Muslim
Brotherhood made space for the radical Gama’a Islamiya (‘Islamic
Association/Community’).14 Guerrilla warfare lasted until the massacres of
tourists in Luxor in 1997 and claimed several thousand lives. In Algeria, the
collapse of ‘Algerian socialism’ and the brutal repression of the non-Islamist
social riots of October 1988 paved the way for the ascent of the FIS (Front
Islamique du Salut), which was almost certain to win the elections of 1992.
The election process, which included two rounds of voting, was interrupted
after the first round by what the Algerian political language describes as le
Pouvoir (‘The Powers that be’). The repression which followed could only
reinforce those militants who, in contrast to the leadership of the party, never
believed in an electoral strategy. The young militants of the FIS created a new
organisation called the GIA (Groupe Islamique Armé), whose multiple fac-
tions played a decisive role in a range of brutal attacks. The Algerian army
and security forces also responded to the uprising with extreme cruelty. In
less than one decade, violence claimed some 200,000 lives, and the civil war
became a ‘fratricide’ – one with many communities and families divided, and
with violence taking an increasingly ‘intimate’ form.
Violence in Egypt and in Algeria was both a continuation of the Afghan
war and a breaking-point with it. Many figures such as Tayyib al-Afghani and
Jaffar al-Afghani of the Islamist guerrilla leaders in Algeria had been pre-
viously involved in the Afghan jihad. Switching from the remote jihad against
a foreign enemy to the jihad within dar al-islam against a Muslim ruler, they
considered that the conquest of Cairo and Algiers was a prerequisite for the
‘liberation’ of Jerusalem.15 It is however obvious that, whatever their feelings
about their regimes may have been, these societies did not support military
jihadism, and followed the medieval legist al-Mawardi’s (Alboacen) teaching:
‘a thousand years of tyranny is better than one minute of discord’.
Islamist violence of this decade should also be analysed in relation to post-
infitah economic policies.16 Islamism was the language that gave to dislocated
youth a sense that the social, political, cultural and economic world had been

14 Muhammed M. Hafez, Why Muslims Rebel? Repression and Resistance in the Islamic World
(Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2003).
15 Quoted in François Burgat, L’Islamisme à l’heure d’al-Qaida: réislamisation, modernisation,
radicalisations (Paris: La Découverte, 2005), p. 151.
16 Cf. namely Luis Martinez, La guerre civile en Algérie: 1990–1998 (Paris: Karthala, 1998).

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‘corrupted’ and proposed an alternative to it. It is obvious that during this

decade the informal mechanisms of social control and traditional solidarity
networks ceased to be effective,17 and could no longer contain the radicalism
of their client groups. The hijra ‘paradigm’,18 which allowed the exportation
of Arab radicalisms to a remote jihad-front such as Afghanistan as in the 1980s,
was no longer an alternative after the Soviet withdrawal, the civil war of the
‘war lords’ and the ascent of the Taliban.

The Self-Sacrificial Violence of 9/11

Towards the end of the 1990s, the failure of jihadist strategies obliged the
mainstream Islamist organisations to distance themselves from violence, to
accept the legitimacy of existing boundaries, to abandon the project of
founding a new Islamic society and to adopt neoliberal economic policies.
The ageing Islamist leaders, who were integrated into the professional and
economic fabric of their respective countries, were henceforth keen to
promote social conservatism and religious orthodox praxis, a policy which,
in fact, was also accepted by their states.
This evolution convinced many observers that two decades after its hey-
day and one decade after the end of the Cold War the flame of jihadism was,
finally, about to extinguish itself. Amid this real de-radicalisation, however,
a new form of violence was taking place at the margins of Islamism and the
Arab societies. Promoted by former Arab-Afghans such as Osama bin Laden,
Ayman al-Zawahiri and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, or by much younger mili-
tants such as Muhammad Atta who had no militant experience, the new
radicalism emerged in spaces with no public visibility: isolated military camps
in Afghanistan and Sudan, prisons in the Arab world and student commu-
nities in Europe. These milieux which would join the al-Qaeda organisation
founded in 1988 by Bin Laden had a double outlook. On the one hand, they
were able to think strategically, and promoted a non-territorial war against
the West, to start with against the United States. On the other hand, they
believed that the individual’s body was the main field of battle between good
and evil; after having been purified, the body could and should be sacrificed
to the Cause. As a consequence of this new orientation, jihad ceased to be
articulated within a social and political movement. It became much more

17 Cf. Guilain Denoeux, Urban Unrest in the Middle East: A Comparative Study of Informal
Networks in Egypt, Iran and Lebanon (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993),
p. 203.
18 Denoeux, Urban Unrest in the Middle East, p. 210.

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violent and self-sacrificial than before, but it also lost its socially and politically
revolutionary content, developed earlier by the Muslim Brotherhood from
al-Banna to Qotb.
Al-Qaida was not the first organisation to use suicide attacks; the first
case of such violence in the region’s recent history was that of Sana’a
Mehaidli, a Christian young woman who was a member of the Lebanese
Communist Party. In 1985, she blew herself up near an Israeli convoy.19
Other organisations, both Islamists like Hamas and non-Islamists like the
Kurdish PKK, have also organised suicidal violence. In spite of many
studies on the issue, this form of violence remains difficult to explain:
whatever its strategic utility might be in an armed conflict, by destroy-
ing the present, a suicidal attack also destroys the past and the future,
and leaves no room for any social-political language. If it is true that al-
Qaida emphasised and still emphasises the conflict between dar al-Islam
and dar al-harb, and legitimates violence against civilians, including
Muslims,20 its suicidal violence aims at an eschatological delivery.
Through the new aesthetic forms it developed, this violence brought
back death to the city from which it had been expelled as the condition
of ‘civilisation-building’.21 Sacrificial violence was, therefore, distinct
from the dialectic of state coercion and social and political conflict,
which can become violent as a result of a process of radicalisation.
The highly aestheticised attacks of 9/11 in 2001 represented the most
striking form of such violence. The destruction of the Twin Towers, which
was followed by the new Afghanistan War (2001), the occupation of Iraq
(2003), deadly attacks in Europe (Madrid, London, Paris, Brussels) and in the
Middle East (Riyadh, Amman, Rabat, Istanbul and no fewer than one thou-
sand suicide bombings in Iraq between 2003 and 2011), constituted a heavy
mortgage on the entire region and determined American foreign policy
during the first two decades of the twenty-first century.
The USA, as well as major European states, gave priority to the consolida-
tion of authoritarian states as the only alternative against violence, while in
fact, the coercive nature of these ‘fragmented tyrannies’22 and their klepto-
mania were among the structural reasons behind the violence.

19 Farhad Khosrokhavar, Les nouveaux martyrs d’Allah (Paris: Flammarion, 2002).

20 Cf. B. Lawrence (ed.), Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden (London:
Verso, 2005).
21 Jean Baudrillard, L’esprit du terrorisme (Paris: Galilée, 2002).
22 For this notion, see Charles Tilly, The Politics of Collective Violence (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 42.

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The Post-2011 Era

The Arab revolutionary configurations of 2011–12 started a new cycle in the
history of the Middle East. There is no need to insist here on the structural
and conjectural factors behind these contests whose main aim was to end
authoritarian rule. We must acknowledge a decades-long social fatigue and
a level of ‘ordinary’ violence that Arab societies produced at their margins
but that touched them at their very heart.23 The uprisings constituted
a unique moment during which the ideal of democracy and the praxis of
revolution could be combined in the Arab world. But the region’s internal
dynamics were far too radicalised and fragmented to permit the kind of social
and political liberalisation that occurred in Latin America and in east
European countries throughout the 1980s.
The uprisings started in Tunisia and Egypt. In these two countries, which
for centuries have had centralised states, the capital city has always occupied
a decisive place in the making of the political map. Tribal and intra-Muslim
sectarian divides played either a limited role or no role at all in national political
life. In Tunisia, after a period of tension, elections led to a recomposition of the
political system: Ennahda, the Islamist party, has been integrated as
a subordinated actor (for the time being) into the new political system in
which some figures of the ‘ancien régime’, such as Beji Caïd Esebssi (born in
1926!), the country’s president, occupied key positions. The country, however,
became an ‘importer’ and an ‘exporter’ of violence from and to other zones of
conflict in North Africa or in the Maghreb. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood
won the parliamentary and presidential elections in 2012, but with a very weak
level of popular participation in the elections. After one year in power,
however, the Islamist president Muhammad Morsi was overthrown by
a bloody military coup on 3 July 2013, which officially claimed more than
a thousand lives, organised by General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. Military rule has
provoked widespread violence in the country, namely in the Sinai Peninsula
where the central government’s authority has always been very weak and
where tribal structures remained strong in contrast to the rest of the country.
The strength of anti-Cairo feelings, solidarity with the Palestinians of the Gaza
Strip, and the fragmentation of the tribal world were among the factors
explaining the triumph of the jihadist movements in the peninsula, and their
capacity to spread their violence to other provinces.

23 Cf. Hamit Bozarslan, ‘The Arab World between 2011 and 2015: The Arab World after
the Revolutionary Contests of 2011’, in J. Karakoç (ed.), Authoritarianism in the Middle
East: Before and After the Arab Uprisings (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 67–91.

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The revolutionary wave originating in Tunisia and Egypt spread to other

places with radically different social, anthropological and political features,
among them Libya, Yemen, Bahrein and Syria. The case of Syria cannot be
separated from those of neighbouring Iraq and Lebanon, both with highly
fragmented social structures. In contrast to Tunisia and Egypt, these coun-
tries were created in the twentieth century and could be considered as
republics with weak capital cities, but strong trans-border affiliations, and
tribal, regional and sectarian divides. The nature of the ‘state cartel’ there was
also very different from the one in Tunisia and Egypt: while the Tunisian and
Egyptian armies refused to participate in direct repression and abandoned the
rais, al-Khalifa’s, al-Assad’s, Gaddafi’s and Saleh’s regimes were able to
mobilise massive resources of coercion against the demonstrators.
As Adel Bari Atwan wrote, by 2012 the overall fate of the Arab world (and
the enlarged Middle East) was determined not by revolutionary contests, but
by the development of jihadist milieux, which increased in number and were
able to create links between different conflicts in the region.24 In contrast to
the military transhumance of the 1980s which followed a double-track pat-
tern, from (mainly) the Arab world to Peshawar and Afghanistan, and back
again, and to that of al-Qaeda at the turn of the 2000s, which was much more
complex but has never been able to mobilise more than a couple of thousand
men, the new armed transhumance concerned probably some 200,000 men
(and a few thousand women) from different geographical origins towards
many destinations, including Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya and Sub-
Saharan Africa. The break-up of Iraq in 2013–14 and the extremely rapid
evolution of the Syrian conflict into a full sectarian civil war were decisive.
In this field of force, we can observe the active involvement of the regional
powers: Turkey, Saudi Arabia which supported jihadist groups, and Iran and
its allies such as the Lebanese Hezbollah; and later on Russia which supported
the Bashar al-Assad regime. Here is the environment in which a dissident
offspring of al-Qaeda emerged: the IS (‘Islamic State’). The territorial control
that this organisation exerted in Syria and Iraq, the division of Yemen with
a new war including Saudi Arabia, and the de facto partition of Libya,
aggravated the region-wide ‘state of violence’.25
In reality, many elements of this ‘state of violence’ were already present in
the 1980s. There are, however, some major differences between the two
periods: not only is the scale of violence much higher in the 2010s, but

24 Adel Bari Atwan, After Ben Laden. Al-Qa’ida: The Next Generation (London: Saqi, 2012).
25 See for this notion, Frédéric Gros, États de violence: essai sur la fin de la guerre (Paris:
Gallimard, 2006).

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different Middle Eastern conflicts interact much more strongly with each
other and form both an intra-Arab civil war and a region-wide sectarian war.
Moreover, with the exception of the Anfal operations in Iraqi Kurdistan
(1988) in which chemical weapons were used, the state of violence of the
1980s did not lead to the destruction of societies, while thirty years later the
new wave of violence directly damaged the social structure. Nearly 2 per cent
of the Syrian population has been killed and half of it forced into exile or to
internal displacement in less than five years. Although less dramatic, similar
developments have been observed in Iraq, Yemen and Libya. This evolution
goes hand in hand with a fragmentation of time and space and creates
a power vacuum in the epicentre of violence. One cannot understand the
facility with which IS conquered vast regions in Syria if one forgets that the
Bashar al-Assad regime has transformed itself into a brutal militia force,
sharing power with some 1,200 other militia forces in 2013. The fragmentation
of Libya also gave birth to some 300 militia organisations.
Moreover, the conflicts of the 2010s constantly mutated, leading to
a progressively higher level of escalation and violence. To give the most
dramatic example of the Syrian war, it has been reconfigured during each
summer since 2011: some branches of the opposition decided to militarise the
conflict in the summer of 2011; the deadly attack of 18 July 2012, which
decimated the regime’s high command in Damascus and killed the presi-
dent’s brother-in-law, opened a new phase marked by the systematic use of
aerial force and the withdrawal of the regime from Kurdish areas; the
summer of 2013 was marked by the reconquest of the city of al-Qusayr on
the Lebanese border by the Lebanese Hezbollah and the formation of
a compact among elements supporting the regime in ‘secured’ territory
including Damascus, Homs (which has been largely emptied of its Sunni
population) and Latakia; the summer of 2014 was marked by the intensifica-
tion of Iraqi and Syrian conflicts and the proclamation of al-Baghdadi’s
caliphate, and that of 2015 by Russian intervention and the full internationa-
lisation of the Syrian conflict. The logic of this vertiginous chronology has to
be found in the fact that the dynamics present in a given moment become
irrelevant within ten to twelve months, obliging the actors to move towards
a much higher level of violence.
Another significant element is that the conflicts in the 2010s gave birth to
a new enlargement of the Middle East. The end of the Gaddafi regime in
Libya redefined the Sahara region, leading to the creation of a short-lived
jihadist state in the north of Mali. The Islamist contest of Boko Haram in the
north of Nigeria, which has its own history distinguishing it from other

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Islamist movements, has become part of a wider violence and affirms itself as
part of IS. One can even say that through unprecedented refugee waves and
deadly attacks in Paris in 2015, the Middle East has moved into western
Europe. But this ‘internationalisation’ is also related to the rather long history
of armed jihadism and to generational changes: Bin Laden, a product of the
Afghan jihad of the 1980s, was 43 years old during the 9/11 attacks; Abu Bakr
al-Baghdadi (named Caliph Ibrahim) was the same age when he proclaimed
his Islamic state in 2014 and was a product of the Iraqi jihad of the years after
2000. In the 2010s, as in the years after 2000, the intermediary cadres of
jihadism were in their twenties or thirties, and the rank-and-file militants
even younger. The only difference was that these later militants came from
much more plebeian categories then before.

Pacified Societies, the Behemoth

and Brutal Margins
The new state of violence in the Middle East attests the weakness not only of
the states created in the twentieth century, often through arbitrary interna-
tional decisions, but also of ideological-social projects such as Arab national-
ism, socialism and Islamism. The overwhelming force that sectarian and
tribal dynamics exhibited after 2011 means that, in a context where societies
collapse, the ‘primary frameworks’ become the only ones to bring an ad
minima protection to their members. The tribes, for instance, can either
protect their members from violence or become a unit of a large-scale state
of violence, as is the case of the Hasheds in Yemen and the Ghaddafas in
Libya. Sectarian affiliations, which formed internal boundaries through mar-
riage and family ties, at times were not militarised. The context of violence
forced these groups to protect themselves militarily through new leadership,
to impose a unique identity and to formulate unique allegiances to their
members, and to sacralise and radicalise their political language. Now they
included ancient references such as to Qamus al-Uthman and Karbala,
references to the shirt that the third Caliph of Islam wore when he was killed
in 656, and the murder of Hussein, son of the fourth caliph and grandson of
the Prophet in 680.
Similarly, this new situation created a ‘Tillyian’ scenario,26 in which power
depends primarily on the capacity of some armed actors to wage war and

26 Charles Tilly, ‘War Making and State Making as Organized Crime’, in Peter B. Evans,
Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol, Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 169–91.

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 Coercion and Violence in the Middle East

‘protect’ their ‘subjects’, while in order to finance these ‘prerogatives’ they

impose a brutal policy of taxation on them. The fall of cities such as Kidal and
Timbuktu in 2012, and Fallouja and Mosul (a city which had huge military
resources) in 2014, had in fact a strong link not only with the issue of violence,
but also with the pacification and/or fragmentation of societies that had lost
their capacity of resistance. The success of a couple of hundred jihadist
fighters in conquering vast spaces is of course not unique in Middle Eastern
history; at the beginning of the 1990s, the Taliban of Mullah Omar (d. 2013),
who had perhaps thirty fighters, could impose themselves on a largely
fragmented country. Other actors, such as Ahmad Shah Massoud (killed by
al-Qaeda on 9 September 2001), who called themselves commanders, cer-
tainly had massive military resources and a vast client group, but their
fragmentation, and the absence of a ‘universal cause’ that could unite
them, allowed the Taliban to radicalise their da’wa and create an asabiyya
of their own. The Afghan case, like the IS case of the years after 2010, confirms
the fourteenth-century historian and thinker Ibn Khaldun’s analysis accord-
ing to which the force of conquerors resided not only in their capacity of
using coercion, but even more in the incapacity of the urban populations
which had lost their habitus of resistance, their capacity to defend
themselves.27

Conclusion
This survey of the phenomenon of violence during recent decades in the
Middle East also shows the limits of the phenomenological approaches that
scholars usually adopt in their analysis. Before the third historical cycle which
started in 1979, the process of mobilisation, modes of action and discourses of
legitimisation of violence in this region could easily be compared with what
one could observe elsewhere in the world, including in Latin America or even
in Europe, where ‘revolutionary violence’ had some purchase in certain
intellectual circles. But how could we explain the post-1979 evolution?
The partition of the Arab Middle East, the creation of Israel and the
Palestinian issue, and the series of wars which did not end with the end of
the Cold War certainly helped to create the conditions behind a generalised
regional instability. The failure of the past nationalist, ‘socialist’, Islamist
unanimist projects, which went hand-in-hand with some forms of integrative

27 Cf. Hamit Bozarslan, Le luxe et la violence: domination et contestation chez Ibn Khaldûn
(Paris: CNRS, 2014).

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 HAMIT BOZARSLAN

welfare society, has also contributed to the spread of general despair. One
could also recognise that the enormous resources of the sacralisation and
radicalisation of Islam, whose naked reality contradicts its ideal of the ‘just
society’, have also played a role in the formation of new and violent elements
within Islam. But this violence can’t be explained by its origins or by any
simple causality.
One should bear in mind that if Middle Eastern violence constitutes an
exception in the world after 2010, it is certainly not an exception in world
history. The European Wars of religion in the sixteenth century, or Nazi
violence with its perverse and yet perfect rationality and its nihilism which
destroyed its own rationality and astonished intellectuals such as Arendt,
Benjamin, Bloc, Freud, Haffner and Kraus, making them aware of the
possibility of the victory of Thanatos, are comparable with what one can
observe in the Middle East today. In all such cases, a destructive and self-
destructive violence was the ultimate means of imposing cruelty as the only
condition that societies could or can envision as their destiny.

Bibliographical Essay
The issue of violence in the Middle East has been mostly analysed within the framework of
security or war studies. One could, however, mention Nadine Méouchy and
Peter Sluglett’s The British and French Mandates in Comparative Perspectives (Leiden: Brill,
2004), J.-D. Mizrahi, Genèse de l’État mandataire: service de renseignement et bandes armées en
Syrie et au Liban dans les années 1920 (Paris: Publication de la Sorbonne, 2003), Guilain
Denoeux’s early book of 1993, Urban Unrest in the Middle East: A Comparative Study of
Informal Networks in Egypt, Iran and Lebanon (Albany: State University of New York Press),
and Quintan Wictorowicz’s edited volume of 2004, Islamic Activism: A Social Movement
Theory Approach (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), with Charles Tilly’s
introduction.
D. Garnham and M. Tessler (eds.), Democracy, War and Peace in the Middle East
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995) also analyses the phenomenon of violence
in the broader context of power relations and violence of war. Muhammed M. Hafez’s
critical book Why Muslims Rebel? Repression and Resistance in the Islamic World (Boulder,
CO: Lynne Rienner, 2003) constitutes an important survey of the pre- and post-9/11
violence in the Arab world and beyond. Franck Mermier and Christophe Varin (eds.),
Mémoires de guerre au Liban (1975–1990) (Arles: Sindbad, 2010), M. L Sifry and C. Cerf, The
Iraq War Reader: History, Documents, Opinions (New York: Touchstone, 2003) and Dina
Rizk Khoury, Iraq in Wartime: Soldiering, Martyrdom, and Remembrance (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2013) are well-documented volumes.
The Palestinian issue has been widely dealt with by scholars such as E. R. Rogan and
A. Shlaïm (eds.), The War in Palestine: Rewriting History of 1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001). A few monographs in French on the specific issues of violence in

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the history of the Arab Middle East include B. Dupret, Le phénomène de la violence politique:
perspectives comparatistes et paradigme égyptien (Cairo: CEDEJ, 1994), P. Haenni, L’ordre des
caïds: conjurer la dissidence urbaine au Caire (Paris: Karthala, 2005), Hamit Bozarslan, Une
histoire de la violence au Moyen-Orient de la fin de l’Empire ottoman à al-Qaïda (Paris: La
Découverte, 2008) and Pierre Blanc and Jean-Paul Chagnollaud, Violence et politique au
Moyen-Orient (Paris: Sciences-Po, 2014). On Algeria see Luis Martinez, La guerre civile en
Algérie: 1990–1998 (Paris: Karthala, 1998) and A. Moussaoui, De la violence en Algérie: les lois du
chaos (Arles: Actes Sud, 2006). And on Turkey, see Benjamin Gourisse, La violence politique
en Turquie: l’état en jeu (1975–1980) (Paris: Karthala, 2014). Although non-scholarly essays,
Adel Bari Atwan’s work on al-Qaida, After Ben Laden. Al-Qa’ida: The Next Generation
(London: Saqi, 2012), and Patrick Cockburn’s monograph on ISIS, The Rise of Islamic
State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution (London: Verso, 2014), are extremely useful.
Worth consulting also are N. Argo, Human Bombs: Rethinking Religion and Terror
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), P. L. Bergen, Holy War Inc.: Inside the Secret World of
Osama bin Laden (New York: Touchstone, 2002), J. M. Davis, Martyrs: Innocence, Vengeance
and Despair in the Middle East (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) and L. Wright, The
Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006).
One should also mention the importance of International Crisis Group’s reports on
Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen (www.crisisgroup.org/).

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 part ii
*

INTIMATE AND GENDERED

VIOLENCE
 7
A Global History of Sexual Violence
joanna bourke

Violence is an essentially contested concept. Despite the fact that cooperation

and communion with other sentient beings is at the heart of what it means to
be human, in every period of history and in every culture, the fleshly
vulnerability of other sentient beings can provoke aggression. Frequently, it
includes a sexual component.
This chapter interrogates the two components necessary for any historical
understanding of sexual violence: that is, what is meant by ‘sexual’ and
‘violence’? How have those concepts changed? What ideological, political
and economic forces have produced ‘the sexual’ and ‘the violent’ at any
period of time and for any particular group?
Both the ‘sexual’ and the ‘violent’ parts of ‘sexual violence’ are constituted
through formative, discursive configurations. Practices become sexually vio-
lent through classification and regulation generated by a vast array of agents.
Crucially, these agents include victims as well as perpetrators, witnesses and
bystanders, and national as well as international authorities. Just as there is
nothing natural or permanent about the body and its sexualisation, concep-
tions of aggression are also fluid. Sometimes violence is seen as requiring
brute force; other times, subtle intimidation will suffice. In all instances,
agency is important. The sexed body is active and resistant in processes of
subjection and subjugation.1

What Is ‘Sexual Violence’?

There have been important shifts in the weighting given to the two compo-
nents of ‘sexual violence’. For many people and for much of history, empha-
sis has been placed on the ‘sexual’ nature of sexual violence: it was a heinous

1 I defend and expand on this definition in Joanna Bourke, Rape: A History from the 1860s to
the Present (London: Virago, 2007). In the USA, it is published as Rape: Sex, Violence,
History (New York: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2007).

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crime because it attacked the purity, decency and honour of girls and women.
By extension, it violated their families and communities as well. From the late
1960s onwards, however, many feminists (especially in the West) attempted
to disrupt this weighting, stressing instead the ‘violent’ part of sexual
violence. Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape
(1975), Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1969) and Susan Griffin’s essay ‘Rape,
the All-American Crime’ (1971) contested assumptions that rape has a libidinal
component for perpetrators or that it dishonours or despoils victims. While
wholly in agreement with the latter argument, other feminists (including
Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin) contended that distinguishing
male sexuality from aggression was itself flawed because violence is an
integral part of masculine desire. As MacKinnon put it, ‘Rape is not less
sexual for being violent. To the extent that coercion has become integral to
male sexuality, rape may even be sexual to the degree that, and because, it is
violent.’2 As she trenchantly asked, ‘if it’s violence not sex why didn’t he just
hit her?’3
There have also been concerns about those problematic categories of
‘victims’ and ‘perpetrators’? I will be referring to targets of violence as
‘victims’ despite the fact that in recent decades a certain strand of feminist
thought prefers to call them ‘survivors’. I do this because many ‘victims’ did
not survive, and many ‘survivors’ insist that they are ‘victims’, however
much they repudiate the passivity that is often attached to that term. My
use of the word ‘victim’ draws attention to the hurt of abuse; it is neither
a moral judgement nor an identity. It also acknowledges that aggressive
‘perpetrators’ may also be victims. Both these terms are shorthand attempts
to problematise and historicise every component of the complex interactions
between sexed bodies.
In exploring these issues on a global scale the first question to ask is: who is
entitled to label something as ‘sexually violent’? For centuries, male-biased
legal and penal systems have taken the task of deciding whether a sexual
assault or rape has taken place or not. The patois of perpetrators has echoed
loudly through time, insisting upon their rights to define and delimitate what
is legitimate and illegitimate aggression. The claims of abused children,
women and men have been routinely questioned, if not disparaged, silenced
and suppressed. Paying attention to all these voices is important if we are to

2 Catharine MacKinnon, Towards a Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1989), pp. 172–3.
3 Catherine A. MacKinnon, ‘Sexuality, Pornography, and Method’, Ethics 99.2 (1989),
314–46, at 323.

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understand not only the struggles of people in the past, but equally the
meaning of violence itself.
Admittedly, attempting to compose a global history of sexual violence
presents formidable challenges. Global analyses of any phenomenon are
necessarily reductive. When the timeframe extends over two centuries
(in this chapter, the nineteenth century to the present), there is also a risk
of emphasising similarities over differences. This must be resisted. The
abducted peasant women of Ireland or central Europe have little in common
with date-raped sophomores in America; the girls and women violated by
Red Army soldiers in 1945 cannot reliably be compared to women who
acquiesce to sexual intercourse with their husbands as the ‘easier option’. It
matters if you are a boy or man. It makes a difference if the attacker wields
a machete or waves an employment contract. Terror is always local; uni-
versalist assumptions insult the specificities of individual histories. Sexual
violence is deeply rooted in specific political, economic, social and cultural
contexts. This is why it is not inevitable.
The fluidity of definitions of sexual violence is particularly evident in legal
spheres. Depending on the time period and territorial jurisdictions, legal
characterisations of sexual violence may be based on either evidence of
extreme physical coercion or lack of explicit consent to sexual intercourse.
Both violence and consent have histories. In some countries, and during
certain periods of history, only girls and women can be raped and there has to
be proof of penile penetration of a vagina as well as evidence of emission of
semen. Elsewhere, the gender of both victims and perpetrators is irrelevant
and a wide range of acts are accepted as sexually abusive. In jurisdictions
prioritising consent, age is important. Sexual activity with ‘a minor’ (that is,
a person who has not reached a designated stage of maturity) is by definition
‘violent’. This, too, can change with startling rapidity. In England and Wales,
for instance, the age of consent was raised from 12 to 13 in 1875, then, scarcely
ten years later, to 16 years. Having sexual intercourse with girls below those
ages was outlawed. Similarly, in the USA, the age of consent in most states in
the 1880s was 10 years. In 1889, Congress revised the statutory age in the
District of Columbia to 16 years. By the end of the nineteenth century, the
difference between the ages in which a girl’s ‘yes’ was legally deemed to be
meaningful could be as young as 10 in Mississippi and Alabama and as old as
18 in Kansas and Wyoming. Throughout the globe, such variations were
linked to ideas about the onset of puberty, different expectations of child-
hood, shifting views about the innocence or culpability of infants and youth,
and the strength of feminist and other activist movements.

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If the fluidity of definitions is one problem, the dearth of evidence is

another. The difficulties in assessing the extent of sexual violence are legion.
We don’t know how many people perpetrated acts of sexual violence; we
don’t know how many were victims.
Rapists know that what they are doing is wrong. They routinely beg
victims not to tell anyone. They feel embarrassed, ashamed and guilty.
Many seek solace in alcohol, drugs and other numbing substances. Such
reactions suggest that sexual violence is not an esteemed masculine trait, but
its opposite.
Victims as well as whistle-blowers often find that they are not believed.
This is usually due to denial and mistrust of the victims, but it is also because
rape accusations have often been used to serve ulterior political functions.
The propaganda value of rape accusations is extremely high in times of war.
During the First World War, for example, the Allies deliberately spread
rumours about the ‘rapes committed by the Hun’ in an attempt to persuade
the US government to commit troops to the war effort. This also happened
during the crisis in the former Yugoslavia where every side made use of rape
propaganda: the Serbian press vilified Croat and Muslim men as orientalised
rapists while the Croatian and Bosnian media did the same to the Serbs. In the
words of gender scholar Dubravka Zarkov, ‘raped women became flags
waved by the warring parties’.4

Silence and Speaking

Throughout the world in the past two centuries, victims and witnesses have
been reluctant to come forward. Victims know that reporting sexual assault
will be an ordeal. They fear publicity and the likelihood of retaliation. They
dread having to undergo humiliating police questioning and uncomfortable
genital examinations. In some contexts, they faced hostile jurors or, even
worse, judges who guffawed during their testimony. Many were promised
anonymity, only to discover that their names were publicised. Certain types
of victims were routinely discriminated against. Thus, prostitutes, peddlers,
domestic workers and immigrant groups are generally correct when they
believe that their complaints will be ignored. Victims fall silent, ashamed of
their own violation.

4 Dubravka Zarkov, ‘Gender, Orientalism and the History of Ethnic Hatred in the
Former Yugoslavia’, in Helma Lutz, Ann Phoenix and Nira Yuval-Davis (eds.),
Crossfires: Nationalism, Racism and Gender in Europe (London: Pluto Press, 1995),
pp. 105–20, at 114.

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Protesting against sexual violence is also difficult for members of lesbian,

gay, bisexual and transgender communities. Male victims sometimes become
aroused, further complicating issues of compliance. Ejaculation is used as
evidence of pleasure, even when levels of brutality have been extreme. Male
victims often fear that being attacked in a sexual way is emasculating. Victims
with a heterosexual orientation worry that they might be labelled homo-
sexual or lesbian: perhaps they ‘unconsciously wanted it’. In other words,
homophobia is a powerful disincentive to reporting both male-on-male and
female-on-female abuse. Reporting sexual assault – ‘washing our dirty linen
in public’ – also provokes alarm within LGBT communities, anxious that
they will be further stigmatised. It is not an unrealistic fear: as late as 1973, the
American Psychiatric Association classified homosexuality as a disorder, as
did the World Health Organization until 1992. Today, more than seventy
countries criminalise sexual activity by lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or
intersex people.
In fact, silence might be the preferred option for those victims keen not to
humiliate their own communities. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, Jewish
women who had been sexually abused by fellow prisoners (such as Kapos or
Funktionshäftling) in labour and extermination camps were often speechless.
Admitting to having been raped in the camps was akin to testifying to
gendered suffering. Their abuse was not a shared experience that could be
employed to reconstitute communities, but a sexed violation in which
Prisoners were not pitted against Nazis but Women against Men. The failure
of one’s community of men to protect ‘their’ women was humiliating for all
concerned.
In times of armed conflict, the relative silence of rape victims might also be
due to the fact that it was simply one of many vicious assaults on their bodies
and minds – and perhaps not the worst. A stark example of this can be seen in
Rwanda. Between the second week of April and the third week of May 1994,
mass rape was routine, but it occurred in a context where between 5 and
10 per cent of the country’s population was slaughtered. Survival took place
against great odds.
Victims routinely struggle to find words for their suffering. In many
cultures (such as Mexico in the nineteenth century), they faced assumptions
that only shameless women would talk publicly about sexual matters.
Frequently, the language of sexual violence was itself deeply problematic.
In Kinyarwanda, for example, the word used to refer to sexual violence was
kubohoza, meaning ‘to help liberate’. The term had initially referred to the act
of coercing Rwandans to change political parties, but was applied during the

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1994 genocide to the rape of girls and women.5 In Rwandan courts, the
Kinyarwanda phrase ‘gufata ku ngufu’, meaning ‘to take by force, to rape’,
was obscure to most witnesses, who consequently preferred using indirect
languages and metaphors, including ‘we got married’.6
In wartime, in particular, accounts of rape projected powerful messages
about national identity and ideology. As a result, censorship was rife. In the
Soviet Union, East Germany and Hungary following the Second World War,
it was only after the collapse of communism that many people felt able to talk
about what they had done or experienced. Tight controls over the press and
mass media had ensured that their stories had to be buried. In many com-
munist states, governments had promoted an idealised version of history in
which the Red Army liberated (rather than victimised) populations. When
rape was discussed – as in Hungary – it was often as a political attack on
communism. For many Hungarian Jews and others, the image of a rapacious
Red Army was dismissed as a myth propagated by conservative, nationalist
commentators who sought to ‘marginalize the importance of Fascism and
the Holocaust for Hungary’.7 Throughout the globe, justice systems were
found to be incompetent, corrupt or even sympathetic to perpetrators. The
perpetrators might be the government or other state agents.
A further problem lies in proving ‘lack of consent’. It is generally assumed
that the victim has to prove that she did not consent, rather than the accused
proving that she did. Whether it is the Nguyên Penal Code in Vietnam, which
required corroboration by witnesses and physical injury, or the famous
instruction given to jurors in Britain and the USA that ‘a charge of rape is
easily to be made and hard to be proved and even harder to be defended’,
accusers generally have to provide irrefutable physical evidence of having
vigorously resisted in order to be believed.
Finally, if the court case is not proven beyond doubt, rape accusations can
rebound dramatically on the woman herself. Unsuccessful complainants in
Darfur can be charged with zena or adultery, which is punishable with
imprisonment or a public whipping.8 The Hudood Ordinances in Pakistan
include rape under zina (adultery/fornication) offences. If a prosecution for
zina-bil-jabr (rape) fails, the accuser can be treated as having confessed to

5 Human Rights Watch, Shattered Lives (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1996), np.
6 Jonneke Koomen, ‘“Without These Women, the Tribunal Cannot Do Anything”’, Signs
38.2 (2013), 265–6.
7 James Mark, ‘Remembering Rape’, Past & Present 188 (2005), 140–60.
8 Kelly Dawn Askin, ‘Holding Leaders Accountable in the International Criminal Court
(ICC) for Gender Crimes Committed in Darfur’, Genocide Studies and Prevention 1.1
(2006), 13–28, at 19.

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adultery, and punished by public lashings or even stoning to death.9 Is it

any wonder that many victims preferred to ‘bury their dishonour’, as rape
victims during the war in the former Yugoslavia put it, rather than seek
redress?10

Politics of Wounding
Despite the formidable challenges in quantifying the extent of sexual vio-
lence, there is no doubt that it has blighted the lives of billions of women in
the past and today. In some jurisdictions such as South Africa (where
‘jackrolling’ or gang rape is considered a game), the extent of rape has been
called an ‘unacknowledged civil war’.11 It has been a political stratagem
(for instance, against followers of Aristide in Haiti or supporters of Benazir
Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party in Pakistan), a weapon wielded by one
ethnic group against another (the Chinese in Indonesia, the Ogoni in
Nigeria and the Tutsis in Rwanda), a way of collecting information during
interrogation (its function for Peru’s counterinsurgency forces) and a way of
wreaking religious vengeance (against Muslims and Croats in the former
Yugoslavia, as well as against Muslims in India and Myanmar). Sexual
violence has been routinely used to humiliate individual women as well as
their families and communities.
The personal harm of rape is undeniable. It is important to note that
the destructive effect of sexual violence actually precedes any attack. The
fear of rape constrains women’s movements and may encourage parents
to marry their daughters at very young ages in the (mistaken) belief that
husbands will provide some kind of protection. In other circumstances,
victims of sexual violence are not even present at the moment of violation.
Children born of rape can be stamped with a formidable stigma, often for
life.
For the immediate victims – the sexually violated girls, women, boys and
men – sexual violence was a scourge that caused suffering for years or
decades after the attack. The physical and psychological harms were

9 Pratiksha Baxi, Shirin M. Rai and Shaheen Sardar Ali, ‘Legacies of Common Law’,
Third World Quarterly 27.7 (2006), 1,239–53, at 1,241; Silvie Bovarnick, ‘Universal Human
Rights and Non-Western Normative Systems’, Review of International Studies 33 (2007),
59–74, at 67.
10 Dorothy Q. Thomas and Regan E. Ralph, ‘Rape in War’, SAIS Review 14.1 (1994), 81–99,
at 90.
11 Helen Moffett, ‘“These Women, They Force Us to Rape Them”’, Journal of Southern
African Studies 32.1 (2006), 129–44, at 129.

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atrocious. Survivors of wartime sexual abuse routinely found themselves

discarded by their own communities, as with the 160,000 women forced to
become ianfu (‘comfort woman’) from 1937.

Violence and ‘Consent’

All of these difficulties in ‘hearing the voices’ of victims of sexual violence are
entangled in definitions of what is ‘sexual’ and what constitutes ‘violence’.
The ‘sexual’ components of ‘sexual violence’ were often disparaged; the
‘violent’ components diminished. In order to understand such confusions
of tongues, we need to interrogate centuries of cognitive distortions about
gender, sexuality and violence.
Women have often been viewed as culpable for attacks made upon them.
Even the mass rapes carried out by the Red Army as they made their way
through eastern Europe near the end of the Second World War were
presented in this way. In Budapest, around 50,000 women were raped; during
the Red Army’s march into Germany, an estimated 1.9 million women were
sexually violated.12 In Berlin, approximately one in every three women was
raped and over 10,000 died as a result of sexual assault. Thousands committed
suicide.13 Boris Slutsky was a poet who served as a politruk of a Red Army
infantry platoon between 1941 and 1945. In his memoir, he dismissed any
suggestion of suffering, claiming that
In Europe the women surrendered themselves and were unfaithful sooner
than anyone else . . . The Hungarian women loved the Russians in their turn,
and . . . along with the dark fear that parted the knees of matrons and
mothers of families, there was also the affectionate nature of young
women and the desperate tenderness of the women soldiers, who gave
themselves to the men who had killed their husbands.14

Aggressors routinely stated that their victims were seductive, and therefore at
fault for the cruelty inflicted upon them.
Another version of this myth claims that husbands, boyfriends and close
acquaintances might get ‘carried away’, but women wanted ‘it’ anyway. In
early and mid-twentieth-century texts, American and European psychiatrists

12 Richard W. McCormick, ‘Rape and War, Gender and Nation, Victims and Victimizers’,
Camera Obscure 16.1 (2001), 99–141, at 131.
13 Anonymous [Marta Hiller], Eine Frau in Berlin: Tagebuchaufzeichnungen vom 20. April bis
22. Juni 1945 (Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn, 2003 [1959]).
14 Boris Slutsky, Things That Happened, ed. G. S. Smith (Birmingham: GLAS, 1998),
pp. 147–8.

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routinely christened rape a ‘victim-precipitated’ crime. In the Journal of

Criminal Law and Criminal Behavior in 1940, for instance, criminal psychologist
Hans von Hentig concluded that ‘If there are criminals, it is evident that there
are [also] born victims, self-harming and self-destroying.’15 In an attempt to
normalise abuse, sexually violent men might even carry out a ‘parody of
domestic interaction’ in its aftermath, as did German rapists in France during
the First World War.16 In the conflict in Guatemala, soldiers carrying out
mass rapes would often insist that their victims cook them a meal and dance
to marimba music. Civilian rapists politely thanked their victims, offered to
escort them home, and requested a cup of tea.
The notion that ‘honour is greater than death’ has been disastrous for
victims of sexual assault. In many jurisdictions (including Puerto Rico),
there is some evidence that, in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, there has been increased emphasis placed on the need for victims
to provide evidence proving vigorous resistance to the attack, rather than
sexual coercion by itself.17 In nineteenth-century European and American
jurisprudence textbooks, women were expected to fight off attackers – even
to the point of being severely wounded or killed. The claim that it is
‘impossible to sheath a sword into a vibrating scabbard’ (a phrase used in
nineteenth-century jurisprudential textbooks in the UK and USA) is used to
suggest that ‘true’ resistance is always effective. The penis is coded as
a weapon; the vagina is its passive receptacle, which merely by ‘vibrating’
could ward off attack. There is another way of saying this: any women who
failed to fight off an attack on her virtue could be assumed to have
acquiesced or even consented. Concessions were made when the victim
was a delicate, middle- or upper-class woman. Sturdy, working-class
women and ‘primitive’ women had no excuses: they were effectively
unrapable.
The damage done by arguments that rape could not occur if a woman
resisted or if she subsequently became pregnant are augmented by more
general problems with arguments based on ‘consent’. In certain contexts,
‘consent’ is seen as redundant. Extreme examples include slave–master
encounters. What was the meaning of ‘consent’ for slaves? As a female

15 Hans von Hentig, ‘Interaction of Perpetrator and Victim’, Journal of Criminal Law and
Criminal Behavior 31 (1940), 303–9, at 305.
16 Ruth Harris, ‘The “Child of the Barbarian”’, Past & Present 141 (1993), 170–206, at 177.
17 Eileen J. Findlay, ‘Courtroom Tales of Sex and Honor’, in Sueann Caulfield, Sarah C.
Chambers and Lara Putnam (eds.), Honor, Status, and Law in Modern Latin America
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), pp. 212–19.

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slave explained, ‘we do anything to get our poor flesh some rest from de
whip’.18
War and times of atrocity also undercut the salience of ‘consent’. Indeed,
‘volunteering’ for sex work could be a survival strategy. In the words of
a woman speaking of her experiences during the Holocaust,
Well, I refused to be consumed and vanish like a cloud. I wanted to return to my
house. I’m eighteen years old – I don’t want to die . . . Everyone in the lager goes
around picking up leftovers from the garbage. They suck bones other people spit
out – and I’m supposed to refuse life because it’s offered on a dirty plate?19

In other words, when food, shelter and life itself depend upon sexual
relations, the liberal emphasis on free and informed consent in deciding
issues of rape is a charade.

Gender
If the first cognitive distortion about sexual violence focuses on notions of
consent, the second one concerns the gendered identities of victims and
perpetrators. In the USA, four out of five victims of sexual abuse by
Catholic clergy were male.20 Estimates of the percentage of prisoners who
are raped in US prisons vary from between 1 and 20 per cent.21
Although I have used the male pronoun to refer to sexual predators, the
claim that the rapist is inescapably male is actually unsupportable. Women,
too, can be guilty of sexual violence, especially during armed conflicts.
Female violence was particularly vicious during the conflicts in Rwanda,
Liberia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In the DRC, 41 per cent of
female rape victims and 10 per cent of male victims claimed to have been
assaulted by a woman.22 In Rwanda, Pauline Nyiramasuhuko (ironically, the

18 Cited in Peter W. Bardaglio, ‘Rape and the Law in the Old South: “Calculated to Excite
Indignation in Every Heart”’, Journal of Southern History 60.4 (1994), 749–72, at 758.
19 Liana Millir, Smoke over Birkenau (Philadelphia: n.p., 1999), p. 171.
20 John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The Nature and Scope of Sexual Abuse of Minors by
Catholic Priests and Deacons in the United States, 1950–2002 (Washington, DC: United
States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2004), p. 68.
21 James E. Robertson, ‘A Clean Heart and an Empty Head’, North Carolina Law Review 81
(2003), 434–82, at 442; Christine A. Saum et al., ‘Sex in Prison’, The Prison Journal 75
(1995), 413–30; David L. Struckman-Jones and Cynthia Struckman-Jones, ‘Sexual
Coercion Rates in Seven Midwestern Prison Facilities for Men’, The Prison Journal 80
(2000), 379–90.
22 Kirstin Johnson et al., ‘Association of Sexual Violence and Human Rights Violations
with Physical and Mental Health in Territories of the Eastern Democratic Republic of
the Congo’, Journal of the American Medical Association 304.5 (2010), 553–62, at 553.

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national minister of family and women’s affairs) ordered militia to round up

people in her hometown for slaughter, encouraging them to rape the women
first. In most instances, female perpetrators abused their victims in conjunc-
tion with, rather than independently from, their male comrades.
We should not be surprised by the presence of sexually violent women in
armed conflicts. Nationalist and ethnic ideologies exerted a formidable power
over these women, trumping female solidarity. Many female perpetrators
had been subject to extreme violence, even rape, themselves. In insurgent
forces, sexual violence has been used as a mechanism for forging effective
fighting units. Some female soldiers also hoped that their cooperation in
abusing other women would mean that their male comrades would spare
them similar insults.

Minimisation of Harm
The concept of ‘violence’ is further complicated by the fact that certain kinds
of aggressive behaviours are not thought to be serious. Certain groups of
women, for instance, have not been regarded as fully human – they are said
to be less sensitive to pain or are ‘naturally promiscuous’ anyway – making it
easy to minimise the injury done to them. In the USA, accusations made by
African American women have frequently been discounted for this reason.
Forensic commentators repeatedly discuss rape as simply another ‘sexual
perversion’ rather than a violent crime. For example, in Lezioni de medicina
legale, criminologist Cesare Lombroso included rape in his discussion of
sterility, impotence and hermaphroditic conditions
Such cognitive distortions have major repercussions, especially in terms of
legal retribution. As a general rule, the greater the social distance between
aggressors and victims, the lesser the penalty. In the USA, for example,
a white man found guilty of rape of a white woman might be imprisoned;
a black man in the same circumstances, executed. Immediate justice for
African American abusers spared ‘delicate’ white women the agony of
testifying in public.
In other instances, some kinds of forced sex are not ‘wrong’ at all. The
most egregious example is rape within marriage. The marital rape exemption
was only abolished in Scotland in 1989 and in the rest of the UK in 1992. In
Europe and the USA, the ‘marital rape exemption’ is attributable to a 1736
ruling by the jurist Sir Matthew Hale. In his words, ‘The husband cannot be
guilty of a rape committed by himself upon his lawful wife, for by their
mutual matrimonial consent and contract the wife hath given up herself in

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this kind unto her husband which she cannot retract.’23 Some proponents of
the marital rape exemption alluded to the property implications of dowries:
where men pay large dowries to the families of their brides, there was the
assumption that they had ‘bought’ their wives and therefore had a right to
complete authority. Others (such as members of the Partido Acción Nacional
in Mexico) contended that marital rape was an oxymoron. In Ghana (where
there is still no provision for wives to prosecute their husbands for rape),
politicians argued that the proposed law would infringe the ‘sanctity of
marriage’ and would be ‘anti-Ghanaian’.

‘Perpetrators as Victims’
A related problem is the dichotomy between ‘victims’ and ‘perpetrators’,
when some people are both. There is clear evidence that many men and
women who act in extremely aggressive ways have experienced sexual
violation themselves. Child soldiers are a good example.
Nevertheless, it is important to point out that ‘cycle of abuse’ arguments
have limited explanatory power. They don’t help us understand why so
many children who grow up in loving homes end up as aggressors, nor
why so many people who were abused as children respond by joining the
caring professions. Since girls are much more likely to be sexually victimised
than boys, the argument also does not explain why sex offenders are pre-
dominantly male.
‘Perpetrators as victims’ appear most frequently in the brutalising context
of combat. An example of this process can be seen in analyses of the mass
rapes carried out by Red Army soldiers as they moved through Germany at
the end of the Second World War. In the 1990s, these rapes were co-opted by
revisionist historians who were attempting to reposition the German people
as victims of that war, as opposed to its major instigator.
This is not the only function performed by the rhetoric of ‘perpetrators are
victims’: it helped alleviate the guilty consciences of individual aggressors.
For example, Japanese soldier Kondō Hajime insisted on his victim status
when he came forward to testify alongside women who had been forced into
sexual slavery for the Japanese Imperial Army after 1937. His motivations
were partly compassionate, but they were also an attempt to explain that the
soldiers only acted as they did because of extreme cruelty practised against
them. Ruthless military training, a starvation diet and heartless senior officers

23 Sir Matthew Hale, Pleas of the Crown (London: Richard Tonson, 1678), pp. 628–9.

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who sent them into combat unprepared were the real villains. Hajime
reminded his listeners that ‘our hearts have [also] been tormented . . . The
victims have gone through a lot, but perpetrators have also suffered
tremendously.’24
It was a refrain often heard during the Winter Soldiers’ Investigation in
early 1971 when 109 American veterans testified about war crimes that they
had committed during the conflict in Vietnam. These GIs provided
a formidable list of the reasons why they acted in atrocious ways, including
racism, peer pressure, fear of being punished by their comrades or senior
officers, environmental confusion, retaliation and revenge, lack of training,
failures in military leadership and so on. The problems with these excuses for
rape were, first, they cannot explain the high levels of violence directed at
their own side (after all, 30 per cent of American women who served in
Vietnam were raped by their own comrades, as have between 30 and
40 per cent of women in the US military today) and, second, the list of
‘stressors’ is so long that sexual atrocities quickly became over-determined.
The veterans at the Winter Soldiers’ Investigation repeatedly made claims
such as ‘I think it’s an atrocity on the part of the United States Army’ and ‘don’t
ever let your government do this to you’. The true victims (the raped, tortured
and killed) were effectively effaced; the ‘real victims’ were the grunts –
victims of US government policy.

War
Implicit in my chapter so far is the symbiotic relationship between sexual
violence during armed conflicts and in more peaceable times. It is important
not to position ‘war’ as existing outside of broader societal practices, ideol-
ogies and power struggles.
However, it is equally crucial not to conflate the two contexts. Mass rape
in wartime requires significant planning: combatants have to be trained;
propaganda disseminated; military hardware marshalled; racial and other
intercommunal prejudices drummed up. Armed conflict not only radically
lowers the threshold at which interpersonal violence can take place, but also
dramatically alters the nature of that violence. Compared to peacetime,
wartime rape becomes an intensely public display of brutality; it could even
be valorised as a patriotic act and one that facilitated emotional bonding

24 Yuki Terazawa, ‘The Transnational Campaigns for Redress for Wartime Rape by the
Japanese Military’, NWSA Journal 18.3 (2006), 133–41, at 141.

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between perpetrators. The international research group SVAC (Sexual

Violence in Armed Conflicts) has been instrumental in analysing these
particularly egregious components of wartime rape.25
The ‘violent’ component of ‘sexual violence’ is especially problematic
when entire armies set about attempting to destroy each other. In armed
conflicts, rules against violent behaviour can become extraordinarily relaxed.
During the First World War, the most thoroughly documented instances of
mass rape took place in Belgium and Russia. From the late 1930s, rape and
enforced prostitution were a feature of the Japanese invasion of China. In
Nanjing, for example, over 20,000 women were raped in 1937 alone. Indeed,
every invading army during the Second World War proved to be rapacious.
Sociologist J. Robert Lilly calculated that between 14,000 and 17,000 women
were raped by American military personnel between 1942 and 1945.26
Notorious mass rapes took place in Germany, Russia, Korea, China, Japan,
Italy and the Philippines.
Despite horrific levels of sexual violence during the Second World War,
international law was sluggish in responding. The war crimes trials in
Nuremberg ignored rape and other gender-based crimes. The International
Military Tribunal for the Far East prosecuted rape, but as ‘inhumane treat-
ment’ and ‘failure to respect family honour and rights’, rather than as a major
war crime.
The catalogue of sexual violence in armed conflicts goes on and on. In
1947, the partition of Punjab between India and Pakistan led to mass rapes.
During nine months in 1971–2, Pakistani soldiers raped around 200,000
Bengali women, 80 per cent of whom were Muslim. Some scholars believe
that twice that number of women were sexually assaulted. In the 1990s, there
was widespread rape as well as torture and killings in Timor, Sierra Leone
and Guatemala. After the Rwandan genocide of 1994, it was concluded that
between half and 90 per cent of surviving Tutsi girls and women had been
sexually attacked. An unknown number of Hutu girls and women had also
been sexually assaulted, generally because they associated with Tutsi women
or were in the ‘wrong place at the wrong time’.
In the twenty-first century, mass rape in Darfur was an attempt to drive
populations out of valuable land and into the desert. As a genocidal strategy,
it has been relatively effective. Another place where sexual violence was
driven by economic incentives, internal political ambition, the weakness of

25 See their website: www.warandgender.net/.

26 J. Robert Lilly, Taken By Force (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

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state authorities and ethnic rivalries is the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
That conflict has been called ‘Africa’s world war’, since it is the deadliest war in
the world since 1945. A thousand girls and women are raped every day; today,
there are over 200,000 surviving rape victims in the DRC. One third of victims
are children under the age of 18. Other conflicts that have seen sexual violence
reach such extreme levels that it amounts to femicide include Afghanistan,
Algeria, Argentina, Bangladesh, Brazil, Burma, Bosnia, Cambodia, Croatia,
Cyprus, East Timor, El Salvador, Haiti, India, Indonesia, Kuwait, Kosovo,
Liberia, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Peru, Serbia, Turkey, Uganda, Vietnam,
Zaire and Zimbabwe.
Even more than in peacetime, wartime rape communicates a powerful
message between men: it has a symbolic value as an insult to the masculinity
of the enemy. In the words of anthropologist Veena Das, ‘The woman’s
body . . . became a sign through which men communicated with each
other.’27 It was an indictment of these women’s male associates: that they
had patently failed to fulfil the unwritten ‘gender contract’, under which men
fight to protect women, who, in turn, provide them with nurture. Because
women have been positioned as ‘biological reproducers of the collectivity’
and ‘transmitters of its culture’, their rape was a potent declaration of
dominance.28
The trigger-point for international attention being paid to wartime sexual
violence was the 1991–9 conflict in the former Yugoslavia, in the heart of
Europe. Mass rapes took place on all sides, but systematic and widespread
violations were perpetrated by Serbian forces against Muslim women,
Catholics and Croats. According to some estimates, nearly 20,000 women
were raped. Women and girls were routinely violated in their homes; they
were incarcerated in detention camps established explicitly for the purpose of
rape; they were forced into prostitution; and at rape camps like the one at
Foca they were deliberately impregnated, then forced to bring the foetus to
term and give birth.
Feminists found themselves disagreeing vehemently on how to respond.
The debate became: was national or female solidarity to be prioritised? On
the nationalist side was American activist Catharine MacKinnon. She
argued that the rapes were genocidal. In her words, Serbian-perpetrated
sexual violence ‘are to everyday rape what the Holocaust was to everyday
anti-Semitism. Without everyday anti-Semitism a Holocaust is impossible,

27 Veena Das, Critical Events (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 56.
28 Miranda Alison, ‘Wartime Sexual Violence’, Review of International Studies 33.1 (2007),
75–90, at 80.

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but anyone who has lived through a pogrom knows the difference.’29 In
contrast, the feminist group ‘Women in Black’ warned against ‘the
politics of instrumentalization of victims’. They refused to become
tangled up in arguments about ‘who is the real victim, or who has the
greatest right to call themselves victims’. They pointed out that ‘A victim
is a victim, and to her the number of other victims does not decrease her
own suffering and pain.’30 Still other feminists worried that there was
a risk of casting all women as victims, thus excusing them from their role
in the carnage.
The high levels of sexual violence during the break-up of Yugoslavia have
been designated ‘rape as a weapon of war’ (also called ‘rape warfare’ and
‘strategic rape’) taken to extremes. Should the violence be considered as
‘ethnic cleansing’ by Serbian forces? There is general agreement that the mass
rapes were part of an attempt to clear territory of Bosnian Muslims and
Croats, with the intention of destroying their cultures. In the words of Kelly
Dawn Askin, legal consultant and adviser to the International Criminal
Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the methods of achieving ethnic cleans-
ing were
not limited to physical elimination. For instance, a person may be sexually
assaulted in order to be humiliated or emotionally destroyed or to be proven
submissive or subordinate; a person may be raped in order to cause chaos or
terror and/or to make people flee the area, effectively destroying the group;
a woman may be raped in order to forcibly impregnate her with a different
ethnic gene. Different tactics but with the same objective – destroying or
removing the unwanted group.31

But was ‘ethnic cleansing’ a form of genocide? Should widespread, systematic

rapes conducted by Serbian forces be regarded as genocidal or were they
a dramatic extension of ‘everyday rape’? Was there a risk of ignoring the rapes
carried out by non-Serbians? Notably, the first time that the ICTY judged rape
to constitute a grave breach of international humanitarian law (rather than
a breach of the Geneva Convention) concerned a Croat defendant
(Furundzija) while the second prosecution involved a Bosnian Muslim

29 Catharine A. MacKinnon, ‘Rape, Genocide, and Women’s Human Rights’, in

Alexandra Stiglmayer (ed.), Mass Rape (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994),
pp. 73–81.
30 Women in Black, ‘Women in Black against War: A Letter to the Women’s Meeting in
Amsterdam on the 8th of March 1993’, Women Magazine (December 1993), 17–18.
31 Kelly Dawn Askin, War Crimes against Women (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1997),
p. 263.

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defendant who raped Serbian women at Čelebići (Foča). Did some victims’
suffering count for more than others?
An important plank in the argument that the Serbian rape campaigns were
genocidal lay in the deliberate impregnation of women who were then forced
to give birth to what the rapists claimed would be ‘little Chetniks’. In other
words, they assumed that infants born of rape would be Serbian. This is
deeply problematical, and not solely for the obvious physiological reasons.
This version of the genocidal argument accepts the ideology of the rapist that
ethnicity is biological and paternal: that is, infants born of rape belong to the
father. As legal expert Karen Engle put it, the belief that ‘if a Muslim egg were
inseminated with a Serbian sperm, a Serbian child would ensure’ too often
went unchallenged.32 This socially constructed notion of biology, favouring
the male, was particularly stark in the context of Bosnia, where there is little
to differentiate Bosnian Muslims and Serbs genetically and where, prior to
the war, around one-third of marriages in the region were inter-group.
In the international furore over the genocidal violence in both Rwanda and
the former Yugoslavia, important legal precedents were established. In 2001,
both the Statute of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former
Yugoslavia and the Statute of the International Criminal Tribunal for
Rwanda recognised rape as a crime against humanity, as opposed to
a violation of men’s property rights or an inhumane act. In the words of
philosopher Debra Bergoffen, by
identifying rape, like torture, as a crime against humanity, the ruling affirms
the principle of embodied subjectivity. It goes beyond past rulings on torture,
however, in attending to the sexual realities of embodiment and in insisting
that violating a woman’s sexual integrity is a crime against humanity.33
International scholars were jubilant; sexually violent perpetrators barely
noticed.
It is important to reiterate, however, that ‘rape as a weapon of war’
should not be allowed to dominate the history of sexual violence. As
Miranda Alison reminds us, such a focus ‘misses so much’. It ‘means that
sexual violence that occurs during conflicts but does not stem from
a directed military strategy is either obscured from view or is, troublingly,
assumed to be part of a military strategy instead of the deeper structures of

32 Karen Engle, ‘Feminism and its (Dis)contents’, American Journal of International Law 99.4
(2005), 778–816, at 788.
33 Debra Bergoffen, ‘February 22, 2001: Toward a Politics of the Vulnerable Body’,
Hypatia 18.1 (2003), 116–34, at 117.

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power in any given society’.34 We should be just as wary of a ‘politics of

exception’ (wartime rape is worse than endemic abuse) as the ‘politics of
accountancy’ (only once this threshold of victims is reached can it be
labelled an atrocity).

Eradicating Sexual Violence

Throughout the last two centuries, victims, feminists, politicians, lawmakers,
police and community activists – and none of these categories are mutually
exclusive, of course – have debated how sexual violence can be diminished, if
not eradicated. It is impossible to do justice in a couple of pages to the range
of resistances all over the globe.
Briefly, however, from the nineteenth century to the present, many
attempts to reduce sexual violence have been unconstructive. Demands
that the law enforcement agencies must ‘simply lock ’em up and throw
away the key’ do not work. Victim blaming – an attitude that is embedded
in suggestions that women police their own behaviour, upgrade their secur-
ity and comport themselves modestly – is common. Too many anti-rape
initiatives warn women to avoid ‘dark alleys’ and ‘short skirts’. Advising girls
and women to ‘stay at home’ is equally unhelpful: household survival often
depends upon female labour in the fields, forests and marketplaces, so
insisting on purdah is impossible. And domestic spheres are crowded with
abusers anyway.
Other proposals make emotional sense, but have minimal effect outside
the immediate context. This includes attempts by individual women to seek
out ways to humiliate their attackers publicly. In nineteenth-century
England, for instance, known sexual abusers might be paraded around the
village to local jeers; the windows of their homes broken; their credit
rejected in the market square. In the contemporary period, vigilantism
against sexually violent men has also flourished, most notably in India
where the Pink Sari Gang (or the Gulabi Gang) are the world’s largest
female vigilante group, boasting over 20,000 members. Local justice may be
gratifyingly retributive, but will never change a culture of sexualised
violence.
Still other solutions are palliative. Prison reform – including greater
surveillance of institutional blind spots (such as shower rooms and dorm
facilities) – might have some effect, but at the cost of greater intrusiveness

34 Miranda Alison, personal communication, 2014.

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into the lives of everyone, and not just sexually aggressive people. More
practically, other rape reformers (particularly in the USA) provide prisoners
with information on how to litigate against prison officials who fail to prevent
sexual abuse. In non-prison contexts, voluntary and philanthropist organisa-
tions also help victims navigate the legal system.
Most solutions to sexual violence focus on specific elements of the pro-
blem. Lawyers believe in better laws; international relations experts place
their faith in inter-state agreements. Feminists debate whether the solution is
less pornography or better pornography. Do we need a return to family values
or a celebration of (sensual-oriented) sexual liberation? Should men march in
the streets with placards sporting the problematic slogan ‘Hands Off Our
Women’ or should women do it for themselves, as did Haitian women when
they established Solidarité Fanm Ayisyèn/SOFA (Haitian Women’s
Solidarity Group) and Kay Fanm (Women’s House)? In the late twentieth
century, support for rape crisis centres grew, although they have been
chronically under-funded.
Tackling wartime sexual violence will probably require broader strategies.
One of the most debilitating myths for those of us seeking to forge more
peaceful worlds is the assertion that sexual violence is inevitable. However,
rape is not ‘about’ male biology or an evolutionary inheritance; it varies
greatly over geographical space and historical time, as I argue in Rape:
A History from the 1860s to the Present (2007). Even in armed conflicts, there
are wide variations in the nature and degree of sexual violence – with some
conflicts experiencing very little. Although rape is high during what interna-
tional scholar Mary Kaldor has called ‘new wars’ – that is, those that are
counterinsurgent or guerrilla in nature and where the lines between armed
forces and organised crime are blurred35 – it is low in armed groups that
possess a strong degree of internal discipline and ideological values.36
Cultures with sexual equality, high levels of female economic power and
low levels of armed conflict tend to have relatively low levels of rape.37 Sexual
abusers learn how to act as sexual abusers within specific historical
communities.

35 Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999).
36 Elisabeth J. Wood, ‘Variation in Sexual Violence during War’, Politics and Society 34.3
(2006), 307–41, and Wood, ‘Armed Groups and Sexual Violence’, Politics and Society 37.1
(2009), 131–61.
37 Peggy Reeves Sanday, ‘The Socio-Cultural Context of Rape’, Journal of Social Issues 37
(1981), 5–27, and Sanday, ‘Rape-Free versus Rape-Prone’, in Cheryl Brown Travis (ed.),
Evolution, Gender, and Rape (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), pp. 337–62.

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Conclusion
Rape is an ‘essentially contested category’,38 infused through and through
with political meaning and norms about gender performances. This is why
any diminution of sexual violence will require the political, ideological and
discursive labour of every global citizen. Sexual violence and the fear of
violation are embedded in women’s lives. This is not because of any innate
tendency in men; it is not only because of socialisation. Rape thrives
in situations of structural inequality. In the modern period, compulsory
heterosexuality, marriage vows and the gendered division of labour have
been particularly effective ways of controlling women. Obviously, there is an
urgent need to reform the legal system so that more rapists are identified,
convicted and punished for their crimes but, in the final analysis, political
attempts to reduce and finally eliminate sexual aggression must start with the
main perpetrators. Rape is a crisis of manliness; its eradication is a matter for
men – for a radically different conception of agency and masculinity.

Bibliographical Essay
When Susan Brownmiller published Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape
(Harmondsworth: Penguin) in 1977, there were very few historical analyses of sexual
violence. Today, there is a sophisticated historical literature on rape and other forms of
sexualised violence. It is impossible in a short bibliographical essay to convey the depth
and breadth of this literature. Many of the best works are published in journals rather than
as monographs. For a historical analysis of perpetrators of sexual violence in Britain and
America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Joanna Bourke’s Rape: A History
from the 1860s to the Present (London: Virago, 2007). In the USA, it is published as Rape: Sex,
Violence, History (New York: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2007). In the context of France, the best
overview is Georges Vigarello’s A History of Rape: Sexual Violence in France from the 16th to
the 20th Century, trans. Jean Birrell (Malden, PA: Polity Press, 2001). The literature on rape
in wartime is particularly rich. The best way to access this is through the website of Sexual
Violence in Armed Conflicts (SVAC: www.warandgender.net/), which has
a comprehensive bibliography of the literature as well as extremely robust critiques of
it. For insightful series of edited essays, see Raphaelle Branche and Fabrice Virgili’s Rape in
Wartime (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and Dagmar Herzog’s Brutality and
Desire: War and Sexuality in Europe’s Twentieth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2009). For supreme examples of the way wartime rape is memorialised during and after
conflicts, see James Mark’s ‘Remembering Rape: Divided Social Memory and the Red
Army in Hungary, 1944–1945’, Past & Present 188 (August 2005), 133–61, and Gina
Marie Weaver’s Ideologies of Forgetting: Rape in the Vietnam War (Albany: SUNY Press,
2010). There is a vast historical, philosophical, legal and political literature focusing on the

38 Eric Reitan, ‘Rape as an Essentially Contested Concept’, Hypatia 16.2 (2001), 43–66.

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sexual violence during the war in the former Yugoslavia. For two useful analyses, see
Kirsten Campbell, ‘Legal Memories: Sexual Assault, Memory, and International
Humanitarian Law’, Signs 28.1 (2002), 149–76, and Karen Engle, ‘Feminism and its (Dis)
contents: Criminalizing Wartime Rape in Bosnia and Herzegovina’, American Journal of
International Law 99.4 (2005), 778–816. Philosophical discussions of rape can be extremely
helpful for historians: examples include Keith Burgess-Jackson’s Rape: A Philosophical
Investigation, (Aldershot: Dartmouth, 1996), Ann J. Cahill’s Rethinking Rape (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 2001) and Moira Gatens’s Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and
Corporeality (London: Routledge, 1996). Pamela Haag usefully problematises and
historicises the concept of ‘consent’ in her Consent: Sexual Rights and the Transformation
of American Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999). Finally, the following
journals publish extensively on sexual violence from historical and contemporary
perspectives: African Studies Review, Human Rights Quarterly, Journal of Genocide Research
and Signs.

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 8
Sexual Violence against Children:
A Global Perspective
lisa featherstone

UNICEF has called child sexual assault ‘a fundamental violation of children’s

rights’,1 while the World Health Organization (WHO) has named it a ‘serious
infringement on a child’s right to health and protection’.2 Yet child sexual
assault has been a common experience of many children, now and in the past.
This chapter will explore child sexual abuse (CSA) across the modern age,
while acknowledging at the outset that attitudes towards sexual assaults on
children vary significantly across time and place. An act that might be
a heinous crime in one time period or one region may be legally and socially
acceptable in another.
Knowledge about sexual violence in the past is limited by inadequate access
to primary-source information. When the data are available, they come from
policing documents, court records, medical sources, government statistics and
studies, autobiographical stories and oral histories. There are inconsistent and
patchy records on child sexual assault in the nineteenth century (and before) in
some jurisdictions in Europe, the United States and Australia. But there has
been almost no historical research on CSA in many regions of the world, due
to the difficulty or impossibility of accessing sources; social and political
tensions around child sex; and the prioritising of other urgent problems
including war, poverty, displacement and disease. In many cases, data have
been destroyed, lost or never adequately collected or archived. It is therefore
impossible to offer a comprehensive and detailed analysis of rates of child
sexual assault in the global past. We can, however, examine changing attitudes
towards CSA, including moments of change in awareness around sexual
assaults on minors; altering definitions of criminality; the prosecution of

1 Dr Najat Maalla M’Jid, Sexual Abuse and Exploitation of Children in West and Central Africa
(Dakar: UNICEF West and Central Africa Regional Office, 2008), www.unicef.org/wcaro/
english/ESEWCAROFinalReport_EN_corrige.pdf, p. 4.
2 WHO Regional Committee for Africa, ‘Child Sexual Abuse: A Silent Health Emergency:
Report of the Regional Director’, 18 June 2004, p. 1.

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 Sexual Violence against Children

offences; and differences in media debates over sexual violence against chil-
dren. Even so, some periods and regions remain better covered than others.
Since the 1970s and 1980s, there has been an escalation in studies of CSA,
including a new focus on qualitative and quantitative data; the development of
treatment regimens for victims and perpetrators; and a growing public aware-
ness, fed by media attention. Yet, as this chapter shows, child sexual assault was
not ‘discovered’ in the 1970s. It changed shape, and interest was perhaps
professionalised, but the two centuries before had also shown knowledge of,
and fear around, sexual violence against children in many nations, evidenced
by legislation, policing, prosecution and media reports. Children have long
been seen as vulnerable to sexual abuse in numerous forms, assaults which
were, in theory, viewed as both criminal offences and morally corrupt. Yet,
almost paradoxically, state and community practices failed to and continue to
fail to protect children, as recent large-scale studies have proven. The problem
of violence against children is an enduring one that crosses the globe.

Defining Sexual Violence against Children

One primary challenge to thinking about sexual violence across time and
place is that there was and is no simple or unchanging definition of what we
mean by child sexual abuse. A widely used contemporary definition of CSA
comes from WHO:
Child sexual abuse is the involvement of a child in sexual activity that he or
she does not fully comprehend, is unable to give informed consent to, or for
which the child is not developmentally prepared and cannot give consent, or
that violate the laws or social taboos of society.3
This may include sexual activity, or the exploitation of a child through
prostitution or pornography.
Thinking historically, there is an immediate problem with this definition,
for the meaning of the term ‘child’ is historically contingent. How do we
derive the social and legal parameters of childhood? Over the past 200 years,
the majority of nations have sought to establish the boundaries of childhood
through ‘age of consent’ legislation. Age of consent laws outline when a child
might be considered legally fit to have sexual relations, regardless of the issue
of consent. The age of consent was generally conceptualised around girls,
though many jurisdictions introduced age of consent laws for male

3 WHO, Report of the Consultation on Child Abuse Prevention, Geneva, 29–31 March 1999,
pp. 15–16.

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 LISA FEATHERSTONE

homosexual activity. In some states, the age of consent was set at a higher age
for boys or for the act of sodomy, with the implicit suggestion that homo-
sexual sex was especially troubling.4
Currently the age of consent varies across jurisdictions, with the majority
settling on an age of consent of 16 or 18, though there are some as high as 21,
and others in the early teens. A small number of jurisdictions have no age of
consent, but control child sexual assault through other legal mechanisms
such as gross indecency and rape legislation. In addition to age of consent
laws, some nations have legislated specific child sexual assault charges,
including laws around abuse perpetrated by fathers, teachers and other
authority figures. In these instances, the age of consent might be higher,
and the penalties stronger. Clearly, there was and remains much variation in
the ways offences against children were legislated for.
Criminal law was not, however, the only way that CSA was governed in
a society. The age of consent might exist, but not be applied. Or, the age of
consent might be over-ridden by marriage: in some jurisdictions, if the age of
consent was 18, but a girl was married at 15, intercourse would be legal with
her husband. Further, in some countries or regions, the age of consent was
not a meaningful social or legal construct. Under sharia law, for instance, all
sexual activity within marriage is legal, and all sexual activity outside of
marriage illegal. Age of marriage could be, but was not always, legislated
for. Thus, the idea of a single age of consent is not universal, but is culturally
specific. What might be common or normalised in one culture would be
unusual, troubling or even criminal in another.
Other difficulties with assessing CSA over time and place are common to
all studies of sexual violence. Sexual assaults on children are generally private
crimes, and criminologists and historians of sexual violence know that under-
reporting of all forms of sexual assault is common. Few cases are reported to
police, and even fewer enter the criminal justice system. Thus researchers
capture only a small proportion of sexual assault cases, and this is complicated
even further in historical cases, where record keeping was inadequate. For
cases that have been reported, there are substantial problems with gaining
access to records involving children, with the state maintaining a range of
protective measures around CSA cases. While in some areas we can access
broad information – arrests, prosecutions, charges – researchers cannot
necessarily access the specificities of either the assault or the trial.

4 See Matthew Waites, The Age of Consent: Young People, Sexuality and Citizenship (London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 88–118.

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 Sexual Violence against Children

Children and Sexuality in the Victorian Period

In Britain and other Western nations, the Victorian period saw an escalating
interest in the sexual abuse of girls, and consequently some of our most
comprehensive historical records are from that period. In part, this was due
to the emergence of specific cultural views of childhood, which imagined girls
as innocent, pure and requiring protection.5 The nineteenth century saw a raft
of protective measures aiming to impose safeguards for children in the home,
the workplace, the school and the street. These targeted the children of the
poor, and aimed to instil middle-class values among the working classes. A key
aspect was the imposition of sexual morality: it was clear to contemporaries
that young girls were suffering various forms of sexual violence. Youthful
prostitutes were a visible problem on the city streets. Girls with venereal
disease were presenting to public hospitals. As social workers, child welfare
experts, parliamentary committees, journalists and writers began to investi-
gate, it was claimed that incest, early pregnancy and other forms of vice and
immorality were common in working-class homes and suburbs.6
The ‘discovery’ of the vulnerable child – and the need to impose moral
order – led to a flurry of public discussions about age and sexuality. This
stimulated debate over the age of consent, and it is worth considering the
British situation at length, as it informs all debates that follow. Britain was
unusual amongst European nations in its early establishment of laws around
child sexual behaviour: the age of consent for girls had been set at 12 in the
thirteenth century. It had largely remained 12 until 1875 when the Offences
against the Person Act raised the age of consent to 13, and also increased the
maximum sentence for an offender having sex with an underage girl to life
imprisonment.7 There was, however, no social consensus over the age of
consent and the ending of childhood: many reformers suggested girls should
be protected until the age of 21.8 There was no corresponding ‘age of consent’
for boys, and indeed boys as victims were largely absent from these debates.
In the 1880s, there was a great deal of formal and informal opposition to
raising the age of consent for girls. Elite men in the House of Commons

5 Louise Jackson, Child Sexual Abuse in Victorian England (London: Routledge, 2000), pp.
4–5, 95.
6 Ibid., p. 7.
7 Waites, Age of Consent, p. 63. The age of consent was raised to 13 in England, Ireland and
Wales, but remained 12 in Scotland.
8 Deborah Gorham, ‘The “Maiden Tribute to Modern Babylon” Re-examined: Child
Prostitution and the Idea of Childhood in Late-Victorian England’, Victorian Studies 21.3
(1978), 353–79, at 364; Waites, Age of Consent, p. 63.

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 LISA FEATHERSTONE

claimed that raising the age of consent might take young prostitutes off the
streets, but immorality would only be driven underground. Given the
perceived needs of young men for a sexual outlet, the working-class girl
was to be made available, to keep the middle- and upper-class homes
virtuous. In the face of a parliament reluctant to raise the age of consent,
the journalist W. T. Stead published a sensational series of articles. The
‘Maiden Tribute’ articles exposed an underworld of child prostitution, forced
sex and the ‘white slave trade’. In the most scandalous of the articles, Stead
wrote of his purchase of a girl’s virginity for five pounds, and whether true or
not, it stimulated a vast, unprecedented outcry over sexual danger and the
ruin of young girls working in London’s brothels.9
‘The Maiden Tribute’ pressed the Conservative government into action,
and the Bill to raise the age of consent was reintroduced into parliament.
Many of the old oppositions still stood – for members of the House of Lords,
it was their sons, not young girls, who needed protection.10 Under significant
public pressure, however, the Bill was passed, raising the age of consent to 16
(though carnal knowledge with a girl aged under 13 was a felony, while sex
with a girl aged 13 to 16 was a misdemeanour).11 It is questionable whether the
law had a significant impact on child sexual assault, and some men effectively
used the defence that they believed the child was older than 16, even in cases
where it was clear she was quite young.12
Similar debates took place in other Western nations.13 Most American
states had an age of consent for girls of 10 years old. By 1895, twenty-two
states had increased the age to 16 or 18 years. Many southern states did not
raise the age of consent, however, and at the turn of the century five states
still set the age of consent at 10 years. Infamously, Delaware had an age of
consent of 7 years.14 Debates in the USA were similar to those we have

9 Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late Victorian
London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), chapter 3; Gorham, ‘“Maiden
Tribute”’.
10 Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, pp. 102–3; Mary Spongberg, Feminizing Venereal
Disease: The Body of the Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century Medical Discourse (Albany:
New York University Press, 1998), p. 105.
11 Jackson, Child Sexual Abuse, p. 13.
12 Sheila Jeffreys, The Spinster and her Enemies (Melbourne: Spinifex, 1997), pp. 54–7; see also
Lisa Featherstone and Andy Kaladelfos, Sex Crimes in the Fifties (Melbourne: Melbourne
University Press, 2016), chapter 2.
13 In Australia see Andy Kaladelfos, ‘“Call All Male Offenders by their Right Name”: Masculinity
and the Age of Consent’, Melbourne Historical Journal Special Issue 1 (2009), 1–20; Jill Bavin-
Mizzi, Ravished: Sexual Violence in Victoria Australia (Sydney: UNSW Press, 1995).
14 Philip Jenkins, Moral Panic: Changing Concepts of the Child Molester in Modern America (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 24.

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 Sexual Violence against Children

encountered in Britain: on the one hand, there were fears over the social and
economic ruin of young girls; on the other hand, there was a reluctance to
punish men for sex with girls, especially those who were considered delin-
quent or otherwise sexually experienced.
This was further complicated in the US states by troubled race relations
that permeated ideas of crime and violence. Age of consent laws had not
applied to slaves, and black women were seen as routinely sexually available.
Child sexual assaults perpetrated on black children by white men were not
a policing priority, especially in southern states.15 Instead, there was
a racialisation of sexual assault, where black men were readily imagined as
brutish or barbaric rapists. In many states, sexual assault of a white child by
a black man would lead to harsher penalties than if the perpetrator had been
white.16
Child sexual assault might be handled by the judiciary, but it was also
managed through extralegal means, including mob violence. Lynching
involved the ritual or actual death of the alleged perpetrator, and, at worst,
his torture and mutilation. Historians of lynching argue that this form of mob
violence was utilised to maintain racial hierarchies in the post-slavery
society.17 In the period from 1880 to 1920, when 90 per cent of lynchings
were of African Americans, around one quarter of all lynchings had their basis
in sexual violence, either real or imagined.18 Race would also have important
implications for official reactions to sexual violence, with black Americans
making up the vast majority of offenders executed for sexual offences.19 Not
all lynchings were mob law for assaults against children, of course, but young
girl victims featured in many of the most violent lynchings, whether white or
black men were accused.20 By the early twentieth century, the black presses
were regularly reporting sexual assaults on black girls by white men, and
black writers also drew attention to the fact that few of these crimes were
recorded in the mainstream media.21 Nonetheless, in America and elsewhere,
black men were more readily imagined as bestial, as uncontrolled, and most
specifically as rapists of women and children (see Bourke, this volume for
further detail on race and rape).

15 Estelle Freedman, Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), pp. 89–103.
16 Ibid., p. 128.
17 Robyn Wiegman, ‘The Anatomy of Lynching’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 3.3 (1993),
445–67, at 455.
18 Jenkins, Moral Panic, p. 26. 19 Ibid., p. 96.
20 See Freedman, Redefining Rape, pp. 89–103. 21 Ibid., p. 234.

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 LISA FEATHERSTONE

Beyond the Metropole

Racial politics were also central to understanding attitudes towards sexual
violence in the colonies. Western debates over the age of consent of girls
rippled outwards to the Empire, taking on specific forms in regions where
child marriages were relatively common. Debates over the age of consent
were particularly marked in colonial India, and showed – on the surface at
least – a divide between British and local ideas on the control of female
sexuality.22 In India in 1891, a bill was introduced to the Legislative Council to
raise the age of consent for girls from 10 to 12 years (there was no serious
discussion of raising the age of consent to 16, as it was in England). The Bill
was designed to protect unmarried girls forced into prostitution and girls
married at a young age, but it was the latter that was controversial. Though
the Bill was not especially far reaching, and attempted not to ban child
marriage but rather to prevent consummation, it generated extraordinary
controversy. Despite the fact that in most regions a girl was not sent to the
home of her husband before puberty (at around the age of 12),23 the Bill
sparked outrage. Opposition to the Bill focused on its removal of the
authority of Indian men. Though the legislation was probably inspired by
the death of a 10-year-old bride after forced sex, and there were some media
discussions on the sexual assault of the child and the physical damage caused
by intercourse and childbirth, in the main the debates focused on male
rights.24 Opposition was most fierce in Bengal, where it was argued that
the Bill would interfere with a husband’s fundamental patriarchal rights of
access to his wife.25 The Age of Consent Bill is often seen as a defining
moment of Indian and especially Hindu nationalism, where the colonised
opposed imperial rule. The Bill, then, was not only about the age of
consent.26 Though the outcome was ostensibly a victory for the imperialists,
and in March 1891 the Indian Penal Code and the Code of Criminal Procedure

22 Dagmar Engels, ‘The Age of Consent Act of 1891: Colonial Ideology in Bengal’, South Asia
Research 3.2 (1983), 107–34, at 107.
23 Ibid., 110
24 On damage to girls, see Judith Whitehead, ‘Bodies of Evidence, Bodies of Rule: The Ilbert
Bill, Revivalism, and Age of Consent in Colonial India’, Sociological Bulletin 45.1 (1996),
47–9; on women’s opposition, see Padma Anagol-McGinn, ‘The Age of Consent Act (1891)
Reconsidered: Women’s Perspectives and Participation in the Child-Marriage
Controversy in India’, South Asia Research 12.2 (1992), 100–18.
25 Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), p. 140.
26 Ibid., p. 138.

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 Sexual Violence against Children

were amended to raise the age of consent to 12, historians have suggested the
law was of limited practical use.27

Family and Institutions

The relative invisibility of child brides in India under colonial rule is just one
example of the broader invisibility of sexual violence against children. Due to
the private nature of the abuse, child sexual assault was often unreported.
This was further complicated by the way the offender was imagined as
a ‘stranger’ and the subsequent focus on ‘stranger danger’. Offenders who
were policed and charged fitted the profile of a stranger rather than an
intimate.28 Yet, sexual assaults on children are most commonly perpetrated
by offenders already close to the victim. Familial sexual violence is amongst
the most hidden of all crimes, and we do not have good information for all
regions, even in contemporary times.29
Though some jurisdictions introduced specific laws against ‘incest’ in the
late 1800s and early 1900s, historical studies have suggested these were not
always utilised, and that familial sexual assault was treated no more seriously
than other forms of sexual violence against children.30 This was because it
was difficult to imagine a child would be hurt by a family member. The
family was and is supposed to be an orderly ‘safe’ space.31 There were
significant complications with uncovering, policing and prosecuting familial
sexual violence. In the nineteenth century, sexual violence in families was
generally displaced upon the poor, hiding abuse in other households. Across
all time periods, children could be accused of making up assaults, or victims
were accused of immorality or seduction. Domestic violence complicated
some cases, making them difficult or impossible to report. As Yorick Smaal
has noted, intrafamilial crimes were not always reported to police: ‘love, fear,
dependency, or malice could all motivate spousal (in)action’.32 Further, work

27 Engels, ‘Age of Consent’, 113. 28 Jackson, Child Sexual Abuse, pp. 31, 44–5, 46–50.
29 John Frederick, Sexual Abuse and Exploitation of Boys in South Asia – A Review of Research
Findings, Legislation, Policy and Programme Responses, Innocenti Working Paper 2010.02
(2009), pp. 1, 9.
30 Yorick Smaal, ‘Keeping It in the Family: Prosecuting Incest in Colonial Queensland’,
Journal of Australian Studies 37.3 (2013), 316–32; Lisa Featherstone and Andy Kaladelfos,
‘Hierarchies of Harm and Violence: Historicising Familial Sexual Violence in Australia’,
Australian Feminist Studies 29.81 (2014), 306–24.
31 See Linda Gordon, ‘The Politics of Child Sexual Abuse: Notes from American History’,
Feminist Review 28 (1988), 58; Elise Chenier, ‘The Natural Order of Disorder: Pedophilia,
Stranger Danger and the Normalising Family’, Sexuality & Culture 16 (2012), 172–86.
32 Smaal, ‘Keeping It in the Family’, 325.

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 LISA FEATHERSTONE

on familial sexual violence in the 1950s shows there was a reluctance to report
crimes against children when the perpetrator was the breadwinner for the
family. A mother might plead in court to protect her husband: without the
safety net of the welfare state, a family without a working male was vulner-
able to extreme poverty.33
The main reason for the secrecy surrounding sexual assault was, however,
probably a complex culture of silence around family violence. Linda Gordon
has suggested that there is a general reluctance to even acknowledge that
incest exists: this reluctance crosses police, jurors, mothers, teachers and
probably even perpetrators.34 The widespread taboo of incest makes the
resistance to acknowledge intrafamilial sexual assault a transnational phe-
nomenon. As Frederick reports in his study of South Asia, this continues to
the present: ‘the child’s security and rights at times may be secondary to
family honour, for public disgrace can have immense negative impacts on all
family members’.35
While familial sexual violence has been and continues to remain largely
hidden, there have been an increasing number of studies into the sexual abuse
of children within institutions, including schools, homes and orphanages, reli-
gious organisations and programmes such as the scouting movement. Recent
national inquiries have revealed that violence against children, including sexual
violence, was relatively common in the institutional context for much of the
twentieth century, and that these abuses were regularly if not routinely handled
‘in-house’, rather than being referred to the criminal justice system. As such,
perpetrators were rarely prosecuted, and victims were silenced.
Karen Terry’s team from John Jay College undertook a comprehensive
report into historical institutional child sexual abuse amongst the Catholic
clergy in the USA from 1950 to 2010, commissioned by the United States
Conference of Catholic Bishops. Findings suggest that priests cannot be
simply understood as ‘paedophiles’: only 5 percent had a specific sexual
interest in children. Instead, children were assaulted as they were available
as objects of sexual attention. Priests followed similar patterns to other sexual
offenders.36 They may have felt some emotional tie to the victim, combined
with a lack of meaningful relationships with adults. The offender may have

33 Featherstone and Kaladelfos, ‘Hierarchies of Harm’; Featherstone and Kaladelfos, Sex

Crimes in the Fifties.
34 Linda Gordon, Heroes of their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence, Boston
1880–1960 (London: Virago, 1989), p. 214.
35 Frederick, ‘Sexual Abuse and Exploitation’, 9.
36 See the model provided by David Finkelhor, Child Sexual Abuse: New Theory and Research
(New York: Free Press, 1984), pp. 53–68.

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 Sexual Violence against Children

been able to make ‘excuses or justifications’ to overcome their inhibitions.37

The reports also tabled the problematic responses from the Church: when
allegations of child sexual assault were made, there was generally internal
action. But ‘the response typically focused on the priest-abusers rather than
on the victims’.38 The emphasis was on the rehabilitation of the priest, rather
than on helping child victims.
In Ireland, the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (established 2000)
investigated all forms of child abuse including sexual assault, also with an
emphasis on institutional abuse. The Commission concluded that in Ireland
‘Sexual abuse was endemic in boys’ institutions’ in particular. As with the
Catholic Clergy in the USA, once abuse was uncovered, action was taken to
protect the offender, and the ‘damage to the children affected and the
[potential] danger to others were disregarded’.39
The studies into child sexual assaults within institutions highlight that
some children are more at risk of CSA than others. As Frederick has sug-
gested in his study in Asia, those most vulnerable include:
children with physical and mental disabilities, children from ethnic mino-
rities and marginalized populations, children living and working on the
street, children in conflict with the law, child refugees, children separated
from their families, children in places of conflict and natural disasters, sexual
minorities, children living in slums and the children of sex workers. Children
who belong to several of these groups are even more vulnerable.40

Here, we see the complex intertwining of various forms of vulnerability to

sexual violence, complicated by race, class, sexuality, ethnicity, poverty and
other forms of fundamental disadvantage.
Indigenous children were and are at greater risk. In Australia, the Bringing
Them Home Report (1997) detailed harrowing physical, emotional and sexual
abuse of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, who had been
removed from families and communities in an ugly attempt to assimilate
them into white Australia. As the National Inquiry noted, ‘Children in every
placement were vulnerable to sexual abuse and exploitation’: they were
sexually assaulted in domestic homes where they were sent as foster children

37 Karen J. Terry et al., The Causes and Context of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests in the
United States, 1950–2010 (Washington, DC: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops,
2011), pp. 4–5; Karen J. Terry, ‘Stained Glass: The Nature and Scope of Child Sexual Abuse
in the Catholic Church’, Criminal Justice and Behavior 35.5 (2008), 549–69.
38 Terry et al., Causes and Context, p. 4.
39 Ireland, The Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, www.childabusecommission.ie/
rpt/pdfs/CICA-Executive%20Summary.pdf, p. 21.
40 Frederick, ‘Sexual Abuse and Exploitation’, 5.

177
 LISA FEATHERSTONE

or servants; in work places and in institutions.41 Indigenous children in

Australia continue to be at risk of sexual violence at higher rates than non-
Indigenous children.42
In Canada, the Royal Commission into Aboriginal People (1996) made
similar findings. Though the focus was not sexual violence, the Report
indicated that children removed from Indigenous families suffered physical
abuse, emotional neglect and sexual assault in foster care and institutions.43
Further, Indigenous communities suffered various traumas including high
rates of domestic violence and sexual assault.44 Continuing problems of
violence against Indigenous children are currently being recorded in
a National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and
Girls.45 While not all nations have developed similar Commissions, it is likely
that further inquiries in postcolonial nations will reveal similar problems for
Indigenous children under colonial rule, and in racist regimes during and
after the decolonisation process. Suffering from the traumas of land loss and
removal from families and extended kin networks, alongside pseudo-
scientific ideas of racial decline, Indigenous children were amongst the
most susceptible to sexual assault, and despite legislation around CSA, the
state failed to protect them, and in some cases facilitated their abuse.

‘Strangers’
It is clear that children were vulnerable at home, and perhaps most vulner-
able in institutions, the very places supposed to guarantee their protection.

41 Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
Children from Their Families, Bringing Them Home (Canberra: Federal Government,
1997); see also Anna Haebich, Broken Circles: Fragmenting Indigenous Families 1800–2000
(Freemantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2000); Carol Edwards and Peter Read, The Lost
Children (Sydney: Doubleday, 1989). Specifically on sexual assault, see Victoria Haskins, ‘A
Better Chance? Sexual Abuse and the Apprenticeship of Aboriginal Girls under the NSW
Aborigines Protection Board’, Aboriginal History 28 (2004), 33–58.
42 See, for example, Judy Atkinson, Trauma Trails: Recreating Song Lines. The
Transgenerational Effects of Trauma in Indigenous Australia (Melbourne: Spinifex, 2002);
Hannah McGlade, Our Greatest Challenge: Aboriginal Children and Human Rights (Canberra:
Aboriginal Studies Press, 2012).
43 Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, vol. I, https://qspace
.library.queensu.ca/bitstream/1974/6874/5/RRCAP1_combined.pdf, p. 172; Report of the
Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, vol. I V , https://qspace.library.queensu.ca/bit
stream/1974/6874/2/RRCAP4_combined.pdf, pp. 3, 59.
44 Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, vol. I I I, https://qspace
.library.queensu.ca/bitstream/1974/6874/3/RRCAP3_combined.pdf, p. 13.
45 National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, www.aadnc-
aandc.gc.ca/eng/1448633299414/1448633350146.

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However, instead of focusing on these dual sites of danger for child sexual
abuse, by the mid twentieth century in North America attention had diverted
to the stranger, and particularly to the so-called ‘sexual psychopath’. Though
there was no recorded increase in the known cases of sexual violence or
murder of children in this period, sensationalised reports from media outlets
fed on domestic anxieties about child safety.46 Between the late 1930s and the
1950s, North American jurisdictions developed substantial legislation for
dealing with sexual assaults on children. As Chenier has suggested, these
laws were framed not only within the justice system but also within the
health system. It was increasingly suggested that the sexual deviant had
a mental health problem that could be treated through psychiatry, rather
than merely contained through incarceration.47 The laws generally allowed
a prisoner convicted of sexual crimes against children (and other crimes
considered to be particularly deviant including sodomy) to be held for an
indefinite period, supposedly to prevent reoffending, and for the treatment of
the offender.48
The new North American interest in the perpetrators of child sexual
assault has been seen as a side effect of the Cold War, with its corresponding
emphasis on normativity, family, heterosexuality and the wider linking of
domestic and national stability.49 Scientific and medical knowledge was
prioritised, with the increased presence of psychiatry in the courtrooms and
prisons of North America. As Chenier suggests, however, the legislation was
more concerned with managing a problem population – and managing the
social fears around sexual offenders – than about treating men who had sex
with children, or other troubling types of offenders.50 Further, by linking
them together as ‘deviant’, the legislation only consolidated the perceived
links between homosexuality and paedophilia, a slippage that operated in
both law and the popular imagination.
Though not all Western nations legislated specifically against the ‘sexual
psychopath’, the focus on ‘sexual deviants’ as certain kinds of men – eugenically

46 G. Chauncey, ‘The Postwar Sex Crime Panic’, in William Graebner (ed.), True Stories from
the American Past (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993), p. 163; see also Estelle B. Freedman,
‘“Uncontrolled Desires”: The Response to the Sexual Psychopath, 1920–1960’, Journal of
American History 74.1 (1987), 83–106.
47 Elise Chenier, ‘The Criminal Sexual Psychopath in Canada: Sex, Psychiatry and the Law
at Mid-Century’, Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 20.1 (2003), 76–7.
48 Jenkins, Moral Panic, p. 11.
49 Mary Louise Adams, The Trouble with Normal: Postwar Youth and the Making of
Heterosexuality (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997); Gary Kinsman, The
Regulation of Desire: Homo and Heterosexualities, 2nd edn (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1996).
50 Chenier, ‘Natural Order’.

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 LISA FEATHERSTONE

unsound, socially deviant – only served to hide the fact that most children were
(and are) sexually abused by those close to them: fathers, step-fathers, teachers,
neighbours, family friends. Through much of the twentieth century, the twin
myths of ‘stranger danger’ and the ‘sexual psychopaths’ erased the fact that
a site of real danger was in fact the domestic spaces of the family home.51 The
1970s and 1980s, however, saw a raft of substantial and enduring changes to
the ways we imagined sexual assault, in the West but also increasingly in the
developing world.

The So-Called ‘Discovery’ of Child Sexual Assault

Some historians have argued that this period saw the development of the
‘paedophile’ as a concept, an object of discourse and an identity.52 As we
have seen, there is a much longer history of concern about child sexual
assault. Yet it is true that there were changes to the ways the paedophile
was imagined and prioritised in this period. The renewed interest in child
sexual assault stemmed initially from two quarters. First, feminists in
many Western nations focused on the impact of male violence on
women. This was extended to thinking about the ways the patriarchal
family led to sexual abuse within the home and the broader culture.53
Second, the mid to late 1970s also saw an increased interest in broader
concepts of child abuse and neglect, of which sexual abuse was one
significant factor.
By the 1970s, a raft of individuals and groups were increasingly concerned
with CSA, including psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, sociologists,
activists and those working in both policing and criminal justice. Research by
sociologists and psychologists had a strong impact on emerging ideas on child
sexual abuse. David Finkelhor’s work Sexually Victimized Children drew
attention to the problem of child sexual abuse, offering theories on how
and why offenders might abuse, and a large-scale survey of victims, to
understand more fully how abuse occurred, and the impacts CSA had on
survivors.54 During the 1980s, feminists highlighted the multiple physical and

51 Ibid., 174.
52 Steven Angelides, ‘The Emergence of the Paedophile in the Late Twentieth Century’,
Australian Historical Studies 36.126 (2005), 272–95.
53 See for example, Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (London:
Martin Secker & Warburg, 1975), which has a chapter on child sexual assault. On the
history of rape more broadly, see Freedman, Redefining Rape; Joanna Bourke, Rape:
A History from the 1860s to the Present (London: Virago, 2007); and Chapter 7 in this volume.
54 David Finkelhor, Sexually Victimized Children (New York: Free Press, 1979).

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emotional traumas children might suffer, and the ways these were intensified
by the power relations between victim and offender. Feminism powerfully
advocated that victims could suffer ongoing trauma after sexual violence.
Rethinking concepts of harm acted to reorient broader understandings of
CSA, placing the victim’s experience at the centre of understandings of abuse.
Working alongside feminists, therapists and reformers were groups at the
other end of the political spectrum: conservatives and those espousing ‘family
values’. Child pornography in particular raised issues of exploitation, and
feminists, social workers and moralists were drawn together in opposition to
its manufacture and distribution.55 It was deeply ironic that radical and
conservative groups held oppositional views on gender and sexuality, yet
were united in their vision of child sexual assault as a major social problem,
and one which should be regulated by the state.
Yet not everyone believed CSA was necessarily harmful. In 1978, Henry
Kempe, an expert on child physical assault and ‘baby battering’, suggested
that a single, ‘non-violent’ assault would cause little harm to a child living in
a safe family home.56 Others were more radical in attempting to rework ideas
of liberation and sexual freedom. In the 1970s, a small number of psycholo-
gists and therapists claimed that child sexual activity and even incest might
have a positive impact on a child. They were suggesting that childhood sexual
activity was merely acting on a natural search for pleasure, and that,
performed with joy and comfort, it might help develop healthy future sexual
relationships.57 Most radically, controversial paedophile and pederast advo-
cate groups in Europe and the USA claimed that intergenerational sex was
not harmful or exploitative of children or teenagers. Most notable was the
North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA), founded in 1978 (it
still remains an online presence). NAMBLA argued that there were positive
benefits to a boy having a sexual relationship with an adult, including the
development of a healthy sexual identity.58 Similar self-justifying views have
been revealed in interviews with paedophiles.59 While this was hotly con-
tested in the media and in law enforcement, it is indicative of the wide-
ranging responses that child sexual activity could generate.

55 Jenkins, Moral Panic, p. 121. 56 Ibid., p. 104.

57 See Steven Angelides, ‘Feminism, Child Sexual Abuse, and the Erasure of Child Sexuality’,
GLQ 10.2 (2004), 145–6.
58 Mary De Young, ‘The World According to NAMBLA: Accounting for Deviance’, Journal
of Sociology and Social Welfare 16.1 (1989), 115–18.
59 Keith F. Durkin and Clifton D. Bryant, ‘Propagandizing Pederasty: A Thematic Analysis
of the On-Line Exculpatory Accounts of Unrepentant Pedophiles’, Deviant Behavior 20.2
(1999), 103–27, at 113–14, 119.

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 LISA FEATHERSTONE

Despite these alternative voices, by the mid 1980s CSA was widely recog-
nised in most Western nations as a serious social problem. In Britain, there
was a broad moral panic, largely driven by the media, around various forms
of CSA, including child pornography, paedophile rings and sex murders.
There was also an increasing awareness of the rates of intrafamilial sexual
assault. During the 1980s, reports of all forms of CSA in the United States
swelled, in part due to widening definitions. It had become commonplace
within the media to refer to the 22 per cent of Americans who had allegedly
been victims of child sexual assault, while in Britain it was claimed one in ten
children had been sexually assaulted.60 Though the reportage of CSA in the
media had become increasingly hysterical in many countries, this should not
distract us from the realities of sexual violence, and this period also saw an
increase in policing, social work and written resources for children, families
and caseworkers. Similar concerns were raised in many nations across the
world, and in 1989 the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child
was ratified. Article 19 required all participating states to provide ‘legislative,
administrative, social and educational measures’ to protect children against
multiple forms of abuse. Article 34 dealt more specifically with sexual exploi-
tation and sexual abuse, including sexual activity, prostitution and
pornography.61

Continuity and Change

Concern over CSA has escalated in the global South over recent decades, with
major aid agencies, governments and NGOs investigating the problem across
a number of regions. The recent focus on CSA in African nations, for example,
has been stimulated by high rates of HIV/AIDs amongst the young.62
Yet advocacy has had to take fundamentally different forms from the
West. In some regions, sexual intercourse with minors was and is accepted
practice, and can be institutionalised in the law and culture. Child marriages
remain common. Almost one in ten children in some countries in East Asia
are married by the age of 15.63 In Bangladesh, over a quarter of girls are

60 Jenkins, Moral Panic, pp. 129–32; Jenkins, Intimate Enemies, p. 102.

61 United Nations, Convention on the Rights of the Child, www.un.org/documents/ga/
res/44/a44r025.htm.
62 Kevin Lalor, ‘Child Sexual Abuse in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Literature Review’, Child Abuse
& Neglect 28.4 (2004), 439–60, at 448.
63 UNICEF, Violence against Children in East Asia and the Pacific: A Regional Review and
Synthesis of Findings. Strengthening Child Protection Systems Series 4 (Bangkok:
UNICEF EAPRO, 2014), p. x.

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 Sexual Violence against Children

married before the age of 15. Older teenagers, too, are regularly married: in
Laos, for instance, 37 per cent of children are married before they turn 18,
while in the Solomon Islands the figure is 28 per cent.64 In some areas in
Africa, the rate is even higher: in rural areas of northern Nigeria, it is
estimated that 90 per cent of girls are married before they are 12 years
old.65 The low age of female marriage in countries such as Nigeria has
been shown to be a primary indicator of both female poverty and reproduc-
tive ill-health.66 Despite the risks, sex with a minor is not necessarily read as
a criminal act, but rather marriage renders sexual activity both legal and
socially condoned.
Further, there remains an often hidden underbelly of criminalised beha-
viour against children, including sex trafficking, sex tourism, child porno-
graphy and related cyber crimes that cross the boundaries of the globe.
UNICEF has estimated that over a million children have been trafficked
annually to the West from countries in South and South-East Asia, South
and Central America, and eastern Europe, generally to work in the sex
industry. Other more conservative reports put the figure at around
600,000–800,000 children trafficked each year across international
borders.67 In addition, children may be forced into sex work in their own
country: it is estimated that around 2 million children and youths work in
the commercial sex trade in Asia alone.68 There is evidence too of growing
rings of child prostitution in Africa, including in Senegal, Ghana and the
Democratic Republic of the Congo.69 This is a particular problem in
conflict zones: in Sierra Leone, for example, it is estimated 37 per cent of
sex workers are aged under 15 years, and displaced children are particularly
at risk.70 Some regions have legislated in an attempt specifically to combat
sex tourism. In Thailand, for instance, the age of consent was initially
raised from 13 to 15 in 1987, but it was raised to 18 for girls working in
prostitution.71

64 Ibid., p. 28.
65 Annie Bunting, ‘“Authentic Sharia” as Cause and Cure for Women’s Human Rights
Violations in Northern Nigeria’, Hawwa (Leiden), 1–2 (2009), 157. Note that the age of
consent was recently raised to 18 in Nigeria under the Sexual Offences Bill (2015), but it is
too soon to know how this will be policed in remote regions.
66 Ibid., 152–70; UNICEF, Early Marriage: A Harmful Traditional Practice. A Statistical
Exploration (2005), www.unicef.org/publications/files/Early_Marriage_12.lo.pdf.
67 R. Barri Flowers, Prostitution in the Digital Age: Selling Sex from the Suite to the Street (Santa
Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2011), pp. 101, 103.
68 Ibid., p. 108. 69 M’Jid, Sexual Abuse and Exploitation, p. 16. 70 Ibid., p. 20.
71 Waites, Age of Consent, p. 49.

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 LISA FEATHERSTONE

Though sexual exploitation for commercial purposes and Female Genital

Mutilation (FGM) have garnered a lion’s share of attention in studies of abuse
in developing nations, continued emphasis needs to be placed on detecting,
policing and studying CSA in the domestic home and community. In many
regions in Africa, for instance, it remains impossible to quantify CSA.72
Similarly, some nations in the Asia-Pacific have no statistics on violence
against children.73 It is significant that, in some areas, repercussions for CSA
are handled within the community through local or traditional law, and no
formal records are kept.74 Further, there are broader issues, including lack of
qualified staff and low budgets for policing and prosecuting. In regions
suffering political, economic and/or social turmoil, investigation of CSA is
likely to be overlooked.75 And when it is investigated, once again, the
tendency to externalise abuse – onto the stranger and in this case the
trafficker – has acted to hide the dangers of CSA within families and neigh-
bourhood communities.

Conclusions
Child sexual assault is a continuing global problem in both the developed and
the developing world. It crosses nation, region, race, class and religion.
Historically, we are still uncovering information about CSA in the past,
through research in court transcripts, media reports and medical records.
Data are limited, and most studies focus on only a limited number of
jurisdictions, generally in the West, making it difficult to uncover beliefs,
practices and incident rates across much of the world. In more recent times,
there have been more systematic attempts to track CSA in many nations, and
we now have a useful statistical analysis or estimates for many countries. The
data, however, contain only reported cases. The many unreported cases, and
also instances that did not leave a trial record or a medical report, remain all
but impossible to track.
We can however trace broader attitudes towards child sexual assault, and
several themes emerge. In most regions of the world, sex with a child is
regarded as a heinous crime, with a serious impact on the young survivor.
There is a greater, and deeper, acknowledgement that CSA may lead to
substantive and long-lasting trauma for the victim. All in all, there is

72 Lalor, ‘Child Sexual Abuse’, 440. 73 UNICEF, Violence against Children, p. xi.
74 M’Jid, Sexual Abuse and Exploitation, p. 5.
75 P. Lachman, ‘Child Protection in Africa: The Road Ahead’, Child Abuse & Neglect 20.7
(1996), 543–7.

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a widespread discursive rejection of the sexual abuse of children. Yet debates

remain on what actually constitutes sexual assault, and what is socially sanc-
tioned in one area might be condemned or criminalised in another. Further, we
know there is a chasm between the discursive condemnation and the reality.
Girls and boys across the world continue to suffer various forms of sexual abuse
at home, in the neighbourhood, at school and at work. Some children are more
vulnerable than others, and may slip through the cracks or elude any frame-
works already in place. In the modern world, two centuries of legislative and
social change has not yet solved the problem of sexual violence against minors.

Bibliographical Essay
Primary sources on historical child sexual assault (CSA) are generally hidden in the
archives, largely in court records, but also in medical records and archives from social
workers, institutions and charities. Basic policing records are generally readily available in
annual government reports, but these give only an overview. Detailed analysis requires
archival research, in records that are generally not yet digitised.
The most readily available historical analysis on CSA in the past is from the Victorian
period, especially from Britain. The best overview is Louise Jackson, Child Sexual Abuse in
Victorian England (London: Routledge, 2000), which covers all key aspects of CSA.
A number of important studies examine girls and prostitution, including
Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late Victorian
London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). For an excellent overview of age of
consent, see Matthew Waites, The Age of Consent: Young People, Sexuality and Citizenship
(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
In the United States, CSA is insightfully covered in Estelle Freedman, Redefining Rape:
Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2012), while Stephen Robertson has produced a definitive study of boys and girls in
New York in his Crimes against Children: Sexual Violence and Legal Culture in New York City,
1880–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). In Canada, see
Constance Backhouse, Carnal Crimes: Sexual Assault Law in Canada, 1900–1975 (Toronto:
Osgoode Society, 2008). For Australia, Yorick Smaal has produced an excellent overview
of the scholarship, see ‘Historical Perspectives on Child Sexual Abuse, Part 1 and 2’, History
Compass 11.9 (2013), 702–26. There are far fewer sources on nineteenth-century child sexual
assault in Africa, the Asia-Pacific or South America. There is influential analysis on colonial
India, including but not only Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’
and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995).
There is not necessarily increased historical scholarship on CSA in the twentieth century.
There are moments of in-depth analysis: the mid-century legislation and media panic
around the ‘sexual psychopath’ is one key moment. A series of important works emerged
in this period: G. Chauncey, ‘The Postwar Sex Crime Panic’, in William Graebner (ed.), True
Stories from the American Past (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993); Estelle B. Freedman,
‘“Uncontrolled Desires”: The Response to the Sexual Psychopath, 1920–1960’, Journal of
American History 74.1 (1987), 83–106; Elise Chenier, Strangers in our Midst: Sexual Deviancy in

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Postwar Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008). New work on Australia in the
1950s shows, however, that the prioritising of psychiatric understandings of offenders was
not universal: see Lisa Featherstone and Andy Kaladelfos, Sex Crimes in the Fifties
(Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2016).
By the 1970s and 1980s, feminist research on CSA proliferated. Some, including
Linda Gordon’s Heroes of their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence,
Boston 1880–1960 (London: Virago, 1989) considered earlier historical periods, but were
heavily infiltrated with second-wave feminist ideas about violence and patriarchy. Further
work on CSA was more present centred, with sociologists and various therapists
producing qualitative and quantitative research, all being useful sources for the historian
of the recent past. Other important historical studies engaged with the 1970s and 1980s as
a transformative period, including Philip Jenkins, Moral Panic: Changing Concepts of the
Child Molester in Modern America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
More recently, there are multiple studies of CSA across all regions. UNICEF and WHO
have produced compelling studies that examine CSA in both micro and macro
perspectives, all of which are readily available online. Both WHO and UNICEF have
prioritised studies in regions that have not always been covered by scholarship, including
Africa, Asia and the Pacific. Importantly, governmental studies (including Australia’s
national inquiry the Bringing Them Home Report and Canada’s Royal Commission into
Aboriginal People) interrogate abuse of Indigenous children, showing sexual violence was
common in state-run institutions. Other interrogations into institutions, including most
notably the John Jay College study of the Catholic Church, highlight the vulnerability of
children, and the lack of care for individual victims, that have now become a hallmark of
a number of cultural institutions in the twentieth century. See Karen J. Terry et al., The
Causes and Context of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests in the United States, 1950–2010
(Washington, DC: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2011); K. Daly, Redressing
Institutional Abuse of Children (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
Overall, there has been some exceptional scholarship detailing a hidden past of CSA in
some nations. However, far more research is needed, in both developed and developing
nations, to uncover more about the extent of CSA; its policing and judicial approaches;
and outcomes for both offenders and victims.

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 9
Homicide in a Global Perspective:
Between Marginalisation and Resurgence
pieter spierenburg

This chapter focuses on homicide and serious interpersonal violence in

modern Europe, placing its character and incidence within a global context.
The word interpersonal serves to distinguish my subject from other types of
violence such as warfare or ethnic conflict, which are dealt with in different
sections of this volume. For a large part, this chapter continues the focus on
male-on-male violence present in my contribution to volume I II. However,
since the section as a whole deals with women, mainly with reference to
sexual violence and infanticide, I will occasionally step outside the bounds of
masculinity to pay attention to female perpetrators and victims, as in the
crime passionnel for example. More is known about the global context as we
approach the present. Yet, much research remains to be done for the non-
Western world and, to the extent that it has been done, overlap with the
chapters on colonial violence should be avoided. Thus, I will primarily
discuss quantitative and qualitative changes in European homicide, touching
on non-Western regions whenever this is appropriate from a comparative
perspective.
The conceptual pair of marginalisation and resurgence forms a guideline
for my discussion. These contrasting themes can be understood in a double
sense. In European history they constituted two phases following upon each
other. After 1800, as homicide had ceased to be a day-to-day affair in urban
and rural communities, the remaining acts of murder assumed the character
of sinister or sensational exceptions. However, from about 1970 on, homicide
was on the rise again, for reasons over which criminologists disagree. On the
other hand, this recent rise was relatively modest. As a consequence, the
conceptual pair of marginalisation and resurgence also makes sense synchro-
nically. Viewed that way, it refers to the contrast between Europe, where
lethal violence still is largely confined to a few unpacified sectors of society,
and the non-Western or postcolonial world, in many parts of which lethal
interpersonal violence is endemic.

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Interpersonal Violence up to the First World War

Let me start with the quantitative dimension. The reader is referred to my
contribution to volume II I for an extended discussion of the concept of
homicide rates and the long-term decline of murder in Europe. All homicide
rates mentioned here are per year and per 100,000 inhabitants of a given
geographic area. The declining trend continued in most of Europe into the
1950s or 1960s, but the bulk of the long-term decrease had already occurred by
1800. In nineteenth-century Europe the most conspicuous quantitative fea-
ture of interpersonal violence consisted of a division between an inner and an
outer zone. In the outer zone homicide rates remained relatively high, not
approaching those of the core area until the First World War. Scholars long
believed that the countries and regions with relatively high homicide rates
comprised a kind of ring around the core area, from Ireland to the
Mediterranean and from there to the Balkans and Russia into Finland. New
research, however, casts doubt on the violent character of Irish society even
in the early nineteenth century. Reliable figures for all homicides reported in
the country in the 1840s yield a rate of 1.97, while the rate comes at 2.83 in the
slightly less reliable police statistics for the 1830s. The mean of 2.4 lies within
the range characteristic for the core countries of Europe at the time. Pre-
Famine Ireland’s undeserved reputation as an extremely violent society
resulted from the preoccupation of travellers and political writers with
a few episodes of agrarian and sectarian unrest.1
Southern Europe, in particular the Mediterranean fringe, certainly
belonged to the outer zone. On two islands off the western coast of Greece
the homicide rate stood at 12.4 in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Within Italy the incidence of violence increased per region from north to
south during all of the nineteenth century. Roman homicide rates were
between 10 and 12 from the 1850s to 1880s, around 8 until 1910 and just
under 5 on the eve of the Great War. Corsica, where feuding remained
rampant long after 1800, probably was the champion in murder. The island’s
homicide rate fluctuated between 26 and 64, measured by five-year averages,
between 1800 and 1850, then declined, went up again after 1875 and still stood
at 14 in the 1890s.2

1 Richard McMahon, Homicide in pre-Famine and Famine Ireland (Liverpool: Liverpool

University Press, 2013), pp. 12–15, 20–1, 162.
2 Stephen Wilson, Feuding, Conflict and Banditry in Nineteenth-Century Corsica (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 16. Slightly different rates in Roger V. Gould,
Collision of Wills: How Ambiguity about Social Rank Breeds Conflict (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2003), p. 156.

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 Homicide in a Global Perspective

Estimates for the core countries of Europe, 1800–1914, fall within a range
from about 1 to about 4. The continuation of the long-term trend of decline is
visible mainly when we contrast this period, continent-wide, with the years
1920–70. For the rest, the national homicide rates in the inner zone in the long
nineteenth century fluctuated without a clear or common pattern, except for
a slight rise in several countries on the eve of the First World War. The
collection of national statistics of crime, which per country started off at
various points in time during the first half of the nineteenth century, actually
means a disadvantage for the quantitative study of murder. These statistics
are based on prosecution records and hence represent an undercount. In
many countries it was not until the end of the nineteenth or even the
beginning of the twentieth century that statistics of the causes of death –
a source equally reliable as early modern body inspection reports – began to
be collected. For the intervening period, available homicide rates are usually
based on criminal statistics.
There are practically no data for the non-Western world to compare the
pre-1914 European homicide rates with. The only reliable figures I have found
so far are based on the governor’s reports of the Mexican states of Hidalgo
(1869–72), Oaxaca (ten years between 1869 and 1898) and Estado de México
(1877–9, 1889–93). Homicide rates in these three regions averaged 58.6, 27.6
and 30.2 annually.3 These figures suggest that late nineteenth-century Mexico
had a rather high incidence of serious interpersonal violence, even when
compared to the European outer zone. The available homicide rates for
Brazil (fluctuating between 2.8 and 5.9, 1830s–1880s) and Japan (between 2.8
and 3.6, 1890s–1910s) are probably from statistics of prosecuted cases.4
Despite the relatively low homicide rates prevailing in the European core
area, the qualitative dimension of interpersonal violence featured one notor-
ious continuity with the early modern period: the formal duel. It was alive
and well once more in the hundred years from the defeat of Napoleon until
the First World War. This is true, moreover, for core-area countries such as
France or Germany as well as representatives of the outer zone such as Italy
or Russia. In England the duel flourished only in the first half of the nine-
teenth century, while the Dutch continued a tradition of rejecting it. As in the
early modern period, the duel rested on the principle that an affront to male
honour required a challenge to a fight. Hence, the continued fashion for

3 William B. Taylor, Drinking, Homicide and Rebellion in Colonial Mexican Villages (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1979), pp. 179–80.
4 Joerg Baten et al., ‘Personal Security since 1820’, in Jan Luiten van Zanden et al. (eds.),
How Was Life? Global Well-Being since 1820 (Paris: OECD, 2014), pp. 139–58, at 150.

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 PIETER SPIERENBURG

duelling in nineteenth-century Europe implied a temporary setback to two

long-term historical developments: the pacification of the elites and the
spiritualisation of honour (whereby male honour came to be based on
inner virtue instead of physical bravado).
As before 1800, the formal duel was socially exclusive. Only members of an
elite could challenge each other and you were morally obliged to accept the
challenge only from your peer. For the first time, however, this elite included
a substantial number of bourgeois men, such as politicians or university
professors, next to nobles and military officers who were the traditional
practitioners. As the century progressed, the elite ‘entitled to satisfaction’
was gradually broadened to include journalists, for example. Another differ-
ence with the preceding centuries is even more crucial. These latter-day duels
involved decidedly less violence than their predecessors. If pistols were the
weapons agreed upon, the adversaries often strove to miss each other or
shoot at an opponent’s feet. After a few bullets had been exchanged, the
seconds declared the honour of both parties saved. Duels with rapiers were
regularly fought ‘at first blood’. A satirical cartoon depicted a physician
examining a duelist during a time-out, finding no blood and offering the
man to secretly cut him with the scalpel, so that the confrontation would be
finished. Thus, the duels of this last period were rarely lethal, which explains
why they could coincide with relatively low homicide rates. The duel died in
the trenches of the First World War.
Outside Europe the duel was practised primarily by men with European
roots. It was frequent among the planter class in the southern United States in
the antebellum period. The elites of several Latin-American countries, nota-
bly Mexico and Argentina, took up duelling around 1870 in imitation of their
European counterparts. Duels there were often related to political competi-
tion and usually led to no more than minor injuries. This fashion lasted until
about 1930.5 Finally, duelling was practised by men from the colonial elites in
the age of imperialism. Dutchmen in Indonesia, for example, were decidedly
more keen on it than their peers in the homeland.6 It appears that the colonial
setting, which brought violence of all kinds with it, also made European men
more eager to challenge each other to a duel.
Although a conspicuous feature, the formal duel everywhere and always
represented just a small part of all interpersonal violence. Can we identify

5 Salvatore in Eric A. Johnson, Ricardo D. Salvatore and Pieter Spierenburg (eds.), Murder
and Violence in Modern Latin America (Chichester: Wiley, 2013), pp. 260–3.
6 Ignaz Matthey, Eer verloren, al verloren: Het duel in de Nederlandse geschiedenis (Zutphen:
Walburg Pers, 2012), pp. 350–80.

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types and patterns within the majority of cases in nineteenth-century Europe?

From the perspective of intercontinental comparison, perhaps the most
important characteristic was a negative one. There were no slaves; every-
body was free, except the serfs on the continent’s Russian fringe until 1861.
There were no racial minorities either; with few exceptions, everyone was
white. No colonial elite faced a native majority; even if we accept the theory
of internal colonialism, this concept implies two populations that are sepa-
rated geographically. More generally, the effect of ethnic divisions on serious
violence was limited. Within Europe’s nation states the extension of school-
ing promoted the homogenisation of language and culture, while interna-
tional geographic mobility was limited still. The process of ethnic cleansing in
east and south-east Europe, beginning around 1870, has been amply docu-
mented, but we know much less about the character of interpersonal vio-
lence in the region’s multi-ethnic cities before that date, except for the
presupposition that everyone lived happily together. In Europe’s inner
zone, ethnic violence was not entirely absent. Conflicts between natives
and the Irish in England, exacerbated by religious difference, abounded,
especially in Liverpool. In the South of France Italian immigrants were
targeted. Incidents often took the form of collective rather than interpersonal
violence. This was certainly so with anti-Semitic violence, increasing towards
the close of the nineteenth century, although a few isolated murders against
the background of Jewish–Christian tensions have been reported as well.
As a positive characteristic, the great majority of fights among European
men took place within a working-class setting, whether urban or rural. This
sealed a development which had already begun before 1800 with the social
differentiation of male fighting. For the inner zone alone, the disappearance
of the knife constituted another new development. Knife fighting had been
extremely common in early modern Europe. In England, as early as the
beginning of the nineteenth century, lower-class men most often fought with
their fists only. The formality of such fights increased as well. The opponents
shook hands before they started off and the spectators formed a ring. Often
there was talk of seconds and distinct rounds. The duel – as it may well be
called – ended when one combatant gave up or was unable to continue. The
participants in such fights appear to have shared a growing conviction that it
was un-English to use anything other than your bare hands. In fact, it was un-
core-European. Throughout the inner zone, knife fighting either was already
a rarity by 1800 or had largely disappeared after mid century, although the
formality of English fist fights remained unreported elsewhere. Among men
prepared to use violence, many shared an understanding that a confrontation

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should not turn too dangerous, refraining from handling knives in particular.
Spatial segregation enhanced the social exclusiveness of fighting. Whereas in
the early eighteenth century respectable men had often been obliged to
defend themselves, after 1800 they were less likely to meet their social
inferiors. Physical confrontations were confined even more strictly to work-
ing-class neighbourhoods and rural villages.
Remarkably, gun violence in the inner zone also remained limited. Several
countries witnessed a gap of three to four decades between the widespread
availability of handguns and the introduction of legislation restricting own-
ership of them. That was the case in England, which introduced prohibitive
legislation in 1920. Mauser and the Belgian firm of Browning increased their
production for the German market from the mid 1890s, while the number of
ads for handguns increased likewise. By 1911 the national government was
concerned enough to ask the country’s states to report incidents and
announce their opinion about regulation, but the war interrupted the legis-
lative process. Regulation had to wait until 1928. Significantly, the incidents
reported in 1911 consisted mostly of accidents, when adolescents had taken
a gun with them to school to impress their fellows, for example.7 A direct link
between the modest increase in homicide rates in several countries on the
eve of the First World War and the availability of handguns has not been
demonstrated so far. It is quite possible that firearms were too expensive for
the majority of working-class men who did most of the fighting.
Within Europe’s outer zone, whatever the availability of guns, the knife
continued to be a popular weapon in male-on-male confrontations in most
places throughout the nineteenth century. Popular duels, akin to those of the
early modern period, have been studied in depth for several places from the
Mediterranean to Finland. All these places had high homicide rates; in
Finland a neat correlation existed between a province’s homicide rate and
the prevalence of knife fighting. Thus, it is highly likely that the entire level of
murder throughout the outer zone owed much to the continuation of the use
of knives as weapons there. Conversely, the lower level of murder in the
inner zone owed much to the renunciation of knives. Men fought with their
fists only, which was rarely lethal. When an incident amounted to murder,
this was often done with any kind of instrument at hand. Homicide ceased to
be a day-to-day event. Consequently, the image of murder came to be

7 Dagmar Ellerbrock, ‘Gun Violence and Control in Germany, 1880–1911’, in

Wilhelm Heitmeyer et al. (eds.), Control of Violence: Historical and International
Perspectives on Violence in Modern Societies (New York: Springer, 2011), pp. 185–212.

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dominated by a few remarkable types. One of these consisted of the exploits

of serial killers, which I will discuss later. Another was the crime passionnel.
There is no official definition for the crime passionnel; a murder or attack
falls into this category by virtue of its designation as such by contemporaries.
This happened most often in France; hence the French name. The act always
had to do with love, often extramarital. Murders or attacks were labelled as
passionate in particular when the target was either a lover who had broken
off the affair or a rival in love. The label referred not to the intense mutual
affection that had once prevailed but to the moment of blind rage in which
the perpetrator supposedly had acted. Juries (and the public they repre-
sented), psychiatrists and criminologists were the parties that helped shape
the crime passionnel. The first and third parties had a sympathetic under-
standing for the offenders in question, considering the risk of repeat,
moreover, negligible. The second group, increasingly called upon as forensic
experts as the century progressed, pleaded temporary insanity. As
a consequence passionate killers got off with relatively light sentences. In
the public imagination crime passionnel was a typically female crime, but in
fact from three-fourths to four-fifths of the perpetrators were men. This still
means an over-representation of women when compared to overall violent
crime. It was only women, moreover, who used the method of throwing
vitriol (sulphuric acid) at former lovers and often at their new sweethearts
when caught with them. This custom was largely restricted to France, but
crime passionnel overall had a truly international dimension. This is exempli-
fied by the case of Maria Tarnovskaia, a Russian noblewoman who had
a series of affairs with men from Kiev to Venice between 1903 and 1910. She
got each of them so jealous that all but the last one killed their rivals.8 The age
of crime passionnel began in the 1870s, when all three parties that produced the
label were in place. It ended around 1930, when popular and scientific
sympathies waned.
When examining interpersonal violence world-wide up to 1914 from
a qualitative perspective, we can begin by turning Europe’s negative char-
acteristic around. Racial tensions, colonial dominance, ethnic conflict or,
until its abolition, slavery – one or more of these factors – deeply affected
the pattern of homicide and assault. Even China had to accept the introduc-
tion of extraterritorial zones in its port cities, where Europeans acted as
masters. Studies that directly address interpersonal violence in the non-

8 Louise McReynolds, Murder most Russian: True Crime and Punishment in Late Imperial
Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), pp. 171–200.

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Western world up to 1914, however, mostly cover limited regions within

countries and sometimes for brief periods. Consequently, it is difficult to
deduce larger patterns, valid for broader world regions, from these studies.
We know little about the class character of homicide and assault, for exam-
ple, although one study maintains that all violence – thus not just interperso-
nal – in Brazil throughout the nineteenth century and beyond served to
maintain elite dominance.9 This raises the question of the distinction
between interpersonal and other types of violence, also in colonial settings.
French ruthlessness in Algeria in the 1830s and 1840s, for example, has been
amply described; among other actions, natives hiding in caves were smoked
to death.10 There is nothing wrong with calling this murder, but it was also
part of establishing colonial rule and as such probably belongs to another
section of this volume.
Let me briefly touch on two world regions, independent Latin America
and colonial India and Indonesia. A study of several local courts in Bahia,
1780–1840, bridges the gap between the colonial period and Brazilian inde-
pendence. These courts dealt mainly with cases of violence. No fewer than
two-thirds of all accused murderers were free men of colour, whereas
whites accounted for a mere 6 per cent; the others were slaves. Race
mattered indeed! Honour played a role in nearly all cases and some
involved group murder out of revenge.11 In the backlands of Fortaleza, in
the subsequent four decades, traditional male honour equally played a role
in violence, whether it concerned conflicts over access to land or with rivals
in love. Whereas rich men derived a large part of their honour from status
and wealth, poor sertanejos could maintain a reputation with physical
strength only. Alternatively, men channelled their energies into poetic
contests.12 Murders were frequent around this time even among the con-
victs on the island of Fernando de Noronha, 350 km off the Brazilian coast.13
Frontier areas of Latin America witnessed both interpersonal and collective
violence. One study narrates the hostilities between the Mexican presidio of
Janos and a nearby Chiricahua community, which started well before 1800

9 R. S. Rose, Beyond the Pale of Pity: Key Episodes of Elite Violence in Brazil to 1930 (San
Francisco: Austin & Winfield, 1998).
10 William Gallois, A History of Violence in the Early Algerian Colony (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2013), pp. 4–5.
11 Patricia Ann Aufderheide, ‘Order and Violence: Social Deviance and Social Control in
Brazil, 1780–1840’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Minnesota, 1976, pp. 213–14.
12 Martha S. Santos, Cleansing Honor with Blood: Masculinity, Violence and Power in the
Backlands of North-East Brazil, 1845–1889 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012).
13 Peter Beattie, Punishment in Paradise: Race, Slavery, Human Rights and a Nineteenth-
Century Brazilian Penal Colony (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).

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and continued after an international border officially separated them.

Mutual violence effectively ended with Geronimo’s final surrender to the
United States in 1886.14 Banditry, finally, was rampant in many rural parts of
Latin America in the post-independence period.
Interpersonal violence in a colonial setting has been studied for British India in
particular. Here, too, the racial difference deeply affected relations between
colonisers and colonised. British people of all social classes routinely called
Indians blacks or niggers. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, numerous
incidents were reported of Europeans who had shot natives and claimed in court
that, while hunting, they had accidentally mistaken them for monkeys, birds or
buffalos. Courts usually credited such claims with an acquittal. A considerable
part of coloniser-on-native violence took place within the context of labour
relations, such as on Assam’s tea plantations. Employers and managers treated
Indian labourers as if they were slaves, disciplinarily beating them with some-
times lethal result. In such cases, too, the killers got off lightly in court, which was
the reverse of when a native had attacked a European.15 Whereas Elisabeth
Kolsky suggests that racist violence and judicial condonement of it in India were
as high in 1914 as they had been in 1800, Martin Wiener sees a change of attitude
beginning at the turn of the twentieth century.16
Male honour loomed large in assault and murder not only in Latin
America but also in many colonial societies. To whites in British India,
honour mattered more than to their countrymen in the metropolis, and it
was equally important for natives. The penal code that the English intro-
duced in India was modelled after their own, except for acknowledging
a large spectrum of insulting words and gestures as signs of provocation
that reduced a charge from murder to culpable homicide.17 This legal situa-
tion also benefited Indians who had killed fellow natives. Traditional honour
was likewise important for many native men on the islands of Dutch
Indonesia. The colonial government often leaned on violent entrepreneurs
for support, but such tough men also turned against Europeans with robbery
raids or setting sugar cane fields on fire.18 Compared to repression and anti-

14 Lance R. Blyth, Chiricahua and Janos: Communities of Violence in the Southwestern

Borderlands, 1680–1880 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012).
15 Elizabeth Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2010), pp. 18, 142–84, 191.
16 Wiener’s review of Kolsky in English Historical Review 126.521 (2011), 987–9.
17 Martin J. Wiener, An Empire on Trial: Race, Murder and Justice under British Rule, 1870–1935
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 157.
18 Pieter Spierenburg, Violence and Punishment: Civilizing the Body through Time
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), p. 70; Marieke Bloembergen, De geschiedenis van de
politie in Nederlands Indië (Amsterdam: Boom, 2009), pp. 71–136.

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colonial resistance, native-on-native violence gets less attention in the histor-

ical literature. In cases of inter se killing among Australian Aboriginals, the
culprit usually enjoyed mercy, escaping capital punisment, for reasons of
‘tribal custom’.19

The Trough of Violence in Europe

For European violence, the five decades from the 1920s to the 1960s constitute
a unity because overall homicide rates declined from the nineteenth-century
level, reaching their lowest point towards the end of this period. Once more,
there is no reason to assume a similar chronological unity for the non-
Western world, although decolonisation had been achieved in many parts
by 1970. Within Europe, the decline meant first of all that the difference
between the inner and outer zones lessened; in particular, Mediterranean
areas joined the core. By the 1950s and 1960s homicide rates converged in the
countries west of the Iron Curtain, being well under 1 per 100,000 in most.
Surprisingly perhaps, the two world wars had little lasting effect on inter-
personal violence. In the last year of the first and for one or two years
afterwards several countries witnessed a rise. In Belgium, for example, the
temporary breakdown of the state’s monopoly of force led to a resurgence of
traditional banditry. From 1920 on, homicide rates everywhere returned to
the prewar level or below, despite contemporary fears that life in the trenches
had degraded the men who came back. Similar things happened during and
just after World War II. A rise in 1943–5 was due primarily to the activities of
resistance movements. The aftermath peak was more modest than in 1919,
except in Italy where some 10,000 fascists were eliminated extra-legally. Soon,
however, all of Europe west of the Iron Curtain witnessed the trough of
violence. Although medical expertise certainly improved between 1920 and
1970, the effect of this improvement on the decline of homicide probably was
modest.
As we advance through the period 1920–70, non-European homicide rates
are increasingly available. We know them for the ‘Western Offshoots’ since
the beginning of the twentieth century; they are similar to European rates in
Canada and Australia but much higher in the United States. With Africa still
a blank spot on the chart, Latin America begins to emerge as the leading
continent in violence. In Mexican causes-of-death statistics the homicide rate

19 Mark Finnane, ‘Settler Justice and Aboriginal Homicide in Late Colonial Australia’,
Australian Historical Studies 42.2 (2011), 244–59.

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fluctuates annually between 40 and 67 from 1927 until 1952; from 1953 (nearly
38) it decreases until a low of just under 10 in 1969: still higher than in the
United States at the time. The Argentinian homicide rate averaged 6 in the
1960s. A surprisingly low rate of 1.1, on the other hand, is reported for Egypt
in the 1950s and 1960s. It is not always clear, however, whether such rates are
based on causes of death or prosecutions only. Indian national homicide
rates, fluctuating between 2.5 and 3 in the 1950s and 1960s, were collected by
its federal police from reported cases and arrests.20
Turning to qualitative aspects of European violence, we must once more
begin with a negative characteristic. Homicide rates declined further because
fewer fights ended lethally. The relative peacefulness of working-class males,
in particular the renunciation of settling conflicts with knives, intensified and
became geographically more widespread. This development was due in part
to conscious campaigns to change the behaviour of the rough sections of the
working classes, through housing projects for example. In the 1950s and 1960s
knives more often were the weapon of choice for men who killed their
female partners than for those attacking other men. This coincided with
the culmination of a centuries-long trend by which murders in intimate
relationships accounted for an ever larger proportion of total homicide. By
the mid twentieth century they made up between a third and nearly half in
several European countries. With the fascination for crime passionnel gone,
moreover, murders of intimates or rivals in love received equal public
condemnation as other types of homicide. Murder had become a marginal
phenomenon.
The marginalisation of murder was symbolised most tellingly in the rise of
and subsequent fascination with serial killers. They were not new in the
period examined in this section. Serial killing appeared on the European
scene from the mid nineteenth century onward, first in France – that is, if we
define the perpetrators as murderers who select specific types of victims for
sadistic pleasure, often with a sexual element, and exclude serial poisoners
with a financial motive who have been attested since the seventeenth
century. Whereas poisoning could remain undetected for some time, the
‘modern’ type of murder sequence simply was impossible to carry out in
a preindustrial world where all neighbours intensely supervised each other.
During the interwar period this phenomenon underwent a geographic

20 Baten et al., ‘Personal Security since 1820’, 149–50; Pablo Piccato in Johnson et al.,
Murder and Violence in Modern Latin America, pp. 104–25, at 111; Baldev Raj Nayar,
Violence and Crime in India: A Quantitative Study (Delhi: Macmillan Company of
India, 1975), pp. 1–30.

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spread, most notably to Weimar Germany. Its most notorious serial killer
was Fritz Haarmann, who, in Hanover between 1918 and 1924, at the point of
his orgasm bit through the throats of the male adolescents he had seduced.
The opportunity for seduction offered itself because the police had recruited
him as an informer and unofficial detective. For the phenomenon of serial
killing, our 1970 dividing line has less meaning than for overall homicide
The second marginal phenomenon, which inculcated both fascination and
fear, was the underworld, as it came to be called. The underworld appeared
in Europe’s largest cities around 1900, with a concentration of prostitution,
gambling and the homes of habitual criminals in a few neighbourhoods. It
became firmly established during the interwar period in cities such as
London, Berlin and Marseilles, although these did not match the reputation
of Chicago. Indeed, in Europe after particularly notorious incidents, the
media and the public alarmingly spoke of an American situation. This
happened in Berlin in 1928, when a participant in a massive fight between
two rival gangs had died and a host of club members escorted the victim to
his funeral in cars. The media concluded that the underworld was motorised,
which enabled them to perform quick raids into wealthy neighbourhoods.
Despite driving cars, most criminal gangs of the interwar years were based
locally and this largely remained so in the 1950s and 1960s.
As I have posited earlier, the hippie movement of the second half of the
1960s was the cultural corollary to the trough in violence. Its encompassing
youth culture was at home in Europe no less than in the United States.
Whereas young men for ages had been the main perpetrators of physical
violence, hippies, male and female, renounced it and proclaimed love.
Although like-minded youth groups preceded them, these had consisted
overwhelmingly of young men and women with a middle-class background.
The hippie movement was the first to attract a significant part of working-
class youths. As it turned out, this ideal of peacefulness was short-lived, but
we must turn to the pre-1970 non-Western world first. While some hippies
proclaimed a cultural revolution, non-violent of course, this term soon
became associated with a wave of massive violence in China. This semantic
switch symbolises the diverging experiences of the West and the rest.
Unfortunately, the semantic switch is also a symbol for the state of
research (in languages accessible to this author). Qualitative evidence for
violence in the non-Western world, 1920–70, abounds, but it refers over-
whelmingly to instances of mass violence or to colonial repression. Thus, one
study with violence as first word in the title, covering European colonies
world-wide during the interwar period, deals in fact with the policing of

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labour unrest. The author argues that economic interests rather than political
concerns determined when and where police forces were called upon.21 One
exception, in which the focus is on interpersonal violence, concerns the
African cases in which Indigenous beliefs played a facilitating role.
Especially notorious were the medicine murders in Lesotho, tried between
1895 and 1969, whose perpetrators believed that their victims’ organs gave
them extra strength. The murders masked as leopard attacks in Nigeria and
Ghana, 1945–8, were probably cases of revenge but the killers took advantage
of beliefs about were-animals.
Martin Wiener’s study of murder in various British colonies, extending to
1935, focuses on the legal treatment of Westerners who had killed non-whites.
In British Honduras, now Belize, the colonial elite mingled with immigrants
from the southern United States. One of them, an Alabama-born lumber mill
owner, searched the home of his black employee for stolen goods in 1934,
finding none but yet shooting the tenant to death. The owner claimed that his
gun fired accidentally but several black witnesses testified that he had
threatened the victim. This resulted in a life sentence, of which the con-
demned eventually served two and a half years.22 For Argentina, finally,
a process of refinement has been observed which involved the retreat of
the rough gaucho as a cultural hero. The ‘new guard’ of tango lyric writers,
active in the 1920s and 1930s, wrote about independent women and romantic
men, whereas the ‘old guard’, active 1880–1920, had glorified honorific men
who subjugated women and often were skilled knife fighters.23

The Globalization of Violence

For the period from about 1970 to the present we can finally speak of a world
history of interpersonal violence. This is due primarily to the growing
geographic integration which we refer to as globalisation. Among other
things, this has brought with it an increased interlocking of international
criminal networks. But let me start again with the European quantitative
figures. Although I have occasionally referred to Russia, I will disregard
eastern Europe for now. It underwent its own peculiar development due to

21 Martin Thomas, Violence and Colonial Order: Police, Workers and Protest in the European
Colonial Empires, 1918–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
22 Wiener, Empire on Trial, pp. 222–9.
23 Eduardo P. Archetti, Masculinities: Football, Polo and the Tango in Argentina (Oxford:
Berg, 1999), pp. 128–60.

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the collapse of the Soviet Union, but it should be noted that in 1989, just
before this collapse, the Russian homicide rate stood at a high 10.6 already.24
Two statistical studies of European homicide share this focus on the area
west of the (former) Iron Curtain. Each examines fifteen countries, with
fourteen the same in both.25 Since they situate the beginning of the rise in
homicide in 1960 and 1965 respectively, which would contradict my 1970
turning point, this matter should be cleared first. In fact, in Eisner’s table per
decade, 1840–2004, the 1960s have the lowest mean homicide rate (0.77) as to
0.79 in the 1950s. Only the non-country of Scotland shows a significant reverse
process of 0.6 in the 1950s to 1.2 in the 1960s.26 Aebi and Linde’s table begins in
1960, breaking the figures down to five-year periods and the authors distin-
guish a geometric mean from a mean. The first is 0.69 for 1960–4 and 0.68 for
1965–9; the second is 0.86 for 1960–4 and 0.79 for 1965–9. This suggests that no
upward rise occurred during the 1960s. The two means of Aebi and Linde,
moreover, are highest in 1990–4 (1.27 and 1.36), after which they decrease to
0.87 and 0.93 in 2005–10. Together these figures suggest a rise in homicide
rates in western Europe that began around 1970 and broke off by the mid
1990s. The decline following on it did not yet take the level back to that of the
1950s and 1960s.
Two methodological problems, however, complicate the issue again. First,
the figures cited are based primarily on causes-of-death statistics, a good
source. Since the 1990s, however, police counts of bodies found murdered are
performed systematically and are available for many European countries. In
most of them – though not in all – the police register more homicides than
captured in the medical statistics. In 2001–3 the resulting rates diverged
markedly for the United Kingdom (2.2 vs. 0.4); for the Netherlands this was
1.4 vs. 1.2.27 In the latter case we know the reason why. Police counts exclude

24 Roderic Broadhurst, Thierry Bouhours and Brigitte Bouhours, Violence and the
Civilising Process in Cambodia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 5.
25 Manuel Eisner, ‘Modernity Strikes Back? A Historical Perspective on the Latest
Increase in Interpersonal Violence, 1960–1990’, International Journal of Conflict and
Violence 2.2 (2008), 289–316, at 297 (table 3); Marcelo F. Aebi and Antonia Linde, ‘The
Persistence of Lifestyles: Rates and Correlates of Homicide in Western Europe from
1960 to 2010’, European Journal of Criminology 11 (2014), 552–77, at 576 (table 3). The figures
cited here are from these tables. Eisner lists in fact seventeen countries, but Hungary is
represented for a few decades only and he distinguishes England and Wales from
Scotland, whereas Aebi and Linde take the UK as one country. Only Eisner includes
Germany, which Aebi and Linde exclude due to the unavailability of the GDR rates.
Only Aebi and Linde include Greece.
26 Eisner bases the chronology of 1960–92 for the rise on a calculation of turning points
per country (table 4, p. 305).
27 Paul Nieuwbeerta and Gerlof Leistra, Dodelijk geweld: moord en doodslag in Nederland
(Amsterdam: Balans, 2007), p. 28.

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and medical statistics include Dutch residents victimised abroad; conversely,

police counts include and medical statistics exclude non-residents victimised
within the Netherlands. If this is the same in all other European countries
where police counts are higher than medical counts, the Dutch murder
surplus is in fact a western European surplus: fewer western Europeans are
killed outside the EU than non-EU residents within it.
The second methodological problem is the old one of changes in the ability
and opportunity of doctors to save the lives of injured persons. Most homi-
cide scholars acknowledge it but few appear to have made an attempt to
estimate its effect on the rates. The capacity to save lives certainly increased
between 1970 and the present, for example through the spread of hospitals
and, more recently, the introduction of fully equipped ambulances.
Obviously, this means that the real rise in potentially lethal aggression was
steeper than the figures indicate at first sight. Next to the growth of medical
knowledge and infrastructure, a third factor, the speed with which assistance
can be mobilised, is often overlooked. I have pointed earlier to the temporal
coincidence of the decrease in homicide rates since the mid 1990s and the
spread of mobile phones in Europe. These enable friends of an assault victim
to call upon assistance at the spot instead of going to a phone, or even lone
victims to reach for their pocket instead of just dying. Could it be that the
spread of phones explains part or even all of the decline in homicide between
1995 and 2010? As I am writing, no one has yet attempted to investigate this.
If we trust the available figures for the moment, the question of what
caused the rise and subsequent decline – partial, because not back to the level
of the 1960s – becomes pertinent. Eisner as well as Aebi and Linde relegate to
the dustbin the explanations offered by a number of other scholars. Several
authors, for example, focused on their own country and tried to explain the
incidence of homicide by national peculiarities, whereas the trends were
Europe-wide. All standard economic predictors of homicide, moreover,
correlate only weakly or not at all with the trends. Instead, both articles
seek an explanation in terms of changes in lifestyle or way of life. In contrast
to my thesis, they suggest that the lifestyle which initiated the rise in
homicide was that of the hippies. Their renunciation of traditional bonds
and the bourgeois family supposedly made them more aggressive, despite
their proclamation of love. This argument at least makes it understandable
that the authors in question want the rising trend to begin before 1970. In my
view, however, the crucial change in lifestyle was away from that of the
hippies to one based on hiphop music and a flirtation with American gangs,
which broke through around 1990.

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On one point the explanations by Eisner and by Aebi and Linde diverge.
The first sees above all a temporary resurgence of male-on-male violence
based on a corresponding return of a macho culture of fighting males, aged
20–40. This conclusion, however, is based almost exclusively on English
statistics, which also reveal (since 1969, when they start to include the
offender–victim relationship) a massive surge in the killing of strangers.
Eisner hypothesises the following types of confrontations: fights between
youth gangs, armed robberies, conflicts between drug addicts ending in
a knife being pulled, or simple pub brawls going wrong.28 For all fifteen
countries, on the other hand, Aebi and Linde observe that male and female
victimisation follows the same trend between 1960 and 2010. Additionally,
they stick to the WHO’s categorisation of ages, noting that victimisation, for
both men and women, is highest in the 30–44 group, then in the 45–59 group
and only then for those aged 15–29. Finally, Aebi and Linde propose another
new lifestyle that corresponds to the decline in homicide beginning during
the 1990s. This was the decade when the internet became available; people
were less inclined to go out, they claim, watching their computer screens at
home alone. One wonders whether early internet addicts belonged to the
social stratum most prone to violence. In any case, this hypothesis implies
a prediction: from about 2010 everyone is surfing the internet on their smart
phones, while bars and restaurants routinely offer free wifi.
The problem with studies of aggregate national statistics like the ones cited
is that they largely ignore the evidence from qualitative studies of potentially
violent groups and in-depth analyses of judicial records or police dossiers.
Based on these two types of evidence, I have attempted to assess the
contribution to the rise in homicide since 1970 of two new phenomena: the
rise of an urban multi-ethnic street and school culture and the proliferation of
organised crime related to the spread of drug use.29 Perhaps a third, the
increasing instability of families, can be added now. This factor may have
brought a slight rise in the killing of intimates, which in its turn may explain
why the victimisation of women increased as well. However, this factor
hardly explains why female victimisation has declined again since the mid
1990s. So let’s consider the other two phenomena. Hard drugs such as heroin
appeared on European markets precisely at the beginning of the 1970s, from
which time on wholesale trade was vigorously pursued. The new youth
culture thrived on the increasing diversity in most European cities, with

28 Eisner, ‘Modernity Strikes Back?’, 308.

29 Pieter Spierenburg, A History of Murder: Personal Violence in Europe from the Middle Ages
to the Present (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008), pp. 213–18.

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 Homicide in a Global Perspective

(the sons of) immigrants importing back traditional honour but also influen-
cing lower-class males from the native population. This produced a common
urban street culture, often with its own slang, that became clearly visible
around 1990.
The answer is unequivocal. The new youth culture has contributed to the
rise in homicide, but only a little. Pupils bring knives with them to school, for
example, but mostly to show off. Some, on the other hand, use these to
commit street robberies. Yet, overwhelmingly the part of youthful violence
remains non-lethal. This is also suggested by the timing of the breakthrough
of the new youth culture: when most of the increase in homicide had already
occurred. It is likely, then, that the other new phenomenon’s contribution to
the rising homicide rates – followed by a mere stabilisation if my mobile
phone hypothesis holds – was more considerable. The expanding market for
illegal drugs has fostered organised crime, which in its turn came to focus also
on human trafficking and the smuggling of weapons. Modern organised
crime in Europe is unlike the interwar underworld that thrived on local
prostitution and gambling. Infused by globalisation, today’s underworld has
an international dimension, with cooperation as well as competition extend-
ing over long distances. Thus, since about 1970 violence concentrates in
specific social environments, whereas sensitivity to violence has increased,
especially since the 1990s, among the majority of Europe’s population.
Paradoxically, this sensitivity explains the rise in prosecuted rates of non-
lethal violence since 1970, as judicial conceptions of assault and robbery are
subject to inflation.30
The international dimension of organised crime constitutes an occasion
for a brief look at non-Western homicide since 1970. The international drug
trade obviously contributes to the level of lethal violence in countries such
as Colombia and Mexico. Nevertheless, countries with high homicide rates
like post-Apartheid South Africa also witness a lot of personal conflict in the
context of a macho culture. The existence of rival gangs often exacerbates
this violence, as in Central America, where the export of gangs from the
United States constitutes another example of globalisation. No common
global trend in homicide levels since 1970 is visible. In the first decade of the
twenty-first century Latin America, the larger part of Africa and the former
Soviet Union were the most violent world regions. Note that the level of
health care there is lower than in the Western world, which results in

30 Karin Wittebrood and Paul Nieuwbeerta, ‘Een kwart eeuw stijging in geregistreerde
criminaliteit: Vooral meer registratie, nauwelijks meer criminaliteit’, Tijdschrift voor
Criminologie 48.3 (2006), 227–42.

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a greater lethality of attacks. Homicide rates stood at levels similar to

western Europe in Canada, Australia and a set of stable Asian states.
Interesting is the case of Cambodia. Most people associate this country
with the ‘killing fields’ of 1975–9 (see Chapter 25 in this volume), but it
recently caught up with the level of stable Asian societies. Instability
continued into the 1990s and in 1993 the national homicide rate, including
political and extrajudicial killings, peaked at 23.5. A consistent decline set in
after 1998, from about 12 in that year to 2.4 in 2012. Broadhurst and
colleagues attribute this decline partly to the growing effectiveness of
state repression which diminished the tendency to seek private justice.
Intriguingly, modern Cambodia resembles fin-de-siècle France to the extent
that women frequently commit crimes passionnels by throwing acid at rivals
and cheating husbands.31

Conclusion
Murder turned into a marginal phenomenon in Europe between 1800 and
1970. Since then it has resurfaced to some extent. However, personal violence
in contemporary western Europe remains at a marginal level when com-
pared to much of the rest of the world. At the same time, globalisation
ensures that the recent history of homicide has an ever more intertwined
character.

Bibliographical Essay
The main syntheses of the long-term European history of homicide and serious violence
are Robert Muchembled, Une histoire de la violence de la fin du moyen âge à nos jours (Paris:
Seuil, 2008) and Pieter Spierenburg, A History of Murder: Personal Violence in Europe from
the Middle Ages to the Present (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008). In both books, for the
period covered in this volume, see especially the later chapters. The bibliographies in
these two books, taken together, constitute a more or less exhaustive list of publications
up to 2006. Since then, a number of studies of murder and violence have appeared,
focusing on the modern period in separate European countries. For Ireland:
Richard McMahon, Homicide in Pre-Famine and Famine Ireland (Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press, 2013). For the UK and Ireland: Carolyn A. Conley, Certain Other
Countries: Homicide, Gender and National Identity in Late Nineteenth-Century England,
Ireland, Scotland and Wales (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007). For France:
Eliza Earle Ferguson, Gender and Justice: Violence, Intimacy and Community in Fin-de-Siècle
Paris (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). For Germany: Sace Elder,

31 Broadhurst et al., Violence and the Civilising Process in Cambodia, pp. 250–2, 268, 281–3.

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Murder Scenes: Normality, Deviance and Criminal Violence in Weimar Berlin (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2010). For Belgium: Antoon Vrints, Het theater van de
straat: Publiek geweld in Antwerpen tijdens de 1e helft van de 20e eeuw (Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 2011). Finally, for the USA: Randolph Roth, American
Homicide (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2009).
Studies of homicide and violence in non-Western countries include: Roderic
Broadhurst Thierry Bouhours and Brigitte Bouhours, Violence and the Civilising Process
in Cambodia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Eric A. Johnson, Ricardo
D. Salvatore and Pieter Spierenburg (eds.), Murder and Violence in Modern Latin America
(Chichester: Wiley, 2013); Martha S. Santos, Cleansing Honor with Blood: Masculinity,
Violence and Power in the Backlands of North-East Brazil, 1845–1889 (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2012).
The main publications on the quantitative dimension of the history of homicide in
modern Europe are Manuel Eisner, ‘Modernity Strikes Back? A Historical Perspective on
the Latest Increase in Interpersonal Violence, 1960–1990’, International Journal of Conflict
and Violence 2.2 (2008), 289–316; Marcelo F. Aebi and Antonia Linde, ‘The Persistence
of Lifestyles: Rates and Correlates of Homicide in Western Europe from 1960
to 2010’, European Journal of Criminology 11 (2014), 552–77; Karin Wittebrood and
Paul Nieuwbeerta, ‘Een kwart eeuw stijging in geregistreerde criminaliteit: Vooral
meer registratie, nauwelijks meer criminaliteit’, Tijdschrift voor Criminologie 48.3 (2006),
227–42. A few publications include a quantitative analysis of homicide rates in the non-
Western world: Joerg Baten et al., ‘Personal Security since 1820’, in Jan Luiten van Zanden,
et al. (eds.), How Was Life? Global Well-Being since 1820 (Paris: OECD, 2014), pp. 139–58;
Baldev Raj Nayar, Violence and Crime in India: A Quantitative Study (Delhi: Macmillan
Company of India, 1975).
For a general analysis of the global history of murder, see Steven Pinker, The Better
Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking, 2011) and
Pieter Spierenburg, ‘Toward a Global History of Homicide and Organized Murder’,
Crime, Histoire & Sociétés / Crime, History & Societies 18.2 (2014), 99–116.
As to various themes in the history of serious interpersonal violence in modern Europe,
recent studies have dealt notably with duelling: Ulrike Ludwig, Barbara Krug-Richter and
Gerd Schwerhoff (eds.), Das Duell: Ehrenkämpfe vom Mittelalter bis zur Moderne (Konstanz:
UVK Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, 2012); Steven C. Hughes, Politics of the Sword: Dueling,
Honor and Masculinity in Modern Italy (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007);
Stephen Banks, A Polite Exchange of Bullets: The Duel and the English Gentleman, 1750–1850
(Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2010); Ignaz Matthey, Eer verloren, al verloren: het duel in de
Nederlandse geschiedenis (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2012); Irina Reyfman, Ritualized Violence
Russian Style: The Duel in Russian Culture and Literature (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1999).
Concerning other specific themes in the history of serious interpersonal violence in
modern Europe as well as the non-Western world, on the relationship with colonialism:
Martin J. Wiener, An Empire on Trial: Race, Murder and Justice under British Rule, 1870–1935
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Elizabeth Kolsky, Colonial Justice in
British India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). On murder in connection
with Indigenous beliefs: Colin Murray and Peter Basil Sanders, Medicine Murder in
Colonial Lesotho: The Anatomy of a Moral Crisis (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,

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2005); David Pratten, The Man-Leopard Murders: History and Society in Colonial Nigeria
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007). On the interrelationship with
punishment: Pieter Spierenburg, Violence and Punishment: Civilizing the Body through
Time (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013). On violence and drugs: David T. Courtwright,
Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1996).

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 10
Violence and Sport, 1800–2000
emma griffin

Humans and Violence in Sport

Through most of human history, displays of violence, between either
humans or animals, have been an integral component of sport. Just as
physical aggression was present in most people’s daily and working life, so
inevitably was it an uncontroversial element of their recreational life as well.
Violent sports have not only been global in reach, they have also extended
across every social rank, though they have been largely a male domain, with
many societies placing restrictions on the extent to which women might
participate in sports of any kind whether as participants or spectators, and
particularly those involving displays of aggression.
Yet the past two centuries have witnessed an unmistakable redrawing of the
place of violence in sport. Starting in Britain and progressing from there to
western Europe, the United States and Australia, governments have actively
sought to eliminate sports which involved staged acts of aggression between
animals. At the same time, sporting organisations have imposed ever greater
regulation around the violence that human combatants might perpetrate
against each other – opening, in the process, a space for female involvement,
firstly as spectators, and in the second half of the twentieth century as
participants. Outside the West, however, opposition to violence in sport has
been more muted. Whilst most non-Western societies have been involved in
the move to restrict the extent of violence that humans might commit in the
name of sport, they have been far less interested in imposing restrictions on
sports that involve animals. Here, the force of ‘tradition’ has invariably
trumped the self-styled ‘humanitarianism’ of the Western abolitionists.
It is helpful to begin by thinking about the range of violent sports enjoyed in
the past, many of which have now disappeared from the industrialised world.
These fall broadly into two categories – sports encouraging violence amongst

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animals and those involving violence between human combatants. Sports

involving animals – often labelled ‘blood sports’ by their critics – can be
helpfully divided into two distinct categories: staged fights or contests between
animals or between animals and humans; and hunting. Staged combats gen-
erally take place in an enclosed or semi-enclosed area and usually between
domesticated, rather than wild, animals. Cockfighting and dogfighting are the
most ubiquitous forms of blood sport, having been recorded in some form in
most corners of the globe. The underlying principle of such fights is to match
the animals as equally as possible – their appeal lies in placing bets on a contest
with an unpredictable outcome.1 Most countries have had many additional
local blood sports, determined by the native animal population and by tradi-
tion – badger-baiting, bull-baiting, bear-baiting, ratting, bull-running and bull-
fighting to name a few from western Europe.2 These sports are much more
varied in nature, and are not necessarily enjoyed as opportunities for gambling.
The bull-running, or jallikattu, in Tamil Nadu, for instance involves tying a bag
of coins between the horns of a bull and setting him loose in the streets.
Participants chase the bull down and attempt to untie, and claim for them-
selves, the bag of coins. Like countless other bullfighting and bull-running
traditions that have been recorded around the globe, jallikattu is essentially
a festive, community event – an occasion for community cohesion and displays
of masculine bravery.
Hunting differs in principle from animal combats in that the animals are
wild rather than domesticated and are hunted in their natural habitat – some
animals hunted by men armed with guns, others by men working in tandem
with other animals, usually dogs or birds.3 In reality, though, this ‘pure’ form
of hunting has been hard to maintain in the past 200 years – an era of
unprecedented population growth, urbanisation and industrialisation
throughout the world. In many parts of the globe, pressure on the land has
forced hunters to pursue animals that were semi-tame, or even tame, and
much of their hunting takes place in enclosed or semi-enclosed spaces rather
than in the wild.4 Nonetheless, it is helpful to maintain a distinction between

1 George Ryley Scott, The History of Cockfighting (London: C. Skilton, [1957]).

2 The most studied of these has been the Spanish bullfight. See Timothy J. Mitchell, Blood Sport:
A Social History of Spanish Bullfighting (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991).
3 Richard Hummel, Hunting and Fishing for Sport: Commerce, Controversy, Popular Culture
(Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1994); Emma Griffin, Blood
Sport: Hunting in Britain since 1066 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).
4 Griffin, Blood Sport; John Fletcher, ‘The Impact of Hunting on European Woodland from
Medieval to Modern Times’, in Keith Kirby and Charles Watkins (eds.), Europe’s Changing
Woods and Forests: From Wildwood to Managed Landscapes (Wallingford: CABI, 2015), pp.
116–24.

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staged animal combats and hunting, less because of an innate difference

between these sports and more because humanitarian reformers have always
insisted in differentiating between the violence that occurred in animal
combats and that which occurred on the hunting field.
Sitting alongside those sports involving animals and violence was a wide
range of sports involving interpersonal violence. Various forms of human
combat have existed across the globe since the beginning of time, though the
precise form they have taken has varied widely. In East and South Asia,
martial arts have dominated.5 In the West, bare-knuckle fighting has always
been more popular.6 Generalising about the nature of these sports is an
impossible task owing to the enormous global variation, but at heart they
involve displays of fighting strength and skill between two (invariably male)
opponents. In addition, many team sports which are today considered to be
‘non-contact’, such as football, involved high levels of physical violence in
1800. More generally, these sports always took a non-standard format. This is
not to suggest that they were not governed by rules. Parameters such as the
rules of combat, the size of teams and pitches, or the length of play were all
subject to rules, but these rules tended to vary from one village or region to
the next. As a result, team sports in 1800 looked very different from those of
the present day. They were characterised by very high levels of interpersonal
violence and, though rule bound, they were played according to local custom
rather than by national, standardised sets of rules.7

Animals, Violence and the Move

towards Prohibition
Opposition towards the use of violence in sports began in Britain, with an
organised campaign against cockfighting and bull-baiting. It is significant that
the country’s first anti-violence movement of any significance was targeted
towards animals, rather than any of the human constituencies at risk of
violence – children, wives, apprentices or servants. As such, it is worth looking
in detail at the campaigners’ objections towards blood sports and asking why
they found such a fertile reception in early nineteenth-century Britain?.

5 Thomas A. Green and Joseph R. Svinth, Martial Arts of the World: An Encyclopedia of History
and Innovation (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2010), vol. I I, pp. 175–82.
6 Kasia Boddy, Boxing: A Cultural History (London: Reaktion Books, 2013).
7 Jeffrey Hill, Sport in History: An Introduction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010);
J. A. Mangan (ed.), Europe, Sport, World: Shaping Global Societies (London: Taylor &
Francis, 2001); David G. McComb, Sports in World History (London: Routledge, 2004).

209
 EMMA GRIFFIN

Many religions have expressed concern about the use of animals, which are
after all part of God’s creation, for sport and recreation, and Christianity is no
exception. Since the sixteenth century, Puritan reformers had been objecting
to sports such as cockfighting and bear-baiting – both on the grounds of the
time-wasting and gambling implicit in such activities, and owing to the
cruelty to animals they involved.8 Towards the end of the eighteenth cen-
tury, however, a new, secular strain of criticism began to emerge, objecting
to the mistreatment of animals not simply as an abuse of God’s creation, but
upon humanitarian grounds as well. Although these reformers ranged widely
over human treatment of animals, as their ideas began to filter into popular
consciousness these concerns crystallised around a small number of blood
sports. In the process, criticisms of hunting were entirely filtered out, and
working-class blood sports such as cockfighting and bull-baiting were tar-
geted as the only serious form of animal cruelty that needed to be addressed.
From the 1790s, public outrage over the persistence of these two ancient
sports continued to mount, and as it did so, parliament soon turned its
attention to these sports as well. Criticism that had originated in newspapers
and drawing rooms rapidly transmuted into a divisive political and class
wrangle that was to last nearly forty years.9
The first bill to attack blood sport was Sir William Pulteney’s ‘Bill for
Preventing the Practice of Bull-Baiting’, introduced in 1800.10 It had the
narrow goal of outlawing (in Pulteney’s words) ‘the savage custom of bull-
baiting’, but despite gathering considerable support in the House, it faced
eloquent and lengthy opposition from Sir William Windham, the Tory MP
for Norwich.11 Windham derided the bill as evidence of ‘a busy and anxious
disposition to legislate on matters in which the laws are already sufficient’,
and his impassioned defence played a large role in the ultimate defeat of the
bill – it was lost by just two votes.12 Windham had successfully tapped into
a widely held concern that, by interfering in men’s private pleasures, parlia-
ment was stepping into new and dangerous waters. ‘It should be written in
letters of gold’, declared The Times, ‘that a Government cannot interfere too
little with the people . . . whatever meddles with the private personal

8 Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800
(London: Penguin, 1983); Edward Barry, Bull Baiting! A Sermon on Barbarity to God’s
Dumb Creation, Preached in the Parish Church of Wokingham, Berkshire (Reading, 1802).
9 Emma Griffin, England’s Revelry: A History of Popular Sports and Pastimes, 1660–1830 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2005).
10 James Turner, Reckoning with the Beast: Animals, Pain, and Humanity in the Victorian Mind
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), p. 15.
11 Parliamentary History xxxv (1800), col. 202. 12 Ibid., col. 203.

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 Violence and Sport

disposition of a man’s time or property is tyranny direct.’13 It was

a powerful critique, and one that protected working-class blood sports for
a number of years.
Further attempts to introduce legislation to prohibit bull-baiting were
made over the next two decades, but reform was delayed until the 1820s,
when Richard Martin – dubbed by his friends ‘Humanity Dick’ – a large Irish
landowner and keen practitioner of all field sports, mounted another, this
time successful attack on blood sports. His ‘Bill to prevent cruelty to cattle
and horses’ received royal assent in 1822. This Act outlawed acts of cruelty to
farm and draft animals, but did not in fact outlaw bull-baiting in the way
Martin and his supporters had hoped: bulls had been expressly omitted from
the final act by a government sensitive to the criticism that it was meddling in
spheres it had no right to touch.
This omission kept the reformers busy for the next decade, but the
precedent set by the landmark 1822 Act made their task rather easier. In
1835 they secured the passage of the Protection of Animals Act, which
extended protection from livestock to domestic animals and made it illegal
to keep any place for the fighting or baiting of any animal, wild or domestic.
Overnight, enjoying a bull-bait, bear-bait or dogfight became a criminal
offence, and fines and prisons served to convince anyone who might think
otherwise. This Act, consolidated and extended to include cockfighting in
1849, was the first major piece of legislation passed to prohibit blood sports in
the Western world.14
The outcome of these new laws was initially mixed. Bull-baiting, being near
impossible to hide from the authorities, was relatively easy to suppress.
Despite some very public displays of opposition in the immediate aftermath
of the Act, local authorities speedily and effectively used their new powers to
round up those involved and consign the sport to history.15 A cockfight or
badger-bait, however, was much more easily shielded from prying eyes, and so
its disappearance was far more protracted. In an attempt to enforce the law
more rigorously, a self-proclaimed body of ‘divers benevolent persons’ formed
itself into the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) in 1824,
and started collecting funds to assist individuals in prosecutions. In 1835, the
Society received the first of many royal patrons (the Duchess of Kent) and in

13 The Times, 25 April 1800.

14 J. H. Porter, ‘Cockfighting in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: From Popularity
to Suppression’, Report and Transactions of the Devonshire Association for the Advancement of
Science, Literature and Art 118 (1986), 63–71.
15 Griffin, England’s Revelry, pp. 235–49.

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1840 Queen Victoria, a patron since 1835, granted it permission to prefix ‘Royal’
to its name.16 As the new society grew in size and importance it took to hiring
constables to walk the streets and apprehend offenders. Its officer corps grew
steadily, totalling 120 by the end of the century.17 The RSPCA played an
important role in translating the new legislation into effective action against
working-class blood sports. It was a pattern that would be widely repeated in
the Western world. Passing legislation often proved more straightforward than
enforcing it, and these private enforcement societies played an important role
in rendering the reformers’ ambitions a reality.
Though the elimination of working-class blood sports proved to be pro-
tracted, the general trend was clear: by the end of the nineteenth century,
bull-baiting had disappeared, and cockfighting and dogfighting had been
firmly pushed underground. Sports that people of all social ranks had enjoyed
for hundreds of years had been cast out of the realm owing to the changing
values of a small, but powerful, minority who no longer took part. It marks
a turning point in the history of blood sports, and one is inevitably led to ask:
why did the Victorians impose such an intrusive piece of legislation?
One argument that we have to reject is that this was the spontaneous
flowering of a new compassion for animals. It is certainly true that this period
did see the awakening of some sensitivities surrounding animal suffering, but
most of these views were expressed in poetry, literature and art, rather than
in mainstream society. Throughout this period, cruelty to animals was
ubiquitous. Animals were used in every aspect of life, and were inevitably
much abused in the process. For most people, animals were there to fill
stomachs, work machinery and move things about. Animals could be seen
everywhere: horses, donkeys, dogs, cats, cattle, sheep and poultry filled
streets, markets, gardens and fields. The sight, sound and smell of animals
were an inescapable part of everyday life. People’s lives and homes were
shared with animals, and there was little room for sensitivity and compassion
in this world, and ample scope for cruelty and ill-use.
Even if we were to grant that the reformers were genuinely concerned
about animal cruelty, there is something suspicious in the targeting of blood
sports. Of all the forms of cruelty that animals might face, cockfighting and

16 The RSPCA is considered in Rob Boddice, A History of Attitudes and Behaviours toward
Animals in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain: Anthropocentrism and the Emergence of
Animals (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 2008) and E. S. Turner, All Heaven in a Rage
(London: Michael Joseph, 1964), pp. 129–30, 146–7. See also Turner, Reckoning with the
Beast, pp. 40–5.
17 Brian Harrison, ‘Animals and the State’, English Historical Review 83 (1973), 786–820, esp.
789, 794.

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bull-baiting were surely the least of their worries. A cockfight was a combat
between two evenly matched animals fighting freely. The concept of a fair
fight was also intrinsic to the sport of bull-baiting, and by the late eighteenth
century, the sport was in any case already very much on the decline.
Cockfighting and bull-baiting both bore more than a passing resemblance
to all forms of hunting and coursing, as animal combats lay at the heart of
these sports too, yet neither attracted criticism of any real note. Furthermore,
the systematic abuse and overwork of the millions of horses that powered the
English economy was surely a greater evil than any of the uses to which
animals were put in the name of sport. Blood sports were marginal forms of
cruelty in a society in which the use and abuse of animals was extremely
widespread. If the Victorians really cared so much about animals, why did
they not focus on more pressing cases of cruelty?
The answer of course may be found by switching our gaze away from the
animals and back to ourselves. Early campaigns against blood sports were not
about animals, but about the human spectators. Animals naturally fight, but
what Britain’s early reformers found objectionable about these fights was the
fact they were orchestrated by humans for their own pleasure, excitement
and financial gain. In arguing that bull-baiting and cockfighting should no
longer be tolerated, the literate classes were promoting their own vision of
a progressive and compassionate society.
Inevitably, it was the poor that needed to be saved, and the oft-used
accusation of class bias is not too far from the mark. With the exception of
a small but dedicated core of wealthy gentlemen who continued to support
cockfighting, the poor were the primary supporters of most forms of animal
fighting and baiting by the early nineteenth century. According to one writer,
bull-baiting was popular with the ‘the most unfeeling, and least humane, part
of the very lowest, and most abandoned orders of the people . . . brutes; the
very scum and refuse of society’.18 So long as animal cruelty was focused
upon blood sports, it could also be categorised as something that other
people did.19 By casting the perpetrators of cruelty as ignorant and unenligh-
tened, Victorian reformers inevitably defined themselves as the vanguard of

18 William Taplin, The Sporting Dictionary and Rural Repository (London, 1803), pp. 44, 93–6.
Likewise, when Pierce Egan’s fictional hero Tom went to the Westminster pit to watch
a monkey baiting he found ‘a motley group . . . all in rude contact, jostling and pushing
against each other’. Pierce Egan, Life in London, of the Day and Night Scenes of Jerry
Hawthorn, esq. and his Elegant Friend Corinthian Tom (London, 1822; repr. 1859), p. 259.
19 See also Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian
Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 126–57.

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progress and civilisation; this was a way for the middle classes to reaffirm
their own status as humane and enlightened individuals.
Western Europe followed the British example with varying degrees of
enthusiasm. The United States, with its shared Puritan heritage and long-
standing concerns about vice and immorality, was the nation most receptive
to the British example. Proposing a bill to strengthen the laws governing
cockfighting in 1830, the representative of Westmoreland County, Samuel
Bushfield, described cockfighting as a ‘kind of vice’ and a crime ‘of great
magnitude’. He continued,
All kinds of vicious people attended them; some to bet money, some to
satisfy criminal curiosity, and many to spend money which ought to be
applied to the support of many of their families. Apprentices and the children
of honest parents have their morals ruined by attending such gaming places;
indeed they are often tempted to steal money to spend it in this way.

Yet despite Bushfield’s eloquence, the resulting legislation was

a compromise: cockfighting itself remained legal, only the betting on matches
was prohibited.20 This was a pattern often replicated in the USA during the
twentieth century, as legislators struggled with the concept of interfering in
what private individuals did in their leisure time.
Just as in Britain, so in the States, the cause of blood sports was subse-
quently taken up by the animal protection societies. And once again,
although the remit of these societies was animal cruelty in general terms,
they proved to be particularly exercised by the use of animals in sport. The
Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was founded in 1866 and the
American Humane Association was established a decade later. Both played
an important part in pressuring state legislatures to abolish not simply betting
on cockfights, but the organising and watching of such events. But American
animal protectionists always faced a greater battle than their British counter-
parts, for although there was considerable sympathy for the anti-vice mes-
sage of their campaign, there was also much stronger sentiment in favour of
personal liberties. Abolition of cockfighting proceeded on a state-by-state
basis and it was a protracted process, with parts of the South not outlawing
cockfighting until the twenty-first century (Louisiana was the last state to
outlaw cockfighting; it did so in 2008).21

20 J. Thomas Jable, ‘Aspects of Moral Reform in Early Nineteenth-Century Pennsylvania’,

Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 102.3 (1978), 344–63.
21 Jon Griffin Donlon, Bayou Country Bloodsport: The Culture of Cockfighting in Southern
Louisiana (Jefferson: McFarland, 2013).

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 Violence and Sport

In continental Europe the process of eliminating violence towards animals

in sport was also highly uneven and encountered resistance of a different
nature. Whereas American abolitionists faced objections from those who
believed in personal freedom, in parts of Europe animal protectionists were
stymied by the power of tradition. In France, for example, cockfighting was
prohibited by law in 1951. This was already more than a hundred years after
the British example and it included an important exemption: those regions
with an uninterrupted local tradition of such fights were permitted to con-
tinue the sport. Nord-Pas-de-Calais claimed this exemption and remains to
this day home to dozens of cockpits, or gallodromes, and to a lively, and
entirely legal, cockfighting scene.22 Efforts to outlaw bullfighting in Spain met
similar resistance. Whilst cockfighting was abolished in most parts of Spain in
the twentieth century, opponents of bullfighting have as yet signally failed to
overturn arguments promoting the sport as a unique and ancient national
tradition. Here, as in France, successive governments have been persuaded
that protecting native tradition is more important than attempting to ban
sports which contained elements of violence.23 The experiences of both
countries are an important reminder that the forces of modernisation and
industrialisation do not automatically quell violence against animals in the
name of sport.
The partial and piecemeal nature of reform is also evident in the large areas
of sporting life that have generally been exempted from reform. Despite the
unmistakable hardening of attitudes towards working-class blood sports in
most of Europe and North America, attitudes towards hunting have changed
far less. Even in the case of hunting with hounds, which generally involves
staging a fairly contrived combat between a supposedly wild animal and
trained hunting dogs, Western opinion has shifted far more slowly, and
indeed in many quarters has shifted hardly at all. Since the nineteenth
century, animal protectionists have maintained a strict distinction between
‘blood sports’ and hunting, and the ideological insistence that these form
separate categories of sport has played an important role in protecting all
forms of hunting with hounds.
Once again Britain has been at the forefront of the prohibition movement.
The Hunting Act of 2004 banned the hunting of wild mammals with dogs in
England and Wales, and still stands out as a rare piece of legislation that
restricted hunting through animal welfare, as opposed to conservation,

22 Richard Holt, Sport and Society in Modern France (London: Macmillan, 1981).
23 Mitchell, Blood Sport.

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 EMMA GRIFFIN

motives. Just as with cockfighting, however, hostility towards hunting in

reality encompassed a wide range of concerns, not all of them centred upon
violence or cruelty towards animals. The Hunting Act owed as much to the
new social and political sensibilities ushered in with Labour’s landslide
victory of 1997 as it did to concerns about animal cruelty.24 Nor have these
concerns about hunting translated effectively beyond Britain’s shores. In
continental Europe and the United States, hunting continues to enjoy
a largely unchallenged place in society. In these countries, not only is hunting
protected by law, there is very little in the way of public disquiet about the
hunters’ activities.
Beyond the West, hostility towards the use of animals in sport has been
much more muted and animal protection arguments have done little to
undermine the popularity of traditional animal combat sports such as cock-
fighting and dogfighting. Cockfighting bans have been introduced in parts of
South America (Brazil in 1934; Argentina, Chile and Paraguay in the later
twentieth century) but through most of Asia the sport remains legal. Across
large parts of the globe, concerns about animal cruelty have failed to dent
what are widely regarded as ancient and legitimate traditions involving
animal combat.
In order to understand the enduring popularity and legality of cockfighting
across large parts of the globe, it is necessary to appreciate its ancient roots. In
China, for example, evidence of cockfighting has been uncovered from the
Zhou period (sixth century B C E). In the following 2,500 years, cockfighting
has featured in Chinese literature, philosophy and poetry. It has been linked
to important spring festivals and been enjoyed by all from the emperor to the
masses. Furthermore, cockfighting in China has been situated within the yin-
yang principles of Daoist belief. In this belief framework, cocks are given the
same yang symbolism as the sun and this provides a space for cockfighting to
fill in the renewal spring festival of Hanshi. Hanshi was marked by extinguish-
ing of all fires and the eating of cold food for three days, followed by the
relighting of fires. Whilst Chinese reformers have long raised concerns about
the animal cruelty, crowds and betting they believe to be associated with
cockfighting, they have been unable to overturn the sport’s very broad social
and cultural basis of support.25
In fact, cockfighting has been slotted into a wide variety of very different
religious and belief systems across the globe. In Bali, for example,

24 Griffin, Blood Sport.

25 Robert Joe Cutter, The Brush and the Spur: Chinese Culture and the Cockfight (Hong Kong:
Chinese University Press, 1989).

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 Violence and Sport

cockfighting is linked with Balinese Hinduism. Here it plays a role in religious

purification rituals designed to expel evil spirits, with the blood of the losing
chicken offered as a sacrifice to the spirits. Likewise in India, cockfighting has
a very long history. It is mentioned in literature from the Sangam period
(from 3 B C E) and has since then been enjoyed in both secular and religious
contexts. In many nations, then, cockfighting is regarded not simply as
a recreational pursuit, but as a practice with deep historical, religious and
cultural roots. And inevitably, these cultural traditions have not been quickly
and easily erased in the march towards modernisation.
The experience of India illustrates the obstacles faced by the animal
protectionists. The Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act of 1960 legis-
lated against the unnecessary pain or suffering of animals and included
inciting animals to fight within its provisions. The Act provided a clear
statement of India’s claims to modernity, but the combined forces of
culture and tradition have proved more powerful than the rhetoric of
modernity and reform. The conservatism of Indian society has stood in
the way of effective elimination of the sport and most attempts at
repression have focused on the betting that accompanies cockfighting
rather than the sport itself. Not only have the police been notoriously
reluctant to interfere in cockfights, there have also been disagreements
amongst the courts concerning whether or not cockfights are covered by
the provisions of the Act, particularly those held within temples or
associated with Hindu festivals. The passage of the Act has done little
to eliminate back-street cockfighting; indeed economic growth has in
some instances provided an impetus to the growth of cockfighting. In
Andhra Pradesh, for instance, the annual festival of Makar Sankranti has
become the occasion of large, spectator cockfights with high-level bet-
ting in excess of Rs 1,000. With local politicians, MPs, prominent
businessmen and even film celebrities visiting coastal Andhra during
Sankranti to participate, cockfighting became big business in the decades
following the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act. Inevitably small
fines of no more Rs 25–100 and a local police force which is at best
indifferent, at worst complicit, have failed to provide any form of
deterrent to those who want to participate.26
It is clear that the elimination of violence from sport is not a linear and
universal process. In the West, violence towards animals in sports became
increasingly controversial around 1800, though abolition attempts were

26 Times of India, 8 January 2012.

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 EMMA GRIFFIN

almost always directed towards animal combat sports rather than hunting
and rarely extended to more general concerns about the mistreatment of
animals in agriculture and transport. Britain led the way and whilst the pace
and motivation of the animal protectionists have varied across Europe and
the United States, the general trend is unmistakable. Cockfighting and
dogfighting are no longer mainstream activities in the West; indeed in
most Western nations organising or watching animal combats is a criminal
offence. At the same time, however, many non-Western nations have been
far more hesitant to interfere with sports that are regarded as belonging to
ancient or religious traditions. Although a number of nations in Asia and in
South and Latin America have passed laws outlawing animal cruelty, some
have been unclear about whether traditional sports fall within the remit of
the new laws and lax enforcement efforts have often rendered the legislation
a dead letter. Other countries have not attempted to legislate against popular
blood sports. As a consequence, cockfighting and a host of other animal
combat sports remain legitimate and popular pastimes across significant parts
of the globe.

Interpersonal Violence in Sport

The history of interpersonal violence in sport has followed a rather
different trajectory from that of violence between animals. Whereas
the West has diverged sharply from other parts of the globe since
1800 with an ever more successful animal protection movement, no
such divergence is evident with respect to human combat sports. The
trend here has been towards ever-greater regulation rather than prohibi-
tion, and the move towards tighter regulation has been shared in
Western and non-Western nations alike.
Men have made sport out of fighting with each other since the beginning
of time, and this tradition remained firmly in place in 1800.27 Indeed, most
governments have traditionally looked favourably towards their indigen-
ous fighting sports and customs, regarding them as a means of encouraging
strength, courage and manly vigour, as the foundation of a strong, fighting
nation. Enthusiasm for human combat sports has hardly waned over the
past two centuries. Admittedly, some abolitionist pressure emerged in parts
of the West in the twentieth century, yet this never gained the strength and

27 For an early example, see Christian Mann, ‘Gladiators in the Greek East: A Case Study in
Romanisation, 124–149’, in Zinon Papakonstantinou (ed.), Sport in the Cultures of the
Ancient World: New Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2013).

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 Violence and Sport

momentum of the animal protection arguments. When it comes to vio-

lence in sport, reformers have sought to control and contain that violence,
rather than to eliminate it.
In the West, much of the impetus for limiting the degree of violence
permissible in hand-to-hand combat emanated, once again, from Britain.
Whilst it is difficult to reconstruct exactly how bare-knuckle fighting was
conducted in Europe at this time, it is clear that high levels of violence were
tolerated. A manual from early eighteenth-century Britain provided instruc-
tion for techniques such as head-butting, punching, eye-gouging and
choking.28 It is certainly the case that organised prize-fights had an unfor-
tunate tendency to end in death, resulting in unwelcome manslaughter
charges for the victorious fighter. It was undoubtedly this which provided
the spur for reform of the sport’s rules. The first set of boxing rules were
introduced by the champion fighter Jack Broughton in 1743, and known as
Broughton’s rules. Broughton also encouraged the use of ‘mufflers’, a form
of padded glove, though their use remained optional well into the nine-
teenth century. Broughton’s rules were revised and consolidated as the
London Prize Ring Rules in 1838, which were in turn superseded by the
Queensbury Rules in 1867. These mandated the use of gloves and form the
basis of the sport of boxing as it is played today. In the USA, one advocate of
new boxing rules argued that they encouraged fighting which was ‘fairer
and more harmless’, and they certainly did lead to a decline in the frequency
with which prize-fights ended in death.29 What we find in the case of hand-
to-hand combat, then, is not an attempt to eliminate violence from sport,
but a move towards greater regulation around the circumstances in which
men fight.
Once this transition had occurred, boxing was able to take its place in
Western society. It was introduced to the Olympics in 1904 and has been
contested at every set of games since, with the exception of the 1912 Olympics
in Sweden (the Swedish government banned the sport at that time).30 These
developments have also opened a space for women to take part in the sport.
Women participated in the sport informally throughout the twentieth cen-
tury but only began to assume a formal presence when national amateur

28 See Sir Thomas Parkyns, of Bunny Baronet, The Inn-Play or Cornish-Hugg Wrestler. Digested
in a Method with Teacheth to break all Holds, and throw most Falls mathematically (London,
1727).
29 William Edwards, The Art of Boxing and Science of Self-Defense, together with a Manual of
Training (New York: Excelsior Publishing House, 1888).
30 John Sugden, Boxing and Society: An International Analysis (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1996).

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 EMMA GRIFFIN

boxing associations began to admit women.31 Indeed it was Sweden which

kicked off this trend, with the Swedish Amateur Boxing Association sanction-
ing events for women in 1988. Through the 1990s, the USA and most
European nations followed suit and women’s boxing was included in the
Olympics just outside the timeframe of this volume – in 2012.
Elsewhere in the world, human combat sports inevitably took a highly
diverse form, with not only each nation nurturing its own local customs,
but considerable variety between one region and the next. Yet for all this
diversity, the same trend towards standardisation is evident. Take the
example of Japan. At the turn of the nineteenth century, Japan was the
home of numerous distinct fighting traditions – martial arts such as ju-jitsu,
karate and aikido; sword-fighting traditions such as kendo and naginata; and
wrestling. Most of these sports claimed heritage back to at least the fifteenth
century, and many considerably earlier than that. All the Japanese martial
arts and wrestling traditions contained high levels of violence and had held
a central place in the culture of the ancient samurai, or warrior class.
Although they had ceased to play an important role in military prepared-
ness by the end of the eighteenth century, they were nonetheless still highly
esteemed for the encouragement they gave to a man’s self-control and
fighting spirit.
Despite their long histories, most modern Japanese martial arts are in
reality only loosely related to their earlier forms. Sumo wrestling, for
example, is all that remains of a once far wider set of wrestling customs.
Medieval sources reveal wrestling contests that were performed as part of
religious rites, or as a spectator event for aristocratic patrons, or for
financial gain. Bouts were fought according to locally determined custom,
and although they did not ordinarily end with the death of one or other
opponent, fights to the death were practised in some contexts. The same
variety was evident in all the Japanese martial arts, with each practised in
numerous different formats and contexts, according to local custom rather
than standardised rules.32
Wrestling was the first Japanese combat sport to undergo standardisation,
a process which began unusually early in this instance. The tradition of tsuji-
zumo, or ‘street-corner’ wrestling, had started to attract the attention of the

31 Malissa Smith, A History of Women’s Boxing (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014).
32 P. L. Cuyler, Sumo from Rite to Sport (New York: Weatherhill, 1979); Harold Bolitho,
‘Sumo and Popular Culture: The Tokugawa Period’, in Gavan McCormack and
Yoshio Sugimoto (eds.), Modernisation and Beyond: The Japanese Trajectory (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 17–32.

220
 Violence and Sport

ruling class in the mid seventeenth century. Street corner wrestling, as its
name implies, took place out of doors, often accompanied by hawkers,
jugglers, and theatrical and freak shows. It encouraged crowds to gather
and gamble on the outcome, and, in the eyes of the authorities, posed a threat
to the social order. The Tokugawa government passed edicts banning it
around the middle of the century, but as these proved only partially success-
ful government officials began instructing wrestling organisers to regulate
their fights instead. One of the most significant outcomes of these negotia-
tions was the agreement to hold fights within a defined space, giving rise to
the dohyo – an arena with a clearly defined, circular border of rice-straw
bales – which is still employed today. In addition, certain rules for sumo
wrestling were formalised – the disallowing of hair-pulling, eye-gouging and
blows with closed fists. Referees were introduced to ensure they were
followed. Further regulation followed in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. Together, these reforms sharply reduced the risk of sumo wrestlers
experiencing serious physical harm or dying in the ring. And although this
had certainly been far from the reformers’ intentions, the introduction of
a formal set of rules also gave rise to a nationwide tournament circuit as
wrestlers from across Japan became familiar with a standard set of proce-
dures. As a result, sumo wrestling emerged from its medieval origins into
a modern spectator sport, fit for Japan’s growing urban centres
A similar process of standardisation transformed the complex patchwork
of martial arts and sword fighting that had existed in Japan in the early
nineteenth century. Swords, for example, had had a significant presence on
the medieval battlefield, but with no major wars during the Tokugawa period
(1603–1868), sword-fighting had evolved from a form of military training into
a spectator sport. Fights were highly choreographed so that fighters might
strike their opponent without fear of injuring or killing them. In the eight-
eenth century, the traditional metal swords were replaced with bamboo so as
to allow for a more authentic, full-contact combat, yet despite this sword-
fighting techniques, along with other traditional martial arts, fell into decline
at the start of the Meiji period in the 1860s. The creation of a new government
in 1868 – the Meiji, or ‘Enlightened Rule’ – marked the beginning of a new era
in Japanese history. Successive leaders actively sought to accelerate indus-
trialisation, to modernise, to catch up with the West. In such an environ-
ment, the nation’s ancient martial arts increasingly appeared to be outdated
relics of the past.
All of Japan’s ancient combat sports, however, were unexpected benefici-
aries of the rise of nationalist fervour that swept the nation in the final

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quarter of the nineteenth century. The Sino-Japanese War of 1894–5 and the
nationalism it helped to foster prompted a reappraisal of traditional martial
culture. The 1890s saw a sharp increase in the number of students joining
martial arts associations and the emergence of a number of martial arts
organisations active in both codifying the sports and lobbying for them.
Kendo was codified into its modern form in the 1890s; in the same decade
naginata was revived as a suitable physical recreation for girls; it was codified
with the creation of a national centre in 1934. Meanwhile, older ju-jitsu
techniques were reconfigured as Kodokan Judo by Kano Jiguro in the
1880s. Kano created a training school and a governing body for his new
martial art, introduced a system of belts to rank competitors, and established
a point system and time-limits for matches. In each of these sports, codifica-
tion helped to restrict the expression of violence in sport. It did not remove
violence altogether, but did sharply limit the degree of harm that combatants
could cause their opponents.
Chinese martial arts evade simple categorisation. There are dozens of
unique fighting styles and training methods, inspired by different philoso-
phies and religions, each with its origins in distinct periods of Chinese
history and regions of the country. Yet despite the great variety of martial
arts in China, these too have all undergone a recognisable process of
standardisation. The process here was delayed until the twentieth century
and was powerfully shaped by China’s own unique social and political
context. In the early twentieth century, one martial art school after another
established its own national association, produced its training manual, and
set about organising its own system of national examinations and competi-
tions. The trend towards standardisation was further accelerated in the
1950s with the creation of the People’s Republic of China. The PRC, whilst
enthusiastic about the physical recreation element of martial arts, was
suspicious of the ancient traditions and aristocratic lineage claimed by
some practitioners. The Chinese State Commission for Physical Culture
and Sports sought to resolve this tension by establishing one, national form
of kung fu – wushu – backed by the All-China Wushu Association, created
in 1958. This attempt to iron out the variety of Chinese martial arts was
inevitably only partially successful. Nonetheless, the martial arts scene in
China at the end of the twentieth century looked remarkably different from
that at the century’s beginning. Despite a large number of different schools,
within each of these schools standardisation was complete. Here, as else-
where, interpersonal violence in sport now took place within a much more
rigorous and restrictive framework.

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Clearly, then, the place of violence in world sport is highly complex.

Nonetheless two distinct trends are observable. In the first instance, the
West has seen a determined, and largely successful, attempt to eliminate sports
which manipulate or showcase aggression between animals for entertainment.
Although countries in many other parts of the world have attempted to pass
some legislation prohibiting animal cruelty, these have tended to be less
explicitly focused on animal sports and far less rigorously enforced.
Elsewhere, the weight of tradition has protected animal combat sports from
any serious threat of repression. In the second instance, there has been
a concerted effort to rein in the degree of interpersonal violence tolerated in
martial arts, boxing and wrestling in all parts of the world. While hand-to-hand
combat sports remain popular across the globe, regulation has sharply reduced
the risk of death or serious injury during competitive events. Violence in sport
is still permitted, but the circumstances in which it is allowed to occur are now
more tightly circumscribed.

Bibliographical Essay
In contrast to many of the other topics covered in this volume on the history of violence,
scholars have not previously identified violence in sport as a discrete area of inquiry.
There are, however, a number of different points of entry into the field. A good starting
point is the field of sports history. Good recent introductions to the global history of
sports can be found in J. A. Mangan (ed.), Europe, Sport, World: Shaping Global Societies
(London: Taylor & Francis, 2001), David G. McComb, Sports in World History (London:
Routledge, 2004) and Jeffrey Hill, Sport in History: An Introduction (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2010).
Animal combat sports such as cockfighting and bullfighting have attracted some
scholarly attention in recent years, though the literature is not extensive. The following
works explore aspects of blood sports in Europe, the USA and China: Timothy J. Mitchell,
Blood Sport: A Social History of Spanish Bullfighting (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1991), Emma Griffin, England’s Revelry: A History of Popular Sports and Pastimes,
1660–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), Jon Griffin Donlon, Bayou Country
Bloodsport: The Culture of Cockfighting in Southern Louisiana (Jefferson: McFarland, 2013)
and Robert Joe Cutter, The Brush and the Spur: Chinese Culture and the Cockfight
(Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1989).
The history of hunting has generally attracted more scholarly attention than blood
sports, but this is not usually worked around the concept of violence. For an introduction
see Emma Griffin, Blood Sport: Hunting in Britain since 1066 (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2007) and Richard Hummel, Hunting and Fishing for Sport: Commerce, Controversy,
Popular Culture (Bowling Green, KY: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1994).
The literature on the history of human combat sports is more extensive, though not
all of it is academic in nature. Some good introductions to the history of boxing in the

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West may be found in John Sugden, Boxing and Society: An International Analysis
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996) and Kasia Boddy, Boxing: A Cultural
History (London: Reaktion Books, 2008). A good study on the history of women in
boxing may be found in Malissa Smith, A History of Women’s Boxing (Lanham, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2014). For sumo wrestling in Japan see P. L. Cuyler, Sumo from
Rite to Sport (New York: Weatherhill, 1979) and Harold Bolitho, ‘Sumo and Popular
Culture: The Tokugawa Period’, in Gavan McCormack and Yoshio Sugimoto (eds.),
Modernisation and Beyond: The Japanese Trajectory (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998), pp. 17–32. Like so much of the history of sport, Chinese martial arts have not
attracted extensive scholarly attention in recent years, though articles by Stanley
E. Henning provide an introduction. See, for example, Stanley E. Henning, ‘The
Chinese Martial Arts in Historical Perspective’, Military Affairs 45.4 (1981), 173–9 and
Henning, ‘Chinese Martial Arts’, in Naomi Standen (ed.), Demystifying China: New
Understandings of Chinese History (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012).

224
 part iii
*

WARFARE, COLONIALISM
AND EMPIRE IN THE MODERN
WORLD
 11
Frontier Violence in the
Nineteenth-Century British Empire
amanda nettelbeck and lyndall ryan

Typologies of Colonial Violence

In The Trouble with Empire, Antoinette Burton explores how violence accom-
panied the imperial project wherever it went. Arising from a perennial
struggle between imperial expansionism and counter-resistance, she argues,
violence emerged as an inherent feature of Britain’s colonial frontiers.
Although it sometimes took the form of large-scale warfare, colonial violence
predominantly manifested itself as innumerable, small-scale insurrections
that perpetually called forth Britain’s military interventions.1 The level of
repressive violence that was required to shore up Britain’s fragile rule over its
extensive territories belied its own understanding of itself as a harbinger of
civilisation. Rather than representing a benign civilising force, the British
Empire was a ‘great military machine’, as Richard Gott puts it, one that over
an extended period pursued the widespread exploitation of peoples, lands and
resources.2 This is not to say that ideas of civilisation exist in a state of
inevitable contradiction with violence. As the precedent of the Roman
Empire had demonstrated, the violence of colonisation and a belief in its
civilising potential had long gone hand in hand, and this was also true of the
British Empire in the nineteenth century. Framed by the beginning of
the Second British Empire (with American independence in 1783) and the
end of the so-called imperial century (with the onset of World War I in 1914),
the ‘long’ nineteenth century of the British Empire witnessed a period of
unparalleled territorial growth accompanied by various forms of coercion.
In this respect, the consequences of colonisation for the peoples whose
territories became part of the British Empire’s global map after 1783 took

1 Antoinette Burton, The Trouble with Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
2 Richard Gott, Britain’s Empire: Resistance, Repression and Revolt (London: Verso, 2011),
p. 8.

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 AMANDA NETTELBECK AND LYNDALL RYAN

more subtle forms besides conquest through military power. Justified on the
grounds of taking British civilisation to the world, different kinds of cultural
and institutional violence were imposed on colonised peoples through
administrative measures that included the introduction of British law, the
spread of British jurisdiction through offices of government, the systematic
dismantling of Indigenous sovereignty, and the incarceration and cultural re-
education of Indigenous peoples. In myriad ways, therefore, the impacts of
colonial violence could be witnessed not just in military campaigns and their
resultant cycles of conflict and revolt, but also in the everyday working
conditions of colonised labourers, in the assumed sexual availability of
colonised women, in the prohibitions that were exercised over colonised
people’s cultural practices, and in the forms of introduced legislation that
undermined their political autonomy and social coherency.
However, while all these forms of physical and cultural violence were
apparent in different degrees across the British Empire, frontier violence
stands out as a particular feature of the British settler colonial world, where
incoming settlers sought to displace Indigenous peoples from their home-
lands and turn those lands to new economic use. The economic forces that
drove colonisation in Britain’s slave and plantation colonies, or that under-
pinned the model of company rule in British India, were shaped by access to
natural resources such as mineral wealth or human labour. In distinction to
these forms of ‘exploitative’ colonisation, the principal motivator of settler
colonialism in the nineteenth century was the permanent acquisition and
cultivation of land. Patrick Wolfe describes this core distinction between
settler colonialism and colonialism per se as being grounded, quite literally, in
the inherent value of the land itself. Because settler colonies such as the Cape
Colony, Australia, New Zealand and British Canada were principally estab-
lished not to accrue economic benefit from labour or other extractable
resources but to take possession of profitable territories from which
Indigenous occupants would need to be dispelled, they were predicated on
the elimination of native societies.
The ‘logic of elimination’ that defines settler colonialism, Wolfe stresses,
not only encompassed physical violence – most characteristically in the form
of frontier wars and homicide as strategies of conquest – but also entailed an
array of institutional strategies through which colonial governments sought
over time to render Indigenous peoples and societies ‘superfluous’. These
strategies included an array of programmes of ‘resocialisation’ and assimila-
tion: ‘breeding out’ to eliminate Indigenous bloodlines; education schemes
implemented by missionary and government schools that aimed to

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permanently remove Indigenous children from the influence of their families

and cultures; legal prohibitions to prevent Indigenous peoples from speaking
their own languages or practising their own customs. Whereas other kinds of
exploitative colonisation might come to an end once the value of colonised
resources or labour had been extracted, settler colonialism’s enduring objec-
tive of dissolving and replacing Indigenous societies ensures that it functions
as an ongoing ‘structure’ rather than a past ‘event’.3 Lorenzo Veracini has
elaborated on this structural distinctiveness of settler colonialism in terms of
‘sovereign entitlement’. While some models of economic colonialism
enabled the metropolitan imperial power to remain significantly politically
distinct from its colonies, settler colonialism was implemented ‘from within
the bounds’ of settler colonial governments that carried an agenda of British
sovereignty to the colonial peripheries and sought to recreate a model of
British civilisation in the New World.4
From the 1820s onwards the scope and scale of settler colonial migration
around the British Empire increased exponentially with what James Belich
has described as the ‘settler revolution’: a period of dramatic expansion in
settler migration and entrepreneurialism through the early to mid nineteenth
century that was made possible by new technologies in communication and
travel, flourishing cross-colonial networks of trade, and burgeoning oppor-
tunities for economic investment in the colonies. The sheer pace and inten-
sity of this settler explosion, Belich argues, had an overwhelmingly negative
impact on Indigenous societies. While imperial expansion in an earlier era
had remained sufficiently contained to allow Indigenous peoples to respond
to colonial newcomers with strategies of resilience and adaptation, the
explosive degree of settler migration that occurred from the 1820s onwards
was unprecedented and devastating.5

The Settler Colonial Frontier: Vacillations

of Conciliation and Warfare
The dramatic increase in settler migration from the 1820s set the terms for the
kind of frontier conflict that would continue across the British Empire for the

3 Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology (London: Cassell,
1999), pp. 1–3; Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’,
Journal of Genocide Research 8.4 (2006), 387–49, at 387.
4 Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2010), pp. 3, 6, 16.
5 James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World,
1783–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 9, 182.

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 AMANDA NETTELBECK AND LYNDALL RYAN

remainder of the nineteenth century. As settler entrepreneurs sought to

capitalise on expanding economic opportunities in the colonies, new frontiers
spread out into territories where the presence of government remained
fragile, or in some cases was yet to be established. With each new wave of
settlement boom, flashpoints of violence erupted with Indigenous peoples
who sought to protect their resources, communities and laws. The constant
threat of Indigenous resistance to British rule prompted a range of responses
from the imperial government and its colonial representatives that ranged
from diplomacy and conciliation through to military and paramilitary force.
As an important strategy of conciliation, the British government sought to
negotiate treaties with Indigenous peoples in circumstances where their
existing demographic strength and military power made diplomatic transac-
tion the most prudent option.6 Whether or not the British government
embarked upon treaty negotiations also tended to depend upon whether it
recognised Indigenous models of law and political organisation as being
sufficiently equivalent to British ones to warrant diplomatic discussions.
Ultimately, however, the existence of treaties offered no guarantee against
the flaring of violence on the Empire’s settler frontiers; nor did treaties guard
against unpredictable shifts in the fragile political landscape that led agree-
ments of allegiance to change into conditions for warfare. In New Zealand,
the Treaty of Waitangi signed in 1840 between the Crown and more than
500 Māori chiefs formed the terms on which the British government secured
the exclusive right to purchase Māori lands in order to advance sovereignty
claims over the territories of New Zealand. However, the Treaty had not
long been in existence before competing understandings of its terms took
root as a set of conflicts over land, control and sovereignty. As James Belich
has analysed, this conflict came to fruition in a series of costly frontier wars
that took place between the mid 1840s and the early 1870s, in which 18,000
British troops were mobilised against 60,000 Māori who fought to defend an
unbroken belief in Māori sovereignty.7
Complex vacillations between peace negotiations and frontier warfare
were also the experience on the northern and eastern frontiers of South
Africa. South Africa represented the most diverse of Britain’s settler frontiers,
each of which raised distinct questions about the methods and consequences
of colonial violence. The northern frontier of the Cape Colony, which Britain

6 Saliha Belmessous (ed.), Empire by Treaty: Negotiating European Expansion, 1600–1900

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
7 James Belich, The New Zealand Wars and the Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict
(Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1986), p. 15.

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 Frontier Violence in the British Empire

inherited from the Dutch in 1795, was already marked by violent warfare
between the Khoisan, the San and Dutch settlers. According to Nigel Penn,
this inheritance influenced British policy in the establishment of mission
stations which would become a feature of all the Cape frontiers. It also led
the Dutch to vacate the Northern Cape in 1833 in the Great Trek for the
southern African interior, which in turn would create a new set of problems
for the British.8 On the eastern frontier, strategies of conciliation and violence
underwent complex turns over the nineteenth century, as Britain’s involve-
ment in eastward expansion entailed the intervention of its troops in Boer/
Xhosa wars. For the greater part of the nineteenth century, British settlement
of the Eastern Cape unfolded not as a territorial sweep through Indigenous
lands but as a series of cyclical shifts between treaties and frontier wars. The
resistance of the Xhosa and their highly successful strategies as guerrilla
fighters created persistent problems for the British in achieving governmental
control.9 In its intensity of sustained conflict over a century, Noel Mostert has
shown, the Eastern Cape frontier constitutes the most protractedly violent
frontier zone in South Africa’s history.10
At the same time, it must be recognised that the history of colonial
violence is far more complex than can be encompassed by a settler colonial
account of the frontier as a site of Indigenous dispersal and settler replace-
ment. In the nineteenth century alone, colonial South Africa was shaped by
shifting relationships between the Boers, the British and multiple African
peoples.11 Far from being forced from their lands, many Indigenous peoples
stayed in place in significant numbers, remaining in close proximity to British
settlers who sought out their labour. In the south-east, Natal Africans were
actively encouraged under the ‘Shepstone system’ to hold land as a farming
peasantry, in the expectation that an ordered model of colonial governance
would produce more enduring loyalty to British rule than violent conquest.12

8 Nigel Penn, The Forgotten Frontier: Colonist and Khoisan on the Cape’s Northern Frontier in
the 18th Century (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005); Penn, ‘The Destruction of
Hunter-Gatherer Societies on the Pastoral Frontier: The Cape and Australia
Compared’, in Mohamed Adhikari (ed.), Genocide on Settler Frontiers: When Hunter-
Gatherers and Commercial Stock Farmers Clash (Cape Town: University of Cape Town
Press, 2014), pp. 159–84.
9 Richard Price, Making Empire: Colonial Encounters and the Creation of Imperial Rule in
Nineteenth-Century Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 3–4.
10 Noel Mostert, Frontiers: The Epic of South Africa’s Creation and the Tragedy of the Xhosa
People (London: Pimlico, 1992). See also Ben Maclennan, A Proper Degree of Terror: John
Graham and the Cape’s Eastern Frontier (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1996).
11 Kevin Shillington, History of Africa, 3rd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
12 Jeff Guy, Theophilus Shepstone and the Forging of Natal (Scottsville: University of Kwazulu
Natal Press, 2013).

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 AMANDA NETTELBECK AND LYNDALL RYAN

The complexity of colonialism in South Africa reminds us that the British

Empire was shaped not by any one kind of frontier, but rather by a series of
frontiers that worked in distinctive ways. Some colonial frontiers took the
form of borders between competing polities, which jostled for power by
negotiating through treaty or by competing through warfare. Other frontiers
were much more permeable spaces through which colonial settlers and
Indigenous groups moved in fluid capacities, and where violence arose in
the intimate context of proximity, labour and economic exchange.13
The idea of an advance frontier that would introduce colonial order and
thereby avoid the causes of open conflict between Indigenous people and
settlers was tested in British Canada during the 1870s, when the dominion
government sought to gain control over the vast prairie lands that stretched
west from Manitoba to the Rocky Mountains. Unlike New Zealand and
South Africa where frontier wars followed in the wake of short-term or
thwarted treaties, the westward push of the Canadian frontier was relatively
stable, planned as a process of laying down the framework of law and
government before the arrival of settlers.14 The relative peace of western
Canadian settlement compared to other British settler frontiers might also be
attributed to the terms that coalesced on both sides to favour a state of
allegiance rather than conflict. For Indigenous nations of the western prairies,
the treaties negotiated with the dominion government through the 1870s
were preceded by a long history of diplomatic and military exchange with the
British Crown, and so represented an extension of an existing relationship.
More pressingly, by the 1870s the increasing scarcity of the bison on the
prairies had come to threaten a staple aspect of Indigenous people’s subsis-
tence and economic life, and no doubt made the Crown’s promise of its
protection and resources appear advantageous. From the dominion govern-
ment’s point of view, acquiring access to Indigenous lands through diplo-
matic rather than forcible means was an urgent priority. Aside from the
existing diplomatic links between Indigenous peoples and the British Crown
in Canada, the Indigenous nations of the prairies together constituted a huge
population and their combined military capacity was formidable; the possi-
bility of conflict was both impolitic and imprudent.

13 On African people’s place in the economic history of colonialism, see Colin Bundy, The
Rise and Fall of the South African Peasantry (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1979).
14 Gerald Friesen, The Canadian Prairies: A History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1987), pp. 136–49; Sarah Carter, Aboriginal People and Colonizers of Western Canada to 1900
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), pp. 118–27.

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 Frontier Violence in the British Empire

However, the absence of frontier wars does not mean that Canadian
settlement proceeded without coercion, threat of force, or enlistment of
cultural violence against Indigenous people. Following the signing of treaties
through the 1870s, Indigenous peoples were managed onto circumscribed
reserve lands, which became whittled down as increasing numbers of settlers
migrated west to take up land for farming and cattle ranching. Those bands
who refused to accept treaties were coerced into submission, and Indigenous
people’s promised rights as British subjects became increasingly limited
under the statutory powers of control embodied in the federal Indian Act
(1876) and its later amendments. As Gerald Friesen has put it, by the last
decade of the nineteenth century Indigenous people were confined to
a restrictive regime on reserves where they were managed as ‘wards of the
state’, setting them upon ‘a very different course’ from Anglo-Canadian
settler society’.15 While resistance did not often take the form of physical
violence, Indigenous people have always actively protested the Canadian
government’s interpretation of the treaties and its failures to protect
Indigenous rights, arguing that the spirit of the treaties was to share the
land’s resources, not to cede Indigenous sovereignty.
As a diplomatic strategy of imperialism, then, negotiating treaties with
Indigenous peoples was not necessarily a measure that either secured the
sovereignty of the British Crown or granted effective authority to its repre-
sentatives in colonial government. As Richard Price observes, it was in the
very nature of the settler colonial frontier to be fragile and unpredictable,
because, by definition, the frontier was a space ‘where hegemony was
constantly being negotiated and defended’.16 This was evident in New
Zealand, South Africa and Canada, where treaties were forged only to
become contested or negated in future years. However, in these settler
colonial sites the imperial government had at least recognised the importance
of Indigenous polities to the extent that it undertook to negotiate formally for
Indigenous lands.
In the Australian colonies, by contrast, no formal transactions for
Indigenous lands were ever pursued by the Crown, a decision justified on
the perceived grounds that Australia’s Indigenous people’s political, legal and
agricultural practices were not sufficiently developed to warrant such nego-
tiations, and that they therefore already came within the Crown’s protection.
This absence of a treaty-making tradition helped to determine how
Australia’s colonial frontiers became defined by repeated, episodic conflict

15 Friesen, Canadian Prairies, p. 128. 16 Price, Making Empire, p. 7.

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 AMANDA NETTELBECK AND LYNDALL RYAN

that was fought opportunistically between Indigenous and settler groups or

otherwise waged by colonial governments in periodic campaigns against
resistant Indigenous populations. The imperial government’s failure to recog-
nise Indigenous polities on their own terms also shaped the ways in which
Australia’s patterns of frontier violence were treated by colonial authorities. In
New Zealand and South Africa, the failure of treaties to secure lasting peace led
ultimately to military campaigns that were openly acknowledged as warfare. In
Australia, however, the concept that Indigenous peoples could already be
deemed subjects of the Crown meant that frontier violence was handled, at
least officially, not as warfare but as a form of civil insurgency.
A much-debated response to the dilemmas of violence with and against
Indigenous peoples was the concept of protection, a policy initiative of
the imperial government that evolved during the 1830s in the wake of the
successful campaign to abolish slavery around the British Empire. The
objectives of protective policy were outlined in the 1837 Report of a House
of Commons Select Committee that had been established in 1835 to consider
the status of the Empire’s Indigenous peoples and the question of how their
rights and well-being could be reconciled with a British agenda of continuing
colonisation. Much of the evidence that came before the Select Committee
focused on the recent problems of frontier violence in the Cape Colony, but
the devastating consequences of recent conflict with Indigenous people in
Van Diemen’s Land also raised the prospect that ‘the whole of the native
population’ could be eradicated by violence.17 The Select Committee Report
argued that the best means to repress further conflict would be to proffer
Indigenous people the benefits of British civilisation, including through the
refuge of British law. Nowhere was this seen as being more urgent than in the
Australian colonies, where in the face of settler violence and ‘the contamina-
tion of the dregs of our countrymen’, Indigenous people were perceived as
being at risk of vanishing ‘from the face of the earth’.18
Through the 1840s, Aboriginal protectorates operated in New Zealand and
several Australian colonies as a measure that authorities hoped would
encourage Indigenous people’s conciliation to colonial culture, help to secure
the Crown’s jurisdiction on fragile frontiers, and ultimately allow the causes

17 British Parliamentary Papers, Report from the Select Committee on Aborigines (British
Settlements), no. 425 (1837), pp. 13–14. On the centrality of the Cape Colony to the
Select Committee’s deliberations, see Zoe Laidlaw, ‘Integrating Metropolitan, Colonial
and Imperial Histories: The Aborigines Select Committee 1835–37’, in T. Banivanua
Mar and J. Evans (eds.), Writing Colonial Histories: Comparative Perspectives (Melbourne:
Department of History, University of Melbourne, 2002), p. 79.
18 Report from the Select Committee on Aborigines, pp. 10–11.

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 Frontier Violence in the British Empire

of violent conflict to give way to new regimes of assimilation and order. By

the mid 1850s, however, all of the protectorates established in the
Australasian colonies had been wound down. In this critical period of the
mid nineteenth century, a political shift towards granting settler colonies
powers of self-government saw the metropole gradually loosen its oversight
over Indigenous matters, leaving colonial governments with increasingly
independent scope to deal locally with the ongoing problems of frontier
violence.19

Indigenous Resistance and State Responses

Wherever the British established white settler colonies, such as Australia,
New Zealand, Rhodesia and Kenya, or expanded the territories of those
acquired from other European powers, such as from the French in Canada
and the Dutch in the Cape Colony, the Indigenous owners invariably made
clear their resistance to British claims of sovereignty over their homelands.
Acts of resistance could take non-violent forms, as was case when Indigenous
peoples appealed to the Crown for recognition of their land rights.20 Acts of
violent resistance ranged from the raised spears of the Cadigal warriors
shouting ‘warra, warra, warra’, ‘go away, go away, go away’, to the ships
of the First Fleet as they prepared to enter Sydney Harbour in New South
Wales in 1788, to the Xhosa chief who informed the British Governor of the
Cape Colony in 1850 that unless his lands were returned he would mount an
army against the British.21
While British settlers considered Indigenous land as a commodity that
could be conquered, bought and sold, for the Indigenous owners it was the
spiritual core of their being that defined who they were as a people. Whether
or not Indigenous peoples were induced to make treaties with colonisers, as
was the case in New Zealand, the Cape Colony and Canada, their connection
to country remained paramount; indeed, the acceptance of treaties did not
necessarily imply the ceding of lands to Indigenous peoples but the sharing of

19 Angela Woollacott, Settler Society in the Australian Colonies: Self-Government and Imperial
Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 152–78; Ann Curthoys and
Jessie Mitchell, Taking Liberty: Indigenous Rights and Settler Self-Government in Colonial
Australia, 1830–1890 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
20 Ravi de Costa, ‘Identity, Authority, and the Moral Worlds of Indigenous Petitions’,
Comparative Studies in Society and History 48.3 (2006), 669–98.
21 Brian Fletcher (ed.), An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales by David Collins
(Sydney: Royal Australian Historical Society and A. H. & A. W. Reed, 1975), 2 vols, vol.
I, p. 2; Price, Making Empire, p. 215.

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 AMANDA NETTELBECK AND LYNDALL RYAN

their resources. In the Australian colonies, where the British declined to

conclude a treaty, the Indigenous people continued to point out that kinship,
totem and country defined who they were as people. Across the settler
colonial empire, Indigenous reaction to the invasion of their homelands
was largely driven by their determination to force the settlers to observe
protocols and treaties in relation to their country. Despite the efforts of
missionaries and protectors, it was the settlers who usually broke the proto-
cols and treaties, rather than the Indigenous landowners.22
Resistance largely took the form of guerrilla warfare that was common to
Indigenous societies: that is, it ranged between small-scale guerrilla warfare,
which typically involved payback for failure to observe protocols, and larger-
scale traditional militarism that the British recognised as being parallel to its
own military strategies. In the Australian colonies, Aboriginal resistance
ranged from payback killings for unauthorised abduction of Aboriginal
women and small-scale seasonal guerrilla-style attacks on settler farmhouses.
These included raids for British rations of flour, tea and potatoes, maiming
sheep and cattle and taking maize crops, all in retribution for the loss of food
resources from the settler occupation of their hunting grounds.23 In the Cape
Colony, the well-armed Khoisan warriors carried out large-scale cattle raids
and attacks on settler villages as well as conducted up-front battles with
British soldiers. In New Zealand, Māori warriors led raids on settler villages
and farmhouses, and, when under attack from a large force of British soldiers,
they retreated to their pa, or forts, from which they repelled British assaults
with singular success.24 Before the 1850s, Indigenous peoples’ superior knowl-
edge of the terrain often placed British forces at a disadvantage, with their
limited access to horses and reliance on single-loading firearms.25 After the
1850s, however, as the British gained access to long-range repeating rifles,
employed larger mounted forces and became more familiar with the terrain,
they developed military strategies that were specifically designed to over-
come Indigenous resistance. These included a ‘scorched earth’ policy used

22 For comparative discussion on historical and ongoing contemporary debates about

political negotiations between Indigenous peoples and settler states, see
Marcia Langton, Maureen Tehan and Lisa Palmer (eds.), Honour among Nations:
Treaties and Agreements with Indigenous People (Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne
University Press, 2004).
23 See Henry Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European
Invasion of Australia (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin Books, 1982).
24 James Belich, The New Zealand Wars and the Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict
(Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1986).
25 John Connor, The Australian Frontier Wars 1788–1838 (Sydney: University of New South
Wales Press, 2002), pp. 1–21.

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against the Xhosa in the Cape Colony, ‘Flying Columns’ of mobile infantry
deployed in New Zealand to surround Māori pa, burning down Xhosa
and Māori villages in both colonial sites, and, on Australasian frontiers that
remained beyond the reach of the law, a strategy of massacre. These frontier
wars, however, were often conducted within a framework of legal excep-
tionalism in which the concept of legal procedure was modified to respond to
Indigenous resistance. Principal among these strategies of legal exceptional-
ism were martial law and paramilitary policing, including use of Indigenous
forces.

Martial Law
The use of martial law against subject peoples in the British Empire intensi-
fied in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, when military governors were
appointed to the settler colonies. Their capacity to declare martial law
empowered them effectively to suspend the ordinary rule of law. As the
Colonial Office under-secretary James Stephen noted, martial law ‘is but
another name for the suspension of all law; It is a measure which necessity
justifies, but for which the Act of Indemnity is necessary for even when
necessary it is illegal’.26 In 1867, legal commentator W. R. Finlason defined
martial law as ‘the final power colonial governors could impose upon
dissidents under their jurisdiction who were perceived to be in an act of
rebellion’. He argued that martial law not only enabled colonial governors to
use military force against all kinds of insurgent subjects across the empire and
to render ‘immune from prosecution’ those government agents who dis-
posed of insurgents, but also denied insurgents ordinary legal rights. Indeed,
he considered that martial law was a necessary measure to control the
empire, and that without it the empire would collapse.27
Possibly the most notorious uses of martial law in the history of the British
Empire until the end of the nineteenth century relate to Jamaica and India
where it was used to put down large-scale uprisings with brutal efficiency. In
the settler colonies, however, martial law was also used against resisting
Indigenous peoples on the frontier as insurgent subjects of the colonial state.
In denying Indigenous people sovereign status, the British used martial law in

26 James Stephen, Minute to Correspondence from George Grey Lt Governor of New

Zealand to Gladstone, Secretary of State for the Colonies, Despatch No.109,
23 October 1846, National Archives, London, CO 325/53.
27 W. F. Finlason, Commentaries on Martial Law with Special Reference to its Regulation and
Restraint (London: Stevens & Sons, 1867), pp. 10–12.

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 AMANDA NETTELBECK AND LYNDALL RYAN

the settler colonies to secure fragile frontiers. As such it proved an extra-

ordinarily flexible mechanism that British governors could use in situations of
crisis to extend and consolidate the settler frontier. It could be used, for
example, to subdue Indigenous resistance in frontier regions, such as
Zuurveld District of the Cape Colony where it was proclaimed in 1811 to
drive the Xhosa out of the district and across the Great Fish River, or the
Bathurst Plains in New South Wales, where it was proclaimed for a period of
four months in 1824 so that a military campaign could ‘clear out’ the
Wiradjuri people who were resisting the settler invasion. It was also useful
in securing larger territories, such as the Settled Districts in Van Diemen’s
Land (Tasmania) where it was promulgated in 1828 to contain the violent
resistance of several Tasmanian Aboriginal nations. Two years later it was
extended across the entire island, and when it was revoked sixteen months
later in 1832, most of the Tasmanian Aborigines had been killed. Just as
flexibly, it could be used in response to a perception by settlers that a treaty
with Indigenous people had been abrogated. In New Zealand for instance,
between 1844 and 1845 and again in 1846, martial law was invoked in specific
regions of the North Island where settlers considered that Māori chiefs were
abrogating the Treaty of Waitangi. British troops were despatched to bring
them to justice, but in this case the chiefs outsmarted the British, who were
forced to sue for peace. Martial law would again be invoked between 1868
and 1872 in the second phase of the frontier wars before the two sides reached
a stalemate. Martial law could also be invoked in a very specific place for
a few days, to carry out summary punishment on specific Indigenous groups.
For example, in 1840 martial law was declared at a specific stretch of coastline
in the colony of South Australia so that a police party could arrest two
Milmenrura warriors, try them in an open court on the spot, and then
hang them on the site where twenty-four passengers from the ship Maria,
wrecked at the mouth of the Murray River a few weeks earlier, had been
killed. This was the largest single killing of settlers by Indigenous people in
the history of colonial Australia. In this case, martial law was used as an
instrument of terror in the hope that it would deter Indigenous attacks on
vulnerable settlers in the future.28

28 On the enlistment of martial law in these settings see Rande Kostal, A Jurisprudence of
Power: Victorian Empire and the Rule of Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005);
Nasser Hussain, The Jurisprudence of Emergency: Colonialism and the Rule of Law (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003); Gott, Britain’s Empire, p. 178; Lyndall Ryan,
Tasmanian Aborigines: A History since 1803 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2012), pp. 108–9;
Belich, The New Zealand Wars, pp. 64–71; Julie Evans, ‘Colonialism and the Rule of Law:
The Case of South Australia’, in Barry S. Godfrey and Graeme Dunstall (eds.), Crime

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 Frontier Violence in the British Empire

The settler frontiers where martial law was invoked most often in the
nineteenth century were the Cape Colony’s eastern frontiers between 1811
and 1860 and the North Island of New Zealand from 1844 to 1872. In each
place, several thousand British troops were deployed over many decades to
assert British sovereignty. On the eastern Cape frontier of the Xhosa home-
lands, the colonial government invoked martial law on at least ten occasions,
sometimes for years at a time, and deployed British troops to suit the shifting
requirements of colonial security: it was variously used to force the Xhosa to
move from one part of their homelands to another, to ‘dispose’ of them for
allegedly breaking treaties, to coerce them into particular areas, and to force
them into British re-education camps.29 In New Zealand it appears to have
been invoked on at least five occasions during the course of the frontier wars
on the North Island.30 The powers of martial law were not necessarily limited
to the colonial state’s capacity for military manpower. During the 1820s, for
instance, the military powers available to the colonial government in Van
Diemen’s Land were considerably extended by adding a call to arms of the
civilian population to assist in wresting the land from the Indigenous
owners.31 Martial law also conferred on other colonial officials, such as police
and magistrates, the summary powers either to ‘dispose’ of ‘insurgents’
without arresting them, let alone bringing them to trial in a court of law,
or to place them in detention in places such as Robben Island. As a key
instrument for putting down Indigenous resistance with force, the principal
purposes of martial law on the settler frontier were to secure the settler polity
and to assert colonial claims to sovereignty over Indigenous lands.32

Paramilitary Policing
By the mid 1830s, the astonishingly violent outcomes of martial law were
causing deep concern in Britain amongst humanitarian politicians who

and Empire 1840–1940 (Cullompton: Willan, 2005), pp. 57–75; Robert Foster and
Amanda Nettelbeck, Out of the Silence: South Australia’s Frontier Wars in History and
Memory (Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 2012).
29 Price, Making Empire, pp. 257–60, 267–90.
30 Martial law was declared in the frontier wars in New Zealand in February 1846,
March 1860, March 1862, May 1864 and January 1869. However, in The New Zealand
Wars, Belich does not directly acknowledge the declaration of martial law, April 1845.
31 Graeme Calder, ‘Routing a Rebellion or Crushing a Crime Wave? Proclaiming Martial
Law and a Call-to-Arms in Van Diemen’s Land, 1828–1830’, Legal History 12 (2008),
129–50, at 145.
32 Julie Evans and Tessa Fluence, ‘Securing the Settler Polity: Martial Law and the
Aboriginal Peoples of Van Diemen’s Land’, Journal of Australian Colonial History 15
(2013), 1–22.

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 AMANDA NETTELBECK AND LYNDALL RYAN

considered that the role of the British Empire was to Christianise and
civilise the Indigenous peoples rather than exterminate them. A key prin-
ciple of the 1837 Select Committee Report was that only by bringing
Indigenous people within the pale of British law could the empire both
achieve peace on its colonial borders and provide justice to Indigenous
people. However, this was more easily imagined than achieved on settler
frontiers where Indigenous people resisted colonial authority. After the
early deployment of military forces to assert Crown sovereignty, local
colonial police forces were seen as the principal legal instrument for bring-
ing law and order to Britain’s settler frontiers. But whereas civil policing
based on the English model of the London Metropolitan Police remained
the ideal in settled towns, this was clearly ineffective on frontiers where
British jurisdiction remained insecure, giving rise to a typology of para-
military policing around the British Empire for ‘intermediate’ or frontier
zones where Indigenous people and settlers competed for territory.33 From
the late 1830s until the end of the nineteenth century, armed and mounted
paramilitary police operated across the settler colonies of Australia, Canada,
New Zealand and the Cape Colony to extend and protect the authority of
the colonial state.34
In all these colonial sites, paramilitary policing became increasingly reliant
upon the employment of Indigenous men, although Canada was exceptional
in that it never employed dedicated Indigenous forces. Notably, an original
intention of establishing ‘native police’ forces in the Australian colonies was
not to secure colonial authority through force but to extend a ‘civilising’
influence by training young Indigenous warriors in the discipline of British
civilisation.35 The authorities on the settler frontier in the Cape Colony were
more pragmatic. They considered that a native police force formed from
defeated Indigenous peoples would be a cheap and effective way of main-
taining and extending the settler frontier.36 Over time, the latter view
prevailed. By the mid nineteenth century, native police forces had become
familiar across the empire as a special legal instrument that served as a cheap
and effective way of suppressing Indigenous resistance.

33 Clive Emsley, ‘Policing the Empire/Policing the Metropole: Some Thoughts on

Models and Types’, Crime, History and Societies 14.2 (2014), 43–54.
34 D. Anderson and D. Killingray (eds.), Policing the Empire: Government, Authority and
Control (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), p. 2.
35 For a humanitarian concept of a native police force, see Alexander Maconochie to the
Editor, Murray’s Review, 16 January 1838.
36 K. I. Watson, ‘African Sepoys? The Black Police on the Eastern Cape frontier: 1835–1850’,
Kleio 28. 1(2007), 62–78, at 63–4.

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The first native police forces established in the settler colonies included
those formed in Queen Adelaide Province in the Cape Colony in 1836, in the
Port Phillip District of New South Wales in 1837 and in New Zealand in 1841.37
Initially recruited from particular Indigenous groups in collaboration with
‘friendly chiefs’ and under the supervision of British officers, the recruits were
issued with Western-style uniforms and rations at government expense.
While the native police in Queen Adelaide Province were initially unarmed,
their counterparts in the Port Phillip District and New Zealand not only
carried firearms but were also mounted on horseback. Despite these differ-
ences, however, they each operated with the same purpose: to apprehend
supposed culprits, to protect the white population on the extreme limits of
the settler frontier, and to use their specialist knowledge to reconcile their
people to settler rule. In the Port Phillip District, those considered ‘culprits’
included runaway convicts from New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land
(Tasmania), but in Queen Adelaide Province and in New Zealand they were
exclusively Indigenous people who engaged in livestock theft or broke other
laws of the settler hegemony. The native police quickly became an integral
strand in the British web of control over settler frontiers, tracking down
livestock theft, operating as informers and acting as messengers between the
colonial authorities and Indigenous leaders. In this role they were a second
line of defence against Indigenous resistance.
By the mid 1840s, all three groups were operating on the settler frontier as
paramilitary forces in suppressing Indigenous resistance. By 1850, they were
vastly expanded and deployed in coercing their people to accept British
sovereignty. By then, however, the settler frontier had moved on and the
forces in Queen Adelaide Province and the Port Phillip District were dis-
banded. Most members of the force in Queen Adelaide Province promptly
deserted to the leading Xhosa chief who opposed the British, allowing several
thousand rounds of ammunition to fall into his hands. Some of the Port
Phillip native police sought employment in subsequent iterations of the
native police force and others became important leaders in their community
in promoting their rights as Indigenous people. In the new colony of British
Kaffraria and in New Zealand, the duties of native police included regulating
the flow of Xhosa and Māori looking for work, trying to control the illicit

37 Ibid., 65; Marie Hansen Fels, Good Men and True: The Aboriginal Police of the Port Phillip
District 1837–1853 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1988), pp. 12–25; Richard
S. Hill, ‘Maori Police Personnel and the Rangatiratanga Discourse’, in Barry Godfrey
and Graeme Dunstall (eds.), Crime and Empire 1840–1940 (Cullompton: Willan, 2005), pp.
174–88.

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 AMANDA NETTELBECK AND LYNDALL RYAN

arms trade, and forcing out Xhosa and Māori squatters from so-called
undesirable locations and burning down their homes. The force in New
Zealand was disbanded in the mid 1880s.38
While these first native police forces had a temporary role in supporting
the imposition of British authority, on the newly expanding frontiers of
northern New South Wales and later Queensland the native police had
a striking longevity as the first line of defence from their establishment in
1848 until the end of the nineteenth century. They were so successful in
suppressing Aboriginal resistance that they became the prototype for the use
of paramilitary violence in securing the settler frontier. The Queensland force
became particularly notorious for the way that it ‘dispersed’ Aboriginal
insurgents, over the course of half a century, without the requirement to
declare martial law. From the 1870s, the force was largely deployed in
‘clearing’ new frontier regions of Aboriginal resistance before the settlers
arrived, and was particularly effective in attacking Aboriginal encampments
at night and killing the occupants. The troopers would then force the
survivors onto reserves or pastoral runs and if they offered further resistance
they could be sent to prison.39 Colonial authorities were reliant on the skills of
Indigenous people to secure the settler frontier, while Indigenous people
themselves undoubtedly had other motivations relating to their own social
and political world for becoming involved in colonial policing. In this sense,
the impact of ‘native policing’ may have been not only coercive but also
a form of Indigenous adaptation to the structural changes wrought by settler
colonialism.

Conclusion
The expansion of the British Empire through the nineteenth-century age of
‘explosive colonisation’ could not proceed without disregarding or directly
subjugating the sovereign claims of existing peoples. Despite the imperial
government’s objectives from the 1830s to govern the empire on the huma-
nitarian principle that Indigenous people held shared rights as British sub-
jects, continued colonial growth could not be achieved without ongoing
physical, institutional and cultural violence. In the settler colonies in

38 On the operation and disbanding of police forces in these different jurisdictions, see
Watson, ‘African Sepoys?’, 72–7; Fels, Good Men and True, pp. 237–57; Hill, ‘Maori
Police’, 178–80.
39 Jonathan Richards, The Secret War: A True History of Queensland’s Native Police (St Lucia:
University of Queensland Press, 2008), pp. 1–4, 132–4.

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particular, where increasing numbers of settlers jostled with Indigenous

peoples over rights to land, the colonial project to domesticate new lands
and replicate a model of British civilisation was made constantly problematic
because the practical difficulties of conciliating and governing Indigenous
peoples repeatedly challenged the assumption of British sovereignty.
As Wolfe has succinctly observed, in order for the settler colonial endea-
vour to be interrupted, ‘all the native has to do is stay at home’.40 Under
conditions where Indigenous people and settlers were compelled to compete
for access to the land and its resources, frontier violence became an endemic
and cyclical feature of Britain’s settler colonies. While it is impossible to
identify frontier death tolls with accuracy, the calculations put forward by
historians for different sites are suggestive of the scale and impact of frontier
violence around the empire. The human cost of violence on Australia’s
colonial frontiers has been a contested question, but conservative estimates
by historians Henry Reynolds and Richard Broome suggest that fatalities
were in the range of 20,000 Indigenous people and 2,000 Europeans, or
a rough ratio of 10:1. More recently, Raymond Evans has suggested that
upwards of 24,000 Indigenous people died at the hands of the Queensland
Native Police alone during the years of its operation. In New Zealand,
historian James Cowan calculated that more than 2,000 Māori and more
than 700 British lost their lives in the frontier wars that took place between
1845 and 1872. Historians have estimated that the longest and the most bitter
of the serial wars on the eastern Cape frontier, the 1850–53 war, resulted in
16,000 Xhosa and 1,400 European casualties.41
Certainly, the expressions and intensity of frontier violence varied accord-
ing to local differences, including the pace and concentration of settlement,
the topography of terrain, and the question of how much settlers were
dependent upon colonised labour. Yet behind these localised variations,
Britain’s settler frontiers all confronted the experience of Indigenous

40 Wolfe, Settler Colonialism, p. 1.

41 For discussion of estimates by Henry Reynolds and Richard Broome of Australian
frontier fatalities see Richard Broome, ‘The Statistics of Frontier Conflict’, in
B. Attwood and S. Foster (eds.), Frontier Conflict: The Australian Experience (Canberra:
National Museum of Australia), pp. 88–98, at 88–90. For estimates of Queensland
frontier fatalities see Raymond Evans, ‘The Country Has Another Past: Queensland
and the History Wars’, in Frances Peters-Little, Ann Curthoys and John Docker (eds.),
Passionate Histories: Myth, Memory and Indigenous Australia (Canberra: ANU e-Press,
2010), pp. 9–38, at 31. For New Zealand estimates nominated by James Cowan see ‘End
of the New Zealand Wars’, URL: www.nzhistory.net.nz/war/new-zealand-wars/end
(Ministry for Culture and Heritage). For estimates of casualties of the Eastern Cape war
during the early 1850s, see James Bradford, ‘Kaffir Wars’, in Bradford (ed.), International
Encyclopaedia of Military History (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 714.

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resistance, and colonial authorities across the empire responded with strate-
gies of extraordinary legal force. These patterns shaped how frontier violence
unfolded across the British Empire from the 1820s, and how it continued for
more than a century thereafter.

Bibliographical Essay
Frontier violence has only recently become a recognised structuring theme of histories of
British imperialism. Philippa Levine’s excellent overview of the rise and fall of British
imperialism, The British Empire: Sunrise to Sunset (London: Routledge, 2013), deals with
frontier violence and Indigenous dispossession as an inevitable consequence of colonial
conquest. Other recent works that give more targeted attention to the nature of the British
Empire as a site of contested power struggle and Indigenous resistance are
Antoinette Burton’s The Trouble with Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) and
Richard Gott’s Britain’s Empire: Resistance, Repression and Revolt (London: Verso, 2011).
However, although frontier violence is relatively new as a trans-imperial subject of study,
it has flourished as one of the most important themes structuring regionally specific
histories of the British Empire.
A wide field of scholarship draws out the specific histories of imperial conquest,
Indigenous resistance and the violent culture of the frontier in Britain’s colonial
possessions. For Africa, these include Noel Mostert’s Frontiers: The Epic of South Africa’s
Creation and the Tragedy of the Xhosa People (New York: Knopf, 1992), Nigel Penn’s The
Forgotten Frontier: Colonist & Khoisan on the Cape’s Northern Frontier in the 18th Century
(Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005), Richard Price’s Making Empire: Colonial Encounters
and the Creation of Imperial Rule in Nineteenth-Century Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2008) and Jon Abbink, M. E. de Bruijn and K. van Walraven’s
anthology Rethinking Resistance: Revolt and Violence in African History (Leiden: Brill, 2003).
On India, recent important works include Elizabeth Kolsky’s Colonial Justice in British India
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) and Taylor Sherman’s State Violence and
Punishment in India (London: Routledge, 2010). For Australasia and the Pacific, key
scholarship includes Henry Reynolds’s large body of work ranging from The Other Side
of the Frontier (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1981; rpt. Penguin, 1982) to
Forgotten War (Sydney: NewSouth Books, 2013), Bain Attwood and S. Foster’s anthology
Frontier Conflict: The Australian Experience (Canberra: National Museum of Australia, 2003),
James Belich’s The New Zealand Wars and the Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict
(Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1986) and Tracey Banivanua Mar’s Violence and
Colonial Dialogue: The Australian-Pacific Indentured Labour Trade (Honolulu: University of
Hawai‘i Press, 2007).
Frontier violence has been valuably theorised through a number of particular frames.
One of the most controversial of these is the question of whether the violence of colonial
conquest in Britain’s settler colonies constituted genocide. Key works exploring this
question are Mohamed Adhikari’s anthology Genocide on Settler Frontiers (New York:
Berghahn, 2014) and Patrick Woolf’s Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race
(London: Verso, 2016), both of which focus on the concept and comparison of genocide

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across settler frontiers, Alison Palmer’s comparative study Colonial Genocide (Adelaide:
Crawford House, 2000), and two anthologies edited by Dirk Moses: Genocide and Settler
Society (New York: Berghahn, 2004) and Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation and
Subaltern Resistance in World History (New York: Berghahn, 2008). For a critique of this
approach see Philip Dwyer and Lyndall Ryan, ‘Reflections on Genocide and Settler-
Colonial Violence’, History Australia 13.3 (2016), 335–50. As a counterpoint to this
question, scholars have explored the significance of the legal frameworks through which
frontier violence took place across Britain’s Empire, and the ways in which it was justified
as legitimate action by the state. Lisa Ford addresses this problem in terms of the role of
legal violence in securing sovereignty in her comparative study Settler Sovereignty:
Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia, 1788–1836 (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2010). Other important works examining the exercise of legal
violence in various colonial sites include Nasser Hussain’s The Jurisprudence of Emergency:
Colonialism and the Rule of Law (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003),
Richard Hill’s Policing the Colonial Frontier, 2 vols. (Wellington: Department of Internal
Affairs, 1986; 1989), David Dyzenhaus’s ‘The Puzzle of Martial Law’, University of Toronto
Law Journal 59 (2009), 1–64, and Julie Evans’s ‘Where Lawlessness Is Law: The Settler
Colonial Frontier as a Legal Space of Violence’, Australian Feminist Law Journal 30.1 (2009),
3–22. Frontier violence has also been importantly theorised in terms of gender. Examples
of such work include Elizabeth Elbourne’s ‘The Sin of the Settler’, Journal of Colonialism
and Colonial History 4.3 (2003), 1–49, Jock McCulloch’s chapter ‘Empire and Violence,
1900–1939’, in Philippa Levine (ed.), Gender and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2007), ch. 10, and Angela Woollacott’s ‘Frontier Violence and Settler Manhood’, History
Australia 6.1 (2009), 11.1–11.15.

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 12
Genealogies of Modern Violence: Arendt
and Imperialism in Africa, 1830–1914
benjamin claude brower

The History of Violence, Large and Small

In this chapter I re-examine the European conquest of Africa in a critical
dialogue with German philosopher Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of
Totalitarianism (1951). This book first proposed understanding the violence
of Europe’s twentieth century through imperialism and the conquest of
Africa, placing what had been understood as separate and unrelated episodes
within a single analytical frame. Arendt thus offers a valuable perspective
from which the African conquest and its particular histories of warfare can be
thought of within a general history of violence. This task presents challenges.
Violence reveals itself best in its local and contingent dimensions. Every
assassination, riot, lynching, battle, mass killing, strike or famine carries
within itself an overdetermined set of causes. The same holds true for
occasions of violence occurring outside of the event, the violence of pollu-
tion, poverty, hunger and illness. The historian pulling a fine-toothed comb
through the sources best grasps each instance’s specific logic as well as how it
is embedded in otherwise invisible economic systems and social structures.
But how can historians think about relations between these phenomena
across time and space in ways that do not rely on abstractions, closed systems
and pre-determined patterns?
Arendt’s merit reveals itself precisely in the fact that Origins does not
present a master narrative or overarching theory of totalitarian violence,
identifying precursors and tracing developments as conventional historio-
graphy might attempt. Indeed the ‘origins’ of the book’s title misleads many
readers. Arendt does not concern herself with identifying an original point
from which totalitarianism developed. Moreover, by ‘origins’ she did not
mean ‘causes’. Causality implies a sequence of events, where one event can
be explained by a preceding event. Arendt argues instead that the ‘event

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illuminates its own past, but it can never be deduced from it’.1 (Many
scholars directly inspired by Arendt fail to grasp this nuance, as I will discuss
below.) Her argument depends upon identifying violence’s ‘elements’, or
the constitutive ideas and practices that ‘crystallised’ in the first half of the
twentieth century.2 Among the many who have been inspired by Origins to
reread modern violence it is perhaps only the scholar Enzo Traverso who
has fully grasped this specific point when he writes in his Origins of Nazi
Violence that his goal ‘is to seize upon the elements of civilizational context
in which that regime existed, elements that throw light upon it and, retro-
spectively, can be seen to constitute its “origins”’.3 We see here something
of Walter Benjamin’s better-known understanding of an event as
a constellation of historical forces rather than their culmination.4 The massive
violence of the mid twentieth century then appears as something of
a perfect storm, neither an aberration nor a continuation but ‘one permuta-
tion among an infinite number of possible configurations, conjunctions and
correspondences’.5 This neatly departs from standard historical arguments
with cause–effect questions concerning the continuity and discontinuity of
violence, its long and short durée. Properly understood, Arendt’s ‘origins’
helps historians separate the causes of violence from its effects,6 while
highlighting what Michel Foucault separately called genealogy, namely
history’s ‘wavering course’, its ruptures, lack of stable forms and, ulti-
mately, its heterogeneity, even to itself.7 This is especially important for
the study of violence, with its traumas and related epistemological crises
that seed the archive with aporia, fissures and gaps.

1 Arendt cited in Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), p. 203.
2 Margaret Canovan, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 17, 28–9.
3 Enzo Traverso, Origins of Nazi Violence, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: New Press, 2003),
pp. 17–18.
4 Norma Claire Moruzzi, Speaking through the Mask: Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Social
Identity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), p. 63; Michael Rothberg,
Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), pp. 43–4; Michael Löwy, Fire Alarm:
Reading Walter Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of History’, trans. Chris Turner (London:
Verso, 2005), p. 95.
5 Graeme Gilloch, Walter Benjamin: Critical Constellations (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002),
p. 25.
6 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, new edn (New York: Harcourt, 1973),
p. 156.
7 Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in The Foucault Reader, trans. Paul
Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), p. 87. See bibliographical essay for sources on the
epistemological problems related to trauma.

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 BENJAMIN CLAUDE BROWER

There are, however, perils to this project. Arendt’s readers have commen-
ted upon the difficult, improbable structure of the book. (Origins consists of
three volumes: along with the second volume on imperialism is a first tome
on anti-Semitism and the third volume on totalitarianism.) Moreover,
Arendt’s method strikes some as intuitive, even improvised.8 Even if one
dispenses with reading Origins as a whole and focuses only on its volume for
imperialism and Africa, as I propose here, the material can be problematic.
First and foremost, there is the fact that Arendt knew very little about
Africans or Africa despite the centrality of this place to her analysis. Indeed
she may have harboured antipathy towards the continent, especially in the
period when she finished writing Origins and the decades after when Africans
threw off European rule. Decolonisation occurred with the violence that she
abhorred and a sharp critique of European norms that she held dear, as she
made clear in her 1970 essay, On Violence. This may account for the fact that,
although she condemns racism as one of the most dangerous legacies of
imperialism, she has no qualms approaching colonised Africans from the
same prejudicial perspective as her sources, even placing people of colour
‘outside language . . . outside politics, outside reason’, as her most trenchant
critic has put it.9 Moreover, apart from the most famous figures, like Cecil
Rhodes, Carl Peters and Lord Cromer, she knew precious little about
imperialism’s agents. That many of these agents were not Europeans never
seems to have entered Arendt’s mind.

Finding a ‘Black Arendt’ in Africa

It is therefore useful to begin this chapter by situating Arendt’s Origins with
respect to African historiography, a task that is especially urgent because few
have undertaken it. Africanist historians understand imperialism and coloni-
alism very differently from Arendt. The German philosopher saw Europeans
imposing themselves on closed and unchanging African societies; history
proper begins in her mind only when Europeans arrive. By contrast, African
studies first constituted itself as a field (at about the same time that Arendt
was writing Origins) precisely in response to these sorts of views ‘which saw

8 Richard H. King and Dan Stone, ‘Introduction’, in King and Stone (eds.), Hannah Arendt
and the Uses of History: Imperialism, Nation, Race, and Genocide (New York: Berghahn,
2007), p. 13.
9 Anne Norton, ‘Heart of Darkness: Africa and African Americans in the Writings of
Hannah Arendt’, in Bonnie Honig (ed.), Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), pp. 247–63, at 252.

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 Genealogies of Modern Violence

Africans as the passive backdrop to the deeds of white proconsuls and

missionaries’.10 It did not take long for Africanists to dispense with these
stereotypes, even writing histories of the imperial and colonial era where
Europeans are largely absent. In the early 1980s eminent first-generation
Africanist Roland Oliver could write confidently that ‘African history
throughout this period pursued paths still largely separate from those of
the European colonisers . . . Even by the end of the period, only a small
minority of Africans had seen a white face or had any idea that their countries
were subject to foreign rule.’11 Rather than the celebrated European ‘scram-
ble for Africa’ of the textbooks, Africanists found a more important internal
African scramble led by expanding African states which defined the conti-
nent’s nineteenth-century history. ‘Thus, some African leaders viewed
Europeans as allies and partners in essentially local struggles of some anti-
quity: Europeans, essentially, were co-opted into African wars, using African
troops.’12
Thus, Africanists’ priorities have diverged substantially from Arendt’s
interests. They have explored the interdependence of Europeans and
Africans and even the dependence of the colonisers on the colonised. This
included various systems of indirect rule deployed by Europeans wherein
colonised people ruled themselves, with the colonisers using local networks
reworked to their interests. Africans also played the essential role of inter-
mediaries and proxies of imperialism, as tax collectors, translators, school-
teachers, clerks, interpreters, even as ‘violent intermediaries’ as was the case
for the askari forces in German East Africa studied by historian Michelle
Moyd.13 In the early case of Algeria, where France had made major commit-
ments of treasure and blood by the 1840s and where many found genocide an
attractive solution to the so-called ‘Indigenous question’, generals and min-
isters recognised that they needed Algerian labour if European settlers were
to have a chance in the rough-hewn, former Ottoman province.14 Thus
nearly everywhere across colonial era Africa, the infamous command

10 Elizabeth Isichei, A History of African Societies to 1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1997), p. 13.
11 Roland Oliver, ‘Introduction’, in R. Oliver and G. N. Sanderson (eds.), The Cambridge
History of Africa, vol. V I, From 1870 to 1905 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985),
p. 1.
12 Richard J. Reid, Warfare in African History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2012), p. 139. Original emphasis.
13 Michelle R. Moyd, Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday
Colonialism in German East Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2014).
14 Benjamin Claude Brower, A Desert Named Peace: The Violence of France’s Empire in the
Algerian Sahara, 1844–1902 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), pp. 19–26.

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 BENJAMIN CLAUDE BROWER

‘exterminate all the brutes’ from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness had to
reconcile itself to the fact that European successes depended as much upon
mobilising Africa’s human resources as it did on exploiting raw materials,
farmlands and ports.15
Ultimately, Africanists have shown that colonialism and imperialism
mutually transformed Africans and Europeans. In the case of European mis-
sionaries, for example, ‘a protracted dialogue based in part on misrecognition,
in part on shared interests, in part on alliances across the very lines that divided
them’, constituted social relations with Africans.16 This went beyond social and
political relations to transform understandings of something as fundamental as
race. Historian Bruce Hall writes that African and European notions of race
emerged in a dialogic process: ‘Africans brought rich vocabularies and devel-
oped concepts about the social world in which they lived into their relation-
ships with Europeans, just as colonial officials carried a late-nineteenth century
conceptual vocabulary of race, nation, and tribe . . . it would be a big mistake
not to recognize that this was a two-way process.’17
It might be, however, that these historiographical insights produce their
own forms of blindness. Notably the violence of the European conquests can
fade or even disappear from the historian’s attention. Today, there are few
Africanist or Middle Easternist historians in the Anglo-American world who
focus on the colonial era’s episodes of mass violence. Fears of neo-orientalism
influence in part this reticence to focus on violence. For example, historian of
Algeria James McDougall has pointed to the dangers of violence studies in an
influential 2005 article that warns how this research risks reproducing colonial
stereotypes. He writes, ‘However many savage wars Algeria may have
suffered, Algerians have not thereby been collectively brutalized into think-
ing with savage minds.’18 It is hard to disagree with a statement like this, but it
leads to my concern that important parts of history might be foreclosed to
research if this sort of historiographical gatekeeping becomes predominant.
Exceptions to this trend are Africanist scholars trained at continental
European universities such as Jan-Bart Gewald, and African scholars who

15 A notable exception for the period of high imperialism is the German General von
Trotha’s ‘Extermination Order’ (1904) for the Herero. (See Bibliographical Essay for
relevant sources.)
16 John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, vol. I I, The Dialectics
of Modernity on a South African Frontier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), p. 6.
17 Bruce S. Hall, Race in Muslim West Africa, 1600–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2011), pp. 20–1.
18 James McDougall, ‘Savage Wars? Codes of Violence in Algeria, 1830s–1990s’, Third
World Quarterly 26.1 (2005), 117–31, at 129.

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 Genealogies of Modern Violence

maintain a sharpened postcolonial consciousness, like Toyin Falola,

Mahmood Mamdani and Achille Mbembe.19 For scholars of Africa working
in African universities, Algeria for example, colonial violence is a mainstay of
the field in spite of the censure their work faces in Europe and the United
States.
What then to make of Arendt? Even as she brings Africa into the
origins of European totalitarianism, and she places the question of
violence at the centre of colonial-era African history, she fails to recog-
nise the role of Africans. Ultimately the problem hinges on the fact that
Arendt sees imperialism and its violence as a problem for Europeans,
not for Africans. Karuna Mantena puts this in strong terms: ‘Arendt’s
interest in imperialism is limited to how imperialism impinges upon, and
indeed radically disrupts, the moral and political coordinates of Europe,
and has very little to say in terms of its specific and catastrophic legacy
for the ex-colonial world.’20 While Mantena does not fully contextualise
Origins, which was written when the world was hardly yet ‘ex-colonial’,
she does nicely point out Arendt’s inability to see non-Europeans as
significant historical actors. Africans do appear in Origins but hardly in
ways that advance our understanding of colonial violence. They play
a central role in the book’s sections concerning full-blown modern
racism, which she argues had only punctuated European thought in
the nineteenth century until imperialism made it a principle of politics
and a permanent feature of social thought. Africans triggered what
Arendt called the ‘shattering experiences’ felt by Europeans who
encountered Africans, somehow shocking in their physical appearance,
and race served these Europeans as an ‘emergency explanation’ for all of
this. Arendt’s understanding of ‘shattering’ has little to do with the
actual force of African resistance, for example the victories won by
the Amir ‘Abd al-Qadir (d. 1883) in northern Africa or Samori Touré
(d. 1900) in western Africa, who are not mentioned in Origins. Quite the
opposite: the racial shock experienced by Europeans is associated with

19 Jan-Bart Gewald, Herero Heroes: A Socio-Political History of the Herero of Namibia, 1890–1923
(Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999); Toyin Falola, Colonialism and Violence in Nigeria
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009); Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and
Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Colonialism (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1996); Achille Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, Public Culture 15.1 (2003),
11–40.
20 Karuna Mantena, ‘Genealogies of Catastrophe: Arendt on the Logic and Legacy of
Imperialism’, in Seyla Benhabib (ed.), Politics in Dark Times: Encounters with Hannah
Arendt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 83–112, at 103–4.

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 BENJAMIN CLAUDE BROWER

her view that to Europeans, Africans ‘were as incomprehensible as the

inmates of a madhouse’.21 Thus Arendt fails to understand that whatever
shattering occurred was a result of the Europeans’ own pre-existing racism
towards people of colour. The sort of ‘Africans’ who Arendt has in mind
come from the slanted sources available to her and her entirely un-
nuanced, uncritical reading of them. Working from accounts penned by
journalists like Selwyn James’s South of the Congo (1943), Arendt conveys
a vision of the ‘Dark Continent’ as a primeval land inhabited by ‘savages’
(both terms used by Arendt without irony).22 Thus she writes:
Whether these [Africans] represent ‘prehistoric man’, the accidentally sur-
viving specimens of the first forms of human life on earth, or whether they
are the ‘posthistoric’ survivors of some unknown disaster which ended
a civilization we do not know. They certainly appeared rather like the
survivors of one great catastrophe which might have been followed by
smaller disasters until catastrophic monotony seemed to be a natural condi-
tion of human life.23

The reader will recognise echoes between Arendt’s post-apocalyptic represen-

tation of Africans and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The novel is a key source for
her, so influential that she occasionally mixes her own voice with Conrad’s
words, producing the sort of ventriloquism apparent in this passage above.24
Conrad knew a good deal about Africa, but Heart of Darkness is a novel, not
a history. Although Arendt was a sophisticated analyst of texts, she subjected
Conrad’s complex novel to a straight reading, using it as a source of empirical
information.25 She can then be accused of being a ‘bloody racist’, an accusation
that writer and critic Chinua Achebe levelled in 1977 against Conrad, having
himself, it would seem, also read Conrad straight.26
What then to do with Arendt in Africa? Certainly, one can say that Arendt’s
dated Origins fits with enormous difficulty into African studies. Thus, recent

21 Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 190. A different perspective on this comment

emerges in Johannes Fabian, Out of Our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration
of Central Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
22 Selwyn James, South of the Congo (New York: Random House, 1943).
23 Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 192.
24 The point is made by Rob Nixon, London Calling: V. S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 95–6.
25 J. Hillis Miller, ‘Should We Read Heart of Darkness?’, in Paul B. Armstrong (ed.), Heart of
Darkness: A Norton Critical Edition, 4th edn (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), pp. 463–74.
See also Nidesh Lawtoo (ed.), Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Contemporary Thought:
Revisiting the Horror with Lacoue-Labarthe (London: Bloomsbury, 2012).
26 Chinua Achebe, ‘An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness’, in
Armstrong (ed.), Heart of Darkness, pp. 336–49, at 343.

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scholars who contend that Arendt merits consideration as a postcolonial

thinker need to seriously account for her Eurocentrism, prejudices towards
people of colour and antipathy towards decolonisation.27 My point is not to
find a place for her in African historiography but to highlight points from
which a fruitful framing of questions relating to violence and Africa might
occur. In this respect, if Martin Bernal was correct to look for a Black Athena
to counter the racism of European ‘Hellenomaniacs’, and if Susan Buck-
Morss showed similar vision in seeking a better understanding of Hegel in
Haiti (where the deeply prejudiced philosopher found inspiration for his
master–slave dialectic in the real struggles of black slaves), then I too
suggest that Arendt can be critically appropriated in ways useful to
students of the conquest of Africa.28 As flawed and dated as they are,
Arendt’s writings provide a useful point for making sense of modern vio-
lence, revealing in particular the importance of areas outside of Europe as
fertile grounds for research.

The ‘Boomerang Thesis’

Most readings of Origins concerned with imperialism centre on what is
known as the ‘boomerang thesis’ or what Arendt herself calls the ‘boomerang
effect’. Arendt’s usage of this term shifts in the book, making it difficult to
pinpoint her ideas accurately. And in spite of its importance to Arendt’s later
readers, the term ‘boomerang effect’ only appears four times in the 600-page
book, putting the boomerang thesis on thin foundations.29 In the most
general terms, one might think of this question within Arendt’s overall
argument that Europe’s civilising process derailed itself in imperialism’s
racism, rapacious expansion and lawless rule. Imperialism ‘led to an almost
complete break in the continuous flow of Western history as we had known
it for more than two thousand years’, Arendt writes, and this served as ‘a
preparatory stage for coming catastrophes’.30 Practices and thoughts that
developed in Africa returned to Europe in totalitarianism. Thus, scholars
evoking the boomerang thesis will generally write about imperialism’s

27 Pascal Grosse, ‘From Colonialism to National Socialism to Postcolonialism: Hannah

Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism’, Postcolonial Studies 9.1 (2006), 35–52; Christopher
J. Lee, ‘Locating Hannah Arendt within Postcolonial Studies: A Prospectus’, College
Literature 38.1 (2011), 95–114.
28 Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, 3 vols. (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987); Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti and
Universal History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009).
29 Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, pp. xvii, 155, 206, 223. 30 Ibid., p. 123.

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‘creating the conditions of possibility’ for totalitarianism, or that ‘imperialism

had set the stage for totalitarianism’.31 This interpretation informs the work
of two researchers who have undertaken studies emblematic of how the
boomerang thesis has been used to link imperialism and the Holocaust, and it
points to their shortcomings. The first is French scholar Olivier Le Cour
Grandmaison and his 2005 book Coloniser, exterminer: sur la guerre et l’état
colonial (Colonise, Exterminate: On War and the Colonial State). The second
is German historian Jürgen Zimmerer, who has published a series of studies
since the early 2000s. Le Cour Grandmaison’s book concentrates on the links
between the Holocaust and France’s conquest of Algeria (1830–71). This
conquest is regularly upheld by historians as one of the most violent of
Europe’s modern global expansion. It ravaged Algerian society, which lost
roughly half of its precolonial population of 3–4 million people to the direct
violence of military encounters, as well as the famines, epidemics and
emigration triggered by the conquest.32 As such, it serves Le Cour
Grandmaison as a case from which he will deduce the ‘origins’ of the
Holocaust. Coloniser, exterminer takes as its primary sources the accounts
published contemporaneous to the conquest. Hardly hidden from the public
view, the violence was well known at the time. Along with those condemn-
ing it were those who celebrated it in dangerous groundbreaking theories of
genocide. These included plans to ‘make disappear, by means of a war of
annihilation, all life deemed useless, a nuisance, or dangerous’.33 Thus he
argues that French colonialism has to be understood primarily as a project of
extermination, a point announced clearly in the book’s title.
Le Cour Grandmaison takes up the boomerang thesis and seems to share
Arendt’s understanding that colonialism diverted the trajectory of European
history. Thus the ‘constraints and self-restraint effective in Europe fell apart
over there’.34 Military practices forged in Algeria travelled to France in
incidents such as the army’s crushing of the 1848 workers’ movement
(known as the ‘Bedouin of the metropole’), along with the laws of exception
first imposed on Muslims in Algeria, and then on non-citizens and Jews in
France, as well as, finally, in more diffuse ways, an early ‘brutalisation’ of

31 King and Stone, ‘Introduction’, p. 3; Margaret Canovan, ‘Arendt’s Theory of

Totalitarianism: A Reassessment’, in Dana Villa (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to
Hannah Arendt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 25–43, at 30;
Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison, Coloniser, exterminer: sur la guerre et l’état colonial
(Paris: Fayard, 2005).
32 Kamel Kateb, Européens, ‘Indigènes,’ et Juifs en Algérie (1830–1962): représentations et réalités
des populations (Paris: Institut National d’Études Démographiques, 2001).
33 Le Cour Grandmaison, Coloniser, exterminer, p. 128. 34 Ibid., p. 196.

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European society, one that occurred well before 1914–18 when George Mosse
first observed its importance. Ultimately, ‘what was perpetrated in Algeria
constitutes a disturbing precedent . . . and a major rupture’, with new forms
of violence specific to colonial contexts appearing on the European
continent.35 These transformed thinking about the nature of human life,
and these in turn shifted political relations by enlarging the boundaries of
state violence. In sum, Le Cour Grandmaison sees these as so many ‘new “red
threads” beginning in Algeria and leading to the totalitarian disasters’.36
Finding the same red threads preoccupies German historian Jürgen
Zimmerer, who seeks the links between imperial Germany’s genocide of the
Herero (1904–8) in Namibia and the Nazi’s brutal occupation of eastern Europe
and the Holocaust. Zimmerer argues that Nazi policies in the Holocaust must
be studied alongside German imperialism in Africa. Building upon a famous
1941 quote of Hitler – ‘Russian territory is our India’ – Zimmerer argues the
Nazis looked to the short-lived projects of German imperialism (the Allies
stripped Germany of its empire after 1918) as well as to the successful empires
of the British and French to conceive their later plans for Europe. ‘Nazi policies
for the occupied areas of Poland and the Soviet Union must also be viewed as
part of the global historical tradition of colonial rule’, he writes.37 The way in
which a boomerang returns to Europe from Africa is considered in a number
of guises, what Zimmerer calls ‘transmission channels’, such as the personnel
who worked first in the German colonial administration and then for the
Nazis. Zimmerer’s most important contribution comes in response to his
question, ‘Where did the idea that an entire people could simply be “extermi-
nated” come from, on what discursive conditions did it rest?’38 He finds
answers in an ‘archaeology of genocide’, or the common discursive formations
and the archive of experiences on which the Nazis drew. This brings Michel
Foucault into Zimmerer’s conceptual and theoretical scaffolding, adopting the
French philosopher’s early ‘archaeological’ project of understanding the histor-
ical conditions that make certain forms of thought possible in a given moment.
Archaeology thereby gives Zimmerer a way to constitute an ‘origin’ for Nazi
violence in a conventional sense. ‘European colonialism is an important
historical starting point for the Nazis’, Zimmerer writes, ‘as it rests on

35 Ibid., p. 171. 36 Citing Arendt, ibid., p. 341.

37 Jürgen Zimmerer, ‘The Birth of the Ostland out of the Spirit of Colonialism:
A Postcolonial Perspective on the Nazi Policy of Conquest and Extermination’,
Patterns of Prejudice 39.2 (2005), 197–219, at 218.
38 Jürgen Zimmerer in ‘Forum: The German Colonial Imagination’, German History 27
(2008), 251–71, at 270.

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fundamentally similar concepts of space and race to those at the heart of the
Nazi policy of expansion and murder.’39 Thus Africa gave ‘precursors’ and
‘precedents’ for Nazi ideology and policy.
Both Le Cour Grandmaison and Zimmerer have taken a great deal of fire.
Reviewers in France attacked Coloniser, exterminer in shrill terms that faulted
the book with a litany of errors, including, it would seem, its having
reanimated controversial arguments previously used by lawyer Jacques
Vergès to draw analogies between French colonialism and Nazism in his
defence of Klaus Barbie at the highly divisive 1987 trial.40 And Zimmerer’s
historiographically more influential body of work was subjected to negative
reviews in the English-speaking academic world, as well as scepticism from
many scholars.41 Besides sending something of a chilling effect into the field
of colonialism and violence studies (especially for Algerian studies in France),
such reviews failed to identify what I take to be the principal problem with
both authors’ arguments and the boomerang thesis overall: first, it puts forth
a very conventional and un-Arendtian understanding of ‘origins’, and, sec-
ondly, it relies on a problematic diffusionist model for its perspectives on
Africa. As stated above, Arendt clearly refused the notion that totalitarianism
had an originary place, a starting point on a timeline, but argued instead that
it emerged from a complex process composed of many different elements.
(These included ‘tribal nationalism’, social imperialism, secret governance,
arbitrary rule by decree and the crisis of the nation state.) Arendt’s rich
understanding of temporality and causation disappears in the boomerang
thesis’s standard search for starting points. In sum, I suggest that the boom-
erang thesis fails to account for violence’s historicity. It can be said in this
respect that, like words, practices change meanings over time, ideas lose their
original logic, policies disguise themselves (even to themselves), displacement

39 Jürgen Zimmerer, ‘Colonialism and the Holocaust: Towards an Archeology of

Genocide’, in A. Dirk Moses (ed.), Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and
Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History (New York: Berghahn, 2004), pp. 49–76,
at 53. Emphasis added.
40 Gilbert Meynier and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, ‘Coloniser Exterminer: de vérités bonnes à
dire, à l’art de la simplification idéologique’, Esprit (December 2005), 162–77. On Barbie
see Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Assassins of Memory: Essays on the Denial of the Holocaust, trans.
Jeffrey Mehlman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).
41 Robert Gerwarth and Stephan Malinowski, ‘Hannah Arendt’s Ghosts: Reflections on
the Disputable Path from Windhoek to Auschwitz’, Central European History 42.2
(2009), 279–300; Matthew P. Fitzpatrick, ‘The Pre-history of the Holocaust? The
Sonderweg and Historikerstreit Debates and the Abject Colonial Past’, Central European
History 41.3 (2008), 477–503; Thomas Kühne, ‘Colonialism and the Holocaust:
Continuities, Causations, and Complexities’, Journal of Genocide Research 15.3 (2013),
339–62; Dan Stone, Histories of the Holocaust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp.
222–42.

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transforms thought and affect, and goals must be improvised, often on the
spot. Thus every act of violence, especially extreme violence like genocide, is
in some way particular to itself.
Nevertheless, the boomerang might serve as an appropriate metaphor
for analysis if it is precisely understood as a thrown object, rather than
used generically to denote a circular relationship. This idea can be framed
by a quotation slip from the Oxford English Dictionary: ‘Boomeranging is
dangerous for on-lookers, till the thrower is a perfect master of his
weapon.’ The danger referred to here is the fact that a boomerang
does not just ‘come back’ from another direction or place. The path
traced by this weapon is in fact counterintuitive because it can hit its
target from a different direction, even in reverse to the position of the
thrower. As a metaphor then, the boomerang places specific require-
ments upon those seeking comparative or trans-historical understanding
of violence and genocide. Although it is studied ‘from Sparta to Darfur’,
genocide is the outcome of complex processes bound to the specific force
of change and constellation of elements produced in a given time, as
Arendt argues.42 This means that the outcome of this process will be
different at different moments, making precise historicisation critical and
fixed trans-historical concepts problematic. Here we can look to the
lessons of Foucault with regard to genealogy, and his point that nothing
is immutable.43 This observation leads to my second point: in the boom-
erang thesis Africa figures simply as a precursor to later developments in
Europe plotted along a linear course, or, more bluntly stated, Africa
serves simply as a place where Europeans start doing bad things. While
Arendt’s prejudicial accounts of Africans are gone in the recent scholar-
ship, so too are Africans for the most part, who figure only in abstract
form as victims. The insights of African historiography regarding the
dialogic nature of colonial relations do not enter into analysis. This
deployment of the boomerang, focusing on beginnings and points of
origin, can be contrasted with Isabel Hull’s conclusions on the institu-
tional culture of the German military during their devastating African
campaigns against the Herero. While she pays little attention to Africans
and African historiography, Hull provides important insights by remain-
ing close to her European sources. She finds that German officers
‘learned nothing from colonial warfare that did not confirm their

42 Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to
Darfur (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).
43 Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’.

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prejudices about the correct way to fight wars’.44 In other words, colonial
Africa served only as a testing ground for practices originating elsewhere.
On the same note, one might add for the French in Algeria that their
own strategies and tactics, centred on punitive raids called ‘razzias’,
probably originated not in northern Africa, despite the misleading
name, but during the revolution’s campaigns.45

Power and Violence

Arendt did not, of course, scapegoat African events for Europe’s violence,
and she cannot be faulted with teleology. Origins consists precisely of
arguments that correspond to the perplexing course of a true boomerang-
like violence with its strange turns and multiple pathways, along with its
contingencies and its ruptures. In this final section, I briefly highlight one of
these, what might be called a hyperbolic notion of power that Arendt
identifies in imperial ideologies. This does not respond to all concerns
that emerge from Arendt’s work on imperialism – notably it does not
solve the problems posed by African historiography – but it highlights the
ways of rethinking violence that I previously pointed to, including the need
to properly historicise and theorise the violence of Africa’s conquest. The
section of Origins that interests me opens with a comment made by Cecil
Rhodes that Arendt cites as an epigraph: ‘I would annex the planets if
I could.’46 Rhodes’s hubristic astro-imperialism nicely frames Arendt’s
study of a truly imperial conception of power, as something inherently
limitless and unbounded, and she presents the strange path by which it
intersects physical violence. Normally separate politico-discursive fields and
the ways that they interact with each other in a larger field of power are
important to parsing this argument. Rather than locating violence in semi-
autonomous, inward-looking fields, like Hull’s study of the development of
extremism within the German military’s planning, Arendt focused her
attention on how fields overflow their particular spheres, even ‘colonising’
neighbouring fields with their values, assumptions, protocols and concepts.
It is precisely such a transposition from one field to another, Arendt argues,

44 Isabel V. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial
Germany (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 333.
45 Peter Paret, Internal War and Pacification, 1789–1796 (Princeton: Center of International
Studies, 1961); Brower, A Desert Named Peace, p. 22. On the razzia in Algeria, see
William Gallois, A History of Violence in the Early Algerian Colony (New York: Palgrave
MacMillan, 2013), pp. 100–21.
46 Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 121.

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that informs Rhodes’s bizarre comment, namely how economic logic

became political principle, resulting in the lawless and violent process of
global expansion that was imperialism.
Like several generations of scholars, Arendt follows J. A. Hobson’s
Imperialism: A Study (1902) towards the links uniting imperialism and
capitalism.47 Unlike Hobson’s Marxist readers, however, she does not see
the state as the simple instrument of capitalists, even if she accepts the view
that the state did capitalism’s bidding. The originality of her argument in
comparison to Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg and their own readings of
imperialism comes from the fact that Arendt maintains clear distinctions
‘between capitalism as an economic system, the bourgeoisie as a social
class, and the nation state as a political formation’, as philosopher Seyla
Benhabib writes.48 Moreover, Arendt historicises these distinctions, point-
ing to a sort of division of labour that existed prior to the imperial
era, when, for example, the bourgeoisie and capitalism recognised
a separate sphere for the state.49 This changed in the imperial era when
the boundaries that separated these institutions and their distinct norms
collapsed. In this sense, whereas Lenin saw imperialism as the last stage of
capitalism, Arendt saw it as the first stage in the political triumph of the
bourgeoisie.
This triumph was marked by economic concepts and ideals making their
way into the sphere of political philosophy and transforming the norms of the
liberal (or liberalising) state. The never-ending economic accumulation
sought by capitalism transformed itself into a never-ending accumulation of
power.
Expansion as a permanent and supreme aim of politics is the central political
idea of imperialism. Since it implies neither temporary looting nor the more
lasting assimilation of conquest, it is an entirely new concept in the long
history of political thought and action. The reason for this surprising origin-
ality – surprising because entirely new concepts are very rare in politics – is
simply that this concept is not really political at all, but has its origin in the
realm of business speculation, where expansion meant the permanent broad-
ening of industrial production and economic transactions characteristic of
the nineteenth century.50

47 John Atkinson Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1965).
48 Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage,
1996), p. 79.
49 Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 123. 50 Ibid., p. 125.

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So rather than a break in the civilising process caused by soiling one’s hands in
overseas conquest, Arendt points to this transposition which changed the
political field, and with it the foundations of the state. The ‘unlimited
accumulation of capital’ transforms itself into the ‘aimless accumulation of
power’ at the level of the state.51 This resulted in bounded nation states
becoming rogue imperial juggernauts, with politics, like the capitalist econ-
omy, conceived not nationally but globally.52 The broad spectrum of norms
and political values that animated liberalism – human rights (or ‘the rights to
have rights’), rule of law and consent of the governed are cited by Arendt –
narrowed to the pursuit of profit and power.53

Conclusion
It is in this circuitous way that European imperialism can, even from the
weak position it occupied in Africa, produce no small amount of violence.
Arendt puts her emphasis on the undermining of liberal values, a point that
she’ll develop further in her problematic effort to distinguish violence, power
and the law in On Violence (notions that do not easily separate themselves).
But Origins provides rich suggestions for understanding how the transposition
of distinct norms and values contributed to transgression and a generalised
climate of normlessness. If many of Arendt’s conclusions and assumptions
prove not satisfying, the questions she poses to her sources and framing of the
project are worth consideration. In this sense I see Arendt less in need of
a ‘historical turn’, as some have proposed, than I see the importance of the
history of violence making a self-reflexive theoretical turn.54 In this case,
Arendt helps historians see that general rules and ‘origins’ of violence are not
reliably deduced from individual events, any more than individual events can
be understood separately from larger processes. How they come together in
fateful, contingent episodes provides historians with some of their most
meaningful understandings of violence, large and small.

Bibliographical Essay
Hannah Arendt (1906–75) wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism in English, and the original
title was The Burden of Our Time (London: Secker & Warburg, 1951). She later rewrote the
book in her native German (Hannah Arendt, Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft,
[Elements and Origins of Total Rule] (Munich: Piper, 2013 [1955]). Her other major works

51 Ibid., p. 137. 52 Ibid., pp. xviii, 143. 53 Ibid., p. 269.

54 King and Stone, ‘Introduction’, p. 6.

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include The Human Condition (1958), Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), On Revolution (1963) and
On Violence (1970). The standard biography is Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For
Love of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982).
A large field of scholarship surrounds Arendt. The following sources are useful for
reading Origins. Margaret Canovan, The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt (New York:
Harcourt, 1974) remains a good introduction to Origins. Canovan’s Hannah Arendt:
A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)
offers a valuable rereading of Arendt based on unpublished papers. See also the useful
chapters in Dana Villa (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000) and Richard H. King and Dan Stone (eds.), Hannah
Arendt and the Uses of History: Imperialism, Nation, Race, and Genocide (New York: Berghahn,
2007). One of the best review essays is Dan Stone, ‘Defending the Plural: Hannah Arendt
and Genocide Studies’, New Formations 71 (2011), 46–57. Those seeing Walter Benjamin’s
influence on Arendt include Norma Claire Moruzzi, Speaking through the Mask: Hannah
Arendt and the Politics of Social Identity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000).
Karuna Mantena offers postcolonial reflections on Origins in ‘Genealogies of
Catastrophe’, in Seyla Benhabib (ed.), Politics in Dark Times: Encounters with Hannah
Arendt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 83–112. Michael Rothberg’s
Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in an Age of Decolonization (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2009) provides an astute reading of Origins, which puts it into
dialogue with négritude writer Aimé Césaire.
Scholars critical of Arendt on questions of race and prejudice include: Jimmy
Casas Klausen, ‘Hannah Arendt’s Antiprimitivism’, Political Theory 38.3 (2010), 394–423;
Anne Norton, ‘Heart of Darkness: Africa and African Americans in the Writings of
Hannah Arendt’, in Bonnie Honig (ed.), Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), pp. 247–61; Shiraz Dossa,
‘Human Status and Politics: Hannah Arendt on the Holocaust’, Canadian Journal of Political
Science 13.2 (1980), 309–23. Gail Presbey takes up Arendt’s understanding of Africa in ‘Critic
of Boers or Africans? Arendt’s Treatment of South Africa in The Origins of Totalitarianism’,
in Postcolonial African Philosophy: A Critical Reader (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1997), pp.
162–80. Finally, George Kateb, Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil (Oxford: Robertson,
1983) defends Arendt’s treatment of Africans and Boers.
Those using Arendt to understand postcolonial questions include Mahmood Mamdani,
When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2001). Achille Mbembe reads colonial violence through the
perspectives offered by Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, who is himself a close if
controversial reader of Arendt; see Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, Public Culture 15.1 (2003), 11–40.
Among those whom Arendt inspired to read Nazism through imperialism,
Enzo Traverso’s Origins of Nazi Violence, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: New Press, 2003)
nicely negotiates away from a diffusionist ‘boomerang thesis’. The cultural links between
Nazism and imperialism are explored in Jared Poley, Decolonization in Germany: Weimar
Narratives of Colonial Loss and Foreign Occupation (Berne: Lang, 2005). Nearly all of the other
major works in this field are noted in chapter 5 of Dan Stone’s Histories of the Holocaust
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), with the exception of Olivier Le Cour
Grandmaison. The field of comparative genocide studies refers to Arendt, even if the
nuances of her ‘crystallisation’ method are often ignored. A useful introduction to

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questions of colonialism and genocide is A. Dirk Moses, ‘Colonialism’, in Peter Hayes and
John K. Roth (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2010), pp. 68–80. Moses’s ‘Hannah Arendt, Imperialisms, and the Holocaust’, in
Volker Langbehn and Mohammad Salama (eds.), German Colonialism: Race, the Holocaust,
and Postwar Germany (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), offers an assessment of
Origins that departs from the consensus. The Journal of Genocide Research maintains an
important presence in this field.
Within African studies, recent studies of colonialism and imperialism stressing its
mutually transformative effects include Michelle R. Moyd, Violent Intermediaries: African
Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa (Athens: Ohio University
Press, 2014) and Bruce S. Hall, Race in Muslim West Africa, 1600–1960 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2011). A previous generation looking at accommodation
between Africans and Europeans is represented by David Robinson, Paths of
Accommodation: Muslim Societies and French Colonial Authorities in Senegal and Mauritania,
1880–1920 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000) and Julia A. Clancy-Smith, Rebel and Saint:
Muslim Notables, Populist Protest, Colonial Encounters (Algeria and Tunisia, 1800–1904)
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). A rereading of British indirect rule is
provided in Moses E. Ochonu, Colonialism by Proxy: Hausa Imperial Agents and Middle Belt
Consciousness in Nigeria (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014). Violence in the
colonial era is typically dealt with by military historians of Africa such as Richard J. Reid,
Warfare in African History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) and Timothy
J. Stapleton, A Military History of Africa, vol. I I, The Colonial Period: From the Scramble for
Africa to the Algerian Independence War (ca. 1870–1963) (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2013). A fine
reading of the sources, attentive to Africa’s diverse and historically varying economy,
geography and society, will necessarily advance scholarship concerning the question of
genocide. For example, Nigel Penn’s research on the San people of the Cape suggests that
the European violence that decimated this hunter-gather people in the eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries served not only to break their armed resistance but also as part
of British reformers’ efforts to transform them into pastoralists and Dutch settlers’ nakedly
instrumental strategies to use the labour of surviving San women and children.
Nigel Penn, ‘The British and the “Bushmen”: The Massacre of the Cape San, 1795 to
1828’, Journal of Genocide Research 15.2 (2013), 183–200. See also Mohamed Adhikari, The
Anatomy of a South African Genocide: The Extermination of the Cape San Peoples (Athens: Ohio
University Press, 2011).

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 13
Religious Dynamics and the Politics
of Violence in the Late Ottoman
and Post-Ottoman Levant
hans-lukas kieser
When religion offers an incentive to perform violent acts, killing and death
appear as ultimately meaningful. Violence, in these circumstances, becomes an
affirmation of identity, that is, a confession of faith and belonging. When there
exists, at the same time, a lack of faith in a viable political project, violence can
become the ultimate act of self-affirmation through killings and, possibly, self-
immolation. The ‘Islamic State’ (IS; or Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, ISIS) of the
twenty-first century is a particularly blatant example of an organisation with
such a connection between religion, violence and death, labelled jihad. Its credo
can be condensed as ‘I am, because I kill (neco, ergo sum), and even the more so
if I die.’ The IS drew explicitly on certain Islamic as well as modern Islamist
tenets, but it also emerged as a reaction to the neo-conservative US invasion of
Iraq. Whether experienced, feared or pretended, Western power had served
since Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt as an argument used to perpetrate intra-
societal violence against non-Muslims, who were considered as agents of hostile
global powers. ‘Levant’ designates here the core lands of the late Ottoman
Empire: today’s Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Israel.
The war in Syria in the 2010s, has been an extremely violent phenomenon.
A civil war with various changing domestic fronts, it has become, since its
beginning in 2011, the scene of an international struggle involving the main
regional and global powers. Together with neighbouring Iraq, Syria at war
has displayed a new and deep Sunni–Shiite divide and given room to an
extremist eschatological experience of a self-declared Islamic state. Turkey,
the Western powers’ NATO partner, has turned to domestic authoritarian-
ism under the dominant AKP party (the Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi or Justice
and Development Party, is led by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan), and to a political

I would like to thank the editor Philip Dwyer and the copy-editor Janice Shaw as well as
colleagues Eric Weitz, Stephan Astourian and Amir Rezapourmoghadammiyandabi for
feedback, and the Australian Research Council for my Future Fellowship (FT130100481,
2014–19).

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Sunni Islam tinged by neo-Ottomanism. Since 2016, it teaches the virtues of

jihad in its schools. Such neo-imperial confessionalism has determined AKP
Turkey’s active partisanship at the side of Islamist forces during the war.
Thus, the Levant and the world have become considerably different since
and because of these recent violent events. Fundamental historical rethink-
ings have to take these core lands into account and to concede that religion
has a real place and power in history, and that this was the case during the
whole modern era. The modern Levant’s most violent period was the last
Ottoman decade (1912–22), which included the Balkan Wars, the First World
War, genocide, internationalised civil wars and massive refugee issues, many
of them consequences of deliberate ethno-religious cleansing. Analogous
violent patterns continued to haunt the region in various guises after former
violence was implicitly endorsed by the Lausanne Treaty of 1923, the diplo-
matic foundation of a precarious post-Ottoman order in the Middle East and
the supposed solution of the Eastern Question.
This chapter concentrates on two related aspects: domestic jihad in late
Ottoman and post-Ottoman times; and the more general connection
between public violence, religion and eschatology. Since the late eighteenth
century, public violence in the midst of society, committed along religious
lines, has been a remarkable feature in the modern Levant. In the eighteenth
century, the Ottoman Empire was still a giant, stretching from Anatolia and
the Balkans to the South Caucasus, Iraq, greater Syria, the Arabic peninsula
and North Africa. In contrast to contemporary states in or originating in
Europe, or to Russia (its most feared and most hated adversary), the Ottoman
Empire lost territory, and could not expand continentally or through colonies
or frontiers. In religious, ethnic and linguistic terms, it was more diverse in its
core lands than any other contemporary empire. Factors such as the con-
centration of ethno-religious diversity, a unique depth of thousands of years
of written history, monotheist eschatology on the revelation of final futures
in a biblical, Koranic, Sunni and Shiite Hadithic geography, and ideologies
like Islamism and Zionism have made the late and post-Ottoman world
a modern global hot spot of unresolved conflicts and produced a theatre of
violence with global ramifications.
This chapter argues that modern coexistence among different groups is not
viable without social contracts. However, stark communitarian and eschato-
logical traditions have particularly prevailed in the modern Levant, aborting
any sustained efforts at establishing such contracts being based on egalitarian
relations. Even those states and movements that sidelined political Islam, like
Kemalism (the founding ideology of the Republic of Turkey under Mustafa

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Kemal Atatürk), could do so only for restricted periods of time, without

achieving societal peace. Divisive Muslim, Christian and Jewish eschatologies
provide religious visions of an ultimate future, thus adding to the sense of
incommensurate existence – although the pragmatics of life call for a decent,
contracted coexistence. Yet successful pragmatics depends upon viable tenets
of faith in political philosophy, theology and eschatology.
The chapter starts with a general introduction, followed by sections on
public violence and eschatology; the Eastern Question as interrelated with
violence against Ottoman Christians; and a close focus on the Levant’s most
violent decade – the 1910s – followed by the Kemalist era. Kemalism per-
formed an incomplete, temporary secular handling of politico-religious
dynamics. These have again, but in a stronger sectarian and eschatological
shape, come to the fore in the Levant, including in Turkey and Israel, in the
early twenty-first century.

Social Contract, Prophetic Monotheism and

Public Violence
Strong incentives are needed to overcome barriers of human decency, shame
and inhibition in order to welcome public acts of violence and to consider
them as justified patterns of human behaviour. The perception of danger,
entrenched social conditions and religion can combine to offer such incen-
tives. Publicly committed and justified violence has been a frequent occur-
rence in the modern Levant from the late eighteenth century to the present.
Remaining largely unpunished, like the notorious lynch violence endemic in
parts of the USA, it repeated itself in various shapes. Lynching cost the life of
thousands of African Americans in the United States from the late eighteenth
century; domestic jihad in the Levant was even more deadly, costing the life
of many hundreds of thousands of non-Muslim civilians.
In question, therefore, is a public violence that is visible and involves active
participation by leaders who use politico-religious arguments to justify that
violence. It is generally tolerated by state authorities, and at times organised
by them. Relying on a consensus regarding a threat to the state’s main
community, that is, the Islamic ummah – the seminal community of faith
standing at the centre of any legitimately ruled polity, according to Koranic
tradition – there is a type of pact among the public, the perpetrators and the
state that incites and tacitly encourages or tolerates violence. Thus we are
confronted with patterns of intra-societal or domestic (in contrast to military)
violence along politico-religious lines. What are and what do these lines

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mean? Why has the Levant been less domesticated by modern social con-
tracts than other regions on earth, while premodern, hierarchical arrange-
ments have been comparatively effective in maintaining internal social peace?
Historical answers can only rudimentarily be elaborated here, but my tenta-
tive general answers are simple: the Levant is the cradle of monotheism and
the focus of powerful eschatological projections. These have overruled or
mitigated modern constitutional precepts that, in turn, had previously dele-
gitimised premodern agreements.
Starting with the Ottoman Tanzimat (‘rearrangement’ or reform) state in
1839–76, modern states in the Levant tried, but failed, to establish
a constitutional patriotism and civil religion, as related to a functioning
modern social contract. They failed because the challenge was higher than
elsewhere. The Ottoman Empire’s premodern hierarchical fabric knew
a high degree of non-territorial religious and cultural autonomy for non-
Muslim religious communities, yet the establishment of modern egalitarian
plurality was not facilitated by regional differentiation. In other historically
diverse and regionalised polities, for example in Switzerland, geography
reflected and protected recognised ethno-religious differentiation. Also, the
Koran’s socio-religious hierarchies and, deduced from them, the Ottoman
millet system (autonomy of subordinated Christian and Jewish Ottoman
communities, so-called ‘millet’) were obstacles to recognising equality in
conditions of social plurality. Moreover, the centralist state tradition of the
late Ottoman capital, emulated by most post-Ottoman rulers, did not allow
for true regionalisation.
‘Ottomanism’, the term for egalitarian relations among the diverse popu-
lations of the empire under a constitution, enjoyed currency only among
small parts of late Ottoman state elites and among non-Sunni groups who, as
minoritarians, had a high interest in equality and legal security. Weak con-
stitutionalism went hand-in-hand with the ongoing political relevance of
religious boundaries and prejudices. Peace beyond conflictual religious
claims and identities did not have a real chance in these circumstances.
Eschatological expectations in their divisive premodern language remained
resilient, and this was even more entrenched as the Levant represents the
central theatre of biblical and Koranic eschatology.
Such resilience in eschatological expectations also applies to Turkey and
Israel, two post-Ottoman countries that seemingly held strong secular ideol-
ogies: Kemalism and Zionism. Their predominance did not, however, last
much longer than the second third of the twentieth century. Also, they were
based on national salvation narratives originating in religious sources: the

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‘modern father of Israel’, David Ben-Gurion with his Zionist reading of the
Hebrew Bible on the one hand, and on the other Ziya Gökalp’s messianist
interpretation of Islam and Turkish ethno-history, largely adopted by
Atatürk. Gökalp, the prophet of Muslim-Turkish greatness during the First
World War, is the pre-eminent spiritual father of Turkish nationalism.
Ethno-religious social unrest stood at the centre of the modern West’s
Eastern Question. This major issue of diplomacy comprised the challen-
ging crisis of the Ottoman sultan-caliph’s realm and revealed the limit of
modern Western methods to build up modern polities in the Levant.
From the late eighteenth century, leading Western statesmen and obser-
vers questioned the future of a premodern, slowly reforming Islamic
realm. Contradicting wishful diplomatic thinking after the Lausanne
Treaty and the foundation of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, the
Eastern Question was not resolved with the end of the Ottoman
Empire. Concretely, it had started with struggles for independence in
the Balkans (moving from Serbia and Greece to Bulgaria and finally
Macedonia) and culminated in the Armenian Question and the genocide
of the 1910s. It had little to do with Western conspiracy or a violence
supposedly essential to an Islamic Orient but was essentially about open
questions on valid rules for human society in general and the Levant in
particular. Although Western technical know-how was in high demand
from the eighteenth century, the example of an often brutally expanding
West did not inspire faith but rather influenced many Ottomans to
revert to their own premodern tenets and structures.
Repeatedly failed social peace is tantamount to a matrix of violence. The
general apocalyptical mood, as framed by Islamic scholars in the late
Ottoman period from the eighteenth century, went alongside the conjuring
of a better imperial era and a Sunni-Orthodox social order (supposedly) to be
restored from earlier centuries. Mainstream Sunni Muslims, which is the
community most tied to the imperial Ottoman state, and not only extremists,
believed that the perceived domestic enemies of the endangered imperial
order had to be eliminated for the salvation of a state considered as symbiotic
with religion (din ü devlet). If the authorities did not or could not act in an
acute crisis, religion demanded pre-emptive and punitive public violence to
be exerted intra muros by locally organised male mosque-goers. The ‘infidel’s’
(gavur, kafir’s) blood was declared halal, and mass murder deemed an act of
heroism and salvation. Most instances of such recurrent intra-social attacks
were associated with vociferous tekbîr/takbîr, the invocation of God (‘God is
greatest’), and at times also with references to the sultan-caliph. Islamic

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vocabulary, the rejection of European modernity, and the social envy of

Christian neighbours concurred in frequent social upheavals that took the
form of pogroms.
A significant example of these upheavals are the large-scale public
massacres of Armenians under Sultan Abdulhamid II, particularly in 1895
(c. 100,000 killed from October to December 1895). Abdulhamid had reacted
in the late 1870s against military defeat and Europe-backed reforms that, in his
eyes, weakened the state. He promoted a politics of Islamic unity, a kind of
Muslim nationalism or late Ottoman Islamism, rightly called pan-Islamism by
contemporaries, because Abdulhamid himself emphasised its global dimen-
sion. He regarded Muslim unity as the only viable and coherent force against
increasing Western influence and centrifugal tendencies within the empire. It
is true, if we leave aside the devastating impact of reactionary violence, that
non-Muslims benefited disproportionately from Western commercial, diplo-
matic, missionary, educative and philanthropic penetration of the late
Ottoman world. Yet this boom was not a political conspiracy as
Abudlhamid’s propaganda claimed but rather resulted from the zimmis’1
readiness and will to escape subalternity and participate in nineteenth-
century globalisation.
Abdulhamid called, formed and empowered modern Islamist enthusiasms,
but could not fully check them. Urban mob violence, organised in mosques,
together with some regional violence of gangs and tribes against villages,
played the main role in the 1895 massacres. Such perpetrators of unofficial
domestic jihad claimed they were fighting foreign evil and were not fully
controlled by the central authorities. Yet they were influenced by an empire-
wide parallel structure of religious figures affiliated to the palace regime that
Abdulhamid had established alongside the official administration. They all
conjured up the spectre of Western and Armenian rule over eastern Asia
Minor, resulting from reforms wanted by Europe and non-Sunnis of the
region. Jihad was declared by local religious leaders who claimed to do so in
the name of the sultan-caliph. At times, local instigators defied the sultan,
accusing him of being too pliable vis-à-vis foreign intrusion and not able to
assert his forefathers’ exercise of power in times of Ottoman glory. This
direct connection to the Islamic empire distinguishes the late Ottoman
pogroms from the 1965 massacres in Indonesia where local Muslim

1 According to the sharia, zimmi (dhimmi) refers to (provisionally) protected or tolerated

but politically and legally subordinated Christian and Jewish communities living within
the Islamic state. However, the term ‘unbeliever’ (gavur, kafir) is largely, but theologi-
cally wrongly, applied also to zimmis among Muslims of the modern era.

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perpetrators acted as instruments of the army (about a million supposed

communists, many of them ethnic Chinese, were killed; the Cold War-
affected USA condoned the bloodshed).
Unrest against non-Muslim minorities remained a powerful weapon and
a trademark of militant Islam in the Levant. A tradition of explicit Islamist
throat-cutting of civilians, declared disloyal unbelievers, runs from the nine-
teenth to the twenty-first century. In a few weeks in autumn 1895, tens of
thousands of mostly Armenian men and youngsters were killed, on occasion
by their own neighbours. A large Sunni male population organised in the
local mosques of towns in central and eastern Asia Minor perpetrated these
mass murders, spoliations and rapes, and was supported or vociferously
backed by women. Tribes sometimes joined in the violence or spread it to
rural areas. Violence was declared sacred and salutary, whence killing and
robbing became a festival, even a competition. In contrast to the genocide of
1915, conversion to Islam saved many Christians from death, whereas in the
First World War it saved Armenians only in particular circumstances.

Eschatology and Violence

Eschatology rooted in Ottoman history implies an imperial, state-centred
(neo-)Ottoman restoration and the wish for a strong leader (reis) able to
establish absolute power. This reis is seen in the image of a mythical world
conqueror (sahib-kırân), in the likeness of Muhammad and the conquering
sultan-caliphs. In contrast, other Muslim eschatologies, particularly since
the second half of the twentieth century and influenced by the seminal
Egyptian author Sayyid Qutb, anticipate and strive for the breakdown of
existing states and societies in line with other violent eschatological tradi-
tions. Claiming holy scriptures and theologies or ideologies of salvation, this
type of Muslim, Christian, Jewish or secular apocalypse attempts violently to
enforce the eschatological reign of God, creating a divinely ordained or
perfect society on Earth. Spectacular violence and ruthlessness against per-
ceived enemies serve to confirm the group’s own supposedly rightful author-
ity and a precipitation into the exalted future. There is no stronger example of
this than the IS in Iraq and Syria in the 2010s, an utterly eschatological
enterprise, whose killings were choreographed as a service of worship before
locals and a global internet public. Though reduced to a local public, analo-
gous patterns were present during the massacres in 1895.
In contrast, since the eighteenth century, various actors in and from the
modernising West projected eschatology into the Levant. In particular,

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Protestant American missionaries believed in peace-centred (post-millennialist)

and at times violent (pre-millennialist) visions that nurtured their lasting
engagement on late Ottoman territory. They linked their visions to Jesus’
kingdom on Earth, and initially also to the quest for ‘Israel’s restoration’, that is,
the restoration of the Jews to Palestine and to Jesus. Often acting independently
of home country governments, and emphatically non-violent in their actions,
they were nevertheless perceived as agents of a threatening, malevolent
Western Christianity. Their unanimous support for constitutionalism rein-
forced reactionary forces that were convinced of a general conspiracy against
Islamic rule and sovereignty. There were conflicts, most acutely in the 1830s
and 1840s, between missionaries and oriental (Armenian, Greek, Arab,
Assyrian) Christians, especially representatives of the millet hierarchy who
feared radical changes. But these conflicts never escalated into general
violence.
Missionaries and other foreigners were not generally in danger under
Ottoman rule even if they were perceived as subversive forces. They had
protective home countries behind them that could pressure the Ottoman
government. However, it was a different situation for Ottoman non-
Muslims. This is especially true for those like the Armenians, Assyrians or
Yezidis, who were in friendly contact with foreigners, but not backed by
another home country. Structurally perceived as devalued ‘others’ outside
the ummah and as agents of foreign powers, and often socially envied, they
became preferred targets of public violence throughout and beyond the late
Ottoman era. This violence climaxed in the cataclysmic last Ottoman decade
(1912–22). One of the main frontlines during the Ottoman First World War
was interior: state-led but condoned by major parts of the society and by
many perpetrators understood as a jihad, domestic violence removed and
exterminated the majority of Ottoman Christians. Influenced by a political
messianism called Turanism (a mix of pan-Turkism and pan-Islamism), the
ruling Young Turks party, known as the Committee of Union and Progress
(CUP), thus brought the process of othering in the late Ottoman era to the
apex of genocide.
The main instances and patterns of late Ottoman politics of Turkish-
Muslim violence paid off, relatively speaking, by making the perpetrators
rich in goods and power, even if they were politically insecure. This is
particularly true for the massacres in 1895 and the genocide in 1915 when,
besides confiscations by the state, many local Muslims enriched themselves
with spoils from their Armenian neighbours. Many patterns of violence
appeared, therefore, to be functional and invited analogous acts in the future.

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As a rule, not only central or local authorities profited from them, but also the
collaborators and bystanders behind the proactive perpetrators on
the ground. Many contemporaries considered the removal and murder of
the Armenians in 1915–16 an unprecedented, country-wide state crime. Yet,
after the Lausanne Treaty of 1923, and because of the international prestige
and attraction of Turkey’s modernist national revolution, these violent
policies not only remained unsanctioned by national or international prose-
cution but became appealing beyond the post-Ottoman world. Right-wing
revisionists, especially in interwar Germany (Ottoman Turkey’s ally in
1914–18), admired Turkey’s diplomatic success, its radical politics, and its
unashamed, transformative use of domestic violence. The victors of the
First World War condoned this stance when they abandoned elementary
demands of justice and, as far as minority protection was concerned, ceded to
most of Turkey’s claims through the Lausanne Treaty. Afterwards, Ankara
easily thwarted the minority clauses.
Turkey’s claims in Lausanne comprised unitary Turkish power over Asia
Minor; a complete silence on the Armenian Genocide with no prosecutions
and reparations; and a compulsory so-called population exchange to which
a disproportionally high number of non-Muslims were submitted. Lausanne
established peace for a high price that mortgaged the future. The victors of
the First World War were led to believe their diplomacy to be realpolitik, yet
this had the effect of corroding international politics and laying the ground
for violence to come, instead of opening a new and better postwar era.
Neither did the ‘divide and rule’ practices of the Mandatory regimes in the
interwar period in former parts of the Ottoman Empire contribute to social
contracts beyond religious and partisan bounds. Equality, supra-religious
political thought and inclusive institutions have remained a utopian challenge
as a result of the course set in Lausanne in 1923. Age-long religious distinc-
tions and related imperial or eschatological myths continued to pervade
a highly fractured human geography in which promises of apocalyptical
fulfilment and of paradise for ‘martyrs’ live on. The ideological influence of
the Cold War was limited in the Levant.
Dying while waging war during jihad is, historically speaking, the most
commonly accepted form of martyrdom, that is of publicly becoming
a shahid/şehit (‘martyr’) in Sunni and Shiite Islam. The condensed credo
‘I am (a believer), because I kill (in faith), and this even the more so if I die’ is
reminiscent of propagandistic European First World War theologies that
helped transform millions of humans into killers because superiors demanded
so in the name of God and the nation. The management of violence and

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death is a powerful weapon that helps produce authority and operates

hegemonic relations of race, class, party, religion and empire. Life thrives,
in contrast, in societies where killing is not accepted as a political option,
because a social contract enables common prosperity, and the law is in force
to diminish personal and party power that is ultimately in need of coercion
and violence. If being killed while killing is believed to be endorsed by faith,
this opens the door for abuse of faithful people by strategists of power. Also,
the common consumption and/or perpetration of violence creates
a compelling communion in crime that founds or re-founds the identity of
the group in question, in our case a militant ummah in the 1890s or during
the First World War.
This aspect, the affirmation of an active Sunni identity, is present in all
anti-Alevi urban pogroms in Turkey in the second half of the twentieth
century. (The large minority of Anatolian Alevis, today about a fifth of the
population, accept only partly or not at all the pillars of Sunni Islam and
have organised themselves outside the state-controlled mosques; Alevis
have been traditionally considered infidels or heretics by conservative
Sunnis since the sixteenth century.) Proud affirmation of Sunni and radical
right-wing Turkish identity characterises perpetrators of recurrent anti-
Alevi violence in Turkey. Such violence is particularly serious in the case
of Kurdish Alevis (for the 1937–8 massacre in Dersim see below). Although
historically different from the Alevis and less brutally persecuted, the
heterodox group of Arab Alawis in Syria experienced a similar history of
discrimination, before they were positively discriminated under the French
Mandate and the Baath regime. These divisions have fundamentally
marked the civil war in Syria in the 2010s.

Western Aggression and Domestic Jihad

The public use and consumption of violence became utterly manifest in
former Arab core lands of the Ottoman Empire occupied by IS. New in this
case was the global dimension of a spectacle, not only before crowds of local
spectators but on the internet, framed by discourses of eschatological
Wahhabism. (Wahhabism is a radical Sunni movement that emerged in the
eighteenth century, aimed at restoring ‘original Islam’; it became Saudi
Arabia’s state ideology and has largely determined the IS’s Islamic tenets.)
Although patterns of public violence were present in much larger dimensions
during the First World War, they were never globally visible. Moreover,
eschatology was less articulate, and holy scripture was not as present at the

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public surface of political acts as in the case of contemporary jihadists, as well

as other groups fighting (also) in the name of religion for their future in the
Levant.
The domestic jihad against Ottoman non-Muslims and the expansion of
modern Europe’s imperial nation states were related. This situation began to
emerge in the late eighteenth century as a profound and acute crisis of the
Ottoman Empire, called the Eastern Question. From the mid nineteenth
century, a central issue turned around postulates of supra-religious constitu-
tional rule. Despite new departures and comparatively ground-breaking
constitutional texts during the Tanzimat, for example the Reform Edict of
1856 and the first Ottoman constitution of 1876 (revised in and after 1908),
egalitarian plurality remained utopian. Sultan Abdulhamid II’s Islamist
authoritarianism marked the opposite direction, and the CUP went even
further during the last Ottoman decade.
The accession of the Ottoman Empire since the mid nineteenth century to
a ‘European concert’ of monarchical powers could not positively influence
the new Ottoman partner, because the European powers were only to
a limited degree inspiring modern democratic states, honestly interested in
spreading rule of law. Diversity, together with legal and real equality, posed
a particularly difficult challenge, because the Ottoman realm could not be
divided into democratic homelands versus imperial dominions, as in the case
of modern Europe’s national empires. Their homelands were ethnically and
religiously relatively homogeneous, while in the mixed colonies the stan-
dards of the homelands did not count. Thus, the Levant displayed more
directly the challenges and dysfunctions of human societies on the threshold
of global modernity than did contemporary European states, or states origi-
nating in Europe like the USA, Canada and Australia, because these acted on
a global scale. In their periphery, they could more easily disguise violent anti-
egalitarian patterns that violated human rights.
Often, modern Europe obeyed premodern premises like royal rights of
conquest and land grab, so that the rule of law in Europe stood in contrast to
lawless frontiers, military government overseas and discrimination against
Indigenous people. Lynchings in US-American culture as well as slavery and
discriminatory post-slavery societies were a fundamental feature of a racial
society. A combination of proletarian misery, convicts and children being
transported to Australia, and a pervasive, deep-seated race and class mental-
ity, contradicted the letter and spirit of modern human rights. Many of these
phenomena can be subsumed under imperialism as well as colonial and

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settler violence in the context of ‘democracies’ that excluded whole domestic

groups from equality.
Still, there was the important experience of (relatively) democratic rule of
law and freedom at home, far from colonial frontiers. This was an important
distinction between the late Ottoman Empire and western Europe where
a considerable number of Ottoman political refugees found asylum. In
Europe after the world wars, this positive experience served as an important
historical connection for innovative reconstruction after destruction, because
well-known principles could be reclaimed. In short: democratic rule of law,
even if limited, kept taking seriously basic human rights in core institutions,
parliamentary debates and domestic public space. The late Ottoman Empire
missed this even in its capital and the parliament. The same is, in general, true
for post-Ottoman states. In the image of the CUP, they have largely func-
tioned as partisan regimes in which favouritism instead of meritocracy,
systemic corruption and (auto-)censure reign.
The modern, post-American and post-French Revolution era coincided
with an acute and permanent Ottoman crisis in which local and geostrategic
dimensions entangled as never before. International stakes entered Cairo,
causing new scenes of violence during the French invasion of Egypt and of
parts of greater Syria at the end of the 1790s. French aggression and repression
of resistance were associated with the organisation of urban mob violence,
locally claimed as jihad, against Ottoman Christians identified with a foreign
power. Even without foreign intervention, but conjuring real or imaginary
foreign threats, ringleaders organised such domestic jihad in other late
Ottoman towns, such as Aleppo and Diyarbekir where Ziya Gökalp grew
up, or in metropoles like Istanbul, Izmir and Beirut. Violence against
Ottoman Christians was henceforth more than just a case of ‘collateral
damage’ or a facet of ‘normal violence’, as it might appear in the case of
Cairo in 1798–1800: it became built into the fabric of late Ottoman society.
The Ottoman general Nasif Pasha called on Muslims in March 1800 to make
jihad against Christians, as a result of which the Ottoman Copts and Syriacs of
Cairo became the target of killings. They were considered members of
a global body of a hostile Christianity.
Late Ottoman public violence was largely intimate, because it often
targeted neighbours and even friends who were regarded as having broken
a contract of submission and loyalty. When in 1850, after an anti-Christian
pogrom in Aleppo, a contemporary Arab writer reported that no Muslim of
the neighbourhoods ‘was there who did not commit these atrocities; not
even ten per cent out of one hundred’, he may have slightly exaggerated, or

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not.2 In many late Ottoman crises, religious polarisation proved so strong as

to blur the lines between a diversity of Ottoman and European Christians. At
times, this category included groups considered local friends of Christians,
such as the Alevis or the Yezidis. Stigmatised as heretic, these groups were
also targeted, and more brutally excluded than Christians from interacting
with the ummah.
The new dimension of late Ottoman violence went against traditional codes,
transcended traditional factions, and included public violations of women. This
inaugurated misogynist patterns far beyond the premodern discrimination
against women, including the tradition of devalued non-Muslim female slaves
(cariye). Similar incidents to those occurring in Cairo in 1800 described above also
happened in areas far from Europe, when no part of Ottoman territory was
attacked. Ottoman Christians, and on a lesser scale the much smaller group of
Ottoman Jews, would be at risk of being openly targeted by violence as soon as
egalitarian reforms were broached, and well-organised groups, foremost the
Ottoman Armenians, fought and lobbied for them. An additional factor was
social envy, related to the economic and educational successes of the zimmi.
Important were feelings of revenge, instigated by leaders after diplomatic
pressure or military defeats against ‘Christian’ (European) powers. Such resent-
ment served as an argument in many pogroms. Both the anti-Armenian mas-
sacres that occurred in 1909 and 1895 and the genocide of 1915 took place after
important instances of diplomatic support from Europe for egalitarian reforms.
An increasing number of nationals of Western countries had begun to live
in late Ottoman towns close to non-Muslims, and established new networks
of business, diplomacy, health and education. As a result, Levantine
Christians and Jews were not only able to advance their own personal careers
but also able to develop the life of their communities (millet) in terms of
education, health and self-organisation. The liberal reforms of the Tanzimat,
starting in 1839, and in particular the 1856 Reform Edict, made these devel-
opments possible, and with them a high degree of organised diversity. The
millets, above all the Armenian Protestant and the Armenian apostolic
communities, became, in a nutshell, non-territorial parliamentarian systems
within the empire. Against such developments, late Ottoman public violence
was generally in defence of a premodern empire, including its pre-reform

2 Feras Krimsti, ‘The 1850 Uprising in Aleppo. Reconsidering the Explanatory Power of
Sectarian Argumentations’, in Ulrike Freitag et al. (eds.), Urban Violence in the Middle
East: Changing Cityscapes in the Transition from Empire to Nation-State (New York:
Berghahn, 2015), p. 145. Cf. Nora Lafi, ‘The 1800 Insurrection in Cairo’, in Freitag et al.
(eds.), Urban Violence, pp. 40–5.

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hierarchical social order. A jihad against its perceived domestic enemies and
looting were allowed by a widespread vulgar understanding of sharia, in
which hate speech was combined with the discourse of a sultanate-caliphate
in urgent need of militant defence against traitors and unbelievers among
neighbours within the empire.
Late Ottoman, predominantly Sunni public violence thus appears in
global perspective as a reaction of those who had lost power but who
still possessed considerable regional means of force against potential
domestic opponents. Mob violence was an advantage in which terror
compensated for weakness on other levels. Yet these forces made regio-
nal and central rulers susceptible to blackmail by local factions, because
local factions used violence at times single-handedly and threatened
minorities or even foreign representatives, thus creating diplomatic con-
flicts. The authorities were responsible for law, order and security,
particularly to protect foreigners. In critical times, as in 1895 and during
the comparable (though more limited) massacres of Armenians in Adana
in 1909, they concentrated upon both protecting foreigners and offering
local perpetrators the freedom to kill, loot and rape local Christians
during limited time slots.
Forced conversions, including painful and risky ad hoc circumcisions of
men, are another poignant chapter of a modern Middle Eastern history of
violence. They were acts of humiliation and public displays of the supposed
superiority of Islam. Not only mostly provincial Christians but also Alevis and
Yezidis were targeted by coerced conversion in critical times. The Yezidis
were also subject to a related military campaign in the 1890s. The genocide of
Yezidis in 2014–17 conducted by ISIS, including forced conversions, is in line
with Ottoman campaigns and, above all, age-old stigmatising discourse.
Islamist discourse, social envy and impunity for murder and robbery condi-
tioned the people to accept late Ottoman massacres as well as the genocide of
1915, including large-scale spoliation. The state tolerated, promoted or orga-
nised such violence while it empowered Muslims and granted them prefer-
ential treatment. Many Ottoman Muslim refugees (muhacir) from the Balkans
and the Caucasus were settled on the land and in houses of Ottoman
Christians. Public discourse justified such preferential treatment as
a compensation for imperial losses and for a supposed supreme Muslim
suffering in the modern age. These policies and the sense of Muslim victim-
hood derived from a sweeping interpretation of the modern age: evil, anti-
Muslim European designs had started in the eighteenth century and had
peaked during the First Balkan War, while the Western press and scholarship

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suppressed positive contributions to human civilisation by Muslims and

Turks.

The Most Violent Decade (1912–1922)

and Kemalism
A decisive new factor for the politics of domestic violence under the CUP in
the 1910s was the interplay of domestic jihad with a new, radical Turkism that
the dictatorial CUP leadership adopted on the eve of and during the First
World War. It complemented Abdulhamid’s Islamism (Hamidism), making
a radical Turkish Islamism or Muslim Turkism that based modern national
identity on Islam and Turkishness. The CUP regarded Hamidism as too
reactionary and therefore unfit for the modern exercise of imperial power.
Turkism on the other hand aimed at Turkish salvation by embracing Turkish
roots and expansion into a huge Central Asian motherland called Turan. It
claimed to make Asia Minor a sovereign Turkish homeland led and possessed
by Muslim-Turks alone, not to be shared with other groups rooted in the
same soil. Whereas Islamism warranted support in the provinces, Turkism
provided the CUP with the backing of large parts of Istanbul’s intelligentsia
and students, as well as power on the streets of the capital.
Gökalp was the main prophet of an Islamist Turkism, while his friend
Mehmed Talaat (Pasha) was Istanbul’s main political leader in the 1910s. In
contrast to their ideology and politics of war and violence after 1913, the
horizon of democratic equality, multicultural peace and pragmatic collabora-
tion had emerged as a more hopeful goal during the Ottoman spring after the
Young Turk Revolution of July 1908. However, just a few years later, this
vision turned to bloody dystopia. Political infighting and Talaat’s disillusion
with parliamentarism, continued territorial losses and Europe’s unfriendly
diplomacy, all played a role in the CUP’s turn to war and violence. (The
European Powers did not actively maintain Ottoman integrity despite the
promises of the Berlin Treaty of 1878 that had determined the parameters of
the late Ottoman Empire.) Talaat and his friends then hastily abandoned the
constitutional ideals of 1908 that had valorised hitherto discriminated groups
and made the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (the main Armenian
party) their political ally.
The dynamics of the Ottoman descent into violence started with
the Balkan Wars that coincided with the re-emergence of the conflict about
the reforms for eastern Asia Minor in 1912–14, based on the Berlin Treaty. The
political atmosphere made it easy for detractors of internationally monitored

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reforms to denounce egalitarian reforms as an anti-Ottoman and anti-Sunni

plot. Ottoman war dynamics became a factor for larger Europe’s cataclysm in
July 1914. It culminated in the genocide of 1915–16 and ended provisionally
when the war for Asia Minor was decided in 1922. Seen from Istanbul, Italy’s
invasion of Ottoman Libya in the autumn of 1911 had already polarised the
political situation in accordance with the old lines of Europe versus the
Orient, and Christians against Muslims. The First Balkan War in autumn
1912 entrenched these lines even more. Heavy losses in this war made the
CUP leadership resentful against Christians in general, both domestically and
internationally. Yet, importantly, Talaat’s acceptance of war and domestic
polarisation had been his choice on the eve of the First Balkan War in
September and early October 1912. The weak performance of the liberal-
conservative cabinet in power during the war played into the hands of the
future putschists.
In 1913, the CUP installed the first single-party regime in the twentieth
century. Domestically at a nadir after an anti-CUP coup had temporarily
succeeded in July 1912, they embraced the hazardous politics of war and
a putsch. They managed to establish their regime after a coup in January 1913.
In 1914, they started to combine the politics of imperial restoration and
expansion with comprehensive demographic engineering and a right-wing-
revolutionary transformation of society. Establishing a Muslim war ummah,
the CUP secured a safe support base for its radical regime. Unprecedented in
Levantine history, public domestic violence, organised or instigated by
authorities, killed over a million Armenians and Assyrians in 1915–16. The
events included serial torture, and mass executions in or outside towns
(the mass killings took place mostly outside of towns, in contrast to 1895),
the serial rape of tens of thousands of Christian women and children, the
mass starvation of hundreds of thousands of deported Armenians, and slave
markets of children and women in many towns in Mesopotamia.
In 1922, the results of an extremely violent decade favoured radical Turkish
nationalism. This brand of Turkish nationalism is called Kemalism after the
former CUP general, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who became the decisive
leader after 1918. Gökalpian Turkism then turned from Talaat to the new
leader and the Ankara-based Republic, and rapidly dominated after 1923. It
repudiated political Islam, and instead emphasised Gökalp’s ethno-nationalist
tenets. However, Kemal’s decisive War of (Turkish-Muslim) Independence
in 1919–22 was fought together with Sunni Kurds in the name of Islam. The
early Kemalist movement cooperated with late Ottoman political Islam to
win this war for Asia Minor, before rejecting it in favour of a radical and

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exclusive Turkism. The brusque rejection of political Islam won Turkey the
sympathy of the West, and to a lesser degree also of Soviet Russia, which had
already been a crucial ally during the war for Asia Minor. Yet the break
suppressed any serious soul-searching regarding previous jihad and genocide.
Decades later, this unclarified history facilitated the return of Islamism.
Attempts at making a break with the experience of massive domestic vio-
lence, including trials against perpetrators and a few attempts at public
ostracism, failed within two years after 1918.
Those responsible for the anti-Christian violence in the last decade of the
Ottoman Empire remained therefore largely in power at all levels of the
administration in post-Ottoman Turkey, except at the head of the state itself.
The perpetrators, their successors and their spokesmen in the new capital
Ankara continued over decades to rationalise the use of violence by the CUP
as mainly self-defence, in line with CUP propaganda. Late Ottoman patterns
of violence and their public arguments remained formative in the Republic of
Turkey, even though the context had changed. There were aspects of the
Armenian genocide in the military campaign of 1937–8 that killed more than
10,000 civilians in the Alevi Kurdish region of Dersim and transferred surviv-
ing children from one group to the other. Similar events like the 1895–6 anti-
Armenian pogroms, though not of the same scale, occurred in the second half
of the twentieth century against Alevis, who were depicted as heretics and
communists.
Talaat and most CUP Central Committee members understood the First
World War as a jihad for the sake of Turkey’s power.3 For them, the violence
perpetrated between 1911 and 1922 was in defence of the Islamic empire and
the state and for a last sovereign resort for Turkish-speaking Muslims in Asia
Minor. It was also expansionist, combining a seemingly constitutional parlia-
mentary rule with an aggressive party dictatorship inspired by Gökalp’s
pan-Turkism. Gökalp’s pan-Turkism had been built on Islam’s supposed
supremacy. Islam-sceptical Kemalism attempted to found its authority on
a pseudo-scientific ‘Turkish History Thesis’ that pretended that ethno-
historical Turkdom was the cradle of human language and civilisation and
had been present in Anatolia since prehistoric times. The socio-political
conclusion was similar: Turkdom was supreme, and non-Turks, a fortiori
non-Muslims, had no claim on and no equal rights in Anatolia.

3 Mustafa Aksakal, ‘The Ottoman Proclamation of Jihad’, in Erik-Jan Zürcher (ed.), Jihad
and Islam in World War I: Studies on the Ottoman Jihad on the Centenary of Snouck
Hurgronje’s ‘Holy War Made in Germany’ (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2016),
pp. 53–69, at p. 64.

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Despite defeat in the First World War, the main players saw the violent
removal of Christians as a crucial achievement and the Treaty of Lausanne as
a diplomatic triumph, at least in respect to the genocide. Against the back-
drop of such successful violence, the CUP lastingly prefigured the domestic
patterns and behaviour of various post-Ottoman power players, namely the
Kemalist single-party regime and the Arab Baath parties. Also, the reverse
conversion of AKP luminaries in Ankara from fresh reform-oriented demo-
crats in the 2000s to war-prone, national-Islamist authoritarians under
Erdoğan in the 2010s displays a political behaviour that is familiar from the
early 1910s.
This perpetuation of patterns is true, although Kemalism abstained from
imperial ambitions and repressed political Islam until the end of the 1990s. It
did this, however, only insofar as it feared Islamic competition in the politico-
cultural arena, not when it conformed to common concepts of the enemy.
Islamism developed in the second half of the twentieth century into the
hegemonic ideology in the Levant (and the Islamic world in general), when
the superficially secular post-Ottoman regimes began to show major short-
comings. Kemalist actors reared up forcefully a last time in the military
putsch of September 1980, when violence and mass imprisonments targeted
above all left-wing and Kurdish militants. This intervention did not stop the
return of political Islam in Turkey. On the contrary, a semi-official Turkish-
Islamic synthesis resulted, and compulsory Islamic instruction was intro-
duced in public schools after the coup.
As a comparatively strong and messianic ideology based both on Gökalp’s
Turkism and a cult of Atatürk, Kemalism had inspired a state whose structure
was, however, no less at risk than that of other post-Ottoman states, because
it too lacked a true social contract. Turkey was caught up by Islamism
comparatively late, after its role as a Middle Eastern cornerstone of NATO
in the Cold War had expired and a promising road to real democracy had
been usurped by authoritarianism. The ‘religious turn’, or the emergence of
religion on the political surface, was a global phenomenon of the second half
of the twentieth century. Besides Islam in the Middle East, we also saw the
rise of the religious right in the United States, a religious shift in post-1967
Israel, and an explicit eschatological reading of Zionism by Jews and
Christians. In Europe, and partly also in Turkey, this religious turn remained
long hidden in the shadow of ideological Cold War conflicts.
It is true that Turkey’s re-intensified interaction with the European Union,
which had condemned the 1980 putsch and recognised the Armenian geno-
cide, opened new windows of opportunity and access to new instruments of

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conflict resolution from 2000 on. This led to a more consensual, violence-
preventing policy-building, including steps towards a new constitution based
on universal standards; an opening towards the Kurds and negotiations with
Kurdish leaders; and, importantly, some steps towards a coming to terms
with mass violence in modern Turkish-Muslim history that has long been
denied by the Turkish state. But these constructive developments were
interrupted and destroyed in the context of an anti-Kurdish war policy that
started domestically in the south-east of Turkey in July 2015 and has con-
tinued since August 2016 in northern Syria.

Conclusion
From a population of over 15 million, Asia Minor lost more than
6 million inhabitants in 1914–23, two-thirds of them Christians, and half
of them killed. The organisers of the latter’s removal gave actors of
domestic jihad ample opportunity to kill, rob and rape. Of about
4 million deaths in the Ottoman First World War, less than 800,000
were soldiers. Domestic death and killing caused far more fatalities than
military violence at the fronts. Rebellions or domestic war in the inter-
war period continued to kill tens of thousands in the former Ottoman
world, the majority of them Kurdish civilians.
The 1878 Berlin Treaty was replaced in 1923 by the even more fundamental
Lausanne Treaty, which is still valid today in its main points, but, in real
terms, the post-Ottoman world has never come to rest. After the Second
World War, Israel’s wars took centre stage. Since the late 1970s, interstate and
domestic wars such as the Iran-Iraq war, the anti-Kurdish Anfal campaign, the
Lebanese civil war, the Kurdish guerrilla wars in Turkey, the Persian Gulf
war in 1991, the US-invasion and its long aftermath in Iraq, the civil war in
Syria and the war in Yemen have killed millions of people and forcibly
removed many more. In contrast to the Cold War-related mass violence in
South-East Asia, unrest has increased in the Levant since the late twentieth
century. In both areas, it has been openly marked by ethno-religious refer-
ences. Jihad played a major role.
Since 1945, there has been an incomparably higher death toll through war
and violence in the post-Ottoman world than in continental Europe, includ-
ing in war-torn former Yugoslavia (Europe’s own post-Ottoman region).
Unsettled issues and a lack of social contracts have kept this vast expanse of
human geography in a state of violent unrest since the cataclysm of the 1910s.
Jihad – domestically even more than towards the exterior – is a crucial aspect

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of this violence. Kemalism failed in overcoming Islamism, as it pretended, but

acted like an ersatz Islam, perpetuating former patterns of imperially biased,
leader-centred politics that favoured (in this case, urban) Turkish-speaking
Sunnis.
Recent research on violence, inspired by the social sciences, has empha-
sised social, political, economic and spatial factors in explanations of violence
and helped deconstruct monolithic ideas on polarisation. Yet it has long failed
to address certain significant elements. The genocide of 1915, a topic dis-
missed by Western academia until the end of the twentieth century, is the
most striking among them, and its long-term consequences still wait to be
explored. Religion is another. Twentieth-century scholarship in general
missed analysing and measuring the resilience and power of prophetic
religion. Historical developments in the Levant went against the grain of
disciplines rooted in Western Enlightenment. Sectarian resurgence and vio-
lence since the 1960s, in particular the civil war in Lebanon and the Islamic
revolution in Iran, have taken Cold War-focused Western intellectuals and
strategists by surprise.
Because ethno-religious differences accompany categorical eschatological
claims, social contracts resulting from a pragmatic negotiation, based on
equality, are almost impossible in the Levant. This is manifest in Turkey,
Syria, Iraq, Israel-Palestine and the whole former Ottoman world. Myths of
power, identity and hierarchies hold sway in politico-religious discourses and
practices. Research must expose them and their resilience. Among the
strongest imperial myths are those such as Islamist, (pan-)Turkist and neo-
Ottomanist that refer to the Ottoman sultanate-caliphate, which is the most
durable Islamic empire in history. Among the strongest religious myths is
apocalyptic Wahhabism, whose birth goes back to the eighteenth century,
when it reacted against an Ottoman capital seen as weak, corrupt, and under
European influence. Referring to the Koranic society of the seventh century
and holy scriptures, it has developed a violent global apocalypticism over
recent decades. Due to the Islamic revolution of 1979 in Iran, Shiism also
strongly displays eschatology on the surface of its political discourse. The
historico-religious lines dividing Shiism from Wahhabite or neo-Ottomanist
Islamisms, however, are deep and have determined alliances on the battle-
fields in Syria in the 2010s.
Current Sunni and Shiite apocalypticisms cannot be understood without
considering interaction with the West. Not only do they react against
American intervention and presence in the Middle East, but they are also
influenced by products such as the films, books, pamphlets and games of

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a late twentieth-century industry of apocalypticism in the USA. This industry

sold and sells pre-millennialist representations of violence along religious
lines. Militant Islam in the spirit of ISIS claims to hasten by war Mahdi-
Messiah Jesus’ second coming and his establishment of a global Muslim rule,
and this is a pattern of Sunni eschatology of which many Christians are not
aware. Although the ‘millennium’ or Kingdom of Jesus cannot be forced by
violence or conquest in most Christian traditions, sales-oriented pre-
millennialist fantasy made its arrival a spectacle of unavoidable mass killing.
Shiite eschatology displays faith in its own militancy and in Jesus’ coming at
the side of the Mahdi, the revealed hidden Imam. Though more flexible in
general, Shiite Mahdism in the militant form of Iran’s Islamic Revolution
mirrors Sunni eschatology in its emphasis on global Muslim conquest and
superiority, and marginalises Sufi or liberal interpretations.
Taking seriously the political weight of legacies, but refusing essentialism,
this chapter has explored patterns of violence, particularly domestic jihad,
rooted in ethno-religious inequality and conflicting eschatology. Often con-
trolled by or going in tandem with state power, such patterns exist to this day
in the post-Ottoman Levant. They encompass demographic engineering,
genocide, annihilating urban warfare, serial suicide attacks, pogroms, med-
iatised atrocities, and war in the name of religion and eschatology. This
chapter has understood the persistence of violence and brutalisation of
societies as a lack of effective social contracts. It has dealt with the failure
of attempts to achieve them in the late Ottoman and post-Ottoman Levant. It
has argued that negotiating them is nowhere more demanding than in
a geography where the historical claims of all revealed monotheisms meet,
and religious mobilisation is rewarded. Given the force of diverging eschatol-
ogies claiming supremacy for their groups and projecting the future in
absolute terms, it is hard to see an end to polarisation in the present Levant.

Bibliographical Essay
On violence in the modern Middle East see Hamit Bozarslan’s studies, including Une
histoire de la violence au Moyen-Orient: de la fin de l’Empire ottoman à Al-Qaida (Paris: La
Découverte, 2008). On urban violence, and the question of sectarian violence, see
Ulrike Freitag et al. (eds.), Urban Violence in the Middle East: Changing Cityscapes in the
Transition from Empire to Nation-State (New York: Berghahn, 2015) and Ussama S. Makdisi,
The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman
Lebanon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). Taking into account sacrifice and
killing in human history as interpreted by René Girard, and including the Armenian
genocide, see Jacques Sémelin, Purify and Destroy: The Political Uses of Massacre and

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Genocide (London: Hurst, 2013; French original, 2005). On ‘tragic mind’ and suicidal
readiness to kill see Hamit Bozarslan, Violence in the Middle East: From Political Struggle to
Self-Sacrifice (Princeton: Markus Wiener, 2004).
A general approach to religion and violence can be found in Mark Juergensmeyer et al.
(eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Violence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013);
instructive for the Cold War period is Paul T. Chamberlin, The Cold War’s Killing Fields:
Rethinking the Long Peace (New York: HarperCollins, 2018). A pioneering synopsis of
religious aspects in the Armenian genocide and the Shoah is Omer Bartov et al. (eds.),
In God’s Name: Genocide and Religion in the Twentieth Century (New York: Berghahn, 2001).
New insights into jihad in World War I are given in Erik-Jan Zürcher (ed.), Jihad and Islam
in World War I: Studies on the Ottoman Jihad on the Centenary of Snouck Hurgronje’s ‘Holy War
Made in Germany’ (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2016).
Studies on modern Levant-centred eschatology include Hans-Lukas Kieser, The Nearest
East: American Millennialism and Mission to the Middle East (Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 2010) and Anita Shapira, ‘Ben-Gurion and the Bible: The Forging of an Historical
Narrative?’, Middle Eastern Studies 33.4 (1997), 645–74. On Levant-centred Muslim
eschatology see David Cook, Contemporary Muslim Apocalyptic Literature (Syracuse:
Syracuse University Press, 2005), Jean-Pierre Filiu, Apocalypse in Islam (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2011) and Filiu, ‘The Return of Political Mahdism’,
Current Trends in Islamist Ideology 8 (2009), 26–38.
Studies on the 1894–6 and 1909 massacres, including forced conversions, are Jelle Verhej,
‘Diyarbekir and the Armenian Crisis of 1895’, in Joost Jongerden and Jelle Verheij (eds.),
Social Relations in Ottoman Diyarbekir 1870–1915 (Leiden: Brill, 2012), pp. 85–146), Owen
Robert Miller, ‘Sasun 1894: Mountains, Missionaries and Massacres at the end of the
Ottoman Empire’, unpublished PhD thesis, Columbia University New York, 2015, and
Etudes arméniennes contemporaines 2017, a thematic issue on ‘The Massacres of the
Hamidian Period’. On forced conversion see Selim Deringil, Conversion and Apostasy in
the Late Ottoman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
Literature on the Young Turk genocide of 1915–16 includes the comprehensive
Raymond Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History (London: I. B. Tauris,
2011) (the 1909 Adana massacres are covered on pp. 71–117). For a list of literature, see
Ronald Grigor Suny, ‘Armenian Genocide’, in 1914–1918-online: International Encyclopedia
of the First World War (Berlin, 2015). On fatal acceptance, in the Lausanne Treaty, of
domestic mass violence, and the role model of Turkish nationalism for interwar
Germany, see Hans-Lukas Kieser and Dominik Schaller (eds.), The Armenian Genocide
and the Shoah (Zurich: Chronos, 2002), Stefan Ihrig, Atatürk in the Nazi Imagination
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014) and Ihrig, Justifying Genocide:
Germany and the Armenians from Bismarck to Hitler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2016).
On the Great War as part of a larger cataclysm (1912–22) see Hans-Lukas Kieser,
Kerem Öktem and Maurus Reinkowski (eds.), World War I and the End of the Ottomans:
From the Balkan Wars to the Armenian Genocide (London: I. B. Tauris, 2015). On Ziya
Gökalp’s ideology and Talaat Pasha’s politics in that era see Hans-Lukas Kieser, Talaat
Pasha: Father of Modern Turkey, Architect of Genocide (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2018). On the Balkan background see İpek Yosmaoğlu, Religion, Violence, and the Politics of
Nationhood in Ottoman Macedonia, 1878–1908 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014).

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On the Balkan Wars as a matrix of fear, revenge and violence see Eyal Ginio, The Ottoman
Culture of Defeat: The Balkan Wars and their Aftermath (London, Hurst, 2016). An analysis of
denial and justification of violence by Turkish leaders is Fatma M. Göçek, Denial of
Violence: Ottoman Past, Turkish Present, and Collective Violence against the Armenians,
1789–2009 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

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 14
Violence and the First World War
bruno cabanes

Although a century has passed since its outbreak, the First World War retains
much of its mystery. Historians have long debated its origins. But now it is
the very violence of the conflict that focuses many of their discussions: its
intensity; its specificity, if we compare the First World War to the wars that
preceded it; or even the way in which combatants and civilians succeeded in
holding on for so long, in almost unbearable living conditions. A mystery,
then, that the historian François Furet has summarised as follows: ‘Today’s
teenagers cannot even conceive of the national passions that led the peoples
of Europe to kill each other for four full years.’1
Violence on the battlefields, violence against civilians, the violence of
weapons and of words: the first global conflict marks a major rupture in
the history of modern warfare, precisely because it abolished any distinction
between combatants and non-combatants. To understand the intensity of
total war, military historians first had to move away from a ‘history from
above’, from the perspective of statesmen, strategists and generals, and
instead study how the violence of war impacted bodies and minds. This
first historiographical revolution occurred in the 1970s, when John Keegan
published his groundbreaking book The Face of Battle.2 More recently, military
historians have explored the impact of the war on civilian populations (the
Armenian genocide; the bombing of cities; blockades and famine; the dis-
placement of refugees; sexual violence . . .) and reflected on the way in which
stirring discourse allowed societies at war to endure the conflict. Indeed, the
violence of the First World War was enacted not only by nation states,
armies, police forces and administrations, but also by individuals, or groups

1 François Furet, Le passé d’une illusion: essai sur l’idée communiste au XXème siècle (Paris:
Robert Laffont/Calmann Lévy, 1995), p. 35; trans. Deborah Furet as The Passing of an
Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1999), p. 20.
2 John Keegan, The Face of Battle (New York: Penguin, 1976).

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of individuals, acting spontaneously or under constraint in support of their

homeland. It consisted not only of violent acts, but also of violent images and
words. Studying the links between the discourse and practice of violence is
one of the important aspects of the history of war cultures, which has been
developed by historians since the late 1990s.3
Last but not least, thinking about the violence of the First World War
means interrogating its place in the history of modern warfare: the emer-
gence of industrial warfare in the second half of the nineteenth century; the
thresholds of violence breached one by one in 1914–18; and finally, how
the violence of war was transformed (far more than it was dissipated) in
the transition from war towards peace. In other words, it requires redefining
what we commonly call ‘wartime’: the individual and collective initiation
into violence; thresholds of violence and the way they are perceived; how
forms of violence mutate; the rhythms and modalities of demobilisation; and
finally, the future of war violence after the official cessation of hostilities.

Towards Total War

From its very beginnings, the First World War was perceived as different
from previous conflicts. In the spring of 1915, French soldiers used the
expression ‘Grande Guerre’ for the first time in their correspondence; it
reveals how the conflict pushed violence to its paroxysm and human endur-
ance to its limits. In the summer of 1914, it only took a few days – a few weeks
at most – for Europe to discover the extreme violence of the conflict that had
just broken out.
The war of movement that lasted four months on the Western Front
(August to November 1914) and almost a year on the Eastern Front was
particularly deadly: 300,000 French soldiers were killed in 1914, which is to say
an average of 60,000 dead each month and more than 2,000 each day. On the
single day of 22 August 1914, the French army lost 27,000 combatants – as
many soldiers as were killed during the Algerian war from 1954 to 1962.4 As
for the German army, September 1914 was one of the three deadliest months
of the war: 71,481 were killed or declared missing, only a few less than in July
and September 1916. On the Western Front, the Battle of the Frontiers, at the

3 Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker, 14–18: retrouver la guerre (Paris:

Gallimard, 2000); trans. Catherine Temerson as 14–18: Understanding the Great War
(New York: Hill & Wang, 2003).
4 Jean-Michel Steg, Le jour le plus meurtrier de l’histoire de France, 22 août 1914 (Paris: Fayard,
2014).

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end of August 1914, marked a turning point which was underestimated by

military historians for a long time.
The rather imprecise monthly tallies of casualties do not allow us to
appreciate fully the descent into violence as it was experienced by comba-
tants. In their war journals, soldiers narrate a series of initiations, which
progressively led them to discover the reality of war violence: destroyed
houses; cannonades heard for the first time; the first wounded; the first dead
bodies (of men or of horses); the first experience of combat. Though Europe
quickly descended into modern warfare, the initiation of individuals to
violence happened step by step – with the decisive threshold of the ‘baptism
of fire’. For Ivan Cassagnau, an artilleryman from south-western France, the
tipping point was on 19 August 1914, a day when two officers, eight NCOs and
117 of his comrades were killed or declared missing in the Belfort sector. ‘How
far away it is already, that fatal date of August 2! And yet how close it still is!’,
he wrote in his journal only three weeks after being mobilised. ‘On August 2,
my life was ripped apart. Until then, I was leading a happy life. I didn’t know
it, but I realize it now. Since that day, I have known more worries, anguish,
pain, and mourning than in all of my twenty-four years.’5
From the start, civilians were also targeted, in Belgium, in northern
France, on the Eastern Front and in the Balkans. There were massacres,
deportations and sexual violence; houses, hospitals and historical monu-
ments were destroyed and cemeteries were desecrated. Only four days
after the invasion of Belgium, 850 Belgian men, women and children had
already been executed: Germans carried out a ruthless suppression of pur-
ported ‘francs-tireurs’ (civilian guerrilla fighters) and of their accomplices.
More than 6,000 civilians were killed in Belgium and northern France in
August and September 1914, in massacres that foreshadowed those of
the Second World War. Women and children were sometimes separated
from men, as in the Tschoffen Wall Massacre in Dinant; at others they were
lined up together, without any age distinctions, as at Faubourg des Rivages
on 23 August 1914.6
Degradations, pillaging and destruction usually accompanied these mas-
sacres. In Château-Thierry or Coulommiers, for example, the ‘Germans took
everything they wanted, even loading quantities of provisions and bedding
onto wagons . . . Inside the houses, they smashed whatever they did not

5 Ivan Cassagnau, Ce que chaque jour fait de veuves: journal d’un artilleur, 1914–1916 (Paris,
Buchet-Chastel, 2003), pp. 22–4.
6 John Horne and Alan Kramer, German Atrocities 1914: A History of Denial (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2001).

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take.’7 The conquerors left an indelible imprint as they lashed out at people’s
homes; anthropologists characterise such actions as crimes of desecration. It
was the very private life of residents that the soldiers targeted, as they soiled
their bed sheets or covered the interior of their homes with faeces.
Desecrating the domestic space, the space of conviviality and of hospitality,
also complicated any future return home. ‘The “atrocities” one hears of are
true’, stated the novelist Edith Wharton in a letter to a friend. ‘It should be
known that it is to America’s interest to help stem this hideous flood of
savagery by opinion if it may not be by action. No civilized race can remain
neutral in feeling now.’8
After the massacres of the summer and fall of 1914, 1915 saw the escalation of
violence on the battlefields as the armies settled into a war of positions, at least on
the Western Front.9 The General Staff sought at all costs to maintain an offensive
posture and to keep the hope of a decisive breakthrough alive, even at the expense
of heavy casualties – for example, in the attacks described as grignotage (literally,
‘nibbling’) launched by the French commander-in-chief Joffre. A new kind of
combatant came into being, sprawled beneath enemy fire, making himself as
invisible as possible in his dirty, muddy uniform. In order to survive, the soldier
needed to become one with the earth. In 1915, the French army experienced more
casualties than in 1916, the year of the great offensive battles of Verdun and of the
Somme. In the inferno of Gallipoli, the Australian and Turkish nations were born.
For ANZAC troops, the battle was a sanitary disaster almost unequalled during
the rest of the war (the exception being the French offensive at the Chemin des
Dames in April 1917): with 20,000 wounded and 64,000 suffering from epidemics,
the Australian Army Medical Corps was completely overwhelmed.10
Civilians were far from spared in 1915, a pivotal year which saw Europe
descend into total war. On the Western Front, the atrocities of the invasion
period opened onto new kinds of violence against civilians, as Germany
began its occupation of Belgium and northern France: forced labour; pilla-
ging of natural resources; famine; deportations to German labour camps.
Occupying regimes on both the Western and Eastern fronts served as
laboratories of a kind for the military occupations of the 1940s.11 In the

7 Ibid., pp. 220–1.

8 Letter to Sarah Norton, 2 September 1914, in Edith Wharton, The Letters of Edith Norton,
ed. R. W. B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis (New York: Scribner, 1988), p. 335; emphasis
original.
9 John Horne (ed.), Vers la guerre totale: le tournant de 1914–1915 (Paris: Tallandier, 2010).
10 Robin Prior, Gallipoli: The End of the Myth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).
11 Annette Becker, Les cicatrices rouges: 14–18. France et Belgique occupées (Paris: Fayard,
2010).

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Balkans, the violence of invasion continued for all of 1915, with the invasion of
Serbia by the German, Austro-Hungarian and Bulgarian armies.
On the Eastern Front, the war of movement created almost 4 million
refugees who fled the advance of German troops.12 Starting in May 1915, the
Russian authorities’ scorched-earth policy also forced the displacement of
some 134,000 German and Austro-Hungarian nationals, as well as of a million
Jews who lived in the Russian Empire and were suspected of being internal
enemies. These massive population shifts, which accompanied the ‘great
retreat’ of the Russian army in the spring of 1915, entailed heavy casualties
from exhaustion, hunger and epidemics. The deportation policy was then
relaxed beginning in the autumn of 1915.
Conversely, for Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, the violence against
civilians became more brutal and more systematic in January (in response to
Russian victories in the Caucasus), in April (when the Allies landed on the
Gallipoli peninsula), and finally in June. It was not only the intensity but the
very nature of the violence of war that changed in 1915. By the end of the year,
the majority of the Armenians in the empire would have been killed, in the
first genocide of the twentieth century. The willingness to destroy an ethnic
group or a people by physically annihilating it, to draw on the lawyer Raphael
Lemkin’s definition, as well as that of the 1948 UN Convention, was not new.
But never before in Western history had a genocidal policy been carried out
so systematically, leading to the death of 650,000 to 850,000 civilians – which
is to say about 8 per cent of the victims of the Great War.13
The year 1915 also saw the introduction of new weapons which trans-
formed combat practices and dramatically increased violence on the battle-
fields. Mine warfare, for example, quickly spread across the Western Front,
with increasingly high explosive charges. Flamethrowers, first introduced in
autumn 1914, became widespread by the spring of 1915, and were used by the
attacking waves of the German army. But it was chiefly chemical weapons
that made a spectacular breakthrough: after a first deployment on the Eastern
Front at the end of January 1915, which failed because of the wind and the
cold, asphyxiating gases were used on the Western Front, in the Ypres sector,
on 22 April 1915. Poison gas immediately became a symbol of the atrocity of
industrial warfare. In reality, there were few victims of gas attacks: armies
quickly developed protective masks that limited casualties. But it was the

12 Joshua A. Sanborn, Imperial Apocalypse: The Great War and the Destruction of the Russian
Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
13 Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism and the
Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

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manner in which gas killed that inspired the combatants’ horror: it was an
invisible death by suffocation, and, for survivors, pulmonary complications
that could last long after the end of the war. For the first time in the history of
warfare, weapons killed without visible wounds or bloodshed.14
The increased sophistication of weapons of war is one of the markers of
the development of industrial warfare – a ‘war of iron and gas’, as the novelist
Pierre Drieu de la Rochelle put it. We see this development represented in
paintings of the conflict: in 1915, C. R. W. Nevinson painted his famous work
Machine Gun, in which he showed how, in the industrial age, combatants
became fused with their weapons. Ten years later, Marcel Gromaire would
take up this theme again in his painting La Guerre (1925): five soldiers wait,
impassibly, in their trench. The French painter represented them as robot-
like, bundled up in their horizon-blue uniforms, to remind viewers that the
Great War was foremost a mechanical, industrial and dehumanising war.
Indeed, the dominant image of 1915 was that of a war of machines that
destroyed individuals. Combatants were killed by gas; civilians became
victims of the submarine war with the sinking of the Lusitania, which was
torpedoed on 7 May 1915. Science and scientists were put to the service of
destruction. Each belligerent nation placed the blame for the corruption of
scientific progress on the other camp. From the point of view of the Allies –
even if they, too, would use poison gas – chemical weapons proved the
barbarity of ‘German science’ and of Germany’s chemists, including the most
famous among them, Fritz Haber. ‘All social and scientific intercourse with
Germany will be practically stopped for this generation’, wrote the physicist
Rutherford.15
Industrial warfare reached its apogee in the following year, 1916, with the
titanic confrontations of Verdun and of the Somme. The combatants’ experi-
ence of war was utterly transformed. For the first time in the history of
warfare, firepower did not merely mean inflicting heavy casualties on the
enemy; it meant that combatants who were hit by a shell could simply
vanish. Without bodily remains, no burial was possible. The desperate
quest for the missing would mark the rest of the war and the postwar period.
New rituals would have to be invented to pay tribute to the combatants of
whom no trace remained: lists of names engraved on monuments to the

14 Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, ‘1915: Stalemate’, in Jay Winter (ed.), The Cambridge History
of the First World War, vol. I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 65–88.
15 Elisabeth Crawford, Nationalism and Internationalism in Science, 1880–1940: Four Studies of
the Nobel Population (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 57.

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dead, such as at Thiepval in the Somme, and the Tomb of the Unknown
Soldier – the Great War’s quintessential commemorative innovation.16
Paul Dubrulle, a Jesuit serving at Verdun in 1916 as an NCO in the 8th
Infantry Regiment, described the distinctive fear triggered by artillery
bombardment:
When one heard the whistle in the distance, one’s whole body contracted to
resist the too excessively potent vibrations of the explosion, and at each
repetition it was a new attack, a new fatigue, a new suffering. Under this
regime, the most solid nerves cannot resist for long . . . Perhaps the best
comparison is that of seasickness . . . [sic] finally one abandons one’s self to it,
one has no longer even the strength to cover oneself with one’s pack as
protection against splinters, and one scarcely still has left the strength to pray
to God . . . [sic] To die from a bullet seems to be nothing; parts of our being
remain intact; but to be dismembered, torn to pieces, reduced to pulp, this is
a fear that flesh cannot support and which is fundamentally the great
suffering of the bombardment.17
In the midst of battle, physical violence (sensory saturation, deafening,
exhaustion) fused with moral suffering (the individual’s powerlessness in
the face of the chaos of war, terror, dehumanisation). Combatants were
trapped in a world without clear boundaries, whose spatial and temporal
landmarks had been removed. After the clashes of the beginning of the war,
such as the Battle of the Marne and the Battle of Tannenberg, there would be
no more battles lasting only a few days. The Battle of Galllipoli took more
than eight months, and that of Verdun, ten months. The Battle of the Somme
took more than four months, as did the third Battle of Ypres in 1917. The very
definition of a battle had changed: it now meant a siege in the open country-
side. Considerably enlarged and fragmented, the battlefield now spread over
dozens of square kilometres. A new kind of battle was born, whose violence
stemmed not only from the kinds of weapons being used, but also from the
feeling of powerlessness experienced by soldiers.
In the trenches of the Western Front, mud was everywhere, swallowing up
corpses and threatening to drown the living. The violence of war, as it was
perceived by combatants, was inseparable from this constant attack on their
individuality: there was no more space or time to oneself. In this context, time
‘stolen away’ from the war – in correspondence with one’s loved ones or the

16 Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
17 Paul Dubrulle, quoted in Alistair Horne, The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916 (London:
Penguin, 1962), p. 177.

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crafting of trench art – became vital. There was also a violence in waiting and
boredom, which took up most of wartime. And when combat finally broke
out, soldiers felt like simple victims sacrificed to chance.
This anonymous, depersonalised violence had a double effect on comba-
tants. First, it gave them the feeling that their survival was due only to luck.
The syndrome of ‘survivor’s guilt’ would be studied in the years that
followed by the psychiatrist William Niederland. ‘Still now, almost sixty
years later, I hold on to this conviction: I’m here by chance’, confided the
historian Georges Dumézil in an interview given just before his death in 1986.
‘I came out different, on borrowed time.’
Industrial warfare also removed the interpersonal dimension from the act
of killing. With the exception of a few snipers, soldiers on the battlefield in
1914–18 rarely aimed at precise targets. Face-to-face killing was uncommon:
only when an enemy trench fell into the hands of a group of assailants did
hand-to-hand fighting take place. These moments did not demonstrate the
technological sophistication that characterised the rest of the war.
Combatants used all kinds of primitive weapons: shovel handles, knives
and clubs, sometimes crafted by the soldiers themselves. The grenade
remained the weapon used most often during these encounters. That said,
such moments of interpersonal violence were uncommon. Data on the
origins of deadly wounds confirms that artillery dominated the war of
1914–18. During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1, 70 per cent of French
soldiers and 90 per cent of German soldiers had been killed by bullets. Forty
years later, only 20–30 per cent of overall deaths were caused by bullet
wounds; 70 per cent of the dead were killed by artillery shells.
In 1914–18, soldiers rarely made eye contact with those they killed. Death
no longer had a face; rather, it took on the sinister and grotesque appearance
of the bodies abandoned in no man’s land. Skills long taught in military
training, such as bayonet attacks, were of no use in the context of the war’s
new violence. At the same time, industrial warfare gave rise to a new kind of
narrative about violence, one specific to the era of total war and of genocide.
Its central theme can be summed up as each individual’s struggle to maintain
his or her identity in an increasingly dehumanising conflict. Soldiers felt
entirely overwhelmed by the violence of war, as if they counted for nothing.

Cultures of Violence in Countries at War

War violence did not only take place on battlefields or in abuses against
civilians. The First World War was also waged in images and words: it was

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a cultural war. At the time of mobilisation, each of the belligerent nations

already had at its disposal a repertoire of collective representations that could
kindle xenophobia and nationalism. The enemy of the summer of 1914 was
often already the enemy of yesteryear. For the French, for example, the
German – soon to be called the Boche – was the Prussian, the erstwhile enemy
of the war of 1870–1. He was the pillager, the vandal, the occupier from the
last war, remembered by the older generation, which had kept his memory
alive and passed it on.18 As for the Germans, many were animated by an
irrational fear of Russians, a fear which was mixed with disdain and which
was also rooted in an imaginary inherited from the nineteenth century.19
Throughout Europe, it was believed that only ‘growing nations’, in
a Social Darwinist perspective, could survive the competition between the
major powers. This state of mind fed a real obsession with decadence, which
could take various forms depending on the country: fear that global power
would shift to the Far East after Japan’s naval victory over Russia in Tsushima
in May 1905; fear of the French demographic decline; fear of aerial bombard-
ment of cities, for the British; for the Germans, fear of encirclement
(Einkreisung) by Czarist Russia on one side and by France and Great Britain
on the other. Popular literature titles reveal the muffled violence permeating
Europe on the eve of the war: The Coming Terror (Sydney, 1894); How the
Germans Took London: Forewarned, Forearmed (London, 1900); The Infernal War
(Paris, 1908).
In the first weeks of the war, the belligerent nations threw themselves into
the conflict with the conviction that their survival was at stake. The hunt for
internal enemies began as soon as the mobilisation was announced. State
violence was rapidly brought to bear against individuals originating from
enemy nations. In 1911, Australia had 33,000 residents born in Germany or in
Austria-Hungary. As early as 10 August 1914, they were required to register at
the nearest police station and to make a written commitment not to engage
in hostile actions. Almost 7,000 of them, including women and children, were
interned during the war. German clubs were closed and the teaching of the
German language in schools was forbidden.20 In Paris, in London, in Berlin,
rumours labelled recent immigrants, foreign nationals, and ethnic and

18 Michael Jeismann, Das Vaterland der Feinde: Studien zum nationalen Feindbegriff und
Selbstvertandnis in Deutschland und Frankreich (1792–1918) (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1992).
19 Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, The German Myth of the East: 1800 to the Present (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2009).
20 G. Fischer, Enemy Aliens: Internment and the Home Front Experience in Australia, 1914–1920
(St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1989).

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religious minorities as ‘enemy agents’, liable to undermine national defence.

In Germany, rumours spread that French and Russian secret agents – Jews –
were crisscrossing the countryside in cars filled with gold. In Paris, the Maggi
company was accused of distributing poisoned milk ‘to children . . . so that
there would be no French people left after the war’.21 Most of its 800 stores
were looted in the first hours of the mobilisation. Even more surprisingly,
this wave of violence against internal enemies also affected countries that
were not yet officially engaged in the war, countries far from the front: in
several cities in the American Midwest, numerous German immigrants were
arrested on suspicion of spying.
Fear was also one of the fundamental mechanisms in the abuses com-
mitted against civilians by combatants in the summer of 1914. There is
nothing surprising about this: for any army, invading enemy territory entails
a period of vulnerability. Soldiers advanced into unknown and unsecured
territory without reliable access to provisions. Even before entering Belgium
and northern France in early August 1914, German infantrymen, remember-
ing the war of 1870–1, were convinced that they would encounter strong
resistance from ‘francs-tireurs’ perched on bell towers, ready to shoot them as
they went by. ‘They put out the eyes of the wounded and cut off their limbs
one by one’, confided a Bavarian soldier to a resident of Nomény (Meurthe-et
-Moselle). ‘If it wasn’t true, our leaders wouldn’t have told us so.’ A pervasive
feeling of insecurity; the exhaustion caused by forced marches; insufficient
food and water: everything conspired to increase the Germans’ nervous
tension. They found an outlet for their anxieties in the massacre of civilians
and in rampant destruction. The same pattern occurred on the Eastern Front
and in the Balkans. According to Germany, its troops’ violation of the laws of
war decreed in the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 signalled the
supremacy of military necessity over any humanitarian principle.22
The German armies’ strain was mirrored by the fear of the invaded
populations, which was based both on real experiences of violence and
imaginary crimes. For example, the stories of ‘German atrocities’ spread by
the 200,000 Belgian and 150,000 French refugees often included terrifying
descriptions of children whose arms or hands the Germans had purportedly
deliberately cut off. This new version of the myth of the ogre, devourer of
children, provoked a real panic in the north of France. Even the Bryce Report

21 Bruno Cabanes, August 1914: France, the Great War and a Month that Changed the World
Forever (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), chapter 7.
22 Isabel V. Hull, A Scrap of Paper: Breaking and Making International Law during the Great
War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014).

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on German atrocities (May 1915) sought an explanation for this paroxysmal

form of war violence. Rings being stolen? Saber thrusts by uhlans? The myth
of children with severed hands would quickly spread across France and the
United Kingdom, through caricatures, postcards, editorial cartoons and
mobilising posters.
The theme of ‘German atrocities’ and its counterpart, the imaginary abuses
committed against German troops by ‘francs-tireurs’, fed the demonisation of
the enemy for most of the war. When the United States officially entered the
war against the Central Powers in the spring of 1917, for example, mobilisation
posters still referred to the ‘violation’ of Belgium –in the sense both of the
violation of its neutrality and of sexual violence during the invasion. ‘Remember
Belgium’, warned an American poster in September 1918; it depicted a German
soldier with his spiked helmet dragging a little girl by the hand. In other posters,
the enemy was portrayed as a gorilla assaulting a woman.23
Obviously, this hatred varied in intensity across different countries and
social classes, and among different individuals. Similarly, the cultural war
against the enemy did not always have the same intensity. The initial
mobilisation of the belligerent societies weakened, especially with the crisis
of 1917; a period of remobilisation followed in France and Great Britain in the
spring of 1918. Despite these nuances, the enemy was often considered a ‘race’
apart, characterised by his barbarism, his lack of moral conscience and his
taste for wanton destruction. Soon the enemy was said to have a foul smell,
a bloodthirsty temperament, and animalistic behaviour – to be an animal.24 In
a classic process studied notably by the philosopher René Girard, the animal-
isation of the enemy allows him to be stigmatised as totally Other – and
therefore to be fought without restraint.25 ‘They [the Germans] don’t deserve
to be treated like human beings’, declared a French soldier from the Fourth
Army in a letter to his parents on the eve of the Armistice. Another soldier
complained about President Woodrow Wilson, who ‘spoke to the Boches as if
they were people. What do you want? He hasn’t seen anything, that
American’, he concluded.26
What is striking, in these letters from French soldiers in autumn 1918, is the
persistence of representations first generated in the summer of 1914 – despite the

23 John Horne and Alan Kramer, German Atrocities 1914: A History of Denial (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2001), p. 323.
24 Juliette Courmont, L’odeur de l’ennemi (Paris: Armand Colin, 2010).
25 René Girard, Le bouc émissaire (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1982).
26 Bruno Cabanes, La victoire endeuillée: la sortie de guerre des soldats français (1918–1920)
(Paris: Seuil, 2004), pp. 61–2.

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grind of four years of war and the 1917 crisis of morale. If this discursive violence
lasted more than four years, it is precisely because it was not only the product of
a discourse artificially constructed by the state – what has often been called
propaganda. The violence against the enemy came from the bottom: it was the
outcome of a kind of self-mobilisation by civilians and combatants, as well as of
the continuous flow of news between the Front and the interior. We should not
imagine that combatants were unaware of the suffering endured by their
families, of blockades and hunger in the case of the Central Powers, of the
urban bombardment undergone by civilians living in Paris or London, and, for
all, of mass bereavement and of material deprivations in daily life.
In much the same way, civilians were perfectly aware of the violence of
everyday life at the Front. As early as the summer of 1914, rumours spread by
refugees and by the first wounded soldiers disseminated, and often amplified,
the news of abuses committed against civilians and of the considerable losses
of the first weeks of war. By the end of 1914, Kodak’s portable camera allowed
thousands of soldiers to take photos of the battlefields. These were then sent
to family members and friends far from the Front, evading official censure. At
the same time, illustrated magazines sought to purchase war photos from
readers: on 14 March 1915, the French weekly Le Miroir launched a contest to
find the ‘most striking war photograph’, with a prize of 30,000 francs. After
the forests of mutilated trees and the bodies of horses photographed in the
early weeks of the war, it was now human bodies – friends or enemy – whose
images were published in newspapers.
The question is therefore not whether or not civilians knew about this new
war violence, but what they wanted to know. From this point of view, the
turning point in all likelihood was in 1916. That year, the Prix Goncourt –
a prestigious prize in French literature – went to Henri Barbusse’s Le Feu
[Under Fire]. In Great Britain, the documentary The Battle of the Somme had
tremendous public success, attracting almost 20 million spectators. After the
slaughter of Verdun and the Somme, the representation of war violence
changed forever. ‘Combat hammered and forged us to make us what we are’,
Ernst Junger would state six years later in ‘Battle as Inner Experience’ (1922).
‘This war will always be the axis around which the carousel of our existence
turns, as long as we are alive.’

The Future of Violence

What exactly do we identify as the end of the war? If we mean the end
of combat, the Armistice of 11 November 1918 suspended hostilities on

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the Western Front until the Versailles Peace Treaty was signed. But the
question is naturally more complex than this military definition of war
and peace allows. The sortie de guerre, as French historians now call the
period of transition from wartime to peacetime, was a long, chaotic and
complex process. Periods of demobilisation and remobilisation suc-
ceeded each other, as did gestures of peace and manifestations of the
impossibility or refusal to demobilise. Sometimes, as in Germany or
Russia, the Great War persisted in the form of a civil war or of new
international conflicts. We must then raise the more fundamental ques-
tion of how war violence mutated in the aftermath of the First
World War.
This evolution took various forms across different countries. There were
battles between regular armies. For example, the Greco-Turkish War
(1919–22) ended, for the first time in Western history, with the mandatory
transfer of 1.5 million individuals on the basis of ethnic homogeneity: Turkish
citizens living in Turkish territory who were of Greek Orthodox faith were
systematically exchanged for Greek citizens living in Greek territory who
were of Muslim faith (Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and
Turkish Populations of 30 January 1923, later integrated into the Treaty of
Lausanne of 24 July 1923). There was also ethnic and religious violence, such
as in Poland or in Ireland (during the war of independence of 1919–21), as well
as class struggles against an ‘internal enemy’, as in Bolshevik Russia. Violence
contesting the colonial presence also broke out in India and Egypt, Algeria
and Indochina.
Some of the violence emerged directly from the outcome of war in the
autumn and winter of 1918. Thousands of families of German descent were
expelled from Alsace, as per the decisions of ‘Commissions de Triage’ (sorting
commissions) created in December 1918. There were skirmishes between
Allied occupation troops and German civilians in the Rhineland. In Germany,
the months that followed the Armistice of November 1918 were marked first
by the Spartacist uprising, by the assassination of Rosa Luxemburg and of
Karl Liebknecht, and then by the repression of revolutionary movements by
paramilitary groups of the far right. ‘We were told that the war was over.
That made us laugh. We are the war’, a member of the Freikorps (German
paramilitary volunteer units) declared.
The historian George Mosse used the concept of brutalisation to encapsu-
late the transformation of war violence into political violence, from violence
against an external enemy to violence against an internal one. Since the late
1990s, this idea has been met with so much enthusiasm from historians – and

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not only First World War specialists – that the meaning Mosse gave it in his
groundbreaking book has often been forgotten. He pointed to veterans’
heightened indifference to violence as a result of the traumatic experience
of the Front and of the pursuit, in peace, of the aggressive attitudes of war.27
The term ‘brutalisation’ is certainly too vague to be fully convincing. Is
brutalisation a collective phenomenon which we can observe at the scale of
postwar societies (and, in this case, did veterans from victorious nations react
differently from those from vanquished ones?), or is it a behavioural trait
manifested only by certain veterans? Even if Mosse’s stated goal has always
been to carry out a ‘comparative cultural history’ of Europe in 1914–18 and
after the war, his examples are largely drawn from German political history.
According to the historian Antoine Prost, the idea of brutalisation is more
difficult to apply to France, where a strong republican tradition and pacifist
movement mitigated veterans’ violence.28 In Great Britain, brutalisation was
much more a ‘collective fear’ than a reality in the 1920s.29 For Dirk
Schumann, the relative stability of France and of the United Kingdom is
due to their displacement of postwar violence towards their colonies,
whereas Germany, having lost its colonial empire, was forced to shift linger-
ing war violence onto the political field – against its own citizens.
These interpretations start with the assumption that the experience of war
in itself inevitably kindles a response of individual and collective violence,
which certain countries might succeed in suppressing with parliamentary
democracy and veterans’ associations, or in redirecting towards the colonial
empire. But might it not be instead the ‘culture of defeat’,30 with its emotional
mixture of humiliation, frustration and anger, that explains how some
countries descended into various forms of political violence while others
were able to organise the return of veterans while limiting social disorder?
Defeat is neither only the result of the power balance between two nations,
nor simply a fact sanctioned by diplomats, but very much a state of mind. In
Germany, for example, the feeling of defeat encompassed various realities:
the occupation of the Rhineland, the political instability of the Weimar
Republic, the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles, the loss of border

27 George Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1990).
28 Antoine Prost, ‘The Impact of War on French and German Cultures’, Historical Journal
37.1 (1994), 209–17.
29 Jon Lawrence, ‘Forging a Peaceable Kingdom: War, Violence and Fear of Brutalization
in Post-First World War Britain’, Journal of Modern History 75.3 (2003), 557–89.
30 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning and
Recovery (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003).

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regions in central Europe – from which, not coincidentally, most of the

members of the Freikorps emerged in the aftermath of the war.
In Russia, the weakening of state power opened up space for warlords, who
carried out frequent pogroms with their private armies. In this unique period of
‘war communism’ (1918–21), many forms of violence combined to create
a quasi-permanent climate of violence: the struggle against counter-
revolutionaries (real or imagined), against foreign intervention forces (which
reached 20,000 men in 1919), and against ‘class enemies’ such as kulaks; the
Polish-Soviet war (1919–21), in which some 250,000 people died; ethnic strug-
gles. The Russian philosopher Pyotr Struve, who went from Bolshevism to the
counter-revolutionary movement, concluded that ‘everything we are living
through is only the continuation and mutation of the world war’.
At the same time, the disintegration of European empires led to
a resurgence of nationalism in the Caucasus, in the new Baltic states, in
Poland, and also outside Europe. In Africa and Asia, there was unrest in
proportion to the considerable expectations that colonised people had placed
in the person of President Wilson and in Wilsonianism. Many saw the Paris
Peace Conference of 1919 as a test of the Western powers’ commitment to
implement the right to self-determination. The Chinese delegation, made up
of young westernised diplomats, argued that former German concessions
should be transferred to China. Anti-Japanese demonstrations broke out across
China when negotiations collapsed, especially in Beijing on 4 May 1919. In mid
April 1919, at the Amritsar massacre, also called Jallianwala Bagh massacre,
British troops under the command of Brigadier General Reginald Dyer killed at
least 379 protesters; it was a bloody repression of the Indian nationalist move-
ment. The violence that erupted in the colonial world was a direct result of the
Great War and of the hope for a new world that it had engendered.

Conclusion
The First World War scarred the twentieth century as a whole with its
extreme violence. A century later, who could say that this violence has totally
dissipated? Without the Great War, there is no Auschwitz, there are no gulags
and there is probably no ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the Balkans in the 1990s; without
the war writers of 1914–18, no Primo Levi; without the eruption of nationalism,
no ulterior development of totalitarianism.
To stress the continuity between the First and Second World Wars is not
to defend the idea that Italian and German fascism were the inevitable result
of the frustrations and resentment provoked by the peace treaties; the 1930s’

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spiral into totalitarianism has many roots. On the other hand, the lack of
distinction between combatants and non-combatants, the fear of the internal
enemy, the industrialisation of death on the battlefield, the degrading and
murderous treatment of prisoners of war, the extermination and deportation
of an entire people on the basis of ethnicity are collective practices of violence
that were inherited from the Great War and that reached their climax in later
conflicts.
In the aftermath of the Great War, veterans did not share the same
ideologies, but they were all convinced of the fragility of peace and the possible
resurgence of violence. Some of them bitterly observed that the conflict
continued in other forms. During the First World War, Michal Römer, born
near Vilnius in 1880, had joined the Polish Legions of Józef Pilsudski with the
secret hope that one day Lithuania would be independent. On 1 April 1919, he
stated what many of his contemporaries had also perceived:
The war, finished in autumn, has not died away. Peace and a return to
stability appear to be as remote, if not more distant, as in autumn when the
war was formally approaching its end. Evicted from the trenches, frontlines
and from the official and regular struggle of militarised powers, it reached
into human societies and transformed itself into a state of permanent chaos,
a bellum omnium contra omnes. Formally, the regular war has stopped, but the
catastrophe, of which the war was only the first act, goes on and is far from
over. Who knows if it is only in its initial stage?31

Bibliographical Essay
It is somewhat surprising that the study of war violence is relatively new in research on the
First World War. It was not until the 1970s and the publication of John Keegan’s
groundbreaking volume The Face of Battle (New York: Penguin, 1976) that military
historians began to describe the battlefield from the point of view of combatants and
the effects of the new weapons of war – artillery, machine guns, flamethrowers, etc. – on
soldiers’ bodies. According to Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker, in 14–18:
Understanding the Great War (New York: Hill & Wang, 2003), this delay can be explained by
historians’ reluctance to work on extreme violence and their inability to understand the
concrete reality of combat. In a recent book – Combattre: une anthropologie historique de la
guerre moderne (Paris: Seuil, 2008) – Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau also observes how difficult

31 M. Römer, ‘Kulisy misji kowienskiej: Fragment Dziennika. Wiosna 1919’, Arcana

70–1.4–5 (2006), 52, cited in Jochen Böhler, ‘Enduring Violence: The Postwar
Struggles in East-Central Europe, 1917–1921’, Journal of Contemporary History 50.1
(2015), 58–9.

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it was for social scientists (historians, sociologists) who had participated in the First World
War to reflect on their own experience.
For a long time, it was the immense body of war literature, produced both during and
after the war, that bore witness to the extreme violence of the First World War.
Photographs, documentary films, artifacts and the material culture of the conflict also
led historians – more accustomed to work on written sources than on images – to change
their approach; see Stéphane Audoin Rouzeau, Les armes et la chair: trois objets de mort en
1914–1918 (Paris: Armand Colin, 2009). With these newly rediscovered sources, the violence
of war is now at the centre of historical research. Historians of the First World War have
used several approaches to study the violence of war. Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau et al.
(eds.), La violence de guerre, 1914–1945 (Paris: Editions Complexe, 2002) and
George Kassimeris (ed.), The Barbarization of Warfare (New York: New York University
Press, 2006) compare the violence of war in the First and Second World Wars. Other
books examine specific years in the Great War, identifying them as turning points in the
escalation of war violence. See, for example, John Horne (ed.), Vers la guerre totale: le
tournant de 1914–1915 (Paris: Tallandier, 2010). Other historians have chosen to study specific
battles, staying as close as possible to the experience of combatants. See Jean-Michel Steg,
Le jour le plus meurtrier de l’histoire de France, 22 août 1914 (Paris: Fayard, 2014) and
Damien Baldin and Emmanuel Saint-Fuscien, Charleroi, 21–23 août 1914 (Paris: Tallandier,
2012) for the Battle of the Frontiers; also see Keegan, The Face of Battle, for the Battle of the
Somme, and Antoine Prost and Gerd Krumeich, Verdun 1916 (Paris: Tallandier, 2015).
On combat as a bodily experience, the groundbreaking book is Joanna Bourke, An
Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth-Century Warfare (London: Granta,
1999). On the medical history of the Great War, the literature has been deeply revitalised
since the 2000s: see, for example, Sophie Delaporte, Gueules cassées: les blessés de la face
pendant la Grande Guerre (Paris: Noésis, 2001), and Mark Harrison, The Medical War: British
Military Medicine in the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). On the
violence of war and shell-shock, see the Journal of Contemporary History 35.1 (2000), special
issue: ‘Shell-Shock’.
The history of war violence includes the histories of the representation of the enemy,
the mobilisation of societies at war, and the motivations of combatants. The concept of
‘war culture’, introduced by Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker in ‘Violence
et consentement: la “culture de guerre” du premier conflit mondial’, in Jean-Pierre Rioux
and Jean-François Sirinelli (eds.), Pour une histoire culturelle (Paris: Seuil, 1997), is at the core
of this cultural approach. Also see Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker, 14–18:Understanding the
Great War, and Alan Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First
World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
Recent research has led to a re-evaluation of the impact of war violence on civilians
during the First World War. These studies may focus on the violence of the invasion
period in the summer of 1914 (John Horne and Alan Kramer, German Atrocities, 1914:
A History of Denial (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001)), on sexual violence
(Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, L’enfant de l’ennemi (Paris: Aubier, 1995)), on violence in
occupied countries (Annette Becker, Oubliés de la Grande Guerre (Paris: Hachette, 2003)),
on the Allied blockade of Germany, on violence committed against prisoners of war
(Heather Jones, Violence against Prisoners of War in the First World War (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2011)), or on the question of refugees.

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There are a great number of books dedicated to the Armenian genocide, its origins, its
specificity in the history of twentieth-century genocidal violence, the reactions of
contemporaries, and the memory of genocide: see especially Donald Bloxham, The
Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism and the Destruction of the Ottoman
Armenians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), Stefan Ihrig, Justifying Genocide:
Germany and the Armenians from Bismarck to Hitler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2016), and Jay Winter (ed.), America and the Armenian Genocide of 1915 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Finally, the idea of sortie de guerre which was introduced in France explores the processes
and rhythms in which societies transition from war to peace. For a general approach, see
Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Christophe Prochasson (eds.), Sortir de la Grande Guerre: le
monde et l’après-1918 (Paris: Tallandier, 2008). On the brutalisation of postwar societies, the
standard book is George Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). The question of demobilisation in France is
discussed in Bruno Cabanes, La victoire endeuillée: la sortie de guerre des soldats français,
1918–1920 (Paris: Seuil, 2004). On violence in postwar Germany, see Mark Jones, Founding
Weimar: Violence and the German Revolution of 1918–1919 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2017). On the question of ‘war after the war’ in central Europe and in Russia, see
Robert Gerwarth and John Horne (eds.), War in Peace: Paramilitary Violence after the Great
War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

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 15
Witnessing and Fighting Nazi Violence
during World War II
jochen hellbeck

As Soviet troops closed in on Germany in January 1945, Ilya Ehrenburg,

Soviet Russia’s foremost wartime writer, published an article in the Red
Army’s newspaper, reminding his readers about the larger meaning of the
war they were fighting:
Advancing toward Berlin are not only our divisions and armies, but also
legions of petrified mothers, inconsolable widows, and children whose hair
has turned gray . . . Advancing toward Berlin are the boots, shoes and
slippers of those who have been gassed, among them the tiny shoes of a two-
year-old. . . . Buried alive by the Germans, the children have crawled out of
the pits and antitank trenches; they are already at the border, eager to get to
Berlin . . . These children are not going to go away. They are our conscience.
They are guiding our tanks and soldiers.1
In histories of the Second World War, Ehrenburg often figures as a fierce
propagandist whose fiery calls on Red Army men to kill Germans contributed
to the exceptional violence that defined the German-Soviet war.2 But in
important other respects his writings have been overlooked: as carriers of
detailed information about Nazi atrocities in the East, and as catalysts of
a moral position from which Ehrenburg’s readers, whether they were soldiers
at the front or civilian workers in the war economy, were to encounter and
defeat the German invaders. The children killed in ravines and death camps
were not going away: Ehrenburg’s editorials ensured that they lived on in the
conscience of Soviet survivors. The violence practised by the German occu-
pants, Ehrenburg felt, should incite moral outrage and lead the Red Army

1 Krasnaia zvezda, 10 January 1945. For the ‘cabbage of Majdanek’, see below pp. 319–20.
2 E.g. Karel C. Berkhoff, Motherland in Danger: Soviet Propaganda during World War II
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), pp. 182–93, and Antony Beevor, The
Fall of Berlin (New York: Viking, 2002), pp. 25–36, in addition to the literature discussed in
Peter Jahn (ed.), llja Ehrenburg und die Deutschen (Berlin: Museum Berlin – Karlshorst,
1997).

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 Witnessing and Fighting Nazi Violence

soldiers on towards victory and retribution. Ehrenburg had been writing in this
vein since the first days of the German invasion – his January 1945 piece marked
a culmination of a multi-year campaign to inform, agitate and educate.
World War II differed from preceding wars on three counts: its staggering
overall death toll of some 60 million people; the fact that most of the
casualties were on the Allied side; and the much higher death rate, again
on the Allied side, of civilians over soldiers. The mass killing of civilians was
a strategic objective of the war. ‘Millions of people’, Richard Bessel writes,
‘lost their lives not as a consequence of military campaigns with military
objectives, but as a result of actions the fundamental aim of which was just to
kill civilians.’3 The war’s epicentres of violence were territories of China and
the Soviet Union occupied by Axis forces for years. This chapter focuses on
the Soviet case, the arena of greatest civilian suffering anywhere in the world.
Germany’s war in the East rested on a transgression of the moral norms of
humanism, which Nazi leaders purposely disavowed to justify the promotion
of a particularist racial ethic and the mass annihilation of ‘unworthy’ life. Both
the moral provocation that defined the Nazi project and its cruel effects for
people who were defined as antithetical to the ‘Aryan race’ registered
profoundly with Soviet observers. Millions of people witnessed German
atrocities on Soviet soil first-hand or learned about them through
Ehrenburg’s writings, political seminars held inside the Red Army, or letters
received from family members who had experienced German rule. Soviet
commentators seized on the nature of German violence to build a moral case
about their war effort, expressed in the imperative need for ‘Soviet humanity’
to fight ‘fascist barbarism’. This narrative, replete with detailed information
about German atrocities, was paramount in mobilising Soviet people to fight
Nazi Germany. In the eyes of many, it also redeemed the Soviet regime,
absolving it of its own ample record of political violence.
Increasingly during the war, the Soviet moral language of anti-fascism
shaped Western attitudes towards Nazi Germany. Documentations of Soviet
suffering presented in newspaper reports or films circulated through many
parts of the world where they produced a groundswell of popular sympathy
with the Soviet Union. In the process, decidedly communist norms of fighting
the German fascist threat to humanity, and fighting it passionately, passed over
to the West. While historians have recently begun to point to the deep sense of
moral superiority over Nazi Germany as a key binding agent that held the anti-

3 Richard Bessel, ‘Death and Survival in the Second World War’, in Michael Geyer and
Adam Tooze (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Second World War, vol. I I I (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 252–76, at 252.

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Hitler coalition together and ultimately accounted for Allied victory in 1945,
their preconceived notion that morality resided in the West and was defined by
it reduces this important insight. Challenging this view, the present chapter
traces how Soviet writers, journalists, filmmakers and many other eyewit-
nesses of German violence formulated an activist and universal response to
German fascism that would become a benchmark of moral value for Western
observers as well. While Stalin disavowed universal ideals after the war, this
did not diminish their wartime vitality and reach, or the part the Soviet Union
played – materially as well as conceptually – in defeating Nazi Germany.
Shared hatred of Hitler held the Allies together until the end of the war, but
the alliance fractured soon after the German regime of violence had been
overcome. At the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, Stalin’s
brazen insistence on indicting the Germans for a mass murder of Polish officers
at Katyn that in fact Soviet forces had committed backfired spectacularly. Many
international observers began to distrust the entire Soviet documentary record
on German war crimes. With these sources in discredit, some of the worst
German atrocities in the East were eclipsed from the historical record. In the
postwar West, anti-fascism yielded to anti-totalitarianism, as Stalin began to
appear as another Hitler. Western anti-communism and liberal notions of
Soviet society as totalitarian have conspired to produce an exceedingly politi-
cised understanding of the Soviet war effort as masterminded by a cynical
regime. This interpretation is insensitive to a Soviet documentary record of
Nazi violence awash with powerful human emotions: shock, grief and hatred.
It represses from view the existential perspectives of violated people roaming
ravaged homes. Even though serious scholars today believe most Soviet
records of Nazi atrocities to be truthful, the Katyn dossier forming the sole
exception, this acknowledgement has barely translated into an injunction to
explore these records beyond their instrumental aims.
One reason for this omission is a Western-centric understanding of the
Holocaust, which liberal scholars have posited as the defining human chal-
lenge of the Second World War. Such an understanding elides millions of non-
Jewish Soviet victims of the Nazi campaign against ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’ –
POWs, communists, partisans and slave workers. In their defence, Holocaust
scholars often claim that the Soviets disregarded or sought to repress knowl-
edge about ‘the Holocaust’, conceived as both the particular suffering of Jews
and the overall record of the Nazi war of annihilation in the East.4 Yet as this

4 See Karel C. Berkhoff’s historiographical discussion, ‘“Total Annihilation of the Jewish

Population”: The Holocaust in the Soviet Media, 1941–45’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian
and Eurasian History 10.1 (2009), 61–105, at 62–5.

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chapter contends, a wide range of people in the Soviet Union were informed
about Nazi violence against Soviet POWs and civilians, Jewish as well as non-
Jewish. It brings into view multiple local initiatives to record German atrocities
and shows how they fed into the work of high-level propagandists like
Ehrenburg. It establishes how documentations of violence catalysed support
for the Red Army and hatred towards the German invaders, throughout the
Soviet Union and beyond its borders. Everywhere in Nazi-occupied Europe,
whether we consider Emmanuel Ringelblum’s clandestine archive in the
Warsaw ghetto or French wartime reports on the Nazi massacre in Oradour-
sur-Glane, the documentary impulse served similar mobilising needs. What set
the Soviet case apart were a much more pervasive practice of German violence
and, in response to it, much broader efforts on the Soviet side to record enemy
atrocities. The documents produced in the process brimmed with a singular
emotional charge: they urged their readers to fight and kill.

The Record of German Violence

In the European theatre, World War II began with a double attack on Poland,
with Germany invading from the West on 1 September, and the Soviet Union
following suit, from the East, days later. Stalin’s and Hitler’s regimes stood out
among other European states as two ruthless dictatorships that openly advocated
massive political violence for the sake of enacting their social or racial utopias.
Both began occupation with campaigns to crush national elites on enemy soil,
killing thousands of captured officers, aristocrats, intellectuals, political activists
and priests. Both carried out deportations on a vast scale. Yet these similarities
obscure important differences. Germany’s occupation policy was more lethal as
it served a more ambitious purpose to incorporate into the Aryan Reich portions
of Poland which were predominantly inhabited by ethnic Poles and Jews.5
Entrusted with a scheme of comprehensive racial reordering, SS chief Heinrich
Himmler prepared the resettlement of ethnic Germans from other parts of
Europe into western Poland. To clear the ground, Himmler dispatched his
Einsatzgruppen killing squads into Poland where they executed scores of Polish
nationalists and forced Jews into ghettos, randomly killing many in the process.6

5 During the invasion alone, Germans murdered 50,000 Polish civilians and 7,000 Jews.
Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe (New York: Penguin, 2009)
pp. 78, 96.
6 Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish
Policy, September 1939–March 1942 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press; Jerusalem: Yad
Vashem, 2004), chapters 2–4; Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder
of the Jews (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 143–4.

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The ‘higher’ law of Germany’s racial survival and enhancement necessitated the
enormous violence in Poland in the eyes of many. Condescension towards the
neighbour in the East as a less civilised type also played a role. As the occupation
progressed, Joseph Goebbels recorded Hitler’s ‘devastating’ verdict on the Poles:
‘More like animals than human beings.’7
Intensely deadly, the Polish campaign emerged in retrospect as but
a prelude to Operation Barbarossa, the code name for Germany’s war against
the Soviet Union, which radically extended and reforged Nazi violence in
World War II. During the invasion of Poland, at least some German army
leaders saw themselves bound by the conventions of international law and
objected to the SS terror on these grounds.8 Operation Barbarossa was
planned in such a way as to ensure that every single German soldier became
a conscious agent of the Nazi war of annihilation. This campaign would be
unlike any other, Hitler believed, because it would be fought against
Nazism’s mortal enemy, Judeo-Bolshevism. Military orders issued in spring
1941 commanded an army of several million conscripted men to adapt their
conscience to the laws of Nazi racial ideology. To prevail against the ‘crim-
inal’, ‘cruel’ and ‘barbaric’ Soviet enemy, German soldiers were directed to
set aside principles of humanity and international law.9 Only a year before,
Himmler had drawn a principled line between the Nazis as ‘civilized
Europeans’ and the ‘Bolsheviks’. As he presented Hitler with a plan to
improve the racial stock in Germany’s east by separating racially valuable
Polish children from their parents, he described the project as ‘cruel and
tragic’ for the concerned individuals, but ‘mild and . . . better, when com-
pared to the Bolshevik method of physical extermination of a people,
a method that we reject in principle as non-Germanic and impossible’.10
Now, about to come face to face with millions of ‘Bolsheviks’ who were
supposedly more beastly than human, German soldiers were to resort to the
very cruelty and ruthlessness that was ascribed to the enemy. As Hitler
directed his generals in a 30 March 1941 address: ‘The troops must fight
back with the methods with which they are attacked.’11

7 Stephen Fritz, Ostkrieg: Hitler’s War of Extermination in the East (Lexington: University
Press of Kentucky, 2011), p. 20.
8 Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, pp. 15–21.
9 Gerd Ueberschär and Wolfram Wette (eds.), ‘Unternehmen Barbarossa’: Der deutsche
Überfall auf die Sowjetunion, 1941: Berichte, Analysen, Dokumente (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1991),
pp. 302–3 and 319–23; Fritz, Ostkrieg, p. 30.
10 Browning, Origins of the Final Solution, pp. 69–70.
11 ‘Unternehmen Barbarossa’: Der deutsche Überfall auf die Sowjetunion 1941, ed. Gerd
R. Ueberschär and Wolfram Wette (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schönling, 1984), p. 303.

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Beyond the specific instruction to isolate and execute Soviet commissars,

Nazi notions about the nature of the Jewish Bolshevik enemy were vague,
however. German commandos proceeded to apply them broadly and leth-
ally. As they entered Soviet homes the first question soldiers would pose to
frightened residents was: ‘Jude, Kommunist?’ Individuals that fitted either
category would be taken away and executed. Einsatzgruppen internal reports
revealed some conceptual flux as they alternated between ‘communists’,
‘Jewish communists’ or ‘Jews and other communist elements’ in their classi-
fication of the same people they had shot. By August 1941, the widespread
sentiment that Jews and Bolsheviks were interchangeable, or that at the very
least Jews firmly backed the Bolshevik system, so much so that ‘every Jew, in
principle’ had to be regarded as a partisan (as Heinrich Himmler instructed
his commandos in Bialystok) prompted the SS to annihilate entire Jewish
settlements, complete with women, children and the elderly.12 The mass
killing of Soviet Jews thus unfolded as part of Nazism’s ideological struggle
against the carriers of ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’, an enemy whom the Nazis por-
trayed as terroristic and savage.
These killings refashioned Germany’s way of war. The murderous cam-
paign against the Soviet agents of ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’, who could be killed
with greatest ease as they were imagined as most radically removed from
European norms of civilisation, became the template into which the treatment
of Jews from Germany and other parts of Europe was fitted. The image of the
Judeo-Bolshevik enemy, and the forms of mass violence that it generated,
travelled west in autumn 1941, inaugurating what is often identified as the
Holocaust. The fact that the decision to annihilate all the Jews of Europe came
after, and was an effect of, Operation Barbarossa underscores how centrally
the war against the Soviet Union defined the Nazi regime of violence.
With almost the same exterminatory zeal that they showed toward Jews,
Germans proceeded to killed Soviet POWs. Their systematic destruction
was an integral component of Nazi policy towards the Soviet Union. The
lethal motive extended beyond starving to death millions of ‘superfluous
eaters’. Soviet POWs (even absent the commissars who had already been
shot) were widely identified as ‘Bolsheviks’, with all the consequences that
this appellation entailed. German military guards were under explicit orders
to train their weapons on captured Red Army men with ‘particular

12 The Einsatzgruppen Reports: Selections from the Dispatches of the Nazi Death Squads’ Campaign
against the Jews in Occupied Territories of the Soviet Union July 1941 – January 1943, ed.
Yitzhak Arad, Shmuel Krakowski and Shmuel Spector (New York: Garland, 1989),
see Reports 19, 27, 32, 60, 108, 124 for the year 1941; Longerich, Holocaust, p. 198.

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severity’.13 When the SS began to introduce gas vans in Sachsenhausen and

gas chambers in Auschwitz, it performed the first deadly experiments on
Soviet POWs. By the end of January 1942, almost 60 per cent of the
3.35 million Soviet prisoners of war who had been captured by then had
died. This number dwarfed even the number of Jews who had been killed
by the Germans up to that point.14
To turn German soldiers into agents of the Nazi war of annihilation required
ongoing indoctrination beyond the Barbarossa decrees of spring 1941. This work
was performed by army field orders, including the directive that Field Marshal
von Reichenau issued to the Ukraine-based soldiers of the Sixth Army on
10 October 1941. Reichenau reminded the German soldiers stationed ‘in the
East’ of their political mission ‘to free the German people once and for all from
the Asiatic-Jewish danger’. His order specifically called for the annihilation of
resisting enemy male soldiers, female soldiers (‘degenerate women’) and sus-
pected partisans as perpetrators of ‘subhuman insidious cruelty’.15
Three months after Reichenau issued this order, Pravda presented it to its
readers as an order ‘so monstrous and cynical that all Soviet people and the
entire civilised world must know about it’.16 In May 1942, Pravda published
excerpts from Göring’s ‘Green Folder’, a policy directive that ordered the total
economic exploitation of the conquered Soviet Union for the exclusive needs
of Nazi Germany.17 Already in a November 1941 address to Moscow officials,
Stalin had quoted from German military orders found on the battlefield to
describe the nature of ‘Hitlerism’ and ‘fascism’ (he used these terms inter-
changeably). Stalin also quoted from Herrmann Rauschning’s recently pub-
lished ‘Conversations with Hitler’: ‘Hitler says: I liberate man from the
degrading chimera called conscience. The conscience, as well as education,
cripple man. I have the advantage of not being constrained by any theoretical
or moral concerns whatsoever.’18 Soviet leaders publicised available German
documents, the Barbarossa decrees in particular, to flag the Soviet war effort as

13 Longerich, Holocaust, p. 224.

14 Christian Streit, Keine Kameraden: Die Wehrmacht und die sowjetischen Kriegsgefangenen
1941–1945 (Bonn: J. H. W. Dietz, 1991); Mazower, Hitler’s Empire, pp. 160–6.
15 Several of these army orders are reprinted in ‘Unternehmen Barbarossa’, pp. 339–45.
16 Pravda, 15 January 1942; reprinted in Zverstva, grabezhi i nasiliia nemetsko-fashistskikh
zakhvatchikov (Leningrad: Ogiz, Gospolitizdat, 1942), pp. 112–15. The order was pre-
sented in slightly edited form: for instance, where the original referenced ‘Judeo-
Bolshevism’, Pravda wrote ‘Bolshevism’. German original: www.ns-archiv.de/krieg/
untermenschen/reichenau-befehl.php#begleit.
17 Pravda, 4 and 7 May 1942; reprinted in Zverstva, grabezhi, pp. 115–30.
18 I. V. Stalin, Sochineniia. Tom 15 (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo ‘Pisatel’, 1997). Stalin’s citation is
a recognisable though not verbatim quotation from Rauschning’s book, which he did
not reference. While the scholarly consensus today is that Rauschning invented at least

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a moral campaign against a depraved invader. Ilya Ehrenburg practised this

method from the very outbreak of the war. He was also one of the earliest
Soviet observers to call attention to the Nazi annihilation of Jews in western
parts of the Soviet Union. On 25 August 1941, Pravda carried his accusation:
‘They kill children, forcing their mothers to watch. They force terrified old
men to act the buffoon. They rape girls. They stab, torture, and burn. Because
of them, Belostok, Minsk, Berdichev, and Vinnitsa have turned into terrible
names.’ ‘Mankind as a whole’, Ehrenburg concluded, ‘is now waging war
against Germany – not for territorial gains, but for the right to breathe.’19
During the first months of the invasion, Soviet knowledge of German
atrocities against civilians was episodic. In November 1941, the media
reported the shooting murder of an estimated 52,000 Jews from Kiev, men,
women and children, at Ваbi Yar.20 This grisly picture filled up with more
detail after the Red Army drove the Germans back from near Moscow and in
southern Russia. In January 1942, authorities dug up the remains of thousands
of executed civilians in Kerch and Rostov, for the most part Jews. Images
showing landscapes of bodies strewn along antitank ditches, or close-ups of
the dead were publicised in Soviet newspapers and magazines.21
A commission of Moscow historians began to interview survivors and
witnesses of German occupation, starting in the liberated areas near
Moscow.22 Planning also began for the creation of an Extraordinary State
Commission (ChGK) that would catalogue the crimes committed by the
Germans, in anticipation of postwar trials and reparations. That commission
took up its work in November 1942.23 Yet it was only with the sustained

some of his ‘Conversations with Hitler’, wartime readers outside of Germany accepted
the book as fact.
19 Il’ia Erenburg, ‘24 Avgusta 1941 goda’, Pravda, 25 August 1941.
20 Mordechai Altshuler, ‘The Holocaust in the Soviet Mass Media during the War and in the
First Postwar Years Re-examined’, Yad Vashem Studies 39.2 (2011), 121–68. Einsatzgruppen
reports record that 33,771 Jews were killed at Babi Yar on 29–30 September 1941.
21 David Shneer, Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011), pp. 100–8.
22 Over the course of the war this Commission on the History of the Great Patriotic War
would produce hundreds of interviews with Soviet survivors and witnesses of the
German occupation regime. See Jochen Hellbeck, ‘The Antifascist Pact. Forging a First
Experience of Nazi Occupation in the Wartime Soviet Union’, Slavonic and East
European Review 96.1 (2018), 117–43.
23 Nathalie Moine, ‘La commission d’enquête soviétique sur les crimes de guerre nazis: entre
reconquête du territoire, écriture du récit de la guerre et usages justiciers’, Le Mouvement
Social 222, Enquêter sur la guerre (2008), 81–109, at 83–4. According to the commission’s
own calculations, around 32,000 public representatives, most of them Communist Party
members, took part in investigating Nazi war crimes, and more than 7 million Soviet
citizens directly collected and prepared documents for the commission. Natal´ia
S. Lebedeva, Podgotovka Niurnbergskogo protsessa (Moscow: Nauka, 1975), pp. 26–31.

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liberation campaign that followed on the heels of Soviet victory at Stalingrad

that these various bodies started to amass a comprehensive record of German
atrocities on Soviet soil.
Since early 1942 the Political Administration of the Red Army had been
publishing brochures detailing atrocities committed by the ‘German fascist
invaders’. In spring 1943, a new phrase entered these brochures: the ‘mass
annihilation of the Soviet civilian population’. As the authors stressed, the
Germans conducted their ‘physical extermination’ in a ‘planned manner
and on a mass scale’.24 The discovery of crimes unprecedented in size and
nature jolted Soviet observers. At the Krasnodar trial of eleven Soviet
citizens who had collaborated in Nazi atrocities against Soviet civilians
and POWs, held in July 1943, new evidence about the killing methods
used by the Germans came to the fore, in particular their use of gas vans
adapted to asphyxiate passengers by exhaust fumes. Filmmaker Mark
Troianovskii, who directed an official camera team at the trial, wrote to
his mother from Krasnodar:
You of course know about the trial from the newspapers. But I must tell you
that I was all choked up when I heard Dr. Kazel’skii’s story about how the
Germans killed his sick patients, the testimony of the teacher Inozemtseva
who talked about the killing of the children, and others. Witness Ivan
Ivanovich Kotov we couldn’t record with audio. His throat is paralysed
after he was poisoned with carbon oxide. It’s as if he has arisen from the
dead. He’s the only one who has miraculously survived the gas van.25

War crime trials, at Krasnodar and elsewhere, were but a few of numerous
sites at which Soviet citizens were instructed and educated about the nature
of the ‘German-fascist atrocities’. In liberated towns and villages, Red Army
political officers gathered rank and file soldiers around the exposed corpses of
victims or near former Gestapo prisons. Local survivors who had personally
witnessed Nazi atrocities spoke; agitators lectured about the horrors com-
mitted by the Germans. These ‘meetings of vengeance’ culminated with
ritualistic vows by the assembled soldiers to fight the enemy with redoubled
force. The sight of German massacres of civilians held enormous mobilising
power for the present soldiers; it stirred into action even recruits who had
initially disliked Stalin or were unwilling to fight. In the face of such atrocities,
the war acquired an even higher moral purpose: ‘as every day of occupation
meant more women raped, towns destroyed, and fellow citizens humiliated

24 Zverstva nemetsko-fashistskikh zakhvatchikov. Dokumenty. Vypusk 7 (n.p., 1943), p. 3.

25 Kino na voine. Dokumenty i fakty, ed. V. Fomin (Moscow: Materik, 2005), pp. 208–9.

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and murdered’, soldiers felt a mandate to move westward quickly, in order to

save lives.26
Red Army soldiers who observed the effects of Nazi occupation corre-
sponded with Ehrenburg, feeding him with evidence that they knew he
needed for his editorials. Twelve days after the liberation of Liady, formerly
a Jewish town on the border of Russia and Belorussia, soldier V. Izvekov
wrote to Ehrenburg sharing stark impressions: ‘How many corpses of chil-
dren with faces distorted by pain? Among the murdered there is even a six-
month-old child with a pacifier in its mouth, apparently buried alive, as there
are no traces of murder.’ Izvekov’s letter ended like a ritualised ‘meeting of
vengeance’, with a description of his unit marching ‘forward to the West, past
the martyrs’ grave’, his fellow soldiers’ eyes filled with ‘tears of rage, such
rage that no one has previously experienced’.27 Izvekov’s letter was a single
sheet in a huge dossier of personal documentation about the nature and
effects of German rule that was produced in the immediate aftermath of
Soviet liberation. Everywhere in the liberated areas, a wartime correspon-
dent noted, ‘people were seized with the spontaneous need to write, to
testify. Stacks upon stacks of testimonies piled up in the political sections of
regiments and divisions. They were written on scraps of Gestapo forms, on
the backs of idiotic Goebbels posters, and more frequently in school note-
books. There is no statute of limitations for what was written in them.’28
Visiting Kharkov in February 1943, days after the Red Army had retaken the
city, British correspondent Alexander Werth was struck by the urge of
residents to tell their stories. Invariably, these testimonies would centre on
hangings: ‘public hangings. It was that which seemed to have left the deepest
impression of all.’29 This is confirmed in hundreds of testimonies that the
Moscow historical commission collected from witnesses of German occupa-
tion throughout the liberated areas of Russia, Ukraine and Belorussia.
Violence figures at the centre of these testimonies, not only and not
primarily because the historians asked the witnesses specifically to talk
about enemy atrocities, but because the German style of violence had etched
itself in witnesses’ minds as the most harrowing thing they had ever experi-
enced. Etta Maizles, a Jewish survivor of the Minsk ghetto, used drastic words

26 Brandon Schechter, The Stuff of Soldiers: A History of the Red Army in World War II through
Objects (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019), p. 115.
27 Arkadi Zeltser and Erina Megowan, ‘Differing Views among Red Army Personnel
about the Nazi Mass Murder of Jews’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian
History 15.3 (2014), 563–90, at 587.
28 Writer Nikolai Atarov, quoted in Sorokina, ‘People and Procedures’, 825, n. 88.
29 Alexander Werth, Russia at War, 1941–1945 (New York: Barrie & Rockliff, 1964), p. 610.

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when she talked about the series of mass killings in the ghetto that also
claimed the lives of two of her own children: ‘He [the German] is a beast,
worse than a tiger, worse than anything in the world. You cannot imagine
what kind of beasts they are, bloodthirsty to no end, unless you come into
their way.’ One of the many German ‘actions’ in the ghetto disturbed Maizles
in particular – the systematic killing in March 1942 of 300 children who lived in
an orphanage in the Minsk ghetto after their parents had died:
What happened to the children was unbearably sad. They were innocent
victims of these monsters. By then I’d seen so many horrors, but when I saw
them massacre those children, I just couldn’t take it. I was beside myself. If
you’d seen that pile of children, those bodies with broken legs. They’d pick
them up by the legs and smash them on the corners and walls of the
buildings. You can understand how such horror could make you lose your
mind. I couldn’t live, couldn’t work. For days on end I didn’t say a word.
Everything inside me went numb.30

Witnesses referred to the inhuman and debasing style of German violence

as the defining characteristic of the occupation regime. A Belorussian partisan
who was interviewed as early as December 1942 (he and others had been
flown to Moscow to update communist officials about the state of partisan
warfare in the swamps and forests of Belorussia) remarked on the gallows
that the Germans had set up ‘on squares, in parks and in front of theatres.
Lately gallows were put up in every village district. They string them up with
hooks in their jaws, like fish.’31 The defiling of culturally sacred places
(theatres and city parks) and the inhuman methods of killing are crucial
markers in this testimony. Partisans noted that the Germans deliberately
placed the gallows in public places, ‘for everyone to see’.32 Nazi violence,
along with the German denigration of Soviet culture and the fact that the
Germans only barked orders at Soviet civilians but did not address them as
citizens, challenged survivors’ self-understanding as Soviet people.
At least some Soviet citizens who had previously called out the communist
regime for its repressive policies came to espouse a novel understanding of
Soviet power in the light of Nazi violence. Lev Nikolaev, a professor of
medicine in Kharkov, had kept a secret diary since 1936, in which he

30 Former members of German police battalions in the East confirmed these monstrous
actions: Edward B. Westerman, Hitler’s Police Battalions: Enforcing Racial War in the East
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005), p. 173.
31 Nauchnyi Arkhiv Instituta Rossiiskoi istorii Rossiiskoi Akademii nauk (NA IRI RAN),
f. 2, razd. I I, op. 4, d. 34, l. 6: Interview with Nikifor S. Pankratov, 29 December 1942.
32 NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. I I, op. 4, d. 6: Interview with Aleksei N. Mal’chevskii,
10 September 1942.

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compared Stalinism and Nazi Germany as two similarly blood-drenched

dictatorships. Nikolaev kept his diary through the war. His first-hand experi-
ence of the Germans’ ‘cunning cruelty’ clarified his moral horizons, making
him long, like many other Soviet citizens, for ‘liberation’ by ‘our’ Red Army
soldiers.33
After liberation, one of the first things Soviet officials did in liberated cities
and towns was to assemble the entire local population for political meetings.
Their purpose was to reinforce the antithesis of fascist inhumanity and Soviet
humanity, a central trope in the ongoing Soviet ideological battle against
fascism. Similar to the Meetings of Vengeance practised in the Red Army,
these gatherings were typically held in front of gallows – sometimes with
corpses of Soviet partisans still hanging from them. A Melitopol official who
was interviewed by the Moscow historians described the overwhelming
effect of a meeting that he convened six days after the city’s liberation. He
was the first to speak, followed by priests and a few Red Army officers. The
last speakers were four partisans – ‘two comrades [i.e. party members] and
two girls, all of them from Melitopol’. They joined the partisans after the
Germans had shot their families and parents. ‘What we witnessed was not
a regular meeting – it was a single roaring and howling. The stories were so
horrible, we all stood there, unable to move.’34
Such meetings were held everywhere on liberated soil, including in the
Baltic republics and the western regions of Ukraine and Belorussia, which the
Soviet Union had annexed in the wake of the Hitler–Stalin Pact. In these
areas, where memories of Soviet occupation and violence in the early phases
of the Second World War were fresh, stories of individual survival of Nazi
terror were particularly important to buttress Soviet claims of ‘liberation’.
Significantly, the Germans never contemplated a comparable interview
project during the period of their rule over Soviet lands, as its civic potential
contravened their colonial ambitions. Soviet civilians, Reichenau’s order
declared, were to be motivated by fear of German reprisals, not to be
addressed as citizens.
Soviet photographers and film crews played a crucial role in weaving
evidence of atrocities into the moral tale of Soviet humanism battling fascist
inhumanity, and disseminating this story to broad audiences. Camera teams
recording the westward advance of the Red Army were under specific
instructions to ‘Record the atrocities and trail of destruction caused by the

33 NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. V I, op. 6, d. 7a and 7v.

34 NA IRI RAN, f. 2, razd. V I, op. 11, d. 2, l. 3.

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Germans, record the most horrific and painful scenes, without any regard to
aesthetic concerns. Cameramen shooting this material should be directed by
no other concern than the obligation to fixate the Germans’ plunder and
infamy on our soil, for which they will have pay one day.’35 A well-known
documentary made from this footage was Aleksandr Dovzhenko’s Battle for
Our Soviet Ukraine, which the director had initially titled Ukraine in Flames.
The film’s principal subject is Ukraine’s and Ukrainians’ unspeakable suffer-
ing at the hands of the Germans. The camera pans over an opened mass grave
in Kharkov containing the remains of 14,000 victims of Nazi terror, to the
voice of a speaker: ‘You who are alive, look at us! Don’t turn away from our
terrible trenches. We cannot be forgotten or ignored. There are many of us.
We are a great multitude in Ukraine. Do not forget us! Take revenge on
Germany for our suffering!’ The film also showed footage of public meetings
in the wake of liberation, and it featured surviving witnesses, including Lev
Nikolaev who showed effects of famine and torture on his body to the
camera, standing in front of Kharkhov’s ransacked medical institute, his
former workplace that, he explained, had been torched by the Germans.

‘You who are alive, look at us!’

These words in Dovzhenko’s film reached audiences the world over. From
early on, Soviet leaders sought to bring information about the extent and
nature of Nazi crimes beyond Soviet borders, to shore up hatred against
Germany and to solidify the anti-Hitler alliance. In the process, they trans-
mitted to Western Allied nations their moral understanding of the war
against ‘fascist inhumanity’. Among the earliest to do so were Ehrenburg
and other Soviet Jewish writers who gathered in Moscow on 24 August 1941
for an international radio appeal. At the meeting, Solomon Mikhoels
described fascist violence as ‘elaborate methods of unheard of, unprece-
dented, brutal, bloodthirsty cruelties’ that aimed at ‘humiliation and
[man’s] degradation to a level lower than that of an animal’. Mikhoels called
on Jews around the world to fight Nazi leaders passionately. This was the
‘duty . . . of all humanity’.36 Many of the Moscow Jewish writers subsequently
became a Jewish Antifascist Committee (JAC). When committee members

35 Tsena kadra. Kazhdyi vtoroi – ranen, kazhdyi chetvertyi – ubit. Sovetskaia frontovaia
kinokhronika 1941–1945 gg., ed. V. P. Mikhailov and V. I. Fomin (Moscow: Kanon,
2010), p. 378.
36 Shimon Redlich (ed.), War, Holocaust and Stalinism: A Documented Study of the Jewish
Anti-Fascist Committee in the USSR (Luxembourg: Harwood, 1995), pp. 177–9.

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toured US cities in summer 1943 to raise funds for the Soviet war effort they
drew huge crowds. The efforts of the JAC to collect documents on the
annihilation of the Soviet Jews contributed to the publication in the United
States of a ‘Black Book’. The publication featured an epigraph by JAC leader
Itzik Fefer: ‘The globe is too small to hold both mankind and fascism.’37
Shown in Allied countries during the war, Soviet documentary films
detailing Nazi violence made a powerful impression. Moscow Strikes Back,
a film devoted to the first liberation campaign in December 1941 and
January 1942, came out in US movie theatres in August 1942 and won an
Oscar in 1943. A critic for the New York Times described the film as at heart
‘a picture of the brutal desolation wrought by war, of the monstrous desecra-
tion of humanity that the Nazis unleashed throughout the world. And any
one who sees it cannot help but be deeply, implacably aroused.’ To call
Moscow Strikes Back the most ехciting of all contemporary war films was an
understatement; another reviewer noted: ‘The film makes you want to jump
out of your seat in the movie theater and join those fighting on the screen in
order to purge once and for all Nazism’s degeneracy and senseless cruelty
from the face of this earth.’ ‘While the film was shown, the theater hall,
crowded with people, was completely silent’, a third reviewer noted. ‘The
people sat there holding their breath. But as the last images flickered over the
screen, everybody erupted in applause and cheers.’38 In Great Britain, popular
identification with the Soviet war against Germany proved even greater than
in the United States, where at least until D-Day the Pacific War relegated the
European theatre to a secondary front. At an August 1942 exhibition of war
photographs in London, it was the ‘Russian atrocity section’ that made by far
the greatest impression.39 Soviet anti-fascist posters trickled into the United
States where they prompted strong reactions from curators who lauded the
ability of Soviet graphic art to communicate forcefully, incite action and
foment hatred of the enemy. ‘They kill Germans’, a critic summarised the
visual power of these posters. Compared to this Soviet standard, British and
American posters looked ‘pretty dull’.40

37 The Black Book: The Nazi Crime against the Jewish People (New York: Duell, Sloan &
Pearce, 1946), p. iii.
38 New York Times, 30 August 1942; New York Post Meridian, 2 December 1942; Motion
Picture Herald, December 1942, cited in Tsena kadra, 1009–10 (reverse translations from
Russian).
39 Janina Struk, Photographing the Holocaust: Interpretations of the Evidence (London:
I. B. Tauris, 2004), p. 51.
40 Peter Kort Zegers and Douglas Druick (eds.),Windows on the War: Soviet TASS Posters at
Home and Abroad, 1941–1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), p. 128.

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The British and US governments contributed to the outpouring of popular

sympathy with the Soviet ally by toning down or even actively countering
references to the violent nature of the Stalinist state. The British Ministry of
Information issued a manual, ‘Arguments to Counter the Ideological Fear of
Bolshevism’, instructing journalists to think of notions such as the ‘Red
Terror’ as figments of the Nazi imagination.41 The Roosevelt administration
enlisted director Frank Capra to produce propagandistic films that portrayed
the Soviet Union solely in a favourable light. The 1943 film Mission to Moscow,
made in a faux-documentary style, went so far as to proclaim that prominent
Soviet communists executed during Stalin’s Great Purges were in fact
German and Japanese agents. But while engaging in overt propaganda,
Western governments remained highly sensitive about the workings of
propaganda, especially when it came to atrocities. Americans recalled the
denunciations of the German ‘Huns and Apes’ during World War I which
had had the effect of pulling their country into a campaign that they later
regretted having joined. British censors removed pictures of killed Soviet
civilians from the stock of Moscow Strikes Back, ostensibly on the grounds that
the disturbing images could produce a popular neurosis. British wartime
films regularly showed pictures of dead women and children killed by the
Blitz; Soviet observers suspected that the British operated from a position of
disbelief towards the Soviet documentary record.42 Such disbelief affected
Soviet communists in particular, as a Russian director who represented the
Soviet film industry in Hollywood during the war experienced first-hand.
(‘Here, every word coming from a Soviet person is treated as propaganda,
with the word “propaganda” essentially denoting a disease that robs
Americans of their entire property and leaves them hungry’, he wrote to
his Moscow superiors in 1943.) But US officials extended their scepticism also
to atrocity reports spread by Polish and Jewish activists as early as 1940. They
feared being ‘propaganded into the war’.43
These attitudes were put to the test in April 1943 when the German
government started a campaign to inform the world about the ‘real face of
barbarous Bolshevism’. In a Russian forest near the village of Katyn, the
Germans had discovered the remains of over 4,000 Polish officers, who, they
established, had been murdered by Soviet security forces in 1940. Propaganda
minister Joseph Goebbels embraced the discovery as an ‘excellent

41 Richard Overy, Why the Allies Won (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), p. 297.
42 Kino na voine, pp. 647–8; see also p. 638.
43 Mikhail Kalatozov to I. G. Bolshakov, 1 November 1943: Kino na voine, p. 597; Struk,
Photographing the Holocaust, p. 29

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opportunity . . . to refute most drastically the attempts undertaken in

England and the United States to whitewash Bolshevism’.44 Against
Goebbels’s hopes, Katyn did not split the wartime alliance. It wasn’t necessa-
rily that Western leaders believed the Soviet counter-claims, forged docu-
ments ‘proving’ that the Germans had murdered the Polish officers in 1941.
Churchill, for one, believed the ‘Bolsheviks’ to be ‘capable of the worst
atrocities’, as he confided to the head of the Polish government in exile.45
But if he and Roosevelt chose not to engage the German claims, they did so
for two reasons: one was a deep-seated distrust towards any form of atrocity
propaganda. The other was their knowledge of the barbaric nature of the
Nazi system. Ironically, Soviet wartime propaganda had provided much of
this knowledge in the first place. By 1943, the Western Allies had become
firmly imbued with the moral position of their Soviet ally: the Nazi regime
posed a singular threat to humanity and had to be defeated with the power of
passionate hatred.
If, after Stalingrad, the discovery of mass grave after mass grave in
liberated areas of Russia and Ukraine had dwarfed prior Soviet notions of
Nazi crimes that had formed in 1941 and 1942, the Red Army’s move into
Poland in 1944 disclosed German atrocities in yet another previously unthink-
able register. Upon seeing the Majdanek death camp, director Roman
Karmen wrote that the gas vans that the Germans had operated in Russia
were but an ‘artisanal form of murder’, compared to the brutally efficient
‘conveyer belt method of human annihilation’ practised in Majdanek.
Karmen pointed out a ‘shocking detail’: the Germans had used the bones
and ashes of the victims to fertilise cabbage that they grew on nearby fields.
A defining feature of Majdanek for him was its ‘pan-European significance’:
trainloads of people from Denmark, Norway, Czechoslovakia and France
were ‘brought here, only to be annihilated’. Karmen’s documentary footage
fully expressed his script notes. Successive shots of gas chambers, ovens,
crematoria and warehouses filled with prisoners’ clothes, shoes, glasses, toys
and hair emphasised the cold and unsparing human annihilation practised in

44 Scholars today believe that the Soviets killed a total of 14,500 Polish officers and
policemen at various execution sites, of whom 4,421 were murdered at Katyn.
Anna M. Cienciala, Natalia S. Lebedeva and Wojciech Materski (eds.), Katyn: A Crime
without Punishment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 1, 332.
45 Claudia Weber, ‘Stalin’s Trap: The Katyn Forest Massacre between Propaganda and
Taboo’, in Philip Dwyer and Lyndall Ryan (eds.), Theatres of Violence: Massacre, Mass
Killing and Atrocity throughout History (New York: Berghahn, 2015), pp. 170–85, at 174.
The British Ambassador in Russia offered a different opinion, declaring that the Polish
officers had been murdered by the ‘Huns’, ‘just to make propaganda pictures’. Struk,
Photographing the Holocaust, p. 48.

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Majdanek. The camera dwelled on rows of thick cabbage growing on a field

in the shadow of the camp towers, and it zoomed in on the passports of camp
inmates – French, Italian, Dutch, Greek and Polish – to reveal its Europe-
wide significance. While the film certainly portrayed Europe as a victim of
Nazi violence in order to underscore the Red Army’s stature as Europe’s
liberator (and counter German claims to the contrary), Karmen’s notes also
brimmed with an ethical concern: ‘The entire world, all future generations,
must know about what happened behind the barbed wire of the German
death machine . . . in which Hitler’s henchmen killed more than a million free
people.’46
The response that the Soviet discoveries and appeals met throughout the
world was mixed, however. When correspondent Alexander Werth sent the
BBC a detailed report on the discovery of the Majdanek camp in August 1944,
his editors in London turned it down, thinking it was a Soviet propaganda
stunt.47 In the United States, popular empathy with tales of Soviet suffering
appeared to be fading. When Ukraine in Flames came out in American theatres
in spring 1944, a reviewer described it as ‘yet another documentary film on
the war in the Russia . . . all about dead bodies, burning cities, weeping
women’. ‘Perhaps it is the duty of every American to see with their own
eyes the horrors of the fascist invasion’, another reviewer noted, ‘but it is an
unpleasant duty.’48 These reactions strikingly differed from how Moscow
Strikes Back had been met two years earlier. All the more noteworthy was
a New York Times article of October 1944 that presented as a major news item
the fact that W. Averell Harriman, the American Ambassador to Moscow,
‘supported . . . the many reports that have come out of Russia concerning
widespread German atrocities’. According to the paper, Harriman specifically
singled out the ‘character of the German atrocities on the eastern front’: their
‘utterly unbelievable’ ruthlessness and efficiency.
The atrocities in the east, he explained, were entirely different from those
committed by the Germans in western Europe. While the shooting of
hostages in the west was shocking, he pointed out, these incidents were
relatively less than the killing of large masses of people, especially Jews, in the
east. He mentioned in this connection the reports from Lublin, Poland,
where Soviet and Polish authorities have estimated that as many as

46 Karmen’s script notes (undated, 1943): Tsena kadra, pp. 846–7.

47 It was not, Werth remarks in his memoirs, until the ‘discovery in the West of
Buchenwald, Dachau and Belsen that Western media became convinced that
Majdanek and Auschwitz were also genuine’. Werth, Russia at War, p. 890.
48 New York Sun and Journal American, both 3 April 1944, cited in Tsena kadra, pp. 1031–2.

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1,500,000 persons were killed in a ‘slaughter house’ operated by the Germans

at Majdanek.49

Beyond backing the factual truth of Soviet atrocity reports, Harriman’s

account echoed the moral understanding of German violence that charac-
terised Soviet responses to Nazi crimes in the East.
In Berlin, military intelligence specialists at the Fremde Heere Ost office
(FHO) avidly studied Soviet media publications, filing many articles in folders
entitled ‘Soviet hatred and atrocity propaganda’. The Germans were as
incredulous as the officials at the BBC. An internal October 1944 memoran-
dum reported on Soviet coverage of the ‘so-called “Majdanek annihilation
camp near Lublin”’. ‘Aside from Jews’, the report read, ‘representatives of all
European nations are said to have been liquidated using ostensibly the most
refined methods.’50 The FHO specialists understood the Soviet reporting as
an ‘exaggerated propaganda action’ aimed at countering the earlier German
revelations about Katyn. The other purpose they noted was the incitement of
hatred. Captured Soviet soldiers confirmed to their German interrogators
that ‘the constant atrocity propaganda filling the Soviet press is stirring up
civilians as well as soldiers to a boiling point. All they seek is revenge.’
In February 1945 the FHO specialists faced a new flood of Soviet reporting –
this time on the Auschwitz death camp, which the Red Army had liberated
a few weeks earlier. Replete as they were with detailed information about the
history and anatomy of the camp as relayed by individually named survivors,
the reports appeared to challenge the disbelief of their German readers: the
intelligence officers no longer provided distancing commentaries of their
own, allowing the Soviet documents to speak for themselves. The translated
materials included an editorial from a Soviet army newspaper which stated
that the Germans had burned about 6,000,000 people in Auschwitz (‘Killing,
burning, poisoning – those are the German professions’) and appealed to its
readers: ‘Comrade! You have seen a lot on your glorious advance since
Stalingrad. Everywhere one finds bloody traces of German crimes. You
have seen and experienced a lot, but Auschwitz surpasses this all as the
most cruel testimonial of German atrocities.’51
As they read enemy reports, the FHO officers paid particular attention to
the works of Ehrenburg. Their dossier for 1944/45 contains several full

49 ‘Harriman Confirms German Atrocities’, New York Times, 27 October 1944.

50 National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), College Park, MD, T78/483,
254–71.
51 NARA, T78/483, 82–7.

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translations of his pieces, without commentary. One of them, penned in mid

August 1944, discussed the retrenchment of German troops into East Prussia
ahead of an anticipated Soviet storm.52 Ehrenburg began by quoting an order
by the commander of a tank army instructing subordinate commanders to
enforce a
fundamental break with all hitherto existing rules and habits. Russia’s
expanse gave the German Wehrmacht a freedom that is no longer appro-
priate in Germany . . . Everything necessary could be taken where it was
found . . . Everywhere the German soldier was the master. In German cities
and villages, the situation is the opposite. The people with whom we are
dealing here are our fellow people. To respect and help them is our duty.

Ehrenburg commented:
Shamelessly, the Commander of the 3rd Tank Army, General Reinhardt,
admits that his soldiers wreaked havoc and plundered in Russia like
barbarians . . . The bandit general speaks to his chaps: ‘Remember,
Germany is not Russia!’ Very well! We will firmly remember the German
general’s words. We will repeat them in Königsberg and Berlin. We were
liberators until we reached the German border. Now we are judges.

Ehrenburg reminded his readers of the flurry of orders issued by German

commanders during the occupation of Soviet lands, orders that had been fully
implemented if judged by the sight of razed towns and ravines overflowing
with corpses that the Red Army had encountered on its path of liberation:
After three bitter years, we are advancing on Germany past Ukraine, past
Belorussia, past the ashes of our cities and the blood of our children. Woe is
the land of the murderers! Not only our troops have reached the German
border. Advancing with us are also the shadows of the dead. Who is knock-
ing on the doors of Prussia? The dead and murdered, killed by gas or fire, the
old people from Trostianets, the children from Babi Yar, the martyrs from
Slawute, the dust and ashes from the ovens in which millions of helpless
people were burned53 . . . Where are these shadows moving toward? Toward
Königsberg, toward Berlin. Right behind them follow we, the living.
Nothing will stop us now. We can’t sleep because of our sorrow and
anger. Woe is the land of the wrongdoers. Woe is Germany!

52 NARA, T78/483, 236–9; published as ‘Gore im!’, Krasnaia zvezda, 20 July 1944.
53 Trostianets (mispelled): (Maly) Trostenets, a Nazi extermination camp on the outskirts
of Minsk. Slawute (mispelled): Slavuta, a city in western Ukraine whose sizable Jewish
community the Germans wiped out during World War II. Ehrenburg carefully picked
murder sites from different union republics to emphasise the universality of Soviet
suffering, a consistent Soviet mandate.

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 Witnessing and Fighting Nazi Violence

The FHO officers singled out Ehrenburg as a signal author of atrocity propa-
ganda on the enemy side. Had they read more widely they would have noticed
a veritable outpouring of soldierly declarations of grief, outrage and revenge
steeped in detailed evidence of horrors personally witnessed or experienced,
which filled Soviet army papers in the last phase of the war. Letter writers
included seasoned soldiers who had seen evidence of atrocities pile up on their
westward march: ‘The Hitlerites mocked the Jewish population with particular
cruelty. In Artemovsk they forced virtually all the local Jews together, stripped
them naked and drove them into underground shafts. They sealed the entrances
to leave the people to die slowly and painfully from asphyxiation.’ Some of them
had escaped German captivity and talked about life in Nazi camps:
The fascists taunted the POWs in various ways. They forced the sick, wounded
and exhausted soldiers to sing the song ‘Katyusha’, and shot those who didn’t
sing along. They made Jews jump onto barbed wire. Every day they gathered
the entire camp population in line formation and shot between 50 and 60
people. Then we would be dismissed. They threw morsels of foul horsemeat
into the crowd of hungry POWs and opened fire onto those who tried to grab
a piece. How many humiliations I endured over twenty days! But I know who
abused me. I’ll enter the fascist den and will get even with the abusers.

Others were survivors of German occupation who had recently enlisted into the
Red Army: ‘Dear editors! We, Communist youth from the occupied regions,
have borne on our shoulders all the burdens of German occupation, we have
seen hundreds of fascist crimes. Herewith we are sending you accounts about
German atrocities by Communist youth members from the unit of Senior
Sergeant Voloshchuk and Senior Sergeant Chabanov.’54 What all the letters
bore in common were trappings of Ehrenburg’s documentary style and accusa-
tory stance, with which their authors were undoubtedly familiar. The letters also
confirmed Ehrenburg’s central point: the memory of those who had suffocated
in gas vans, or were tortured, burned or hanged, was alive. It lived on in the
Soviet soldiers who advanced towards Berlin, thirsting for a reckoning.

Bibliographical Essay
While the Eastern Front now commonly figures as the epicentre of violence during World
War II, scholars disagree on the nature and cause of this violence. In Bloodlands: Europe
between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010), Timothy Snyder casts the German

54 Sergei Ushakin and Aleksei Golubev (eds.), XX vek: Pis’ma voiny (Moscow: Novoe
literaturnoe obozrenie, 2016), pp. 580–7.

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 JOCHEN HELLBECK

and the Soviet dictator as rival evils, jointly responsible for the suffering of millions.
Michael Burleigh refers to the USSR and Nazi Germany as ‘brotherly enemies’, each the
common foe of decent humankind (Moral Combat: A History of World War II [London:
Harper, 2010], p. 76). Mark Edele and Michael Geyer’s co-authored piece oscillates
between such neo-totalitarian framings and an insistence on the singularity of Nazi
violence – a reflection perhaps of disagreements among the two contributing authors:
Mark Edele and Michael Geyer, ‘States of Exception: The Nazi–Soviet War as a System of
Violence, 1939–1945’, in Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick (eds.), Beyond Totalitarianism:
Stalinism and Nazism Compared (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 345–95.
On the other edge of the spectrum, Christian Streit, in ‘Keine Kameraden’: Die Wehrmacht
und die sowjetischen Kriegsgefangenen 1941–1945 (Paderborn: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1978),
and the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, in Hannes Heer and Klaus Naumann
(eds.), War of Extermination: The German Military in World War II (New York: Berghahn,
2000), have spearheaded research that explains Germany’s war of annihilation in terms of
colonial imperialism, anti-Semitism and anti-communism. For an excellent synthesis, see
Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy,
September 1939–March 1942 (New York: HarperCollins, 2007). Paul Hanebrink’s A Specter
Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2018) makes a more pointed contribution by showing how in the wake of
World War I anti-communist fears became fused with a longstanding history of anti-
Semitism to spark a new, genocidal war. Klaus-Michael Mallmann makes the important
point that Soviet Jews in the Nazi imagination, as instigators and carriers of a ‘Jewish
Bolshevik terror regime’, differed from Jews elsewhere in Europe. The war against the
Soviet Union, he points out, began with designs for a ‘final solution of Bolshevism’. ‘Only
with the conflation of two central images of the enemy – Jews and communism – and their
mutual imbrication and reinforcement did a genocidal dynamic arise.’ Klaus-Michael
Mallmann, ‘Die Türöffner der “Endlösung”. Zur Genesis des Genozids’, in
Gerhard Paul and Klaus-Michael Mallmann (eds.), Die Gestapo im Zweiten Weltkrieg: Die
‘Heimatfront’ und besetztes Europa (Darmstadt: Primus, 2000), pp. 437–63, at 443–4.
Earlier histories of the Holocaust insisted on a rigid distinction between war and
genocide and imagined the Holocaust apart from other horrors perpetrated during
World War II. By contrast, recent studies are sensitive to the intricate dynamic between
ethnic prejudice and war, and they embed the mass murder of Jews into the history of
the Second World War; see, for instance, Omer Bartov’s locally grounded study, Anatomy
of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (New York: Simon & Schuster,
2018). Several recent studies have called attention to the Soviet victims of the Holocaust;
see Yitzhak Arad, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
2009); and Yad Vashem’s online platform, ‘The Untold Stories: The Murder Sites of the
Jews in the Occupied Territories of the Former USSR’, www.yadvashem.org/untoldstor
ies/homepage.html.
Nazi violence rested in good measure on the elaboration of a distinct Nazi morality –
one sanctifying German culture, and necessitating the eradication of ‘Jewish’ universality;
see Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003),
Eric Michaud, The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004)
and Raphael Gross, Anständig geblieben: Nationalsozialistische Moral (Frankfurt: Fischer
Verlag, 2010). For the Soviet side, historians have barely begun to historicise Stalinist

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wartime morality. Many studies favour liberal projection over historical understanding:
Richard Overy, author of Why the Allies Won (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), writes that
the Anti-Hitler Alliance functioned as a moral coalition ‘only to the extent that the West
was able to suppress or at least lighten their [Soviet] ally’s dark image’ (p. 296). In line with
this view, scholars understand Soviet wartime documentations of Nazi violence
predominantly as politically motivated atrocity propaganda; see Marina I. Sorokina,
‘People and Procedures: Toward a History of the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in the
USSR’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 6.4 (2005), 797–831, and
Karel Berkhoff, Motherland in Danger: Soviet Propaganda during World War II (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). However, when placed into the wider context of
wartime documentation across Nazi-occupied Europe, Soviet documentary efforts no
longer appear unique. Everywhere in Europe, Nazi violence prompted initiatives among
occupied populations to record acts of violence in order to solicit support in the struggle
against Nazism. Everywhere records of German violence were created for the purposes of
mobilising readers into action. See Laura Jockusch, Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust
Documentation in Early Postwar Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) and Sarah
Bennett Farmer, Martyred Village: Commemorating the 1944 Massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
By May 1943, 80 per cent of the Red Army’s personnel had reportedly participated in at
least one of more than a thousand ritualised Meetings of Vengeance, held on sites where
Germans had tortured and killed Soviet civilians (Brandon Schechter, The Stuff of Soldiers:
A History of the Red Army in World War II through Objects (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
2019), p. 112). Mark Edele makes a strong case for the revenge thesis, by pointing out that
all Allied soldiers were more likely to rape German women than those of other
nationalities, and that the Red Army was particularly fierce among the occupiers of
Germany. Mark Edele, ‘Soviet Liberations and Occupations, 1939–1949’, in
Richard J. B. Bosworth and Joseph A. Maiolo (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Second
World War, vol. I I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 487–508, at 492–4.
Even those historians who support the revenge thesis do so mostly on political grounds;
they portray the soldiers as stirred up by a propaganda of hatred and skirt the issue of
personal experience. Oleg Budnitskii tries to discount the revenge thesis by arguing that
some Jewish Soviet officers whose families had been killed by Nazis practised restraint,
while many soldiers who did not suffer personal losses raped German women; see
Oleg Budnitskii, ‘The Intelligentsia Meets the Enemy: Educated Soviet Officers in
Defeated Germany, 1945’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 10.3 (2009),
629–82. And yet his study reads as a sustained demonstration of the workings of a Soviet
morality shaped by the experience of Nazi violence and summed up in the dictum, ‘We’re
not Germans.’

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 16
Violence and the Japanese Empire
takashi yoshida

On 6 April 1868, the Meiji emperor proclaimed the Imperial Oath and
‘restored’ the imperial rule, beginning the Meiji period (1868–1912). At the
time, the emperor was a mere 15 years old, so the royalists from southern
domains, often of humble origin inside the samurai class, overthrew the
Tokugawa government in his name. The Oath was written, not by the
emperor, but by these royalists, and one of their objectives was abolishing
‘harmful’ (rōshū) feudal customs of the previous periods.1 The Tokugawa
government had provided the people with a no-war environment for more
than two centuries. While nearly 3,000 peasant uprisings and other social
upheavals occurred during the Tokugawa period (1600–1867), the govern-
ment experienced neither domestic nor international warfare.2 Nonetheless,
the Tokugawa era was not necessarily less violent than the Meiji era. The
Tokugawa government used various kinds of punishment, including torture,
in order to maintain domestic peace and order.3 After all, it was the Meiji
government that introduced Western-style penal reforms, abolished some
harsh older punishments and built new Western-style prisons and a Supreme
Court. In addition to judicial reforms, the new government accomplished
various economic, political and social reforms in order to demonstrate that
the new empire was as civilised as the Western powers.
To examine whether the Tokugawa or the Meiji government was more
violent, one needs to define ‘violence’. If it is defined as physical violence such
as war, torture and murder, the Meiji government may have been more

1 Peter Duus, Modern Japan (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), p. 86.
2 Between 1590 and 1867, more than 2,800 peasant uprisings were organised, and most of
them occurred during the second half of the Tokugawa period. See Mikiso Hane,
Peasants, Rebels, and Outcastes: The Underside of Modern Japan (New York: Pantheon,
1982), p. 7.
3 Regarding a study of punishment and prisons in Japan from the Tokugawa to the Meiji
periods, see Daniel Botsman, Punishment and Power in the Making of Modern Japan
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).

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 Violence and the Japanese Empire

violent than the Tokugawa, because, similar to other colonial governments

in the West, it committed atrocities and acts of aggression both within and
outside the empire, including the Civil War (1868–9), the Satsuma Rebellion
(1877), the Sino-Japanese War (1894–5) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5).
Nonetheless, if the term includes structural violence, as defined by Johan
Gultung, a sociology professor who founded the Peace Research Institute in
Oslo, the evaluation may be more difficult, because structural violence
includes poverty, hunger, and inequalities based on ethnicity, gender, nation-
ality and religion.4 If one counts these latter forms of violence, one may
conclude that Tokugawa Japan was as violent as its successor.
A comparison among the Meiji (1868–1912), Taishō (1912–25) and Shōwa
(1925–89) periods in Japan yields troubling results. Like Meiji Japan, Taishō
Japan continued to be energetically involved in international military con-
flicts such as World War I from 1914 to 1918 and the Siberian intervention
from 1918 to 1920. As the scale of the military conflicts widened, the degree of
violence abroad also intensified. Nonetheless, many more citizens of the
empire, including ethnic minorities from its colonies, probably enjoyed
liberal domestic politics, including labour, civil rights and feminist move-
ments. Compared with Meiji and Taishō, the early Shōwa period brought the
most severe destruction to Asia and the Pacific from the early 1930s to 1945,
during which millions of people perished. From 1945 to the end of the Shōwa,
however, Japan embraced the so-called Peace Constitution and Japanese have
enjoyed a much less violent period than the wartime and prewar years.
While it is difficult to decide which period of the Japanese empire was
more violent, violence in the empire was without doubt too abundant to list
entirely. Nonetheless, it can be grouped as violence related to imperialism/
militarism, racism and sexism. This chapter details some of the specific
examples in each category in order to demonstrate institutionalised violence
committed by the state from the birth of the empire in 1868 to the end of its
existence in 1945. The term ‘violence’ in this chapter includes not only
physical but also structural violence.

Imperialism/Militarism
The imperial era military conscription system, first announced by the
emperor in 1872 and promulgated a year later, was a piece of institutionalised

4 Johan Galtung, ‘Violence, Peace, Peace Research’, Journal of Peace Research 6.3 (1969),
167–91.

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violence that symbolised Japanese imperialism and militarism. The Meiji

government carefully studied conscription law in Europe and the United
States and modelled their system after the one in Prussia. Proponents of
conscription such as Ōmura Masujirō, a scholar of Dutch studies, had been
familiar with Prussia’s military studies through Dutch publications since the
Tokugawa period. The law mandated that all non-exempted 20-year-old
Japanese citizens serve in the military for three years and enlist in the reserve
forces for four years.5
The size of the conscripted military was small at first. In 1874, 5.3 per cent of
all 20-year-olds (14,461) were called to serve. In 1875 and 1876, the numbers
were 2.4 per cent and 3.2 per cent, respectively. In the early Meiji years, the
government was not able to afford a large military, and it selected a small
number of capable young men from a large pool of candidates. The system at
first provided a series of exemptions from mandatory conscription through
legal means. For example, bureaucrats, medical school students, public
university students, students studying abroad, heads of households, adopted
sons, siblings of a drafted brother, criminals imprisoned a year or more, and
those who paid 270 yen were all exempted from the service.6
By 1889 the empire needed a large military, and these legal exemptions,
except for those pertaining to men with criminal records, disappeared. The
empire drafted more than 10 per cent of the eligible 20-year-olds in 1896,
nearly 20 per cent in 1919, and approximately 60 per cent in 1943. In 1944, the
government revised the law and inducted not only the 20-year-olds, but also
19-year-olds. This enabled the government to draft more than a million men.
In 1945, approximately 90 per cent of the nineteen- to twenty-year-olds who
passed the medical examination served in the military. By the end of World
War II, the imperial army and navy had enlisted more than 7 million
servicemen.7
Those enlisted servicemen included ethnic minorities such as Koreans and
Taiwanese. Taiwan became Japan’s colony in 1895, after the Sino-Japanese
War, and Korea became a part of the Japanese empire in 1905, after the Russo-
Japanese War. By 1943, both the army and the navy adopted Taiwanese
volunteers. While the total number of Taiwanese volunteers in the navy is
unknown, nearly 5,000 Taiwanese served in the army by the end of the war.

5 Katō Yōko, Chōheisei to kindai Nihon, 1868–1945 (Conscription and Modern Japan, 1868–1945)
(Tokyo: Yoshikawa kōbunkan, 1996), pp. 57, 68–9, 75.
6 Ibid., pp. 20, 46–7.
7 Yoshida Yutaka, Nihon no guntai, heishitachi no kingendaishi ( Japan’s Military: The History
of Servicemen in Modern Japan) (Tokyo: Iwanami, 2002), pp. 19, 197–8.

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The government was planning to pass a conscription law that would make
military service mandatory for Taiwanese, but the war ended before it was
executed. As to the Koreans, by 1943 the military enlisted more than 16,000
and military service became mandatory for the Korean minorities in 1944. In
1944, the army drafted 45,000, while the navy inducted 10,000. Both military
institutions drafted the same number of servicemen in the following year.
While the empire made military service compulsory in Korea, it did not
extend suffrage to those minorities in its colonies.8
According to Fujiwara Akira, a veteran who later became a renowned
scholar of modern Japanese history, the imperial military can be summarised
as a violent organisation that stripped individuality from servicemen with
strict discipline and punishment. In the military, absolute obedience was
mandatory, and senior officers constantly used physical abuse and violence
against their juniors. While the military officially prohibited corporal punish-
ment, certain officers believed that physical punishment would cultivate
strong minds and patience among the servicemen, transforming them into
tough and courageous soldiers. Newly recruited soldiers learned that they
were no longer in the civilian world through public humiliation and physical
abuse from their seniors. Slaps on the face, beatings on the buttocks and
blows of fists were all common in both the army and the navy. As violence
was so systemic, many Japanese soldiers were accustomed to it, and did not
hesitate to exercise violence on their own troops when they became senior in
the military.9
Indeed, imperial Japan had a highly disciplined military. In the final years of
the Asia-Pacific War (1941–5), the imperial military demanded that its service-
men fight to the death. Nonetheless, the battles themselves did not inflict the
most critical damages on them. One estimate suggests that starvation and
malnutrition-related disease caused more than half of the deaths of 2.3 million
servicemen. Another study finds that 70 per cent of the dead succumbed to
hunger and related illnesses. In the postwar years, some of the veterans who
survived the war in the Philippines and New Guinea even confessed to
having committed cannibalism during the war. Although the exact figure
of the deaths from starvation is unknown, the loss of air and naval supremacy

8 Katō Yōko, Chōheisei to kindai Nihon, pp. 247–8, 254–5; Oguma Eiji, Nihonjin no kyōkai
(The Boundaries of the Japanese) (Tokyo: Shinyōsha, 1998), p. 455.
9 Fujiwara Akira, Nankin no Nihongun: Nankin daigyakusatsu to sono haikei ( Japanese Army
in Nanjing: The Nanjing Massacre and Its Historical Contexts) (Tokyo: Ōtsuki shoten, 1997),
pp. 76–7; Ichinose Shunya, ‘Kōgun heishi no tanjō’ ‘(The Making of Imperial Soldiers)’, in
Aiko Kurasawa, et al. (eds.), Senjō no Shosō (Understanding Battlefields) (Tokyo: Iwanami
shoten, 2006), p. 14.

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 TAKASHI YOSHIDA

to the Allies in China and in the southern Pacific in the end of the war brought
substantial deaths from starvation among Japanese servicemen.10
Similarly, drowning was another significant cause of deaths among
Japanese servicemen. One study concludes that approximately 182,200 navy
servicemen and 176,000 army servicemen died by drowning during the Asia-
Pacific War. In short, 15.6 per cent of the 2.3 million Japanese servicemen who
died (including ethnic minorities) were killed in the sea. The Allied strikes
were the direct causes of these deaths, but the military exacerbated the
problem by packing too many servicemen into each ship. In addition, due
to the shortage, the military used not military transport boats but commercial
cargo ships that were more vulnerable to the Allied assaults. Servicemen’s
deaths from drowning during the Asia-Pacific War were four times those of
the Russo-Japanese War.11
While the number is much less striking compared with the deaths by
starvation or drowning, deaths from suicide attack were also significant
among Japanese servicemen. Both the imperial army and the navy decided
to utilise suicide tactics to alter the tide of war in early 1944. It was in February
that the navy first commissioned a prototype of a human torpedo. The Army
Chief of Staff urged the Commander in charge of the defence of the
Philippines to employ suicide tactics in order to destroy enemy morale.
The first kamikaze suicide attack occurred at the Battle of Leyte Gulf in
October 1944. More than 4,000 servicemen (including those from Taiwan
and Korea) died in suicide attacks by aircraft, and 43 percent of the navy’s and
23.5 per cent of the army’s suicide forces were teenagers, the youngest of
whom were 16 years old. In addition, 68 per cent of the navy’s and 55 per cent
of the army’s servicemen deployed for suicide missions were rank-and-file
military men. As to the officers, the military preferred reserve officers for
these missions, meaning that those who graduated from ordinary colleges
and universities, instead of the Imperial Army Academy or the Navy
Academy, were more likely to be selected for those missions.12

10 Fujiwara Akira, Tennō no guntai to Nit-Chū sensō (The Emperor’s Military and the Japan-
China War) (Tokyo: Ōtsuki shoten, 2006), p. 11; Hata Ikuhiko, Shōwashi no nazo o ou,
vol. I I (In Search of Puzzles in the History of the Shōwa Period) (Tokyo: Bungeishunjū,
1993), p. 183; Yuki Tanaka, Hidden Horrors: Japanese War Crimes in World War II
(Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996), p. 112; Yoshida Yutaka, ‘Ajia taiheiyō sensō no
senjō to heishi’ ‘(Battlefields and Soldiers in the Asia-Pacific War)’, in Kurasawa et al.
(eds.), Senjō no shosō, p. 73.
11 Ibid., pp. 76–7.
12 Yoshida Yutaka and Mori Shigeki, Ajia taiheiyō sensō (The Asia-Pacific War) (Tokyo:
Yoshikawa kōbunkan, 2007), pp. 258–9, 261–3.

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Various kinds of weapons were used for suicide missions besides aircraft,
casualties of which were not included in the figure in the previous paragraph.
Kaiten, a weapon developed by the navy, was a small submarine with
explosives on its front. Approximately eighty Kaiten crews lost their lives
during missions. The Navy also built Ōka, a rocket propelled glider with
explosives, and Shinyō, a motorboat with explosives. The Navy used the
battleship Yamato, with approximately 3,300 men on board, for a suicide
mission at the Battle of Okinawa in April 1945. The mission failed, and the
battleship sank to the bottom of the ocean, killing all but 276 of the crew.
Similarly, the army built Marure, a suicide motorboat, and often utilised
‘human bullets’, soldiers with explosives, who were ordered to destroy
tanks and other armed vehicles.13
During the last years of the empire’s existence, civilians too suffered
extreme violence in many different forms. The empire demanded that its
people on the Japanese islands and colonies sacrifice their lives for the empire,
if necessary. Okinawa, for example, became a battlefield in March 1945, and
approximately a half of the 244,000 Japanese losses were civilians.14 This is
partly because the government mobilised the residents in Okinawa to defend
not only the Okinawan islands, but also the Japanese mainland. Historians
such as Hayashi Hirofumi consider the Battle of Okinawa itself a suicide
mission meant to protect the emperor system and the Japanese mainland.15
All able-bodied people, including children, ethnic minorities and women,
were mobilised to prepare for the battle, building air bases, barracks and
bunkers and transporting necessary equipment and materials. The army
drafted some 22,000 men aged 17 to 45 to reinforce its undermanned units
and mobilised male and female students and youth aged 14 and above into the
youth, the medical and the transportation units. One third of the Japanese
defence forces consisted of the Okinawan draftees and students. While many
of the Okinawans perished in the American assaults, many others died from
starvation, took their own lives, or died at the hands of the Japanese
military.16

13 Ibid., pp. 260–3; Yamato mūjiamu (Yamato Museum), Kure-shi kaiji rekishi kagakukan
Yamato mūjiamu jōsetsutenji zuroku (Illustrated Records of the Permanent Exhibits of the Kure-
City Maritime Museum of Science and History: Yamato Museum) (Kure: Yamato Museum,
2005), p. 38.
14 Okinawa Prefectural Government, An Oral History of the Battle of Okinawa (Okinawa:
Okinawa Prefectural Government, 1985), p. 1.
15 Hayashi Hirofumi, ‘“Shūdan jiketsu” mondai o kangaeru shiten’ (‘Examining the “Mass
Suicide” Dispute’), Kikan sensō sekinin kenkyū (Quarterly Journal of the Study of Japan’s
War Responsibility) 60 (2008), 3.
16 Okinawa Prefectural Government, Oral History, pp. 1, 4.

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 TAKASHI YOSHIDA

As more than 2 million shells fell on the islands, the civilians and the
defending forces retreated to southern Okinawa, taking shelter in natural
underground caves. Two-thirds of the civilian deaths occurred after the
retreat. The Army often drove out civilians who had been hiding in the
caves without much food, and these wanderers consequently lost their lives
in the bombardments. When the caves were shared between the army and
the civilians, the army often prohibited the civilians from surrendering to the
American troops and forced them to die with the servicemen. Compulsory
mass suicides by the ‘volunteers’ frequently occurred during the battle, and
the army provided grenades for them to kill themselves. In addition, the army
often executed suspected Okinawan spies, including those who refused to
give up their food or shelter, who attempted to surrender, who received food
from the American troops, or who provided ‘suspicious’ responses to the
army interrogators.17
Wartime education, aimed at creating imperial subjects (kōminka), justified
the government’s war efforts and provoked patriotism among the youth,
such that many young Okinawans, like their counterparts in other regions,
saw sacrificing themselves for the empire as ethical and just.18 In addition, the
wartime mass media demonised the American and British people.19 It is not
surprising that the young Japanese patriots chose to fight to the death rather
than surrender as they often believed that the American enemy would
torture Japanese men and boys to death and would rape and kill Japanese
women and girls.20 The trend of the times hardly allowed the youth to
question patriotism imposed by the empire. The empire utilised various
tools, including its judicial system, to control dissent. Treason was a serious
crime, and unpatriotic Japanese had no place in the empire.21
This mobilisation of youth was not limited to Okinawa. It happened across
the empire, and children were forced to work at unsafe places such as the
poison gas factory on Ōkuno Island (built in 1929) in Hiroshima. Yoshimi

17 Hayashi Hirofumi, ‘“Shūdan jiketsu”’, p. 3.

18 See, for example, the excerpt about the Pacific War in the 1943 history textbook in
Takashi Yoshida, The Making of the ‘Rape of Nanking’: History and Memory in Japan,
China, and the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 3–4.
19 John Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York:
Pantheon, 1986), pp. 234–61.
20 Hayashi Hirofumi, ‘“Shūdan jiketsu”’, p. 4.
21 In 1937, for example, the Japanese government arrested some 529 alleged leftists, among
whom 210 were indicted for violations of the Peace Preservation Law of 1925, which
made illegal any attempt to challenge the empire’s national polity and allowed the state
to employ capital punishment for those who violated the law. See Yoshida, Making of
the ‘Rape of Nanking’, p. 21.

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Yoshiaki, professor of history at Chūō University, estimated that the imperial

military produced a total of 73.8 million tons of toxic gas between 1931 and
1945, of which 66.2 million tons were made on the island.22 Due to its strategic
importance, the island was erased from the map during the war. At its peak,
approximately 5,000 workers produced lethal gas at the factory.23 From
June 1943 to August 1945, more than 1,000 students aged between 13 and 16
were mobilised to work on the islands. Their duties included moulding
ignition powder for the smoke canisters and rolling drums filled with lethal
materials from the storehouse to the pier. These drums were often covered in
remnants of the toxic liquids, but the children had little protection. Nearly
64 per cent of the former student and adult workers on the island experienced
respiratory and digestive problems in the postwar period.24
In order to cope with the labour shortages and to propel war industries, the
empire also mobilised residents of Japan’s colonies and occupied territories.
For example, one estimate concludes that, between 1939 and 1945, the
Japanese government mobilised more than 6 million Koreans to propel
Japan’s war machine. Approximately 1.5 million of these Koreans were
transported to Japan in order to work at mines, military factories, construc-
tion sites, and other places that required hard manual labour.25 As for Chinese
mobilised labourers, nearly 40,000 people in northern China were trans-
ported to Japan and forced to work in the 135 mines and other construction
sites across Japan.26 Their working conditions were generally harsh, and
approximately 18 per cent of them died. In addition, the Japanese government
transported thousands of Chinese ‘special labourers’ (tokushu kōjin), including
suspected communist sympathisers and prisoners of war, to the mines in
Manchuria as the region needed more than 1.1 million workers.27

22 Yoshimi Yoshiaki, ‘Nihongun wa donokurai dokugasu o seisan shitaka’ (‘On the Gross
Production of Chemical Agents by the Japanese Military’), Kikan sensō sekinin kenkyū 5
(autumn 1994), 4, 7.
23 Okada Reiko, Ōkunoshima dōin gakuto no katari, trans. Jean Inglis as Okuno Island: The
Story of the Student Brigade (Hiroshima: Okada Reiko, 1989), p. 2.
24 Chūgoku shinbunsha, Dokugasu no shima: Ōkunoshima akumu no kizuato (Poison Gas
Island: Ōkuno Island: Scars of Nightmare) (Hiroshima: Chūgoku shinbun, 1996), pp. 2, 22,
24, 27.
25 Pak Kyong-sik, Zai-Nichi Chōsenjin, kyōseirenkō, minzoku mondai (Korean Residents in
Japan, Forced Mobilisation, and Ethnic Relations) (Tokyo: San’ichi shobō, 1992), p. 194.
26 Tanaka Hiroshi, Utsumi Aiko and Ishitobi Jin, Shiryo Chūgokujin kyōsei renkō (Historical
Documents: The Forced Mobilisation of the Chinese People) (Tokyo: Akashi shoten, 1987),
p. 727.
27 Sugihara Tōru, Chūgokujin kyōsei renkō (The Forced Mobilisation of the Chinese People)
(Tokyo: Iwanami, 2002), pp. 31, 42–4.

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 TAKASHI YOSHIDA

Exploiting prisoners of war for work was not uncommon in the Japanese
empire. In 1942, the army announced that it had captured more than 260,000
Allied servicemen after they surrendered to the empire. Between
November 1942 and October 1943, the empire mobilised approximately
60,000 Allied prisoners of war in addition to tens of thousands of Asian
labourers (rōmusha) in order to build the 260-mile Burma–Thailand
Railway.28 As the army did not allow its servicemen to be captured, its policy
towards the Allied prisoners was hostile and often cruel. The Army forced
these labourers to work more than ten hours a day in order to build the
railway as fast as possible. It was no surprise that approximately 43,000 are
estimated to have died during the construction because of exhaustion, mal-
nutrition, disease and physical abuse.29
Many of the guards of the Allied prisoners were ethnic minorities. In 1942,
the Army sent more than 3,000 Koreans and Taiwanese to the Allied prisoner
of war camps in South-East Asia. The army tried to use these Allied prison
camps as facilities to convince the imperial subjects that the empire was
superior to the American and European powers. This is one example of how
prevalent racist thoughts were during the war. A statement on
5 November 1941, by Hara Yoshimichi, president of the Privy Council,
revealed his concern that Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor would unite ‘the
entire Aryan race’ against Japan.30 He, like many others of the period,
understood international affairs from a perspective of race relations.

Racism
While Japanese servicemen suffered violence from the empire, they also
perpetrated violence. Killing enemy servicemen in combat was considered
honourable. Although killing civilians was not considered admirable even
during the war, the distinction between combatants and non-combatants
became blurred as the war with China and the Allies progressed. After the

28 Utsumi Aiko, Gavan McCormack and Hank Nelson, Taimen tetsudō to Nihon no sensō
sekinin: horyo to rōmusha to Chōsenjin (The Burma–Thailand Railway and Japan’s War
Responsibility: Prisoners of War, Labourers, and Koreans) (Tokyo: Akashi shoten, 1994), pp.
13–14.
29 Ibid., pp. 120–4, 145. John Dower points out that 27 per cent of American and British
prisoners of wars in the Pacific theatre died during their imprisonment. See
John Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York:
Pantheon, 1986), p. 48.
30 Utsumi et al., Taimen tetsudō to Nihon no sensō sekinin, pp. 123–6, 146; Akira Iriye, Pearl
Harbor and the Coming of the Pacific War: A Brief History with Documents and Essays
(New York: Bedford/St Martins, 1999), p. 37.

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 Violence and the Japanese Empire

war with China broke out near Beijing, the Japanese mass media often
stressed the brutality of the Chinese forces and their killings of Japanese
civilians. Many ordinary Japanese welcomed attacks on Chinese forces, as
seen in news reports about the ‘100-man killing contest’ between two second
lieutenants who were trying to outdo each other in killing one hundred
Chinese enemies while they advanced to Nanjing. When the Japanese forces
captured Nanjing, the newspapers widely reported the annihilation of the
enemy.31 The nation celebrated the fall of Nanjing, instead of mourning the
loss of the lives of the enemy nationals.
The Judgment of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East
(1946–8) estimated that more than 200,000 Chinese people were killed in
and around Nanjing during the first six weeks of the Japanese occupation.
The Tribunal, describing the atrocities in Nanjing, said:
The Japanese soldiers swarmed over the city and committed various atro-
cities. According to one of the eyewitnesses they were let loose like
a barbarian horde to desecrate the city. It was said by eyewitnesses that the
city appeared to have fallen into the hands of the Japanese as captured prey,
that it had not merely been taken in organized warfare, and that the
members of the victorious Japanese Army had set upon the prize to commit
unlimited violence. Individual soldiers and small groups of two or three
roamed over the city murdering, raping, looting, and burning. There was no
discipline whatever. Many soldiers were drunk. Soldiers went through the
streets indiscriminately killing Chinese men, women, and children without
apparent provocation or excuse until in places the streets and alleys were
littered with the bodies of their victims. According to another witness,
Chinese were hunted like rabbits, everyone seen to move was shot. At
least 12,000 non-combatant Chinese men, women and children met their
deaths in these indiscriminate killings.32
Tall and thick walls with blockaded exits protected the city of Nanjing, but
many of the Chinese defending forces were trapped inside these same walls.
The troops threw away their uniforms and attempted to hide in the refugee
zone. The thorough mopping up operations by the Japanese military con-
tributed to the number of victims.
In terms of scale and duration, the Japanese Army’s strategy known as the
Three-All campaigns (kill all, burn all and loot all) was greater than the
atrocities in Nanjing. The campaigns were intended to annihilate Chinese

31 Yoshida, Making of the ‘Rape of Nanking’, pp. 16, 82.

32 John Pritchard, The Tokyo War Crimes Trial, vol. XX (New York: Garland, 1981),
49,604–8.

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 TAKASHI YOSHIDA

communists and their sympathisers in northern China for three years from
1941. The Japanese North China Area Army (Kita-Shina hōmen gun) occupied
more than 10 million hectares in northern China (including Hebei, Shandong,
Shanxi, Chahar, Suiyuan and part of Henan) with a population of approxi-
mately 100 million people. In order to carry out the campaigns, the army
mobilised at least 2 million labourers to dig 6 by 35 m trenches running
200 km from north to south or build walls if it was impossible to dig trenches.
These trenches and walls were used to surround and isolate the enemy bases.
After completely destroying the villages, the army sprayed mustard gas so
that the enemy would not able to reuse them as bases. While the exact
number of the deaths from the campaigns is unknown, one Chinese estimate
concludes that nearly 2.5 million people were killed during these campaigns.33
As many of the Japanese perpetrators explained in the postwar period, they
did not feel remorse when they killed Chinese enemies. Whether they were
civilians or combatants, whether old or young, whether male or female,
whether adults or children, these differentiations were not important to
many of these perpetrators as they felt utter contempt for the Chinese people.
For example, Tominaga Shōzō, a squadron leader who beheaded Chinese
prisoners, ordered his squadron to machine gun a group of prisoners, and
participated in burning a village of one hundred houses during the war,
needed a lengthy and complex process to overcome his wartime hatred
and disdain for the Chinese people. Yuasa Ken, an army surgeon who
conducted human vivisections during the war, believed that ‘the Koreans
were despicable and that the Chinese were an inferior race’. These views
helped him justify his atrocities during the war.34
After the war both Tominaga and Yuasa were captured and imprisoned by
the Chinese communists. Tominaga spent six years in prison, while Yuasa
spent five years. Contrary to their expectations, they received no retribution.
The Chinese communists neither tortured nor executed them. Instead, they
were treated humanely and received ample time to re-examine their wartime
thoughts and deeds. They discussed their atrocities with their fellow inmates,
confronted the Chinese survivors of the Japanese atrocities, and began to feel
inexpiable guilt and responsibility for their war crimes. They recognised their
victims not as faceless enemies but as other human beings and took

33 Fujiwara, Tennō no guntai to Nit-Chū sensō, pp. 109–16, 124.

34 Tominaga Shōzō, Aru B/C kyū senpan no sengoshi (The Postwar History of a Class-B and
Class-C War Criminal) (Tokyo: Suiyōsha, 1977), pp. 44, 53–4; Yuasa Ken, Kesenai kioku:
Nihongun no seitai kaibō no kiroku (Indelible Memory: A Record of Human Vivisections by the
Japanese Army) (Tokyo: Nit-Chū shuppan, 1996), p. 230.

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 Violence and the Japanese Empire

responsibility for their crimes instead of accusing the state, their superiors in
the Army, or their education. Tominaga and Yuasa were not alone, and they
established the Liaison Society for Returnees from China (Chūgoku kikansha
renrakukai) after their repatriations. When they returned to Japan, they
began to educate the public about the atrocities that they had committed
through publications and oral presentations. They believed that their honest
confessions would convey to young Japanese the reality of war, and their
mission of atonement continued until their deaths.35
Racist ideology probably also inspired Japan’s chemical and biological
warfare. During the eight years of the war with China, according to the
Chinese government’s study, the Japanese military used both lethal and non-
lethal chemical weapons approximately 2,000 times in more than nineteen
provinces. These weapons killed and wounded more than 90,000 Chinese
combatants and civilians. The Chinese government estimates that the
Japanese military abandoned nearly 2 million gas canisters and shells in
China. In addition to chemical warfare, the army also conducted biological
warfare in China. The Army units such as Unit 731 and Unit 100 conducted
vivisections, germ warfare and lethal experiments on people in China.
Although it is unknown how many people were killed by Japan’s biological
warfare, Unit 731 alone took 3,000 human lives through its medical
experiments.36
Opium and other drugs were systematically used to control the people in
China, Korea, Mongolia and Singapore. In Mongolia, the Japanese govern-
ment controlled the puppet regime and sold 714 tons of opium between 1939
and 1942, 55 per cent of which was exported to Shanghai and 24 per cent to
northern China. The amount of opium was able to provide annual supplies
for 500,000–800,000 people. In Manchuria, between 1933 and 1945 at least 3,410
tons were produced, while in Korea 293 tons were harvested between 1935
and 1944. In addition, the Japanese government imported Iranian opium to
central China and Manchuria. After Imperial Japan conquered South-East
Asia, the Japanese government initiated opium operations in Singapore.

35 Takashi Yoshida, From Cultures of War to Cultures of Peace: War and Peace Museums in
Japan, China, and South Korea (Portland, ME: Merwin Asia, 2014), pp. 35–40.
36 Awaya Kentarō, Murata Tadayoshi and Fujiwara Akira, Nihongun no kagakusen
(Chemical Warfare by the Japanese Military) (Tokyo: Ōtsuki shoten, 1996), p. vii;
Awaya Kentarō, Miketsu no sensō sekinin (Unresolved War Responsibility) (Tokyo:
Kashiwa shobō, 1994), p. 159; Yoshimi Yoshiaki and Ikō Shunya, ‘Nihongun no saikin-
sen’ (‘Biological Warfare of the Japanese Military’), Kikan sensō sekinin kenkyū 2 (Winter
1993), 27; Sheldon Harris, Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932–45, and the
American Cover-up (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 116.

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 TAKASHI YOSHIDA

According to Eguchi Keiichi, Professor of Modern Japanese History, Japan’s

opium operations in China had two goals: to profit from selling the drugs and
to poison China into submission, because addiction would deprive the
Chinese people of their will to fight. While the Japanese government func-
tioned as the drug cartel, dealers were often colonial residents from China,
Korea and Taiwan, many of whom struggled to survive at the bottom of the
empire’s social hierarchy.37
Although racism may not be the sole reason for such violence as the
Nanjing Massacre, Three-All campaigns, chemical and biological warfare,
and opium production and smuggling, the belief that the Japanese people
were racially superior to colonial residents amplified violence by the state and
the individuals in the empire. Similarly, the state and its residents frequently
committed violence against women.

Sexism
From the beginning of the Meiji Period to Japan’s defeat, according to
Okuda Akiko, a scholar of women’s history, men dominated all areas in
politics, the economy and society, and led the nation to the Sino-Japanese
War, the Russo-Japanese War, the First World War and the Asia-Pacific
War. In the eyes of Okuda, while women continued to challenge men’s
dominance, it was a period of restraint and subordination. While modern
ideas were introduced to society in the Meiji period, the same feudal
patriarchy continued to exist. The newly introduced civil code in 1898
legally empowered men, and legally incapacitated women and children.
The law strictly limited women to the household, and wives had no right
to inherit their husband’s wealth. The law allowed men to sue their
wives (and mistresses) for adultery, but wives (and mistresses) had no
such right.38
During the empire’s reign, the government tolerated prostitution and
human trafficking.39 From the early Meiji period, male traffickers purchased
women, including girls as young as 13, from the heads of households and sold

37 Eguchi Keiichi, Nit-Chū Ahen sensō (Japan’s Opium War) (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1988),
pp. 203–8; Timothy Brook and Bob Wakabayashi, ‘Introduction: Opium’s History in
China’, in T. Brook and B. Wakabayashi (eds.), Opium Regimes: China, Britain, and
Japan, 1839–1952 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), pp. 15–19.
38 Okuda Akiko, ‘Jo’ (‘Introduction’), in Okuda Akiko et al. (eds.), Onna to otoko no jikū
(The Time and Space of Gender: Redefining Japanese Women’s History), vol. V (Tokyo:
Fujiwara shoten, 1995), pp. 16, 17–21, 23.
39 Fujiwara, Tennō no guntai to Nit-Chū sensō, p. 6.

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them to the brothels in Japan, Asia, Europe and Americas for the purpose of
sexual slavery.40 The Meiji government licensed and taxed brothels, and the
recruited women were controlled through debt bondage. The prostitution
law was in effect in the Japanese colonies, but different standards applied to
different regions: female prostitution with a minimum age of 18 was legal in
Japanese homelands; the minimum age was 17 in Korea and 16 in Taiwan.
While human rights activists attempted to criminalise prostitution, their
efforts did not succeed. The empire supported the narrative that the prostitu-
tion law would benefit society and was essential for public hygiene and for
the military.41 Many of these women attempted to escape, died because of
sexual diseases or committed suicide, but the government completely
ignored their wishes.42
As the government embraced the idea that setting up brothels would serve
the greater public good, it was inevitable that the military founded and
sponsored the so-called comfort stations in Asia and the Pacific, including
China, Hong Kong, French Indochina, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore,
British Borneo, the Dutch East Indies, Burma, Thailand, New Guinea, the
Japanese Okinawan archipelago, the Bonin Islands, Hokkaidō, the Kurile
Islands and Sakhalin. Yoshimi Yoshiaki, a professor of history who specialises
in the study of the ‘military’s comfort women’, concludes that the comfort
stations existed along with the military stations where the Japanese troops
were dispatched and that between 50,000 and 200,000 women were forced
into sexual servitude during the Asia-Pacific War.43 The military believed that
these ‘comfort stations’ would prevent its servicemen from raping local
women or contracting sexual diseases, maintain morale by providing sexual
‘comfort’ to the troops, and protect secret information by limiting its service-
men’s contacts with outside people. Contrary to the military’s expectation,
the establishment of these stations failed to prevent assaults on local women
by the military and the spread of sexual diseases among the servicemen.
Nonetheless, the number of these stations continued to increase and spread
across Asia.44

40 Morisaki Kazue, ‘Sekushuaritı̄ no rekishi’ (‘The History of Sexuality’), in Okuda Akiko

et al. (ed.), Onna to otoko no jikū, vol. V, pp. 155–8.
41 Ibid., pp. 155–8, 165, 171.
42 For example, in Fukuoka (known as the ‘prostitution kingdom’), between January and
July 1927, among the some 2,000 women forced into prostitution, 16 women died and
171 attempted to escape. See ibid., pp. 155–8, 165, 171, 174.
43 Yoshiaki Yoshimi, Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery in the Japanese Military during World
War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 91, 93.
44 Ibid., pp. 72, 74–5, 91, 93.

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 TAKASHI YOSHIDA

The victims of such sexual slavery included women of various nationalities

and ethnicities, including Australians, Burmese, Chinese, Dutch, Filipinas,
Koreans, Indonesians, Japanese, Singaporeans, Taiwanese and Vietnamese.
Procurement of these women varied. Some of them were deceived or lured
with the promise of a well-paid job, some were abducted, and others
volunteered without knowing the realities of the services that they had to
provide. In the case of Pak Yong-sim, born in 1921 in South Pyongan, when
she was 17 a Japanese policeman promised her a well-paid job, but she was
taken to a ‘comfort station’ in Nanjing and was coerced into providing sex to
the Japanese soldiers. Three years later, she was transferred to Burma and
then sent to the war front. The Japanese troops were annihilated except a few
soldiers, but she and two other women escaped the battlefield and were
rescued by the Chinese troops. She was pregnant and experienced heavy
bleeding. A Chinese doctor gave her a Caesarean section, but discovered that
her child was dead. She lost not only her child, but also her uterus. In the
1950s, she was married, and adopted a child. For nearly fifty years she kept her
wartime experience secret from her son, daughter-in-law and grandchildren.
In 1993, inspired by other women who had similar experiences, she decided to
share her haunting experience with the public. Understandably, she could not
forgive the empire or forget what it had done to her.45
After Japan’s defeat, the empire’s attitude towards women remained
unchanged until the promulgation of the new Constitution in 1947, which
guaranteed women’s civil rights. During the Allied Occupation, the Japanese
government established the Recreation and Amusement Association (RAA)
and opened the same kind of ‘comfort stations’ for the Allied troops. The
government believed that these stations would save women and girls from
being raped by the Allied troops, and disregarded the fact that the RAA
employees had to sacrifice their bodies for the state. The Association origin-
ally planned to mobilise 5,000 women. The government intended to enlist
primarily geisha, licensed and unlicensed prostitutes, waitresses, barmaids
and habitual offenders under the prostitution law.46 In reality, however, non-
professional women, including high school students who lost their families

45 Ibid., p. 94; Yuki Tanaka, Japan’s Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery and Prostitution during
World War II and the US Occupation (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 44–50;
Nishino Rumiko, Senjō no ‘ianfu’: Ramō zenmetsusen o ikinobita Paku Yonshimu no kiseki
(‘Comfort Women’ in the Battlefield: The Life of Pak Yong-sim, Who Survived the Annihilating
Battle of Lameng) (Tokyo: Akashi shoten, 2003), pp. 18–80, 201–21.
46 Yoshiaki Yoshimi, Comfort Women, pp. 180–1.

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due to the bombings, were recruited. The Association put up a large poster in
front of its office in Tokyo to recruit the women:
Announcement to New Japanese Women! We require the utmost co-
operation of new Japanese women who participate in a great project to
comfort the occupation forces, which is part of the national emergency
establishment of the postwar management. Female workers, between 18
and 25 years old, are wanted. Accommodation, clothes and meals, all free.47

To lure as many patriotic women as possible, the advertisement stressed that

the job was urgent and important to the nation.
RAA succeeded in enlisting 1,360 women. An estimate suggests that those
women had to provide sex to between fifteen and sixty Allied servicemen
a day. Whether these stations did prevent the Allied servicemen from raping
women is unknown, but Allied soldiers frequently perpetrated violence
against women even after the establishment of these stations. For example,
seven drunken former Australian POWs confined three women to a room
and gang raped them, apparently for retaliation. Some members of the
American military police took advantage of their rank and raped Japanese
women. In addition, contrary to expectation, sexual diseases among the
Allied servicemen increased. Soon after the Occupation, venereal diseases
became the most urgent health issue for the Allied troops. Nearly half of the
US Navy and Marine troops in Yokosuka were suffering from such diseases in
1946. By then, the Occupation forces had prohibited their servicemen from
visiting public or private brothels, and RAA closed its facilities.48
The RAA facilities were short-lived. Nonetheless, the Japanese govern-
ment declared that women had the right to become prostitutes and contin-
ued to disregard the women who were exploited by the Allied servicemen
allegedly to protect a greater number of girls and women from sexual
violence. Prostitution play, in which a boy imitated an Allied serviceman
while a girl pretended to be a prostitute, became a popular activity among the
children in occupied Japan. ‘You like to meet my sister’ became as popular as
‘give me chocolate’ to many orphans who collected some money by intro-
ducing their women to the servicemen. These prostitutes included girls as
young as 14 years old.49 Although the empire collapsed, its attitude towards

47 Quoted in Yuki Tanaka, Japan’s Comfort Women, p. 146.

48 Yoshiaki Yoshimi, Comfort Women, p. 181; John Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the
Aftermath of World War II (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), p. 129; Yuki Tanaka, Japan’s
Comfort Women, pp. 127, 149, 155, 162–3.
49 Dower, Embracing Defeat, p. 112.

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 TAKASHI YOSHIDA

less privileged citizens remained no different. Even after the war ended, the
government consistently justified abuses in the name of national emergency.

Conclusion
As discussed above, much of the violence that the Japanese empire inflicted
was associated with imperialism, militarism, racism and sexism. These ideol-
ogies, fuelled by the social and political contexts of the time, led the empire to
become the perpetrator of atrocities and war crimes. Victims of such violence
were not limited to non-Japanese, but included a wide variety of nationalities
and ethnicities as well as both sexes. In many cases, however, this fact is
dismissed as if the empire’s mass violence had been aimed exclusively at its
colonial subjects and foreign nationals. From the birth of the empire in 1868
until the birth of the new Constitution in 1947, imperialism and militarism
were unleashed. They tended to be galvanised by racism and sexism, and
mobilised in the name of national interests.
The same society that waged aggressive wars and brought destruction in
Asia and the Pacific has embraced pacifism since the end of the empire.
Defeat and despair obliterated the cultures of war, and a new Japan outlawed
any aggressive war under Article Nine of the Constitution. Nationalism
certainly survived in the new nation, but society has been able to contain it
successfully. Japan’s case demonstrates that any society can perpetrate mass
violence and that imperialism, militarism, racism and sexism provoke this
violence.

Bibliographical Essay
Studies of violence and the Japanese empire are rich in Japan. Particularly since the early
1980s too many monographs to be listed have tackled this topic, inspired by the dispute
over the textbook description of Japan’s wartime aggression. These studies examine such
topics as the Nanjing Massacre, Japan’s chemical and biological warfare, slave labour of
Chinese and Koreans in Japan, Japanese colonial exploitations in East and South Asia,
mistreatment of Allied prisoners of war, violence against women, and indiscriminate
bombing of cities. Takashi Yoshida’s ‘Historiography of the Asia-Pacific War in Japan’,
Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence, published in June 2008 (www.massviolence.org/
Historiography-of-the-Asia-Pacific-War-in-Japan) summarises the study of Japan’s war
crimes in Japan. For those who are able to read Japanese, Kikan sensô sekinin kenkyû
[Study on Japan’s War Responsibility], currently published twice a year, gives up-to-date
scholarly articles on violence and the Japanese empire. Scholars in Japan continue to
discover new materials that enable us to expand our knowledge on the topic.

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While a few books on violence and the Japanese empire were published in English, such
as Ienaga Saburô’s The Pacific War, 1931–45 (New York: Pantheon, 1978) prior to the 1980s,
studies in English language on this topic has been growing since the mid 1990s.
Sheldon Harris’s Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932–45, and the American
Cover-Up (New York: Routledge, 1994) examines Japan’s biological warfare during the war,
and is primarily based on English-language sources such as the American archival
documents at the National Archives. Brian Victoria analysed the role of the Sôtô school
of Buddhism during the war and its priests’ war responsibility in his Zen at War (New York:
Whetherhill, 1997). Joshua Fogel edited the first scholarly book on the study of the Nanjing
Massacre in history and historiography: The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). Suzanne O’Brien translated Yoshimi
Yoshiaki’s Jûgun ianfu, which was published as Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery in the
Japanese Military during World War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). In
2007, Bob Wakabayashi published The Nanking Atrocity, 1937–38: Complicating the Picture
(New York: Berghahn, 2007), providing scholarship on what happened in Nanjing and
challenging the problematic narrative set forth in Iris Chang’s best-selling The Rape of
Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (New York: Basic Books, 1997).
Despite the fact that the publications on Japan’s war crimes and atrocities have been
growing, far more scholarly books have been published on World War II and memory in
postwar Japan. They include Lisa Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the
Dialectics of Memory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); James Orr, The
Victim as Hero: Ideologies of Peace and National Identity in Postwar Japan (Honolulu:
University of Hawai‘i Press, 2001); T. Fujitani, G. White and L. Yoneyama, Perilous
Memories: The Asia Pacific War(s) (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001);
Takashi Yoshida’s The Making of the ‘Rape of Nanking’: History and Memory in Japan,
China, and the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Carol Gluck,
‘Operations of Memory: “Comfort Women” and the World’, in S. Miyoshi and
R. Mitter (eds.), Ruptured Histories: War, Memory, and the Post-Cold War in Asia
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), pp. 47–77; and Franziska Seraphim’s
War Memory and Social Politics in Japan, 1945–2005 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Asia Center, 2007).
Compared with scholarly accounts, non-scholarly accounts and websites on violence
and the Japanese empire are already abundant and widely available. These non-scholarly
accounts, whether written in Chinese, English, Japanese or Korean, tend to provide simple
dichotomous narratives between good and evil. While the scholarly books listed above
certainly have strengths and weaknesses, many of these books try to go beyond this
nation-state oriented analysis.

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 part iv
*

THE STATE, REVOLUTION

AND SOCIAL CHANGE
 17
Change and Continuity in Collective
Violence in France, 1780–1880
peter mcphee and jeremy teow

When the Bastille fell on 14 July 1789, first its governor and then, shortly after,
the mayor of Paris (prévot de marchands) were seized and gruesomely decapi-
tated by the crowd, before their heads were paraded on pikes around the
capital’s streets. For some historians, from Thomas Carlyle to more recent
‘chroniclers’ like Simon Schama, these scenes of collective violence prefi-
gured an inherently bloody course for the French Revolution. Others, in
riposte, have argued that the outbreak of revolutionary violence ought to be
situated within a longer span of time, drawn back to the various riots before
the Revolution, if not to an even wider economy of violence under the ancien
régime.1
But whereas the origins of popular violence have long sparked a heated
debate, much less has been said about its transition into the years following
the Revolution and into France’s ‘revolutionary century’. For, from 1780 to
1880, a series of popular insurrections either succeeded in overthrowing the
nation’s established regime – in 1789, 1792, 1830, 1848 and 1870 – or failed to
prevent what was resented as an elite retreat from revolutionary change – as
in 1795, 1832, 1851 and 1871. Not until the late 1870s was a durable democratic
polity consolidated in the mass electoral politics of the Third Republic. The
French Revolution of 1789–99 may have been the period most visibly marked
by acts of collective violence, but these acts did not decline across the
nineteenth century. Rather, their forms, expressions and targets shifted
within a transforming political culture.
What, then, was different by 1880 in occurrences of popular violence, in
what ways, and what remained the same? By closely examining several case
studies of collective violence throughout the revolutionary century, this

1 Cf. notably Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1989) and Jean-Clément Martin, Violence et révolution: essai sur la
naissance d’un mythe national (Paris: Seuil, 2006). Unless otherwise stated, all translations
are our own.

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 PETER MCPHEE AND JEREMY TEOW

chapter explores the possibilities for reckoning with these questions of

change and continuity, melding older interpretations with new modes of
analysis.

Political Protest and Collective Violence: Models

of Transition
Developments in insurrectionary violence were gradual and regionally varied
as the mass of France’s population underwent a ‘politicisation’, understand-
ing particular grievances within wider national structures and contexts. As
with the broader issue of violence, historians disagree about when this
particular change occurred, searching for a seemingly illusory moment of
transition. Michel Vovelle has seen the French Revolution as the moment of
unprecedented popular participation in national politics, while Maurice
Agulhon and many others have identified a mass political ‘apprenticeship’
during the Second Republic. For Eugen Weber, this was a process that only
began after 1880 in regions south of the Loire. Sudhir Hazareesingh, in
contrast, has emphasised the importance of the Second Empire, usually
dismissed as an authoritarian hiatus in the democratic, republican narrative.2
Yet, in each revolutionary crisis, forms of collective violence reflected the
changing society of which they were a product. Building on the insights of
Eric Hobsbawm and George Rudé, Charles Tilly in particular saw in the
history of rebellion in nineteenth-century France the paradigmatic example
of the interrelationship of changes in the nature of the state, society and
protest.3
Tilly’s vast quantitative surveys demonstrated two key theses. First, vio-
lent protest was endemic rather than confined to the months of spectacular
revolutionary upheaval (there were more such protests in 1832 than in 1830,
for instance) and was to be understood as an expression of conflict between

2 Michel Vovelle, Les métamorphoses de la fête en Provence de 1750 à 1820 (Paris: Aubier/
Flammarion, 1976); Maurice Agulhon, The Republican Experiment, 1848–1852, trans.
J. Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Sudhir Hazareesingh, From
Subject to Citizen: The Second Empire and the Emergence of Modern French Democracy
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen:
The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976).
On this debate, see Peter McPhee, The Politics of Rural Life: Political Mobilization in the
French Countryside, 1846–1852 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), chapter 5.
3 Eric J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Protest in the
Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1959);
George Rudé, The Crowd in History (New York: Wiley, 1964). For Tilly’s most relevant
works, see the listed entries in our bibliographical essay.

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 Change and Continuity in Collective Violence in France

‘contenders’ for power, including the centralising state. Second, the changing
forms of protest were a reflection of wider changes in economic and political
structures. As mechanisation of manufacturing became more widespread, for
example, so machine-breaking became a common reaction, jostling with
older forms of protest such as collective price-fixing (taxation populaire)
during grain shortages.4
By the 1850s, both subsistence rioting and machine-smashing – which had
also underpinned key elements of popular ideology in the first half of the
century – had effectively disappeared. Tilly has argued that the years of
the Second Republic (1848–51) were the time of critical transition in the
forms in which political power was contested, the changing ‘repertoires’ of
protest. The great wave of subsistence protests in 1846–7 and the explosion of
forest invasions, occupation and destruction of private property, and anti-tax
rebellions in 1848 were to be the last great outbreak – at least on a large scale –
of forms of protest described by Tilly as ‘reactive’ or ‘defensive’ responses to
state centralisation and capitalist economic structures. From 1848 they were
juxtaposed with a remarkable proliferation of demonstrations, mass electoral
rallies, ‘associational’ political activity and coordinated insurrectional activity
epitomised in secret societies and resistance to Louis-Napoléon’s coup d’état
in 1851: collective action he described as ‘proactive’ or ‘national’.5
Fundamental to these changes in the nature and orientation of protest
were transformations in urban and rural society. In Tilly’s words, the decades
before and after 1845:
spanned the country’s first great surge of industrial expansion and urban
growth. They included the knitting together of the nation by railroad and
telegraph. They contained the advent of universal manhood suffrage, the
emergence of political parties, and the formation of trade unions . . . It was
a time of profound political transformations. The nature of collective vio-
lence changed in step with those transformations.6

Tilly’s model, which became more nuanced over time, is compelling and
profoundly influential. One weakness, however, is in his comparatively brief
treatment of the decade of the Revolution of 1789. Rather than being an

4 On food riots, see Nicolas Bourguinat, Les grains du désordre: l’État face aux violences
frumentaires dans la première moitié du XIXe siècle (Paris: Éditions ÉHÉSS, 2002), pp. 154–61
and passim.
5 Michael Hanagan, ‘Charles Tilly and Violent France’, French Historical Studies 33.2 (2010),
283–97.
6 Charles Tilly, ‘The Changing Place of Collective Violence’, in M. Richter (ed.), Essays in
Social and Political History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), pp. 139–64.

349
 PETER MCPHEE AND JEREMY TEOW

intense period of ‘reactive’ violence, as Tilly suggested, the Revolution

actually initiated an extraordinary range of ‘proactive’ conflict. The evidence
is overwhelming in the light of the new state structures, political associations
and revolutionary political culture. To be sure, there were thousands of
episodes of food rioting, forest invasions and land seizures, but these were
mixed with nationwide ‘associational’ activity in political societies, especially
Jacobin clubs, national elections, petition campaigns and even strikes.
Nationally, there were perhaps 6,000 Jacobin clubs and popular societies
created in 1793–4, short-lived though many of them were.7 At times, the
distinction between ‘reactive’ and ‘proactive’ protest seems arbitrary at best:
the most sweeping collective action of the decade – the ‘Grande Peur’ of July–
August 1789 – was both a defensive reaction by rural communities in
preparation against anticipated attacks by vengeful nobles and then
a revolutionary attack on the seigneurial system when those attacks failed
to eventuate.8
Strikes, usually understood as the paradigmatic form of protest in indus-
trial societies, were far more common in the eighteenth century than histor-
ians have assumed. For example, while the Le Chapelier law of June 1791 was
chiefly directed at ‘coalitions’ of Parisian wage-earners, it was also aimed at
the waves of strikes by large bands of harvesters working on the commercial
wheat-farms in the Paris basin. These often violent strikes, or ‘bacchanals’,
occurred at times when harvests were plentiful and labour was in strong
demand, as in the summer of 1791, during which the administrators of Aisne
had to outlaw strikes of up to 700 harvesters on farms around Château-
Thierry. At the height of the ‘Terror’ of 1793–4, the district authorities of
Montpellier complained that ‘the workers involved in agricultural labour
form themselves into groups [se coalisent], threaten, aggress and force the
landowner to pay a day’s labour at a rate far above that fixed by the law’. In
Heudicourt and other communes of the department of Somme, labourers
confronted farmers, some holding placards reading: ‘Unity is strength – to the
harvester of good will – to harvest at that price – republicans have had
enough. All citizens will come at two o’clock for a festival . . . to dance
around the tree of fraternity.’9 For these reasons, it could be argued that the

7 Michael Kennedy, The Jacobin Clubs in the French Revolution, 1793–1795 (New York:
Berghahn, 2000).
8 Georges Lefebvre, The Great Fear of 1789: Rural Panic in Revolutionary France, trans.
J. White (New York: NLB, 1973); Clay Ramsay, The Ideology of the Great Fear: The
Soissonnais in 1789 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).
9 Peter McPhee, Liberty or Death: The French Revolution (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2016), pp. 134–5, 257–8, 293.

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 Change and Continuity in Collective Violence in France

great turning point in the forms of collective protest was 1789, not 1848, or
that the decades 1789–1860 as a whole were the period of transition.10

The Challenge of Cultural Anthropology

A second shortcoming lay in Tilly’s quantitative focus on the causes and types
of violent collective behaviour, which led him away from a sufficiently
qualitative analysis of the cultural practice of violence. Sporadic though
they may have been, the striking instances of deliberate cruelty by rioting
crowds in particular have since attracted closer study. In investigating the
genealogy of mass democratic political culture in France, scholars have, in
recent decades, highlighted the importance of close-knit communities of
place, faith and family, and examined the specificities of violent acts.
Cultural anthropology has especially informed this recent work. Seeking
to nuance interpretations of food protests beyond subsistence motivations,
such analyses have stressed the internal logic of crowd action by pointing to
the symbolic rites of popular violence.11 Violence may have lingered daily in
the streets of eighteenth-century Paris, for example, but this world of fre-
quent ‘disorder’ also held, in Arlette Farge’s words, a ‘great desire for justice
and order’. Urban crowds were governed by a sense of communal solidarity
and mobilised within a local system of ‘customary rights and obligations’.
These moral boundaries were dynamically ‘enforced’ in quotidian acts; they
limited crowd violence through a strong tradition of self-regulation.12
Understanding social tensions as more than simply direct expressions of
material interests therefore reveals much about the communitarian nature of
collective violence, with some of its most startling expressions across the
revolutionary decades directed towards individuals who were known to their
killers. In October 1790, for example, the villagers of Varaize in the depart-
ment of Charente-Inférieure stabbed their mayor Latierce to death in the
streets of Saint-Jean-d’Angély, a nearby town. Latierce was the manager of
the Countess d’Amelot’s local estates, and was caught between his interests

10 See William Sewell, ‘Collective Violence and Collective Loyalties in France: Why the
French Revolution Made a Difference’, Politics & Society 18.4 (1990), 527–52.
11 See the seminal essays by E. P. Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd
in the Eighteenth Century’, Past & Present 50 (1971), 76–136, and Natalie Zemon Davis,
‘The Rites of Violence: Religious Riot in Sixteenth-Century France’, Past & Present 59
(1973), 51–91.
12 Arlette Farge, Fragile Lives: Violence, Power and Solidarity in Eighteenth-Century Paris,
trans. C. Shelton (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), esp. pp. 256–83;
David Garrioch, Neighbourhood and Community in Paris, 1740–1790 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1986), esp. chapter 1.

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 PETER MCPHEE AND JEREMY TEOW

in preserving her seigneurial rights and the insistence of his village that the
feudal regime had been destroyed in 1789. It was later claimed that Latierce
was held upright so that his neighbors could all have the opportunity to join
in this violent act, as if to figuratively expel him from the community – not
unlike the ‘symbolic extrusion beyond death’ that Colin Lucas has argued for
the post-mortem inflictions on corpses during the ‘White Terror’ in 1795.13
If common ties between perpetrators of violence and their victims help to
account for the intensity of some cruel acts, however, personal familiarity
was not always essential. An estranged awareness of prominent individuals,
in fact, in many ways favoured the selective targeting of victims by popular
anger. On 22 July 1789, a week after the fall of the Bastille, the royal officials
Foulon de Doué and Berthier de Sauvigny were lynched and decapitated in
Paris, just a few hours apart from each other. They were later exhibited on
pikes: with hay stuffed in his gaping mouth, Foulon’s floating head was
brandished before Berthier. The brutality of these deaths reflected in part
simmering undercurrents of rumour, conspiracy and fear, all common to
popular revolt – whether in stirring Parisian panic over the ‘vanishing
children’ of the 1750s, sparking the rural disturbances during the Great Fear
of summer 1789, or stimulating fears of a Prussian invasion that underlay the
September Massacres in 1792.14
As rumour’s underlying structure remained, then, its forms altered along
with anxieties over conspiracy. The fervent level of hostility towards Foulon
and Berthier, while underpinned by fears of armed forces outside Paris,
derived particularly from the ‘famine plot persuasion’ of eighteenth-century
France. A recurrent popular reaction to subsistence crises in the ancien régime,
this popular belief in conspiracy extended blame beyond market boundaries
to moral ‘crime’ – where dearth was ‘artificial’, generated by rumour-
sustained ‘plots’ among notables – that were only remediable through price
alterations.15 Foulon was a wealthy former army official who had controver-
sially replaced the popular finance minister Jacques Necker, whose dismissal

13 Peter McPhee, Living the French Revolution, 1789–99 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2006), p. 63; Colin Lucas, ‘Themes in Southern Violence after 9 Thermidor’, in
Gwynne Lewis and Colin Lucas (eds.), Beyond the Terror: Essays in French Regional and
Social History, 1794–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 180.
14 Arlette Farge and Jacques Revel, The Vanishing Children of Paris: Rumour and Politics
before the French Revolution, trans. C. Miéville (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1991); Lefebvre, The Great Fear of 1789; Timothy Tackett, ‘Collective Panics in the
Early French Revolution, 1789–1791: A Comparative Perspective’, French History 17.2
(2003), 149–71.
15 Steven Kaplan, ‘The Famine Plot Persuasion in Eighteenth-Century France’,
Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 72.3 (1982), esp. 62–72.

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 Change and Continuity in Collective Violence in France

only a few days earlier had sparked fierce protests until he was recalled on
19 July.16 As the intendant of Paris, meanwhile, his son-in-law Berthier was
responsible for provisioning. His filial ties with Foulon were only com-
pounded by the devastating harvest of 1788, which raised bread prices in
July 1789 to a peak unseen since 1715.
Moreover, Foulon had been particularly subject to vicious if apocryphal
rumours of ‘boasting . . . of making the people eat [hay]’.17 Similar contemp-
tuous metaphors of ingestion had circulated previously. In 1725, for example,
the Parisian lieutenant general of police, Ravot d’Ombreval, was suspected
not only of hoarding grain, but also of having dismissively remarked, ‘Let
them eat cabbage runts.’ During the ‘Flour War’ of 1775, a farmer in Signy-
Signets likewise incensed other villagers by commenting that ‘the poor could
no longer complain, because the grass was growing and they could eat that’.18
That the motif of hay would dog Foulon from procession to posthumous
torture could then hardly have been surprising – both men, accused of
entanglement with ‘conspiracy of the court against Paris’, made for obvious
victims.19
E. P. Thompson’s work on the ‘moral economy’ of early modern English
crowds and Natalie Zemon Davis’s pioneering argument about the denomi-
national divergences in ritualised violence during the French Wars of
Religion have similarly helped to reshape new, cultural characterisations of
later forms of violence.20 The ‘War of the demoiselles’ makes for a pertinent
example. Between 1829 and 1832 in Ariège, bands of men ‘armed and dis-
guised as women’ sought to re-appropriate local forests in resistance against
the Forest Code of 1827, perceived to have encroached upon the community’s
rights to the shared resources of the woodlands. But if reliance on forest land
for pasturing livestock lay at the heart of the peasants’ discontent, and if their
disturbances reveal strong communal attitudes – both towards their environ-
ment and in their ability to mobilise collectively in retaliation against the
state – these acts also bore the cultural imprint of past rites. Investigating their

16 Jacques Godechot, The Taking of the Bastille: July 14th, 1789, trans. J. Stewart (London:
Faber & Faber, 1970), pp. 119–22, 186–9, 256–8.
17 Nicolas Ruault, Gazette d’un Parisien sous la Révolution: lettres à son frère, 1783–1796, ed.
Anne Vassal (Paris: Perrin, 1976), p. 155 (letter of 22 July 1789).
18 Quoted respectively in Kaplan, ‘Famine Plot Persuasion’, 17–18, and Cynthia Bouton,
The Flour War: Gender, Class, and Community in Late Ancien Régime French Society
(University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 1993), pp. 90–1; see also 203–4.
19 Ruault, Gazette d’un Parisien, p. 157 (letter of 22 July 1789). On conspiracy more
generally, see Peter Campbell, Thomas Kaiser and Marisa Linton (eds.), Conspiracy in
the French Revolution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007).
20 Davis, ‘Rites of Violence’.

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‘symbolic dimension’, Peter Sahlins has suggested, points to these guerilla-

like incidents as constituting a subversive, ‘festive rebellion’. The demoiselles,
rather than killing their enemies, performed instead something of a charivari
writ large; coloured by carnivalesque rites, their female garb arguably evoked
the fertility of the lands they sought to recover. Thus folkloric tradition
mingled with the violence of the men, not only as they pillaged local chateaux
and intimidated the forest guards, but also in their sartorial inversion; in the
way they sacralised the forest and respected its supernatural beliefs; and in the
way local social and sexual hierarchies were preserved through dress and
gesture.21
As during the French Revolution, there were sporadic cases of commu-
nitarian violence towards well-known and hated individuals in later revolu-
tionary crises, when an explosive coincidence of economic misery,
expectation of radical change, government instability and the liberation of
political life generated an escalation of division and conflict. On
12 November 1830, near Narbonne, long-standing friction over access to
wooded hillsides culminated in the collective killing of a noble and his
son.22 Early that day a brigade of gendarmes went to the estate of Gabriel
Latreille at Gléon, on Gabriel’s insistence, to make arrests of locals from
Villesèque, a village 4 kilometres away, who were illegally grazing their
livestock and cutting wood on his estate. There was an angry stand-off
between, on the one side, Gabriel and his son Gonzague, six of their private
forest-guards and the gendarmes, and, on the other, perhaps one hundred
Villeséquois armed with spades, meat-spits and rifles. The question of who
fired first was to be hotly debated, but the wounding of one in the crowd
provoked them into rushing the gendarmes, overwhelming them, and seiz-
ing their ammunition. As Gabriel and Gonzague attempted to flee through
the trees, they were pursued by the villagers and shot dead.
The murders of the Latreilles were the climax of a half-century of open
resentment and conflict between the inhabitants of Villesèque and the
proprietors of the two large estates on the borders of the commune’s land.
The murders make more sense because here the rural people involved knew

21 Peter Sahlins, Forest Rites: The War of the Demoiselles in Nineteenth-Century France
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); several similar, earlier cases have
been noted, most recently in Kieko Matteson, Forests in Revolutionary France:
Conservation, Community, and Conflict, 1669–1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2015).
22 The account that follows draws on Peter McPhee, Revolution and Environment in
Southern France: Peasant, Lords, and Murder in the Corbières, 1780–1830 (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1999), chapter 8.

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 Change and Continuity in Collective Violence in France

their victims, and only too well: the murders were the manifestation of
extreme and longstanding hatreds, at least a half-century in the making.
Here, to follow Tilly, news of the Revolution of 1830 in Paris had shifted
the balance between contenders for power even at the village level, and
permitted Villeséquois to confront the Latreilles openly. Whether the vio-
lence was premeditated or spontaneous was never to be clear.
Forty years later, in August 1870, several hundred peasants from around
the tiny village of Hautefaye, near Nontron in south-western France, system-
atically battered a young nobleman for two hours, then, as he was about to
expire, burned him to death. In his comprehensive microhistory of the
murder, Alain Corbin teased out the reasons why, for the noble, Hautefaye
was the fateful place to be.23 Part of his explanation was a web of historical
factors. In this area north of the Dordogne, popular ideology was distin-
guished by a longstanding hatred of nobles (evident in the Grande Peur of
1789), mistrust of priests (manifest in a wave of rioting after rumours of a plot
to reimpose the tithe in 1868) and resentment of urban republicans (news of
the workers’ insurrection in Paris in June 1848 had caused a panic in the area).
This distinctive ideology, combined with unprecedented prosperity under
the Second Empire, had generated a fervent Bonapartism. The news of the
imperial army’s reverses during the Franco-Prussian War in August 1870
reached the drought-afflicted countryside at the same time as the anxious
villagers from around Hautefaye were attending a fair and celebrating
Napoleon III’s national holiday (15 August). The young noble, Alain de
Monéys, unknown to most of his assailants, was accused of shouting ‘Long
live the Republic!’, dubbed a ‘Prussian’, and became a doomed symbol of
accumulated hatreds and fears. Up to 800 locals participated in or looked on
as the young nobleman was tortured for hours, then incinerated.
The incident at Hautefaye in 1870 shocked and deeply embarrassed the
liberal republicans who came to power a few weeks later. For the murder
occurred eighty years after the French Revolution and the presumed triumph
of a new political culture based on citizenship, equality before the law,
tolerance and popular sovereignty, running against their assumptions that
the rural masses had shared in a linear progress of enlightenment. Corbin in
turn used the incident at Hautefaye not only to probe the meanings of
collective violence, but also to pose the relationship between the rise of
liberal democracy and continuing examples of collective violence.

23 Alain Corbin, The Village of Cannibals: Rage and Murder in France, 1870, trans.
A. Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).

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 PETER MCPHEE AND JEREMY TEOW

Politics, Emotions and the Rites of Violence

It is important to emphasise that these social and cultural approaches do
not rid revolutionary violence of its political agenda. Instead they reveal
the complex ways in which political action could be articulated. Recent
work has especially highlighted the primacy of sovereignty in popular
insurrection, where excercises of revolutionary violence staged transfers
of legitimate violence from its monarchical monopoly to that of the
people. The deaths of Foulon and Berthier, for instance, can no longer
be viewed simply as the outcome of a subsistence riot or even an expres-
sion of communal anger, but assume a political drive central to the
national events of July 1789. Paolo Viola has stressed the need to go
beyond the ‘classical’ view of popular violence vue d’en bas – as in
Georges Lefebvre’s model of ‘defensive reaction and punitive will’ –
which fails to comprehend violence as both ‘sovereign’ and ‘a form of
political representation’. Like Colin Lucas and Regina Janes, Viola has
argued that by appropriating the state’s power over punishment through
the pike, the revolutionary crowd visually encoded its actions with state-
ments of sovereign power. Since these rites of violence mirrored those of
the ancien régime’s execution process (supplice), they were imbued with the
‘virtual representation’ of spectacular punishment – that is, ‘invested with
an extraordinary symbolic power’ by the crowd’s own legitimising
dynamics of spectatorship.24
Revolutionary crowds likewise often established makeshift courts to judge
their victims – even if they were almost always already guilty in the eyes of
their captors, such as those who ‘tried’ Foulon in the hôtel-de-ville in 1789 or
the refractory priests in Paris’s prisons in September 1792. So too did the
perpetrators of collective violence when on trial – from the cook Desnot,
who decapitated the governor of the Bastille on 14 July 1789, to those at
Hautefaye – often refuse to recognise that they had committed a wrong, at
times even framing their crimes as patriotic acts. Rhetorical bluster aside, the
indignant demand of the participants in the September 1792 massacres at
Meaux for compensation for their roles, like others elsewhere before and
after them, points to the conscious integration and articulations of popular

24 Original emphasis; Paolo Viola, ‘Violence révolutionnaire ou violence du peuple en

révolution?’, in Antoine de Baecque and Michelle Vovelle (eds.), Recherches sur la
Révolution (Paris: La Découverte, 1991), pp. 95–7, building on Colin Lucas, ‘The
Crowd and Politics from Ancien Régime to Revolution in France’, Journal of Modern
History 60.3 (1988), 421–57, at 426–7. A more discursive approach is taken in
Regina Janes, ‘Beheadings’, Representations 35 (1991), 21–51, at 24.

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justice that were only bolstered under the collective sentiments of revolu-
tionary action.25
Military situations could create an environment particularly conducive to
such attitudes, stirred by fears of defeat or counter-revolution. Hautefaye was
one example, as Corbin has charted, with the rise of regional ‘anxiety and
rumour’.26 A representative to Soissons’s electoral assembly, Nicolas-Joseph
Grain, recorded another in his memoirs upon a particularly brutal death there
in September 1792. As volunteers arrived at a military camp stationed near
Soissons, a group of soldiers seized one accused of treason; crying ‘Death to
the traitor [Meure le traître]!’, they jabbed him with their bayonets as they
‘dragged him from the city to the camp’. Surrounded by a circle of soldiers, he
was forced on to his knees and made to ‘beg pardon of the Nation’ before
being ordered to lower his head. Once executed, his remains were cut into
pieces and paraded around ‘at the tip of a bayonet’ – in perhaps the military
equivalent of the Parisian crowds’ pikes – to celebratory cries of ‘Vive la
Nation!’27
Yet popular violence cannot be elided with sovereign punishment
alone. In the search for the logic of political crowds, the more experiential
interplay between brutal acts and their actors can often be overlooked. In
this sense, the emotional currents of violence have remained relatively
under-appreciated. In July 1789 cultural and political dimensions were also
welded with an emotional agenda: Berthier was forced to kiss the ‘pale
and bleeding head’ of his father-in-law as it was flaunted in front of him.
William Beik, among others, has advanced us in this direction by outlining
how crowds in the ancien régime played more broadly into a ‘culture of
retribution’. Building on Thompson’s earlier model, this form of ‘moral
outrage’ extended past the moral economy’s restorative motives in
demanding a ‘focused . . . vindictive aspect’ to ‘harm the responsible
parties’.28
If there is a limitation to this more recent focus on the affective dimension
of punitive anger, it is that this remains largely one-dimensional in addressing
only perpetrator emotions. Understandably, modern scholarship has sought
both to escape the emphasis of traditional histories on elites and to repudiate

25 D. M. G. Sutherland, ‘Justice and Murder: Massacres in the Provinces, Versailles,

Meaux and Reims in 1792’, Past & Present 222 (2014), 129–62, at 136.
26 Corbin, Village of Cannibals, pp. 7–8 and chapter 1.
27 Nicolas-Joseph Grain, Mémoires (Archives Départmentales de l’Aisne), pp. 153–7; see too
McPhee, Living the French Revolution, p. 112.
28 William Beik, ‘The Violence of the French Crowd from Charivari to Revolution’, Past
& Present 197 (2007), 75–110, at 75–7.

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the reductive ‘crowd psychology’ of nineteenth-century theorists.29 Yet

a closer look reveals that the revolutionary crowds drew on encoded rituals
to wield emotional power that also inherently involved their victims. The
deaths of Foulon and Berthier were notably punctuated by inflictions of
humiliation, which, as a ‘self-conscious’ emotion, requires a corresponding
response from its targets.30 The actors central to emotional transactions in
violent acts – that is, the victims themselves – should not be overlooked.
From the perspective of Foulon and Berthier, the crowd’s violence was
clearly not sovereign, but politically and judicially illegitimate, and above
all emotionally transgressive. Humiliation had a dual function here, each
integral to the broader social and political meanings of its violence. On the
one hand, it was a violent supplement to the retributive nature of popular
punishment; on the other, it formed a critical component of an enacted
judicial and hence sovereign rite.
To this end, these punishments were explicitly structured along a mimetic
logic that drew upon the spectacular configuration of ancien régime public
executions, including a shaming procession that culminated in the punitive
site of the Place de Grève.31 As both men were captured outside Paris and
escorted that morning back into the city, onlookers made clear to stress the
emotional spectacle of their journey. As the editor Nicolas Ruault noted,
describing the scene in terms of visible justice, Foulon was humiliatingly tied
to the end of a cart with ‘a string of hay around his body’, which presaged the
mouthful his severed head would later receive. Berthier’s carriage was
expressly ‘cut in half so that everyone could see him’.32 Even in death, the
humiliation of the supplice could be posthumously inflicted again through the
emotional weaponry of various physical interactions: the hay stuffed in
Foulon’s mouth; his decapitated head paraded in front of his son-in-law;
the crowd’s taunts for a kiss between them.
Just as these acts had relied on the crowd’s knowledge of their familial ties,
the Princess de Lamballe’s own head was similarly paraded outside the
Temple in September 1792 before the eyes of her confidante Marie-

29 See esp. Gustave Le Bon, The French Revolution and the Psychology of Revolution, trans.
B. Miall (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1980 [1895]).
30 See e.g. Jeff Elison and Susan Harter, ‘Humiliation: Causes, Correlates, and
Consequences’, in Jessica Tracy, Richard Robins and June Tangey (eds.), The Self-
Conscious Emotions: Theory and Research (New York: Guilford Press, 2007), pp. 310–29.
31 Lucas, ‘Crowd and Politics’, 436–7; on eighteenth-century judicial rituals in Paris, see
Pascal Bastien, L’exécution publique à Paris au XVIIIe siècle: une histoire des rituels judiciaires
(Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2006), pp. 93–142.
32 Ruault, Gazette d’un Parisien, pp. 157–9 (letter of 22 July 1789).

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Antoinette. This use of close relationships to intensify psychological torture,

one might argue, suggests much about the need for different kinds of
spectatorship – not just the legitimising eyes of the crowd, as Lucas and
Viola have rightly signalled, but also a more intimate and vengeful exhibi-
tionism, grounded on an acute social awareness of the relationships between
victims. To recognise these emotional associations in acts of intimidation and
aggression is not to reduce the symbolic force of other cultural codes, but
merely to add further dimensions to understand violence within each poli-
tical space.

Violated Bodies and the Search for Meaning

But are all unhappy cases of mutilation or decapitation alike? In Gémenos and
Rocquevaire in 1795, for example, victims had their eyes, ears, noses
and throats cut out. In March 1793 in La Rochelle, conversely, both the
heads and genitals of refractory priests were set atop pikes (as well as forks,
sabres and batons) in a triumphant parade, their corpses dragged along
closely behind.33 Nor were the shootings of Gabriel and Gonzague Latreille
in 1830 and the attack on the gendarmes to force them to release their
prisoners the final act of violence that morning. After the wounded gen-
darmes had left the scene, the band of Villeséquois then turned on the bodies
of Gabriel and Gonzague and cut off their heads with axe-blows. Raymond
Huard has argued of popular politics in nineteenth-century Languedoc that,
‘in its roughest form, the revolutionary tradition as a political expression
generated a particular conception of political victory which allows only the
complete annihilation of the enemy . . . symbolised by the guillotine’.34 It is
possible that, by the time of the Villesèque murders, these acts of decapitation
could have been seen as the symbolic form of a people’s guillotine.
On the other hand, even as there is something cross-cultural about the
public display of beheadings, meaning inevitably alters with context, as
Regina Janes has noted: ‘While severed heads always speak, they say different
things in different cultures.’35 Hence Claudy Valin, in seeking to understand
the decapitations of the La Rochelle massacre in 1793, points away from the

33 Lucas, ‘Themes in Southern Violence’, 180; Claudy Valin, Autopsie d’un massacre: les
journées des 21 et 22 mars 1793 à La Rochelle (Saint-Jean-d’Angély: Éditions Bordessoules,
1992), pp. 43–6, 114–16.
34 Raymond Huard, Le mouvement républicain en Bas-Languedoc, 1848–1881 (Paris: Presses de
la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1982), p. 63.
35 Janes, ‘Beheadings’, 24, 47.

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 PETER MCPHEE AND JEREMY TEOW

influence of the guillotine’s introduction. Instead, he cites a deposition of 1791

from the nearby town of Dompierre-sur-Mer that made reference to the
earlier bouts of violence in Paris as a model – saying, of the local constitu-
tional priest, that one had to ‘cut his head off and put it at the end of a baton
like one had done in Paris’.36
Even so, explanations of decapitation in terms of political symbolism do
not necessarily conflict with other possibilities. One alternative reading is
that such mutilation represented a chance to express loathing in
a communitarian fashion. Whatever misgivings one might have about
Elias Canetti’s discussion of the group dynamic of violent crowds, there
are undeniable similarities between the participatory nature of these post-
humous acts and his insights on the ‘unsurpassed intensity’ of ‘baiting
crowds’:
Everyone wants to participate; everyone strikes a blow and, in order to do
this, pushes as near as he can to the victim . . . His permitted murder stands
for all the murders people have to deny themselves for fear of the penalties
for their perpetration . . . No-one has been appointed executioner; the com-
munity as a whole does the killing.37

Although the murders at Villesèque occurred in November, there may also

have been a symbolic identification of the lifeless nobles with the carnival
dummy dispatched on Ash Wednesday to represent the climax and the end of
‘the world turned upside down’: the enactment of symbolic popular justice
was common in carnival celebrations in the Midi.38 However, in this region
the carnival dummy was normally burnt on Ash Wednesday, sometimes
after being ‘hanged’ or ‘shot’ first.39 Alternatively, just as Corbin stressed the
parallels between the way the nobleman was burnt at Hautefaye and the
roasting of pigs in its region,40 so the regular butchering of sheep and goats in
Villesèque may have rendered the severing of the nobles’ heads less shocking
to those involved.

36 Valin, Autopsie d’un massacre, pp. 108–10.

37 Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, trans. C. Stewart (London: Victor Gollancz, 1962),
pp. 49–50. See also Corbin, Village of Cannibals, p. 76.
38 Jean-François Soulet, Les Pyrénées au XIXe siècle, vol. I, Organisation sociale et mentalités
(Toulouse: Eché, 1987), pp. 257–64; Peter McPhee, ‘Popular Culture, Symbolism and
Rural Radicalism in Nineteenth-Century France’, Journal of Peasant Studies 5.2 (1978),
238–53.
39 Arnold van Gennep’s ethnographic survey reported decapitation of the dummy only in
parts of the east of France: Manuel du folklore français contemporain, vol. I, part II I (Paris:
A. et J. Picard, 1947), pp. 957–90.
40 Corbin, Village of Cannibals, pp. 79, 142–3, 76–7, 81–101.

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To be sure, change could and did occur. Comparing the Hautefaye

murder to those of the September Massacres, Corbin has argued for the
clear handprint of ‘modernity’: the perpetrators of violence in 1870
displayed certain ‘humanitarian sentiments’ by refusing to ‘indulge in
the “ceremonious mutilations”’ of the earlier case. Yet it is also easy to
exaggerate this. Even when assessing the killings of September 1792, to
confront their violence head-on is not to cede to naivety over either
contemporary sources or posterior accounts. The Princess de Lamballe’s
infamous torture at the hands of the septembriseurs has gone down in the
canons of French history as exemplifying the sheer brutality of the
September Massacres. Soon mythicised as the bloodthirsty apex of popu-
lar violence, even immediately published narratives painted macabre
scenes of how, after striking her dead on a pile of corpses, her assailants
stripped her naked, gruesomely disembowelled her, then dragged her
headless and unclad body through the gutters, while fixing her body
parts on pikes. In fact, according to Antoine de Baecque, she was ‘neither
stripped nor mutilated’.41
But that revolutionary and subsequent accounts centred on the sexual and
feminine dimensions of de Lamballe’s vulnerability prompts questions about
the reverse: male violence. Thirty-four men from Villesèque stood trial; in
Hautefaye, twenty-one men were accused. The gendered assumptions of
judicial authorities aside, which inevitably fed into these legal outcomes,
what might this say about violence and masculinity? Working within the
tradition of the Annales school, the analyses of Nicole and Yves Castan of
violence in eighteenth-century Languedoc illuminated the mentalité of this
rural world, one in part characterised by a highly developed male sensitivity
to perceived insults, to ‘l’honneur viril’ and by a ready escalation of physical
resolution to such menaces to manliness. In Nicole Castan’s words, ‘in
a society based on esteem and dignity, the desire to protect physical and
moral respectability mattered above everything’.42
Still, although much violence in nineteenth-century France can be traced
to such intersections of honour and masculinity, which were accentuated in
rural areas, demographic trends of especially young men cannot alone

41 Antoine de Baecque, Glory and Terror: Seven Deaths under the French Revolution, trans.
C. Mandell (New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 61–84.
42 Nicole Castan, Les criminels du Languedoc: les exigences d’ordre et les voies du ressentiment
dans une société pré-révolutionnaire (1750–1790) (Toulouse: Université de Toulouse-Le
Mirail, 1980), p. 159 and chapters 3–4; Nicole Castan, Justice et répression en Languedoc
(Paris: Flammarion, 1980); Yves Castan, Honnêteté et relations sociales en Languedoc,
1715–1780 (Paris: Plon, 1974).

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explain everything.43 Few of Monéys’s murderers, for example, were men

between the ages of 18 and 30 – due in part to conscription, in part to work,
since the murder occurred at a fairground in the middle of the day.44
Subsistence riots often present another exception as a domain traditionally
dominated by women. Olwen Hufton’s reading of the ‘bread riot [as a]
maternal terrain’ has been extended by David Garrioch to argue for the
gendered particularity of the October Days.45 Female violence too could
therefore be revolutionary: as Garrioch has reminded, we must detach
ourselves from a common ‘condescending dichotomy’ between
a putatively ‘traditional’, localised collective action that is female and its
‘modern’ and national ‘male’ counterpart.46

Conclusion: Violence and Democracy

Finally, there is an important caveat to be stressed about the relationship
between collective violence, protest and the history of democracy.
Throughout the nineteenth century, according to Corbin, popular politics
was predicated on an explosive mixture of new assumptions about popular
sovereignty and a long tradition of collective cruelty – even cannibalism –
dating back to the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and beyond, and which
had resurfaced during the September Massacres of 1792 and the decapitation
of the deputy Féraud in 1795.47 The mutilation of the bodies of Gabriel and
Gonzague Latreille might accordingly be read as the resurfacing of archaic,
pre-democratic cultural forms – if only evidence could be found of such
behaviour in the region, rather than in Paris. Rivalries between villages and
neighbourhoods were regularly expressed in violent ways, but it is remark-
able how few violent deaths were occasioned in rural France after 1816 in this
manner or through political conflict. At Villesèque, the violence was all the
more shocking because wider evidence suggests that murder, if not physical
assault, was comparatively rare through the wider region, the lowlands of
Languedoc.48

43 See, generally, Pieter Spierenburg (ed.), Men and Violence: Gender, Honor, and Rituals in
Modern Europe and America (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998) and, for
a broader psycho-social take, Kerry Carrington and John Scott, ‘Masculinity, Rurality
and Violence’, British Journal of Criminology 48 (2008), 641–66.
44 Corbin, Village of Cannibals, p. 72.
45 Olwen Hufton, Women and the Limits of Citizenship in the French Revolution (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1992), chapter 1; David Garrioch, ‘The Everyday Lives of
Parisian Women and the October Days of 1789’, Social History 24.3 (1999), 231–49.
46 Garrioch, ‘Everyday Lives’, 248. 47 Corbin, Village of Cannibals, pp. 88–9, 92–4.
48 Castan, Criminels, pp. 159–66; Castan, Honnêteté, p. 545 and annexes.

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Instead, as Tilly and Rudé stressed, insurgent crowds tended towards

verbal and symbolic violence – the use of threatening language, occasional
destruction of property, and ritualistic action (‘repertoires’) that channelled
violence within cultural limits. This is precisely why the murder at
Villesèque, like that at Hautefaye, was so deplorable to contemporaries.
In 1870, Hautefaye stood out because, as Corbin points out, it was a rare
vestige of spectacular brutality.49 To focus exclusively on the horror at such
violence expressed by the nineteenth-century âme sensible is thus to under-
play the relative isolation of these cases. Corbin and others have used the
insights of cultural anthropology to insist – rightly – on the distances of
time, space and perception between ourselves and those who lived in
nineteenth-century France. Carried to an extreme, however, such an
approach falsely implies an unbridgeable rift between the ‘modern present’
and a sharply distinct ‘archaic past’ by magnifying exceptional examples of
splenetic action into the fixed expressions of a fundamentally violent
society.
In Paris, too, far more common in actuality than the potent images of
violent mobs were peaceful demonstrations, petitions, banquets and mass
meetings. Micah Alpaugh has found that only 12 per cent of an estimated
750 protests by sans-culottes in 1789–95 resulted in physical violence.50
Indeed, apart from the September 1792 killings, the greatest losses of life
in Paris over this ‘revolutionary century’ – the Réveillon riots of 1789, the
rue Transnonain in 1834, the coup d’état of December 1851, and the
repression of the Paris Commune in May 1871 – were the work of
armed forces.
In this sense, Georges Lefebvre’s elementary distinction between the
revolutionary crowd as spontaneous gathering (agrégat) and premeditated
assembly (rassemblement) still provides us with a useful starting point to
analyse popular violence.51 The relative infrequency of collective acts of
extreme cruelty suggests that they tended to arise from the former rather
than the latter, as with both the September Massacres and the Hautefaye
murder, for instance. But for the crowds that set out from Paris to retrieve
Foulon and Berthier, or for the market-women on the road to Versailles in
October 1789, the outcome of murder – as opposed to justice – was hardly set

49 Corbin, Village of Cannibals, pp. 1, 101.

50 Micah Alpaugh, Non-Violence and the French Revolution: Political Demonstrations in Paris,
1787–1795 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
51 Georges Lefebvre, ‘Foules révolutionnaires’, Annales Historiques de la Révolution
Française 61 (1934), 1–26.

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in stone; or, at least, any retrospective speculation of their motives remains

merely that.
Instead, they possessed different motives and intentions as heterogeneous
groups, just as protesters do today. To focus unwaveringly on the violence of
insurrectionary crowds during the revolutionary century, without paying
attention to their wider aims and diverse tactics, is to erect a false dichotomy
between such behaviour and democratic politics. Particularly when what is at
stake seems to be the very survival of the social order, nowhere is the practice
of popular sovereignty free of collective pressures – or, indeed, of violence
itself.

Bibliographical Essay
A particularly rich literature has flourished around the history of collective violence
during the ‘revolutionary century’, and the following titles represent only a small
selection. Relevant works by Charles Tilly include ‘How Protest Modernized in
France, 1845–1855’, in W. C. Aydelotte (ed.), The Dimensions of Quantitative Research
in History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), pp. 192–255; The Contentious
French (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986); and ‘Collective Violence in
European Perspective’, in Ted Robert Gurr (ed.), Violence in America, 3rd edn
(Newberry Park: Sage, 1989), pp. 62–100. An incisive treatment of Tilly’s ‘intellectual
evolution’ on collective violence is Michael Hanagan, ‘Charles Tilly and Violent
France’, French Historical Studies 33.2 (2010), 283–97; a critique of his treatment of the
Revolution is by William Sewell, ‘Collective Violence and Collective Loyalties in
France: Why the French Revolution Made a Difference’, Politics & Society 18 (1990),
527–52.
On crowd violence in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France, see Arlette Farge, Fragile
Lives: Violence, Power and Solidarity in Eighteenth-Century Paris, trans. Carol Shelton (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Colin Lucas, ‘The Crowd and Politics from Ancien Régime
to Revolution in France’, Journal of Modern History 60.3 (1988), 421–57; William Beik, ‘The
Violence of the French Crowd from Charivari to Revolution’, Past & Present 197 (2007), 75–110;
and George Rudé’s classic The Crowd in the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1959), whose materialist arguments were further developed in The Crowd in History: A Study of
Popular Disturbances in France and England, 1730–1848 (New York: Wiley, 1964) and Ideology and
Popular Protest (New York: Pantheon, 1980), esp. chapters 3–4. More theoretically, see the useful
overviews by Robert Holton, ‘The Crowd in History: Some Problems of Theory and Method’,
Social History 3.2 (1978), 219–33, and, on the culturalist interpretations, Suzanne Desan, ‘Crowds,
Community, and Ritual in the Work of E. P. Thompson and Natalie Davis’, in Lynn Hunt
(ed.), The New Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 47–71. On the
continuity of religious violence from ancien régime to the nineteenth century, see
Caroline Ford, ‘Violence and the Sacred in Nineteenth-Century France’, French Historical
Studies 21.1 (1998), 101–12.

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On the Revolution of 1789–99, two important reassessments of revolutionary violence

and the relative peacefulness of Parisian crowds are, respectively, Jean-Clément Martin,
Violence et Révolution: essai sur la naissance d’un mythe national (Paris: Seuil, 2006) and
Micah Alpaugh, Non-Violence and the French Revolution: Political Demonstrations in Paris,
1787–1795 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). The most thorough analysis of
the September Massacres remains Pierre Caron, Les massacres de septembre (Paris: Maison
du Livre Français, 1935), but see also Frédéric Bluche, Septembre 1792: logiques d’un
massacre (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1986) and, more recently, Côme Simien, Les massacres
de septembre 1792 à Lyon (Lyons: Éditions Aléas, 2011) and D. M. G. Sutherland, ‘Justice
and Murder: Massacres in the Provinces, Versailles, Meaux and Reims in 1792’, Past &
Present 222 (2014), 129–62. Factional violence in the South is explored in Colin Lucas,
‘Themes in Southern Violence after 9 Thermidor’, in Gwynne Lewis and Colin Lucas
(eds.), Beyond the Terror: Essays in French Regional and Social History, 1794–1815 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 152–94; Stephen Clay, ‘Vengeance, Justice and the
Reactions in the Revolutionary Midi’, French History 23.1 (2009), 22–46; and
D. M. G. Sutherland, Murder in Aubagne: Lynching, Law, and Justice during the French
Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Recent useful surveys on
collective violence between 1789 and 1799 can be found in Peter McPhee (ed.),
A Companion to the French Revolution (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013) and
David Andress (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2015).
Violent rural protest, including subsistence riots, is treated extensively in Louise Tilly,
‘The Food Riot as a Form of Political Conflict in France’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History
2.1 (1971), 23–57; Yves-Marie Bercé, Croquants et nu-pieds: les soulèvements paysans en France
du XVIe au XIXe siècle (Paris: Gallimard/Julliard, 1974); Jean Nicolas (ed.), Mouvements
populaires et conscience sociale, XVI–XIXe siècles. Actes du colloque de Paris 24–26 mai 1984 (Paris:
Maloine, 1985); and Nicolas Bourguinat, Les grains du désordre: l’État face aux violences
frumentaires dans la première moitié du XIXe siècle (Paris: Éditions ÉHÉSS, 2002). Rural
insurrections during the French Revolution have meanwhile been examined by
Georges Lefebvre, The Great Fear of 1789: Rural Panic in Revolutionary France, trans. Joan
White (New York: NLB, 1973); John Markoff, The Abolition of Feudalism: Peasants, Lords, and
Legislators in the French Revolution (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press,
1996); and Anatolï Ado, Paysans en révolution: terre, pouvoir et jacquerie 1789–1794 (Paris:
Société des Études Robespierristes, 1996).
On the insurrectionary crowd in later revolutions, see, chronologically,
Mark Traugott, The Insurgent Barricade (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010);
John Merriman, The Margins of City Life: Explorations on the French Urban Frontier, 1815–1851
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Pamela Pilbeam, ‘Popular Violence in
Provincial France after the 1830 Revolution’, English Historical Review (1976), 278–97;
John Merriman (ed.), 1830 in France (New York: New Viewpoints, 1975); Peter McPhee,
The Politics of Rural Life: Political Mobilization in the French Countryside, 1846–1852 (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1992); Ted Margadant, French Peasants in Revolt: The Insurrection of 1851
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979); and Cynthia Bouton, Interpreting Social
Violence in French Culture: Buzançais, 1847–2008 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 2011).

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Finally, close interpretations of popular massacres across the century are numerous,
including (amongst many others) Claudy Valin, Autopsie d’un massacre: les journées des 21 et
22 mars 1793 à La Rochelle (Saint-Jean-d’Angély: Éditions Bordessoules, 1992);
René Moulinas, Les massacres de la glacière: enquête sur un crime impuni, Avignon 16–17
octobre 1791 (Aix-en-Provence: Édisud, 2003); and Alain Corbin, The Village of Cannibals:
Rage and Murder in France, 1870, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press).

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 18
Geographies of Genocide: The European
Rimlands, 1912–1948
mark levene

The mountain masses and mountain chains of the peninsula do not

constitute a regular, well-defined system . . . This irregularity . . . has its
analogue in the distribution of the various races which inhabit the penin-
sula. Hungary has a homogeneous population, if we compare it with that
of Turkey; for in the latter country there are districts where eight or ten
nationalities live side by side within a radius of a few miles.1
Macedonia lies confounded within three vilayets (i.e. provinces), which
correspond to no natural division either racial or geographical . . . the result
is that no race attains a predominance, and no province acquires a national
character. The natural arrangement would have been to place Greeks,
Serbians, and Albanians in compartments of their own, leaving the
Bulgarians to occupy the centre and the East.2
One might think that the primary role of geography is to describe the Earth’s
landscapes, environments, peoples and places. As such, the way it acts as
a bridge between the social sciences and humanities on the one hand and the
natural sciences on the other ought to be benign. Nobody would normally
associate the study of geography with the perpetration of genocide. Here we
argue to the contrary, not because the making of accurate maps, the topo-
graphic descriptions of a region or the compiling of comprehensive statistics
about its inhabitants is in itself toxic, but because in the way they have been
deployed as tools of modern, post-Enlightenment orderings of the world as
their practitioners imagine it ought to be, they intrinsically are. Of course, the
fin-de-siècle observations – and irritations – as quoted above, of a renowned
French geographer, Elisée Reclus, and an influential British journalist,
H. N. Brailsford, as to the failure of both physical and human Balkan
geography to fit into neatly contained boundaries would not count for too

1 Quoted in Ipek Yosmaoglu, Blood Ties: Religion, Violence and the Politics of Nationhood in
Ottoman Macedonia, 1878–1906 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014), pp. 106–7.
2 Quoted in ibid., p. 109.

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 MARK LEVENE

much if these were purely idiosyncratic. But they were not. They influenced,
fed into or otherwise were part and parcel of wider Western scientific and
cultural assumptions that there was something wrong and ill-formed, if not
about the physical then certainly about the ethnographic landscape of the
Balkans; that something radical by way of demographic engineering was
pivotal to its reform but at the same time this could not be achieved under
Ottoman imperial rule. At which point supposed empirically led analysis bled
into a whole slew of racial or gendered stereotypes as to the ‘uncivilised,
crude, cruel and without exception, dishevelled’ nature not just of Turks but
of all Balkan peoples.3 More surprisingly, perhaps, it was exactly such ‘think-
ing’, as imbibed by indigenous Balkan elites, which helped catalyse and drive
their own transformational nation-state building agendas.
It is in the transmission belt from an Enlightenment project to observe,
describe and categorise the world to the political one of ‘seeing like a state’
that we posit the seeds of genocide in the Balkans.4 Or to put it another way, it
was through the insistent, hegemonic proposition that the only way healthy,
modern societies might cohere, develop and take their legitimate place within
an international system of such states was through the separation of previously
jumbled up ‘national’ elements into their correct, bounded ‘national’ territories
that drives for cultural homogenisation had their corollary in the urge towards
ethnic cleansing. This was not some straight, unilinear or inevitable trajectory.
For one thing it assumed the supersession of a great, age-old, dynastic
Ottoman world empire by contending and actually aggressively competing if
paradoxically weak national states. Indeed, before 1900, these were all protean,
peripheral to the empire, necessarily geographically circumscribed or, quite
possibly, existing only in the minds of their national dreamers. It was the
concatenation of their respective aggrandising ambitions with the historically
contingent that produced an imperial shatter zone in which a genocidal
reordering of political and hence human geography took place.
Yet the fin-de-siècle perception of the Ottoman Balkans (and Ottomania
more generally) as a power vacuum in the making was hardly limited to
small, putative, neighbouring – themselves ex-Ottoman – states but rather
was equally driven by the competing geopolitical interests of the great
powers. If Britain and France, the truly avant-garde nation states among
these, were also the first (competing) purveyors of a modern, liberal, geo-
graphically informed, economically interconnected, international nation-state

3 Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 14.
4 James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition
Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).

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system, they were also at the same time imperial powers in their own
right, competing with other European imperial powers, in this instance to
determine the fate of, or, if one prefers, the spatial arrangements of a post-
Ottomania. It was this wider geopolitical power struggle, as it catastrophi-
cally launched or more plausibly slid into the 1914 Great War, that spread an
already emergent Ottoman shatter zone from the onset of the Balkan wars
two years earlier, to embrace – on their 1917–18 collapse – the Russian,
Austrian and German empires too. Or again, more precisely, those parts of
these empires which were not reconstituted or failed to fully cohere within
their successor radically anti-liberal, Soviet and eventual Hitlerian states but
were either fragmented, indeed Balkanised, as a series of smaller and what at
the time looked like provisional polities – the post-1919 ‘New Europe’ – or
remained ‘problem’ regions within the USSR or post-Ottoman Middle East.
Here we have our exact historical conjuncture between a Western pre-
sumption to recast the world in its own metropolitan image and the realities
of the political breakdown of previously normative world empires: in
Wallersteinian terms, what we might call a semi-periphery to a Western
core.5 But it was at the geographical intersection between these two
systems, at the exposed European or near-European rim of the semi-
periphery that the full brunt and genocidal consequences of being turned
into a shatter zone were fully borne. It was in these rimlands between 1912
and 1953 that there was a concentrated yet repeated incidence of genocide,
the completion of which coincided (in most cases) with the triumphant
compartmentalisation of alleged national groups within fixed, impervious
boundaries over forms of historic multicultural co-existence within fluid
zones of cross-frontier human engagement.
In this chapter we will focus on Macedonia and Thrace – regions which
often have been overlooked or ignored in the history of genocide – to
illustrate and develop this trajectory in microcosm. But first, we need
to return to the wider geography of early to mid twentieth-century genocide:
to the landscape of the rimlands.

The Rimlands: A Geography of Genocide

Studies of genocide have a habit of isolating discrete examples from any bigger
picture. This tends to be in line with a general treatment of the phenomenon as

5 Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System, 3 vols. (New York: Academic Press,
1974–89).

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a product of a particular country’s problematic development, the emergence of

radical and uncompromising ideological tendencies, and, very often, the role of
megalomaniac, power-crazed leaders who have driven this or that polity
towards extreme outcomes. Moreover, despite scholarly efforts geared
towards comparing one genocide with another across time and space, these
efforts usually seek to reinforce the peculiarity of the act against a normative,
non-genocidal mainstream. On one level, this would dovetail with what
Raphael Lemkin, the founder of the neologism genocide, assumed to be
true. Lemkin saw the phenomenon as a regressive condition which could
only be defeated through a strong international community outlawing such
barbarism. Yet at the same time he recognised that tendencies towards the
combined physical, biological and cultural destruction of peoples were widely
applicable to many modern instances.6 Consideration of major optimal cases
from the first part of the twentieth century such as the Holocaust, the
Holodomor in early 1930s Ukraine and the Medz Yeghern, the Armenian genocide
of 1915–16 might thus make greater sense if they could be charted as part of
a wider sequence of genocidal events, the vast majority of which took place or
at least emanated in this period from our rimlands’ range.
Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands has been suggestive of this historical-
geographical intermeshing at least in relation to the Holocaust and
Holodomor.7 The very title of his study underscores the idea of an extended
region in which many peoples – Jews, Poles, Ukrainians and Germans
amongst others – suffered mass violence leading to the death of millions.
Yet despite being replete with detailed maps, for Snyder the geography is
largely incidental to the causative issue, which is presented as a giant
totalitarian struggle between Hitler and Stalin for ultimate control of the
lands between Germany and Russia. Thus, heavily focused on the period
1933 to 1945 Snyder foreshortens the time scale within which we might
read the broader relationships between history, geography and the making
of genocide. But he also reduces the geographical framework itself, exclud-
ing the Balkan region where the mass murder of Serbs, Bosnian Muslims,
Jews and Roma – amongst others – took place in synchronous time, not
to say an Anatolia-Caucasus range where the extermination of the
Armenians and many other genocidal events occurred prior to the rise of
Stalin or Hitler.

6 Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment
for International Peace, 1944).
7 Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (London: Bodley Head,
2010).

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 Geographies of Genocide

The key question here is can (indeed should) we emplot (to borrow a term
of Paul Ricoeur) all these examples within a single narrative and at the same
time legitimately embrace them within one map? Snyder’s analysis did not
require him to do that, not least because his main interest was in the Hitler–
Stalin contest not genocide per se. Even so, Snyder implicitly reinforces the
standard liberal view that the phenomenon is aberrant, each genocide thus
a separate deviation from the normal course of historical development. An
alternative view, however, might argue that modern genocide is an aspect of
a systemic dysfunction and so a good indicator of humanity’s direction of
travel towards a globalised political economy founded on the creation of an
international system of nation states. As such the spatial emplotment of
genocide could be as a series of similar or even linked events.
For instance, a major clustering of genocides occurred towards the end of
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as very diverse but premodern
societies in the Americas, Africa, Asia and Antipodes sought to resist Western
imperial encroachment, penetration and ultimate colonial–settler subjuga-
tion. The geographic range is global yet explicable as part of the final
metropolitan surge towards an integrated world system at the expense of
a Wallersteinian periphery. By the same token, a more staccato spate of
genocides committed by Russian, Chinese and Ottoman empires from the
mid to late nineteenth century might equally be identifiable as semi-
periphery responses to Western penetration, and not least as the primary
victim ‘minority’ groups – Circassians, Uighurs, Armenians – were perceived
by their respective imperial nemeses as Trojan horse tools of external
destabilisation. The fact, moreover, that taken together these events – to
use a more geological metaphor – took place on increasingly fragile yet
interlocking political fault lines along a single Eurasian tectonic plate may
explain how one small seismic shift on one fault might spark off a series of
after-shocks further down the plate.8 This causative pattern in fact can be
discerned as the harbinger of the much more concentrated shatter zone effect
from 1912. This in turn would be succeeded by a much more intensive if
disparate ‘Third World’ range of postcolonial genocides from c. 1948, before
the end of the Cold War would produce a yet further sequence of genocidal
events, including some on the latent stress points of the Eurasian tectonic
plate. In short, a repeat potential for genocide would necessarily indicate
a history of disturbed, unresolved if latent local state-communal hostilities,

8 Mark Levene, Genocide in the Age of the Nation State, vol. I I, The Rise of the West and the
Coming of Genocide (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005), pp. 222–3.

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yet in its actualisation would also most likely be symptomatic of more

paradigmatic and hence systemic geopolitical shifts.
This returns us to the European rimlands as the primary 1912–53 locus of
genocide. Let us attempt a clearer geographical delineation. Though he uses
the more politically neutral term ‘borderlands’, Terry Martin’s description of
these regions, as an L-shaped swathe of territory ‘extending southwards from
Leningrad through the Balkans, and then eastward across southern Ukraine
and Turkey into the Caucasus region’, serves well.9 However, the delineation
could be made stronger through the identification of three sub-zones. A first
would encompass most of the Balkans (with the exception of pre-1912 Greece)
but also leap-frog both the Aegean and the Dardanelles to include western
Anatolia and its adjacent islands. A second would consist of a Caucasus–Black
Sea–eastern Anatolia zone. A third sub-zone, sometimes referred to as ‘The
Lands Between’, more or less equivalent to Snyder’s Bloodlands, would
embrace a giant sliver of territory running from the Baltic to include
Belarussia and right-bank Ukraine in the east, modern-day Poland as far as
Silesia in the west, and through the Carpathians and sub-Carpathian ranges
towards an intersection with the Danube at its deltaic point of entry into the
Black Sea. The intersection at various points such as this, or the Crimea, of
two or more zones might be noted.
Does this confer a coherent geography of genocide in the rimlands? Not
exactly. There were, to use a more volcanic metaphor, parts which we
might visualise as a central, ‘hot’ core, with, by degrees, cooler, outer layers
which at critical moments seemed to be drawn by the core’s heat. There
could be spill-over too, into adjacent regions, extreme violence, like any
seismic shift, being no respecter of pre-existing boundaries. If there is
fuzziness here, that is because – still utilising the geological language of
fault lines, stress points and volcanic eruptions – the way in which the
genocidal reshaping of the political, social and, above all, ethnographic
landscape of the rimlands took place did not come all at once through
one single catastrophic event, but rather might open up at one point, close
down again for a while, and then re-emerge further down the fault, coales-
cing with other feedbacks, to produce a sequence of blasts, spasms and
after-shocks. Only when the zone had ‘cooled’ into new political building
blocks was the genocidal sequence brought to a close, though even then –
particularly by reference to what happened in post-1990 Bosnia and the

9 Terry Martin, ‘The Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing’, Journal of Modern History 70
(1998), 817–21.

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 Geographies of Genocide

Caucasus – some regions were plunged once more into genocide, sugges-
tive again of the resilience of fault lines.
Yet despite all this, there was nothing intrinsic in the human geography of
these regions to suggest the inevitability of genocide. On the contrary, the
fundamental paradox of the rimlands is that, while their diverse peoples may
have been living on pre-existent political fissures, their consistent record was
one of co-existing with each other for centuries without recourse to mass,
inter-group violence. This does not mean there was no violence. However,
Arnold Toynbee’s 1923 verdict on the specifically Ottoman scale of it was that
the previous dozen years had been ‘worse than during the rest of the previous
century, worse again during that century than between the years 1461 and
1821’.10 In other words, what was at stake was not a continuity of ancient
inter-ethnic hatreds – the repeated Western presumption as to Balkan and
Middle Eastern mindsets – but rather a case of radical rupture. The key
questions are how we explain the rupture and, if it wasn’t from within the
traditional fabric of traditional rimlands’ society, from whence it came.
Toynbee’s answer was simple: it came from the outside, as a Western
import, in the form of nationalism. But once more we have a paradox. The
notion that nations were or, to follow Brailsford’s dictum, should by rights
have been existing on this or that piece of territory cut across a premodern
ethnographic reality in which an extraordinary mosaic of different ethno-
religious and linguistic communities, whether peasant or mountaineer,
nomad or transhumant, socially, economically and culturally interacted in
the same plural environmental space. Worse, from the nationalist perspec-
tive, they did so with no reference whatsoever to national difference. Here is
a classic observation from the British author, Arthur Ransome, on his trip to
Russian-occupied eastern Galicia early on in the Great War:
The peasants working on the land were very unwilling to identify themselves
as belonging to any of the warring nations. Again and again, on asking
a peasant to what nationality he belonged: Russian, Little-Russian, or
Polish, I heard the reply ‘Orthodox’, and when the men were pressed to
say what actual race he belonged I heard him answer safely: ‘We are local.’11

It was not then that rimlands’ inhabitants did not recognise distinctions
between themselves. But those distinctions were fundamentally based on

10 Arnold J. Toynbee, The Western Question in Greece and Turkey: A Study in the Contact of
Civilisations (London: Constable, 1923), p. 266.
11 Quoted in Z. A. B. Zeman, The Making and Breaking of Communist Europe (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1991), p. 24.

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religion, supported by an understanding of self embedded in clan, family and

habitus, and thus completely at odds with the nationalist ‘imagined commu-
nity’ of language, primordial identity and terrestrial goal-driven purposeful-
ness across time and space.12 Such notions began as the preserve of schooled,
literate, usually urban people, more often than not of people aware – through
the cognitive map of the world they imbibed through newsprint – of the rapid
pace of change in the wider world, including as it impinged on their own
patch, and hence of all manner of existential dangers which lurked just over
the horizon.
If the emergence of nationalism in the rimlands thus began as a minority
creed, it usually also carried feelings of both acute anxiety and grievance.
However, their common corollary was a powerful proactive urge towards
rapidly cohering and mobilising the ‘nation’ – even where the majority of that
constituency were not yet aware of their alleged commonality. It was the
accruing of national assets – firstly the very numbers of people whom one
could call one’s own (the assumed marker of which was usually ‘language’)
followed by a designation of the territory upon which they had supposedly
lived since time immemorial – that, by means of modern maps and censuses,
as well as lexicons, novels and historical accounts, became the legitimating
tools through which the nation’s entitlement was presented or demanded of
a wider international (usually meaning metropolitan) community. Herein
also implicitly lay the pre-1912 limiting factors on the making of national
destiny. There were already putative nation states – including Romania,
Bulgaria, Greece and Serbia – in the rimlands’ zones. But these had emerged
at the margins of still existing empires and could not expand further without
either militarily confronting them singly or in combination, or having the
support of other, great powers. Equally crucially, none was a true nation-
state in the sense that each included ethno-religious communities who were
perceived by the political elites of these countries as extraneous, alien or
downright subversive to the national cause. Given the weakness of these
states, the possibility that ‘minorities’, as they now increasingly became
called, might act as some fifth column for the dominant imperial or some
other state interest became nationalists’ recurring nightmare.
Therein lay the origins of genocide in the rimlands even before the violent
removing or killing of ‘minorities’ had begun in earnest. One could of course
seek to absorb such problematic peoples (forcibly or otherwise) into the

12 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of

Nationalism (London: Verso, 2nd edn, 1991), chapter 10, ‘Census, Map, Museum’.

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tissue of the nation in what Zygmunt Bauman would call an anthropophagic

approach. Or one might opt for an alternative anthropoemic route, vomiting
out the unwanted elements from society and polity.13 Either route could be
seen as Social Darwinian and zero-sum, which is why Lemkin tended to view
both of them as potentially genocidal. However, before 1912, while there had
already been a whole series of massacres and mass flights as Muslim
muhajirs (refugees) in particular had fled regions where Ottoman power in
the Balkans and Transcaucasia had been reduced, no up-and-coming national
state had been strong or foolhardy enough to undertake a systematic ethnic
cleansing. Paradoxically, the best prior model for how to achieve that came
through one of the empires: Russia’s early 1860s deportation of the Circassian
peoples from the north-west Caucasus onto Ottoman shores offered an
indubitably genocidal precedent.14
Another such imperial precedent came through the Ottomans themselves,
plans for wholesale mass relocations of non-Turkish national groups at the far
corners of the residual empire emerging in the wake of the Committee of
Union and Progress’s 1908 usurpation of power. Significantly, though in
principle upholders of empire, the CUP were increasingly focused on achiev-
ing this goal through a nationalist ‘Turkey for the Turks’ path. Further
radicalised through the depredations of the Balkan wars in 1912–13, it was
above all the CUP’s decision to enter the Great War that unlocked the
potential for mass deportations of people being turned into wholesale opera-
tional practice. The first great casualties were the Armenians, the most
concentrated element of whom inhabited eastern Anatolia.15 But if what
was broadcast by the CUP as deportation in summer 1915 was actually full-
scale genocide it was also the first of many such ‘national’ assaults on the non-
Turkish elements of the residually multi-ethnic empire.16
Writ large, the 1914–18 war opened up the prospect for a mass ethnic
reordering of the resulting rimlands’ shatter zones by whichever national or
postimperial forces had the wherewithal with which to stamp their territorial
writ on them. The most drastic of such reorderings would be conducted by
the Soviets and the Nazis, Stalin’s great advantage over his Hitlerian

13 Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodernity and its Discontents (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), p. 18.
14 Irma Kreiten, ‘A Colonial Experiment in Cleansing: The Russian Conquest of Western
Caucasus, 1856–65’, Journal of Genocide Research 11.2/3 (2009), 213–41.
15 Raymond Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History (London: I. B. Tauris,
2011).
16 Mark Levene, ‘Creating a Modern “Zone of Genocide”: The Impact of Nation and
State Formation on Eastern Anatolia, 1878–1923’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies 12
(1998), 393–433.

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antithesis, in the central Asian, far eastern and northern expanses of the
Russian empire to which the Soviets had succeeded, providing a vast spatial
dumping ground for any and all of his unwanted ethnic and social enemies.17
Genocide, if one prefers, at one remove. Denied these possibilities through
the failure of his 1941 military campaign against the USSR, Hitler’s only
recourse was directly to exterminate the Jews and vastly reduce Slavic
peoples, as envisaged in Generalplan Ost within what amounted to the
much more limited geographical scope of the rimlands.18
However, focus on the vast scale of Hitlerian and Stalinist killings should
not deflect us from who were the ultimate beneficiaries of totalistic efforts
to recast rimlands’ geography. When the dust settled and their territorial
integrity was confirmed, albeit with boundaries truncated or redesignated
thanks to a triumphant Stalin, it was the ‘New Europe’, even paradoxically
for the next forty or more years a communist ‘New Europe’, that was the
heir to the genocidally cemented process of people-homogenisation begun
between 1912 and 1923. Nor was it only Hitler and Stalin who were
protagonists in this extirpation of rimlands’ plurality. The Western
Allies, despite their 1919 treaties’ commitment to safeguard the minorities
of the shatter zones, had also given their imprimatur to the ‘unmixing of
peoples’ between Turkey and Greece at the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne,
effectively a mandate for ethnic cleansing.19 Twenty-two years later at
Yalta they repeated the formula when, in association with Stalin, they
endorsed the even larger compulsory removals of millions of ethnic
Germans plus many Hungarians, Poles, Ukrainians and other peoples.20
The protection of minorities was thereafter a dead letter. In short, the
genocidally supported destruction of a historic human geography involved
diverse geopolitical protagonists from conflicting ideological systems.
That said, as we will see by way of the final ‘cleansings’ from Macedonia-
Thrace at the onset of the Cold War, the liberal reaffirmation of the
culturally homogeneous nation state was also closely aligned to the
emergence of a Western led, ultimately hegemonic world system of
such states.

17 Pavel Polian, Against Their Will: The History and Geography of Forced Migrations in the
USSR (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2004).
18 Mechtild Rössler et al. (eds.), Der ‘Generalplan Ost’: Hauptlinien der nationalsozialistischen
Planungs- und Vernichtungpolitik (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1993).
19 Renée Hirschon (ed.), Crossing the Aegean: An Appraisal of the 1923 Compulsory Population
Exchange between Greece and Turkey (New York: Berghahn, 2003).
20 Pertti Ahonen et al., People on the Move: Forced Population Movements in Europe in
the Second World War and its Aftermath (Oxford: Berg, 2008).

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 Geographies of Genocide

Passages in a Genocidal Reordering:

Macedonia-Thrace
Before 1912 geographical designations such as Macedonia or Thrace had no
administrative meaning. The terms derived from the classical world.
However, through an Ottoman lens they were no less than oxymoronic,
the organisation of vilayets in Rumeli – the name the Porte gave the
European part of the empire – cutting across a zone whose modern geogra-
phical nomenclatures would only become commonplace through the erup-
tion of violent conflict largely derived from external forces and factors. It was
the mid-nineteenth-century collapse of most of Ottoman power in Europe
and the post-1878 great power ‘propping up’ of what remained that focused
attention on the empire’s residual territories west of the Bosphorus. And it
was great power assumptions, both cultural and political, that it was only
a matter of time before the entire Ottoman carpet was rolled up once and for
all, that acted as the primary goad to the mapping of ‘Macedonia’ and
‘Thrace’ by any number of parties who claimed them as their own by dint
of some natural birthright, geopolitical necessity, or both. Where Western
pontificators like Brailsford led in assuming that Balkan reform could only
come through ethnographic reordering, regional Greek, Bulgarian, Serb and
latterly Albanian actors followed in seeking to demonstrate their national
preponderance in all or parts of these regions. The rising incidence of pre-
genocidal, inter-group political violence in Macedonia and Thrace thus can
be closely correlated to these ambitions. A flurry of competing late nine-
teenth-century, usually German-published maps – thus reinforcing their
supposed empirical credentials – were grist to this mill, as was an Orthodox
kulturkampf between Bulgarian Exarchists and Greek Patriarchists which
through competing statistics on the number of their congregations and
school rolls – as regularly presented to foreign consulates – proved equally
toxic in dividing, paralysing or polarising communities.21
This is where a modern sense of seeing the human landscape through
clearly demarcated nationalities so destabilised what in practice was ‘a cultures
area, inhabited by a plethora of ethnic groups tied together in a complex web
of interactions’.22 Christians, Muslims, Jews, all living side by side in a plural
multifaceted ‘mazemata’, was not simply an affront to nationalist conscious-
ness while proof of these regions’ backwardness but all the more reason why

21 Yosmaoglu, Blood Ties, chapters 3 and 4.

22 Anastasia N. Karakasidou, Fields of Wheat, Hills of Blood: Passages to Nationhood in Greek
Macedonia, 1870–1990 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), p. 220.

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they needed urgent homogenisation. Over and beyond the mobilisation of

religious differences, even within a formerly single and unified Orthodox faith,
the nationalist route was to intrude respective national bands – andartes,
komitadjis or çeta – into Macedonia to dragoon hesitant communities on side
or clear out those who stood in the way. As this largely outsider-inspired
violence began to spiral from the turn of twentieth century, the Ottoman
military also became increasingly involved, retaliating often indiscriminately
against suspect villages.23 Moreover, it was precisely the experience of this
‘dirty’ counterinsurgency war that helped crystallise from within the ranks of
Ottoman Third Army junior commanders such as Enver Pasha, a Turkish
nationalism which in key respects was a mirror-image of all other Balkan
ethno-national creeds. It was Enver and his CUP comrades – when faced in
1908 with what seemed an imminent great power pretext of intervening
directly to end the Macedonian violence – who reacted by marching out
from the Third Army Salonika headquarters to overthrow the Sultan in
Constantinople.24 If this act was intended to firmly forestall either a great
power or Balkan nationalist partition of the region, it proved rather to be the
starting gun for the creation of Europe’s first rimlands’ shatter zone and thus
for a sequence of genocidal reordering lasting almost forty years.
Up to this point we can see the trajectory of communal violence largely
shaped by guerrilla bands or their local Ottoman army adversaries. What
followed from 1912 was not just a scaling up of the violence, as state armies
directly intervened, but the implementation of policies designed to suffocate
or destroy those local populations now designated as alien and hence enemies
of the national interest. The first key evidence of this acceleration was when
Greek, Serb, Montenegrin and Bulgarian polities, in defiance of great power
agendas, allied together to take matters into their own hands and unilaterally
expel the Ottomans from Europe. Direct exterminatory violence against
Albanian Muslims, most especially committed by both Serb bands and
military, was one obvious consequence of this first Balkan war, many
hundreds of thousands of Muslims further south in the region not waiting
to suffer a similar fate but fleeing en masse towards the port of Salonika.25 But
the contours of ethnic cleansing became all the more evident when the
Balkan League allies fell out over the territorial division of the Macedonian

23 George W. Gawrych, ‘The Culture and Politics of Violence in Turkish Society 1903–13’,
Middle Eastern Studies 22.3 (1985), 307–30.
24 M. Naim Turfan, Rise of the Young Turks: Politics, the Military and Ottoman Collapse
(London: I. B. Tauris, 2000).
25 Reginald Rankin, The Inner History of the Balkan War (London: Constable, 1914), p. 304.

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 Geographies of Genocide

and Thracian spoils and began terrorising ethno-religious communities

loosely associated with their erstwhile partners, either to forcibly assimilate
them or to get them to flee to the ‘other’ side.
The ferocity of this second Balkan 1913 war was made plain through the
‘remarkably well-documented and impartial’ report by the Carnegie interna-
tional commission sent to investigate charges of atrocity.26 Over and above
extensive atrocities committed by soldiers upon soldiers, it found that each and
every party to the conflict had also repeatedly committed multitudinous atro-
cities against supposed ‘enemy’ non-combatants. The murder of un-uniformed
battle-age men in the course of war has a long and vicious history.27 But these
massacres went beyond vengeful blood lust. Rather Carnegie’s findings sug-
gested something more akin to a standard operating procedure which, alongside
the systematic burning of villages and towns, was aimed at getting the greater
mass of surviving terror-filled inhabitants to clear out at speed.
Certainly, there were variations on this theme. In the contested Greco-
Bulgarian zone in western Thrace, around Sérres and Kukuch, for instance,
leading members of Exarchist Slavophone congregations were intimidated
by Greek soldiery with the words ‘If you want to be free; be Greeks.’
Meanwhile, in the Rhodope mountains, thousands of Bulgarian-speaking
Muslims – Pomaks – found themselves inducted into the Bulgarian
Exarchist church in mass ceremonies. The compulsory rite of passage was
the biting of a pork sausage: hence a conscious slap at an Islamic dietary
prohibition. Similar antics occurred in much of the area around Pec, in
Kosovo, which came under Montenegrin occupation. Here, too, thousands
of both Albanian Catholics and Muslims were rapidly turned into Orthodox
congregants.28 If not all the violence thus was directly exterminatory, it was
nevertheless genocidal in the Lemkinian sense that it was geared towards the
physical, biological and cultural emasculation of ethnic or religiously differ-
ent groups with a view to their ultimate disintegration.
But equally the destruction could be immediate and total, as took place in
the south-east Thracian districts of Malgara, Rodosto and Airobol, close to the
Sea of Marmara, where Carnegie reported the ‘men, women and children’ of
more than forty-five villages, mostly Bulgarian, some Pomak, ‘were separated,

26 Alan Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 138.
27 Adam Jones, ‘Gendercide and Genocide’, Journal of Genocide Research 2.2 (2000), 185–211.
28 The Other Balkan Wars: A 1913 Carnegie Endowment Inquiry in Retrospect with a New
Introduction and Reflections on the Present Conflict by George F. Kennan (Washington, DC:
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,1993 [1914]), pp. 77–8, 154–8, 170–1, 199.

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and all killed without exception’.29 But these genocidal massacres, which also
included systematic mass rape, were mostly committed by Ottoman-
organised bashi-bazouk irregulars, or by the embryonic Teskilat-i Mahsusa, or
Special Organisation. This covert formation, as founded by the CUP leader-
ship, appears to have played an instrumental role in the Armenian genocide
two years later.30 The covert involvement of ‘violence specialists’ aside,
another reason why Malgara is significant is that it offers a reminder on the
one hand of the provisionality of the new political map of Macedonia and
Thrace as a result of the Balkan wars – the episode being part of a late CUP bid
to take advantage of the intra-League struggle and recapture a smidgen of its
European territories – and, on the other hand, of the ongoing vulnerability of
communities who might fall prey to genocide as a consequence.
The immediate focus of these ongoing tensions was the Bulgarian grievance
that it had been denied parts of Macedonia and Thrace which it believed were its
by right of national composition and conquest. Sofia’s attempt to recover what it
perceived as its unredeemed territories thus set a pattern of conflict in which
Greece and Serbia sought to consolidate their hold on their respective gains,
Bulgaria to overturn them. The latter’s alignment with the Central Powers in
1915, and its military ‘recovery’ at Greek or Serbian expense of much of
Macedonia and Thrace, carried further efforts to forcibly assimilate
Slavophones or clear out Greeks. The scale and atrocity of these efforts, now
fully supported by the total coercive machinery of military and state, left the
earlier Patriarchist–Exarchist conflict in the shade, and precisely spoke to the
‘barbarism’ and’ vandalism’ of Lemkin’s early efforts to describe ‘genocide’. Yet
when the Bulgarians were defeated in 1918 the whole thrust of this demographic
reordering simply went into reverse, the ‘voluntary’ exchange of Greek and
Bulgarian populations in western Thrace, as given Allied imprimatur by the 1919
treaty of Neuilly, being in practice a green light for Greece to ‘get rid of her
Bulgarian population at any cost’.31 The statistics speak for themselves. The
Greek share of this previously predominantly Turkish- and Bulgarian-speaking
region jumped within a few years from a mere 21 per cent to almost 70 per cent.32
And while Turkish and Pomak Muslims were in principle safeguarded here by
dint of a protective clause in the Lausanne treaty, throughout the rest of Greece

29 Carnegie Inquiry, Other Balkan Wars, pp. 148–51, 181–2.

30 Kévorkian, Armenian Genocide, pp. 180–7.
31 Benjamin Lieberman, Terrible Fate: Ethnic Cleansing in the Making of Modern Europe
(Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006), pp. 86–7, 150–1.
32 Loring M. Danforth, The Macedonian Conflict: Ethnic Nationalism in a Transnational
World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), pp. 53–4.

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hundreds of thousands of ‘Muslims’ were compulsorily exchanged for up

1.3 million ‘Orthodox’ Greeks, most of whom had already been ethnically
cleansed from Turkey.33
One might argue, of course, that however severe such deportations, not-
withstanding the uncompensated loss of homes, land and businesses, this did
not of itself constitute genocide. It is also true that the relatively orderly post-
Lausanne Muslim removals from places such as Salonika to Turkey were
hardly equivalent to the genocidal CUP, and then Kemalist deportations
mostly from Anatolia of Armenians, then Greeks, over preceding years. Yet
the overall pattern was unmistakably the same. In our Macedonian-Thracian
theatre for instance, state drives towards socially engineered homogenisation
of recently acquired territories continued to veer towards extreme instrumen-
talisation so long as the noisily irredentist claims of neighbouring states
exposed one or more minorities as their supposed stalking horses. In other
words, so long as the political geography of the New Europe in this particular
arena remained contested, elimination of ‘enemy’ populations – by fair means
or foul – remained a long-term state policy objective.
The role of renewed general war thus represents the key contingent factor
in the violent consolidation of land and people in our region. From 1923 to 1938
southern Balkan states were impeded from implementing mass removals by an
Anglo-French-led international order which, ambivalent about population
‘transfers’, nevertheless was adamantly against unilateral border changes.
After Munich that writ was clearly defunct, opening up the possibilities of
a territorial repartition of the rimlands, Macedonia-Thrace included.
Paradoxically, that initially suggested, yet again, that the process of creeping
nation-state consolidation in the interests of one dominant society could
simply be overturned in favour of another. Bulgaria’s partisanship to the Axis-
led sweep into the Balkans in April 1941 reaped its reward thus, in Berlin’s
sanctioning of its annexation of much of previously Greek Thrace and Eastern
Macedonia. In its wake came Sofia’s massive effort to disgorge recent Greek
settlers in what it now called Belomorie and replace them with Bulgarians, the
majority of the latter previously displaced in the 1910s and 1920s by the Greeks.
Some distance to the north, ultra-nationalist Serb Chetniks attempted to
counter the emergent Croat Ustasha state by scoping a post-Yugoslav
Greater Serbia whose forcible absorption of Croats and complete erasure of
Muslims would take place after the war when other countries would be too

33 Bruce Clark, Twice a Stranger: How Mass Expulsion Forged Modern Greece and Turkey
(London: Granta, 2006), pp. 11–14.

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busy with their own problems to care about whether an unwanted population
was being annihilated somewhere else.34 Meanwhile, during the war, just as
Zagreb was doing exactly such things to Serbs and Jews, Sofia was doing the
same to Greeks and Jews. The Bulgarian aspect of wider Axis occupation
(Katochi) of 1941–4, as remembered by its Greek inhabitants, is one of extreme
barbarity and atrocity.35 Yet it was based on a Bulgarian foreign ministry
blueprint whose transparent aim was to intimidate, suffocate or starve its
Greek and other non-Slavophone elements to a point where those elements
would fall apart or flee.36 On the latter score, refugee deaths from the area
were disproportionately high among the hundreds of thousands of fatalities in
the war-induced Greek famine of winter 1941/2.37
Yet while the Bulgarian occupation is treated in contemporary Greece as
genocidal, its most optimal feature was the assault not on the region’s Greeks
but on its Jews. This finally brings us back to the Bloodlands element in the
Macedonia-Thrace, geography–genocide equation. The rounding up and depor-
tation to Auschwitz of nearly all of Salonika’s 50,000 Jews, the most significant
concentration of Sephardim in Jewry’s global diaspora, is the single most
egregious act both in the Nazi ‘final solution’ in Greece and of the Katochi.38
The Nazi descent on the Balkans may be seen as a complete bolt from the blue,
or alternatively as consistent with competing European great power efforts to fill
or control a weak political vacuum created by the Ottoman retreat from before
1912. Yet either way, it cannot be entirely divorced from the nation-state building
of Nazi Germany’s regional clients, or victims. The Bulgarian willingness to
round up the entirety of some 11,400 ‘Belomorie’ Jews just before the Salonika
transports began to roll in March 1943 was not just compliance with Nazi
demands: it was consistent with Sofia’s own ethno-national homogenising
goals. Local Greek complicity with the destruction of Salonika Jewry was the
same: the sequestration or outright theft of its private and communal assets not
simply a case of rampant venality but identical nationalising objectives.39

34 Tomislav Dulic, ‘Mass Killing in the Independent State of Croatia, 1941–1945: A Case
Study for Comparative Research’, Journal of Genocide Research 8.3 (2006), 255–81, at 266.
35 Xanthippi Kotzageorgi-Zymari (ed.), The Bulgarian Occupation in Eastern Macedonia and
Thrace 1941–1944 (Thessaloniki: Paratiritis. 2002) (in Greek).
36 Kevin Featherstone et al., The Last Ottomans: The Muslim Minority of Greece, 1940–1949
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 107.
37 Violetta Hionidou, Famine and Death in Occupied Greece 1941–1944 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006).
38 Steven B. Bowman, The Agony of Greek Jews, 1940–1945 (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2009).
39 Christian Gerlach, Extremely Violent Societies: Mass Violence in the Twentieth-Century World
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 242–5; Mark Levene, ‘“The
Bulgarians Were the Worst!’: Reconsidering the Holocaust in Salonika within

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 Geographies of Genocide

What is equally striking is the way bigger postwar geopolitical contests

continued to intermesh with and feed such lethal nationalising trajectories.
Where the Germans and Italians retreated, the British and then Americans
entered the fray, ostensibly to forestall a Soviet communist drive into the
Aegean. That meant in Greece either disarming or liquidating the Greek
Communist Party (KKE)-led national liberation movement, ELAS, which in
1944 effectively controlled most of the country outside of Athens. This task
could only be accomplished by supporting, arming and directing ultra-
nationalist forces many of whom had previously fought as fascist proxies.40
This emerging confrontation is recognised as representing the first shots in
the superpower Cold War. The tragedy for Macedonia, however, is that it
became a cover and pretext through which the ultra-nationalists could turn
a merciless civil war into a wholesale, genocidal assault on what remained of
the country’s non-Greek, primarily Slavophone communities.
During the war, Bulgarians had cynically mobilised many of these commu-
nities under their jurisdiction as armed proxies, just as the Italians had
attempted to do with the Albanian-speaking Chams of Epirus. The fact that
other Chams had sided with ELAS only compounded the grounds for the
Greek rightist, Colonel Zervas, to carry (British-aided) fire and sword into
the district aimed at forcing the entire 15,000–20,000 surviving Chams across
the Albanian border.41 But the remaining Slavophone communities, mostly
concentrated in eastern Macedonia where the Bulgarian writ had not run,
numbered many hundreds of thousands. Here their logical alignment was to
the KKE, as the only Greek political party which – albeit shifting its emphasis
many times between equal rights and actual independence – had recognised
their ‘national’ existence. Given that at World War II’s end the Yugoslav,
Bulgarian and Soviet communist parties were all vying to create a ‘Slavic’
Balkan federation with Macedonia as one of its constituent parts, that was
enough to brand all Slavophones, regardless of political allegiance, as ‘Slavo-
communist’ enemies of Greece. Indeed, as the nationalist noose tightened
around the residual KKE strongholds in this now Macedonian-centred strug-
gle, it is telling the degree to which it regurgitated toxic historic alignments,
elements of the longstanding Bulgarian-backed Internal Macedonian

a Regional History of Mass Violence,’ in Giorgos Antoniou and A. Dirk Moses (eds.), The
Holocaust in Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 36–57.
40 Tim Jones, ‘The British Army and Counter-Guerrilla Warfare in Greece, 1945–49’,
Small Wars and Insurgencies 8.1 (1997), 88–106.
41 Mark Mazower, ‘Three Forms of Political Justice: Greece, 1944-1945’, in Mark Mazower
(ed.), After the War Was Over: Reconstructing the Family, Nation, and State in Greece,
1943–1960 (Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2000), pp. 25–6.

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 MARK LEVENE

Revolutionary Organisation (IMRO), among the violence specialists on the

‘communist’ side, many formerly Anatolian Greek refugees, a significant ele-
ment among the grass-roots, right-wing bands loosely coordinated by ‘govern-
ment’ forces. The result was counterinsurgency, terror, starvation, forcible
mass displacement and finally ethnic cleansing leading to a mass Slavophone
excision from Aegean – Greek – Macedonia-Thrace.42 In this sense the govern-
ment victory was not so much against communism but for a genocidally
implemented national homogenisation. But what is significant is that it could
not have been achieved ultimately without great power intervention. Just as
the Bulgarian script for cultural homogenisation of the region piggybacked on
the Nazis, so the alternative Greek one – as founded on a cartographically
inspired vision of expansion to and ethnic consolidation of its Aegean frontiers –
was dependent for its full realisation on the British and Americans.
This was not the complete end of the story. The previous signature of the
great powers to the treaty of Lausanne meant that a return to the pre-1941
territorial status quo ante did not carry with it an imprimatur for a further
cleansing of the Muslim (including Pomak) communities of western Thrace.
They continued to survive in a sort of no man’s land between Greek
acceptance and Turkish exit.43 Residual Slavophone communities, as with
other minorities, the surviving Jews included, necessarily kept their heads
down, the very concept of cultural difference more or less expunged from
Greek consciousness.44 Only when another cross-border issue – the declara-
tion of an independent Macedonia following the collapse of Yugoslavia in
1991 – presented Athens with a neighbouring state whose very constitution
harked back to the struggles for the autonomy of ‘the whole of the
Macedonian people’ was there reason to believe that sacro egoismo was
about to resurface in violent conflict.45 In fact, despite inflamed denunciations
of ‘the other’ on both sides of the border, that conflict, dampened by
international intermediaries, has never come to pass. Instead, with the 1949
culmination of the Greek civil war on the napalm-soaked slopes of Mount
Gramos, Macedonia-Thrace, as a microcosm of the broader geography of the
genocidal rimlands, arrived through the extirpation of its plurality at its
dysfunctional, contemporary ‘normality’.

42 Andrew Rossos, ‘Incompatible Allies: Greek Communism and Macedonian

Nationalism in the Civil War, 1943–1949’, Journal of Modern History 69.1 (1997), 42–76.
43 Featherstone, Last Ottomans, chapter 8.
44 Richard Clogg (ed.), Minorities in Greece: Aspects of a Plural Society (London: Hurst,
2002).
45 Danforth, Macedonian Conflict, p. 52.

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Bibliographical Essay
Works such as Jeremy Black’s Maps and History: Constructing Images of the Past (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1997) clearly show how cartography has helped shape modernity. But
while Black’s study considers war, nationalism and geo-politics, the connection between
geography and genocide is absent. There are some studies which make explicit links
between aspects of the Holocaust and geography. Notable is Robert Jan van Pelt and
Deborah Dwork’s Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996),
a highly innovative exploration of the location of the Nazi death camp par excellence at
a historic European crossroads, replete with maps illustrating how changing borders over
time were a factor in determining the fate of millions. Excellent maps are also assets in other
Holocaust or Holocaust-related studies, including Ray Brandon and Wendy Lower’s The
Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2008) and Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (London:
Bodley Head, 2010), but minus considerations of how the disciplinary development of
geography per se informed an increasingly toxic Ratzelian geopolitics.
However, there has been keen interest in recent studies of the impact of imperial
collapse on Europe’s borderlands and its people. Omer Bartov and Eric D. Weitz (eds.),
Shatterzone of Empires: Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg and Ottoman
Borderlands (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013) exemplifies the contemporary
scholarship in the field, including a growing awareness of how and where genocide
became a key vector of postimperial nation-building. That this also included Soviet
‘nation-building’ is acutely developed in Terry Martin, ‘The Origins of Soviet Ethnic
Cleansing’, Journal of Modern History 70 (1998), 813–61. Martin’s study is also exemplary in its
situating of Soviet ethnic cleansing within a borderlands landscape which needs to be read
as a whole, as well as disaggregated into discrete zones of violence.
While the broad, systemic picture of genocide in its relationships to historical time and
geographical space is yet to be fully explored, there have been suggestive regional studies
including of the Macedonia-Thrace arena. Henry R. Wilkinson, Maps and Politics: A Review of
the Ethnographic Cartography of Macedonia (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1951) was
a notable forerunner in assessing how competing, mythic and increasingly belligerent
nationalist claims on territory were dependent on the creation of allegedly accurate,
supporting ethnographic maps. More recently the subject has been brilliantly reconsidered
in Ipek Yosmaoglu, Blood Ties: Religion, Violence and the Politics of Nationhood in Ottoman
Macedonia, 1878–1906 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014), not least in demonstrating
the connecting threads between cartography and censuses and an ensuing mass violence.
Finally, for further, recent but significant intervention cross-relating genocide, the
specific political geography of Macedonia-Thrace and modernity, see Raz Segal, ‘The
Modern State: The Question of Genocide and Holocaust Scholarship’, Journal of Genocide
Research 20.1 (2018), 108–33, and Mark Levene, ‘“The Bulgarians Were the Worst!”:
Reconsidering the Holocaust in Salonika within a Regional History of Mass Violence’,
in Giorgos Antoniou and A. Dirk Moses (eds.), The Holocaust in Greece (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 36–57.

385
 19
Concentration Camps
dan stone

What Is a Concentration Camp?

Zygmunt Bauman has offered one of the more memorable assessments of
concentration camps, with his pithy claim that just as the eighteenth century
was the age of reason and the nineteenth the age of progress, so the twentieth
century will be remembered as the ‘century of camps’. Following Hannah
Arendt, he writes:
The camps were distillations of an essence diluted elsewhere, condensations
of totalitarian domination and its corollary, the superfluity of man, in a pure
form difficult or impossible to achieve elsewhere. The camps were patterns
and blueprints for the totalitarian society, that modern dream of total order,
domination, and mastery run wild, cleansed of the last vestiges of that
wayward and unpredictable human freedom, spontaneity and unpredictabil-
ity that held it back. The camps were testing grounds for societies run as
concentration camps.1

There is a striking mismatch between this sort of philosophical attempt to

account for the meaning of concentration camps and historical studies which
examine the development, running, staffing and victims’ experience of camps as
they appeared in particular settings. This chapter will consider the historiography
of concentration camps, showing how histories of individual camp systems – and
individual camps – mean we now have a detailed understanding of how camps
arose, developed and, in many cases, closed, although the scholarship is much
better developed in some cases than others. This body of literature now allows
historians to ask whether concentration camps should be considered from
a transnational perspective, the ‘global portability of the concentration camp’

1 Zygmunt Bauman, ‘A Century of Camps?’, in The Bauman Reader, ed. Peter Beilharz
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), pp. 266–80, at 274–5.

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 Concentration Camps

as Klaus Mühlhahn puts it.2 Did regimes learn from one another’s practices?
Were ideas about incarceration passed on by particular ‘experts’ or by the press
and concerned commentators? Were the specific practices engaged at concen-
tration camps, such as the use of barbed wire, torture, ritual humiliation or
forced labour, shared ideas or did they emerge spontaneously across the globe?
The answers shed light on camps as one of the twentieth century’s most notable
inventions. I will suggest that this history should make us wary of accepting
some of the most influential philosophical accounts of the meaning of concen-
tration camps, such as Bauman’s, insofar as these argue on the basis of an
archetypal and ahistorical ‘camp’. Philosophers and sociologists have asked
whether concentration camps are ‘laboratories of violence’ (Sofsky) or places
for the ‘eradication of man’ (Arendt). They have claimed that the camps’ victims
are reduced to ‘bare life’, that is, non-people whom the guards can kill with
impunity, and that this biopolitical control combined with the normalising of the
‘state of exception’ reveals that camps are ‘the nomos of the modern’ (Agamben).
Still, despite talking past one another, in many ways these apparently discrete
worlds of scholarship share common ground and together they can help us
understand why and how concentration camps emerged when they did, and
why studying them, however unpleasant, remains crucial for understanding
twentieth-century world history.
The question ‘what is a concentration camp?’ is not as easy to answer as it
might at first appear. On the one hand, it may seem straightforward to say
that a concentration camp is an enclosed site used to hold against their will
and without due legal process a group of civilians deemed ‘unwanted’ by
a regime. On the other hand, and thanks mainly to the association of
concentration camps with the Third Reich, we tend to think of concentration
camps as places where the law has been abandoned, ‘spaces of exception’
where the inmates are set against each other and where they are at the mercy
of the guards’ whims. The imagery of barbed wire, guard towers, machine
gun emplacements and ironic slogans over the entrance gates completes the
picture. That is all well and good, until we consider some questions which
complicate the story. What if we take seriously the notion that camps in
South Africa were set up by the British primarily with the aim of preventing
a rural population, whose land had been destroyed by the British Army’s
scorched-earth policy, from supporting Boer guerrillas and not as ‘punish-
ment’ camps? What if we consider the cases of people interned against their

2 Klaus Mühlhahn, ‘The Concentration Camp in Global Historical Perspective’, History

Compass 8.6 (2010), 543–61, at 544.

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will because of racial and political paranoia, such as citizens of many

European countries during World War I, Japanese Americans or German-
Jewish ‘enemy aliens’ during World War II, Jewish Displaced Persons at the
end of World War II, either in Germany and Austria or, even more proble-
matically, in the camps set up by the British in Cyprus where Jews who had
made the ‘illegal’ crossing to Palestine were held until the establishment of
Israel? What happens to our understanding of camps when we discover that
in the Soviet Gulag there were prisoners who were granted the right to live
‘outside the zone’ (so-called zazonniki) who could move about unguarded?
How should we deal with ‘liberal’ countries’ use of camps – in which brutal
torture and mistreatment were rife – in the context of decolonisation in
Malaya, Kenya or Algeria? None of the people in these camps want to be
there, but can we say that they are in each case a ‘surplus’ population
abandoned to their fate, deprived of the law? The case of Guantánamo Bay
is especially disconcerting here. Few would dispute that it is a shocking abuse
of power and that it is wrong to hold people for years solely on the basis of
suspicion, but is it, as some commentators hold, a concentration camp? Are
favelas, slums, sweatshops or enclosed territories such as the Gaza Strip huge
open-air concentration camps? There are those who believe so.3 If all of these
sites are concentration camps then we rapidly come to the conclusion that
there is no archetypal camp, that a camp need not look like Dachau in order
to qualify as a concentration camp, and that the concept of the concentration
camp needs to be historicised, for what it designates changes over time.

Histories
Concentration camps did not appear out of nowhere. There is a long history
of incarceration that includes workshops, POW camps, asylums, quaran-
tine islands, slavery plantations and prisons. The idea of isolating unwanted
population groups precedes the modern age. The most important prece-
dent is to be found in the European overseas colonies, ‘spaces of exception
from European law’, places in which, as Hannah Arendt argued, anything
was possible.4 The consistent forced relocation of American Indians, the
forcing off the land of Aborigines in Australia, the wiping out of whole
populations such as San Bushmen or Caribs, all were justified on the
grounds that the ‘natives’ were not able to follow the laws of civilised

3 Vinay Lal, ‘The Concentration Camp and Development: The Pasts and Future of
Genocide’, Patterns of Prejudice 39.2 (2005), 220–43.
4 Mühlhahn, ‘Concentration Camp’, 547.

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 Concentration Camps

warfare. Specific cases such as Flinders Island off the coast of Tasmania or
Shark Island off the Namibian coast are very close approximations of
concentration camps, except that they were ‘ready-made’ rather than con-
structed. Indeed, the first wave of camps to be known as ‘concentration
camps’ were located in the European colonies: Cuba, South Africa, the
Philippines, German South West Africa. In the first three of these places,
concentration camps were established primarily as a military solution to
guerrilla warfare. By removing the displaced rural population, guerrilla
fighters would lose their source of food, shelter and morale, and the civilian
authorities could engage in social engineering. German South West Africa
is somewhat different; here the camps were established after the war, more
as a means of pacifying and humiliating a defeated enemy and forcing them
into slave labour than a counter-guerrilla strategy. Revealingly, though,
given that the term Konzentrationslager had been used in German, up to that
point, to refer to the British camps in South Africa, it is clear that the British
experience in their guerrilla war was regarded as some kind of guide by the
Germans.5
Klaus Mühlhahn writes that the global history of concentration camps
shows that they ‘first emerged in the non-Western world within the historical
context of colonial rule – which reinforced the assumptions of white super-
iority, justified the use of violence against colonized populations, and pro-
liferated ideas of ethnic and/or political cleansing’. That is probably not
contentious. His following statement is more interesting, however: ‘Global
connections and transfers moved the military and policing doctrines from the
European colonial domains to the European continent itself where the
implementation of those practices facilitated the shift to total war and also
helped shape a new brutality displayed by European armies toward non-
combatants during and after World War I.’6 This claim makes assumptions
about the transnational nature of concentration camps that need to be tested.
Perhaps, following anthropological models, we might in fact discover that
similar ideas arose less through ‘diffusion’ – the transnational sharing of
ideas – than through ‘evolutionism’ or ‘parallel development’. In other
words, the repertoire of violence represented by concentration camps was

5 Jonas Kreienbaum, ‘Deadly Learning? Concentration Camps in Colonial Wars around

1900’, in Volker Barth and Roland Cvetkovski (eds.), Imperial Co-operation and Transfer,
1870–1930: Empires and Encounters (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), pp. 219–35, at 228;
Kreienbaum, ‘Ein trauriges Fiasko’: Koloniale Konzentrationslager im südlichen Afrika
1900–1908 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2015), pp. 310–11.
6 Mühlhahn, ‘Concentration Camp’, 555.

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an expression of structural similarities and family resemblances in modern

global history that emerged largely spontaneously in different locations.
The most compelling reason for the redeployment in Europe of these
colonial practices was the First World War. During this conflict, not only
were POWs taken in numbers previously unseen but so were civilians
interned – and subjected to all manner of suffering – in enormous numbers.
Some 8–9 million POWs were held during the war, 2.2 million in Russia
alone. Nor was this only a European problem, with German POWs being
held in Japan, albeit in small numbers. POW camps cannot by definition be
considered concentration camps, but the sheer scale of them during the First
World War, not to mention the high death rates in them, tells us something
about the modern state’s ability and willingness to intern huge numbers of
people. In the era of total war, this willingness to intern then impacted most
forcefully on civilians. As historian of the POW camps Heather Jones notes,
in the First World War the ‘prisoner of war camp began the conflict as
a means of ensuring that the captured enemy combatant was kept away from
rejoining the battlefield fight; in other words, with a purely military function;
it ended the war as a sophisticated system of state control and as a laboratory
for new ways of managing mass confinement, forced labour and new forms
of state–military collaboration.’7
Even more significant for later developments was the internment of
civilians during World War I, and not only in Europe. In 1915, in a move
that had enormous ramifications for the rest of the twentieth century and
beyond, France revoked the status of naturalised citizens from people of
‘enemy origin’. Belgium, Italy, Austria and Germany soon followed suit, with
the result that one could be stripped of one’s nationality and reduced to
statelessness and thus deprived of the benefit of law – this being long before
the UN Refugee Convention, of course. British civilians in Germany, for
example, were held in the Engländerlager Ruhleben near Berlin. In total, by
the end of the war, some 111,879 ‘enemy civilians’ were in German intern-
ment. At the same point, October 1918, 24,255 German, Austrian and
Hungarian civilians were still interned in Britain. The Austro-Hungarians
used French and Belgian citizens for forced labour, and deported Italian
citizens of the Austro-Hungarian Empire for being ‘out of place’: they were
either interned or deported to Italy. From 20 May 1915 they were held in what

7 Heather Jones, ‘Discipline and Punish? Forms of Violent Punishment in Prisoner of War
Camps in the First World War: A Comparative Analysis’, in Christoph Jahr and
Jens Thiel (eds.), Lager vor Auschwitz: Gewalt und Integration im 20. Jahrhundert (Berlin:
Metropol, 2013), pp. 91–116, at 100.

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 Concentration Camps

were called ‘concentration camps’, one of which, at Steinklamm, the Italians

referred to as the ‘Campo della morte’ (camp of death). The internees were
treated very harshly, were forced to work for little pay, and received inade-
quate food supplies. The Italian royal commission of investigation noted, in
fact, that the ‘really tragic characteristic of these concentration camps was the
hunger’ and, in the face of large numbers of deaths, especially of children,
claimed that the Austrians intended to ‘destroy or reduce to a small number
the Italian race on its territories’.8 The Austrians also rounded up some 7,000
so-called ‘Russophiles’ in eastern Galicia and Bukovina and deported them to
the Thalerhof camp near Graz, where nearly 1,500 died. In the colonies,
German priests and civilians in Togo and Cameroon were rounded up and
interned first in Dahomey and later in Algeria and Morocco, and in British
East Africa German civilians were deported to camps in India.
The war also witnessed refugee movements on a huge scale. The Russian
Revolution of 1917 created about 1.5 million refugees, and even before that, as
a result of the war, in Russia’s larger cities refugees made up more than
10 per cent of the population by mid 1916; in Kharkov it was 25 per cent and in
Samara 30 per cent.9 There were philanthropic efforts to help them, but these
were insufficient to counter the power of a nationalist language of ‘floods’,
‘swarms’, ‘deluges’ and other biblical disasters, which quickly became asso-
ciated with refugees across Europe. The Times, for example, described Belgian
refugees in Britain as ‘a peaceful invasion’, whilst Russian commentators used
even more colourful terms such as ‘lava’ or ‘avalanche’.10 These population
movements saw emergency accommodation being created in schools, fac-
tories, barracks, monasteries and so on, and the creation of refugee camps for
the first time on European soil. The refugees were not always grateful,
however. Belgians in Britain, for example, were constrained by the Aliens
Restriction Act (4 August 1914), confining them to specific parts of the
country; they complained that this amounted to being held in
a ‘concentration camp’.11 Whether undertaken out of fear of ‘fifth colum-
nists’, as reprisal actions or in order to obtain forced labourers, the scale of

8 Alan Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 59–60.
9 Peter Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War I
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), p. 63.
10 Peter Gatrell, ‘Refugees and Forced Migrants during the First World War’, Immigrants
& Minorities 26.1–2 (2008), 82–110, at 90 pp. 82–110, at 90; Gatrell, Whole Empire Walking,
p. 200.
11 Gatrell, ‘Refugees and Forced Migrants’, 91–2.

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civilian internment during the war was far greater than anything that had
been witnessed before.
Perhaps more important than the sheer numbers of civilians held in camps
is the reason for their being so held. This is the point at which the emerging
nation states as well as more established ones, became gripped by fears of
‘fifth columnists’, by paranoid fantasies of enemies within, and by
a fascination with racial and national homogeneity which rendered civilians
with foreign descent suspect in the eyes of patriots and nationalists. The
logical extension of this fear was the declaration of a state of emergency,
a state which France, for example, remained in from 1914 until 1919. Civilian
camps were thus the expression of the break with the liberal rule of law and
rule by decree under a state of emergency in which those rendered suspect by
irrational political fears were placed in a position of enemy number one, with
the result that when rendered stateless or denied citizenship rights they
suddenly became very vulnerable indeed. Mühlhahn claims that: ‘The tem-
porary internment of displaced and dislocated groups and POWs in the wake
of the war together with the politization of citizenship and nationality and the
temporary suspension of regular legal procedures provided the conditio sine
qua non that facilitated the emergence of concentration camps on the
European continent.’12 In other words, in the global history of concentration
camps, the POW and civilian camps of the First World War provide closer
connections to the later Nazi and Soviet camps than do the colonial concen-
tration camps of southern Africa.
Nowhere is this claim clearer than in the context of the Armenian geno-
cide, during which Anatolian Armenians were deported to the deserts of
Syria, with many eye-witnesses describing their destination as concentration
camps or even, as in the case of Katma (Ghatma), death camps. Take, for
example, Naomie Ouzounian’s description, written in 1982:
The ‘camp’ where hundreds of thousands had already been thrown
together was a narrow strip of the desert, surrounded by bare hills. The
hot, humid air was filled with the stench of human refuse and decaying
unburied bodies. I couldn’t breathe, oh, if only I could take a deep breath!
The name of this hell was Ghatma. ‘Dear Lord, I hope there is no Ghatma in
the hereafter, and if there is one, forgive my sins and do not condemn me to
it’, I prayed.13

12 Mühlhahn, ‘Concentration Camp’, 549.

13 Cited in Hilmar Kaiser, At the Crossroads of Der Zor: Death, Survival, and Humanitarian
Resistance in Aleppo, 1915–1917 (Princeton: Gomidas Institute, 2002), pp. 21–2.

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Historians of the Armenian genocide agree with this terminology. Hilmar

Kaiser goes on to talk of the ‘world of the death camps’ as the genocide
became more coordinated and ferocious in 1916.14 Other historians concur,
Ronald Suny claiming that the ‘concentration camps’ at Tel-Abiad, Ras al
Ayn, Mamureh, Katma and Aleppo ‘were way stations toward extermination.
They were death camps.’ Taner Akçam too says of the ‘concentration camps’
of Aleppo that ‘the appalling sanitary and humanitarian conditions turned
these into death camps’.15 These were camps designed not to isolate civilians
but to get rid of them altogether.
What is different about twentieth-century camps from colonial and
European sites of incarceration that preceded them is thus the context.
First of all, we are talking about civilians, people who have not formally
been convicted of any crime. As Arendt noted, ‘Criminals do not properly
belong in the concentration camps, if only because it is harder to kill the
juridical person in a man who is guilty of some crime than in a totally
innocent person.’16 They are held against their will because of who they
are or what the authorities suspect them of believing or what they might do.
That ‘liberal’ regimes have incarcerated – and continue to incarcerate –
people on this basis is an important reminder that concentration camps are
not solely the tool of ‘mad’ dictators and evil regimes, though we should be
clear that the most complete instantiation of camps as ‘laboratories of human
behaviour’ occurred in the fascist and communist regimes of the twentieth
century. Second, it is less the physical appearance of camps that is significant
than what they represent, that is to say, the power and the nature of the
twentieth-century state, although it is true that with the exception of the
Soviet ‘special settlements’ – from which there was little chance of escape
across hundreds of miles of tundra – they tend to assume a similar pattern,
based on conventional prisons, though less accessible to outsiders. Third, the
large-scale incarceration of civilians not because they were diseased physi-
cally but because they were presumed to be ‘diseased’ mentally or racially
conforms to what we know of the development of modern states.
Concentration camps appeared in the age of the modern nation state when
the drive to establish homogeneous populations – ethnically, nationally or

14 Ibid., p. 66.
15 Ronald Grigor Suny, ‘They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else’: A History of the
Armenian Genocide (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), p. 314; Taner Akçam,
A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility (London:
Constable, 2007), p. 198.
16 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, rev. edn (San Diego: Harcourt Brace,
1979), p. 448.

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‘racially’ – was common and when the inability to achieve that goal was put
down to the existence of ‘alien’ population groups. As multinational empires
gave way in Europe to homogenising nation states or as new empires such as
the Soviet Union attempted to mould society in a new image, the threat of
‘enemies’ and ‘wreckers’ was in-built as something that had to be combated.
Concentration camps were novel forms of incarceration because they were
the expression of the modern state when it felt itself to be under threat.
This analysis is most easily confirmed when one turns to the literature on
the Nazi and Soviet camps, which we will examine briefly. Here the con-
tinuities with the earlier manifestations of concentration camps are clear –
but perhaps not as clear as the breaks. Hannah Arendt remarked that the
colonial camps provided only ‘apparent historical precedents’, although the
fact that they provide precedents at all, even in Arendt’s formulation, should
not be dismissed. There is a huge literature on the Nazi camps, exemplified
now by Nikolaus Wachsmann’s KL (2015), which follows Saul Friedländer’s
paradigm of an ‘integrated history’. This combines top-down institutional
history with a deep regard for the ways in which the camps’ inmates lived
through the experience, and shows how the camp system changed over time,
from the ‘wild camps’ of 1933 to the early camps designed to rid Nazi
Germany of political enemies and ‘asocials’, and through to the massive
expansion of the camps after 1938, peaking at the end of the war with the
huge growth in slave labour sub-camps attached to the numerous main
camps, and showing how the SS’s camps system became embroiled in the
history of the Holocaust, the murder of Europe’s Jews. There are histories of
all the main camps and a growing historiography on the sub-camps, dealing
with issues such as gender, survival rates, SS economic policy, human
experiments, the camps as ‘schools’ for Nazi ideology, and many other topics.
Yet the Third Reich was a world of camps in another respect too. Just as
the regime’s de facto ‘enemies’ were eliminated through the use of concen-
tration camps, so the Volksgemeinschaft, or ‘people’s community’, was to be
brought into existence and trained in martial values through the use of
a variety of labour camps for different constituencies: Hitler Youth, BDM
and teachers, for example. Indeed, according to a law of November 1934, the
term Arbeitslager (labour camp) was reserved for organisations which catered
for Volksgenossen (racial comrades) and which were devoted to the honour of
the German Volk. Camps therefore became a necessary fixture of German
life, whether for those excluded from the racial community or for those who
were to be drilled into it. The Labour Service camps in particular became
must-see sites for foreign dignitaries and tourists alike and were regarded by

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Nazi commentators as ‘the best means of making this National Socialist call
for a Volksgemeinschaft a reality’, as Reich labour leader Konstantin Hierl
put it.17 The Janus-faced nature of the Nazi camps meant that few alterations
were required to make a concentration camp for the eradication of enemies
into a site for the education of the racially valuable members of the Volk –
and vice-versa.18 Inclusion and exclusion went hand in hand; the former
required the latter.
With respect to the Gulag, the rather under-developed and partisan
historiography of the Cold War has given way to a far more sophisticated
and nuanced set of works, which see the camps less as the realisation of
Stalin’s dream of totalitarian control and more as a changing set of institu-
tions. In particular, the many different faces of the Gulag – which was by no
means a monolithic institution – have been revealed. With lines of continuity
from Tsarist and early post-revolutionary carceral practices, the Gulag has
been traced by historians from its early days on the Solovetski Islands to the
proliferation of prison camps, labour camps and ‘special settlements’ across
the Soviet Union. Historians have shown how there was no single experience
of the Gulag. From the brutal camps of the Far East and Arctic north to the
camps of Kazakhstan, the Gulag encompassed a wide variety of institutions:
prisons, punishment colonies, corrective labour camps, agricultural colonies,
‘special settlements’ and, after the Stalinist period, psychiatric clinics.
The brutal nature of the Gulag’s infamous sites of Magadan and Vorkuta is
not in doubt. Recent historiography, though, shows that these places changed
over time. Perhaps the most notorious of the ‘camps’ was Magadan in the
Soviet Far East, ‘the capital of the Gulag’. The city of Magadan was the
administrative centre of a region of nearly 3 million square kilometres which
reached from the Lena River to the Bering Strait, an area larger than western
Europe. Magadan’s camps existed because of the area’s gold reserves. Dal’stroi,
Magadan’s penal branch, was the largest entity in the labour camp system. Its
name, an acronym for the Far Northern Construction Trust, was ‘a calculated
euphemism for a ruthless organisation whose wide array of functions made it
the omnipotent overlord in the Soviet north-east’.19 The growth in prisoner

17 Kiran Klaus Patel, Soldiers of Labor: Labor Service in Nazi Germany and New Deal America,
1933–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 1.
18 Kiran Klaus Patel, ‘Volksgenossen und Gemeinschaftsfremde: Über den Doppelcharakter
der nationalsozialistischen Lager’, in Jahr and Thiel (eds.), Lager vor Auschwitz, pp. 311–34, at
327–8.
19 David J. Nordlander, ‘Origins of a Gulag Capital: Magadan and Stalinist Control in the
Early 1930s’, Slavic Review 57.4 (1998), 791–812, at 793.

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numbers in Magadan mirrored the spectacular growth of the Gulag as a whole:

from 9,928 in 1932 to 190,503 in September 1940.
A similar process occurred elsewhere. Vorkuta, in the Arctic north-east of
Russia, became the site of one the largest camp complexes, holding about
75,000 prisoners in 1950. Coal mining began in Vorkuta in 1931 when a group
of thirty-nine prisoners was sent to the uninhabited region for that purpose; it
soon grew into a massive camp complex, particularly in 1937–8 as victims of
the Great Terror arrived in large numbers and thus as ‘political enemies’
replaced ‘colonists’. Although prisoners were sent there to be ‘reformed’,
their deaths in appalling conditions meant that the reality was far grimmer
than the authorities had anticipated. Ukhtpechlag camp was, according to the
inspectors’ own reports, ‘exceptionally appalling’.20 By the end of 1937,
Ukhtpechlag held nearly 60,000 prisoners in an area of over 700,000 square
kilometres. It was split into four separate camps in May 1938. But the term
‘camp’ should not conjure up an image of a small, enclosed institution. One
of the four camps, Vorkutlag, occupied a vast space in which the small
population was not properly divided (‘zonified’) between prisoners and non-
prisoners and in which the civilian administration was more or less indis-
tinguishable from the camp administration.21 Even during the war, when
control over the prisoners was tightened, not all sections of Vorkutlag had
been enclosed behind barbed wire.
Far more than the Nazi case – despite the efforts of the WVHA, the SS’s
economic wing – the Soviet camps were tied to the country’s economy,
proving vital for mining and other basic industries. And historians have
shown that inmates were handled with a great degree of variance, ranging
from those imprisoned behind barbed wire to the so-called zazonniki (‘un-
zoned’), who were able to live and work within a certain territory but were
not shackled or permanently guarded. According to one historian, ‘in some
parts of the Gulag, such as Vorkuta, it was quite common for prisoners to live
outside of the [camp] zone, and the borders between camp and city fre-
quently shifted’.22 Although recent popular histories of the Gulag tend to
follow the Cold War script, describing it as an ‘archipelago’ of isolated sites of
atrocity, this is to overlook the findings of post-Cold War scholarly research.
Certainly there were very isolated camps and being sentenced to a ‘corrective

20 Alan Barenberg, Gulag Town, Company Town: Forced Labor and its Legacy in Vorkuta
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), p. 29.
21 Ibid., p. 35.
22 Wilson Bell, ‘Was the Gulag an Archipelago? De-convoyed Prisoners and Porous
Borders in the Camps of Western Siberia’, Russian Review 72 (2013), 116–41, at 124.

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 Concentration Camps

labour camp’ was tantamount to a death sentence. But elsewhere, especially

in the ‘special settlements’ – which were half way between freedom and the
concentration camp – the situation was different. Most important, historians
now agree that the Gulag provides a microcosmic mirror on Soviet society as
a whole, with the camp system’s waxing and waning following the pattern of
development of the Soviet system in general.
The totalitarian regimes’ use of concentration camps marked their high
water mark, although this does not necessarily justify Arendt’s assertion that
‘these camps are the true central institution of totalitarian organizational
power’,23 since camps have occurred in numerous settings across the world.
In the cases of Francoist Spain, fascist Italy, communist China, Cambodia or
North Korea, or in the right-wing dictatorships of Argentina and Chile, the
spread of camps combined the diffusion of camp ‘technologies’ with specific
local conditions and national traditions. Even the Nazi and Soviet camps
were not particularly bound to one another. Contrary to Ernst Nolte’s claim
that Hitler’s camps were inspired by a Soviet model, the Germans had
already looked to the British for the terminology and to South West Africa
for the practice, and had also officially named as Konzentrationslager two
former POW camps reopened in 1921 to hold ‘unwanted foreigners’, that is
Ostjuden.24 Russian military officials, too, first used the term konsentratsionnyi
lager during the Anglo-Boer War and the Bolsheviks quickly revived the term
after the 1917 revolution. Perhaps it is in Nationalist China that the evidence
for transnational learning is strongest: the Guomindang was advised not only
by American officers but by General Alexander von Falkenhausen, a friend of
Lothar von Trotha, the man responsible for the concentration camps in
German South West Africa.
In Europe, camps became the standard fare of authoritarian regimes. More
than half a million Spaniards and other Europeans passed through the more than
180 camps which made up the Francoist concentration camp system. The
largest, Miranda de Ebro, opened in November 1936 and remained in existence
until 1947. As of June 1937, they were administered by the Prisoner Concentration
Camps Inspectorate (Inspección de Campos de Concentración), a name which
‘is eerily reminiscent of Eicke’s Nazi Inspectorate of 1934’.25 Himmler inspected

23 Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 438.

24 Wolfgang Wippermann, Konzentrationslager: Geschichte, Nachgeschichte, Gedenken
(Berlin: Elefanten Press, 1999), p. 24.
25 Javier Rodrigo, ‘Exploitation, Fascist Violence and Social Cleansing: A Study of
Franco’s Concentration Camps from a Comparative Perspective’, European Review of
History 19.4 (2012), 553–73, at 557.

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Franco’s camps and prisons in 1940; in the same year Spanish officials visited
Sachsenhausen.26 In Italy a ‘fascist archipelago’ comprised islands such as
Ventotene and San Nicola and held political prisoners. Later, some fifty-two
‘fascist concentration camps’, holding about 10,000 civilians, were set up all over
Italy between 1940 and 1943, ‘directly influenced by Mussolini’s race laws that he
introduced in 1938’ – that is, primarily for Jews and Gypsies, but also for foreign
citizens.27 There are even indications of an attempt to create in 1932 an ‘extermi-
nation camp’ for Italian political prisoners in the Libyan Sahara, in Gasr Bu Hadi,
478 kilometres south-east of Tripoli. Financial constraints meant it was not built
but the idea shows the logic of fascism’s radical exclusion taken to its extreme.28
In fascist states, concentration camps were central to the functioning of the
regime as such. The use of concentration camps in the context of colonial
wars and decolonisation, such as in Kenya, Malaya or Algeria, recapitulated
the logic of earlier colonial wars, in separating guerrillas and civilian suppor-
ters, and sanctioning exceptional measures that would have been considered
unacceptable at home. Several authors refer to the ‘Gulag’ in the context of
the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya. More people were detained in Kenya than
anywhere else in the British Empire, with a maximum of 71,346 detained in
December 1954, the vast majority of them (98 per cent) from Kenya’s Kikuyu-
speaking central highlands. David Anderson calculates that ‘at least one in
four Kikuyu adult males were imprisoned or detained by the British colonial
administration at some time between 1952 and 1958’.29 Kenya already had
a higher number of prisoners than neighbouring British colonies of Uganda
and Tanganyika, but when the ‘Emergency’ began in 1952 numbers increased
rapidly. As part of Operation Anvil in 1954, further camps were built, and the
use of forced labour – contrary to international law – was sanctioned by
Oliver Lyttleton, secretary of state for the colonies in Churchill’s Tory
government. Operation Anvil itself was ‘Gestapolike’, as loudspeakers were
set up in Nairobi and a 25,000-strong security force cordoned off the city to

26 Nikolaus Wachsmann, ‘The Nazi Concentration Camps in International Context:

Comparisons and Connections’, in Jan Rüger and Nikolaus Wachsmann (eds.),
Rewriting German History: New Perspectives on Modern Germany (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2015), pp. 306–25, at 319.
27 Michael R. Ebner, Ordinary Violence in Mussolini’s Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2011), p. 104; Luigi Reale, Mussolini’s Concentration Camps for
Civilians: An Insight into the Nature of Fascist Racism (London: Vallentine Mitchell,
2011), p. 1.
28 Adriano Dal Pont, I Lager di Mussolini: l’altra faccia del confine nei documenti della polizia
fascista (Milan: La Pietra, 1975), pp. 133–6.
29 David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of
Empire (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004), p. 313.

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search it sector by sector in order to ‘purge’ it, a technique that the British had
previously deployed in Tel Aviv.30 One historian writes that the Kenyan
camps ‘were not wholly different from those in Nazi Germany or Stalinist
Russia’ and suggests, more provocatively, that in these camps ‘Britain finally
revealed the true nature of its civilizing mission.’ The slogan placed at the
entrance to Aguthi Camp: ‘He Who Helps Himself Will Also Be Helped.’31
Clearly, a transnational model has some purchase here, although we lack
explanations which prove that the process was a conscious one and which
connect the Kenyan camps to the earlier South African ones. Doing so would
mean taking into account the British role in liberating the Nazi camps and
how that affected British colonial and military self-perception in the context
of decolonisation.
Recent revelations of the torture and brutal rule that characterised the
British camps in Kenya has shocked the public. But the scale of the camp
system was dwarfed by that established by the French in the context of the
Algerian War (1954–62). Algeria was considered a part of metropolitan France,
not a colony, and the fight to retain it united almost all shades of French
political opinion. During the years of the war, some 2.3 million people were
driven out of their villages and ‘resettled’ in some 2,000 ‘camps de regroupe-
ment’ – in other words, a third of the rural population. The inmates depended
on the army for their basic necessities, the hygiene conditions were appalling,
and one historian notes that they were no more than ‘fenced-in tent camps’.32
After 1958, with de Gaulle’s return to power, plans to improve conditions and
turn the camps into ‘new villages’ were announced, but by 1962 only very few
had been built. Unsurprisingly, the camps which were supposed to stem
support for guerrillas – in Kenya and Algeria, and many other examples
from Rhodesia to Vietnam – had the opposite effect. And where resettlement
succeeded, as in ‘villagisation’ in Malaya, ‘it usually did so not because of any
economic benefits it generated for a majority, but through sheer force’.33
By contrast with the lack of interest in British colonial camps, the internment
of Japanese Americans during the Second World War has generated a sizable
historiography. Indeed, this case is in many ways the most disturbing since, like

30 Caroline Elkins, Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya (London: Jonathan
Cape, 2004), p. 121.
31 Ibid., pp. 153, 188 (Aguthi).
32 Moritz Feichtinger, ‘“Concentration Camps in all but Name”? Zwangsumsiedlung und
Counterinsurgency, 1950–1970’, in Bettina Greiner and Alan Kramer (eds.), Welt der Lager:
Zur ‘Erfolgsgeschichte’ einer Institution (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2013), pp. 310–11.
33 Christian Gerlach, Extremely Violent Societies: Mass Violence in the Twentieth-Century
World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 191.

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the internment of ‘His Majesty’s Most Loyal Enemy Aliens’ – German and
Austrian Jews in wartime Britain – here we are dealing with a state interning its
own citizens or residents. Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Japanese
Americans came under suspicion. In the anti-Japanese clamour, this statement
from leading anti-Japanese campaigner Lieutenant-Colonel John L. De Witt
was typical: ‘I have little confidence that the enemy aliens are law-abiding or
loyal in any sense of the word. Some of them yes; many, no, particularly the
Japanese. I have no confidence in their loyalty whatsoever. I am speaking now
of the native born Japanese – 117,000 – and 42,000 in California alone.’34
Ultimately it was President Roosevelt’s decision to intern the Japanese, one
he took on the basis of his own personal antipathy and because anti-Japanese
feeling was generally strong. Daniels puts it down to ‘the general racist
character of American society’.35 Indeed, the decision to intern the Japanese
Americans was made before Pearl Harbor.
The presence of a post office, laundry buildings, a library and schools, and
the fact that internees could receive guests, clearly indicate that camps like
Tanforan, Minidoka or Manzanar were not Dachau. Nevertheless, some
historians are in no doubt as to what to call them:
The most accurate overall descriptive term is concentration camp – that is,
a barbed-wire enclosure where people are interned or incarcerated under
armed guard. Some readers might object to the use of this term, believing
that it more properly applies to the Nazi camps of World War II. Those
European camps were more than just places of confinement, however; many
were established to provide slave labor for the Nazi regime or to conduct
mass executions. I contend that such camps are more properly called Nazi
slave camps or Nazi death camps.36

Whatever we call them, the experience of internment was not pleasant and
the decision to intern Japanese Americans was hardly a credit to a democratic
state. All that really happened was that ‘The myth of military necessity was
used as a fig leaf for a particular variant of American racism.’37 Indeed, the
practice set a precedent for postwar America: at the height of the Cold War
the Emergency Detention Act (1950) gave the president the right to set up

34 Roger Daniels, Concentration Camps USA: Japanese Americans and World War II
(New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1971), pp. 45–6.
35 Ibid., p. 72.
36 Tetsuden Kashima, Judgment without Trial: Japanese American Imprisonment during World
War II (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003), p. 8.
37 Roger Daniels, ‘The Decision for Mass Evacuation’, in Alice Yang Murray (ed.), What
Did the Internment of Japanese Americans Mean? (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000),
pp. 29–64, at 58.

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 Concentration Camps

camps for ‘The detention of persons who there is reasonable grounds to

believe will commit or conspire to commit espionage or sabotage’ (Sec.101
[14]). Daniels observed in 1971 that ‘Any foreseeable use of these concentra-
tion camps will be for ideological rather than racial enemies of the republic.’38
Although the act was partially repealed by the 1971 Non-Detention Act,
Daniels here presciently foresaw Guantánamo Bay.
The liberal countries’ use of camps is dwarfed by the Chinese camp
system, however. Internment in the UK or USA represented ‘an authoritarian
trend . . . in our home life’, as the author of a contemporary study of the
policy wrote, suggesting that the spread of illiberal ideas concerning foreign-
ers, citizenship and national belonging was very hard for the democracies to
resist when the fascist countries seemed to be in the ascendant.39 But in the
communist countries, concentration camps were tools of the wholesale
reshaping of society and were inseparable from the regimes’ economic
plans. China’s massive laogai system remains understudied. Enough is
known, however, for us to agree with the authors of one study that ‘China
endured more than its share of concentration camps during the twentieth
century. Moreover’, they go on, ‘China is the only major world power to
have entered the twenty-first century with a thriving concentration camp
system, which has been commonly known as “the laogai system” [laodong
gaizao zhidu] since May 1951.’ Of course, in China one cannot refer to
‘concentration camps’, only to ‘remoulding through labour facilities’ or ‘re-
education through labour facilities’. The term is freely used by emigrants
who have published their memoirs abroad, as one might expect; but scholars
have also found the term applicable. ‘While considerable variability among
the camps is naturally present in a country as large and diverse as China’, two
scholars write, ‘the living and working conditions in their camps have often
evoked the harshness associated with concentration camps, particularly dur-
ing spikes in the death rate such as the record-breaking famine of 1959–62.’40
Like in the Soviet Union, the laogai system has also been characterised by
the forced settlement of those formally ‘freed’ from the camps. When Harry
Wu returned to China in 1991 to make a film about the camps for CBS, he met
a former prisoner named Zhou. Having served eight years from 1956 to 1964
for ‘counter-revolutionary crimes’, Zhou then remained in Xining, the capital

38 Daniels, Concentration Camps USA, pp. 142–3.

39 François Lafitte, The Internment of Aliens (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1940), p. 27.
40 Philip F. Williams and Yenna Wu, The Great Wall of Confinement: The Chinese Prison
Camp through Contemporary Fiction and Reportage (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2004), pp. 2, 5.

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of Qinghai province, for a further twenty-seven years. He told Wu that one

third of the province’s population were resettlement prisoners and their
families. ‘Their labour’, writes Wu, ‘had been used, he told me, to reclaim
wasteland, construct roads, open up mines, and build dams, not just prior to
1979 but throughout the 1980s.’41 In other words, far more so than in the
Soviet Union, the labour of laogai prisoners was economically beneficial to
the CCP; the goods manufactured by the prisoners ‘are sold in domestic as
well as foreign markets and have become an indispensable component of the
national economy’.42 This is hardly surprising when one considers the
numbers involved. In 1992, Harry Wu estimated that at least 50 million
people had been sentenced to labour reform camps over the previous forty
years and that 16–20 million were still confined in them.43 Thought reform
through labour turned out to be a convenient way of acquiring ‘a dependable
source of wealth’, as Luo Ruiqing, the public security minister, put it at the
Communist General Assembly of 1954.44 Unlike in North Korea, the laogai
system was formally abolished in 2013 but the structure of the system
remains: prison factories, psychiatric prisons, community correction centres
and other forms of extrajudicial incarceration still exist, according to cam-
paigners. As all of the above examples show (and there are many others that
could have been examined), concentration camps not only have a global
history; they are one of the best indicators and symptoms of the nature of the
world ‘system’, if we can use that term.

Conclusion
In 1949, American critic Isaac Rosenfeld published an article in Partisan
Review, entitled ‘The Meaning of Terror’. In this cry of despair, Rosenfeld
set out his opinion that the world had been forever sullied:
Terror is today the main reality, because it is the model reality. The
concentration camp is the model educational system and the model form
of government. War is the model enterprise and the model form of com-
munality. These are abstract propositions, but even so they are obvious;
when we fill them in with experience they are overwhelming.45

41 Harry Wu and Carolyn Wakeman, Bitter Winds: A Memoir of My Years in China’s Gulag
(New York: Wiley, 1994), p. 283.
42 Hongda Harry Wu, Laogai: The Chinese Gulag (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992), p. 5.
43 Ibid., p. 15. 44 Ibid., p. 34.
45 Isaac Rosenfeld, ‘The Meaning of Terror’ (1949), in Preserving the Hunger: An Isaac
Rosenfeld Reader, ed. Mark Shechner (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988),
p. 133.

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What does it mean to say that the concentration camp is the ‘model form of
government’? Surely this is no more than a case of postwar shock? And yet
the recurrence of concentration camps, with states’ ready recourse to them in
all parts of the world in different political, geographical and cultural settings,
suggests that Rosenfeld may have been on to something.
What Rosenfeld captured was the way in which the concentration camp
became an expression of modern states, especially fascist states, at a certain
historical moment. The German philosopher Karl Jaspers wrote that: ‘This
reality of concentration camps, this circular movement of torturers and
tortures, this loss of humanity threatens human survival in the future.
Confronted with the reality of the concentration camps, we are unable to
speak. This is a greater danger than the atom bomb, since it represents
a threat to the human soul.’46 That may be true but it is also ahistorical.
Concentration camps emerged in the early twentieth century as modern
states emerged out of older empires, sustained by ideas of nationalism and
biological metaphors defining the healthy and valuable on the one hand and
the polluting and degenerate on the other.
It is in fact possible to historicise the emergence of the concentration camp
and to explain why, for all the continuities with social and colonial practices
of preceding centuries, the term and the phenomenon arose when they did.
The concept of the concentration camp, Javier Rodrigo reminds us, ‘refers
not so much to a place with a set of uniform features over space and time as
to the status that has been conferred on such a place’. As he notes, concentra-
tion camps emerged in many places around the same time, but with distinct
local variations, meaning that there is a ‘cumulative history’ of concentration
camps, ‘with lessons learned, discontinuities and adaptations to the contexts
in which they developed’. Rodrigo provides a clear statement of the historical
context in which concentration camps emerged in the wake of colonial wars
and the First World War:
The concentration camps symbolized the transformation and radicalization
of the politics of occupation, which extended from the treatment of political
prisoners and prisoners of war to the deportation of civilians, from forced
labour in extreme conditions to the hunger and misery occupied peoples
were also subjected to. Concentration camps also came to serve as a space for
social cleansing and internal politics.47

46 Cited in Galina Mikhailovna Ivanova, Labor Camp Socialism: The Gulag in the Soviet
Totalitarian System (London: Routledge, 2015), p. 191.
47 Rodrigo, ‘Exploitation, Fascist Violence’, 562, 563.

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 DAN STONE

Concentration camps were ways of keeping the unwanted elements at bay

and, furthermore, putting them to use: not only through their labour (which
was rarely very productive) but as a warning to wider society too. ‘The
camp’, Richard Overy writes, ‘reflected political and social insecurities, and
a public discourse of fear, part real, part sustained by regimes built on warring
ideologies.’48 The concentration camp was an expression of the centralisation
of terror, one of the key characteristics of the modern state in the age of
nationalism and technology.
For many historians today, the extraordinary vileness of the Nazi camps
means that it is invalid to use the term ‘concentration camps’ to encompass
both the Nazi sites and those established by regimes in other times and places.
Yet many of the first people to see the Nazi camps in 1945 made the
connection explicitly, as a way of warning the world of the risk of seeing
the Third Reich as a sui generis case. Percy Knauth, for example, one of the
first American journalists to see Buchenwald after liberation, not only
admonished his fellow Americans for failing to do anything about the Nazi
camps whilst they were in existence, but went further and urged his readers
to think through what the Nazi camps meant for humanity:
And even in this year of peace and victory, we have let the concentration camp
live on. We have let it live in Argentina, right in our own hemisphere. We have
let it live in Egypt, where Greek soldiers who a year and a half ago revolted
against a government-in-exile which had oppressed them while it held the
power were clapped in prison by our British allies. We are letting it live in
country after country – in Greece and in Palestine, in India and in Spain, among
nations liberated and unliberated from the oppressions against which, after four
long years, we were finally forced to fight. We wrote ‘Four Freedoms’ on our
banners – freedoms for which men were dying in places we had never heard of;
but now the freedoms and the places and the Buchenwalds have all receded into
the unpleasant past . . . Our measure of responsibility for Buchenwald is not so
great or immediate as is Germany’s, but it is equal with Germany’s responsi-
bility for concentration camps as a creation of mankind. If we deny that
responsibility today, as Germany did when Hitler came to power, we may
find Buchenwald in our own land tomorrow.49

This kind of universalising moralising is not to everyone’s taste. Some may

find Knauth’s argument that all people are to some extent responsible for
things done by a certain regime unpalatable, regarding it as playing down the

48 Richard Overy, ‘The Concentration Camp: An International Perspective’, Eurozine

(2011), online at www.eurozine.com/articles/2011–08-25-overy-en.html.
49 Percy Knauth, Germany in Defeat (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1946), pp. 62–3.

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 Concentration Camps

specific responsibility of those who created and ran the camps. Yet there are
different ways we can read Knauth. He could be warning us not to regard the
Nazi camps as the only manifestation of concentration camps in history. He
may be reminding us that even if they are not as destructive or as synon-
ymous with a ruling ideology as the Nazi camps, concentration camps can
still exist elsewhere. And he might be telling us that bracketing off the Nazi
experience – even if done for valid and justifiable reasons – might have the
opposite effect to the one intended and might allow evil to flourish. Indeed, it
is quite clear that the camps discussed in this chapter are all quite different.
I have stressed the camps of World War I not because they were physically
more like the Nazi camps than were others but because they help us to
understand the ways in which camps became indispensable tools of the
twentieth-century state. That it is nevertheless possible to speak of them
using the same designation – concentration camps – does not mean that they
are the same either empirically or morally. The question is how we
historicise the camps.

Bibliographical Essay
There are not very many general overviews of concentration camps. The two most
interesting methodologically are Bettina Greiner and Alan Kramer (eds.), Welt der Lager: Zur
‘Erfolgsgeschichte’ einer Institution (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2013) and Christoph Jahr and
Jens Thiel (eds.), Lager vor Auschwitz: Gewalt und Integration im 20. Jahrhundert (Berlin:
Metropol, 2013), although the older survey by Andrzej J. Kaminski, Konzentrationslager 1896
bis heute: Geschichte, Funktion, Typologie (Munich: Piper, 1990 [1982]) remains well worth
consulting. More like a compendium is Joël Kotek and Pierre Rigoulot, Le siècle des camps:
détention, concentration, extermination: cent ans de mal radical (Paris: J. C. Lattès, 2000). Two
excellent short accounts are offered by Richard Overy, ‘The Concentration Camp: An
International Perspective’, Eurozine (2011), online at www.eurozine.com/articles/2011–08-25-
overy-en.html, and Klaus Mühlhahn, ‘The Concentration Camp in Global Historical
Perspective’, History Compass 8.6 (2010), 543–61. Useful comparative approaches can be
found in Javier Rodrigo, ‘Exploitation, Fascist Violence and Social Cleansing: A Study of
Franco’s Concentration Camps from a Comparative Perspective’, European Review of History
19.4 (2012), 553–73, which contains many insightful remarks about camps in general;
Jonathan Hyslop, ‘The Invention of the Concentration Camp: Cuba, Southern Africa and
the Philippines, 1896–1907’, South African Historical Journal 63.2 (2011), 251–76; Iain Smith
and Andreas Stucki, ‘The Development of Concentration Camps’, Journal of Imperial and
Commonwealth History 39.3 (2011), 417–37; and Jonas Kreienbaum, ‘Ein trauriges Fiasko’: Koloniale
Konzentrationslager im südlichen Afrika 1900–1908 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2015),
which succinctly discusses the colonial camps’ similarities to and differences from the Nazi
camps. Also worth consulting are Hermann Scharnagl, Kurze Geschichte der Konzentrationslager
(Wiesbaden: Marix Verlag, 2004); Annette Wieviorka, ‘L’expression “camp de concentration”

405
 DAN STONE

au 20e siècle’, Vingtième Siècle: Revue d’Histoire 54 (1997), 4–12; and Wolfgang Wippermann,
Konzentrationslager: Geschichte, Nachgeschichte, Gedenken (Berlin: Elefanten Press, 1999). A recent
synthesis is Dan Stone, Concentration Camps: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2019). A related research project is the University of Leicester’s Convict
Voyages, which talks of ‘The Carceral Archipelago’, online at http://convictvoyages.org/.
On the first colonial camps, apart from the works mentioned above, see also Elizabeth
Van Heyningen’s work, which provides a needed corrective to Afrikaner mythologies, but
perhaps giving too much credence to British good intentions. See especially: ‘“Costly
Mythologies”: The Concentration Camps of the South African War in Afrikaner
Historiography’, Journal of Southern African Studies 34.3 (2008), 495–513; ‘The
Concentration Camps of the South African (Anglo-Boer) War, 1900–1902’, History
Compass 7.1 (2009), 22–43; and The Concentration Camps of the Anglo-Boer War: A Social
History (Auckland Park: Jacana, 2013). See also Fransjohan Pretorius, ‘The White
Concentration Camps of the Anglo-Boer War: A Debate without End’, Historia 55.2
(2010), 34–49. On the Hereros, see the essays in Jürgen Zimmerer and Joachim Zeller
(eds.), Völkermord in Deutsch-Südwestafrika: Der Kolonialkrieg (1904–1908) in Namibia und seine
Folgen (Berlin: Christoph Links Verlag, 2003) and Jonas Kreienbaum, ‘“Vernichtungslager”
in Deutsch-Südwestafrika? Zur Funktion der Konzentrationslager im Herero- und
Namakrieg (1904–1908)’, Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 58.12 (2010), 1014–26.
The literature on the Nazi camps is mountainous. The essential starting point is now
Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (London: Little,
Brown, 2015), but other examples of innovative recent work include: Marc Buggeln,
Slave Labor in Nazi Concentration Camps (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014);
Kim Wünschmann, Before Auschwitz: Jewish Prisoners in the Prewar Concentration Camps
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); Christopher Dillon, Dachau and the SS:
A Schooling in Violence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Habbo Knoch and
Thomas Rahe (eds.), Bergen-Belsen: Neue Forschungen (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2014); and
Jane Caplan and Nikolaus Wachsmann (eds.), Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany: The
New Histories (London: Routledge, 2010).
Likewise, the literature on the Gulag is now huge and far more sophisticated than it was
at the turn of the century. Works which question a simple notion of a ‘Gulag archipelago’
include: Alan Barenberg, Gulag Town, Company Town: Forced Labor and its Legacy in Vorkuta
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014); Steven A. Barnes, Death and Redemption: The
Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011); Paul R.
Gregory and Valery Lazarev (eds.), The Economics of Forced Labor: The Soviet Gulag
(Washington, DC: Hoover Institution, 2003); Galina Mikhailovna Ivanova, Labor Camp
Socialism: The Gulag in the Soviet Totalitarian System (London: Routledge, 2015); Oleg
V. Khlevniuk, The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2004); and Lynne Viola, The Unknown Gulag: The Lost
World of Stalin’s Special Settlements (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Useful Nazi–
Soviet comparisons include Gerhard Armanski, Maschinen des Terrors: Das Lager (KZ und
GULAG) in der Moderne (Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 1993) and Dittmar Dahlmann
and Gerhard Hirschfeld (eds.), Lager, Zwangsarbeit, Vertreibung und Deportation:
Dimensionen der Massenverbrechen in der Sowjetunion und in Deutschland 1933–1945 (Essen:
Klartext, 1999).

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On camps in Franco’s Spain see: Fernando Mendiola Gonzalo, ‘Forced Labor, Public
Policies, and Business Strategies during Franco’s Dictatorship: An Interim Report’,
Enterprise and Society 14.1 (2013), 182–213; Javier Rodrigo’s article mentioned above and
his chapter in Greiner and Kramer (eds.), Welt der Lager; Carme Molinero et al. (eds.), Una
imensa prisión: los campos de concentración y prisiones durante la guerra civil y el franquismo
(Barcelona: Editorial Crítica, 2003), 224–44; and the beautifully written book by
Helen Graham, The War and its Shadow: Spain’s Civil War in Europe’s Long Twentieth
Century (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2012). On fascist Italy, see Adriano Dal Pont,
I Lager di Mussolini: l’altra faccia del confine nei documenti della polizia fascista (Milan: La
Pietra, 1975); Michael R. Ebner, Ordinary Violence in Mussolini’s Italy (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2011); and Luigi Reale, Mussolini’s Concentration Camps for
Civilians: An Insight into the Nature of Fascist Racism (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2011).
On concentration camps in communist regimes see, among many others:
Kate Saunders, Eighteen Layers of Hell: Stories from the Chinese Gulag (London: Cassell,
1996); Klaus Mühlhahn, ‘The Dark Side of Globalization: The Concentration Camps in
Republican China in Global Perspective’, World History Connected 6.1 (2009), 543–61;
Kang Chol-hwan and Pierre Rigoulot, The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in a North
Korean Gulag (Oxford: Perseus Press, 2001); Virgil Ierunca, Fenomenul Piteşti (Bucharest:
Humanitas, 2013); and, although contentious, the relevant sections in Stéphane Courtois
et al., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1999).

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 20
Violence in Revolutionary China,
1949–1963
zhou xun

In 1848, commenting on the quashing of the Viennese popular uprising

against the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Karl Marx predicted the only way
the ‘bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and
concentrated, [would be through] revolutionary terror’.1 Marx’s pessimistic
words evoking the Terror of 1793–4, with its mass executions across France,
took on new meaning in twentieth-century China. After a long civil war, the
Chinese Communist Party (CCP) defeated the Nationalist army and estab-
lished the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in autumn 1949. During the early
years of the PRC, the CCP employed total terror in Marx’s sense: first, as
a means to bring about revolutionary change; then to create a new social
reality; finally to guard the ‘fruits of revolution’ against reactionary forces. In
this process, the use of violence was justified over and over again and became
common coin of social experience in the early PRC. For Mao Zedong and
many top CCP leaders, ‘power grows out of the barrel of gun’ and the
revolution had to be maintained with those weapons. The use of violence
was seen as necessary.
After the CCP seized power in 1949, remnants of the Nationalist army as
well as hostile local forces staged fierce resistance across the country. For the
new and fragile CCP regime, repression and terror were essential instru-
ments to guard their newly gained power while at the same time, to destroy
the ‘old’ and to make a ‘new’ society free of the ‘evil remnants’ of the past.
Together with the counter-revolutionary as well as the ‘bad’ elements, land-
lords and rich peasants were classified as enemies of the people. They were to
be eliminated at any cost. ‘Be ruthless and be tough’; ‘To strive one must kill’;
for Mao there was no middle ground. Common people were encouraged to
take up violence against their fellow countrymen.

1 Karl Marx, ‘The Victory of the Counter-Revolution in Vienna’, Neue Rheinische Zeitung
(November 1848), quoted in Michael Evans, Karl Marx (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 127.

408
 Violence in Revolutionary China

Between 1950 and 1953, the CCP launched the Land Reform in the Chinese
countryside and the Campaign to Suppress Counter-Revolutionaries
throughout China. The top leadership urged local cadres to ‘not fear execut-
ing people’ and to punish those who were too lenient and practised peaceful
Land Reform. Killing quotas were handed down. In 1951, at a February CCP
Central Committee meeting, it was agreed that one out of every thousand
should be killed. A month later, when speaking about the Suppression of
Counter-Revolutionaries campaign in big cities, Mao used the metaphor of
‘blast rain’: ‘killing counter-revolutionaries should be fast and thorough like
blast rain. We must kill a huge numbers of them’, he said.2 Within one year,
millions of people were charged as counter-revolutionaries. They were either
executed, imprisoned or controlled. According to official estimates, 712,000
‘counter-revolutionaries’ were executed, 1,290,000 were imprisoned and
1,200,000 were subject to control at various times. But both Yang Kuaisong
and Frank Dikötter argue that the actual number of executions was much
larger than the reported 712,000.3 Recent archival research also shows that in
in far southwestern regions such as Guizhou and Sichuan where the popula-
tion consisted of a mixture of social and ethnic groups, who were treated as
subalterns or officially classified as minorities, the number killed far exceeded
the quota handed down by the CCP Central Committee. In the heat of
the killing, countless ordinary civilians were stirred up to violence.
Revolutionary upheaval led to turmoil and lawlessness. Some used suppres-
sion of counter-revolutionaries as a way to settle personal scores. For others,
killing became a job to do or, indeed, a habit. In some parts of the country,
killing was undertaken at such speed that there was not enough time to
determine who was counter-revolutionary or not. After thousands were
killed, their crimes, as well as often their names, were invented to pass the
inspection from the party. Physical torture such as burning, limb amputation,
hanging and beating were also widely used prior to the actual killing.4 In
Guizhou’s Huishui County, a man named Xie Caoxiang was arrested simply
because he had visited a landlord in the same village. Being charged with the

2 ‘Chairman Mao’s Instruction to Comrade Huang Jing on Supplement Plan for Tianjin’,
from Western Sichuan Party Committee Archive, file C X1-78, p. 12.
3 Yang Kuaisong, ‘Reconsidering the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries’,
China Quarterly 193 (March 2008), 104–20; Frank Dikötter, The Tragedy of Liberation:
A History of the Chinese Revolution, 1945–57 (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), pp. 85–100.
4 ‘Chairman Mao’s Edict on the Killing Quota, 20 April 1951’, from Western Sichuan Party
Committee Archive, File CX 1-834, pp. 75–7; Southwestern Bureau’s Report on the
Suppression of Counter-Revolutionaries Campaign and Public Security Work, from
Western Sichuan Party Committee Archive, File CX 1-837, pp. 105–8.

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 ZHOU XUN

crime of liaising with counter-revolutionaries, he was repeatedly hanged and

beaten. Eventually he died while his body was hanging on a pole.5 The
violent atmosphere incited fear as well as rage. In western Sichuan, at
a public trial of a counter-revolutionary, the angry crowds jumped on the
accused. After repeatedly beating him with wooden clubs and stones, in the
chaos that followed the poor man had his eyes gouged out.6
In rural China, Land Reform provided villagers with the context to
overthrow the landlords and take over their properties. The sins of the
landlords, as well as of the rich peasants, were not merely being counter-
revolutionary but also being rich. Once the Confucian moral framework
was removed (a common moral and cultural heritage shared by the major-
ity of the population living in China), rural Chinese villages quickly turned
into what Hannah Arendt called ‘the atmosphere of disintegration’.7 All of
a sudden, the old rule of the world had ceased to apply. Gone with it was the
moral balance between right and wrong and between good and evil. Some
interpreted revolution in their own light. In many areas, the Land Reform
turned out to be an exercise in looting others. Hatred began to play a central
role in everyday human interaction as well as in public affairs. Everyone
was pitted against everybody else, most of all against their next-door
neighbours, their fellow villagers. Many villagers took up violence in almost
medieval fashion. In central and south China, for example, under the
disguise of revolution or the Land Reform, the bloody feudal style of clan
fighting was rife. Hundreds, indeed thousands, were brutally murdered as
a result. Protected by the local command of the Public Security Police or
village militia, known as the Peasant Association (nonghui), villagers of one
clan openly robbed fellow villagers from another.8 In addition to landlords
and rich peasants, many middle-level peasants were also targeted. In
China’s south-west, in Yunnan province’s Zhanyi County, seventy villagers
were tortured to death within twenty days during the Land Reform in 1951.
One landlord was beaten to death simply because a fellow villager wanted

5 The Public Security of Southwestern China’s Report on the Suppression of Counter-

Revolutionaries Campaign, from Western Sichuan Party Committee Archive, File
CX1-839, pp. 227–9.
6 Western Sichuan Public Security Bureau’s report on the Suppression of Counter-
Revolutionaries campaign, from Western Sichuan Party Committee Archive, File
CX 1-843, p. 98.
7 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2nd edn (Cleveland: Meridian Books,
1958), p. 268.
8 The Central Committee of the CCP and the Southwestern Bureau’s Instruction on
How to Carry Out Land Reform and Tax Collection Work, from Western Sichuan
Party Committee Archive, File CX 1-882, p. 16.

410
 Violence in Revolutionary China

his trousers.9 In Guizhou province’s Wuchuan County, a region with

a predominantly Miao and Gelao ethnic population, a 70-year-old local
peasant Zhang Baoshan was butchered in the Land Reform in 1951 after
he had been falsely classified as a landlord. His two sons sought revenge for
their father’s death. One son was caught and hacked to death with an axe by
two fellow villagers; the other son Zhang Ren’an was besieged by a group
of revolutionary activists in the village and then hanged. After Zhang
Ren’an’s death, they chopped off his tongue and sexual organ and burned
his body. The rest of the family were also arrested and brutally tortured by
local cadres and villagers.10 In some cases, the party had to intervene to save
landlords from sheer butchery, though killing and looting were allowed as
long as they were done in what, according to the authority, was labelled
a civilised manner. In southern Sichuan’s Zizhong County, for example,
during the Land Reform more than 400 people were beaten to death within
ten days. Most of those being killed were not landlords or counter-
revolutionaries. They were beaten to death simply because someone else
in the village hated or envied them. When the local authority was alarmed
at the seriousness of the situation, instead of mediating, they instructed
villagers: ‘Don’t kill anyone in broad daylight.’ In other words, killing was
allowed as long as it was done secretly or in the dark.11 In parts of
Guangdong, which were historically the base for revolutionary guerrilla
fighters, after Mao issued instruction to speed up the pace of Land Reform,
killing had become so uncontrollable that eventually its extent alarmed
even the CCP Committee.12
For some local officials, the use of violence also became a habit, an
obligation or a pathway to promotion. A student from the elite Tsinghua
University in Beijing sent to the south to assist Land Reform and tax collec-
tion was so shocked by the sheer scale of violence in the countryside that he
wrote a letter to the Beijing Municipal Government raising serious concerns.
According to him some village officials in rural Zhejiang tortured people
routinely in order to secure their position: they arrested or tortured villagers
when they could not collect enough grain to meet the government’s tax
quota. When being challenged, they replied: ‘Our job is to meet the target.

9 Ibid., pp. 16, 21, 156–8, 284–5. 10 Ibid., pp. 127–8.

11 The Central Committee of the CCP and the Southwestern Bureau’s Instruction on
How to Carry Out Land Reform and Tax Collection Work, from Western Sichuan
Party Committee Archive, File C X1-884, pp. 32, 38–9.
12 The Central Committee of the CCP Instruction Regarding the Problems during the
Land Reform, from Western Sichuan Party Committee Archive, File C X1-886, p. 6.

411
 ZHOU XUN

We will have remorse later.’ As a result, the majority of villagers lived in fear
and horror. ‘What kind of revolution is that?’, this student asked.13
As landlords were being killed or arrested, their properties were to be
‘distributed’. Villagers, encouraged by local officials, rushed to chop down
trees as they now belonged to the public. The logs were sold for profit to
boost local funds. The authority tried to stop the unrestricted logging, leading
to violent clashes with villagers. In addition, villagers from different villages
fought each other to secure more logs, thus more profits. This often led to
further bloodshed.14
Such violence was ubiquitous in regions of mixed populations such as in
Gansu and Ningxia, where since the Manchu conquest in the eighteenth
century the ethnic Hui and the Han lived next door to each other under
imperial rule. On the eve of Communist Liberation, their fragile or (perhaps)
artificial sense of solidarity – ‘All under the Heaven’ as it was labelled in
imperial China – evaporated. As happened with Serbs and Croats in the
former Yugoslavia in the late 1980s, ethnic hatred and violence soon fol-
lowed. This quickly escalated into spontaneous pogroms. In Gansu pro-
vince’s Linxia region in the north-west, the local authority fell into the
hands of Han officials who were seconded here from other parts of China.
The local Public Security office too was dominated by the Han. In the name
of ridding the area of bandits, they openly arrested and tortured a huge
number of the local Hui population. One night at the regional Revolutionary
Political Department office, eight local Huis froze to death during detention.
After they died, their bodies were openly abandoned on nearby wasteland.
The incident caused a huge public outcry and a riot broke out. Local bandits
stirred up public anger, and recruited an army of 8,000 Hui ‘rebels’ to wage
a war against the communist officials and armies as well as the local Han
population. More than 400,000 of the local population were implicated in this
ethnic massacre. In the chaos, thousands of both Han and Hui were brutally
murdered. To escape the massacre, some 40,000–50,000 Hui fled to what is
now called Inner Mongolia in the PRC.15

13 The Central Committee of the CCP and the Southwestern Bureau’s Instruction on
How to Carry Out Land Reform and Tax Collection Work, from Western Sichuan
Party Committee Archive, File CX 1-882, p. 21.
14 The Central Committee of the CCP Instruction Regarding the Problems during the Land
Reform, from Western Sichuan Party Committee Archive, File C X1-886, pp. 110–12.
15 The Central Committee of the CCP, the PLO and the Public Security’s Instruction on
Eliminating Bandits and Spies, from Western Sichuan Party Committee Archive File
CX 1-857, pp. 19–20; the Central Committee of the CCP and the Central Committee of
the CCP United Front’s Instruction on Works in the Ethnic Regions, from Western
Sichuan Party Committee Archive, CX 1-879, pp. 3–7.

412
 Violence in Revolutionary China

In Gansu province’s Guiyuan, now under the administration of Ningxia

Hui autonomous region, ethnic conflicts dated back to the warlord era (1916–
28). After the communist Liberation, to reduce financial and administration
burdens, the region was forced to become integrated with another nearby
region. The majority of the local population, both the Han and the Hui,
refused the amalgamation. A major revolt broke out. The populace tried to
disarm the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) soldiers. In the chaos that
followed, some PLA soldiers killed one of the civilians. This stirred up further
violence. The civilians turned on the regional CCP head. After repeatedly
kicking and beating him, they tied him up and used him as a bargaining chip
to deal with the authorities. When the authorities refused to listen to their
appeal, they turned on each other: the Huis took up violence against the
Hans, and the Hans seized weapons to kill the Huis.16
In China’s far south-west, prior to the communist Liberation, Xikang
province, now part of Sichuan, had been the territory controlled by the
warlord Liu Wenhui. Historically on the periphery between the Chinese
empire and the Himalayan kingdom of Tibet, the region was of strategic
importance both militarily and commercially. In the eighteenth century the
Manchu had conquered and pacified these regions. After the end of imperial
rule, it fell into the iron grip of the warlord. During the Manchu rule, as under
the warlord, the Han Chinese and the Tibetans as well as some nomadic
tribes were integrated. They traded with each other as well as married each
other. Prior to any substantial settlement, the nomadic Lolo tribes had been
moving back and forth in these regions, and occupied different hills. Trade in
merchant goods as well as opium allowed settlements to flourish. The Lolo
tribes soon learnt that they could make a living from the Han and Tibetan
merchants, as the caravans had to pass through their hills. From the late
nineteenth century, an increasing number of Han villagers moved there to
cultivate the cash-rich opium crops, as the Manchu government imposed
a ban on opium in the Chinese heartland. These Han villagers rented hills
from the Lolo tribes on which to grow opium, and in return they paid the
Lolos in silver, food and sometimes weapons. This was not without conflict,
but there was a general understanding and agreement between all groups
that as long as the Han and the Tibetans kept the Lolo supplied with silver,
food and weapons, the Tibetans and the Han were allowed to trade and the
latter to grow their opium. This continued to be the case after the warlord

16 The Central Committee of the CCP and theThe Central Committee of the CCP United
Front’s Instruction on Works in the Ethnic Regions, from Western Sichuan Party
Committee Archive, File CX 1-879, pp. 15–16.

413
 ZHOU XUN

Liu Wenhui took over the region. Liu was one of the ‘opium lords’, who
profited greatly from the illicit drug trade. Under him opium became the
major life blood for the region.
The communist Liberation, however, broke down the existing harmony
resulting from the economic system in the region. The new freedom became
an open invitation to violence. As soon as the former ruler – the warlord – was
obliterated, so too were the old rules. Now the warlord was gone, lawlessness
prevailed. Bandits – many of them opium lords – as well as remnants of the
Nationalist army took advantage of the situation, threatening the CCP authority
as well as the civilian population. To rid the region of bandits was also
interpreted as a call to rid the area of opium, suppressing the opium trade. As
the opium fields were wiped out, the new communist authority also hunted
down all opium farmers and traders. The Lolo, who were the previous posses-
sors of the hills and had weapons, were classified either as landlords or as
counter-revolutionary bandits. To start with, the Lolo understood this as mean-
ing that the Han had broken the rules governing their relationship. In response,
they blocked trading routes, looted caravans carrying essential supplies and
massacred the Han villagers. Fearing for their lives, and in panic, the remaining
Han population began to flee. Zhaojue, the capital of Xikang, turned to total
chaos. Instead of mediating between these different groups, the CCP officials,
most of them Han from elsewhere in China, began treating all of the Lolo tribal
chiefs as bandits.17 As these tribal chiefs were arrested or beheaded, the different
Lolo tribes were reorganised into one single group with the new ethnic label ‘Yi’.
As Yi, these different tribes came under the new leadership of the CCP, with
Mao as their supreme head. Ethnic hatred, previously unknown in the region,
became a living reality. The chaos soon spread across Xikang. It continued into
the late 1950s. Although Xikang was merged to become part of Sichuan province
after 1955, it took nearly ten years for the CCP finally to consolidate its rule in the
region. In the process, the CCP authority gradually isolated the Yi population
into the hills around Zhaojue. The Lolos, the former possessors of a range of
different hills, had since been turned into a permanent underclass with their new
ethnic label Yi.
The ever-growing chaos in Xikang, as well as its geographic position
at the periphery of China, provided the authorities with a further con-
text for introducing a hard-line approach. In 1954, in two villages in the
suburb of Xichang city – the site of the CCP’s regional authority

17 Xikang Provincial Party Committee’s Instruction Regarding the Suppression of Counter-

Revolutionaries Campaign, from Xikang Regional Party Committee Archive, File
J K1-418, pp. 19–22.

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 Violence in Revolutionary China

headquarters – hundreds of innocent villagers were arrested. They were

interrogated and tortured until they were forced to admit they were
counter-revolutionary bandits.18
While the chaos in Xikang, coupled with violence, persisted into the late
1950s, for most of the rest of China both the Land Reform and the Campaign
to Suppress the Counter-revolutionary had almost come to an end towards
the last quarter of 1953. Violence, however, did not cease. On the contrary, as
the CCP regime began to introduce the national ‘grain procurement policy’
(centralised grain collection system), demanding set quotas of grain collec-
tion from across rural China from 1953, violence found a new context. Many
local officials, who had become used to the practice of violence during the
earlier revolutionary campaigns, took up violence as an instrument to force
villagers to hand over ever more grain. On the other side, villagers took to
violence as a necessary weapon for self-defence. For example, in China’s
agricultural heartland, Anhui province, between 1953 and 1955 more than
32.5 per cent of the total number of crimes were ‘crimes of sabotaging’ the
government’s grain procurement policy.19
Those saboteurs who were caught were charged not according to their
supposed crimes but as counter-revolutionaries. The use of violence against
them was thus further justified. Looting, physical torture and public humilia-
tion were some of the most common methods used. As with the Land
Reform, many officials once again used grain procurement as a weapon to
attack their rivals or to settle personal scores left over from previous eras. In
Xikang province’s Huili County, more than half of the homes were looted,
and many villagers suffered physical abuse. The methods of torture varied
from hanging to beating, suffocation by smoke, and poisoning by forcing
villagers to swallow a large dose of hemp. Sometimes, torture sessions would
last as long as three days and three nights.20
Direct personal violence and structural violence went hand in hand.
As James Gilligan observed, this led to behavioural violence such as
suicide.21 When the pressure to hand over grain and the fear of physical

18 Investigative report by Xichang city and other backward regions party committee,
from Xikang Regional Party Committee Archive, File J K 1-1978, no page number.
19 Anhui Difangzhi Editorial Department, Anhui Local History – Legal Section (Beijing:
Fangzhi chubanshe, 1997), p. 409.
20 Xikang Party Committee’s Report on Grain Procurement Work (1953–5), from Xikang
Regional Party Committee Archive, File J K 1-2173, pp. 50–1.
21 See James Gilligan, Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic (New York: Vintage,
1997), p. 196; for a study on structural violence see Johan Galtung, ‘Violence, Peace, and
Peace Research’, Journal of Peace Research 6.3 (1969), 167–91.

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 ZHOU XUN

torture became too great, when they had been denied human dignity,
when they had no one to turn to for their grievances, many villagers
turned their anger and sense of helplessness into self-loathing and self-
hatred. Some believed it was better to be a criminal than free, as life in
prison seemed a better and safer outcome than being constantly abused
or being starved to death.22 An even greater number were driven to
commit suicide. In north-west Anhui’s Fuyang region, for example,
within less than one month between December 1953 and January 1954,
thirty-two villagers committed suicide because they could not endure
the public humiliation or physical torture inflicted on them by local
officials during the grain procurement campaign.23 Suicide was not
limited to one or two areas, or to the grain procurement campaign. It
had become a widespread phenomenon in the early years of the
People’s Republic. Between 1954 and 1955, 512 cases of suicides or suicide
attempts were reported to the central authority of the CCP. The
frequency of suicide among the wider public had alerted the CCP’s
political centre. Although Lu Dingyi, the man in charge of national
political cultural work, who became the PRC’s first minister of propa-
ganda, admitted that the CCP did not like the fact that so many people
had committed suicide, in his address to the meeting of the eighteen
provincial leaders that year he insisted that ‘we should not let this hold
us back. We must have confidence. We must try to think positively . . .
being petrified, lack of control, as well as lack of confidence are the
reasons behind high suicide rates. We must encourage the masses to
participate in our national political culture. We must take total
control . . . If we don’t win them over, they will join the enemies.’ He
urged the provincial leaders that ‘to win them over is to educate them
over and over again’.24
For the next thirty years, ‘thought reform’ dominated the everyday poli-
tical culture of the PRC. As Wang Lishi, a survivor of the Great Leap Famine
told me during an interview, ‘there were just endless meetings in those days.
We used to say that under Chiang Kai-shek there were endless taxes to pay,
and under Chairman Mao there were endless meetings to attend . . . Every

22 Ya’an region’s special report on grain procurement work (1954–5), from Xikang
Regional Party Committee Archive, File J K 1-2174, pp. 55–6.
23 Fuyang regional party committee documents on grain procurement work, from
Fuyang Regional Party Committee Archive, File J3-2–57, pp. 40–2.
24 Lu Dingyi’s speech to the conference of eighteen provincial leaders, from Xikang
Regional Party Committee Archive, File J K 1-3123, pp. 10–13.

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 Violence in Revolutionary China

night they called us out to meetings. Only one or two nights when there was
no campaign meeting could we get some rest. But the peace never lasted
long. Soon, another campaign would begin.’25
In the meantime the national grain procurement policy persisted. In 1955,
the CCP went ahead and launched the agricultural collectivisation in the
Chinese countryside. As with the grain procurement policy, collectivisation
was regularly met with contention. Violence was used as a form of ‘power
propaganda’ to realise the ideological claim in building the new socialist
countryside or the future socialist utopia. While not all local officials accepted
the CCP’s ideological claims, many were intimidated into competing with
each other. To outdo others, many local officials used violence to whip
unwilling individuals into joining agricultural collectives. By 1956, to Mao’s
surprise, virtually all agricultural households in China had been organised into
farming collectives. The use of violence was thus retrospectively ‘justified’.

Violence during the Great Leap Famine

Once the CCP regime had completed or achieved its initial goals of Land
Reform, the suppression of counter-revolutionaries and the initial stage of
collectivisation through terror, the system quickly turned not only against its
stated enemies, but against much wider sections of the population. From the
end of 1957, as Mao and the top leadership pushed for the Great Leap
Forward, the CCP inaugurated radical collectivisation in the Chinese coun-
tryside. Terror and violence were the foundation of the Great Leap Forward.
In the People’s Commune, the new and the highest form of administrative,
economic and political organisation in rural China created to lead rural China
into a ‘communist paradise’, terror, repression and violence were used
directly against the Chinese peasantry, who had been among the CCP’s
most loyal supporters before its claim to power. Organised violence was
practised as a means of total control. The aim was to ‘kill one in order to deter
one hundred’, or, as a Chinese proverb says, ‘Kill the chicken to scare the
monkey.’
From its outset, Mao conceived of the People’s Commune as an environ-
ment without legal safeguards, which operated strictly as a military organisa-
tion, meaning that violence could be practised with impunity. At the CCP
‘Enlarged Politburo Conference’ in August 1958, Mao urged his colleagues

25 Zhou Xun, Forgotten Voices of Mao’s Great Famine, 1958–1962: An Oral History (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), pp. 89–91.

417
 ZHOU XUN

that ‘we must re-establish our military tradition. It is Marxist tradition. Being
boorish is a good thing. It shows we are sincere. Bourgeois politeness is
deceitful . . . an orderly society is built on discipline . . . We don’t rely on civil
or criminal law to ensure public order . . . The Soviet Union used force to
collect grain. We have twenty-two years of military tradition.’26
Echoing the chairman, Tan Zhenlin, the minister of agriculture, reminded
provincial leaders that ‘last year we achieved high yield by giving forceful
orders . . . This year, we need to pay more attention. We must fight with
peasants. Cadres should continue giving forceful orders. The practice of
giving forceful orders will continue for the next ten thousand years . . . this
is not the best method, but it’s necessary.’27
Violence quickly turned into normal practice in the People’s Commune.
As it permeated every aspect of daily life in the People’s Commune, for some
the practice of violence became habituated, or indeed for some an ‘addiction’.
Once made into a habit, the act of violence no longer needed any intellectual
rationale. In Guangdong province’s Huaiji County, for example, within four
days one commune party secretary physically assaulted eleven people.
Villagers called him the ‘tiger’. In their eyes, he no longer acted as a human
but had turned into a beast.28 Endless ‘struggle’ meetings provided opportu-
nities for venting personal revenge. Local cadres used their positions of
power to extract as much benefit for themselves as possible, while punishing
anyone they disliked or with whom they disagreed. Villagers were also
encouraged to ‘struggle’ against each other, and in some cases even family
members fought one another. In Guangdong province in southern China, the
practice of violence had reached an unprecedented level. As mentioned
earlier, Guangdong has a long revolutionary tradition. The CCP was extre-
mely active there from its earliest days, and in 1927 China’s first rural Soviet
base was established in Haifeng and Lufeng counties in eastern Guangdong.
One legacy of Guangdong’s revolutionary culture was a propensity for
political violence. With the People’s Communes, the region’s military tradi-
tion was restored by Mao’s order; oppressive control was revived. Violence
became a routine practice. Local cadres as well as villagers were coordinated
to take up violence against fellow villagers. Most communes set up their own

26 Chairman Mao’s speeches at the August Enlarged Politburo Conference (17–30 August 1958),
from Hunan Provincial Party Committee Archive, File 141-1-1036, pp. 27–30.
27 Chairman Mao and other CPC Central Committee’s Leaders’ Conversations with
Provincial Leaders (1958), from Hunan Provincial Party Committee Archive, File 141-
2-62, p. 148.
28 A report on several recent cases [of commune cadres] violating the law (June 1959),
from Kaiping County Party Committee Archive, File 3-A0.09-80, p. 5.

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 Violence in Revolutionary China

prisons or labour camps. These were called ‘little prisons’. Commune or

brigade officials, as well as villagers, could arrest anyone they disliked by
labelling them potential ‘saboteurs’ and put them in these little prisons. They
needed no warrants. They only had to frame it as if they were supporting the
party ‘general line’ or the People’s Commune. In Taishan County, one
woman in her sixties suffered poor health. When she asked for permission
to be absent from a commune’s celebration meeting, the local cadre force-
fully brought her to the meeting, where she came close to death spitting
blood. In one commune, more than seventy villagers were locked up in the
commune labour camp. Their crimes were that they were ‘disobedient’ and
‘wilful’. When the number of arrests had become so extensive that there was
no longer any room to accommodate them, they were crowded into village
toilets. Those under arrest were routinely tortured, beaten and hanged.
Common methods of torture included whipping with sticks; administering
electric shocks; pouring boiling water over their heads; using red-hot metal to
burn faces or bodies; forcing prisoners to kneel for long hours; mutilation
such as scalping or chopping off ears; medieval style humiliations such as
tattooing. In one commune in Luoding County, nearly a hundred villagers
were clubbed to death.29
As the People’s Commune, the CCP’s so called ‘bridge to communist
paradise’, descended into the ‘people’s hell’, grain production plummeted. As
of spring 1959 a severe famine took hold across rural China. The procurement
system for the acquisition of grain and other agricultural products broke
down across large sections of the country. But crop failure and famine
conflicted with the state’s utopian vision of abundance. Mao and many top
CCP leaders determined to win ‘the war’. On 22 February 1959, in a letter to
provincial leaders, Mao suggested that the food shortage was a conspiracy:
the peasants were hiding grain and this was due to corruption at the local
level. To ‘take back the countryside’ and to ‘educate the peasants’, he gave
orders for the launch of the ‘Anti-Hiding Campaign’. A month later, at a top
CCP leaders’ meeting in Shanghai (25 March to 1 April), Mao again urged the
leadership to ‘be relentless’ towards the peasants and to procure ‘a third’ of
the total crop produced.30
The nationwide Anti-Hiding Campaign soon turned into another crusade
against peasants. Under pressure from their superiors, provincial leaders

29 A report on several recent cases [of commune cadres] violating the law (June 1959),
from Kaiping County Party Committee Archive, File 3-A0.09-80, pp. 5–6, 42.
30 Chairman Mao’s words at the Shanghai Conference (25 March 1959), from Gansu
Provincial Party Committee Archive, File 91-18-494, pp. 44–8.

419
 ZHOU XUN

turned on those at the level immediately below them. As the popular Chinese
saying goes, ‘The big fish eats the small fish, the small fish eats the little
shrimp, and the little shrimp eats nothing but sand.’ At the local level, cadres
made up false production figures showing praiseworthy success. This led to
the ever-increasing procurement quotas based on the false figures. When
they failed to procure the projected amounts, local cadres forced starving
peasants to hand over their very last kernels of grain and to work day and
night in scorching summer and freezing winter. Anyone who did not follow
orders was severely punished. Many were tortured or starved to death. In
some counties in Shandong province, villagers caught hiding grain were
treated as saboteurs or ‘American devils’. In Dan County, more than one
third of the families were looted. Local villagers commented that the CCP
policy was worse than the wartime Japanese army’s Three All Policy (burn
all, kill all and loot all). In Juye County, when one female villager asked
for leave to take care of her sick child, the brigade head refused by saying: ‘If
he dies we could save 180 kg of grain, and his corpse could be used as
fertiliser.’31
In the aftermath of the CCP’s Lushan Plenum in late July and early
August 1959, Mao silenced the critical voices of the Great Leap Forward
within the CCP leadership, and pushed the campaign even harder. Violence
intensified across the countryside. At the local level, public meetings became
the platform for the promotion of terror and the site for decisions about its
execution. A mass campaign, engineered by the Party under the Three Red
Banners (Socialist Construction, the Great Leap Forward and the People’s
Commune), turned into a ‘beating frenzy’. It spread across the country at
terrifying speed. Sichuan province, the proverbial land of abundance, was led
by the provincial Party boss Li Jingquan, whom Mao once called more
ruthless than even the earlier regional warlords. Having reached his position
by being brutal, Li was keen to take up the public practice of mass violence
for his own career interests. Early in the spring in 1959, serious food shortages
afflicted the Sichuan countryside. But Li was only interested in receiving
continuous praise from top CCP leaders in Beijing for Sichuan’s steadfast and
generous provision of grain to the rest of country. He launched a ‘Balance the
Books Campaign’ in March to achieve unrealistically high procurement
quotas. This was part of the nationwide Anti-Hiding Campaign, accompanied
by the ‘Rectification Campaign’. Rectification, however, did not clean up

31 Report from Tian Qilang and Wang Ying Regarding the Food Crisis and the
Widespread Problem of Oedema in Jining Region (April 1959), from Shandong
Provincial Party Committee Archive, File A001-01-465, pp. 26–8.

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 Violence in Revolutionary China

corruption among the cadres. It enabled open looting of peasants’ homes and
the theft of the very last reserves of food they possessed. When no grain was
found, peasants were physically tortured or were punished by total food
deprivation. In eastern Sichuan’s Shizhu County, a county not far from
prosperous Chongqing, more than 70 per cent of the local population in
the Xianfeng Big Brigade of the county’s model Huaban commune were
battered during the ‘Balance the Books Campaign’. Here local cadres took
pride in beating villagers up. Indeed special ‘people-beating squads’ were set
up. Local cadres even encouraged children to attack other children. Between
mid 1959 and mid 1961, Shizhu County had an average death rate as high as
60 per cent. While the majority of those who died did so as the result of
starvation, many were also beaten to death. In nearby Fuling County the
situation was no better. Take the Baozi Commune, for example. This was
once considered Fuling’s granary. With its lush green terraced fields, the area
had produced such an abundance of food that over 2.5 million kg of grain
were sent to the state granary in 1958. But in 1959 and the first half of 1960, the
death rate there was as high as 29 per cent. By January 1961 the population had
dropped by 46 per cent compared to 1957. The majority were either beaten to
death or died of food deprivation during the Anti-Hiding Campaign. In
Qinglong Big Brigade, in December 1959, the Anti-Hiding activists meeting
lasted for six days and nights. During this protracted public ordeal villagers
were repeatedly beaten. Some were clubbed to death in the meeting and
many more were severely injured as a result. One former village cadre, an
opponent of the acting brigade head, was so brutally tortured that he was
driven completely insane.32 In Youyang County, an official estimate found
that 359 people had been beaten to death in less than a year during the Anti-
Hiding Campaign. In Youyang’s Longtan district, the local party secretary
knocked out the teeth of more than eighty villagers, and beat one four-year-
old child to death for having eaten a small amount of sweet potato.
A government investigative report shows that he had beaten every child in
the district during the campaign.33

32 A Report on How Ordinary Peasants from Qinglong Big Brigade in Baozi Commune
Were Encouraged to Expose [Corruption] and Seize Power (January 1961), from the
Sichuan Provincial Party Committee Archive, File J C 1-2068, pp. 1–3.
33 Comrade Liang Qishan from Sichuan Provincial Administrative Office’s Report on
Rectification and Famine Relief Work in Fuling Region (1961), from Sichuan Provincial
Party Committee Archive, File J C001-2605, p. 72; Comrade Yang Wanxuan from
Sichuan Provincial Administrative Office’s Report on Rectification and Agricultural
Production Work in Fuling region (1961), from Sichuan Provincial Party Committee
Archive, File J C001-2606, p. 3.

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 ZHOU XUN

Humiliation inflicted as much pain as torture. In traditional China, public

humiliation was used as a form of punishment. Under the Maoist regime it
was an essential tool for carrying out political violence and it was widely
practised in the People’s Commune. In the name of Anti-Hiding, women in
Shandong’s Juye County were regularly raped or publicly humiliated by
being forced to stand naked if they were suspected of hiding grain or could
not work in the fields due to menstruation.34
In time of scarcity, food was a more powerful weapon than torture. Food
deprivation was a common method used by local cadres to force villagers to
work harder or to extract more food. While the total number of people who
died of food deprivation during the Great Leap Famine is a statistic hard to
obtain due to the continuing restricted access to archival material, from those
examples gathered from local archives we learn this was a widespread
problem. Take eastern Sichuan, for example, between 1959 and 1961: in one
commune in Hechuan County 496 people died an abnormal death. Of these,
forty-two were hanged or buried alive or frightened to death and sixty-two
were beaten to death, while 392 died of food deprivation.35
What makes the Great Leap Famine in Mao’s China different from famines
in late imperial China and the brief period of the Chinese Republic is the
extraordinary level of violence that was meted out during this period. In the
pursuit of the CCP’s utopian vision to transform the Chinese countryside into
a communist paradise, it is estimated that 2–3 million people were tortured to
death or deliberately killed between 1958 and 1961.36 Some of these were
buried alive; others were beaten to death; even more were starved to death
by deliberate food deprivation. As with the earlier campaigns, the majority of
those victims had done nothing wrong: some happened to have been born
into the ‘wrong class’, and others simply fell victim to a lawless environment
where privilege and cronyism were the only ways to survive. For most of the
local cadres who committed violent crimes, there was often no ideological
conviction or specifically evil motive. As Hannah Arendt famously argued,
‘the sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their
minds to be good or evil’. When the practice of violence became a habit in the

34 Report from Tian Qilang and Wang Ying Regarding the Food Crisis and and the
Widespread Problem of Oedema, Jining region (April 1959), from Shandong Provincial
Party Committee Archive, File A001-01-465, p. 28.
35 Sichuan Provincial Administrative Office and the Work Team’s Report on the Situation
in Jiangjin (1960), from Sichuan Provincial Party Committee Archive, File J C001-2609,
p. 114.
36 For further discussion on the figure see Frank Dikotter, Mao’s Great Famine: The History
of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), p. 298.

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People’s Commune, it needed no intellectual or moral justification. Like all

habits, it could be learnt over time.
Once they had been deprived of their dignity as well as their rights to live
a human life, some began to live as criminals or indeed even as savages. The
Chinese countryside turned into an even more violent world. Robbery, theft,
murder and cannibalism were regularly reported between 1959 and 1961.
According to an incomplete estimate by the Ministry of Public Security,
from September 1960 to 25 January 1961, there were 30,000 incidents of
gang robbery from state granaries in twenty-three different provinces and
regions throughout China. Railways across the country had become the main
battlefield. Train robbery became a ‘weapon of the weak’, a survival strategy
in time of famine. Starving villagers carrying knives routinely robbed passing
trains carrying grain and goods. In Gansu alone, the Public Security reported
more than 500 incidents of train robbery.37 In Shandong province, famous for
the Boxer sectarian violence at the turn of the twentieth century, sectarian
groups were active again. They put out slogans such as: ‘To have enough to
eat, we must unite together to kill cadres and rob granaries.’ Southern and
south-western China also saw a revival of sectarian activities. There were
regular reports of sectarian followers storming the local Public Security and
furnishing themselves with weapons. Many villagers saw the famine as a sign
that the CCP had lost the ‘Mandate of Heaven’, the right to rule. They killed
local CCP officials and declared they would take over Beijing and overthrow
the CCP rule. To suppress these ‘counter-revolutionary sabotages’ led to
many violent clashes between the PLA soldiers and followers of sectarian
groups.38 In parts of the country, cannibalism became widespread. In Linxia
autonomous region in Gansu province, for instance, where there had been
violent clashes between Chinese officials and the Hui ethnic group during
which thousands were massacred (as mentioned earlier), more than fifty
instances of cannibalism were uncovered in one municipality between late
1959 and the following summer. While the majority consumed the flesh of
villagers who had died as a result of starvation, five villagers murdered
victims before consuming their flesh. One even killed his own younger

37 Zhou Xun, The Great Famine in China, 1958–1962: A Documentary History (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2012), pp. 127–9.
38 Ibid., pp. 105–7, 112–13; Wuchuan Gelao and Miao Autonomous County Gazette (Guiyang:
Guizhou renmin chubanshe, 2001), p. 40; Zhunyi City Gazette (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju,
1998), p. 63; Guizhou Provincial Gazette (Guiyang: Guizhou renmin chubanshe, 2007), p.
451; Shizu County Gazette (Chengdu: Sichuan chishu chubanshe, 1994), p. 25; The CCP
Chronicle of Major Events in Sichuan (Chengdu: Sichuan renmin chubanshe, 1998), p. 206;
Lushan County Gazette (Beijing: Fangzhi chubanshe, 2000), pp. 28–9.

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 ZHOU XUN

brother and ate his flesh. Far away from Gansu, in Sichuan’s Fuling region as
well as in parts of Guizhou in south-west China, cannibalism was regularly
reported. Here again, it was often children who became victims of human
scavengers. On one occasion, a desperate mother strangled her own son to
death and consumed his flesh.39 In Henan’s Xinyang region, China’s agricul-
tural heartland and the birthplace of the People’s Commune, villagers in
Guanshan County told me that every village had cases of cannibalism.40
The systematic violence that haunted the PRC during the Mao era was not
merely the result of a series of unplanned and disconnected events. Violence
was a state weapon used to implement radical political changes aiming
towards a perfect, utopian state that would be free of mass violence. Once
such practices were built into the system, violence became habituated, and
therefore beyond any justification. Before modern times, Chinese society had
been constrained by Confucian ideals, which also limited the ability of the
state to inflict random violence against individuals. This broke down over the
course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century with the decline of
imperial and then Republican rule (and the emergence of local warlords).
This meant that it became easier and easier to instrumentalise violence for
a wide range of purposes, both public and private, under Mao’s leadership.
Thus, violence in the PRC took a wide range of forms and was not necessarily
‘top-down’. From torture and beatings to public humiliation and starvation,
violence became the common coin of human interaction in the PRC. It
became a vocabulary through which state policy was seen as validated and
thus also became simultaneously a means by which individual interests and
desires could be fulfilled. The PRC under Mao’s leadership became defined
by violence at every level, well exceeding Marx’s pessimistic view of the
nature of revolution in 1848.

Bibliographical Essay
Until the 1990s, because of restricted access to the Party archives and other essential
primary sources, there had been no in-depth analysis that had scrutinised violence in
revolutionary China. Scholars studying the history of the PRC, who relied on the
published works, could do little more than provide a broad view that, to a large extent,
echoed the CCP’s official historiography. This coincided with the decade leading up to as
well as after Nixon’s visit to China in 1972, when a group of Westerners, including some
China specialists, took an increasingly sympathetic view of the PRC. They often credited

39 Zhou Xun, Great Famine in China, pp. 59–71.

40 Zhou Xun, Forgotten Voices of Mao’s Great Famine, pp. 258–60.

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 Violence in Revolutionary China

the CCP with establishing a stable government after decades of war and political turmoil.
This began as a counter-trend that quickly gained momentum in the wake of the Vietnam
War. This positive image of the Chinese communist revolution and the achievements in
the PRC was a useful weapon in their criticism aimed against America’s military
aggression in South-East Asia. After the death of Mao, however, in the late 1970s and
early 1980s the stories of persecution of intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution years
(1966–76) began to challenge this earlier positive image. The background for this was the
1981 Chinese Communist Party Central Committee’s (CPCC) ‘Resolution on Certain
Questions in the History of our Party’ that divided the history of the PRC into pre- and
post-1957. In this modified version of Chinese historiography, the years before 1957 were
depicted as the ‘Golden Years’ of the PRC, during which the CCP and the PRC
government had successfully accomplished peaceful Land Reform and embarked on the
First Five-Year Plan that foreshowed the rapid and non-violent agricultural collectivisation
from 1955 to 1956. Western as well as Chinese scholarship quickly adopted the CPCC’s 1957
division. This was further supported by an increasing number of autobiographical and
fictional texts on the Cultural Revolution that were published in and outside of China.
They reinforced the official view that the Cultural Revolution was the disastrous period of
the PRC history and that the years before it were ‘Golden Years’.
This position began to change in 1989 when the news of armed violence against
unarmed students on Tiananmen Square shocked the world. Gradually, in the 1990s,
a bleaker picture of the pre-1957 PRC history began to appear. An increasing number of
Chinese as well as Western scholars began to challenge the image of the pre-1957 ‘Golden
Years’. In the 1990s, in part triggered by similar developments in the former Soviet Union
and its east European ex-satellites, changes took place in the PRC archives. The 1990 new
archival regulation (revised in May 1999) theoretically made documents more than thirty
years old available for public access. In practice, however, a great number of documents
were and still are classified as ‘unsuitable’ for public access and remain as ‘closed’ files.
After autumn 2012, greater restrictions were introduced by the State Archives
Administration of China (SAAC), which made it difficult for researchers to read
documents from the period of 1949 to 1979. The short window of openness between the
1990s and 2012, however, allowed Chinese as well as Western scholars in the humanities
and social sciences access to a great mass of declassified original Party and other sources on
the PRC’s first three decades. This newly unearthed information, often in conjunction
with newly available documentary materials in other countries, transformed the ability to
study, understand and explain the social, economic and political history of the PRC under
Mao. This resulted in a far more critical view of the Chinese communist revolution and
the early PRC history. In this reappraisal, we learn that coercion and violence existed
throughout the Mao era from the early PRC to the end of the Cultural Revolution.
Edward Friedman, Paul G. Pickowicz and Mark Selden’s Revolution, Resistance, and Reform
in Village China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), for example, showed that
during and after the Great Leap Famine (1958–62), intra- and inter-village clashes erupted
and spilled over into violence. This continued into the Cultural Revolution, when violence
peaked throughout the countryside. At the same time, Yang Kuisong’s ‘Reconsidering the
Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries’, China Quarterly 193 (2008), 104–20,
allowed readers in English to see how violence was an essential tool used by the CCP
regime to maintain its fragile power in the early 1950s after the communist Liberation.

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 ZHOU XUN

Frank Dikötter’s major history of the Great Leap Famine, Mao’s Great Famine: The History
of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), argued that violence
was the very foundation of the Great Leap Forward. There was widespread violence on
the local level throughout the famine period. The argument presented by Dikötter was
further reinforced by Zhou Xun’s companion volumes. Using first-hand oral interviews
with survivors as well as previously unseen Party archival documents, Zhou Xun’s
Forgotten Voices of Mao’s Great Famine: An Oral History (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2013) and The Great Famine of China, 1958–62: A Documentary History (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2012) allowed readers to see for themselves that the sheer extremity
of violence that took place during the Great Leap Forward famine was beyond doubt.

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 21
Anti-Communist Violence in Indonesia,
1965–1966
gerry van klinken

On 23 May 1965, the immensely popular President Sukarno addressed 120,000

enthusiastic communists cramming the national stadium. The 45th anniver-
sary celebrations for the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) looked like
a national holiday. Five months later, all those people were being hunted
down in a nationwide campaign to exterminate the PKI. By mid 1966, about
half a million people were dead, many more had been imprisoned without
trial, and still more had lost civil rights. The biggest communist party outside
the communist bloc disappeared almost overnight, as did its affiliated pea-
sant, labour, women’s and intellectuals’ organisations. It was the worst
political violence to take place in this country since its war of national
liberation in the late 1940s. How could this happen? Where anti-communist
pogroms in, for example, Spain, El Salvador or Guatemala had followed
significant communist violence, this had hardly been the case in Indonesia.
Yet where military violence against leftists in, for example, Argentina or
Thailand took place with little popular support, many Indonesians seemed to
endorse it.
Within Indonesia, the ‘crushing’ of the PKI has since then always been
a matter of public celebration. But that this involved murdering so many
unarmed civilians remains a taboo. A militarised New Order regime made
the crushing a central part of its legitimacy. Contrary to the expectations of
human rights activists, however, democracy since 1998 has not brought about
a change of narrative. The tenacity of denial suggests that statist explanations
do not do justice to reality. As one experienced student of the episode has put
it, the central dilemma facing scholars remains what it has been for many
years: determining ‘the relative importance of army initiative and local
tension’.1

1 Robert Cribb, ‘Genocide in Indonesia, 1965–66’, Journal of Genocide Research 3.2 (2001),
219–39, at 235.

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 GERRY VAN KLINKEN

On the one hand, growing evidence indicates that nearly all the killings
were coordinated by the military. Earlier accounts that attributed a large
proportion of deaths to uncontrolled violence by outraged religious militias
and other independent civil groups are increasingly discredited. In reality
most victims were taken to their deaths out of military detention centres.
Rather than the work of frenzied mobs, these were mass disappearances.2
Where soldiers did not kill the victims themselves, they signed them out for
murder to their stooges, who put them to death at military-controlled sites.
The militias carried out their gruesome work with evident enthusiasm, but
they still acted under military orders. These discoveries take the story out of
the realm of popular outrage – where New Order propaganda always placed
it – into that of military planning.
Within the technical constraints of a Third World state, the soldiers did an
effective job of (a) disposing of large numbers of communist sympathisers in
a short time; (b) ensuring they (the soldiers) would not be blamed for it
afterwards; and (c) fixing an impression of unspecified terror permanently in
the public mind. Radio broadcasts immediately created a warlike atmosphere
that justified extreme violence; local officers forced political party represen-
tatives to sign off on death lists. Afterwards, military teams toured rural areas
to survey political affiliation and run indoctrination sessions. In the longer
term, military censors checked that news media and school textbooks rein-
forced the effect of terror created by the half-secret killing campaign. Even
today, military-backed militias remain available to intimidate human rights
groups intent on honouring or exhuming victims. The garrison system that
made this possible – heavy on intelligence capabilities – remains in place,
though the system of seconding (retired) military officers to key senior
government positions is mostly gone.
On the other hand, there is no doubt that social involvement in the killings
was substantial. Civilians enthusiastically took part in killing people for local
reasons – prestige, envy, payback, even fun. This adds complexity and even
‘multi-causality’ to the story.3 Civilians provided the death lists, and the
labour to do much of the dirty work with them in hand. Afterwards they
created the stigma that still attaches to survivors today. They helped to stifle
incipient signs of a backlash to the violence, and to block questioning of the
military account (or rather denial) of it. Two decades after the end of the New

2 John Roosa, ‘The State of Knowledge about an Open Secret: Indonesia’s Mass
Disappearances of 1965–66’, Journal of Asian Studies 75.2 (2016), 281–97.
3 Christian Gerlach, Extremely Violent Societies: Mass Violence in the Twentieth-Century World
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 43.

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 Anti-Communist Violence in Indonesia

Order, Indonesia is rightly praised for its successful democratic transition. Yet
no post-1998 government has shown more than a passing interest in changing
the 1965 narrative. Like the Armenian genocide in Turkey, denial remains
part of the Indonesian national orthodoxy. Maintaining a belief of this nature
requires civilian complicity.
This chapter is divided into four parts. The first reviews three theoretical
approaches that have inspired explanations for the 1965 killings, evaluating
them in terms of their success at dealing with the state and society question.
The next two sections apply the best of them, a contentious politics
approach, to the problem at hand. One of these, the second, sketches the
context before a marked turning point in 1963; the third reconstructs an arc of
escalating tension, climax and de-escalation over the subsequent three to four
crucial years. A fourth section ends the chapter with observations on the
nature of state–society relations that produced mass violence in Indonesia in
this period.

Three Approaches
Behaviourism was popular in social science work on violence at the time that
the Indonesian events occurred. Its instinct that violence arises from the
irrationality of the crowd found vindication in the nightmarish quality of the
atrocities being committed there. The accounts written under its influence
speak of ‘extraordinary popular savagery . . . mainly along the primordial
lines’, and of ‘a nation running amok . . . the mob on the one hand, and the
army on the other’.4 Exotic Asian emotions were part of the picture. Pulitzer
Prize-winning journalist John Hughes wrote of ‘the sudden boiling over of
resentment against the Communists’.5
Samuel Huntington soon after this drew a recommendation from the
spectre of a society breaking down into anomic violence: ‘the soldier as
institution-builder’.6 Hobbes’s epigram – ‘when nothing else is turned up,
clubs are trumps’ – summed up the 1960s and 1970s argument for prioritising
strong state institutions over social mobilisation. By the 1980s and 1990s,
however, this argument came under pressure from a human rights

4 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 282;
Anthony Reid, To Nation by Revolution: Indonesia in the 20th Century (Singapore: NUS
Press, 2011 [1968]), p. 190.
5 John Hughes, Indonesian Upheaval (New York: Fawcett, 1967), p. 152.
6 Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1968), p. 237.

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 GERRY VAN KLINKEN

perspective. As New Order militarism went on to unleash one wave of

human rights abuse after another – against East Timorese, Acehnese,
Papuans, left-wing students, fundamentalist Muslims, and even common
criminals – the view that ‘1965’ was the nation’s originary case of state
violence became increasingly commonplace. This is the perspective that
has carried the subject into the genocide studies community, with its empha-
sis on state responsibility. Recent studies of 1965 have only tightened the net
around the military.
As the human rights perspective overtook the ‘amok’ studies, however,
the question of ‘the relative importance of army initiative and local tension’
came little closer to a solution. One recent attempt to bridge the gap came
from a comparative scholar new to Indonesian studies. Societies are not
inherently violent, Gerlach wrote in his chapter on Indonesia in 1965, but
they can become extremely violent at certain moments. Mass participation in
violence, driven by multiple motivations, produces tempestuous violence at
such moments that spreads to other groups besides the announced target
group. ‘Neither state violence controlled and manipulated by the military,
nor popular rage, nor the organization imparted by political party machi-
neries and religious groups alone can explain the power of the 1965–66
killings; what was crucial was the combination of all three.’7 Once the
interests of the various parties to the violent coalition began to diverge –
from January 1966 onwards – violence declined. Gerlach was inspired by
Michael Mann’s idea that twentieth-century ethnic violence was intimately
linked to the rise of political participation in state processes.8 In Indonesia, the
PKI had been at the forefront of a massive mobilisational surge over the two
decades preceding 1965. It brought millions into politics for the first time.
Recognising the modernity of the moment was a great step forward.
Nevertheless, merely seeing a ‘link’ between social mobilisation and violence
is not the same as understanding the social mechanisms that laid it. Like
many other historians of 1965, Gerlach begins his narrative on 1 October 1965.
On that day, a small group of left-wing conspirators abducted and eventually
killed six right-wing generals in Jakarta. Seizing on the pretext that the
Communist Party had betrayed the nation, General Suharto seized the
army command and, helped by civilian allies, launched a military operation
to suppress the PKI, with the results described above. The most shocking
atrocities began to occur almost immediately after this date. But beginning

7 Gerlach, Extremely Violent Societies, p. 87.

8 Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004).

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 Anti-Communist Violence in Indonesia

a story at its climax is not usually the best way to tell it. To unravel the social
processes that led to this moment, we need to go back in time to the point at
which the contention began to escalate. At that moment, about two years
earlier as we shall see, key elite actors perceived fresh opportunities and
threats, launched new strategies to respond to them, and in doing so devel-
oped the sharply polarised identities that came to underlie the violence.
Murder on such a scale cannot easily be analysed with conventional
institutional political science tools. It crosses the boundary separating nor-
mal, contained political action and grossly transgressive modes of action.
A third approach known today as contentious politics focuses on both kinds
of action, by all the key collective actors involved. They can range from
a well-established military hierarchy or a political party, to an ad hoc,
temporary local militia or an occasional pact among religious leaders. All
are engaged in strategic action; none can be sure of success. Political conten-
tion has been likened to an argumentative conversation, which likewise
cannot be easily reduced to the intentions of any of the participants.9 The
analyst will want to identify who is making claims, and why; who they say
they are, and why; and what forms their claim-making actions take, and why.
Contentious politics looks for explanatory mechanisms that lie at the
middle level, in between the grand narrative of a single explanation and the
irreducible multiplicity of the newspaper account. It breaks a series of events
(known as an episode) into a limited number of analytical elements called
social mechanisms or social processes. Such elements are robust enough to
serve an explanatory function because they are found in many different types
of contention. An example of a social mechanism is brokerage, which brings
previously unconnected collective actors into a relationship. This can cause
contentious coalitions to expand.
Some of the best work on ‘1965’ was done with such a contentious politics
approach before it acquired the name. Geoffrey Robinson’s study on the mass
violence in Bali dispensed with ahistorical and apolitical anthropological
accounts that focused on long-standing cultural beliefs.10 Instead, it attributed
violence to contemporary contestation within the state. State institutions had
been riven with factional conflict since independence. Local government
leaders had to build alliances with local capitalists and with national political
groups, for patronage and for protection. PKI sympathisers also took part in

9 Douglas McAdam, Sidney Tarrow and Charles Tilly, Dynamics of Contention

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 126.
10 Geoffrey Robinson, The Dark Side of Paradise: Political Violence in Bali (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1995).

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 GERRY VAN KLINKEN

this struggle for the state. They exacerbated internal bureaucratic conflicts by
using state resources to stimulate class consciousness. Dynamics such as
these could be found all over Indonesia at the time, as the following account
will demonstrate.

Context
In order to avoid having to recreate an infinite regression of causal processes
going back to the remote past, contentious politics analysts identify a key
turning point in the story that they find the most puzzling. The rest they
consign to ‘context’. The following paragraphs sketch the context for
a turning point in 1963.
Indonesia at this time was the economic basket case of South-East Asia;
90 per cent of its 100 million inhabitants remained rural and poor. Its
economy had been shattered by the Pacific War (1942–5) and by the revolu-
tionary war of national liberation it had fought against the colonial
Netherlands (1945–9). The young national institutions remained fragile and
deeply embedded in the numerous local societies that made up this diverse
nation. To correct the economic injustices of the colonial era, the govern-
ment promised ‘socialism à la Indonesia’. To the indigenous middle class,
small but largely urban and vocal, this meant jobs for them. But the govern-
ment lacked the wherewithal to disturb the inherited capitalist economy. As
it desperately attempted to control inflation and thus the money supply on
the one hand, while not offending the state-dependent political class on the
other hand, the government from 1958 onwards lurched from crisis to crisis.
The only solution was to slash government expenditure, yet precisely that
was politically inexpedient.
The result was an economy of primitive accumulation in which too much
money – acquired in highly political ways by the well-connected – was
chasing too few goods. Indonesia’s developing economy was ‘marginality-
ridden’: awash in financial and labour surpluses, while the poor remained cut
off from the modern formal economy.11 Financial surplus was the basis for
a politics of patronage through the highly politicised bureaucracy. Labour
surplus disempowered labour. The corruptly acquired wealth of military
generals, well-connected rural landholders, and those within the upper
reaches of the bureaucracy and the political parties created growing

11 Hartmut Elsenhans, ‘The Political Economy of Good Governance’, Perspectives on

Global Development and Technology 17.2 (2001), 33–56.

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 Anti-Communist Violence in Indonesia

dissatisfaction among the rural and urban poor. The Communist Party found
it easy to recruit new members by portraying elite behaviour as a betrayal of
the promise of 1945.
Three phenomena of relevance to the ensuing violence followed from this
political economy context. One concerns the prevalence of patron–client
relations; the second, populist politics that the government deployed to
compensate for organisational ineffectiveness; and the third, the slow growth
of institutional effectiveness particularly in the armed forces.
Patron–client relations began to attract researchers’ attention in the 1960s,
when American social scientists rediscovered Weber and reformulated his
notion of patrimonialism as ‘neo-patrimonialism’.12 They quickly found
many instances of it in Indonesia. From the rural dependency relation
between landlord and peasant to the personalised politics at the highest levels
of the Indonesian military, Indonesian society was shot through with patron–
client relations.13 Everyone, including Indonesians themselves, thought these
relations signified a modernisation lag. Even government officials initially
praised the communist-affiliated Indonesian Farmers Union (Barisan Tani
Indonesia, BTI) for attempting to wean peasants off their dependency on
patrons. It encouraged them to take ‘small but successful’ steps towards
modern, autonomous citizenship.14 One reason that the party ultimately
failed is that patron–client relations proved to be far more resilient than
was then thought. Such unequal relations typically thrive under conditions of
poverty and insecurity.
Populist mobilisation was one of the hallmarks of the period. As in other
developing countries at the time, elites in Indonesia oscillated between
wanting to mobilise and to repress popular agitation. In the absence both
of autonomous citizens and of a smoothly functioning state apparatus to
deliver effective services to them, President Sukarno chose to hold the
diverse nation together by means of enthusiasm (semangat). Nationalist
solidarity had proven a powerful weapon in the face of the colonial enemy
in 1945–9, and he believed it would continue to carry the nation through its
teething troubles in early independence. As the economy began to falter from
the late 1950s onwards, he responded to the inevitable growth of internal

12 S. N. Eisenstadt, Traditional Patrimonialism and Modern Neo-Patrimonialism (Beverly

Hills: Sage, 1973).
13 J. C. Scott, ‘The Erosion of Patron–Client Bonds and Social Change in Rural Southeast
Asia’, Journal of Asian Studies 32.1 (1972), 5–37; Harold Crouch, ‘Patrimonialism and
Military Rule in Indonesia’, World Politics 31.4 (1979), 571–87.
14 Gerrit Huizer, ‘Peasant Mobilisation and Land Reform in Indonesia’, Review of
Indonesian and Malayan affairs 8.1 (1974), 81–138, at 111.

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 GERRY VAN KLINKEN

fractiousness by launching aggressive campaigns against ‘neo-colonial’

Western powers.
The Communist Party was far better at spreading calls to arms than any
one else. All the others were patronage parties with limited mass appeal. The
PKI practised modern politics, based on an active membership and on
practical material issues. Starting with just 8,000 members when the new
leadership took over in 1951, it gained 16 per cent of the national vote in the
1955 general election, and even more in regional elections held in some areas
in 1957. By 1964 it claimed to have branches in every large island, 93 per cent of
districts and cities, 83 per cent of sub-districts and small towns, and 62 per cent
of villages.15
The party had, moreover, a strong interest in building a mutually bene-
ficial relationship with the president. It had barely survived elimination
during the national revolution in 1948, when it had supported a rebellion at
Madiun (East Java) against the national leadership. Fighting between local
Muslims and communists broke out that claimed tens of thousands of lives.
Memories of the PKI betraying the republic at its most critical hour were to
resurface vigorously after 1963. But in the early 1950s, under new leadership,
the party managed to rebuild its nationalist credentials. Socialism was de
rigueur. Indonesia was officially neutral in the accelerating Cold War, but
nearly everyone, whatever their religion, accepted the idea that Western
capital was the cause of misery in former colonies. The party followed the
Soviet united front strategy of supporting the nationalist bourgeoisie. Of all
the nation’s parties, it was the most loyal to the president.
Social mobilisation of all kinds in the 1950s and early 1960s created an
enormous range of popular organisations at the provincial level. These often
represented cross-class collaborations that saw themselves optimistically as
bringing modernity to their region. At the same time, limited state centralisa-
tion meant that these organisations also expressed and deepened locally
specific social divisions. Underneath their (often religious) differences lay
latent class conflict. This was particularly so where agrarian capitalism had
penetrated deeply, such as in East Java and North Sumatra.
Institutional effectiveness, the third contextual phenomenon to consider
here, was low. Elites weakened it by constantly politicising the bureaucracy.
They struggled for advantage, and for control of rents. The military, too, was
affected. Rather than a professional force guarding borders against foreign

15 Guy J. Pauker, Communist Prospects in Indonesia (Santa Monica: Rand Corporation,

1964), p. 37.

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 Anti-Communist Violence in Indonesia

enemies, it had looked inwards towards internal security since its birth in the
national revolution. But as an armed hierarchy it was less open to public
intervention than other institutions. It could afford to contemplate organisa-
tion as an effective political resource even without popularity. Initially,
however, it did not even have a presence outside the major towns.
Especially in the thinly populated islands beyond Java, the state bureaucracy
in general was virtually absent, while political party mobilisation was wide-
spread. The army’s success in suppressing the regional rebellions of 1956–7
provided a major motivation to expand. Between 1958 and 1963 it extended its
network of garrisons to the provincial level, and in some critical areas of Java
down to the district and even village level. In March 1961 it set up a mobile
force called Kostrad that could be deployed anywhere at short notice. A year
later a new army office was created to insert active army officers into every
field of government activity. Senior military officers kept in close touch with
the US Embassy, which worried about Indonesia falling into the communist
camp.
Internally, the military leadership increasingly saw the organisational
reforms as a counter-balance to PKI influence. They saw the PKI expanding
in areas where the army, for lack of funds, still had no presence. PKI general
secretary D. N. Aidit realised top army officers were overwhelmingly anti-
democratic and anti-communist – the reason he sought the president’s
protection – but he believed rank-and-file ‘peasant soldiers’ could be appealed
to.
Despite many incidents of riots, rebellions and bannings out in the pro-
vinces, political contention at the centre did not become particularly antag-
onistic before late 1963. President Sukarno would not permit open
confrontation in his polity. He acknowledged ideological distinctions
among nationalists, the religious and communists, but he ruled that all
should work together. In 1960 he announced that factional struggles within
the government should be resolved through a principle of proportional
representation he called Nasakom (NASionalisme, Agama, KOMunisme).
This prevented open discord, but at the cost of intensifying byzantine intra-
bureaucratic politics. Every government departmental head, governor,
attorney or police chief owed their appointment to factional alliances. The
communists, under-represented in the bureaucracy, stood to gain most from
Nasakom.
Sukarno’s always-belligerent campaigns against foreign oppressors pro-
vided more opportunity for manoeuvring. Each new venture led to yet
another joint military–civilian organisation primed for mobilisation. The

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 GERRY VAN KLINKEN

campaign from December 1961 to recover West Irian (West Papua) from the
Dutch was the first of these; the move from September 1963 to combat the
new state of Malaysia another. Each helped to militarise society, yet in each
the military had to share authority with civilians.
Whenever the military attempted openly to buck the enforced unity and
assert their own agenda, they failed. A coup d’état attempt on 17 October 1952
backfired. In 1956–7, revolts by various regional commands against perceived
communist dominance in Jakarta failed, despite military backing from the
United States. Later in 1957 the army piggybacked on Sukarno’s economic
nationalism and seized the remaining Dutch plantations and other companies,
and in the same year they became martial law administrators in many regions.
Neither initiative brought them much popularity: the first set them in opposi-
tion to the labour unions, and the second to civil society organisations.
Only Sukarno could get away with assertive action. After returning from
a visit to communist China late in 1956, he spoke about ‘burying the parties’,
which, he said, divided the nation. Extra-constitutional acts followed rapidly
after this. In 1957 he dismissed the cabinet and appointed a non-party ‘work-
ing’ cabinet. Two years later he took over the leadership of cabinet himself,
dismissed the elected assembly debating a new constitution, and reinstated
the authoritarian 1945 constitution. In 1960 he got rid of the elected parlia-
ment and appointed his own, arguing that politicians did not understand the
people as well as he did. The military supported these anti-democratic moves.
Then he banned the small but powerful liberal intellectual technocrats’ party
PSI. More importantly, in August 1960 he banned the Islamic party Masyumi.
Both were enemies of the PKI. Many newspapers were banned as well. All
this alienated some upper-middle-class intellectuals in Jakarta, and many
religious petit bourgeois traders in the outer islands. But the political heart-
lands remained loyal, and nowhere did these actions trigger national-level
contention that threatened to get out of hand.

An Arc of Contention
So, what further destabilised the situation in 1963 and created the conditions
for the confrontation that followed? Most observers agree Aidit of the PKI
made the first move. One historian of the PKI wrote: ‘By late 1963, the party
leaders felt more secure and capable of taking political initiatives.’16 In

16 Rex Mortimer, Indonesian Communism under Sukarno: Ideology and Politics, 1959–1965
(Singapore: Equinox, 2006 [1974]), p. 204.

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 Anti-Communist Violence in Indonesia

September he visited the People’s Republic of China. The China–Soviet split

had become open by 1960, and China was eager to demonstrate its leadership
of the Third World, particularly among Southeast Asian communist parties.
Where Aidit had long favoured Italian- and Soviet-style gradualism, he now
echoed Chinese criticism of Khrushchev, who had caved in over Cuba and
whose massive aid to Indonesia seemed to have done the country little good.
In this Aidit was following Sukarno, who, like Mao, had for years been
building his iconic Third World leader status on constantly rising militancy.
Aidit felt politics had put the army on the back foot. In May, martial law
had been lifted, reducing the army’s day-to-day powers. No longer was
armed forces commander A. H. Nasution the most powerful man in the
country after Sukarno, but the civilians Johannes Leimena and Subandrio.
This was a victory for Sukarno. He won another in July with the successful
resolution of the Irian Jaya crisis. Aidit began to speak in thinly veiled terms of
a struggle within the state between a ‘pro-people aspect’ and an ‘anti-people
aspect’. The PKI – never opposed to democracy – put elections back on the
agenda in 1963, thus openly countering hitherto successful army efforts to
postpone them. It felt confident of winning them.
Another motivation for Aidit’s risky move came from below. His party had
drawn millions into politics for the first time, but until now they had seen
none of the social justice it had promised them. In 1960 the PKI had been the
biggest supporter of a new basic land reform law (UUPA). Bureaucratic
wheels were set in motion to implement it. PKI cadres in the provinces
laboured to make farmers aware of their rights. Three years later, Aidit’s
Chinese tilt seemed to be a signal that he had heard them. Having dropped
class struggle as a campaign theme since 1959, he now revived it in
September 1963. Just as loud nationalistic demonstrations against Malaysia
filled the capital’s streets, he spoke of ‘radical land reform’. In December he
urged peasants to seize land without compensation. This went beyond the
land reform law.
Early in 1964, farmer groups belonging to the PKI-affiliated Farmers Union
(BTI) began scattered unilateral actions (aksi sefihak) to occupy and till plots
of land they considered theirs by right. This was a shocking new repertoire in
the rural and small town areas where they took place. Until this point, the
PKI’s agitation had not diverged much from the general tone set by the
president. Its members had confronted foreign plantation owners over land
and labour rights, but even the army had agreed foreign capital should be
tackled hard. Now farmers began confronting indigenous landowners. As
aksi spread from Central to East Java, landowners began to coordinate

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a response through their Islamic party Nahdatul Ulama (NU), a long-standing

rival to the PKI. The timing of the aksi increased the sense of threat. Instead
of serving as vote-getters at election times, land seizures were now intruding
into everyday life.
NU sent flying squads of its youth militias (Ansor) to support landowners
against challengers. Rival groups adopted strident identities, and assigned
their opponents to distinct categories as well. Where organised communists
had until then been seen as little different from other nationalist groups, now
a mutual process of name-calling kicked in that saw them take on distinct
shapes. Groups led by religious landowners and village bureaucrats presented
themselves as defenders of the faith against atheist communists. Their
repertoire of tactics grew increasingly violent. These new repertoires gave
them strident new identities that served both to distinguish and intimidate
rivals, and to embolden followers. In short, the contestation was trans-
formed. Sukarno’s united front was beginning to fall apart into competing
fractions. This is how one observer described the change:
Revolutionary conflict, as a new phenomenon, resulted in a new social
reality constructed by both the PKI and its opponents. The two parties had
to redefine the political arena from a competitive political market (prior to
1963) to a battlefield where political and human survival became the new
stakes. Social interaction also changed, and new violent actions, such as
beatings, kidnapping and killings, replaced prior actions, such as ‘horse
trading’.17

A legitimation conflict lay behind the demonstrative shows of force by rival

provincial groups. Farmers Union members squatting on rice fields felt
inspired by their president’s sympathy for their plight. They knew that justice
had been at the heart of the independence war twenty years earlier. At the
very same time, NU drum marchers in a town nearby felt they were defend-
ing the faith of their community, indeed the entire social order, from godless
attack, just as their fathers had done in Madiun in 1948. Similar legitimation
conflicts were emerging in other parts of Indonesia. In Bali, one observer
wrote, ‘The anger of PNI administrators, landlords and traditional rulers had
been roused by the boldness of the PKI’s agitation in the 1960s.’18 A Catholic

17 Iwan Gardono Sudjatmiko, ‘The Destruction of the Indonesian Communist Party:

A Comparative Analysis of East Java and Bali’, unpublished PhD thesis, Harvard
University, 1992, pp. 146–7.
18 Kenneth Young, ‘Local and National Influences in the Violence of 1965’, in
Robert Cribb (ed.), The Indonesian Killings of 1965–1966: Studies from Java and Bali
(Clayton: Monash University Centre for Southeast Asian Studies, 1990), pp. 63–99, at 91.

438
 Anti-Communist Violence in Indonesia

priest who had mobilised church youths against communists in Central

Flores wrote afterwards of the heightened tension surrounding the prospect
of new national elections: ‘A new authority must be established within
society.’ He had in mind one that was obedient to the church.19
As both sides perceived and acted on threats and opportunities, they
engaged in a spiral of increasingly confrontational actions. To its own
surprise, however, the PKI by September 1964 found itself in a defensive
position in the most religious parts of East Java. One reason was that the
resources that each side had brought to this local class conflict were unba-
lanced. The Farmers Union only had the promise of land to hold out to its
supporters. These were the poor who had not long been involved in politics,
and had no access to rents from the state. Their opponents in the aksi sefihak
struggles, meanwhile, had the material incentives that flowed from rents that
its leaders – NU Muslim leaders and PNI nationalists – were extracting from
the state. Aidit dropped his ebullient mood by December 1964, but his
opponents had sensed success and violent incidents kept occurring in Java
in February and March 1965.
The PKI had overestimated its own strength in the villages. Recruitment to
the peasants’ cause was not bringing in as many new supporters as they had
hoped. Unlike China, Java had no real tradition of rural revolt. Even with
inflation running at several hundred per cent, the economic crisis was not bad
enough to be creating an impoverished rural proletariat. Moreover, they had
too little success leveraging cross-class linkages on the issue of economic
injustice. Middle-class civil servants, army officers and white-collar workers
were still doing reasonably well. This caused one foreign observer to write
prophetically already in 1962 that the nation was unlikely to turn to the PKI
‘by acclamation’.20
The increasingly strident tone of the rural confrontations soon attracted
attention higher up the social and administrative chain. As it did so, con-
testation expanded to the provincial and even the national level and fed into
the elite struggle between army and president. Each side framed the situa-
tion in sharply contrasting ways, aiming to strengthen internal ranks and
attract allies. Military commanders in some regions (West Java, Aceh,
North Sumatra, Sulawesi) identified the problem as one of communists
creating unmanageable disturbances to public order. They cracked down

19 Gerry van Klinken, Postcolonial Citizenship in Provincial Indonesia (Singapore: Palgrave

Pivot, 2019), p. 93.
20 Donald Hindley, ‘President Sukarno and the Communists: The Politics of
Domestication’, American Political Science Review 56.4 (1962), 915–26, at 925.

439
 GERRY VAN KLINKEN

on communist organisations in their regions. The president weighed in on

the other side in June 1964. He expressed sympathy for the farmers’ actions
and asked his deputy prime minister Leimena to resolve the dispute
through mediation. In his National Day speech on 17 August, he said he
was ‘not satisfied’ with the pace of land reform and identified ‘sabotage’ as
the problem, particularly in the communist heartlands in Java, Madura and
Bali.
Meanwhile, on the ground an expanding circle of contestants was being
drawn into the ring. Groups directly opposed to the aksi sefihak had revived
the Madiun theme of the PKI as a danger to the nation. This broader theme
appealed to elite urban groups for whom peasant landlessness held no
interest. By means of brokerage, the new discursive repertoire was spreading
and helping to expand a still rather loose anti-PKI coalition. Students belong-
ing to religious and nationalist organisations, already at odds because their
future careers depended on factional patronage, now took up the PKI ques-
tion as the lens on their differences. On one side was the Islamic HMI, backed
by the army, and on the other the left-wing CGMI, backed by the PKI. They
began loudly to confront each other in May 1964, and in October HMI was
expelled from the national student union PPMI. Polemics continued to
escalate throughout 1965. These were the nation’s elites, many from well-
connected families. The polarising language they each used was widely
reported and helped set the tone for journalists and other opinion-makers
throughout the nation.
‘Show of force’ rallies and marches where these slogans were aired began
to be widely deployed throughout 1965. On 23 May 1965 the PKI invited
President Sukarno to a massive 45th anniversary rally held in the nation’s
largest sports stadium. Aidit announced the party had 20 million sympathisers
throughout the nation. Sukarno told the rally Aidit was the ‘bulwark of
Indonesia’. Similar PKI rallies were held in towns all over the country. Non-
communist parties, who increasingly saw themselves as anti-communist,
tried to follow suit with rallies of their own. Posters lampooning rival elites
appeared on town walls. Muslim religious youths in August and
September 1965 were holding militant drum marches in the East Javanese
towns most affected by the aksi sefihak.
In this polarised atmosphere, marked by agitating popular collectivities
that increasingly saw themselves and rivals in antagonistic terms, national
elites began to fear the other side would strike first. The military feared the
PKI. Army commander Yani had been secretly consulting an informal
‘brains trust’ of top generals since January 1965 about contingency plans

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 Anti-Communist Violence in Indonesia

in the deteriorating political situation. In that month Aidit, hoping to

increase the party’s influence within the armed forces, called for the estab-
lishment of an armed civilian militia. He knew the army leadership was
busy in Borneo with Sukarno’s anti-Malaysian Confrontation (which had
also started in September 1963). The first volunteers began training in
June 1965. More threatening, the generals felt, was the possibility that
Sukarno, president-for-life with unlimited powers, might anoint Aidit as
the next president. He was a somewhat fragile 64 years of age, and lacked an
obvious successor since his vice-president Hatta had resigned in 1956 with-
out being replaced. His remarks praising Aidit at the May PKI rally worried
them.
Simultaneously, the PKI feared the military. The Politburo read news leaks
about Yani’s ‘brains trust’ as a coup-in-preparation. In August 1965, it blinked.
It authorised Aidit to give ‘political support’ to pre-emptive military action by
progressive army officers, leaving the details to him. Inspired by the progres-
sive coup by Algerian army officers the previous June (he had met the
conspirators in Paris), Aidit secretly formed a little group that would kidnap
a number of right-wing generals. He intended that they should be presented
to Sukarno, who would condemn them and replace them with leftists. Street
politics in support of the PKI was supposed to do the rest. The plan was
adventurous, but not a coup.
However, the kidnapping on 1 October 1965 went wrong. All six abducted
generals were killed by their ill-trained captors after some resisted. Not
among those taken was another general, named Suharto. He too was right-
wing but had kept a low profile. Suharto took over the levers of military
power in Jakarta vacated by those killed and neutralised the kidnappers’
group within 24 hours. He then judiciously ignored various executive orders
from President Sukarno designed to limit the impact of the incident. Instead,
he set about using it to justify a nationwide crackdown on all communist
organisations. His coherent, purposeful action suggests he was working to
contingency plans prepared in preceding weeks, even if implementation was
chaotic. Army censors told newspaper editors early in October they were
starting a campaign against the PKI and anyone printing information critical
of that campaign would be considered an ally of the PKI.21 The following
months were taken up with organising and mobilising to seize state power on

21 John Roosa, ‘The September 30th Movement: The Aporias of the Official Narratives’,
in Douglas Kammen and Katharine McGregor (eds.), The Contours of Mass Violence in
Indonesia, 1965–68 (Singapore: NUS Press for the Asian Studies Association of Australia,
2012), pp. 25–49, at 29.

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 GERRY VAN KLINKEN

the back of the destruction of the Communist Party and the isolation of
President Sukarno.
The high command realised the military were unpopular, so rolling in the
tanks alone would not work. However, it believed it could build
a legitimating coalition out of friendly factions in the nation’s peak and
provincial elites, and of course from its own military ranks. The preceding
polarisation had spooked the nation’s factionalised elites enough to make
them listen to a call for united action. Without this, Suharto would not have
been able to solve his collective action problem. Images of the six dead
generals, luridly exploited in military broadcasts, finally convinced them
that communists were a serious threat to their established authority. The
wonderfully unifying effect of popular action on elites similarly created many
other autocracies in the Southeast Asian region during the Cold War, as
Slater has shown.22 Leaders of the devout Islamic community, Christian
minorities, and members of the indigenous entrepreneurial, professional
and bureaucratic middle class, and a Westernised intelligentsia, united
quickly behind Suharto. Western governments, meanwhile, had already
quietly indicated their support for anti-communist action. The US govern-
ment had long envisaged a military-led developmentalist regime as its pre-
ferred option for Indonesia. It committed itself after 1960 to ‘provoking
a clash between the army and the PKI, on the presumption that the army
would emerge victorious . . . Washington [in 1965] did everything in its power
to encourage and facilitate the army-led massacre of the alleged PKI
members.’23
Within the armed forces, Suharto had to persuade or else remove officers
unhappy about the brutal and unconstitutional course upon which he was
set. Governors, some but not all active military men, also had to be per-
suaded to permit aggressive action in their region. All this required skill and
time. Ultimately, the organisational resources available within the armed
forces were decisive to the outcome.
Out in the provinces, Suharto had to mobilise the civilian groups that had
joined the loose anti-communist coalition over the previous eighteen
months. In addition, he had access to a large array of non-ideological
civilian clients who were more or less directly attached to military garri-
sons. Every local commander could call on hundreds of young men who

22 Dan Slater, Ordering Power: Contentious Politics and Authoritarian Leviathans in Southeast
Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
23 Bradley Simpson, Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development and U.S.–Indonesian
Relations, 1960–1968 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), pp. 38, 193.

442
 Anti-Communist Violence in Indonesia

had registered as village guards or other auxiliaries. Various campaigns over

the years had led to people’s militias being set up to recruit volunteers for
possible service in faraway places such as Papua or Malaysia, or for village
defence against insurgents such as Darul Islam militants. All were encouraged
to vent their feelings about PKI treason to the nation. A barrage of radio,
television and newspaper propaganda about the PKI ‘stockpiling Chinese
weapons, digging mass graves for opponents, compiling lists of individuals
to murder, or collecting special instruments for gouging out eyes’, while
entirely fictitious, helped build a ‘kill or be killed’ atmosphere.24
At some point, the young men were given a licence to kill those in
detention. Who issued this licence, and why, remains a matter for research.
Mass murder from then on became for the allied provincials the ultimate
‘show of force’. Aware that the military needed their eyes and ears for local
intelligence, and their hands for plausible deniability, they exercised a reign of
terror in which every neighbourhood feud could be dressed up as anti-
communist righteousness. It was these feuds that, in some areas, gave the
killing sprees an anarchic energy that early observers saw as amok. Yet rarely,
so far as we now can see (and contra Gerlach), was it a case of ‘uncontrolled
violence’.
Organisational exigencies meant that the exact timetable and course of
events varied from one region to another. Wholesale savagery occurred in
rural parts of Java and Bali, and in the plantation zone near Medan. In East
Nusa Tenggara the military mostly did the killing themselves, for lack of
a strong anti-communist civilian movement. We still know little about other
regions of Indonesia.
Some mass executions took place in public, with crowds forced to watch
and even clap for joy. But even when they took place secretly at night – as
was more often the case – a performative element remained central. Heads
were left on spikes, severed penises nailed to trees, bodies thrown into rivers.
The great majority of victims were indigenous leftists (the stubborn myth
that most were ethnic Chinese obscures the class nature of the violence). The
carnage stopped before all the millions who had supported the PKI were
dead. Apparently, the political objective of establishing a new ‘counter-
revolutionary’ authority had been achieved. Allowing unruly proxies to go
on killing risked unleashing civil war. After initially encouraging it, the
military in some cases intervened to rein in further violence.

24 John Roosa, Pretext for Mass Murder: The September 30th Movement and Suharto’s Coup
d’État in Indonesia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), p. 29.

443
 GERRY VAN KLINKEN

Detainees suffered a full array of torture techniques – rape, forced ‘mar-

riage’ with officers, electric shock, displacement, forced labour, hunger.
‘Scientific’ psychological tests designed in the West were used to purge
hundreds of thousands of teachers and other civil servants from the state
apparatus. The military first shut down and subsequently controlled closely
all political party activity. This left them as the sole party in charge of
allocating rents obtained from the state. The religious militias failed to gain
significant prominence afterwards: they had been pawns. On the contrary,
the New Order became a military-led, secular developmentalist regime. It
demanded religious observance as a form of obedience but prosecuted any
who preached theocracy.
Elite and middle-class members of the anti-communist coalition looked
to their military patrons for rewards. The rapidly expanding bureaucracy
after 1965, paid for by Western aid and a fortuitous oil boom, could
accommodate plenty of them. Depoliticised economic planning turned
the economy around, creating performance legitimacy for the new
arrangement.
Censorship of print and electronic media remained tight throughout the
three decades of the New Order. Yet middle-class support for the destruc-
tion of the PKI was largely genuine, despite some discomfort over the
extreme violence it took. A new legitimation discourse dropped the
theme of justice for those dispossessed by neo-colonialism, and took up
bourgeois concerns for law and order, and religion. In this discourse, the
killings in fact never ended. They continued in the form of more or less
subtle threats of further arbitrary violence made on every public occasion.
At the community level, meanwhile, ‘Violence continues to reverberate
through social networks, marking everyday life and molding aspirations for
the future.’25
Indonesian political, social, economic and cultural life continues to pay
a high price for this single violent episode. The principles of non-violent
political consultation were replaced by those of violent authoritarianism. The
political party’s function of forum for popular representation disappeared and
with it progressive programmes of land reform and labour rights.
Emancipative aspirations born out of the anti-colonial movement went
underground. Whole genres of fictional, political and historical writing as

25 Leslie Dwyer and Degung Santikarma, ‘“When the World Turned to Chaos”: 1965 and
its Aftermath in Bali, Indonesia’, in Robert Gellately and Ben Kiernan (eds.), The Specter
of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2003), pp. 289–305, at 296.

444
 Anti-Communist Violence in Indonesia

well as visual and dramatic arts were banned. Even after democratisation in
1998, law courts still have not recovered from the blow to their authority
delivered by the extrajudicial impunity with which the killings were car-
ried out.

Conclusion
By retracing the social relations that produced it, the 1965 violence is seen to
arise within a long arc of contention. Far from being the product of
a momentary encounter between social groups, violence on this scale becomes
comprehensible only if we recover a view of Indonesia as a coherent society,
albeit one shot through with struggles for the ultimate rule-making power. So
what do the sociological dynamics that have emerged tell us in answer to the
question about ‘the relative importance of army initiative and local tension’?
All the evidence points towards a notion of the state that cannot easily be
divorced from society. What Robert Holden writes in Chapter 24 in this
volume he could have written about Indonesia: ‘[I]t is the combined problem
of violence and the state – whose principal function is to administer justice –
that will dictate the course of this analysis, with the unavoidable addition of
the concept of revolution in its distinctly Latin American expression as the
ever-frustrated search for a just order.’ Whether at the national or the local
level, the boundary between state and society is porous. The discovery that
state institutions are embedded in various social formations, captured by the
term ‘state-in-society’, continues to be fruitful in analysing Indonesian society
today.26
The contentious politics approach reveals that the 1965 drama involved
both elite and non-elite collective actors. The popular contention that
culminated in mass murder began with elite initiatives, and this is usually
the case. But popular movements can in turn also influence elite behaviour.
Aidit would probably not have escalated the tension in late 1963 without
pressure from his large constituency of impatient peasants and workers.
The military would not have been spooked by Sukarno’s praise of Aidit as
the nation’s ‘bulwark’ if peasants had not engaged in unruly actions in East
Java, where they triggered religious outrage among provincial elites. This
contingent sequence of events culminated by 1965 in a legitimacy crisis

26 Joel S. Migdal, State in Society: Studying How States and Societies Transform and Constitute
One Another (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Gerry van Klinken and
Joshua Barker (eds.), State of Authority: The State in Society in Indonesia (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 2009).

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 GERRY VAN KLINKEN

affecting both elites (including ‘the army’) and non-elites (provincials

involved in ‘local tensions’). Such a crisis can lead to genocidal violence.27
Those groups that could muster the greatest resources at every level of
the polity won the struggle over the ultimate legitimate authority. This
struggle, moreover, took place within a state that was rooted in a highly
unequal political economy of primitive accumulation. Organisational and
financial resources available through the bureaucracy favoured the state-
dependent urban middle class. This lent a strong class dimension to the
outcome, and justifies the term ‘counter-revolution’ for the 1965 violence in
Indonesia.28

Bibliographical Essay
The Indonesian anti-communist killings in 1965–6 have until recently attracted little
scholarly attention within Indonesia. The New Order regime did what it could to block
research. Even today, two decades after street protests overthrew the New Order in
1998, studies on their how and why remain relatively scarce. Discussion of them has also
hardly penetrated the world of genocide studies. Yet over the years committed scholars
have still built up a body of research. A comprehensive bibliographical guide is in John
Roosa, ‘Bibliography on the Events of 1965–66 in Indonesia’ (Indonesian Institute
of Social History, 2009), www.sejarahsosial.org/2009/09/11/bibliography-on-the-
events-of-1965–66-in-Indonesia/. A focused bibliographical overview is in Katharine
E. McGregor, ‘The Indonesian Killings of 1965–1966’, in Online Encyclopedia of Mass
Violence (SciencePo, 2009).
Behaviourist thinking had considerable influence on early thinking about the
massacres; see overview in Donald L. Horowitz, The Deadly Ethnic Riot (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2001). Some well-known scholars of Indonesia like
Clifford Geertz and Anthony Reid used behaviourist language in the 1960s and 1970s
when alluding to the Indonesian killings, and as late as 2003 one historian still described
them as a ‘vast popular irruption’; Theodore Friend, Indonesian Destinies (Cambridge, MA:
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 99). However, book-length work in
this vein has tended to come from journalists, notably the Pulitzer Prize-winning John
Hughes, Indonesian Upheaval. It has also been prominent in Indonesian accounts that
remain close to the army’s narrative of the period; Nugroho Notosusanto and

27 As one useful though somewhat tortuous definition puts it, genocide is ‘a strategy that
ruling elites use to resolve real solidarity and legitimacy conflicts or challenges to their
interests against victims decreed outside their universe of obligation in situations in
which a crisis or opportunity is caused by or blamed upon the victim (or the victim
impedes taking advantage of an opportunity) and the perpetrators believe that they can
get away with it’. Helen Fein, ‘Revolutionary and Anti-Revolutionary Genocides:
A Comparison of State Murders in Democratic Kampuchea 1975 to 1979, and in
Indonesia 1965 to 1966’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 35.4 (1993), 796–823,
at 813.
28 Kammen and McGregor (eds.), Contours of Mass Violence, p. 11.

446
 Anti-Communist Violence in Indonesia

Ismail Saleh, The Coup Attempt of the ‘September 30 Movement’ in Indonesia (Jakarta:
Pembimbing, 1968).
Most scholarly work on the episode has, by contrast, been consciously political. The
focus of publications that have introduced the subject to the genocide studies community
has been on the consequences of military intervention, justified in the West by Cold War
considerations, in the politics of a highly mobilised, poor agrarian Southeast Asian society.
See the following works by Robert Cribb: Cribb (ed.), The Indonesian Killings: Studies from
Java and Bali (Clayton: Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University, 1990);
‘Genocide in Indonesia, 1965–66’, Journal of Genocide Research 3.2 (2001), 219–39;
‘Unresolved Problems in the Indonesian Killings of 1965–1966’, Asian Survey 42.4 (2002),
550–63; ‘The Indonesian Massacres’, in Samuel Totten and William S. Parsons (eds.),
Century of Genocide: Critical Essays and Eyewitness Accounts (London: Routledge, 2008),
pp. 235–62. See also McGregor, ‘The Indonesian Killings of 1965–1966.’
The political intrigues in Jakarta on the night of 1 October 1965 have been of central
interest. What links did the ‘30 September Movement’ have with the PKI, the military,
Sukarno, or even Suharto? On this topic, refer to military historian Harold Crouch, The
Army and Politics in Indonesia, rev. edn (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988).
John Roosa’s Pretext for Mass Murder: The September 30th Movement and Suharto’s Coup
d’État in Indonesia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006) critically and
absorbingly discusses all previous work on the episode before coming up with his
own conclusions. This will remain definitive for some time to come. The effect of
recent research has been to tighten the net around the military (Kammen and
McGregor, eds., The Contours of Mass Violence in Indonesia, 1965–1968 ; Jess Melvin, The
Army and the Indonesian Genocide: Mechanics of Mass Murder (London: Routledge, 2018);
Geoffrey B. Robinson, The Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian Massacres,
1965–66 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018). Essential background is the
military history of Ulf Sundhaussen, The Road to Power: Indonesian Military Politics,
1945–1967 (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1982).
A good older study on the PKI, at the centre of the contention, has recently been
reissued, Rex Mortimer’s Indonesian Communism under Sukarno: Ideology and Politics,
1959–1965 (Singapore: Equinox, 2006 [1974]). Links between political parties and
underlying religious persuasions are expertly explored by M. C. Ricklefs, Islamisation and
Its Opponents in Java: A Political, Social, Cultural and Religious History, c. 1930 to the Present
(Singapore: NUS, 2012). The complicity of the United States government is described in
Bradley Simpson, Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development and U.S.–Indonesian
Relations, 1960–1968 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008).
One of the reasons (beyond the behaviourist instinct) that early work on the
massacres emphasised societal dynamics was that they showed so much regional
variation in timing and extent. The particular savagery in the countryside of East Java,
for example, was seen to indicate Javanese cultural motives. A growing number of
regional studies have focused precisely on questions of the state–society interface that
provides the backdrop for the killings. Among the best of these is still
Geoffrey Robinson, The Dark Side of Paradise: Political Violence in Bali (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1995). Others have discussed the impact of the violence on
women (Saskia E. Wieringa, Sexual Politics in Indonesia (Houndmills: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2002)); on literature (Keith Foulcher, Social Commitment in Literature and

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the Arts: The Indonesian ‘Institute of People’s Culture’, 1950–1965 (Centre of Southeast Asian
Studies, Monash University, 1986)); and on film (Krishna Sen, Indonesian Cinema: Framing
the New Order (London: Zed Books, 1994)).
Contemporary awareness of the 1965 massacres received a boost within Indonesia and
abroad from two Joshua Oppenheimer films, The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence
(2014), and by the International People’s Tribunal 1965 held in The Hague in 2015 (‘1965,
Today: Living with the Indonesian Massacres’, special edition of Journal of Genocide
Research 19.4 (2017)).

448
 22
The Violence of the Cold War
heonik kwon

The Cold War occupies a rather unusual place in the history of organised mass
violence. The second half of the twentieth century is sometimes depicted as an
exceptionally peaceful era in modern history, in contrast to the century’s first
half, which witnessed two wars of great magnitude. In this pacific view of the
Cold War, which is not uncommon in the scholarship of modern European and
transatlantic history, the Cold War was an unconventional conflict: it was fought
mainly according to political, economic, ideological and polemical means; the
powerful nations that waged this war kept building arsenals of weapons of mass
destruction in the hope that they would never have to use them, and the threats
of mutually assured destruction came to assure one of the longest times of
international peace among industrialised nations. These strange features of the
Cold War as being neither real war nor genuine peace, which Mary Kaldor
succinctly explains with the idiom of an ‘imaginary war’, makes it difficult to
come to terms with its history according to the conventional antinomy of war
and peace.1 George Orwell sums up this oddity of the Cold War in his novel
Nineteen Eight-Four with the emphatic statement, ‘War is Peace.’
Turning our attention to the historical horizons outside Europe and the
transatlantic, however, the pacific view of Cold War history runs into
obstacles. The term ‘cold war’ refers to the prevailing condition of the
world in the second half of the twentieth century, divided into two separate
paths of political modernity and economic development. In a narrower sense,
it means the contest of power and will between the two dominant states, the
United States and the Soviet Union, which, according to Orwell, set out to
rule the world between them under an undeclared state of war, being unable
to conquer one another.2 In a broader definition, however, the Cold War also

1 Mary Kaldor, The Imaginary War: Interpretations of East–West Conflict in Europe (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1990).
2 Cited from Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the
Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 2.

449
 HEONIK KWON

entails the unequal relations of power among the political communities that
pursued or were driven to pursue a specific path of progress within the binary
structure of the global order. The ‘contest-of-power’ dimension of the Cold
War has been an explicit and central element in Cold War historiography; in
contrast, the ‘relation-of-domination’ aspect has been a relatively marginal
and implicit element. Highlighting these two contrary aspects of the global
conflict, Walter LaFeber states that the questions of which Cold War and
whose Cold War are central to any effort to understand Cold War history in
a global perspective.3 In a similar light, Geir Lundestad and Odd Arne Westad
emphasise the importance of political and revolutionary struggles for deco-
lonisation in the making of the Cold War global order.4 Their view is that the
experience of the Third World is pivotal to Cold War global politics and,
therefore, the history of decolonisation is integral to the history of the
bipolarisation of world politics.
It is important to note that the Cold War took violent forms especially in
the regions that underwent the advent of political bipolarity as part of the
political process of decolonisation. In this light, this chapter deals with three
interrelated issues concerning the place of the Cold War in the history of
violence. First, it discusses the fact that the Cold War becomes a legitimate
subject of the history of violence once we broaden our interest to include
postcolonial historical milieux. Second, it considers the related issue that the
violence of the Cold War can be conceptualised broadly in terms of two
forms: on the one hand, an imaginary violence – most notably, the threat and
the fear of thermonuclear destruction – and, on the other, a non-imaginary,
real violence that tore apart the physical and moral integrity of numerous
human communities. It explores the duplex character of the Cold War’s
violence, adopting what may be called a historical anthropological approach
that is attentive to questions of plurality and unity in human historical
experience. The destruction of the Cold War first became apparent in North-
East and South-East Asia. Drawing upon the violent postcolonial Cold War
experience in Korea and Vietnam, finally, the chapter will explore how the
duplex character of Cold War violence, imaginary and non-imaginary, can be
discussed as an issue of the Cold War in Asia, not merely along the

3 Walter LaFeber, ‘An End to Which Cold War?’, in Michael J. Hogan (ed.), The End of the
Cold War: Its Meanings and Implications (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992),
p. 13.
4 Geir Lundestad (ed.), East, West, North, South: Major Developments in International Politics,
1945–1990 (Oslo: Norwegian University Press, 1991); Westad, Global Cold War.

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 The Violence of the Cold War

comparative historical horizon between postcolonial Asia and post-World

War II Europe.

Cold War Divisions

In December 1955, the US Gallup Poll conducted a survey on the meaning of
the Cold War. Their question to Americans was: ‘Will you tell me what the
term “COLD WAR” means to you?’ The responses to this survey question
were diverse and revealing. The pollsters classified the following as correct
answers: war through talking, not down and out fighting; not a hot war;
a subtle war, without arms – a diplomatic war, state of enmity between
countries but will not become a total, all-out war; war without actual fight-
ing; political war, battle of words among powers to gain prestige among their
nations; like a bloodless war. The correct answers included: doing what you
want to do and disregarding the other country’s opinion; war of nerves;
peaceful enemies; propaganda to agitate the reds against democracy; nations
can’t agree among themselves – bickering back and forth; uncertainty
between foreign countries and this country; battle of wits. The Gallop
pollsters classified other responses as incorrect: little children being parents
and going without; too many people feathering their own nest. The so-called
wrong answers included: cold war just like a hot war – as in Korea just as
many boys being killed – that was supposed to be a cold war; fighting slow –
no one knows what they are doing; war where no war is declared; fighting for
nothing; real war all over the world; where everybody was at war; like
a civil war.
The distance between ‘a bloodless diplomatic war’ and ‘real war all over
the world like a [global] civil war’ is huge, and we can infer from the above
episode that these radically different understandings of the Cold War coex-
isted at the initial stage of the global confrontation. It is interesting to discover
that these contrary, nearly mutually incompatible conceptions of the Cold
War were expressed in the context of the post-Korean War American society.
The Korean War, for Americans, was part of their nation’s police action in
the world at the time of the Cold War. About 30,000 American lives were lost
in this conflict, not to mention 2 million Korean lives. Their nation fought in
both European and Asian spaces during World War II. It continued to be
involved militarily in Asia after that war was over, whereas in Europe the
country’s postwar involvement took different means that were primarily
political, diplomatic and economic. These bifurcating understandings of the
early Cold War, between America’s relation to postwar Europe, on the one

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hand, and its actions in the postwar Asia-Pacific on the other, is squarely
present in the result of the 1955 polls. What is interesting about the episode is
also the fact that one stream of interpretation out of the two was assigned to
a categorical mistake. The pollsters classified as correct answers seeing the
Cold War as a bloodless or political war, relegating the opposite view of the
Cold War world as a global civil war to an uninformed, mistaken under-
standing of the concept.
These two radically different images, and related unresolved issues relating to
the place of violence in Cold War history, persist even now, many years after the
end of the Cold War. In March 2015, I had the pleasure of attending the
preparatory meeting of the Center for Cold War Studies in Berlin and, shortly
before, in February of the same year, the inaugural meeting for the Association
for Cold War Studies in Seoul. These two events presented rather different
atmospheres. The Berlin meeting was decisively one of historical reflection,
consisting primarily of historians of modern Germany and those specialising in
the international history of the Cold War. It clearly represented the change in
Cold War studies since the 1990s, from the field of social science to that of
historical research. In the Seoul meeting, however, it was not clear to me
whether the conference was approaching the Cold War as a subject of historical
research or as a set of questions concerning contemporary history. My impres-
sion was that this meeting had two outlooks. In relation to global horizons, it
discussed the Cold War as a historical question; however, when the conversation
covered conditions in the Korean peninsula and in broader North-East Asia,
issues of the Cold War appeared to be much more ethnographical than historical
as these concerned phenomena and developments here and now rather than
from a bygone era. There was another notable difference between the two
events and between the ideas of the Cold War invoked in these events. Unlike in
the Berlin meeting, in the Korean one the very idea of the Cold War seemed
somewhat controversial and even contradictory, having to include in it the
human experience of an extremely violent and precarious social crisis that is at
odds with what the term ‘cold war’ usually stands for.
The crisis took myriad forms and continues to affect local lives. In the
south-eastern region of the Korean peninsula, for instance, there is a village
once known in the environs as a moskoba (Moscow) – the wartime
reference for a communist stronghold. Each year, people originally from
this village return to their homeland in order to join the ceremony held on
behalf of their family and village ancestors, mainly to visit their graves
scattered on the hills around the village. On these occasions, the relatives

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from distant places are pleased to meet each other and exchange news –
but not always so. When a man cautiously suggested to his lineage elders
recently that the family might consider repairing a neglected ancestral
tomb, the harmony of the family meal held after the tomb visit was
disrupted. One elder left the room in a fury, and others remained silent
throughout the ceremonial meal. The man who proposed the idea was the
adopted son of the person buried in the neglected tomb, having been
selected for this role by the family elders for a ritual purpose. The elder
whom he offended happened to be a close relative of the deceased. The
ancestor had been a prominent anti-colonial communist youth activist
before he died at a young age in a colonial prison without a descendant.
The elder’s siblings were among the several dozen village youths who left
the village together with the retreating communist army during the chaos
of the Korean War (1950–3). Such phenomena were widespread in the early
months of the war when local communities were exposed to the pre-
emptive and retributive violence against the so-called collaborators com-
mitted liberally by both sides of the war as the frontier of war moved (see
below). The elder believes that this catastrophe in village history and
family continuity could have been avoided if the ancestor buried in the
neglected tomb had not brought the seeds of ‘red ideology’ to the village
in the first place. Beautifying the ancestral tomb was unacceptable to this
elder, who believed that some of his close kinsmen had lost, because of the
ancestor, the social basis on which they could be properly remembered as
family ancestors.
The morality of ancestral remembrance is as strong in the Vietnamese
cultural tradition as it is in the Korean. These two countries also share the
common historical experience of being important sites and symbols in Asia
for the American leadership in the global struggle against international
communism. In recent years, since the Vietnamese political leadership
initiated a general economic reform and regulated political liberalisation in
the country in the late 1980s, there has been a strong revival of ancestral
rituals across Vietnamese villages. Such rituals were previously discouraged
by the state hierarchy who regarded them as being incompatible with the
modern secular, revolutionary society. In the communities of the southern
and central regions (what was South Vietnam during the Vietnam War),
a notable aspect of this social development has been the introduction to the
ancestral ritual realm of the identities previously excluded from public
memory. The memorabilia of the hitherto socially stigmatised historical

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identities, such as those of former South Vietnamese soldiers, have become

increasingly visible in the domestic and communal ritual space.5
In the home of a stonemason south of Danang, a commercial and
administrative centre of Vietnam’s central region, the family’s ancestral
altar displayed two framed pictures of young men. One man wore
a military uniform, and his name was inscribed on the state-issued
death certificate hanging above the family’s ancestral altar. The other,
dressed in his high school uniform, had also fought and died in the war.
His death certificate, issued by the former South Vietnamese authority,
had been carefully hidden in the closet. Recently, the matron of this
family decided to put the two soldiers together. She took down the Hero
Death Certificate from the wall and placed it on the newly refurbished
ancestral altar. She laid this on the right-hand side of the altar usually
reserved for seniors. She had enlarged a small picture of her younger son
that she had long kept in her bedroom. She invited some friends, her
surviving children and their children for a meal. Before the meal, she
held a modest ceremony during which she said she had dreamed many
times about moving the schoolboy from her room and next to his elder
brother.
Another family living in the same environs has a similar, yet deeper and
broader history of displacement and reconciliation. The family’s grandfather
was a former labourer soldier of the French colonial army. In 1937–8, the
French colonial authority in Indochina conscripted a large number of
labourers from the central region of Vietnam and shipped them to the
great Mediterranean city of Marseilles. There, in the city’s poudrerie, 2,000
Vietnamese conscripts manufactured gunpowder for the French army and,
under the Vichy regime, for the German army under French management.
Some of these Vietnamese labourer soldiers objected to their situation and
joined the French resistance, whereas others continued to endure the appal-
ling working conditions in the factory. After sharing the humiliating experi-
ence of German occupation with the French citizens, these foreign conscripts
found themselves in a highly precarious situation following their return
home in 1948: the leaders in the Vietnamese revolutionary movement
distrusted them, indeed looked upon them as collaborators with the colonial
regime; and the French took no interest in their past service to their national
economy or their contribution to the resistance movement against the

5 Heonik Kwon, After the Massacre: Commemoration and Consolation in Ha My and My Lai
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), pp. 161–4.

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German occupiers. Many of these returnees perished in the ensuing chaos of

war – the First Indochina War (or what the Vietnamese call the War against
France) – and many of their children joined the revolutionary resistance
movement in the following era during the Second Indochina War (which the
Vietnamese call the War against America).
The family’s grandfather is one of the few returnees who survived the
carnage and has an extraordinary story of survival to tell: how he rescued his
family in 1953 from the imminent threat of summary execution by pleading to
French soldiers in their language. He accomplished this again in 1967 thanks to
the presence of an American officer in a pacification team who understood
a few words of French as a result of having fought in Europe during World
War II. The man’s youngest brother died unmarried and without a descendant,
so the man’s eldest son now performs periodic death-remembrance rites on
behalf of the fallen. His brother was killed in action during the Vietnam War as
a soldier of the South Vietnamese army, and his eldest son is a decorated
former partisan fighter belonging to the National Liberation Front. The eldest
son, together with his father, also performs a periodic rite of commemoration
for his great-grandmother who died in a tragic incident in 1948 shortly before
her only surviving grandchild returned from France.
At that time, the woman was living alone in her bamboo hut. She had lost
her husband in 1936 and her children shortly after, and her orphaned grand-
children had left the village for an urban ghetto or further away. She survived
on a small plot of land where she grew vegetables. The neighbours regularly
helped the lonely woman with rice and fish sauce. On the fifth day of the
eleventh lunar month of 1948, she spotted a group of French soldiers con-
ducting a house-to-house search. Ill at the time, she waved to the soldiers for
help. The soldiers came, pushed her back into the house, closed the shutters
and set fire to the bamboo house. In the following era, the locals reported
seeing apparitions of this woman. The villagers eventually erected a small
shrine in her memory on the site of her destroyed home and then started
calling her Ba Ba Linh, meaning powerful grandmother. Throughout the
chaos of the Vietnam War, her humble shrine attracted regular visits by local
women who came to pray to the old woman for their family’s safety. During
the day, some Saigon soldiers saw the village women kowtowing to the
shrine, heard the story and prayed for their own wishes at the site. At night,
the peasant militiamen who came to survey the area heard the same story.
The village women saw that some of these partisan fighters were praying to
the shrine before they hurriedly joined their group to move to the next
hamlet. When people returned to the village after an evacuation during the

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critical period of the Vietnam War in 1967–9, they recalled that there was
nothing standing in the hamlet except the humble wooden shrine dedicated
to the powerful grandmother.
The precarious condition of life that confronted this family and many other
people in this region for many years is often referred to as xoi dau by the locals.
Xoi dau refers to a ceremonial Vietnamese delicacy made of white rice flour
and black beans. Used also as a metaphor, the term conveys how people of
these regions experienced the Vietnam War. As such, xoi dau refers to the
turbulent conditions of communal life during the war, when the rural inhabi-
tants were confronted with successive occupations by conflicting political and
military forces. At night, the village was under the control of the revolutionary
forces; during the daytime, the opposing forces took control. Life in these
villages oscillated between two different political worlds governed by two
mutually hostile military forces. The people had to cope with their separate,
yet equally absolute, demands for loyalty and with the world changing politi-
cally so frequently that sometimes this anomaly almost appeared normal. Xoi
dau conveys the simple truth that, when you eat this food, you must swallow
both the white and the black parts. This is how xoi dau is supposed to be eaten,
and this is what it was like living a tumultuous life seized by the brutally
dynamic reality of Vietnam’s civil and international war.
Survival in such a reality often meant accepting both sides of the dual
world. One common episode that resulted from coping with such
a thundering bipolarity involved family disunity: some siblings joined ‘this
side’ (ben ta, the revolutionary side) whereas others, especially the younger
ones, were dragged to ‘that side’ (ben kia, the American side). The situation
was tragic and the result often painful: many of them failed to return home
alive, and even years later the younger ones cannot return home even in
memory. Yet the situation also had a creative side: for instance, the family
hoped to have at least one of them survive the war by having them on
different sides of the battlefield; or if the family had the extraordinary luck of
seeing all of them return home alive, the siblings on the winner’s side would
be able to help those on the loser’s side to rebuild their lives.
The meaning of xoi dau, of course, is not the same as the meaning of the
Cold War as we usually understand it; yet the extreme conditions of human
life that this Vietnamese idiom refers to are very much part of Cold War
history as the latter was experienced by people in central Vietnam and many
other communities in the decolonising world. Moreover, the experience of
xoi dau is hardly a thing of the past and is very much part of contemporary
history, involving vigorous communal efforts to come to terms with the

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ruins of the past destruction existing in communal life. This is the case with
the stonemason’s family, and the same is true with the village in South Korea,
both mentioned earlier.
The moskoba village’s tragedy related to the changing waves of war and
occupation. The Korean War was not a single war but rather a combination
of several different kinds of war. Above all, it was a civil war waged between
two mutually negating postcolonial political forces, each of which, through
the negation, aspired to realise the ideal of self-determination by building
a common, singular and united modern nation state. It was part of a global
war waged between two bifurcating international political, moral and eco-
nomic forces having different visions of modernity, which we commonly call
the Cold War. The Korean War was also an international conflict fought,
among others, between two of the most powerful states of the contemporary
world, the United States and China. Hidden beneath the relatively well-
known characteristics of the Korean War as a civil, international and global
conflict, recent studies show that another kind of war was being waged in
postcolonial Korea. Steven Lee characterises the last layer of the Korean War
as a war against the civilian population.6
In the very early days of the war, in face of the enemy forces rapidly
advancing southward to its territory, the South Korean state committed pre-
emptive violence against society on a massive scale. Directed against people
whom it considered sympathisers or hypothetical collaborators with the
enemy, this state action set in motion a vicious cycle of violence against
civilians in the ensuing chaos of war: it radicalised the punitive actions
perpetrated under North Korean occupation against the individuals and
families who were classified as supporters of the southern regime, which in
turn escalated the intensity of retaliatory violence directed against the so-
called collaborators with the communist occupiers when the tide of war
changed. When the North Korean forces left their briefly occupied territory
in the South, they acted in the same way as the South had done before,
committing numerous atrocities of pre-emptive violence against people
whom they considered to be potential collaborators with the southern
regime. The mobile frontier resulted not only in extreme abuse of the civilian
population by the coercive powers of the warring states but also in the rise of
the phenomenon that Kalyvas calls the privatisation of violence.7 Village
communities were turned inside out, becoming a crucible of destruction in

6 Steven H. Lee, The Korean War (New York: Longman, 2001).

7 Stathis N. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2006), p. 333.

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the image of the wider theatre of war but at the hands of people who were kin
and had been neighbours for generations. This chaotic, reciprocal violence
against society generated a mass exodus of the terrified population from their
places of origin, both southward and northward, and thus was greatly
responsible for one of the most critical questions of the human condition in
the post-Korean War Korean peninsula, which remains unresolved till
today – the plight of families divided between North and South. The general-
ised human displacement and family separation had other far-reaching impli-
cations. The presence in families of missing persons – those who were
suspected to have moved to the enemy territory or those who were killed
during the war while being accused of being anti-state elements – became
a critical liability for the surviving families after the war was over.
In places that experienced the early Cold War in such a chaotic civil war,
therefore, kinship rarely constitutes a politically homogeneous entity. Their
genealogical unity is crowded with the remains of wartime political bifurca-
tion. In the customary practices of ancestral commemoration, people must
deal not only with the memory of meritorious ancestors who contributed to
the nation’s revolutionary or anti-communist march to independence but
also with the stigmatising genealogical background of working against the
defined forward march. As in Sophocles’ epic tragedy Antigone, which
inspired Hegel in his philosophy of the modern state, many individuals and
families in these regions were torn between the familial obligation to tend to
the memory of the war dead related in kinship and the political obligation not
to do so for those who fought against the anti-communist or revolutionary
state. It is common in these places for a family to have a few heroic fallen
soldiers from the war to commemorate. Siblings and others close to those
killed in action on the opposite side of the war’s frontier are also somehow
accounted for. The memories of the dead in these communities are simulta-
neously united in kinship memory and bipolarised in political history. The
initiatives taken by people such as the stonemason’s family or the man in the
Korean village arise out of this long, turbulent political history, and they
continue to evolve and expand today.

Decolonisation and the Cold War

The violence of the Cold War, such as that which inflicted enduring wounds
and crises on these families, was typically intertwined with the process of
decolonisation. In this sense, we may start thinking about the Cold War’s
globally encompassing yet regionally and locally variant histories, in terms of

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two broad realities: the imaginary war in Europe and North America on the
one hand and, on the other, the postcolonial experience of bipolar politics in
which the very concept of the Cold War becomes problematic and contra-
dictory. Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis calls the second half of the twen-
tieth century a ‘long peace’, an exceptional period of international peace in
contrast to what came before, the first half of the century characterised by
two gigantic wars among nations and empires.8 A late historian of modern
Europe, Tony Judt, objected to Gaddis’s characterisation of the Cold War as
a long peace, however. He writes, ‘This way of narrating cold war history
reflects the same provincialism. John Lewis Gaddis has written a history of
America’s cold war. As a result, this is a book whose silences are especially
suggestive. The “third world” in particular comes up short.’9
Indeed, as LaFeber notes, the era of the Cold War was far from a peaceful
time when seen in a broad perspective; it witnessed over 40 million human
casualties across territories.10 The experience of bipolar politics certainly
varied in intensity and in temporality across regions. The most violent
manifestation of the global Cold War took its earliest tolls in South-East
and North-East Asia, represented by the outbreak of the First Indochina War
(1945–54) and the Korean War. In the following decades, while a new total
war was being waged in Vietnam and its neighbouring countries, the Cold
War’s political violence became much more transnational and generalised,
engulfing many nations and communities in Africa, the Middle East and Latin
America during what Fred Halliday, historian of the Middle East, calls
the Second Cold War.11 It is against this historical background that the
celebrated Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez once said that nations
in Central and South America did not have a moment’s rest from the threat
and reality of mass violence during the so-called ‘cold’ war.12 The reality of
mass violence endured in Latin America may have been different in intensity
and in character from that suffered by the Koreans in the 1950s and by the
Vietnamese in the 1960s, which incorporated a totalising war as well as
systematic state political violence. Moreover, not all postcolonial states and
communities experienced the Cold War in terms of armed conflicts or in

8 John Lewis Gaddis, The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1987).
9 Tony Judt, Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century (New York:
Penguin, 2008), p. 371.
10 LaFeber, ‘End to Which Cold War?’, p. 13.
11 Fred Halliday, The Making of the Second Cold War (London: Verso, 1983).
12 Cited from Greg Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 170.

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other exceptional forms of political violence. South Asia is a notable example.

Despite these exceptions, however, it is reasonable to conclude that, for
a great majority of decolonising nations, the Cold War was hardly a period
of long peace.
The claim that the Cold War was a global conflict should not mean,
therefore, that the conflict was experienced in the same terms all over the
world. Cold War politics permeated developed and underdeveloped socie-
ties, Western and non-Western states and colonial powers and colonised
nations alike; in this sense, it was a truly global reality. However, the
historical experience and the collective memory of the Cold War contain
aspects of radical divergence between the West and the postcolonial world.
This has indeed been one of the key questions in recent developments in Cold
War studies. For the past decade, enquiries into the plurality of the Cold War
human historical experience have been mostly focused primarily on the
comparison between the postcolonial world, on the one hand, and
Western Europe and the larger transatlantic world, on the other.13
Grounded in the observation that Asia’s postcolonial experience of political
bipolarisation was far from an ‘imaginary war’ – a warlike condition that is
nevertheless contrary to an actual condition of war – a reasoned considera-
tion of this question has been pivotal to the advent of new Cold War
historical scholarship in recent years and has provoked a number of innova-
tive studies of the zone of historical field that is often referred to as decolo-
nisation and the Cold War.14
The emerging interest in the postcolonial Cold War shows that we can no
longer think of the history of the Cold War, and the broader political history
of right and left that in the mid twentieth century became entrenched in the
form of what some observers call the confrontation between the empire of
liberty and the empire of equality, without thinking of the history of mass
violence and mass death. Both right and left were part of anti-colonial
nationalism, signifying different routes towards the ideal of national libera-
tion and self-determination. In the ensuing bipolar era, the ideas of right and
left transformed into the ideology of civil strife and war, in which achieving
national unity became equivalent to annihilating one or the other side from

13 Westad, Global Cold War, pp. 73–109.

14 Among many examples are Robert J. McMahon, The Cold War in the Third World
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Hajimu Masuda, The Cold War Crucible: The
Korean War and the Postwar World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015);
Leslie James and Elisabeth Leake (eds.), Decolonization and the Cold War: Negotiating
Independence (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).

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the body politic. In this context, the political history of right and left is not to
be considered separately from the history of human lives and social institu-
tions torn by the distinction, nor is the social development beyond the Cold
War to be separated from the memory of the dead ruins of this history.
The recognition that a Cold War with mass human casualties and a Cold
War without them are different entities, however, should not be taken to
mean that these two histories are not comparable or commensurable.
Dissecting the whole of the global Cold War into different constituent
parts is for the purpose of creating a new image of the whole rather than
dismantling the image of the whole. Even within the history of mass death,
there are elements of diversity. The US experience of the Cold War does not
collapse to the paradigm of the imaginary war or the long peace as easily as
does the dominant European experience. The United States has a memory of
mass sacrifice of American lives from the era, not least in relation to the
Korean and Vietnam conflicts. This collective memory of mass sacrifice,
however, is not the same as the memory of mass death kept in Vietnam or
in Korea. Consisting principally of the heroic death of armed soldiers, the
American memory distinguishes the United States from the rest of the West,
whose dominant memory of the Cold War encompasses a painful but largely
deathless confrontation between political groupings, but it is also distinct
from the collective memories of death in the wider world during the Cold
War, chiefly the tragic mass death of ordinary civilians. In the sphere of the
history of violence and the related realm of death commemoration, there-
fore, we cannot easily say that Europe and America constitute a single
community of shared collective memory called the West. But nor can we
easily reconcile America’s memory of heroic death and sacrifice in the
struggle against communism with the memories of mass tragic death asso-
ciated with the same struggle in the rest of the world.
Although the recent development in Cold War studies has made a notable
contribution to diversifying Cold War narratives, an equally important
question remains critically unexplored. The plurality of the Cold War experi-
ence is not merely an issue of comparative history between Asia and Europe;
instead, it may be discussed as part of a specific regional history.
Witnessed in the relatively narrow sphere of East Asia, the early Cold War
was manifested differently among the societies that constitute this regional
entity. For instance, Japan experienced the early Cold War in a manner that is
closely akin to how nations in western Europe underwent the era: with the
imperative post-World War II socio-economic reconstruction, a growing
economic prosperity and an unprecedented era of international peace. In

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the late 1960s, Japanese society underwent forceful social protests and gen-
erational upheaval, which Immanuel Wallerstein dubbed a ‘revolution in the
world-system’.15 Provoked by the tragedy of the Vietnam War and the West’s
role and complicity in it, the multi-sited, simultaneous civil protest in 1967–9
transformed the social fabric of Japan as well as that of the United States and
several western European nations. However, the so-called world revolution
hardly had any ramifications elsewhere in Asia or in Japan’s neighbouring
societies.
We can apply the same idea of Cold War historical plurality to other
political societies in Asia. The fate of Korea in the 1950s, which involved
a destructive civil war, is not that remote from the experience of political
societies in the Middle East and in Africa in the 1970s and the 1980s, during
which many of them were swept into a civil war or a similar crisis. The
behaviour of some of the East Asian states (such as China and North
Korea) in the 1970s comes close to that of some of the Western states
during the general crisis of the early Cold War in the 1950s: maintaining
the peace of an imaginary war at home while playing a role in the
escalation of a total war crisis elsewhere in the postcolonial world. It is
a known historical fact (although one that is not yet satisfactorily
researched) that North Korea and China were deeply implicated in the
crisis of the Second Cold War across the African continent, from Sudan
and Uganda to Angola and Zimbabwe. By then, these state entities were
both in and out of the Cold War, having assimilated an ideology of non-
alignment in thought, yet in practice engaging vigorously in the interna-
tional postcolonial sphere with a self-conscious and sometimes self-centred
revolutionary zeal. Meanwhile, South Korea, together with Taiwan and
some other political entities in Sout-East Asia, joined, with considerable
success, what some Cold War historians call ‘the right kind of revolution’ –
economic development as a Cold War power struggle – while maintaining
within its domestic political sphere a military-led authoritarian political
order and radical politics of containment with regard to civil society,
which is fairly akin to how societies in Latin America underwent the
Cold War era.16

15 Immanuel Wallerstein, ‘1968, Revolution in the World-System: Theses and Queries’,

Theory and Society 18 (1989), 441–9.
16 Michael E. Latham, The Right Kind of Revolution: Modernization, Development, and U.S.
Foreign Policy from the Cold War to the Present (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
2010), pp. 10–35.

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Conclusion
If we approach the plurality of Cold War experiences in this way, we may say
that Cold War history has a fractal formation. A fractal theory of social
structure and political system is very much a part of the development of
modern social anthropology. It posits that the whole and each of the parts
that together constitute the whole have an identical structural form – as in
the study of the segmentary kinship and political systems of traditional
Africa.17 Concerning the subject matter at hand, this idea conveys that
a new way of conceptualising Asia’s place in modern global history may be
possible. Asia’s Cold War experience is in many ways distinct from and even
contrary to how Europe underwent the era of political bipolarity. The Cold
War in Asia was far from an imaginary war, and we are not sure whether it is
over and done with today. Parallel to these differences in form and in
temporality, however, Asia’s Cold War has elements within it, an attention
to which can render the region’s experience of bipolar modernity in a similar
image of the global Cold War. Considered this way, Asia’s Cold War was
other than an imaginary war and, at once and in part, very much an
imaginary war. We can see in it not only the long peace of Europe but also
the turbulent fates of Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. In the end, it
appears that Asia’s Cold War is not an Asian history but rather a global
history in the guise of an Asian history.
If the Cold War was both an imaginary war and at the same time
a generalised experience of political terror and mass death, we need to tell
its history accordingly, inclusive of the seismic death events experienced by
communities, rather than considering the latter as only perfunctory marginal
episodes in an otherwise peaceful, balanced contest for power. In regard to
the Cold War’s duplicity in terms of the presence and absence of mass
violence, Mary Kaldor argues that the Cold War ‘kept alive the idea of war,
while avoiding its reality. [No conventional warfare] broke out on European
soil. At the same time, many wars took place all over the world, including
Europe, in which more people died than in the Second World War. But
because these wars did not fit our conception of war, they were discounted.’18
Kaldor believes that these ‘irregular, informal wars of the second half of the
twentieth century’ took place ‘as a peripheral part of the central conflict’, and

17 Meyer Fortes and E. E. Evans-Pritchard (eds.), African Political Systems (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1940).
18 Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Age (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2001), pp. 29–30.

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 HEONIK KWON

she argues that these ‘informal wars’ are becoming the source of new post-
Cold War bellicosity. If we follow Kaldor, it appears that Cold War history
has a concentric conceptual organisation consisting of a ‘formal’ history of
relative peace in the centre and ‘informal’ violence on the periphery. The
Cold War was both an idea of war in the exemplary centre and a reality of
revolutionary war and chaotic violence in the peripheral terrains. At the
centre, the end of the Cold War was a largely peaceful event and opened
a constructive development of transnational integration, whereas in the
periphery the same ‘end’ gave birth to a new age of aggression. In this
view of the Cold War and what comes after it, the Cold War was not only
an ambiguous phenomenon, being neither real war nor genuine peace, but
also a highly contradictory phenomenon, experienced as an idea of war for
some and as a reality of prolific organised violence for others.
The above comment from an eminent observer of modern Europe
demonstrates that our understanding of the Cold War is still grounded in
a concentric spatial hierarchy. In the history of the Cold War as an imaginary
war, the history of man-made mass death existed mainly in the form of
disturbing memory and a disturbing possibility, being haunted by the morbid
events in Auschwitz and Hiroshima and overshadowed by the threat of
thermonuclear destruction. As the philosopher Edith Wyschogrod argued,
the ‘life-world’ in the second half of the twentieth century was suspended
between the death events of the immediate past and the fear of an apocalyptic
end of the life-world in the uncertain future.19 Beyond the horizon of the
imaginary war, however, death events were not a possibility but an actual
‘unbridled reality’ and an aspect of everyday lives.20
This chapter proposes that confronting the centre/periphery hierarchy in
the conception of the Cold War is critical to a grounded understanding of the
political history of the bipolar era. The effort involves an attention to the
violence of the Cold War and its variant forms, real or imaginary. It also
involves the recognition that the violence of the Cold War was experienced
varyingly within a region as well as between different regional entities.
Communities in Asia did not experience the Cold War in an identical way,
just as bipolar politics was manifested differently between post-World War II
Europe and postcolonial Asia. Orwell’s ‘War is Peace’ continues to be mean-
ingful for understanding the nature of the Cold War, yet for reasons that

19 Edith Wyschogrod, Spirit in Ashes: Hegel, Heidegger, and Man-Made Mass Death (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).
20 The expression ‘unbridled reality’ is Gabriel García Márquez’s and is quoted in
Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre, p. 170. See also Masuda, Cold War Crucible.

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 The Violence of the Cold War

depart from what he had in mind when he coined the expression. How to
reconcile the radically different historical experiences and related divergent
historical memories of the global conflict goes beyond an issue of academic
research in significance. Rather, it constitutes a vital, unresolved issue of
public policy in the international sphere, relevant to efforts to build up
transnational solidarity in the face of common contemporary threats to
human security, as manifested in the debates about territorial disputes in
East Asia.
The real distinctiveness of Asia’s Cold War experience is perhaps to be
found in a much more minute scale and intimate sphere of human life than in
a wide comparative historical sphere. It may be found, rather than in the
violent ways in which communities in the region experienced the Cold War,
in the ways in which the violent historical legacies are kept alive and its
meanings are transformed in the intimate sphere of human life. The humble
shrine for the powerful grandmother south of Danang is one example I am
familiar with. The grandmother lost her life amidst the crisis of the First
Indochina War. She transformed into a powerful spirit at the start of
the Second Indochina War, and she listened and responded to many hopes
against hope enunciated by numerous people whose lives were turned upside
down by the continuing war. Today, her spirit continues to be responsive to
a multitude of other human hopes. The history of this grandmother man-
ifests the power of the human spirit to overcome the destructive power of
modern history. However, it does so on the basis of a specific religious and
cultural tradition, which has long celebrated the vitality of the regenerative
human spirit that refuses to give in to the annihilation of violent death.

Bibliographical Essay
The Cold War holds a unique place in the history of violence. Notably, a large body of
Cold War literature concentrates on imaginary violence (the threat and fear of violence),
especially regarding thermonuclear destruction. Among the prominent exemplars are
Mary Kaldor’s The Imaginary War: Understanding the East–West Conflict (Cambridge, MA:
Blackwell, 1990) and John Lewis Gaddis’s The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold
War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). For Gaddis, the era’s imaginary violence is
equal in meaning to the extraordinary stretch of peace that Western and other
industrialised nations enjoyed during the Cold War.
Different renderings of the place of violence in Cold War history also exist. These
typically result from broad comparative or global historical views of the Cold War that
consider the different ways in which violence was manifested across territories, especially
between post-1945 Europe and the postcolonial world. Walter LaFeber’s ‘An End to

465
 HEONIK KWON

Which Cold War?’, in Michael J. Hogan (ed.), The End of the Cold War: Its Meaning and
Implications (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 13–20, clarifies that Cold
War conflicts resulted in over 40 million human casualties across places. The era’s large-
scale violence erupted especially in places that experienced Cold War confrontation as part
of decolonisation. Accordingly, the theme of Cold War violence is discussed widely in
studies on the global conflict that was waged in the decolonising world. Notable in this
regard is Odd Arne Westad’s The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making
of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), which brings to the centre of
Cold War historical narratives the history of Third World revolutions, which typically
involved civil war crises.
The view of the Cold War in terms of a history of violence is present in several area
studies. In Latin American studies, Greg Grandin’s The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin
America in the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004) is useful for
discerning the particular character of political violence that the region experienced –
both as a continuation of colonial violence and as a new form of political terror that
was harbouring novel ideological dispositions. Kyle Burke’s Revolutionaries for the Right:
Anti-Communist Internationalism and Paramilitary Warfare in the Cold War (Durham, NC:
University of North Carolina Press, 2018) provides a history of counterinsurgency warfare
during the Cold War in a global context. In addition, the growing scholarship on Asia’s
Cold War experience has consistently foregrounded the violent aspects of global
confrontations in the region. Heonik Kwon’s The Other Cold War (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2010) and Hajimu Masuda’s Cold War Crucible: The Korean Conflict and the
Post-War World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015) are some recent
examples.
Notably, a large body of work on the Korean and Vietnam wars can be considered part
of Cold War violence studies. Bruce Cuming’s investigation of the 1947–9
counterinsurgency violence in Korea in The Origins of the Korean War: The Roaring of the
Cataract, 1947–1950 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990) is a classic example. An
important investigation of a systemic failure regarding the protection of civilians by US
forces in the Korean conflict would be Charles J. Henry, Martha Mendoza and Sang-hun
Choe’s The Bridge at No Gun Ri: A Hidden Nightmare from the Korean War (New York: Henry
Holt, 2001). Taewoo Kim’s ‘Limited War, Unlimited Targets: U.S. Air Force Bombing of
North Korea during the Korean War, 1950–1953’, Critical Asian Studies 44 (2012), 467–92,
provides a useful introduction to the violence of aerial bombing in North Korea, the
legacies of which continue to reverberate today in the ongoing US–North Korean stand-
off. Bombing Civilians: A Twentieth-Century History, edited by Yuki Tanaka and Marilyn
B. Young (New York: New Press, 2010), investigates Cold War era aerial violence in
a broader historical context inclusive of the experience of the Second World War.
Heonik Kwon’s After the Massacre: Commemoration and Consolation in Ha My and My Lai
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006) delves into both the reality and the
aftermath of intimate violence that was committed against civilians during the Vietnam
War by South Vietnam’s key allies. Nha Ca’s Mourning Headband for Hue: An Account of the
Battle for Hue, 1968, which was beautifully translated by Olga Dror (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2014), is an excellent yet painful testimony to the Vietnam War’s intimate
violence, which was committed in South Vietnam by communist forces.

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New and innovative studies are now exploring other forms of Cold War violence,
which have been hitherto understudied. Monica Kim analyses highly intimate violence,
both physical and psychological, in relation to the idea of ‘brainwashing’, which was
manifested in the interrogative acts against the communist prisoners of war during the
Korea conflict, in The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: The Untold History (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2019). Polymeris Voglis explores similar issues in the context of
the Greek Civil War in his Becoming a Subject: Political Prisoners during the Greek Civil War
(Oxford: Berghahn, 2002). Edwin A. Martini’s Agent Orange: History, Science, and the Politics
of Uncertainty (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012) explores the Vietnam
War’s violence against the environment, focusing on the widespread use of highly toxic
herbicides as part of counterinsurgency warfare. This form of violence left enduring
human disabilities on combatants, civilians and even those born after the war. These
aspects of the Cold War’s ‘war against nature’ are investigated in The Environmental
Histories of the Cold War, edited by J. R. McNeill and Corinna R. Unger (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010). Another notable example in this research genre is
anthropologist Krisna Uk’s informative study of how the Jorai people in the border region
between Vietnam and Cambodia relate to the deadly remains of the Vietnam War,
including unexploded bombs and mines that abound in their highland forest
environment, in Salvage: Cultural Resilience among the Jorai of Northeast Cambodia (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 2016).

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 23
Quotidian Violence in the French
Empire, 1890–1940
james p. daughton

When Léon Leconte beat, blinded and threatened to kill Chief Tieou he had
little reason to fear recrimination. In 1908, at the time of the attack, Leconte’s
father was one of the richest and most powerful Frenchmen in the Pacific
colony of New Caledonia. Both father and 29-year-old son had, as the
governor of the possession put it, ‘reputations for brutality’ as well as records
of beating and injuring local residents stretching back nearly twenty years.
Neither had ever been punished for his actions.1 This most recent incident
would likely have gone completely unnoticed, not to mention unpunished,
except for the facts that Leconte attacked a chief and did so in front of
witnesses.
As Chief Tieou told the story, at about one o’clock in the afternoon, he
was walking into the village of Koné, in the north of the island, on his way
to pay his tribe’s taxes when Leconte assailed him without saying a word.
Leconte knocked him to the ground and kicked him, cutting his head and
right eye, covering the chief’s face in blood. Tieou fled his assailant,
escaping to a nearby river to wash his wounds. But Leconte found him
and attacked again, this time chasing him into the river, yelling, ‘Give me
a knife and I’ll kill him.’ Tieou would not be caught; he swam across the
river to the opposite bank, and ran to a nearby village. A Kanak witness
named Levi saw the altercation but did not get involved for fear of being
beaten himself. ‘Leconte’, Levi later explained, ‘is the terror of the
country.’2
When interrogated by the local gendarme, Leconte felt no obligation to
say anything at all about the affair. A few days later, Leconte tried to convince

1 Archives Territoriales de la Nouvelle-Calédonie (ATNC): 44 W 585: Letter from the

governor to the minister of colonies. Nouméa, 21 July 1909.
2 Archives Nationales d’Outre Mer, Aix-en-Provence (hereafter ANOM): FM /S G/
Nouvelle Calédonie: V I I I, 231: ‘Copie’ of report by Henri Chabert, gendarme à cheval,
Koné, January 1909.

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 Quotidian Violence in the French Empire

Tieou to retract his complaint, but the chief, who would be left incapacitated
for a month and permanently blinded in one eye, refused. Leconte soon
appeared in court in the capital, Nouméa, with his attorney who happened
also to be a high-ranking administrator in the district. The attorney had
a number of private conversations with the jurors before the procedure
began and in no time secured an acquittal for his client. The judge, however,
was less easily persuaded of Leconte’s innocence and awarded Chief Tieou
3,000 francs in damages. In reflecting on the verdict, the governor of the
colony wrote to his superiors in Paris that it was unfortunate that Leconte’s
punishment was only pecuniary. But he assured the minister of colonies, with
perhaps disingenuous optimism, that the judgment had had ‘the best effect in
giving the indigenous the assurance that they can count . . . on the protection
that they are due’.3 Officials in Paris expressed concern that the jury had not
shown the ‘desirable impartiality’ that one might expect.4 But the case was
closed and, it seems, soon forgotten, at least by French officials.5
Leconte’s attack on Chief Tieou was not an uncommon event in the
modern French empire. Many French civilians – be they settlers, merchants
or travellers – believed beating, kicking and verbally abusing non-Europeans
to be an expected, and even necessary, part of daily colonial life. Africans,
Asians and Pacific Islanders in the empire lived at the bottom of a social
hierarchy defined by race, class and social status. As in the Jim Crow
American South, many colonial subjects were systematically kept in positions
of political and economic weakness by laws that excluded them from govern-
ment decisions, tax schemes that pushed many from subsistence to misery,
and labour expectations that made it impossible for them to produce enough
food for their own consumption. In everyday social interactions, their sub-
servience to white settlers and officials was punctuated by acts that could run
the broad gamut from verbal abuse to murder. Colonial populations were left
wondering why, as one African subject put it in 1922, when ‘blacks and whites
are the children of the French republic’, they were exposed to the most
degrading humiliations.6
That colonialism is synonymous with violence has become a truism, so
much so that it is tempting to see the colonial world, to quote Frantz Fanon,

3 ATNC: 44 W 585: Letter from Governor Jules Richard to the minister of colonies,
21 July 1909.
4 ANOM: FM/SG /Nouvelle-Calédonie: VIII, 231: ‘Note pour la Direction du
Personnel’, 22 October 1909.
5 Ibid.: ‘Note pour la 2ème Direction’, 19 November 1909.
6 Archives de la Ligues des Droits de l’Homme (hereafter ALDH): F delta rés 798/179:
Letter from Jean Yenot to the president LDH. Kinshasa, 29 October 1922.

469
 JAMES P. DAUGHTON

‘cut in two’. The question for historians is thus not whether colonialism was
violent, but where to locate the incision that so brutally divided colonial
societies. Most historians of the French Empire have located the dividing
line in what Fanon called ‘agents of government’, particularly soldiers,
policemen, judges and administrators, who acted as the ‘spokesmen of
the settler and his rule of oppression’.7 The result has been a rich collection
of historical works on myriad forms of colonial violence, from military
conquest to abusive tax systems, that has highlighted the complex
structural underpinnings of the iniquities of French rule. In so doing,
historians have made plain the claim of the Antillean poet and critic Aimé
Césaire, who said ‘between colonization and civilization there is an infinite
distance’.8
Acts of violence carried out by non-state actors – that is, by European
settlers, merchants and travellers like Léon Leconte in New Caledonia –
remain far less explored in the historiography of French colonialism. In
important ways, brutality perpetrated by non-state actors helped perpetuate
the Manichean dynamics of colonialism so powerfully described by Fanon
and others. Such violence helped harden the racial, political and social
hierarchy of coloniser and colonised. The prevalence of violence suggests
that quotidian brutality was central to settlers’ sense of power and identity in
regions where they felt under constant threat from larger non-European
populations.
But the ways in which civilians mistreated colonial subjects often differed
starkly from the state’s efforts to legitimate its own use of violence in
military, administrative and judicial capacities. As the Leconte case makes
clear, in possessions where subjects greatly outnumbered white colonists,
daily acts of violence were potentially threatening to the colonial adminis-
tration. They undermined administrative control of French citizens and
destabilised what were often delicate balances of power between officials
and subject populations. Equally important, uncontrolled violence jeopar-
dised the central rhetorical claim that colonisation brought rationalism and
civilisation to allegedly less-developed societies in Africa, Asia and the Pacific.
Such issues were brought increasingly to the fore in the interwar years when
internationalist organisations increasingly scrutinised the treatment of
colonial subjects in all European empires.9

7 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove
Press, 1963), p. 38.
8 Aimé Césaire, Discours sur le colonialisme (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1955), pp. 10–11.
9 Daughton, ‘Behind the Imperial Curtain’, pp. 503–28.

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 Quotidian Violence in the French Empire

Violence and Everyday Colonial Life

The men, women and children who lived under French rule in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were reminded daily of their infer-
iority to Europeans. The very language of the ‘civilising mission’, with its
promises of transforming backward, unclean ‘savages’ into educated, moral
human beings, made inequality the basis of all colonial relations and the chief
justification of European rule. Racial difference was inscribed in a variety of
cultural artefacts, from novels and advertisements to political tracts and
pseudo-scientific theories. Beyond the rhetorical, non-Europeans’ interac-
tions with white people were regularly laden with humiliation as well as
physical and emotional pain that reinforced the colonial hierarchy and made
all too apparent the relative helplessness of many subjects.
While it is possible to find many descriptions of quotidian violence in
published and archival sources, there is good reason to believe that the
number of specific cases of abuse reported represent only a fraction of the
incidents of violence that occurred. The mainstream press rarely picked up
stories of whites harming Indigenous men, women and children, even when
incidents were publicised in the radical press or by organisations like the
Ligue des Droits de l’Homme, France’s premier defender of civil rights.
A perusal of major colonial newspapers leaves the reader assuming that the
empire was the exclusive domain of progress and civilisation. Memoirs
written by those who defended colonial expansion, such as merchants,
officials and soldiers, rarely reflected on Indigenous suffering. For mistreated
Indigenous men and women, as well as white men and women who found
the abuse unacceptable, little good resulted from reporting incidents.
Africans, Asians and Pacific Islanders who reported cruelty at best found
the administration unresponsive, and at worst could be imprisoned or further
abused. Even whites – be they officials or colonists – who spoke out against
inhumane behaviour had to overcome intense social pressures not to stray
across the racial divide. Even well-established writers, including André Gide,
Albert Londres and Félicien Challaye, faced heated recriminations and even
accusations of treason for highlighting the mistreatment of Indigenous peo-
ple at the hands of European colonisers.
While the pressure to ignore abuses against non-Europeans was intense,
there is also evidence that whites in the empire grew immune to even
disturbing scenes of violence. Across the empire in the early twentieth
century, for example, postcard producers not only capitalised on the exoti-
cism of the ‘Orient’ and the grandeur of colonial facades; they also sought

471
 JAMES P. DAUGHTON

profit by producing ‘real photo’ images of killed rebels and bombed-out

pirate dens. In Indochina, following the 1908 campaign against the legendary
anti-colonial fighter De Tham in Indochina, Pierre Dieulefils, one of the
colony’s most prolific postcard makers, produced a series of images, ranging
from half-starved conspirators captured to the executed bodies of the con-
demned. Dieulefils’s cheap, mass-produced postcards mirrored those gaining
popularity in the USA that depicted the lynching of African Americans. Both
types of photos emphasised the total vulnerability of non-whites to white
violence and social and political power.10 A final indignity could be levelled
with a trifling salutation scribbled by the sender. On the back of one
particularly graphic image of the severed head of a ‘pirate’, a Frenchman
wrote to a loved-one at home with a succinct, if startling, nonchalance: ‘I
haven’t forgotten you. A thousand kisses.’11
If cultural artefacts offer only suggestive evidence of French attitudes
towards colonial violence, official reports, newspaper articles and travellers’
accounts provided more detailed descriptions. In the more remote and
understaffed colonies, where white settlers and businessmen were furthest
from the administration’s view, evidence of the mistreatment of Indigenous
people was often vague but suggestive. Writing about the New Hebrides in
1911, for example, the governor of New Caledonia admitted, ‘the actions
that have given Europeans a detestable reputation, very often merited, in
the eyes of the natives, are unfortunately too frequent’. Stories of ‘revolting
facts’ circulated, though were hard to prove. Islanders were exposed to
white plantation owners with reputations for brutality, for whom life in the
tropics seemed ‘destructive to the moral senses’. These settlers, he contin-
ued, ignored the law, living like the ‘old buccaneers’ of the Caribbean.
When labourers were needed, whites hunted them down and captured
them as slavers would. The governor was optimistic that rational rule over
whites could be established in the New Hebrides, for there were some
people who ‘remained French in all the noble meanings of the word’.12 But
considering the logistical and administrative challenges of ruling such
a remote collection of islands, the governor’s optimism was not entirely
convincing.

10 See Jacqueline Goldsby, A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), chapter 5.
11 Postcard of a Vietnamese ‘pirate’, Stanford University, Manuscript Collection: Misc
1433.
12 ATNC: 44 W 585: Letter from Governor Richard to the colonial minister. Nouméa,
8 November 1911.

472
 Quotidian Violence in the French Empire

Even in a colony like Indochina, which many Frenchmen considered to

possess an ancient and refined culture, colonial subjects were exposed to the
pettiest mistreatment. White Frenchmen demanded to be treated with
formality, regardless of their rank. Vietnamese of all ages and grades were
expected by many Frenchmen to bow and tip their hats in their presence.
Regardless of their accomplishments, the Vietnamese were addressed as ‘tu’
by even the lowliest French fonctionnaire and regularly excluded from white
people’s homes.13 When shopping, whites believed they had the right to be
served before Vietnamese customers. Even wealthy Vietnamese elites could
be made to feel unwelcome in more exclusive stores, restaurants and hotels.
Félicien Challaye, an outspoken critic of colonial rule, was struck by the
variety of mistreatment he witnessed in Indochina. In 1901, Challaye
encountered a well-dressed and cultivated Vietnamese administrator arriv-
ing home from a trip to France. Unable to wait a moment longer, the man’s
father, wife and children all boarded the ship looking for him on the second-
class deck. The French ‘garçons’ working on board chased the family from
the deck, swiping at them with their towels, while white on-lookers
laughed. Such indignities reminded even successful and assimilated colonial
subjects of their inferiority to their French counterparts. Other encounters
were more violent. ‘I constantly saw Frenchmen offend, injure, brutalize
the indigène’, Challaye wrote. White Frenchmen used whatever was at
hand – their fist, a cane, a riding crop – to hit Vietnamese people who
displeased them. Challaye saw one colonist slap and pull an old Vietnamese
man through a village by the ear, and another beat and kick young women
who had come to his hotel to have tea. He saw Frenchmen hit pousse-
pousse drivers while haggling over a fare. And he saw them hit for no
reason at all, except ‘for the pleasure, or well, as they say, to maintain the
prestige of the white man’.14
The most regularly mistreated non-Europeans were probably domestic
servants. Regardless of the employee’s age, the French used the English term
‘boy’ to describe their menservants. For Challaye, ‘boys’ appeared to be the
white man’s punching bag of choice. ‘I constantly see the Frenchman –
stricken by the heat, absinth, opium – beating the indigenous domestic
who poorly executed an order poorly given in a language poorly

13 Andrée Viollis, Indochine S.O.S. (Paris: Éditeurs Français Réunis, 1949), pp. 46–8; and Le
Temps, 16 June 1908, clipping in the Archives du Ministère des Affaires-Étrangères, Paris
(MAE): C PC/Indochine: N S 1, doc pp. 114–15.
14 Félicien Challaye, Un livre noir du colonialisme: ‘Souvenirs sur la colonisation’ (Paris: Les
Nuits Rouges, 2003), pp. 33–5.

473
 JAMES P. DAUGHTON

understood.’15 The activist Camille Drevet noted with horror that her hotel in
Phnom Penh found it necessary to hang a sign warning clients that it was
prohibited to beat the servants.16 Indeed, the governor general of Indochina
ultimately felt it necessary to publish a circular outlawing the beating of the
Indigenous population, though there is no evidence it was ever enforced.17
The poet and travel writer Luc Durtain witnessed similar behaviour. Over
a meal with a Frenchman, Durtain watched with shock as his host inter-
spersed his cultivated conversation about Montaigne and Valéry with tirades
against the hired help. ‘Damned peasant [nha-qué]! Idiot!’, the man screamed,
throwing punches at his servant for forgetting the champagne and a spoon for
the mustard.18
Such mistreatment of servants was not only to be found in Indochina.
A Frenchman in Equatorial Africa reported that the lieutenant governor of
that colony had beaten his ‘boy’ to the point of unconsciousness, the servant’s
body covered in blood. Though rumours swirled, the real reason for the
attack was unknown; the ‘boy’ had served many other civil servants and had
always received high marks.19 This fragmentary piece of news is hauntingly
reminiscent of the Cameroonian writer Ferdinand Oyono’s Une vie de boy
(1956). In the novel, Toundi, the main character, is beaten to death essentially
for knowing too much about the infidelity of his employer’s wife – a fact he
could not help but learn working in her house.
Whether discussing assaults on elites or servants, reports of such daily
humiliation did not come simply from appalled Frenchmen. Indigenous
people across the empire expressed their own resentment of the treatment
they received. In 1916, for example, a group of eight educated men from
Gabon protested their treatment in a letter to the president of the Ligue des
Droits de l’Homme in Paris. ‘The nègre before the white man’, they com-
plained, ‘is considered a bestial being.’ Some Europeans, including colonial
officials, acted terrified of blacks, refusing to receive them in their offices or
homes for fear, it seemed, of getting fleas or disease. One administrator, the
men wrote, denied Africans the most basic courtesies: he refused to hold any
afternoon meetings because, he said, at that hour ‘it was too hot to speak to

15 Ibid., p. 34.
16 Camille Drevet, Les Annamites chex eux (Paris: Imprimerie de la Société Nouvelle
d’Éditions Franco-Slaves, 1928), p. 20.
17 Léon Werth, Cochinchine (Paris: Viviane Hamy, 2005), p. 47.
18 ‘Nha-qué’ is a derogatory Vietnamese term for ‘peasant’; Luc Durtain, Dieux blancs,
hommes jaunes (Paris: Flammarion, 1930), p. 120.
19 ALDH: F delta rés 798/90: Letter from E. Mathias to secretary general, LDH. Dijon,
26 February 1933.

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 Quotidian Violence in the French Empire

blacks’. Such offensive behaviour came on top of beatings, injuries and other
insults. The men, showing the extent to which racial hierarchies in the
colonies could be internalised by Indigenous people, simply wanted appro-
priate treatment: ‘Our desire is not to be equal to the European, but we desire
certain improvements of our lot.’20
The lieutenant governor of Gabon responded to the eight men’s com-
plaints in typical fashion: he brushed over the specifics of the claims with
civilising rhetoric and patriotic flourishes. In a response to the Ligue des
Droits de l’Homme, he swore that in his long career he had always taken care
to safeguard Indigenous people. Certainly, there were some officers who
misunderstood their role, the governor continued; but the majority
embraced a ‘spirit of self-denial’ and were driven to put into practice ‘the
principles constituting the cornerstone of the republican colonial mission
[œuvre]’. The lieutenant governor felt no need to investigate the complaints of
humiliation. The rhetoric of republican imperialism, it seems, had told him
all he needed to know.

The Human Cost of Mise-en-Valeur

In the wake of the First World War, issues of quotidian humiliation, beatings
and murder became increasingly imbricated in questions of colonial mise-en-
valeur, or economic development. Of particular importance in many overseas
possessions – especially Indochina, West and Equatorial Africa, and various
islands in the Pacific – was colonial labour. French investors regularly com-
plained that local administrations obstructed, more than facilitated, their access
to labour. As a result, many colonial officials turned a blind eye to European
employers’ mistreatment of Indigenous employees. Denunciations of abuses
and calls for reform often met with vindictive responses from the white
colonial community. As a result, the colonial administration often dealt with
problems between critics and colonial business interests, but rarely stepped in
to sanction violence against non-Europeans.
In 1920, for example, the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme published in its
journal, Cahiers, a damning article entitled, ‘The Reestablishment of Slavery
in New Caledonia’. The report, written by Ligue members from Nouméa,
provided an overview of both labour legislation and the actual treatment of
Kanaks recruited for plantation work. Most pressing, plantation owners

20 ALDH: F delta rés 798/90: Letter from ‘indigènes lettrés du Gabon’ to the president,
LDH, Lambaréné, 20 December 1916.

475
 JAMES P. DAUGHTON

willingly ignored the law and efforts to protect free labour were regularly
ignored. Employees who were ‘mistreated or wrongly paid’ had, by law, the
right to leave their employers. But in practice they were not allowed to go
freely. Colonists wanted to have slaves and, in the report’s assessment,
through a series of weak laws and blatant abuses, ‘they succeeded’. The
most common form of recruitment in New Caledonia was through an official
who dealt with Indigenous affairs, a chef de service, who worked with tribal
chiefs. It was this system, the Ligue’s report argued, that was so open to
abuse. ‘The administration writes to the chef [de service] and says it “needs”
50, 60, 80 people. – Certainly, no one says to use violence, but the chef
understands’, the authors reported. ‘Thus opens a veritable hunt for men and
children. The chef sends his police agents whose cudgels work marvels.’ In
addition to blunt force, threats of sending the labourers to the New Hebrides,
a place Kanaks believed to be notoriously inhospitable, scared them into
agreeing to work locally. The Kanak ‘is terrorised by the chef, by this distant
and formidable machine that is the administration’, the report asserted;
‘when one says before him this dreaded name, he is inclined to consent’.21
Once recruited, Kanak men, women and children had little idea what to
expect. Some employers, ‘with humanity’, provided their labourers with
what regulations required: salary, lodging, clothes, food, medical care and,
if necessary, hospitalisations. But many employers failed to do so, and
recruits remained ‘badly fed, badly paid, badly cared for, [and] overwhelmed
by work and punishments’. Such conditions were nothing new; sixteen years
earlier, in 1904, a medical doctor complained that the administration of
Indigenous affairs was woefully understaffed, leading to grave mistreatment
at the hands of ‘inhuman’ employers. The workers, the doctor reported, were
left in ‘deplorable health’, stricken by fatigue and tuberculosis.22
Under colonial law, labourers could complain of poor living or working
conditions, but employers were given a grace period to make improvements.
The Ligue insisted this was unacceptable, as workers ‘had time to die before
having obtained justice’. And that assumed workers had the opportunity to
lodge a complaint. ‘Most often’, when labourers denounced a powerful
colonist they were simply put in prison, charged with ‘insubordination’.
Workers could be sentenced to hard labour – usually breaking rocks from 5
in the morning to 8 at night – for eight to sixty days. Further insubordination

21 ALDH: F Delta rés 798/94: ‘Le rétablissement de l’esclavage en Nouvelle Calédonie’,

Cahiers des Droits de l’Homme 18 (20 September 1920), pp. 3–5.
22 Dr Blandeau, quoted in the procès-verbeaux of the Conseil Général deliberations, 1904,
p. 311 (‘Le rétablissement de l’esclavage’, p. 5).

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meant solitary confinement in a concrete room without air, light or blankets.

If they fell sick from this confinement, the time spent in hospital did not count
towards their sentence. Some workers opted to run, but in such cases employ-
ers resorted to imprisoning family members as a kind of ransom until the
recruit returned. Despite the draconian treatment of recruits, many employ-
ers thought the treatment too lenient.
The members of the Ligue in Nouméa closed their report with an impas-
sioned plea to end this form of slavery. It acknowledged that colonists in New
Caledonia lacked adequate labour, but rejected the all-too-often made claim
that it was necessary and ‘civilising’ to force Kanaks to work. There was no
moralising influence in this form of recruitment. Instead, recruiters intro-
duced workers to alcohol and trafficked Kanak women as prostitutes. The
Nouméa section of the Ligue demanded that the French government no
longer tolerate such abuses and that all labourers have the chance to address
their complaints to competent tribunals.23
When pushed by the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme in Paris to investigate,
the colonial ministry did contact the governor for information. But the out-
come of the governor’s review was a standard non-denial. ‘The native question
in New Caledonia’, the colonial minister wrote, ‘is intimately linked to the
problem of labour and my Department as well as the local administration
accords all its attention to the examination of this question that interests the
future of our colonisation of the Pacific. The appropriate instructions have
moreover already been sent to the colony.’24 The colonial minister did not feel
obliged, however, to tell the president of the Ligue whether his instructions
included ending the alleged regime of slavery in New Caledonia.
While the ministry brushed over the accusations with typical aplomb, the
Ligue report caused an intense backlash in the colony. Within three months
of publication in the Cahiers of the ‘Re-establishment of Slavery’ report,
members of the Ligue in Nouméa felt their livelihoods and jobs threatened
by powerful political and economic interests. A representative of the
Nouméa section wrote to Paris to ask for help: ‘Their devotion to the
cause of law and justice must not be for them the loss of their jobs, their
ruin and that of their children.’25 And this plea was sent before two incendiary
articles denouncing the Ligue appeared in the colonial press.

23 ‘Le rétablissement de l’esclavage’, pp. 6–8.

24 ALDH: F Delta rés 798/94: Letter from the colonial minister to the president of the
LDH. Paris, 7 April 1921.
25 ALDH: F Delta rés 798/94: Note, no date. The ‘note’ makes reference to a letter
from M. Muller of the Nouméa section to M. Guernut in Paris, dated 15 December 1920.

477
 JAMES P. DAUGHTON

The responses to the Ligue’s report showed how many colonists in the
French Empire justified severe treatment of non-Europeans by pointing to
their own alleged sacrifices in trying to develop colonial economies. In
December 1920, an article appeared in the influential Caledonian newspaper,
Le Messager, called ‘The League of Rights of the Canaque’ and written by the
paper’s editor-in-chief, Alin Laubreaux, a white native of New Caledonia who
became a successful right-wing journalist in France. In his response,
Laubreaux admitted that there was one truth in what the author of the
Ligue’s report had said: ‘It is, this truth, that slavery has been effectively re-
established in New Caledonia . . . Yes, certainly. There are slaves in New
Caledonia and these slaves, IT’S US.’ The white man’s master, according to
this white Caledonian, was none other than ‘His Majesty the Canaque’.26
Laubreaux expressed violent sentiments about Kanaks that were not
uncommon among landowners in New Caledonia. The Indigenous, it was
widely claimed, were overly protected, even pampered, by an administration
that refused to force them to work for French settlers in dire need of
labourers. According to Laubreaux, Kanaks were free of taxes, free of work
obligations, and free to leave their land uncultivated, all at the expense of the
white population. Progress, he argued, had made this kind of ‘communism’
unacceptable: ‘You know full well, that the first of [our] duties is to produce
at least as much as we consume, and that the lazy, the useless don’t even have
a right to exist.’ Laubreaux argued that the Kanak’s ‘ignorance, filth and
laziness’ was only augmented by the protection offered from the
administration.
Laubreaux concluded his article by reminding the ‘League of the Rights of
the Canaque’ of a colonist named Grassin, who went to the bush, armed with
the ideals of the Rights of Man, ready to defend the islanders. And what
happened to him? ‘One day they came, savagely tattooed, armed for war, lit
his house on fire, pillaged his stores.’ Grassin, he reported, was decapitated
and disembowelled; his wife killed, then raped. ‘Voilà. Is that enough?’ The
reader was left with the question hanging: enough for what? Laubreaux added
no further comment. But it is hard to read the article, which deemed Kanaks
to be ungrateful murderers and rapists, as anything but a call to arms.
Certainly not all Europeans were so overtly violent. An article in La France
Australe, also written in response to the Ligue’s report, was less combative
towards the government but argued that the Kanak had to be dealt with
sternly or else he would ‘lose all consideration for the white man’. ‘The

26 Alin Laubreaux, ‘La Ligue des Droits du Canaque’, Le Messager, 16 December 1920.

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native must be disciplined: he must, like a child who knows to obey his father,
know to obey the administration. We must be very just with him, very good
when he submits to orders, very severe when he tries to evade them.’27 While
La France Australe left undefined what ‘severe’ meant, other settlers were
more to the point. A dozen years later, with an international depression
underway, debates still raged about Kanak labour. Letters to the editor
flowed into the offices of La France Australe. One reader, appalled by the
insensitivity of his fellow colonists, summed up their opinions thus:
The humanitarian point of view has nothing to see here. We need labour
before everything else. – Thus the canaques before daring to plant their own
crops must work for the European . . . uniquely for him! At the same time,
we claim the whole place . . . Let’s make colonization 100% white . . .
That day, there will be no more canaques but that doesn’t matter . . .
Labour! And soon . . . let’s kill them, if we have to! 28
In his letter to the editor, this reader condemned such ‘blind hatred’ and
violent – even genocidal – proposals as being ‘anti-French’. That may have
been true; but they were not entirely uncommon in the French Empire.
White men and women living in the empire regularly complained that
metropolitan Frenchmen had no idea of what their lives were like and had
no business criticising their treatment of the Indigenous population. In the
opinion of many colonists, metropolitan misunderstanding of colonial ways
of seeing stemmed from their inherent naivety that misled Frenchmen in
France into believing that all Indigenous people were, as one writer put it,
‘the victims of European colonisers’.29
In a particularly frank 1928 article on the subject, an ‘Old Colonist’ from
Madagascar wrote of his compatriots in France who ‘speak of our Colony and
of our natives like a blind man [speaks of] colours and proclaim that it is us who
are wrong when we do not share their opinions’. The ‘Old Colonist’ consid-
ered the apparent transformation that took place when the idealist metropo-
litan moved to the colonies. ‘How to understand this immediate volte-face of
the intractable diehard humanitarian, for whom all the Malagasy must be
beloved brothers’, he mused, ‘who suddenly becomes the level-headed,

27 L. Chauvière, ‘Les Indigènes’, La France Australe, 2 February 1921. The use of the child
metaphor in describing Indigenous people was widespread. See, William B. Cohen,
‘The Colonized as Child: British and French Colonial Rule’, African Historical Studies 3.2
(1970), 427–31.
28 P.L., ‘La haine aveugle . . .’, La France Australe, 27 August 1932; this and other clippings
from August and September can be found in ALDH: F Delta rés 798/94.
29 Camille Devilar, ‘La Ligue des Droits de l’Homme et la colonisation’, Le Rappel,
5 November 1927, clipping in F Delta rés 798/53.

479
 JAMES P. DAUGHTON

calm, just, but mistrustful and distant man, characteristic of the true colon?’ For
this writer, the difference was easily explained by experience. Whatever
‘humanitarian convictions’ the new arrival came with dissipated when he
found himself ‘facing a reality completely different from that expected’.
What ‘hard and sometimes cruel experience’ revealed to the new arrival in
Madagascar was little different from what Alin Laubreaux saw in New
Caledonia. According to the ‘Old Colonist’, the new arrival slowly finds that
the administration works primarily for the Indigenous population, and that the
‘character’ of the native is ‘deceitful, lying, lazy, and above all infinitely
ungrateful’. Malagasies – like Kanaks, it seems – only understood tough
treatment: they were weak and obsequious when they feared the white man;
arrogant and insolent when they felt themselves safe from punishment.30
Colonial administrators had at least two reasons for not cracking down on
colonists who condoned the rough treatment of Indigenous labourers. First,
inherent in the backlash against the Ligue’s article decrying slavery in New
Caledonia was a volatile contempt for the administration, both in the colony
and in Paris. Already reviled by many colonists for allegedly being on the side
of the Indigenous population, local administrators shied away from further
angering their compatriots by disciplining them for mistreating their work-
force. Locally powerful and with strong support from the colonial lobby in
Paris, planters had the political sway to oust officials who tried to undermine
their business plans. Second, many officials agreed that Indigenous labourers
needed to be forced, even with violence, to work. As the colonial ministry
pointed out, labour shortages were a problem faced in many parts of the
empire, from New Caledonia to Cochinchina to Madagascar to Equatorial
Africa. If the colonies were to be profitable, labour was needed at any cost –
a belief adopted by even some outspoken administrative critics of labour
violations.31 Suffering was part of the political economy of empire. And for
many Frenchmen – settlers, businessmen, officials – the price of humane
treatment was too high.

Colonial ‘Justice’
If the economic development of the empire helped justify violence, ironically
so too did notions of justice. Brutality was the clearest indication that many

30 Le Vieux Colon, ‘À propos de Ligue des Droits de l’Homme’, Le Colon Tamatave,

15 January 1928.
31 See Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French
and British Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 88–9.

480
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settlers, merchants and even travellers believed that they had every right to
perform the role of judge, jury and, in some instances, executioner. The
absence of a reliable colonial police and judicial system no doubt encouraged
vigilantism among French civilians. But acts of violence also helped draw the
lines of identity: brutality solidified racial distinctions and political and social
hierarchies within the empire. French men and women often mistreated
colonial subjects – even to the point of torture and murder – with an assumed
impunity based entirely on their race, claim to French culture and civilisation,
and relation to political power.
In 1922, the Ouest-Africain Français, a ‘republican-socialist’ newspaper,
under the ironic headline ‘Civilisation’, reported two cases of murder in
Equatorial Africa that the local administration had chosen to ignore. In the
first case, a Gabonese ‘notable’ named Awalo, who worked on a launch,
drowned when a French mechanic on his boat threw him overboard.
The second victim, who was unidentified, was shot and killed by an
English agent of a local business in Gabon. The agent then doused the
body in gasoline and burned it. According to the paper, he probably would
have succeeded in hiding his deed but for one of his workers who stumbled
upon him. The Englishman tried to shoot that worker as well, but missed. No
motives were established in either case. In demanding that the administration
order investigations of the murders, the Ouest-Africain Français noted that
they were two in a ‘long series of crimes, until now kept in the shadows’ of
the colony.32 The Ouest-Africain Français warned that the population had been
left ‘scandalised’ since the criminals had been ignored simply because they
were not black. The Gabonese, the article continued, protested energetically
‘against the violation of his right to life [droit de vie], of this intangible right
that the most backwards man recognises in his own kind’. The only explana-
tion for denying justice to the people of Gabon was ‘negrophobia’.
The administration, however, was unmoved and showed no interest in
investigating the murders. It is perhaps not surprising that the Ouest-Africain
Français – a minor publication if ever there was one – did not persuade the
administration to open an investigation. More revealing of official recalci-
trance, though, is that the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme in Paris did not fare
any better. Three letters on the subject from the organisation’s president to
the colonial minister went unanswered. And when the minister finally
replied – well more than a year after the president of the Ligue first
wrote – he offered a polite brush-off. ‘I can assure you’, he wrote, ‘that all

32 L’Ouest-Africain Français, 29 January 1921, clipping in ALDH: F Delta rés 798/90.

481
 JAMES P. DAUGHTON

measures are being taken to avoid in the future all new causes of trouble, of
agitation, or of discontentment’ in the region.33 On the brutal crimes of old,
the minister had nary a word to say.
Similar incidents – and official responses – could be found across the
empire in South-East Asia. In 1925, a man named Charles Yonne, who worked
for a coalmine in Vietnam, shot a 23-year-old coolie named Ngô Viêt Ly who
was ‘satisfying his needs’ near the fence around Yonne’s property. Yelling, ‘go
soil somewhere else’, Yonne fired at the crouching man, hitting him in the
side. Ngô tried to flee but soon could run no further. An ambulance took him
to the hospital where he underwent surgery. The bullet had torn internal
organs; he died the next day. Yonne later claimed only to have been shooting
towards the victim in order to scare him away. Before dying, however, Ngô
said he had not heard Yonne until the bullet hit him, calling into question the
Frenchman’s desire to chase him away. For killing the 23-year-old worker,
Yonne was given a two-year suspended sentence and was not required to pay
an indemnity to Ngô’s family. He walked out of court a free man.
Such verdicts caused anger and dismay within the wider Vietnamese
community. Yonne’s killing of Ngô came just one month after a Japanese
employee of a French concession killed a Vietnamese worker suspected of
stealing coffee plants. Uyéno Nisaku hanged the suspect, Lê Van Da, by his
thumbs, punched him, kicked him, and beat him with a bamboo rod. He left
Lê suspended for some time, hoping to elicit a confession. But when Nisaku
returned he found only a cadaver. Nisaku had been accused of inflicting this
punishment – which the president of the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme
termed ‘torture’ – just the previous day by another employee.34 Like
Yonne, Nisaku was given a two-year suspended sentence, meaning that he,
too, walked out of court without even paying a fine.
The decisions the court handed down on Nisaku and Yonne caused
disbelief in Vietnam. The injustice was compounded by the fact that, the
same year, Phan Bôi Châu, a prominent anti-colonial nationalist who had
been captured in China and returned to Hanoi, was condemned to forced
labour in perpetuity. One French commentator reported that the Vietnamese
were struck by the severity of Phan Bôi Châu’s punishment considering the
fact that he had ‘neither killed nor tortured’ anyone. ‘The life of

33 ALDH: F Delta rés 798/90: Letters from the president to the colonial minister, Paris,
12 May and 2 November 1922 and 1 August 1923; and letter from colonial minister to
president, Paris, 20 September 1923.
34 ALDH: F delta rés 798/85: Letter from president of LDH, Hanoi Section, to secretary
general, LDH, Hanoi, 7 November 1925.

482
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a Vietnamese’, the commentator noted, ‘is estimated at a very low price in

Indochina.’35 A number of Frenchmen reflecting on the cases insisted that the
acquittals did damage to the Indigenous population’s respect for the French
and the justice they purported to bring. But in the 1920s, the administration
was interested in supporting, rather than punishing, industries like mining
and plantations. Labour was a particular point of tension between business-
men and officials. For the time being, the administration chose not to pursue
harsher punishment.
By the 1930s, with criticism of colonial brutality mounting, both from anti-
colonial voices and from bodies like the League of Nations and the
International Labour Organization, such acts of vigilante justice had become
increasingly troubling for the administration. But subject populations were
not much closer to finding justice. In 1931, for example, La Revue d’Outre Mer
recounted the horrific story of a Gabonese man named Massima who was
accused by his employers of stealing a chicotte from the forestry concession
where he worked.36 Ironically, the chicotte – a hide whip – was the emblem
of white violence in the empire as it was regularly used to punish workers.
Massima was accused randomly, but his employers decided to torture him
until he confessed to the crime. They began by stripping him, tying him to
the back of a tractor, and dragging him until he lost consciousness. Failing to
elicit an admission of guilt, they bound him in a ‘croix de Saint-André’ and
proceeded to burn his extremities; a white woman among the group insisted
they burn Massima’s sexual organs as well. Finding him still alive – and still
refusing to confess – the Frenchmen hanged their victim from a post by the
ankles, his head dunked in a barrel of water until he passed out. Unconscious,
the man was untied from the post; he died shortly thereafter. According to
a number of reports, the Frenchmen sipped champagne as Massima expired.
The sheer horror of the crime, distinguished by what one commentator
called the ‘incredible refinement of cruelty’ shown by the torturers, brought
Massima’s murder into the mainstream press in France.37 Making it even
more shocking, the Frenchmen involved in the crime confessed to certain
instances of abuse, but denied the most troubling details, including the
dragging and burning of Massima’s body. At trial, all four of the accused
were acquitted, as the court remained unconvinced that the drowning of
Massima actually caused his death. The court also condemned four African

35 ALDH: F delta res 798/177: Clipping, A. E. Babut, ‘Il faut supprimer les tribunaux
d’exception en Indochine’, Progrès Civique 337 (1926), 168.
36 ‘Un scandale en AEF’, La Revue d’Outre-Mer, Prémère année, 9 (30 November 1932).
37 Jean Philip, ‘Les crimes coloniaux’, Les Annales Coloniales, 24 December 1932.

483
 JAMES P. DAUGHTON

witnesses who were found guilty of giving false testimony, sentencing three
of them to five years in prison.38 Condemnation of the decision was wide-
spread. The decision was criticised in the French National Assembly. The
procurer general who reviewed the case deemed it ‘shocking’. For Pierre
Contet, a French writer who had spent years in the Congo, it was nothing but
‘white man’s justice’: in Equatorial Africa, he noted, it was customary to
condemn ‘the weak in order to cover up the thefts, corruption, and crimes of
the powerful’.39
The fallout from the Libreville verdict revealed the difficult position that
the colonial administration found itself in when it came to issues of justice.
Severe shortages of officials in Equatorial Africa meant that the presiding
judge had minimal knowledge of law. Strapped for cash and short on experts,
the administration had no alternative but to assign functionaries from other
departments to hear cases. In the Massima case, the judge’s primary job was
working for the postal service; the assessors were merchants and bureaucrats
equally ignorant of criminal procedure. French residents were unlikely to find
their compatriots guilty of mistreating Indigenous people. Such was the
colour of justice in many parts of the French Empire.
But the colonial ministry in France, itself closer to much of the outrage
about miscarriages of justice, did take action. It drafted and then released
a circular to all administrations in the empire condemning the ‘dispropor-
tionate’ sanctions given to Europeans and Indigenous people for the same
crime. Such ‘verdicts of race’ risked undermining the principle that ‘justice is
equal for all’. Tellingly, the circular admitted to being motivated by the fact
that miscarriages of justice empowered ‘denigrators of our colonisation’. It
also acknowledged the delicacy of racial hierarchies in the empire: the
ministry’s intention was not to ‘diminish the prestige of the European’, but
rather to emphasise that the settler’s authority should be defined by his
‘magnanimity and his moral superiority’, not by ‘his power’.40
The ministry’s call for all colonies to be more scrupulous in questions of
justice where violence was involved, however, did not result in sweeping
changes of practice. Three years after the circular was sent out, more calls
for reform followed the death of a Vietnamese hotel employee suspected of
robbery. The accused killer, a Frenchman named Furcy, insisted he was simply
trying to get a suspect to confess to stealing cash from a septuagenarian French

38 ANOM: Aff Pol 664: ‘Note pour le ministre’, 16 February 1933; and letter from the
procurer general J. Sanner to the governor general of AEF, Brazzaville, 20 October 1932.
39 Pierre Contet in Le Populaire 17 année, no. 4208 (11 August 1934), 2.
40 ANOM: Aff Pol 664: ‘Circulaire’, Paris, 14 March 1935.

484
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couple, the Bernards. A low-ranking Vietnamese administrator was called to

the scene, but failed to intervene as Furcy and M. Bernard interrogated the
suspect. The two men beat the Vietnamese victim, identified as Ly Van Binh,
to the point of unconsciousness and left him without medical assistance. Ly
later died from his wounds. There was evidence that Furcy had tortured the
man, holding a burning candle under his nose and ears, but officials would only
admit that Furcy did not ‘hesitate to employ criminal means’. Known to
possess ‘a violent character’ and having been previously condemned for beat-
ing, Furcy nonetheless only received a suspended sentence.41 Bernard, too, was
freed with what one journalist called ‘complete absolution’.42
The administration again became the focus of criticism from the Ligue des
Droits de l’Homme and a couple of radical newspapers. The president of the
Ligue complained to the colonial minister that the Vietnamese people were
‘violently moved by the insufficiency of the condemnations’ and the ‘admin-
istrative negligence’ shown in the case. The Revue Franco-Annamite asserted
that the verdict exposed a double standard in the justice system. ‘Suppose the
victim had been a Frenchmen’, the paper noted, ‘and the two murderers [had
been] two Indigenous men, would they have been given suspended
sentences?’ Rebuking the ‘judges without courage’ and a dysfunctional
administration, the Revue concluded, ‘there is a lot to redress here’. But the
Ligue and the Revue were minority opinions. Another paper, the Tribune
Républicaine, reported that the mainstream press had insisted that ‘sound
justice’ had been rendered in the case. ‘Relations between French and
Vietnamese’, the Tribune dissented, ‘have nothing to gain from verdicts of
this kind.’43
The colonial ministry did, on paper, argue that colonial courts should
crack down on the ‘tendency of some French citizens’ to assume certain
‘feudal’ rights. Failing to do so could be ‘prejudicial to French prestige in
Indochina’.44 But little was done to rectify the system. The colonial minister
ultimately defended the verdict in the Furcy case, saying that ‘attenuating
circumstances’ had led the criminal court to suspend the sentence. ‘No
violation or false interpretation of the law’ had occurred. The only one at
the scene of the crime deemed negligent was the low-ranking Vietnamese

41 ALDH: F Delta rés 798/431: ‘Affaire de Hatien’, no date, no author.

42 Raymond Delmas, Tribune Républicaine, 1 July 1938.
43 ALDH: F Delta rés 798/431: Letter from the president to the colonial minister, Paris, no
date (c. April 1938); ‘Verdict trop doux’, La Revue Franco-Annamite 213 (1 May 1938); and
Delmas, Tribune Républicaine, 1 July 1937.
44 ALDH: F Delta rés 798/431: ‘Affaire de Hatien’.

485
 JAMES P. DAUGHTON

administrator, who was said to have shown indifference and passivity in the
face of the violent Frenchmen. He was relieved of his duties and a demerit
(blâme) was put on his record.45 No one apparently saw the irony that the
administration was holding a Vietnamese subaltern to a higher moral stan-
dard than the two native-born Frenchmen.

Calculating Brutality
The question remains why officials in Paris, who so often waxed lyrical about
the liberating power of their civilising mission, did not do more to curb
quotidian violence. For experts interested in the theory of colonial rule, the
suffering of Indigenous populations at the hands of colons had long been
a core concern. As early as the 1870s, the French government had studied the
causes of revolts and other forms of political unrest in the empire. In 1878, in
a moment of uncommon introspection, the naval ministry, which at the time
oversaw New Caledonia, ordered an investigation into the causes of a major
insurrection in which hundreds of Kanak warriors tried to destabilise French
rule. Kanaks had killed as many as 200 European settlers and soldiers; but the
army brutally defeated the revolt, killing around a thousand islanders, or
5 per cent of the Indigenous population. The root causes identified by the
final report would have seemed strikingly familiar to anyone who read the
Ligue’s 1920 report on the re-establishment of slavery in the colony. The 1879
report explained the rebellion by pointing to dispossession of Kanak lands,
mistreatment by immoral white colons, an unfair and abusive labour system,
and inadequate administrative protection of islanders from unscrupulous
settlers, who, among other misdeeds, often refused to pay their labourers.
The commission also found fault with authorities who remained ‘quite blind’
to the situation around them.46
Half a century later, administrators had apparently not learned the lessons
of their own reports. In 1929, Georges Hardy, one of the leading colonial
experts of his generation, again identified both colonists and administrators as
potential problems for achieving long-term stability across the empire. Of
particular concern to Hardy was the colonist’s moral judgement, especially
when placed in tropical climes that proved so trying to what he deemed ‘the
European’s nerves’. At all costs, Hardy argued, white civilians should avoid

45 ALDH: F Delta rés 798/431: Letter from colonial minister to president of the LDH,
Paris, 16 May 1938.
46 ANOM: FM /S G/NC: V Carton 43: ‘Rapport sur les causes de l’insurrection canaque
en 1878’, 4 February 1879.

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‘bad habits, like slovenliness, crude language, an excess of anger, [and]

brutalities’ when around the Indigenous population.47
While all indications – from the 1879 commission’s findings on the Kanak
insurrection to Georges Hardy’s 1929 study – suggested that the French
government should shun acts of violence against Indigenous populations
for the sake of stability, if not humanity, the administration lacked both the
will and the means to do so. Violence was a subject that many regional
officials refused to report and preferred not to discuss. To report the occur-
rence of abuses in an administrator’s region was tantamount to an admission
of professional negligence. Officials in Paris associated disorder, including
settlers acting unlawfully, with weak leadership. The few bold officials who
did report abuses perpetrated by Frenchmen not only potentially tarnished
their own reputations, but also regularly faced vicious recrimination from the
colonial community.
Where the central administration was most negligent, however, was in not
diligently investigating complaints. The colonial ministry was entirely willing
to believe in the power of its own regulations. If certain violent behaviours,
such as the mistreatment of labour, were unlawful, then most officials in
Paris insisted that they did not occur. The ministry was also far too trusting of
its own officials, even when they were implicated in cases of alleged corrup-
tion and cruelty. With independent inspectors scarce in the empire until the
1930s, the colonial ministry regularly ordered investigations to be carried out
by colleagues of the very officials accused of abuse. The Ligue des Droits de
l’Homme pointed this out to the ministry: investigations that were carried
out ‘with the collaboration of local officials, associated with the local quarrels’
were done so ‘in vain’.48
Not only did such investigations prove futile; they often made matters
worse. As a Frenchman in Guadeloupe put it in 1930, failing to hold whites
accountable for their violent behaviour only encouraged them to carry on
with a sense of ‘impunity’.49 Considering the importance of the presence of
a punitive authority in curbing violent behaviour, the ministry’s insistence
that abuses did not take place made colonies more prone to abuse, rather
than less. Under such circumstances, it is not surprising that critics in the
interwar years would decry the lack of justice across France’s African

47 Georges Hardy, Nos grands problèmes coloniaux (Paris: A. Colin, 1929), pp. 123–4.
48 ALDH: F Delta rés 798/89: Letter to the minister of colonies from the president of
LDH, Paris, 1 February 1933.
49 ALDH: F Delta rés 798/91: Letter from Joseph Sarat to the secretary general of LDH,
Pointe-à-Pitre, 11 March 1931.

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 JAMES P. DAUGHTON

possessions, where there was no hint of a truly republican administration, but

only a ‘sovereign master’ that oversaw a ‘regime of terror’.50

Bibliographical Essay
As this chapter makes clear, the historiography specifically on quotidian violence as
perpetrated by non-state actors in the French empire is not extensive. The best sources
on such violence remain testimonies and reports written by travellers, journalists and
officials in both published volumes and archival collections. Among the most influential
contemporary published non-fiction accounts are Aimé Césaire, Discours sur le colonialisme
(Paris: Présence Africaine, 1955); Félicien Challaye, Un livre noir du colonialisme: ‘Souvenirs
sur la colonisation’ (Paris: Les Nuits Rouges, 2003); Camille Drevet, Les Annamites chex eux
(Paris: Imprimerie de la Société Nouvelle d’Éditions Franco-Slaves, 1928); Frantz Fanon,
The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963);
André Gide, Voyage au Congo (Paris: Gallimard, 1927); Georges Hardy, Nos grands problèmes
coloniaux (Paris: A. Colin, 1929); Albert Londres, Terre d’ébène (Paris: Albin Michel, 1928);
Léon Werth, Cochinchine (Paris: Viviane Hamy, 2005); Andrée Viollis, Indochine S.O.S.
(Paris: Éditeurs Français Réunis, 1949).
Despite the dearth of work directly on quotidian violence by non-state actors, there is
a rich collection of books that deal with administrative responses to various aspects of
violence in the French Empire. A very select list would include William Cohen, Rulers of
Empire: The French Colonial Service in Africa (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1971);
Jeffrey Herbst, States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Phyllis M. Martin, ‘The Violence of
Empire’, in David Birmingham and Phyllis Martin (eds.), History of Central Africa, vol. I I
(London: Longman, 1983), pp. 1–26; the essays collected in Martin Thomas (ed.), The French
Colonial Mind, vol. I I (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011); and the collection
introduced by Samuel Kalman in ‘Colonial Violence’, Historical Reflections/Réflexions
Historiques 36.2 (2010), 1–6.
The shifting ideas regarding colonial rule, especially the rise of a kind of anti-colonialism
and colonial ‘humanism’, has been a subject explored by Jean-Pierre Bondi, Les
anticolonialistes (1881–1962) (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1992); Alice Conklin, A Mission to
Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1890–1930 (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1997); Raoul Girardet, L’idée colonial en France de 1871 à 1962
(Paris: La Table Ronde, 1972); Claude Liauzu, L’histoire de l’anticolonialisme en France du
XVIe siè cle à nos jours (Paris: A. Colin, 2007); Martin Thomas, The French Empire between the
Wars: Imperialism, Politics, and Society (Manchester: University of Manchester, 2005);
Gary Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between
the Two World Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). On the Ligue des Droits
de l’Homme’s engagement with colonial questions, see William Irvine, Between Justice and
Politics: The Ligue des Droits de l’Homme, 1898–1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press,

50 ALDH: F Delta rés 798/179: Two reports, ‘De la justice criminelle en Afrique
Occidentale Française’ and ‘Justice indigène en Afrique Occidentale Française’, no
date, but with a cover letter dated 26 July 1922.

488
 Quotidian Violence in the French Empire

2006) and Cylvie Claveau, Une sélection universaliste de l’altérité: l’autre à la Ligue des Droits de
l’Homme et du citoyen en France 1920–1940 (Sarrebrucken: Presses Universitaires
Européennes, 2010).
On shifting norms regarding the treatment of colonial subjects in internationalist
circles, see Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in
French and British Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); J. P. Daughton,
‘Behind the Imperial Curtain: International Humanitarian Efforts and the Critique of
French Colonialism in the Interwar Years’, French Historical Studies 34.3 (2011), 503–28;
Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2015).
Finally, comparisons between French colonial relations with Indigenous populations
and the dynamics of Jim Crow America can be contemplated by looking at James Allen
(ed.), Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Santa Fe: Twin Palms, 2000);
Jacqueline Goldsby, A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2006); Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in
the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998); C. Vann Woodward, The Strange
Career of Jim Crow, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974).

489
 24
Violence, the State and Revolution
in Latin America
robert h. holden

Latin America, defined here as the nineteen American republics that once
constituted almost all of the overseas territories of the monarchies of Spain
and Portugal, now accounts for 8 per cent of the world’s population and
13 per cent of its land area. This chapter analyses the violence associated with
the social field of power surrounding the state, or what we will call ‘public
violence’. The volume’s focus on the period after about 1800 conveniently
captures the first years of the great divide in the chronology of Latin
American public violence: the rupture, extending from about 1808 to about
1824, that ended a three-century, post-conquest period of relative order and
stability under the rule of the Iberian monarchies. That break inaugurated
two centuries of self-government distinguished by consistently high levels of
public violence. In breadth and intensity, public violence associated with the
making and remaking of state institutions may have peaked in the late
twentieth century. Since the 1980s, organised violence of a more criminal
and less overtly political kind has flourished in many places without losing its
place within the field of state power, because so much of it has depended
directly on the collaboration, indifference or incompetence of agents of the
state.
No investigation of violence, in any society, can pass over the role of the
permanent institutions of rule (i.e., the state), particularly those responsible
for the administration of law and justice. As a result, it is the combined
problem of violence and the state – whose principal function is to administer
justice – that will dictate the course of this analysis, with the unavoidable
addition of the concept of revolution in its distinctly Latin American expres-
sion as the ever-frustrated search for a just order. Public violence remains
closely linked, as both condition and consequence, to long-standing traditions
of Latin American politics that cannot be overlooked but which can only
receive cursory notice here. First among them is a towering indifference to
the rule of law, and its sequelae of impunity and official venality. Another is

490
 Violence, the State and Revolution in Latin America

patrimonialism and its offspring, personalism and presidentialism, for where

public office is widely seen as a kind of endowment to be utilised by its
occupant for the benefit of family and friends, the personal qualities of the
caudillo or leader, including his capacity to attract and reward followers while
punishing enemies, overshadow law and ideology, thwarting common
notions of just order. These mutually reinforcing dispositions entail
a continuous summons to violence as the means of enlargement or resis-
tance, enforcement or abatement, validating and even invigorating the dis-
positions and thus the tendency to use violence.
The following analysis interprets public violence not as some amorphous,
unchanging ‘structure’ of Latin American life but as a collective activity
subject at once to the circumstances of particular times and places and to
the larger tendencies that cross the national boundaries of the Hispanic
world. In its numerous guises, public violence may signal a crisis of order,
but only rarely, if ever, a state of utter disorder or chaos. Public violence
should thus be understood as a mode of action dictated by a particular
strategy for keeping or seizing power, or for influencing those in power.1
Its agents justify it in the same way that they justify the exercise of the power
that the violence is intended to serve – i.e., according to the principles of
some legitimacy-bestowing authority. For power always invokes, and at least
formally remains accountable to, some powerless, supreme authority:
a political ideology, a person gifted by an extraordinary grace (charisma) of
leadership, or some higher-order world view appealing to deeply held
beliefs.2 Hence, violence in the service of state-making.
Any state-centred analysis of violence across two centuries must rest on
a periodisation of what Oakeshott called the ‘interminable enterprise’ of
the state formation process itself.3 As the processes and outcomes of state-
making shifted over time, so did the kinds of violence associated with
them, yielding the four-phase chronology of state formation that frames
the following analysis. A formative period associated with intense violence
among rival power-seekers loyal to a diversity of legitimacy-bestowing

1 I owe this perspective in part to Eduardo González Calleja, ‘La razón de la fuerza: una
perspectiva de la violencia política en la España de la Restauración’, Ayer 13 (1994), 85–103,
at 86.
2 For a compatible theoretical perspective on the centrality to Latin American disorder of
the absence of a shared, legitimacy-bestowing belief system, see Douglass C. North,
William Summerhill and Barry R. Weingast, ‘Order, Disorder, and Economic Change:
Latin America versus North America’, in Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Hilton L. Root
(eds.), Governing for Prosperity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 17–58, at
23–5, 29, 47.
3 Michael Oakeshott, On Human Conduct (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 189.

491
 ROBERT H. HOLDEN

authorities ended in the 1870s. In the second phase, lasting to about 1940,
violence diminished as state institutions were consolidated along more or
less liberal but markedly non-democratic lines. The phase of state-making
that coincided with World War II and the ensuing Cold War was probably
the most destructive in the region’s history, as the result of large-scale
mobilisations of people seeking more inclusive levels of both economic
and political development, and the repressive response by states and their
allies outside of Latin America. In an era of Marxist-tinged social revolu-
tion, expanding state responsibility for economic development and social
welfare accompanied an often disproportionate enlargement of the capa-
city and internal reach of the armed forces. Finally, an era of democratisa-
tion and demilitarisation, from about the 1980s until the present, has been
unmatched in two, paradoxical, ways. The level of elections-driven poli-
tical stability has never been higher or appeared more durable. But so has
lawless violence, official corruption and state failure.

The Great Rupture and its Consequences: Rival

Authorities and Fragile Institutions, c. 1810 to c. 1870
The first phase (roughly the 1810s to the 1870s) was a formative period of
institution building, characterised by the persistence of a wide range of
competing authorities to which rival power holders and power seekers
appealed as the sources of their right to rule. Because such authorities
conveyed competing criteria by which the legitimacy of states, governments
and office holders were to be judged, the result was a crisis of legitimacy.
During this first phase of state formation, most power seekers found inspira-
tion in the continuous arrival of European-derived mutations of liberalism
and conservatism, spawning a range of ideological authorities whose fol-
lowers issued anathemas invoking mutual declarations of extermination.
Almost everywhere, in this phase, the fragility of governing institutions –
a characteristic that has never faded entirely in Latin America – was at its
maximum level. State-making tended to be dominated by power-seeking
personalities, caudillos and their clients, many of whom organised under the
banner of one or another justice-seeking ideological or moral authority. The
rivalry over control of the nascent state apparatus, which itself frequently
consisted of little more than the means to coerce rivals and to occupy the
customs-house, has rarely been more intense. Power deployed in the pursuit
of state-making was likely to be transient and dispersed, focused above all on
defending itself against rivals.

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Another distinguishing feature of the first phase of state formation, and the
violence associated with it, was its matrix: the great rupture of 1808–24, which
separated the Americans from a governing entity in which the power of
monarchy and the authority of religion, though overlapping rather than
strictly separated, had together managed to generate and sustain order for
more than three centuries. Independence normalised what was relatively
exceptional during the period of Spanish rule: the use of force. Under Spain,
there was not even a standing army until the late eighteenth century;
composed almost entirely of Spanish Americans, its main function was to
defend the realms against Spain’s European adversaries. The military occupa-
tion of Spain and the removal of its legitimate monarch, Ferdinand VII, by
imperial France in 1808 unleashed the discord over authority that would
shortly begin to lacerate the Hispanic world. A restoration of the old order,
founded on the power of kingship and the authority of religion, natural law,
corporate rights and the church, would prove to be beyond reach. While the
process of separation itself need not occupy us here, its outcome is crucial for
understanding the patterns of public violence that would follow. The simul-
taneous collapse of substantive traditions of rule and the invasion of emanci-
patory ideologies generated a crisis of order in all the new republics of
Spanish America. It was a fate largely avoided by the Empire of Brazil,
whose independence from Portugal was proclaimed in 1822 by none other
than a resident prince of the ruling Braganza dynasty of Portugal itself.
Brazil’s transition to independence, marked by continuity, favoured the
persistence of familiar institutions suitably recalibrated by the legitimate
monarch. In the Spanish dominions, only Puerto Rico and Cuba eschewed
independence, adhering to the monarchy until 1898 when an independence
war in Cuba and a US invasion of Puerto Rico finally terminated Spain’s
presence in America.
Independence was not so much sought by Ibero-Americans as thrust
upon them by events in Europe. A rupture that was unplanned, and for
which no one was prepared, generated experiences whose effects would
resound across the rest of the century and beyond, in two main ways: first,
in the pressing need to adopt institutions of self-rule subject to some socially
recognised authority to replace those of the monarchy, a need that persisted
well beyond the actual acquisition of full independence in 1821–4;
and second, in the myriad, and often destructive, means devised to advance
the fortunes of one or another party, programme, regime or leader in the
search for political order. Rather than a clearcut encounter between
a Spanish army and American armies seeking national independence, the

493
 ROBERT H. HOLDEN

violence of the independence era (1808–24) was overwhelmingly internal,

pitting groups of Americans against each other – an ominous portent.
Grievances and identities tied to ethnicity (Indian, European, African and
their composites), class (typically smallholders, landless peasants and estate
owners) and locality (in defence of claims to political autonomy) blended
with new and old ideological and religious commitments, spurring mobi-
lisations and conspiracies, civil wars, and cross-border interventions.
Politics became militarised, military forces became politicised, and state-
making became an improvisational art subject less to constitutional man-
dates than to the transient exigencies of office holders, office seekers and
their respective political programmes.
Emerging immediately as a characteristic practice of the age was the
pronunciamiento, the vehicle of so much state-centred violence and the
primary expression of the region’s search for a socially recognised, legiti-
macy-bestowing authority. A pronunciamiento might range from an act of
force against an incumbent power holder – a straightforward coup d’état – to
some declaration of principles issued by a disaffected group, aimed at intimi-
dating those in power as a prelude to negotiating a new governing arrange-
ment. Their paradoxical character, typical of the age, has been remarked by
Fowler, their most assiduous analyst: ‘unlawful yet legitimate, revolutionary
and at the same time tiresomely bureaucratic, openly aggressive yet not
always violent’, defying the government even while ‘hoping to negotiate
with it’. By 1876, Mexicans had launched more than 1,500 pronunciamientos,
making them, rather than elections, the primary means of effecting political
change.4
Across Spain’s former dominions, a crisis of order comparable to
Mexico’s sowed devastation, though the fighting forces elsewhere tended
to be more fragmentary and disparate than those of Mexico, whose army
managed to preserve, at least until the 1850s, a semblance of the unity it
inherited as the direct successor of the royal army. Uprisings and civil wars
contested power not only on the national level but also at the infra-national;
so far, a systematic numerical analysis of their frequency, range, intensity
and cost in lives and property has eluded researchers. Suggestive indicators
abound, however, beginning with the high rates of turnover among heads
of state and the frequency with which constitutions were replaced or

4 Will Fowler, ‘Introduction’ (pp. xv–xxxiv) and ‘“I Pronounce Thus I Exist”: Redefining
the Pronunciamiento in Independent Mexico, 1821–1876’ (pp. 246–66), in Will Fowler
(ed.), Forceful Negotiations: The Origins of the Pronunciamiento in Nineteenth-Century Mexico
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010); for the quotation, see p. 246.

494
 Violence, the State and Revolution in Latin America

reformed.5 In Colombia, over the course of the nineteenth century, a year

of peace was exceptional. The country saw between nine and fourteen
national-level civil wars (historians disagree on how to count them), per-
haps two wars that qualified as ‘international’, three coups d’état by the
army and numerous local wars. In the ‘semi-absence’ of a state, in the
estimation of Sánchez, war fused with politics. Political and military leader-
ship became inseparable. The men who followed the caudillos into battle
rarely did so willingly but as the clients of their patrón, making the wars
more patrician than popular. Invariably ending with a pact between the
leaders (because clear winners or losers rarely emerged), these wars and the
devastation they wrought became the means by which principled differ-
ences would be affirmed in Colombia until the present day.6
Here and elsewhere in Latin America, state-making was in effect privatised
among an ever-shifting array of rivals who alternately fought and pacted with
one another. As a result, the actual strength of ‘the state’ at any given
moment was less important than the certain knowledge that those who
occupied its offices rarely counted as the ultimate source of power. To
a partial extent this was true even for Brazil, where a monarch presided
over a weak but stable national system of administration that tolerated the
regular use of violence among rival patron–client networks for control of
local and regional posts, particularly at election time. Chile, almost alone in
the Hispanic world, succeeded in overcoming an initial decade of violent
disorder by establishing in 1830–3 a competent, centralised state with
a national army that exercised, in the interest of public order, a near mono-
poly on violence, under one of Latin America’s most enduring constitutions
(1830–1925). Of the many explanations for the ‘Chilean exception’ of com-
parative tranquillity, the foremost is the cohesion of the elite and the conse-
quently high level of social recognition accorded to the legitimating
principles upon which the state was founded. And yet even so, that consensus
was fragile enough to fail in three civil wars (1851, 1859, 1892). Much like Chile,
Costa Rica in the 1830s also established an effective, socially recognised state

5 For a comparative enumeration of constitutions, see José Antonio Cheibub,

Zachary Elkins and Tom Ginsburg, ‘Latin American Presidentialism in Comparative
and Historical Perspective’, Texas Law Review 89.7 (2011), 1,732. Gustavo Ernesto
Emmerich analyses statistical data on government instability in ‘Ejercicio del poder y
carácter de los regímenes políticos en América Latina, 1801–1984’, in Pablo González
Casanova (ed.), El estado en América Latina: Teoría y práctica (Mexico City: Siglo
Veintiuno, 1990), 131–60.
6 Gonzalo Sánchez Gómez, Guerra y polí tica en la sociedad colombiana (Bogotá : El Ancora
Editores, 1991), pp. 18–25.

495
 ROBERT H. HOLDEN

apparatus that managed to draw under its control, in the form of a national
army, disparate sources of public violence. The army tended to dominate the
civilian leadership, making Costa Rica’s regime stability, like Chile’s, mark-
edly authoritarian. Compared to their northern neighbours in Central
America, Costa Ricans experienced far less of the sort of violence that arose
among rival caudillos for control of a quasi-state structure forever subject to
improvisation. But like Chileans, they were not entirely exempt from public
violence, for at least seven coups d’état from within the national army decided
who would rule between 1846 and 1870.
Neither in this nor in subsequent phases of state formation was interna-
tional war, of the sort driven by geopolitical tensions and aiming at territorial
conquest, a common occurrence in Latin America. That may have been a gift
of the state’s improvisational and therefore less capable character. Typically
counted among the few such wars was the most ruinous of the nineteenth
century, that of the Triple Alliance, in which Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay
ganged up against Paraguay from 1864 to 1870. Costing at least 350,000 deaths
in combat alone, the war propelled all four countries towards the construc-
tion of more militarised, national states. Not to be overlooked in the same
category was the US–Mexican war of 1845–8, which resulted in the US capture
of half of Mexico’s territory, and the War of the Pacific (1879–84), in which
Chile annexed huge and strategically rich parts of Bolivia and Peru. A more
frequent type of cross-border warfare, categorised by Loveman as ‘transna-
tional wars of political consolidation’, including wars of secession, signifi-
cantly altered boundary lines at least nine times between 1823 and 1851.7
Within nine years of declaring its independence, Gran Colombia disinte-
grated into three republics in 1830: Venezuela, Ecuador and Colombia. In
1823, the provinces of the former Kingdom of Guatemala – which had seen
almost no violence during the independence era – seceded from the short-
lived Empire (soon-to-be republic) of Mexico, to which they had been
forcibly annexed in 1821–2. They established themselves as the Federal
Republic of Central America, a union that fell apart in the late 1830s under
the pressure of continuous war among the provincial capitals for control of
the federal republic. Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa
Rica separately declared their independence. But in neither the former Gran
Colombia nor the former Republic of Central America did secession deliver
domestic peace; caudillo-led civil war and rebellion persisted at levels no less

7 Brian Loveman, For la Patria: Politics and the Armed Forces in Latin America (Wilmington:
Scholarly Resources, 1999), pp. 43–4.

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intense within the new countries, and in the case of Central America civil war
often entailed mutual invasions of each other’s territories.

Perfecting Coercion in an Era of State

Consolidation, c. 1870 to c. 1940
In the first phase of state formation, public violence was largely driven by
internal conflicts among power-seekers loyal to a plurality of rival criteria of
legitimacy. During the second phase (c. 1870 to c. 1940), state structures in
most places were gradually consolidated around specifically liberalist ideas
from which the egalitarian and political-freedom branches were pruned away
in favour of a more practical but cold-blooded economic liberalism. Heavily
salted with the premises of Comtean positivism and Social Darwinism, this
oligarchical or dictatorial liberalism was thus less tolerant of popular expres-
sions of non-conformity with the officially defined goals of order, progress
and civilisation. At the same time, export-driven economic growth and
copious injections of US and European investment capital ensured that state-
makers knowledgeable enough to exploit the opportunities aroused by
industrialisation in the North Atlantic world would not lack the revenue
required to finance the further expansion of state power, particularly in the
direction of military and police spending.
Dictatorial methods of rule found institutional expression in the gradual
emergence of national armies whose troops were increasingly conscripted,
and who served under the command of men trained by European military
missions in national service academies. Where they could, these armies
absorbed or neutralised, through cooptive techniques, the more formidable
caudillo-led bands. Where such measures failed, extermination was their
usual fate, as was that of the semi-autonomous or rebellious Indian groups
that inhabited the national peripheries, particularly of Argentina, Chile and
northern Mexico. Having worked out a modus vivendi with the Spanish
monarchy in the latter years of the Bourbon dynasty – sometimes siding with
Spain in the turmoil of 1808–24 – these so-called ‘independent Indians’ found
that their success in evading the reach of the phase-one quasi-states would be
temporary.
Military professionalisation had the paradoxical effect of politicising the
officer corps, which increasingly saw itself as the patriotic and technically
competent counterweight to a corrupt caste of greedy, power-hungry poli-
ticians. A concomitant tendency towards institutional autonomy and social
detachment, enhanced by constitutional provisions sanctioning unilateral

497
 ROBERT H. HOLDEN

military intervention in times of political crisis, engendered a new kind of

militarism. In the 1920s and 30s, a wave of unconstitutional government
successions in thirteen countries counted on the participation of the military,
a tendency that hardened into the outright seizure of power by military
dictators in the 1930s in fifteen countries, some of whom continued to rule
into the 1940s and 50s. Although guided by a diversity of ideological autho-
rities, extending from right to left and including at times a mélange of both,
the dictators in uniform typically shared a strongly statist, developmentalist
and authoritarian approach to government, and thus a readiness to punish
dissenters, rebels and agitators who occasionally resorted to violence them-
selves in the course of objecting to the terms and conditions of industrial
employment or, in the case of rural cultivators, to the loss of customary rights
to land.8 The threats posed by such protests to the social order, and to the
stability of economies heavily dependent on one or two commodities for
export and on the confidence of foreign capitalists, frequently generated
a violent response from the state. Within weeks of ousting an elected left-
wing civilian government in December 1931, El Salvador’s army – the best in
Central America – repressed a rural rebellion by massacring 8,000–10,000
people during the first few months of 1932. In similar circumstances, civilian
governments were often no less ready to unleash the military. In 1907,
Chilean soldiers machine-gunned to death striking nitrate workers and
their families in a school yard in Iquique; the estimates of lives lost range
from hundreds to a thousand or more.
Similar tactics applied the same year by the Mexican liberal-dictatorial
regime of General Porfirio Díaz have been widely cited as precursors of the
most profoundly destructive civil war (1910–20) in the history of Latin
America. In 1906 and 1907, after thirty-one years in power, Díaz’s government
still seemed to be unshakeably in command when its armed forces con-
fronted striking copper miners at a US-owned mine, and factory hands at
a French-owned textile mill. To the dozen or so deaths at the mine were
added fifty to seventy at the textile mill. Widely publicised and exploited by
the rising political opposition, these events eroded the legitimacy of the
regime. But weightier still were grievances among rural cultivators over
declining access to land and deteriorating working conditions stemming
from the export-led development policies of the Díaz dictatorship. The
campesinos converted a liberalist political revolt in 1910–11 into a social revolu-
tion that would take the lives of at least a million Mexicans in the course of

8 Ibid., pp. 75, 102.

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establishing a state that would go on to implement the most thoroughgoing

and extensive land reform in Latin America, while guaranteeing urban work-
ers the right to organise and strike. The revoutionary regime’s fiercely anti-
Catholic policies would, however, ignite a counter-revolution (the Cristero
War) in 1926–9 that would harvest the lives of still another 100,000 comba-
tants by the time the two sides – devout Catholics versus the Mexican state –
negotiated a settlement that essentially ratified the revolutionary state’s
power to continue controlling (albeit somewhat less oppressively) traditional
religious expression, until constitutional and statutory revisions were
adopted in 1992.
In this phase, only Mexico’s civil war qualifies as one fought largely to
revolutionise society, making it a harbinger of the revolutionary movements
that swept Latin America after the 1950s. On the other hand, except for the
land redistribution and pro-labour legislation of the 1930s, the state-affiliated
and financed Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI in its Spanish acronym)
governed Mexico until the 1990s according to principles that deviated little
from those of the dictatorship that it replaced. In comparative terms, how-
ever, Mexico’s epochal revolution, whose populistic attributes the ruling
party managed to elevate to a patriotic myth, delivered a state that produced
what no other Latin American country could in the twentieth century: eight
continuous decades of stable, civilian government, without a single instance
of military intervention or interruption of the constitutional succession of
presidents. Far from eradicating violence from public life, the Mexican
‘revolutionary’ state managed to regulate it in favour of institutional con-
tinuity and at a level that most Mexicans found tolerable. From the 1960s, the
system’s legitimacy would nevertheless be put to the question in emblematic
acts of public violence that will be analysed in the next section. Elsewhere in
Latin America, Mexico’s long-term, populist-authoritarian solution to fac-
tional violence in the field of state formation remained a uniquely Mexican
innovation. Perhaps the key explanatory variable was the unusual readiness
of the victorious faction (the ‘Constitutionalists’) to accommodate, with the
reforms mentioned above, the many followers of its defeated revolutionary
rivals in framing the Constitution of 1917. And that readiness may have been
inspired by the uniquely violent and destructive character of the war that the
Constitutionalists had just won, and perhaps wished to avoid re-igniting.
In Colombia, factions of liberals and conservatives, unable to produce their
own counterpart of the widely admired General Díaz of Mexico, continued
to rise up in arms against one another in the 1880s and 90s, until the
cataclysmic War of the Thousand Days (1899–1901), which took uncounted

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tens of thousands of lives. The relative tranquillity of the four decades after
1901 climaxed in 1930 with the country’s first peaceful change of the party in
power, though the worst carnage in Colombia’s history awaited it in
the second half of the century. In Venezuela, for most of the period from
the 1870s to the 1950s, self-styled generals rose up, mobilised their clients, and
ruled in the colourful, personalistic fashion of the traditional caudillo. In both
republics, military professionalisation lagged as the armed forces only very
gradually shed their clientelistic character, despite the establishment of
military academies and the presence of foreign military training missions.
In the Southern Cone countries, whose economies had achieved consider-
ably higher levels of growth and diversification, military professionalisation
and institutional stability advanced considerably beyond almost anywhere
else in Latin America. In some respects, the armed forces in Argentina, Chile
and Uruguay could even take credit for the comparative depth in the forma-
tion and reach of their countries’ non-military state institutions. Civil war
nearly disappeared, and overt military intervention in the political process, in
the form of coups d’état, was now a rarity except in Argentina, where the
armed forces established themselves as final arbiter, and as the habitual
counterweight to populist excess. Brazil’s military exercised a similar supre-
macy over the political process, although its multiple interventions never
ended in outright seizures of power except in 1889, when it removed the
monarchy and made the republic, and in 1964. Brazil’s nineteenth-century
pattern of chronic, localised violence centred on the distribution of patronage
at election time may actually have intensified after the removal of the
monarchy, owing to the absence of its conciliatory influence, according to
Graham. On the other hand, by delivering benefits to clients, Brazilian
patrimonialism dampened political animosities and thus may have prevented
outbreaks of violence on a national scale.9
In the countries of the Caribbean basin, including those of the isthmus of
Central America, public violence in this phase was not so easily distinguished
from that of the first. The state’s markedly patrimonial and therefore impro-
visational character, and the persistence of a clientelistic rather than profes-
sional relationship between the typically despotic executive and his armed
forces, nourished violence and instability. The situation increasingly drew the
attention of the United States, particularly from the 1890s onward, the decade
that marked its emergence as a world power and the beginning of its role as

9 Richard Graham, Patronage and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Brazil (Stanford: Stanford

University Press, 1990), pp. 269–70.

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a significant participant in the public violence of the Caribbean basin coun-

tries. Driven as much, if not more, by legitimate security interests as by
imperialistic ambitions, US military interventions were typically followed by
long-term military occupations and US administrative oversight. The aim
was to install and maintain regimes sufficiently businesslike in their conduct
to avoid the rise of pretexts (such as bank loan defaults or asset-threatening
chronic violence) that had earlier been seized by Washington’s European
rivals to justify their own interventions. The uninvited entrance of the United
States into Cuba’s war for independence in 1898 fixed the pattern for the next
three decades. In 1903, the United States joined with separatist forces in the
Colombian province of Panama to make way for the possession of an inter-
oceanic canal on better terms than those on offer from the Colombian
government. Subsequent interventions through the 1930s resulted in the
occupations, and control of governments, in Haiti, the Dominican Republic
and Nicaragua. In each instance, the US exit strategy called for the creation of
a supposedly non-partisan national constabulary that would in theory main-
tain constitutional order after the withdrawal of US forces. In every such case,
however, despots seized control of the constabularies almost immediately
after the US departure, utilising them to tyrannise the country for decades,
often with the continued financial and military collaboration of Washington.

Insurgency and Military Rule in the Cold War,

c. 1945 to c. 1990
The markedly oligarchical nature of second-phase state formation gave way,
from about the 1940s, to an evolving but rarely pacific struggle over the limits
of political and economic inclusiveness. A diverse repertoire of techniques of
popular mobilisation, violent protest and insurgent warfare incited propor-
tionately, and sometimes disproportionately, violent responses by state insti-
tutions increasingly fortified by centralised, coordinated and modernised
military and police agencies. As such, this third phase of state formation –
the 1940s to the 1980s – produced the bloodiest wave of public violence in
Latin America’s history. Aggravating and enlarging the scope and intensity of
the violence was the Cold War rivalry of the great powers of the period,
which drew the United States directly into the fray as the stalwart enemy of
radical social change.
Until the 1960s, populist caudillos took the first steps towards a kind of
paternalistic incorporation of the masses. Nationalistic and class-based
appeals for votes would be paid for with a dose of national esteem, curbs

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 ROBERT H. HOLDEN

on the plutocratic enemies of the working class and the fatherland, and
promises of higher living standards through state-directed economic devel-
opment via import-substitution industrialisation. As these largely unsatisfied
aspirations increasingly resolved into unruly protests, radical political move-
ments, guerrilla warfare and urban terrorism, the armed forces reacted by
seizing power from elected civilian governments, abrogating civil and poli-
tical rights, actively repressing dissenters, and ruthlessly pursuing insurgent
bands and urban terrorist cells in almost every country of the region. A major
source of inspiration for these movements was Cuba’s popular, putatively
liberal-democratic revolution of 1959 to overthrow the dictatorship of
General Fulgencio Batista, anti-communist ally of the United States.
Reconfigured by 1961 as a communist dictatorship under Fidel Castro, the
new regime executed some 2,000 enemies within two years of seizing power,
jailing or driving into exile many thousands more, and seizing virtually all
private property by 1970.
The ‘Cuban model’ of development – a thoroughgoing political and social
revolution under the guidance of Marxist ideology – rapidly drew adherents
throughout Latin America, provoking a massive increase in US support for
both counterinsurgency operations and economic development initiatives by
the militarised governments of the region. At first, the United States sought
to remove the threat at its source by launching a Cuban invasion force of anti-
Castro exiles in 1961. In turning back the invasion promptly, decisively and
with the evident support of the populace, the regime fortified itself politically
and enhanced its prestige abroad; Washington, on the other hand, suffered
the disgrace not only of failure but of the unveiling of its hitherto covert role
in financing and organising the invasion.
But this was not Washington’s first covert effort to change a Latin
American government it disapproved of, nor would it be the last. A similar
strategy had succeeded in removing an elected, left-wing government from
power in Guatemala in 1954, but the role of the United States remained secret
until the 1970s. It was tried again in 1980, when the United States sought to
undermine the Marxist-oriented government that had seized power in
Nicaragua in 1979 under the banner of the Sandinista Front for National
Liberation, which had fought a guerrilla war to oust a US-backed dictator.
Nicaragua seemed poised to replicate Washington’s Cuban nightmare. This
time, US participation from 1980 in the organisation and training of a guerrilla
force of Nicaraguan exiles based in neighbouring Honduras was promptly
revealed, and pridefully acknowledged, by Washington. The US-backed
insurgents succeeded in substantially weakening the Nicaraguan

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government’s hold on power, forcing it to hold a competitive election in 1990

won by a pro-US slate of candidates. As a result, the programme of radical
reforms that Washington considered to be a continuation of Cuban-style,
communist penetration of the hemisphere was abruptly halted and reversed.
Elsewhere in Central America, Washington helped the governments of El
Salvador (in the 1980s) and Guatemala (from the 1960s to the 1980s) stand off
guerrilla armies seeking to carry out revolutionary reforms along Marxist lines.
The antagonists in these three civil wars, driven by sharply opposed, Cold War
era beliefs over the criteria of legitimate rule, could count heavily on the supply
of external resources associated with one or the other of the era’s two super-
powers, the United States and the Soviet Union. Thus, prolonged and intensi-
fied, these wars savaged Central America more profoundly than did all of the
previous civil wars of the region, where political violence had been practically
endemic since independence from Spain. The human cost alone exceeded
325,000 lives: more than 200,000 in Guatemala alone from 1962 to the peace
settlement in 1996, some 75,000 in El Salvador from 1989 to the 1992 settlement,
and about 50,000 in Nicaragua, including the period of insurgent mobilisation
from 1972 and the civil war that followed in the 1980s. Not all public violence
was Cold War related; what Colombians call ‘La Violencia’, a civil war pitting
political-party militias and the army against one another, swept away more
than 200,000 lives between 1946 and 1966.
Where military rule was firmly established, the generals and their civilian
technocrats, guided by a miscellany of liberal-developmentalist ideologies,
sought to expand the reach and influence of the state. Import-substitution
industrialisation and the statist policies that accompanied it would be carried
forward under the care of the generals to their disastrous conclusion in the
1980s, the ‘lost decade’ of the region’s post-World War II economic history.
But the most enduring legacy of this period of military rule would be the
unusually cruel and barbarous character of the repression of groups and
individuals considered to be subversive by the authorities, particularly in
Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Guatemala. The contours of the repression
would not be fully revealed until the epochal institutional changes that
broke forth, in almost dialectical fashion, in the next phase of state formation.

Lawless Violence and Impunity in the Age

of Electoral Democracy, c. 1990 to the Present
The drive in favour of democratic inclusiveness, interrupted by nearly three
decades of military rule, resumed spectacularly in the 1990s, the decade that

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marks the onset of the fourth phase of state formation. Civilian governments
everywhere but in Cuba were being chosen in free elections. The armed
forces appeared to have stepped away permanently from direct intervention
in state affairs. The state formation process was generating institutions
capable of responding successfully to some of the core tenets of liberal
democracy, above all requirements for reliable mechanisms of popular con-
sent in the form of fair elections open to all, and the subordination of the
armed forces to elected civilian governments. The popular revulsion against
military rule, in countries where many people had often welcomed coups to
remove incompetent civilian governments, found expression in the creation
of commissions of inquiry (‘truth commissions’) in thirteen countries
between 1979 and 2007 to ascertain as precisely as possible the methods of
repression and to identify and quantify both the perpetrators and the victims.
Torture, often bestially sadistic, had been a routine instrument of military
rule, as was the intentional killing of unarmed civilians considered to be
subversives. Tens of thousands of people were ‘disappeared’ – their bodies
secretly burned, buried, or dropped in the ocean. Others died in collective
massacres carried out by army patrols in the countryside, often against
civilians suspected of aiding insurgent combatants. Even in civilian-
governed (but authoritarian) Mexico from the 1960s until the early 1980s,
under the rule of the official Institutional Revolutionary Party at least
645 persons were ‘disappeared’ by government agents, at least another
ninety-nine were summarily executed and more than 2,000 tortured, accord-
ing to a five-year investigation sponsored by the first non-PRI government to
win the presidency in eight decades and released in 2006. Not included in that
accounting was the public massacre by Mexican security forces of roughly 300
unarmed, pro-democracy protesters in the capital on 2 October 1968; revul-
sion over the ‘Tlatelolco massacre’ marked the beginning of Mexico’s slow
transition away from one-party rule.10
By the middle of the new century’s second decade, some twenty-five years
after the transition to democracy had begun, Latin America’s commitment to
electoral democracy and civilian rule was still holding firm, with the excep-
tions of Cuba (where the first had never existed) and Venezuela (where a left-
wing government allied with Cuba’s sought to abolish competitive elec-
tions). Organised political violence, whether that of a repressive military

10 The most compact synthesis of truth commission findings is in Robert H. Holden and
Rina Villars, Contemporary Latin America: 1970 to the Present (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell,
2013), pp. 82–95, including Table 4.1, ‘Truth Commission mandates and findings’, which
summarises the work of each century’s commission.

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force, a guerrilla army, a gang of urban terrorists or a party militia, had almost
entirely faded from Latin America. However, institutions long inimical to
liberal-democratic practice and social peace continued to flourish, and in
some respects, as we shall see, the state’s capacity in many countries to carry
out basic policing functions and to administer justice appeared to have
diminished significantly during the democratisation phase. In almost every
country, the fourth phase of state formation coincided with a fundamental
shift towards a consensus, one more widely held than any since late colonial
times, in favour of liberal democratic principles as the core criteria of
legitimacy. Curiously, however, the twenty-first-century consensus also hap-
pened to share with its late-colonial analogue what Taylor authoritatively
styled the latter’s ‘nearly always conditional and incomplete’ character.11
Murderous violence, often wreathed by and intertwined with the very state
institutions designed to prevent it; an unremitting record of spectacular and
seldom-punished acts of malfeasance among public officials; and a pervasive,
society-wide indifference to the rule of law all persisted well into the twenty-
first century. That was enough to provide, for many, a plausible justification
for reversing democratisation and restoring the military’s prerogative to
intervene in the political process and suspend elections.12
The Latin American state’s tentative and improvisational character, while
particularly obvious in the first phase, has therefore survived in the form of
violence-inducing patterns of ‘competitive state-making’, ‘state capture’ or
‘the criminalisation of the state’, in the varied terminology of a growing
academic literature on the subject. In parts of Colombia, El Salvador,
Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Peru and elsewhere, criminal organisations
competed – often successfully – with the state for the loyalty of a region’s
populace. They did so by erecting and sustaining transnational systems of
production and exchange – illegal economies typically centred on narcotics,
but often extending into complementary services such as extortion, kidnap-
ping, murder for hire, and contraband in firearms, human labour or environ-
mental resources. The criminals (who occasionally presented themselves as
social revolutionaries) earned a kind of local legitimacy protected by their
capacity to generate revenue in sufficient quantity to buy off agents of the

11 William B. Taylor, ‘Between Global Process and Local Knowledge: An Inquiry into
Early Latin American Social History, 1500–1900’, in Olivier Zunz (ed.), Reliving the Past:
The Worlds of Social History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), pp.
115–90, at 153 and n.77, 183.
12 Orlando J. Pérez, ‘Crime and Support for Coups in Latin America’, AmericasBarometer
Insights 32 (2009), 1–8.

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 ROBERT H. HOLDEN

state and to develop the military power necessary to ward off competitors
and the state’s own law enforcement agents. The latter sometimes played
a double role as business competitors in the illegal economies. Cities were no
less subject to competitive state building; in November 2010, it took Brazilian
military and police forces a week to recover control of the Complexo de
Alemão district of Rio de Janeiro from the drug gangs that had governed it for
years, at the cost of thirty-seven lives.
The shift away from traditional authoritarian forms of rule to competitively
elected civilian government had added a measure of accountability and transpar-
ency – exposing flaws, but achieving little in overall effectiveness, and high-
lighting as never before the linkage between public violence and state-sanctioned
impunity for, and collaboration with, wrongdoers. It was now ‘public knowl-
edge’, two prominent Mexican jurists wrote in 2008, that the criminal justice
system of Mexico was ‘completely bankrupt’ and therefore ‘useless for trapping
the most dangerous criminals’. No Mexican would be surprised, they asserted, by
the statistical record: 85 per cent of victims never file a complaint, 99 per cent of
offenders avoid conviction, 92 per cent of criminal hearings occur without the
presence of a judge, 60 per cent of arrest warrants are never executed, 40 per cent
of prison inmates have never been convicted, and 80 per cent of detainees have
not spoken to the judge who convicted them.13 Across Latin America, civil
disputes that might have been settled through negotiations or within the judicial
system were routinely terminated by assassination; only in high-profile cases did
arrests occur. In Honduras, Berta Cáceres, a prominent Indigenous leader of
a movement to stop the construction of a hydroelectric dam, ignored numerous
death threats. She was shot to death on 3 March 2016 as she slept in her home. In
2018, seven men were convicted in her murder, a rare step in a country where 123
environmental activists were said to have been murdered between 2009 and
2016. By 2012, Latin America had become ‘the most dangerous place on earth’,
with 33 per cent of the world’s homicides (and 8 per cent of its population); its
rate of 20 homicides per 100,000 persons was three times the world average and
the highest of any world region.14

13 Miguel Carbonell and Enrique Ochoa Reza, ‘The Direction of Criminal Justice Reform
in Mexico’, Voices of Mexico 81 (2008), 20–4.
14 Laura Jaitman, ‘Introduction: The Welfare Costs of Crime’, in Laura Jaitman (ed.), Welfare
Costs of Crime and Violence in Latin America and the Caribbean (Washington, DC: Inter-
American Development Bank, 2015), pp. 1–12, at 4. Among all the countries of the region,
Chile, Costa Rica and Uruguay continued to stand out as comparatively peaceful and law-
abiding. For Honduran environmental activist deaths, see Global Witness, Honduras: The
Deadliest Place to Defend the Planet (London: Global Witness, January 2017), www.globalwit
ness.org June 2019.

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The failure to administer justice in much of Latin America was not

a fourth-phase innovation; nor was there anything novel about its sources –
a combination of the venality, impotence and incapacity that had largely
characterised the region’s state structures for two centuries. What defied
expectations was its continuity even after the unparalleled, and apparently
lasting, transition to representative institutions and electoral democracy. As
Latin America commemorated two centuries of independent self-
government, only distant echoes remained of the pronunciamiento, the
populist caudillo, social revolution and the military junta. What endured
almost everywhere was the violence-laced crisis of order that had followed
immediately on independence. Its source was no less familiar: a fragile,
shallow and easily disrupted level of social recognition for the legitimating
principles (now, liberal-democratic) of the state, almost everywhere.

Bibliographical Essay
Luxuriantly documented episodes of lawlessness and violence have never been scarce in
the historiography of Latin America. But only since the 1990s has violence achieved its
current status as a distinctive category of systematic research, a move that coincided with
the rise in the study of Latin American state formation. Both themes have inspired
a sizable corpus of works that frequently overlap.
Studies explicitly linking state formation and violence (variously defined) include
Miguel Angel Centeno, Blood and Debt: War and the Nation-State in Latin America
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002); Fernando López-Alves,
State Formation and Democracy in Latin America, 1810–1900 (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2000); Robert H. Holden, Armies without Nations: Public Violence and State Formation
in Central America, 1821–1960 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Two collections of
essays stand out: Juan Garavaglia et al. (eds.), Las fuerzas de guerra en la construcció n del
estado: Amé rica Latina, siglo XIX (Rosario: Prohistoria Ediciones, 2012) and Kees Koonings
and Dirk Kruijt (eds.), Armed Actors: Organized Violence and State Failure in Latin America
(London: Zed Books, 2004). Less directly concerned with state building, but valuable for
their treatments of state-centred violence, are Frank Safford, ‘Reflections on the Internal
Wars in Nineteenth-Century Latin America’, in Rebecca Earle (ed.), Rumours of Wars: Civil
Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Latin America (London: Institute of Latin American Studies,
2000), pp. 6–28, and country-specific contributions in the same collection. For Colombia,
see Marco Palacios, Between Legitimacy and Violence: A History of Colombia, 1875–2002
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).
The broadest historical treatments of the armed forces as an institution are
Alain Rouquié, The Military and the State in Latin America (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1987) and two books by Brian Loveman: The Constitution of Tyranny:
Regimes of Exception in Spanish America (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993)
and For la Patria: Politics and the Armed Forces in Latin America (Wilmington: Scholarly
Resources, 1999). An essential compendium of many of the region’s wars, both internal

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and external, is Robert L. Scheina’s two-volume Latin America’s Wars: The Age of the
Caudillo, 1791–1899 and The Age of the Professional Soldier, 1900–2001 (Washington, DC:
Brassey’s, 2003).
Many works focus on particular aspects of violence and state-making, without explicitly
joining the two. For caudillismo, John Lynch, Caudillos in Spanish America, 1800–1850
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) and John Charles Chasteen, Heroes on Horseback:
A Life and Times of the Last Gaucho Caudillos (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press, 1995), are essential. For violence and fraud as routine features of electoral politics see
Richard Graham’s masterpiece, Patronage and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Brazil (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1990), Steve Stein, Populism in Peru: The Emergence of the Masses
and the Politics of Social Control (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980) and François
Xavier Guerra, ‘The Spanish-American Tradition of Representation and its European
Roots’, Journal of Latin American Studies 26.1 (1994), 1–35. For its interpretative depth and
range, and for exposing continuities and contrasts with the period of monarchical rule,
almost all of Guerra’s work remains indispensable for the study of violence and state
formation in the nineteenth century; begin with his Modernidad e independencias: ensayos
sobre las revoluciones hispánicas (Madrid: Editorial MAPFRE, 1992) and the collection he
edited with Annick Lempérière, Los espacios públicos en Iberoamérica: ambigüedades
y problemas, siglos XVIII–XIX (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1998).
A landmark collection of essays amid the rising tide of work on the failure of the rule of
law is Juan E. Méndez, Guillermo A. O’Donnell and Paulo Sérgio de M. S. Pinheiro (eds.),
The (Un)Rule of Law and the Underprivileged in Latin America (Notre Dame, IN: University of
Notre Dame Press, 1999); particularly insightful is O’Donnell’s concluding essay.
Rural rebellion and social revolution, staple themes of the historiography since the
1980s, have provided a platform for theoretical and empirical analyses of the role of
violence in state formation. Here as in many areas, the quantity and quality of studies
of Mexico outstrip those of other Latin American countries. The Mexican Revolution of
1910, looked to elsewhere in Latin America as a template for change, inspired a huge
historiography; see Alan Knight’s monumental, two-volume The Mexican Revolution
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); a useful survey of the preceding
century is John Tutino, From Insurrection to Revolution in Mexico: Social Bases of Agrarian
Violence, 1750–1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986). Among the few well-
grounded comparative treatments of rural violence is Florencia Mallon, Peasant and
Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1995). A mix of case studies and comprehensive interpretations of twentieth-
century revolutionary and counter-revolutionary violence are collected in Greg Grandin
and Gilbert M. Joseph (eds.), A Century of Revolution: Insurgent and Counterinsurgent Violence
during Latin America’s Long Cold War (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). For
a sociologically ordered comparison of Cold War insurgencies, see Timothy P. Wickham-
Crowley, Guerrillas and Revolution in Latin America: A Comparative Study of Insurgents and
Regimes since 1956 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
Racketeering and banditry are old themes but their recent, newfound prominence, and
their capacity to suborn or even substitute for state institutions, have attracted systematic
attention in Enrique Desmond Arias, ‘The Dynamics of Criminal Governance: Networks
and Social Order in Rio de Janeiro’, Journal of Latin American Studies 38 (2006), 293–325;
Vanda Felbab-Brown, Shooting Up: Counterinsurgency and the War on Drugs (Washington,

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 Violence, the State and Revolution in Latin America

DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2010); Luis Jorge Garay Salamanca and Eduardo Salcedo-
Albarán (eds.), Narcotráfico, corrupción y estados: cómo las redes ilícitas han reconfigurado las
instituciones en Colombia, Guatemala y México (Mexico City: Debate, 2012). For Mexico,
Guillermo Raúl Zepeda Lecuona’s massively documented Crimen sin castigo: procuración de
justicia penal y ministerio público en México (Mexico City: Centro de Investigación para el
Desarrollo, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2004), is essential.

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 25
Structural Violence during
the Cambodian Genocide, 1975–1979
james a. tyner

On 14 November 1976 a young woman named Kim Ham-Bin was arrested

and detained at a secretive prison designated ‘S-21’. Located in Phnom Penh,
the security-centre was established as one of approximately 200 detainment
sites located throughout Democratic Kampuchea – as Cambodia was
renamed. During its brief existence, roughly between October 1975 and
January 1979, upwards of 12,000 men, women and children were warehoused
under inhumane conditions. Many were tortured and forced to confess to
various crimes; all but a handful were eventually executed, either within the
broader S-21 compound or at the nearby ‘killing fields’ known as
Cheoung Ek.
Little is known of Kim Ham-Bin. Archives from S-21 indicate that she was
25 years old. Her ‘position’ is recorded simply as ‘wife of Chhim Sak’. No
documents have survived that might indicate why she was arrested – other
than the fact that she was the wife of Chhim Sak. As to Chhim Sak, he was
arrested on 16 January 1976 and executed on 22 July 1976 – three months prior
to his wife’s arrest.
On the day of Kim Ham-Ban’s detainment, forty-five other people were
arrested. Of these, at least forty were women, all of whom were classified as
‘wife’, ‘mother’ or ‘sister’ of other detainees. And with few exceptions, all of
these women, including Kim Ham-Bin, were executed within twenty-four
hours.
Since the collapse of Democratic Kampuchea, the security-centre known
as S-21 has assumed a prominent role in the ongoing historiography of the
Cambodian genocide. As an institution, S-21 calls attention to the adminis-
tered violence that was manifest in Cambodia. Undue focus on S-21, how-
ever, deflects attention from other, more systemic forms of violence that
enabled the security-centre to function.
From its inception as a disorganised socio-political movement, the
Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK; aka the ‘Khmer Rouge’) emerged

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as one of the most violent and brutal apparatus of state terror and murder
since the Nazi party held power in Germany. Between April 1975 and
January 1979 approximately 2 million people died from starvation, disease,
exposure, torture, murder and execution. Historians and other scholars have
attempted to understand how this mass violence could have taken place, with
particular emphasis focused on the allegedly ‘extreme’ or ‘radical’ variant of
Marxist-Leninist doctrine forwarded by the Khmer Rouge. Indeed, some-
thing of a caricature of the Khmer Rouge has emerged, as the CPK has
variously been compared to Peru’s ‘Shining Path’ and, most recently, to al-
Qaeda and ISIS – the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.
The dominant interpretation of Cambodian history during this period,
described by Michael Vickery as the ‘Standard Total View’ (STV), presents
the CPK as a totalitarian, communist and autarkic regime seeking to reorga-
nise Cambodian society around a primitive, agrarian political economy.1
Under the STV, the victims of the regime perished as a consequence of the
structural violence of misguided and irrational economic policies,
a draconian security apparatus implemented to instil terror, and the central
leadership’s fanatical belief in the creation of a utopian communist society.
Notable here is the blame laid upon Pol Pot, the highly secretive and
paranoid leader of the CPK. Under the Khmer Rouge, following the STV,
cities were emptied; hospitals and schools destroyed; and religion, currency
and private property were abolished. To this end, Stewart Clegg and co-
authors write, ‘the Khmer Rouge embarked on creating an agrarian, egalitar-
ian, anti-professional, anti-technology and self-sufficient society – a primate
communist utopia’.2
For Vickery, the STV limits our understanding of CPK ideology, policies
and practice to such an extent that its presumptions of CPK autarky and
despotism have become conventional wisdom. These latter presumptions
have permeated not only scholarly accounts, but also popular understandings
and journalistic commentaries. Consequently, the STV has become the
interpretative framework for understanding the Cambodian genocide:
a taken-for-granted historiography into which new evidence is either accom-
modated or ignored. Thus, Greg Procknow is able to write that CPK policies
‘converted the bourgeoning capitalist economy into a communistic, rural-

1 Michael Vickery, Cambodia 1975–1982 (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 1984).

2 Stewart Clegg, Miguel Pina e Cunha and Arménio Rego, ‘The Theory and Practice of
Utopia in a Total Institution: The Pineapple Panopticon’, Organization Studies 33 (2012),
1,735–57, at 1,739.

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 JAMES A. TYNER

centric, independent, self-sustainable nation, with an emphasis on self-

mastery. Money was abolished, foreign trade collapsed.’3
It is not so much that the STV is inaccurate as that it is incomplete and
theoretically vapid. In fact, documentary evidence indicates that the CPK sold
rice surpluses on the global market to satisfy the state’s need for fertiliser,
tractors, industrial inputs and provisions.4 Ben Kiernan finds also that agri-
cultural exports were traded for artillery, coastal patrol boats and other
weaponry.5 Rhetoric aside, the regime’s consolidation of control was not
based on an irrational foundation of self-reliance and self-mastery. Instead, as
I document in this chapter, CPK policy was predicated upon surplus agricul-
tural production and a selective engagement with the global economy as
informed by its allegiance to the Non-Aligned Movement. Accordingly,
I challenge standard historiography of the Cambodian genocide by providing
an analytical overview of the structures of violence set in place by the Khmer
Rouge. First, however, it is necessary to provide a broader geopolitical
framework from which to understand the emergence of the CPK as
a political organisation that would come to orchestrate genocidal violence
upon its own people.

Conflict Comes to Cambodia

The push for a communist revolution in Cambodia was largely connected and
facilitated by the broader geopolitics of the Cold War. As with many former
colonial states, Cambodia functioned as a proxy for the ideological struggle
between, on the one hand, the United States of America (USA) and its ‘western’
allies and, on the other hand, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR)
and the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and their ‘eastern’ allies. Across the
Indochina peninsula, various revolutionary movements – including both
‘Marxist’ and non-Marxist factions – had long sought to liberate their

3 Gregg Procknow, ‘Human Resource Development in Democratic Kampuchea, 1975–1979’,

Human Resource Development Review 12 (2014), 369–88, at 371.
4 See for example Document No. L0001022, ‘Minutes of the Standing Committee’s Visit
to the Southwest Zone 20–24 August 1975’; Document No. D00683, ‘Minutes of the
Meeting of the Standing Committee 28 February 1976’; and Document No. D22762 ‘List
of Goods Imported from Korea’, archived at the Documentation Center of Cambodia,
Phnom Penh. Document No. D00683 specifically details that the CPK requested over
5.4 million US dollars’ worth of supplies from Sweden, including 400 diesel engines, 50
rice huskers and 100 tractors. Document No. D22762 indicates that 70 water pumps were
acquired from North Korea.
5 Ben Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer
Rouge, 1975–79, 3rd edn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 378.

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homelands from French colonial rule. These efforts intensified in the years
immediately following World War II, leading to the First Indochina War
(1946–54).6 For those individuals informed especially by Soviet ideology, includ-
ing members of the Vietnamese Communist Party, successful liberation could
only be achieved if all of Indochina was liberated. This meant in practice
that victory in Vietnam was dependent upon victory in both Cambodia and
Laos. Consequently, in 1951 the Khmer People’s Revolutionary Party (KPRP)
was founded. The precursor to the CPK, this organisation was heavily influ-
enced directly by the Vietnamese communists, and indirectly by the USSR
and PRC.
In general, there was never a singular communist movement in Cambodia,
but instead various factions that over the years ebbed and flowed as a result of
external influences and internal dissent. Moreover, other social movements
not aligned with communism came and went. Broadly speaking, Cambodian
revolutionaries were motivated to a greater or lesser extent by three factors.
First and most pressing, most if not all revolutionaries sought an indepen-
dent, sovereign state, free from French colonial rule. A second motivating
factor was a sense of widespread exploitation and oppression resultant in
large part from perceived inequalities in land ownership. This was an argu-
ment made most vehemently by those revolutionaries influenced by
Marxism. A final and very much minority cause was anti-monarchical, that
is, an argument to overthrow the long-standing prince, Norodom Sihanouk.
In 1953 Cambodia – unlike Vietnam – was granted independence by the
French. Thus, whereas Vietnamese revolutionaries continued to wage their
anti-colonial war, this objective in Cambodia became moot. As David
Chandler explains, most Cambodians ‘were reluctant to become involved
in rebellious politics after Cambodia’s independence had been won’. Stalwart
communists, however, redirected their efforts, in part as a revolution against
the monarchy of the reigning prince and, increasingly, as an anti-imperial
revolution against the USA. This latter cause increased in importance as the
USA gradually replaced France as the dominant foreign power in Indochina.
America’s overt military involvement in Vietnam was gradual and hapha-
zard, reflecting an ignorance and uncertainty over objective, policy and
strategy. The Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV; i.e., North Vietnam)
posed no military threat to the United States. However, convinced that the
fall of Vietnam to communism would lead to the loss of all of South-East
Asia, a succession of American presidents – from Dwight Eisenhower to

6 Also known as the Franco-Viet Minh War.

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 JAMES A. TYNER

Richard Nixon – came to believe that the establishment of a sovereign and

non-communist state in southern Vietnam7 was imperative. Indeed,
Vietnam, itself standing for all of South-East Asia, became a ‘surrogate
space’, as both the country and the war became symbols of American
geopolitical policy.8
Sustained aerial bombing campaigns against North Vietnam began in mid
February 1965. Repeated sorties, however, failed to deliver the expected
results and, consequently, American tacticians gradually expanded both the
list of ‘acceptable’ targets and the frequency of air-strikes. Consequently,
sorties against the North increased from 25,000 in 1965, to 79,000 in 1966, and
to 108,000 in 1967; bomb tonnage increased from 63,000 to 136,000 to 226,000
over the same period. However, the DRV remained steadfast in the face of
America’s bombing campaign. This led to the gradual expansion of American
ground forces, as the war continued to intensify in scale and scope. Not
surprisingly, casualty rates in the growing conflict also rapidly spiked upward.
Vietnamese civilian and military casualties nearly doubled from 13,000 in 1965
to approximately 24,000 in 1966.9
Throughout the 1960s the conflict between the United States and North
Vietnam expanded geographically. As early as 1959 the National Liberation
Front (NLF; also known as Viet Cong) and the North Vietnamese Army
(NVA) began to use networks of trails in Laos and Cambodia as transit routes
and sanctuaries from US bombing. These networks – what came to be known
as the Ho Chi Minh Trail along the border with Laos and Cambodia, and the
Sihanouk Trail within Cambodia – had been used by the Viet Minh during
the First Indochina War to maintain north–south communication over hilly
and densely forested terrain. Seeking to deprive its enemies of this strategic
advantage, as early as 1965 US military leadership authorised bomber pilots to
strike targets within Cambodia, an ostensibly neutral party to the conflict
between the USA and the DRV. Between March 1969 and May 1970, the US
Strategic Air Command conducted Operation Menu, a covert bombing
campaign in eastern Cambodia intended to deprive Viet Cong forces of
sanctuary and disrupt the flow of material and communication. Operation
Menu was followed by Operation Freedom Deal, which ran until

7 South Vietnam, alternatively known as the State of Vietnam and the Republic of
Vietnam, was established following the Geneva Convention of 1954.
8 James A. Tyner, America’s Strategy in Southeast Asia: From the Cold War to the Terror War
(Boulder, CO: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), p. 94.
9 Robert D. Schulzinger, A Time for War: The United States and Vietnam, 1941–1975 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 213.

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August 1973. By the time all air campaigns were halted in late 1973, American
B-52s had dropped over 260,000 tons of bombs on Cambodia – a figure that
does not include the tonnage dropped by other American fighter planes.10
A defining moment in the growth of the Communist Party in Cambodia
occurred in March 1970. While travelling to France, Sihanouk had entrusted
his government to army general and prime minister Lon Nol and his pro-
Western deputy prime minister, Prince Sisowath Sirik Matak. In Sihanouk’s
absence, Lon Nol and Sirik Matak launched attacks on the Vietnamese
communist positions, organised anti-Vietnamese demonstrations, and re-
established ties with various non-communist groups. Sihanouk, upon learn-
ing of these actions, condemned both Lon Nol and Sirik Matak. In response,
Sirik Matak pressured Lon Nol to depose Sihanouk and, on 18 March 1970, the
National Assembly voted 89–3 to remove Sihanouk from power.11
Following the coup, Sihanouk was persuaded by the Chinese Premier Zhou
Enlai to form a military alliance with the Vietnamese and Cambodian com-
munists and to lead a government-in-exile.12 Consequently, Sihanouk issued an
appeal to the Cambodian people whereupon Royalist supporters would join
the Khmer Rouge in a unified effort to defeat the Lon Nol government. The
Khmer Rouge, for their part, continued to hold Sihanouk responsible for the
war in Cambodia, but well understood his popularity. Accordingly, the coup
was widely used for propaganda and recruitment purposes.
The alliance of Sihanouk with the CPK, coupled with the sustained and
indiscriminate air campaign waged by the United States, contributed to the
rise of the Khmer Rouge. Whereas in 1970 Khmer Rouge forces were
described as ‘marginal’, with perhaps only 4,000 members, by 1972 these
forces were estimated to have grown to more than 20,000. Indeed, some US
officials presented figures between 35,000 and 50,000, with some CIA

10 William Shawcross, Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of Cambodia

(New York: Cooper Square Press, 2002), pp. 294–5.
11 David P. Chandler, A History of Cambodia, 3rd edn (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000),
p. 208.
12 Initially, China attempted to align itself with the Lon Nol government, if three
conditions were met: permission for the Chinese to continue to supply the
Vietnamese communists through Cambodian territory; authorisation of Vietnamese
communists to maintain their bases inside Cambodia; and Khmer support of the
Vietnamese communists in government statements. In effect, the Chinese were willing
to postpone the Cambodian revolution in order to help the Vietnamese revolution and
to maintain a Chinese-Vietnamese front against the United States. The Lon Nol
government, given its anti-Vietnamese and anti-communist hardline stance, predicta-
bly refused the Chinese overture. It is also likely that Lon Nol assumed that the United
States would not abandon a loyal ally in its proxy war against the communists.

515
 JAMES A. TYNER

estimates placing Khmer Rouge forces at over 150,000.13 As one villager who
joined the communist forces in 1970 recalls:
I saw them [the bombs] being dropped at Andaung Pring [village] . . . The
bombs came tumbling down in a big clump . . . right onto Andaung Pring,
and that time villagers were killed in amazing numbers . . . The bombs fell in
the village, setting fire to people’s houses and killing them . . . sometimes
they didn’t even have the time to get down out of their houses . . . The
bombing was massive and devastating, and they just kept bombing more and
more massively, so massively you couldn’t believe it, so that it engulfed the
forests, engulfed the forests with bombs, with devastation.14

From 1973 onward the CPK and its military wing, the Revolutionary Army of
Kampuchea, progressively ‘liberated’ Cambodia from Lon Nol’s Republican
forces. When victory was achieved on 17 April 1975, however, it was not
because of the military or strategic superiority of the Khmer Rouge. Ben
Kiernan is blunt in his assessment: ‘Pol Pot’s revolution would not have won
power without [the] US economic and military destabilization of
Cambodia.’15 To this we must add the geopolitical machinations of the
DRV, the PRC and the USSR, among many others.

Democratic Kampuchea as a Non-Aligned State

When the Khmer Rouge stood victorious on the streets of Phnom Penh in
April 1975 they constituted neither a centralised, efficient political party nor
a military force.16 Their victory was the haphazard by-product of the culmi-
nation of a series of concurrent revolutions, armed conflicts and geopolitical
machinations. The CPK inherited also a country devastated by years of
conflict. By war’s end, approximately one-third of Cambodia’s bridges were
destroyed, two-fifths of the road network was unusable, and the railroad was
inoperable. Much of the country’s productive infrastructure, including its
lone oil refinery near Kompong Som, had stopped working. Only 300 of 1,400
rice mills and 60 of 240 saw mills were functioning; and both timber and
rubber production – Cambodia’s major prewar commercial products other
than rice – had declined to only one-fifth of prewar production levels.

13 Kenton Clymer, Troubled Relations: The United States and Cambodia since 1870 (DeKalb:
Northern Illinois University Press, 2007), p. 119.
14 Quoted in Ben Kiernan, ‘The American Bombardment of Kampuchea, 1969–1973’,
Vietnam Generation 1 (1989), 4–41, at 20.
15 Kiernan, Pol Pot Regime, p. 16.
16 Internal factions among the CPK leadership would result in widespread purges.

516
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Moreover, upwards of half of Cambodia’s livestock had been killed, either

through fighting or bombing, or as a food source for the starving people.17
Once in power the Khmer Rouge never achieved or received widespread
support. They did however enjoy, initially, a certain level of backing, if only
because the populace hoped for an end to conflict and a return to normalcy –
something the Khmer Rouge in fact promised. What they ultimately deliv-
ered was anything but salvation. On paper Democratic Kampuchea was
a ‘People’s State’, meaning that all men and women over the age of 18
were to participate freely in democratic governance. In practice, power was
monopolised by a few key individuals who formed the Standing Committee
of the CPK – dominated by Pol Pot, Nuon Chea and Ieng Sary.18 Over the
next three years, eight months and twenty days the CPK subjected the people
of Cambodia to forced labour, starvation wages, horrendous living condi-
tions and widespread terror. These conditions, moreover, were in direct
contradiction to those forwarded in public pronouncements, both within
and beyond Democratic Kampuchea, as Cambodia was renamed by the
Khmer Rouge.
On 14 December 1975 a constitution was drafted for Democratic
Kampuchea; to the world, this event signalled the arrival of the
Communist Party of Kampuchea on the world stage. Administratively, the
constitution declared that Democratic Kampuchea was ‘an independent,
united, peaceful, neutral, non-aligned, sovereign and democratic state with
territorial integrity’.19 From the outset, therefore, it was clear that, at least
rhetorically, the CPK adhered to the position advocated by other interna-
tional members of the Non-Alignment Movement.
In the early years of the Cold War representatives of former colonial
powers sought to forge an independent path, free from the dictates of either
American capitalism or Soviet socialism.20 Known as the Non-Aligned

17 Arnold Isaacs, Without Honor: Defeat in Vietnam and Cambodia (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1983), p. 224.
18 As of April 1975 the Standing Committee consisted of Pol Pot (secretary general), Nuon
Chea (deputy secretary general and vice-chair of the Military Commission), Ieng Sary
(deputy prime minister of foreign affairs), So Phim (secretary, East Zone), Vorn Vet
(deputy prime minister for the economy), Ros Nhim (secretary, Northwest Zone), Ta
Mok (secretary, Southwest Zone), Son Sen (deputy prime minister for defence) and
Khieu Samphan (president of the State Presidium). The Standing Committee was
a subset of a larger Central Committee; this committee consisted of approximately
thirty individuals at any given time.
19 Document No. D55874, archived at the Documentation Center of Cambodia, Phnom
Penh.
20 Brian R. Tomlinson, ‘What Was the Third World?’, Journal of Contemporary History 38.2
(2003), 307–21, at 309.

517
 JAMES A. TYNER

Movement, this became a powerful political force that proclaimed

a commitment to nationalism, the preservation of national dignity and the
realization of national power.21 More precisely, the Non-Aligned Movement
connoted an alliance with the forces of regionalism, national independence,
the struggle for a new economic order, social and economic progress, and
self-reliance.22
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s the aims of the Non-Aligned Movement
broadened considerably. Participants at the 1974 Conference held in Algeria
for example called for efforts to create a new economic world order. This
attempt was predicated on a crucial distinction that was made between ‘anti-
colonialism’ and ‘anti-imperialism’. As Singham explains,
Until the end of World War II, the political form of imperialist exploitation
was colonialism in that it sought outright control over the subject peoples of
Asia, Africa, and the Americas . . . World War II, however, resulted in the
great awakening of colonial powers who proceeded to demand and obtain
political independence for their countries . . . The end of colonial rule did not
negate imperialism. While one saw the decline of the colonial powers in
Europe one also saw the emergence of a newly reconstructed capitalism led
by the United States.23

Thus, for many members of the Non-Aligned Movement, it was necessary to

identify a path towards development that did not result in a form of neo-
colonialism. This meant that states were to avoid becoming entangled in
asymmetric foreign and trade relations.
In August 1976 the Fifth Summit Conference of Non-Aligned Countries
was held in Colombo, Sri Lanka. In attendance were representatives of
Democratic Kampuchea. The context of the Fifth Summit is important in
understanding subsequent CPK policy. Throughout the early to mid 1970s
many liberal economic strategists and financial institutions advocated the
view that developing countries could and should pay for essential imports by
borrowing extensively from private banks; in turn, numerous developing
countries borrowed sizable amounts to engage in the importation of indus-
trial goods.24 High levels of indiscriminate borrowing contributed to a world-
wide debt crisis – a problem that was compounded by the decision of OPEC

21 Kristin S. Tassin, ‘“Lift Up Your Head, My Brother”: Nationalism and the Genesis of the
Non-Aligned Movement’, Journal of Third World Studies 23.1 (2006), 147–68, at 148.
22 Ibid.
23 A. W. Singham, ‘The Fifth Summit Conference of the Non-Aligned Movement’, Black
Scholar 8.3 (1976), 2–9, at 5.
24 Ibid., 7.

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to raise the price of oil.25 It is no surprise, therefore, that participants at the

Colombo Conference, including representatives of the CPK, debated at
length alternative paths to economic growth.
The attitudes and positions of the CPK in response to the Fifth Summit are
revealed in a text later published by the Embassy of Democratic Kampuchea
in Berlin, East Germany.26 According to this document, the Summit had
‘achieved brilliant victories’, including the adoption of a number of policies:
which reinforce the principles of non-alignment, enhance the role of this
Movement and confirm the resolute solidarity of the non-aligned countries
in the common struggle against imperialism, colonialism, neo-colonialism
and against the interferences, interventions, aggressions and against the
expansionism of the rich great powers, for independence, sovereignty,
territorial integrity and the right of each people to determine the destiny of
its nation by itself in full independence and sovereignty.27

The text continues that:

The people of Kampuchea warmly hails the victories of the Fifth Summit
Conference of Non-Aligned Countries which consolidate the non-aligned
principles, enhance the non-aligned movement and strengthen the solidarity
within its ranks . . . In contributing to the revolutionary struggle of the
peoples of the world, to the liberation struggle of the brotherly countries
of the Third World and to the strengthening of the cause of the great non-
aligned family, the people of Kampuchea is determined to carry out the
revolution successfully in its own country, to build up its economy and edify
its country according to the principles of independence, sovereignty and self-
reliance.28

Two months later Ieng Sary, deputy prime minister in charge of foreign
affairs, spoke before the 31st Session of the United Nations General Assembly
in New York. Following an opening welcome statement, Ieng Sary explained
that:
The 31st Regular Session of our General Assembly takes place at a time when
all the peoples of the world and especially the peoples of the non-aligned
countries and of the Third World are waging a victorious struggle every-
where against imperialism, colonialism, neo-colonialism, Zionism and all
forms of foreign interference, aggression, expansionism and exploitation, for
independence, sovereignty, territorial integrity, for the right to determine

25 Ibid., 6–7.
26 Document No. D55874, archived at the Documentation Center of Cambodia, Phnom
Penh.
27 Ibid. 28 Ibid.

519
 JAMES A. TYNER

their own destiny and for the establishment of a new international economic
order on the basis of justice and equality.29

He continued that:
Dozens of new independent states are arising from the ruins of colonialism,
determined to engage in the struggle to defend and consolidate their political
and economic independence, their sovereignty and territorial integrity
against all acts of domination, exploitation, interference and aggression on
the part of the rich great powers . . . They call forcefully for the establishment
of new relations between the peoples and nations, in accordance with the
significant changes which have taken place in the world, and based on the
principles of mutual respect of independence, sovereignty and territorial
integrity, equality, mutual advantage, non-interference in the internal affairs
of other states and the right of every people to manage its own affairs.30
Democratic Kampuchea, Ieng Sary explained, stood by these principles.
Moreover, the people of Kampuchea had participated actively in the struggle
against colonialism and foreign aggression. ‘Together with all the other
peoples’, he declared, Democratic Kampuchea ‘has actively taken part in
the common struggle against imperialism, colonialism and neo-colonialism
in order to liberate itself from all forms of domination, oppression and
exploitation’.
Ieng Sary presented Democratic Kampuchea as not so much an isolated,
autarkic society, but rather an independent, sovereign state that would
interact on the global stage on its own terms. Viewed from this vantage
point, the repeated phrases of ‘self-reliance’ and ‘self-mastery’ that appear
throughout CPK documents take on a new interpretation. As Ieng Sary
explained:
Democratic Kampuchea will always continue to follow a policy of indepen-
dence, peace, neutrality and non-alignment . . . As a non-aligned country,
Democratic Kampuchea respects and conscientiously practises the principles
of non-alignment . . . Democratic Kampuchea neither participates in any
alliance nor in any regional association. She resists the establishment of any
foreign military bases on her territory and all forms of intervention and
interference with her internal affairs. Our people resolutely defends its
independence, national sovereignty, territorial integrity and its inalienable
right to determine its own destiny, for which it has fought so hard and
sacrificed so much. At the same time, Democratic Kampuchea continues her
efforts to establish and maintain close relations with her neighbours and with

29 Ibid. 30 Ibid.

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all the other countries of the world, based on the strict mutual respect for
independence, sovereignty, territorial integrity, of the principle of equality
and mutual advantages.31
Democratic Kampuchea’s allegiance to self-reliance and self-mastery would
extend to its participation in the global economy. Ieng Sary clarified that
Problems of economic development remain the major preoccupation of our
world . . . [The] present international economic order [is] based on relations
of domination, exploitation and dependence [and has] enabled the developed
countries to enrich themselves very rapidly and to live in superfluity and
wastage, whereas the developing countries get poorer from day to day, and
having acquired their political independence, still remain confronted with
the dramatic problems of misery, malnutrition, hunger, sickness and
illiteracy.32

Moreover,
The terms of trade continue to deteriorate for these developing countries,
because the basic products and raw materials they possess are constantly
devaluated. Their indebtment with all the resulting financial implications is
growing in a tragic manner . . . [and] these unequal and unjust relations have
led to the importation of the economic and financial crisis of the capitalist
world with all its consequences, especially inflation, rising prices, devalua-
tion of currency and a sinking standard of living for the population.33

Agricultural Policies as Structures of Violence

The CPK premised that economic success – and, by extension, political
success – depended on its agricultural sector. As explained in its ‘Four-Year
Plan’, developed between 21 July and 2 August 1976, the CPK identified two
economic objectives. The first was ‘to serve the people’s livelihood, and to
raise the people’s standard of living quickly, both in terms of supplies and in
terms of other material goods’.34 This was to be accomplished through the
satisfaction of a second objective, namely to ‘seek, gather, save, and increase
capital from agriculture, aiming to rapidly expand our agriculture, our
industry, and our defence’.35 Therefore, to achieve industrial self-sufficiency

31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid.

34 Communist Party of Kampuchea [CPK], ‘The Party’s Four-Year Plan to Build Socialism
in all Fields, 1977–1980’, in Pol Pot Plans the Future: Confidential Leadership Documents from
Democratic Kampuchea, 1976–1977, ed. David Chandler, Ben Kiernan and Chanthou Boua
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), pp. 36–118, at 51.
35 Ibid., p. 51.

521
 JAMES A. TYNER

– including both light and heavy industry – the CPK decreed that they would
‘only have to earn [foreign] capital from agriculture’.36 CPK policy, in other
words, conforms readily to those strategies identified by members of the
Non-Aligned Movement.
During the 1950s and 1960s many former colonies, but especially those
adhering to the Non-Aligned Movement, embarked on a particular economic
strategy known as import-substitution industrialisation (ISI).37 Proponents of
ISI argued that less-developed countries should initially substitute domestic
production of previously imported, simple consumer goods and then sub-
stitute through domestic production for a wider range of more sophisticated
manufactured items.38 In other words, advocates of ISI promoted an eco-
nomic strategy predicated on self-sufficiency. Variously understood within
broader theories of dependency or underdevelopment, the argument was
this: For decades if not centuries the economies of colonies were held in
check by unfair trade arrangements and production processes that consigned
the colonies to positions of subservience within the global economy.
Colonies and former colonies historically were forced to import most of
their manufactured goods in return for the export of primary products, such
as sugar, bananas, coffee, tea and cotton. Under ISI, these unequal relations
were to be inverted. Governments of former colonies would protect their
domestic industries and by extension encourage the production of domestic
consumer goods. Revenue saved from not having to import these goods
could then be used to purchase other manufactured commodities that could
not be produced given the country’s overall level of industrialisation.
In practice, ISI constitutes a form of self-imposed isolation and it is this
economic strategy I maintain the CPK initiated from 1975 onwards. An
internal document dated 8 May 1976 states clearly that ‘We will decrease
importing items next year, including cotton and jute, because we are working
hard to produce ours. We will import only some important items such as
chemical fertiliser, plastic, acid, iron factory, and other raw materials.’39
According to this document, such a strategy was deemed most appropriate;
indeed, to solve the currency problem, it was determined that solutions were

36 Ibid., p. 96.
37 Tony Smith, ‘The Underdevelopment of Development Literature: The Case of
Dependency Theory’, World Politics 31.2 (1979), 247–88.
38 Michael P. Todaro, Economic Development in the Third World, 4th edn (New York:
Longman, 1989), p. 428.
39 Document No. D00698, ‘Cooperation with the Ministry of Commerce’, archived at the
Documentation Center of Cambodia, Phnom Penh.

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not to be found ‘by taking loans from the West or eastern Europe’, for in so
doing the CPK would lose their ‘self-reliant stance’.40
Having adopted a policy of import-substitution, the CPK next directed its
attention to those items that could be effectively produced, both for domestic
consumption and for foreign trade. On the home front, plans called for the
promotion of items necessary to facilitate the people’s livelihood: plates, pots,
spoons, mosquito-nets, shovels, hoes and so on. In practice, most of these
industries never materialised, although textile factories and some machine
shops were in operation. Internationally, documents indicate that the CPK
was receptive to any number of imported goods but that economic efficien-
cies would be the determining factor in deciding the conditions of foreign
trade.
Within a system of production for exchange, it matters little if linen or
coats are produced; whichever offers the best opportunity for capital accu-
mulation will, in principle, be produced. Marx refers to this tendency as
‘indifference to use-value’ and the CPK was in many respects indifferent to
use-value. In a document entitled ‘Report of Activities of the Party Center
According to the General Political Tasks of 1976’, it is noted that
We can export and sell many products such as kapok, shrimp, squid,
elephant fish, and turtles. All of these products can earn foreign exchange.
There are great possibilities for exporting peanuts, wheat, corn, sesame, and
beans. The objective would be to save up these products for export. Almost
anything can be exported, so long as we don’t consume it ourselves, but set it
aside.41

The report further details that ‘We have the potential to achieve full quotas in
rubber, cement, railroads and salt. We have progressed nicely, almost with
empty hands. We have achieved good results. But the possibilities are even
greater. We must expand the Plan. Our line is to stress industry and the
working class as the basis.’42
For the CPK, agriculture – but especially rice – was determined to be the
country’s comparative advantage. During a speech delivered in June 1976 at
an assembly of cadres of the Western Zone, the speaker (most likely Pol Pot)
discussed the importance of rapid agricultural development. The speaker
explains: ‘National construction proceeds along the lines laid down by the

40 Ibid.
41 Communist Party of Kampuchea [CPK], ‘Report of Activities of the Party Center
According to the General Political Tasks of 1976’, in Pol Pot Plans the Future, pp.
177–212, at 200.
42 Ibid., p. 200.

523
 JAMES A. TYNER

Party. The important point of this is building up our agriculture, which is

backward, into modern agriculture within ten to fifteen years.’43 This point is
developed at greater length in the Four-Year Plan, whereby it is noted that
Democratic Kampuchea is replete with ‘such things as land, livestock, natural
resources, water sources such as lakes, rivers and ponds’ and that these
‘natural characteristics have given us great advantages compared with
China, Vietnam, or Africa. Compared to Korea, we also have positive
qualities.’44 Paramount among these, of course, was agriculture. According
to the Four-Year Plan, ‘We stand on agriculture as the basis, so as to collect
agricultural capital with which to strengthen and expand industry.’ This was
no desire to construct an agrarian utopia but instead a pragmatic course of
action based on capitalist principles. Indeed, it was simply a continuation
of policies advocated by the former French colonial government and that of
Sihanouk. From a competitive standpoint, rice was the clear choice. And
while other agricultural products were identified, including rubber, corn,
beans, fish and forest products, these were largely gratis. The CPK argument
was profit-based: ‘For 100,000 tons of milled rice, we would get [US]
$20 million; if we had 500,000 tons we’d get $100 million . . . We must increase
rice production in order to obtain capital. Other products, which are only
complimentary [,] will be increased in the future.’45
Returning to the twin objectives established by the CPK it becomes clear
that policy decisions were based on calculations of expected economic
productivity. Foremost was the proposed increase in rice production – an
objective that was pivotal to the CPK’s overall strategy of state building. This
is vividly illustrated in a series of remarks prepared and delivered by Pol Pot
to a special meeting of the CPK ‘centre’ during 21–23 August 1976. Here, Pol
Pot considers ‘the production of rice as it is related to rice fields’. He explains:
We have greater resources than other countries in terms of rice fields.
Furthermore, the strength of our rice fields is that we have more of them
than others do. The strength of our agriculture is greater than that of other
countries in this respect . . . It is the Party’s wish to transform agriculture
from a backward type to a modern type in 10–15 years. A long-term strategy
must be worked out. We are working [here] on a Four-Year Plan in order to
set off in the direction of achieving this 10–15 year target.46

43 Communist Party of Kampuchea [CPK], ‘Excerpted Report of the Leading Views of the
Comrade Representing the Party Organization at a Zone Assembly’, in Pol Pot Plans the
Future, pp. 9–35, at 27.
44 CPK, ‘Party’s Four-Year Plan’, p. 46. 45 Ibid., p. 51. 46 Ibid., p. 131.

524
 Structural Violence during the Cambodian Genocide

The CPK determined that Democratic Kampuchea would need to triple rice
productivity, to a national average yield of 3 tons per hectare per year. Only
by attaining such a surplus could the CPK raise sufficient revenues to obtain
necessary goods and commodities from abroad; notable among these was
ammunition. The strategy for increased rice production was predicated on
the introduction of more ‘rational’ and ‘efficient’ agricultural techniques.
Thus, the CPK classified rice fields into two categories: those harvested once
a year and those harvested twice. Calculations provided by the CPK indicate
that in 1977 there would be an anticipated 2.4 million hectares of land suitable
for rice production; of these, 1.4 million hectares could sustain a single harvest
per year; the remainder would be conducive to two harvests. Over the next
four years, according to Pol Pot, the land devoted to single harvests would
remain constant, while the amount of double-cropped lands would progres-
sively increase from 200,000 hectares in 1977 to 500,000 in 1980. However, it
was determined that all new agricultural lands would generate two harvests
per year.47
For the CPK, an overriding difficulty associated with increased rice pro-
duction – and, by extension, the economic development and defence of
Democratic Kampuchea – was the ‘problem of water’. According to the Four-
Year Plan, it was necessary to ‘increase the degree of mastery over the water
problem from one year to another until it reaches 100 per cent by 1980 for
first-class rice land and reaches 40–50 per cent for ordinary rice land’.48
Following a table of calculations indicating the annual percentage increase
projected between 1977 and 1980, the text continues: ‘In order to gain mastery
over water there must be a network of dykes and canals as the basis. There
must also be canals, reservoirs and irrigation pumps stationed in accordance
with our strategy.’49 The rapid and massive development of irrigation was
thus paramount, necessitating the completion of thousands of dykes, dams,
canals and reservoirs throughout the country. This necessitated a constant
moving of men and women to satisfy ever-changing labour needs. In turn,
through the forced displacement of the population, the CPK dramatically
altered the human environment both for urban and for rural inhabitants. The
collective movement of people from diverse parts of the country into
agricultural communes exposed people to infectious diseases, while the
close confines, insanitary living conditions and rudimentary medical care
present in the communes accelerated the spread of diseases. In addition, the
forced labour employed to complete these projects endured brutal working

47 Ibid., p. 132. 48 Ibid., p. 89. 49 Ibid., p. 89.

525
 JAMES A. TYNER

conditions, with many people succumbing to exhaustion, injury and even-

tually death.
The rapid expansion of agriculture and irrigation systems was to be
achieved through the standardisation of labour and a matching implementa-
tion of food rations. Consequently, under the CPK, various social classifica-
tions were established. And for many men, women and children, the
consequences of these administrative practices were grave indeed. Most
prominent throughout Democratic Kampuchea was the separation between
‘base’ people and ‘new’ people. ‘Base’ people, also known as ‘old’ people,
were those who either participated in the revolution and/or lived in geo-
graphic zones liberated and controlled by the Khmer Rouge during the war.
‘New’ people (also identified as ‘17 April’ people) consisted of those men and
women who were evacuated from the cities and towns following the Khmer
Rouge victory. Rhetoric of equality notwithstanding, these designations
could literally mean the difference between life and death. ‘Base’ people,
for example, were eligible for ‘full rights’, meaning that they were allowed to
vote and run for local elections. They could become chiefs of cooperatives
and generally had access to better food rations and medical care. ‘New’
people, conversely, received less food, were treated more harshly, had
fewer rights, and were directly killed more readily than ‘old’ people.50
Labourers were further classified as either kemlang ping (full strength) or
kemlang ksaoy (weak strength), with the former consisting mostly of adults
and the latter consisting of small children and the elderly. Those designated as
full-strength were further classified into two subgroups: kemlang 1, which
consisted of young, able-bodied, single men and women who comprised
mobile work brigades (kong chhlat); and kemlang 2, composed of married,
able-bodied men and women who were divided by sex but generally worked
closer to the village. The heaviest tasks were generally reserved for kemlang
1 persons. These work-teams were segregated by sex; males belonged to kong
boroh and females to kong neary. These brigades were set to work primarily on
land-clearance, the digging of canals and reservoirs, and the construction of
dams and dykes. As the name implies, people assigned to mobile work
brigades often lived outside of villages, in temporary work-camps also seg-
regated by sex. Kemlang 2 workers generally worked closer to their villages,
performing such tasks as local wood-cutting (for building materials or fuel),
preparation and cultivation of agricultural fields, and maintenance of

50 Alexander L. Hinton, Why Did They Kill? Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2005), p. 86.

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 Structural Violence during the Cambodian Genocide

irrigation schemes. These tasks were also, but not always, segregated by sex;
women, for example, reaped the rice while threshing was performed by the
men.51 Lastly, the ‘weak strength’ labourers (kemlang 3) were given lighter
tasks. Elderly workers were grouped into work-teams known generically as
senah chun; male groups were termed senah chun boroh and female groups
senah chun neary. Duties for members of senah chun groups included sewing,
gardening, collecting small pieces of wood and caring for children.
Depending on the conditions and the attitudes of the cooperative chief,
some elderly workers might be required to labour in the rice fields or engage
in other, more strenuous work. Children under 14 years of age were assigned
to work groups known as kong komar, with boys and girls separated into kong
komara and kong khomarei, respectively. Children were responsible for watch-
ing over cows and water buffalo, light digging in gardens and fields, collecting
firewood, and gathering cow dung for fertiliser.52
The Khmer Rouge division of labour was matched with a corresponding
system of food rations, namely, a fourfold system was devised to distribute
food rations based on type of workforce. Those workers classified in the No. 1
system would be allocated three cans of rice per day; those in the No. 2
system, two and a half cans; No. 3, two cans; and No. 4, one and a half cans.53
This numeric system refers to the type of labour involved; those people
performing the heaviest manual labour, in principle, were to receive the
highest rations. The lightest tasks, performed by the elderly or the sick,
received the smallest rations. Pregnant women, or women who had just
given birth, were at times given higher rations. Ostensibly, two side dishes
(either soup or dried food) were to be provided to all workers; desserts were
to be offered once every three days. Moreover, detailed work-schedules were
devised – although not necessarily implemented – that determined how
many days of work were required, and for how long a period, for society
as a whole. In this way, the CPK determined the average amount of surplus
that could be produced for the country as a whole. Consequently, the CPK
was able to calculate work-quotas, such as the amount of soil to be excavated,

51 Charles Twining, ‘The Economy’, in Karl D. Jackson (ed.), Cambodia, 1975-1978:

Rendezvous with Death (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 109-150, at
127–8.
52 Kalyanee Mam, ‘The Endurance of the Cambodian Family under the Khmer Rouge
Regime: An Oral History’, in Susan E. Cook (ed.), Genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda:
New Perspectives (New Haven: Yale Center for International and Area Studies, 2004),
pp. 127–71, at 134–5.
53 The ‘cans’ used for measurement were most often Nestle’s condensed milk cans; each
can could contain approximately 200 grams of rice.

527
 JAMES A. TYNER

the amount of forest to be cleared, or the hectarage of fields to be planted and

harvested. Often, these quotas were calculated collectively, based on the
work-group in question. A work-team of fifteen ‘full-strength’ women, for
example, may be assigned to reap one hectare of rice per day.
Apart from the imposition of food rations, the Khmer Rouge prohibited by
deadly means all other means of subsistence. With few exceptions, notably
for ‘base’ people or more trusted cadres, people were prevented from
cultivating personal gardens or from foraging for food. In effect, through
the establishment of supervised cooperatives everyone in time became
dependent upon the Party to satisfy even their most basic of provisions.
That adequate food, medicine and other materials were in short supply
contributed to the prevalence of illness, injury and death. Moreover, horrific
conditions played a role in the ever-expanding terror as the Khmer Rouge
sought to tighten its grip on a disintegrating society.

The Contradictions of Mass Violence

The Khmer Rouge wanted to create a state funded by rice exports, a policy
that justified the pursuit of an ever-expanding agricultural surplus for export.
To increase overall production, they sought to increase the area under
cultivation, increase the overall productivity of agriculture, and limit domes-
tic rice consumption. To increase the cultivated area, labour was required to
build paddy and irrigation works, and cultivate new fields. This work was
supplied in the form of forced labour. The plan to increase productivity
involved the domestic production or importation of agricultural tools, ferti-
lisers, pesticides and herbicides. To produce these agricultural inputs domes-
tically entailed additional forced labour, while importation depended once
again on the rice surplus (and, by extension, forced labour). Finally, to reduce
domestic rice consumption, the Khmer Rouge imposed a regulating system
on the workforce. In these ways, the new political economy of Democratic
Kampuchea placed the majority of the population between the teeth of two
powerful forces: a demand for surplus rice and agricultural inputs that
justified severe labour policies, and an austere rationing system that subjected
men, women and children to starvation wages.
These economic structures of violence contributed most especially to the
direct violence that permeated Democratic Kampuchea. The fragility of CPK
rule upon victory contributed on the one hand to the development of
a massive security apparatus designed to seek out and ‘smash’ perceived
external and internal enemies. First, former soldiers and officials of the

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previous governmental regime were to be identified, arrested and, often, killed.

Likewise, Vietnamese soldiers and ‘spies’ were to be eliminated. Second, many
high-ranking officials of the CPK cautioned against the presence of ‘internal’
enemies, such as traitors and saboteurs. ‘New’ people by definition were
immediately suspect; more pernicious, however, were perceived traitors
among the ranks of the Khmer Rouge: disloyal soldiers, traitorous officials,
and those cadres harbouring ‘revisionist’ or ‘bourgeois’ tendencies.54
On the other hand, it was the hurried implementation and resulting
inefficiency of economic policies that led to widespread paranoia among
the highest echelons of the CPK. Surviving CPK documents describe
people being arrested for ‘stealing’ food or merely complaining about
insufficient rations. Such punishment was not confined to the masses:
CPK leaders also purged local officials who admitted that starvation was
occurring in their areas. As the food crisis increased, the CPK accused
traitorous and inept low-level cadres of undermining the food production
system.55 Thus, beginning in 1976, and intensifying throughout 1977, Pol
Pot and his close associates initiated a series of purges against suspected
traitors and reactionary elements within the Party. High-ranking cadres
were arrested, detained and executed. Prior to their death, they were
tortured and forced to confess their knowledge of and involvement in
traitorous activities and to divulge names of other men and women.
These ‘strings of traitors’ would subsequently lead to more and more
purges. In time, entire divisions and work groups would be arrested and
executed en masse.56
In short, the deaths from exposure, starvation and disease during the
Cambodian genocide were not unintended side effects of poor research,

54 It is probable that Chhim Sak, husband of Kim Ham-Bin, was arrested on suspicion of
being an internal enemy. Arrest records indicate that he was an ‘engineer for irrigation’
and had been working in the Battambang region. No doubt his wife was arrested
following standard Khmer Rouge protocol of ‘smashing’ all known friends, relatives
and associates of the condemned party.
55 See Randel C. DeFalco, ‘Accounting for Famine at the Extraordinary Chambers in the
Courts of Cambodia: The Crimes against Humanity of Extermination, Inhumane Acts
and Persecution’, International Journal of Transitional Justice 5.1 (2011), 142–58; DeFalco,
‘Voices of Genocide: Justice and the Khmer Rouge Famine’, Searching for the Truth First
Quarter (2013), 29–32; James A. Tyner and Stian Rice, ‘To Live and Let Die: Food,
Famine, and Administrative Violence in Democratic Kampuchea, 1975–1979’, Political
Geography 52.1 (2016), 47–56; Tyner and Rice, ‘Cambodia’s Political Economy of
Violence: Space, Time, and Genocide under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–79’, Genocide
Studies International 10.1 (2016), 84–94.
56 Hinton, Why Did They Kill? See also James A. Tyner et al., ‘Emerging Data Sources and
the Study of Genocide: A Preliminary Analysis of Prison Data from S-21
Security-Center, Cambodia’, GeoJournal 81.6 (2016), 907–18.

529
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poor planning or poor implementation, but rather the necessary and dialectic
consequence of the CPK’s distinct imperative to increase surplus. Without
the threat of direct violence, the policies of rationing and surplus could not
have been enforced. Without the policies of rationing and surplus, neither the
material nor the discursive basis for direct violence could have been realised.
Consequently, structures of violence worked dialectically with direct forms
of violence to account for the massive death toll associated with the
Cambodian genocide.

Bibliographical Essay
For a general overview of the Cambodian genocide within its historical context, begin
with David Chandler, The Tragedy of Cambodian History: Politics, War, and Revolution since
1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991). See also Michael Vickery, Cambodia,
1975–1982 (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 1984); Craig Etcheson, The Rise and Demise of
Democratic Kampuchea (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1984); Ben Kiernan, The Pol Pot
Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–79 (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1996); Alexander L. Hinton, Why Did They Kill? Cambodia in the
Shadow of Genocide (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). More detailed accounts
of the rise of the Communist Party in Cambodia include Ben Kiernan, How Pol Pot Came to
Power: A History of Communism in Kampuchea, 1930–1975 (London: Verso, 1985) and
Steven Heder, Cambodian Communism and the Vietnamese Model: Imitation and
Independence, 1930–1975 (Bangkok: White Lotus Press, 2004). More broadly, for overviews
of the conflicts leading up to the Cambodian genocide, specifically the Cambodian civil
war (1970–5), see Arnold R. Isaacs, Without Honor: Defeat in Vietnam and Cambodia
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983); Wilfred P. Deac, Road to the Killing
Fields: The Cambodian War of 1970–1975 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press,
1997); William Shawcross, Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of Cambodia
(New York: Cooper Square Press, 2002).
On more specific aspects of the Cambodian genocide, see David Chandler, Voices from
S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot’s Secret Prison (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1999); Peg LeVine, Love and Dread in Cambodia: Weddings, Births, and Ritual Harm under the
Khmer Rouge (Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2010); Ian Harris,
Buddhism under Pol Pot (Phnom Penh: Documentation Center of Cambodia, 2007);
Boraden Nhem, The Khmer Rouge: Ideology, Militarism, and the Revolution that Consumed
a Generation (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2013). On foreign relations and Cambodia, see Odd
Arne Westad and Sophie Quinn-Judge (eds.), The Third Indochina War: Conflict between
China, Vietnam and Cambodia, 1972–79 (London: Routlege, 2006); Kenton Clymer, Troubled
Relations: The United States and Cambodia since 1870 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University
Press, 2007); Andrew Mertha, Brothers in Arms: Chinese Aid to the Khmer Rouge, 1975–1979
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014).
There are a number of accounts written from the perspective of journalists who
covered the events, including Elizabeth Becker, When the War Was Over: Cambodia and

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 Structural Violence during the Cambodian Genocide

the Khmer Rouge Revolution (New York: Public Affairs, 1986); Nayan Chanda, Brother Enemy:
The War after the War (New York: Collier Books, 1986); Henry Kamm, Cambodia: Report
from a Stricken Land (New York: Arcade, 1998).
Overall there is a dearth of biographies written about the main perpetrators. Two now
exist on Pol Pot, including David Chandler’s Brother Number One: A Political Biography of Pol
Pot, rev. edn (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 1999) and Philip Short’s Pol Pot: Anatomy of
a Nightmare (New York: Henry Holt, 2004). For accounts of Kaing Guek Eav, commandant
of S-21 security-centre, see Nic Dunlop, The Lost Executioner: A Journey to the Heart of the
Killing Fields (New York: Walker, 2005) and Thierry Cruvellier, The Master of Confessions:
The Making of a Khmer Rouge Torturer (New York: Ecco, 2011). There are many
autobiographies written by survivors; see for example Someth May, Cambodian Witness:
The Autobiography of Someth May (London: Faber & Faber, 1986) and Loung Ung, First They
Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers (New York: Harper Perennial, 2000).
There are a growing number of books that have explored Cambodia after the genocide.
For a discussion on the conflict between Vietnam, China and Cambodia after the
genocide, see Stephen J. Morris, Why Vietnam Invaded Cambodia: Political Culture and the
Causes of War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). For more general accounts, see
Craig Etcheson, After the Killing Fields: Lessons from the Cambodian Genocide (Lubbock: Texas
Tech University Press, 2005); Evan Gottesman, Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge: Inside the
Politics of Nation Building (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003); Margaret Slocomb,
The People’s Republic of Kampuchea, 1979–1989: The Revolution after Pol Pot (Chiang Mai:
Silkworm Books, 2003); Peter Maguire, Facing Death in Cambodia (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2005). Many books are now appearing on the Cambodian genocide
tribunal; see for example Tom Fawthrop and Helen Jarvis, Getting Away with Genocide?
Elusive Justice and the Khmer Rouge Tribunal (London: Pluto Press, 2004) and John
D. Ciorciari and Anne Heindel (eds.), On Trial: The Khmer Rouge Accountability Process
(Phnom Penh: Documentation Center of Cambodia). For discussions on the
memorialisation of the Cambodian genocide, see Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, War, Genocide,
and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2012) and James A. Tyner, Landscape, Memory, and Post-Violence in Cambodia
(Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017).

531
 26
The Origins of Modern Terrorism
randall d. law

Although wars, classic insurrections and genocides have claimed far more
lives, terrorism has become the very face of modern conflict and turbulence,
particularly since the attacks of September 11, 2001. But terrorism has a much
longer history: in fact, recognisably ‘modern’ terrorism has existed for more
than two centuries. This chapter surveys terrorism from the late eighteenth
to the early twentieth centuries and analyses its emergence as a peculiarly
modern form of violence in the context of the clash between the growth of
state power and the emphasis on individual rights and entitlements.
The word ‘terrorist’ was first used in English by Edmund Burke in 1795 in
a passing comment denouncing the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror.1
The terms ‘terrorism’ and ‘terrorist’ were rarely invoked in the following
decades but entered wide if idiosyncratic circulation in the last decades of the
nineteenth century. Those who used or advocated insurrectionary or sym-
bolic political violence frequently embraced the word ‘terrorism’ to describe
their own behaviour, even as it began to enter broader usage as a convenient
epithet to use against those whose motives or means of waging a struggle
were deemed illegitimate by political elites or dominant populations. When
scholars, legal authorities and international agencies began to turn their
attention to ‘terrorism’ in earnest in the middle of the twentieth century,
the phenomenon was understood to overlap broadly with insurgency, that is,
asymmetric warfare waged against a state by a group or a population not
legally recognised as a sovereign entity. Only in the wake of the ascendance
of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the emergence of ‘international
terrorism’ in the late 1960s did observers analytically distinguish terrorism
from other forms of violence. Policy-oriented academics – usually from the
social sciences – began to emphasise several core features: first, that it was

1 Edmund Burke, ‘Fourth Letter . . . to the Earl Fitzwilliam’, in The Works of the Right
Honourable Edmund Burke, 12 vols. (London: Nimmo, 1887), 6:70.

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 The Origins of Modern Terrorism

violence against civilians outside of the normal bounds of war; second, that
its intent was to achieve political change by intimidating state authorities or
the broader population; and third, that it was, by definition, carried out
against states by sub-state groups.
In the 1980s, a minority within academia began to focus on the symbolic
nature of terrorism and to characterise it as a communicative act, which
untethered the study of terrorism from the increasingly lengthy list of
criteria that was used to define it. Such an approach made clear that
terrorism could be used by both states and non-states, against soldier and
civilian alike, and within and beyond the confines of war. Those who
advocated this approach identified terrorism as a strategy that sought to
change the behaviour of the many by violently targeting the few and argued
that those who use terrorism pick symbolically charged targets and take
advantage of the subsequent media attention to communicate their grie-
vances, recruit new followers, terrorise and provoke their enemies, and –
they hope – achieve political change.
But just as the study of terrorism has evolved, so has terrorism itself.
Terrorism can be treated as a dynamic, evolving strategy in many different
ways. Sometimes this is done via the broader effort to link the emergence
of ‘modern’ terrorism to one or more ‘modern’ phenomena – such as mass
media or certain weapon technologies – or the development of ‘modern’
self-consciousness or subjectivity.2
This chapter locates the emergence of modern terrorism in the parallel
growth of the rhetoric and the reality of, on the one hand, state power and
nationalism and, on the other, of individualism, individual entitlements and
individual rights. To put it more polemically, modern terrorism is democratic
violence for a democratic era. This has multiple meanings. First, much
terroristic violence in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was carried
out in pursuit of liberating ‘the people’ from coercive state authority and
asserting their rights, both individual and collective. Second, modern terror-
ism is individualised and small scale, not only in terms of the perpetrator and
the victim, but also in the narratives that are created in which members of
society are encouraged to see themselves as the personal victim of the
violence. Third, modern terrorists assert the power of the individual who
strikes back heroically against an all-powerful state but often on behalf of
causes that have a deeply social, even ‘mass’ element.

2 See Claudia Verhoeven, The Odd Man Karakozov: Imperial Russia, Modernity, and the Birth
of Terrorism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009).

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 RANDALL D. LAW

Democracy, Revolution and Terrorism

The roots of modern terrorism are deep and can be found in the slow
emergence of state power, the ideology of democracy and the conception of
the individual. Early European writers, such as St Augustine (d. 430), widely
referenced the ‘common good’ and the duty of the powerful to safeguard
certain traditional rights of the people. Later scholars, such as John of Salisbury
(d. 1180) and Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274), countenanced violence to protect those
traditional rights of society or to punish those who ruled as tyrants. But such
violence differed from modern terrorism in many ways: it was only to be used
by society’s elite against those individuals who were directly responsible for
tyranny in order to restore society’s natural harmony. But the Protestant
Reformation, the English Civil War (1642–51), John Locke (d. 1704) and
America’s Founding Fathers democratised and secularised violence and intro-
duced the possibility of revolutionary, not just conservative political violence.
The French Revolution (1789–94) was the real watershed moment in the
intertwined histories of terrorism, state terror, democracy, nationalism and
individualism. Revolutionaries introduced a new language of both individual
and collective rights, as well as justifications for state power based on them.
Meanwhile, attacks on symbols of royal and aristocratic power grew in
number and intensity and resonated powerfully among revolutionaries and
the broader population. As the Revolution grew more radical, its proponents
carried out even more displays of symbolic violence, such as attacks on Church
property and aristocratic reactionaries. The coming of war in 1792 between
France and its conservative neighbours drew a European-wide battle line
between popular and monarchical sovereignty. When the moderate
Charlotte Corday assassinated the radical journalist Jean-Paul Marat in the
summer of 1793, revolutionaries interpreted it as a violent act meant to
intimidate supporters of the new French republic. With the Revolution
under assault at home and abroad, radicals ruled France as a dictatorship and
deployed terror on a massive scale to cement and extend state power and, at
least rhetorically, to establish liberty. The targets of this violence were the anti-
democratic pillars of the old order as well as revolutionaries who either
insufficiently supported the use of terror or supported popular rather than
state power. Approximately 17,000 people were executed by the authorities
during the Reign of Terror, but unofficial numbers are easily double that.3 The
moderate revolutionary Jean-Lambert Tallien, who helped organise the arrest

3 Hugh Gough, The Terror in the French Revolution, 2nd edn (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2010), p. 109.

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 The Origins of Modern Terrorism

of Maximilien Robespierre and end the Reign of Terror, identified the essence
of the radical regime: ‘if the government of terror pursues a few citizens for
their presumed intentions, it will frighten all citizens’.4 What differentiated
‘terror’ from the state’s other violent actions, such as the prosecution and even
execution of criminals, was that ‘terror’ was used against potential criminals and
was thus essentially symbolic.
When the Bourbon dynasty and European conservative elites were restored
after Napoleon’s defeat, sub-state, conspiratorial groups became the principal
users of what today we would recognise as terrorism. One example was the
Carbonari, who plotted terrorist actions that they hoped would spark popular
revolutions against the monarchies of France and Italy. Carbonari plans
included prison breaks, assassinations, and coordinated efforts to sow chaos.
In the end, Carbonari cells, which were active in the 1810s and early 1820s, did
little beyond recruiting members, hatching plots, and engaging in Masonic-
inspired oaths and rituals that were awash in symbolism and revolved around
bloodthirsty denunciations of the Catholic Church and monarchical tyranny.
The more important point is that groups such as the Carbonari represent
the transition from terrorism as a state to a sub-state phenomenon. In theory,
the goals (civil liberties, popular sovereignty, representative assemblies) and
the enemies (religious and secular tyrants) remained the same. But with the
political and military defeat of Napoleon, the revolution and the violent
means that would be necessary to achieve and secure it went underground.
The French revolutionaries had been state actors, developing as terrorists
after they had seized the reins of state authority. Only after 1815 did ‘revolu-
tionary’ acquire the meaning that today seems commonsensical, that of the
underground conspirator dedicated to seizing power and the use of violence
to overturn the current order and establish a new one.
The conservative powers of Restoration Europe – the most significant of
which were France, Prussia, and the Russian and Habsburg empires – identi-
fied themselves as opponents of revolution and protectors of the traditional
pillars of society: monarchy, nobility and the church. These governments
used the military as well as traditional legal, economic and social privileges to
preserve their holds on power, but they also increasingly turned to new, even
‘liberal’ forces to preserve their position. Chief among these forces was
industrialisation. Conservative states co-opted or aligned themselves with
emerging capitalists through contracts, favourable tax policies, the provision

4 ‘J.-L. Tallien on the Terror’, in Laura Mason and Tracey Rizzo (eds.), The French
Revolution: A Document Collection (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), p. 266.

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of critical infrastructure (roads, canals, ports and eventually railroads), and

the use of law and force to quell labour disturbances.
The Industrial Revolution encouraged and was accompanied by other
‘revolutions’ that led to the growth of the size, reach and effectiveness of
bureaucracies, militaries and security forces – in short, the growth of state
power. This bureaucratic expansion took many forms, including the growth
of the means to surveil, tax and conscript citizens, as well as to shape lives and
dominate spaces through the development of infrastructure, public works
and public health.5 Another manifestation of urbanisation and bureaucratisa-
tion was the establishment in the second quarter of the nineteenth century of
permanent, uniformed police forces which could be used, on the one hand, to
combat crime and ensure a minimal level of safety and, on the other, to
suppress labour gatherings and disturbances as well as public protests for
more rights and freedoms.
Meanwhile, during the mid nineteenth century the intellectual framework
for terrorism developed despite the lack of terrorist acts per se. The crucial
figure was Karl Heinzen, a Prussian radical democrat who participated in the
upheavals of 1848–9 in his homeland. Shortly thereafter he published a series
of articles entitled ‘Murder’, in which he stated that although killing is always
immoral, in practice the state praises its soldiers for killing during war, its
patriots for acts of tyrannicide during ‘proper’ revolutions, and its hangmen
for executing criminals. Meanwhile, the state denounces those who fight for
democracy, liberty and the people’s rights. Heinzen argued that states are
themselves simply the expression of the interests of the wealthy and that the
concepts of morality and justice are relative. Therefore, governments should
not be able to reference those standards when violently oppressing their
opponents. Moreover, true freedom fighters should not shrink from using
violence. ‘Let us, then, be practical’, he wrote. ‘Let us call ourselves mur-
derers as our enemies do, let us take the moral horror out of this great
historical tool.’ The dilemma that freedom fighters faced was that states
possessed more than just the faux moral and legal standing to suppress
democratic movements; modern states also had the economic, logistic and
demographic ability to overwhelm those who would take up arms against
them. The answer, Heinzen said, was for revolutionaries and democrats to
fight against well-armed states by using terror, conspiratorial organisation
and destructive new technologies – in a word, terrorism (although he did not

5 Among others, see Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (London: Fontana,
1989) and Oliver MacDonagh, ‘The Nineteenth-Century Revolution in Government: A
Reappraisal’, Historical Journal 1.1 (1958), 52–67.

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use it). In the end, he drew the Machiavellian conclusion: ‘the path to
Humanity’ could pass successfully ‘through the zenith of Barbarity’.6 In
doing so, Heinzen appropriated the moral arguments of the Enlightenment
concerning civil rights, democracy, liberty and emancipation, but used them
to justify terror, violence, even mass murder. These rhetorical devices were
later used by many movements and individuals – which, of course, were
unlikely ever to have heard of his name – that have used terrorism.

Russian Revolutionary Terrorism

The theory and practice of terrorism became a major fixture of the modern
world in the last third of the nineteenth century in many places, but it
achieved the most prominence in three distinct forms: Russian revolutionary
terrorism, international anarcho-terrorism, and American white supremacist
terrorism. Those behind each of these forms theorised and carried out
terrorism on behalf of society against what they described as the overarching,
tyrannical power of the state, and yet proponents of each movement indivi-
dualised the violence to a greater or lesser extent.
Tsarist Russia was a land with little experience of representative institu-
tions, civil liberties or the rule of law. The leaders of the revolutionary
movement that developed there in the third quarter of the nineteenth
century were devoted to the emancipation of the serfs, an emphasis on
local governance and a massive reapportionment of the land – in toto,
a generic form of agrarian socialism known in Russia as ‘populism’. They
vacillated between working towards the development of a popular revolu-
tionary movement through education and agitation and, when tsarist police
infiltration and repression blocked that possibility, the use of targeted assas-
sination. The earliest attempt on the life of the tsar by a revolutionary was
carried out by Dmitri Karakozov against Tsar Alexander II in 1866. The return
of revolutionary terrorism was marked in 1878 by attacks on St Petersburg’s
governor general Fyodor Trepov by Vera Zasulich (unsuccessful) and on
Nikolai Mezentsov, the head of the tsar’s secret police, by Sergei Kravchinsky
(successful). Both assassins were ideologically populists. While Zasulich’s
attempt was primarily an act of revenge meant to punish Trepov for his
beating of a jailed revolutionary, Kravchinsky’s attack had a much broader
motive, about which he later wrote at great length. He imagined that

6 Karl Heinzen, ‘Murder’, in Walter Laqueur (ed.), Voices of Terror: Manifestos, Writings
and Manuals (New York: Reed, 2004), pp. 57–67, at 58, 62, 67.

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individual acts of targeted violence against the state’s leaders could actually
change the regime’s behaviour – this because and not in spite of the vast gulf
between the power of the state and its subjects. On the one hand, he believed
that it would be virtually impossible for the authorities to find all the
individual assassins who could hide within the broader population.
Meanwhile, assassinations of prominent figures would create popular heroes
who could keep alive the revolutionary movement and inspire the emer-
gence of new activists. On the other hand, Kravchinsky theorised that these
violent acts would encourage a bunker mentality on the part of the tsar and
his ministers which would diminish the government’s effectiveness and
encourage its repressive tendencies, leading, in turn, to the creation of
a true mass movement that could eventually topple the tsar and his system.7
In the late 1870s, Russians formed the first-ever large-scale conspiratorial
organisation devoted to the use of revolutionary terrorism. The People’s
Will, as it was known, probably did not have more than a few score hardcore
members, but its several thousand supporters across Russia were organised
into cells, whose members were unaware of each other’s names and loca-
tions. These cells engaged in agitation, raised money, recruited members and
supplied safe houses. Within the central organisation, members specialised in
distinct fields, such as surveillance, counterespionage, forgery, smuggling and
explosives. The group’s leaders debated among themselves about how best
to deploy their violence: Nikolai Morozov argued for a massive campaign of
terrorism that would destabilise Russia and lead to peasant rebellions, while
others proposed using targeted assassinations as a prelude to a coup. The
organisation’s nominal chief, Lev Tikhomirov, eventually prevailed: like
Kravchinsky, he believed that the principal purpose of terrorism was sym-
bolic in that it could keep the movement alive, undermine the legitimacy of
the tsar and his regime, and eventually pave the way for some sort of
revolution. More to the point, he later confessed that the commitment to
violence came before the rather tortured efforts to validate its purpose.8
Although Morozov left when his dream of a widespread campaign was
discarded, he captured the group’s mood when he claimed that terrorism
‘should make the struggle popular, historical, and grandiose’.9 After six failed

7 Sergei Stepniak-Kravchinsky, Underground Russia (New York: Scribner, 1883), pp. 38–42,
256–64.
8 Deborah Hardy, Land and Freedom: The Origins of Russian Terrorism, 1876–1879 (Westport,
CT: Greenwood, 1987), pp. 154–6.
9 Nikolai Morozov, ‘The Terroristic Struggle’, in Feliks Gross, Violence in Politics: Terror
and Political Assassination in Eastern Europe and Russia (The Hague: Mouton, 1972), pp.
110–12, at 110.

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 The Origins of Modern Terrorism

attempts on the life of the tsar, the People’s Will finally succeeded in
assassinating Alexander II on 1 March 1881, by blowing up his sled with hand-
tossed explosives. No popular revolution erupted, and the tsar’s son,
Alexander III, rolled back reforms and launched a major crackdown on
even mild subversion after he came to the throne.

Anarchist Terrorism in Europe and Russia

The second form of political violence during this period was anarcho-
terrorism, which was shaped not only by horror at the consequences of
rapid industrialisation and growing state power in Europe and the United
States but also by complicated political and ideological developments across
the political spectrum. As middle-class support for liberal democracy grew,
most embittered workers turned to socialism. That movement inspired few
terrorists during this era, however, because socialists found that they could
make more progress in terms of improving workers’ lives through large-scale
organising. And many conservative leaders, such as Germany’s Otto von
Bismarck, found that they could blunt the revolutionary impulse by imple-
menting limited reforms and even turn some workers towards the state by
harnessing nationalism. Gradualism – from both the Left and the Right –
threatened to undermine more radical movements, such as revolutionary
Marxism, which preached that workers could only truly be emancipated
when the system was completely overthrown. Even those Marxists com-
mitted to the use of violence rarely turned to terrorism, however. As the
Russian revolutionary Lev Trotsky put it in 1911, ‘if we rise against terrorist
acts, it is only because individual revenge does not satisfy us’.10 Terrorism
was ahistorical, Trotsky argued, since it was the work of small groups rather
than of entire social classes.
The radicals most threatened by the partial amelioration of working-class
demands and the growing might of centralised states were anarchists. Like
socialists, anarchists lamented what they understood to be working-class
repression at the hands of capitalists and the states that they controlled. But
anarchists decried the solutions proposed by socialists, which were seen as
the substitution of one kind of repression for another. Anarchists denounced
the state itself – regardless of who controlled it – as repressive, since it always
represented the power of one segment of society over another.

10 Lev Trotsky, ‘Why Marxists Oppose Individual Terrorism’, Der Kampf (November 1911),
www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1911/11/tia09.htm.

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Most anarchists were peaceful, even pacifistic, but a small fringe of the
movement turned to violence in the hopes of bringing about a liberating
revolution. But if they were few in number – as were the number of
casualties – their impact was significant. Anarchist terrorists struck targets
in Europe, Russia, South America and the United States, and their violence
stretched from the 1880s to its last gasp in the early 1920s. While some
anarchist attacks were carried out by small cells and loosely affiliated net-
works, individuals were responsible for most of the mayhem.
Anarcho-terrorists acted on a range of motives, but three stand out. The
first was articulated by Mikhail Bakunin, a Russian who was one of the key
anarchist theorists of the nineteenth century. He theorised that individual
attacks, motivated by anything from thievish greed to altruistic idealism,
could foment chaos and wear down the state, eventually creating opportu-
nities for revolutionaries to overthrow the state and establish self-governing
communes. ‘Everything in this fight is equally sanctified by the revolution’,
Bakunin declared. ‘[Never mind that those destined to perish] will call it
terrorism!’11 While his vision of an anarchist heaven-on-earth never materi-
alised, his strategy of using essentially random violence to create
a revolutionary moment has become second nature to modern radicals
willing to use terrorism, particularly against civilians.
The second motive behind anarcho-terrorism was best articulated by the
Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin who popularised the phrase ‘propaganda
of the deed’. For him, this meant acts of violence or even simple insubordina-
tion that, through visceral, immediately experienced examples, pushed com-
moners past their passivity, their sense of inferiority, and their ingrained
reluctance to act against their oppressors. In other words, violence was
empowering. For Kropotkin, the significance of terrorism – a word he rarely
used but a concept that he clearly evoked – lay almost entirely in its impact on
the perpetrator and not the victim.
The European most associated with the direct promotion of terroristic
‘propaganda of the deed’ was the German Johann Most, who published the
anarchist newspaper Die Freiheit (Freedom), first in Germany and then in
New York after he emigrated in 1882. Most essentially brought the
Bakuninist and Kropotkinite justifications for terrorism together. He claimed
that terrorism could ‘stoke the fire of revolution and incite people to revolt in
any way we can’.12 Most did not just encourage propaganda of the deed; the

11 Laqueur, Voices, p. 70.

12 Quoted in Martin A. Miller, Kropotkin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976),
pp. 44–5.

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 The Origins of Modern Terrorism

pages of Die Freiheit contained detailed descriptions of how to make and

deploy poisons, dynamite and letter bombs. And after he moved to the
United States, he spoke to rapturous audiences at anarchist clubs across the
country – a speech in Chicago reportedly drew 6,000 – and directly contrib-
uted to the spread of the doctrine of the propaganda of the deed in the New
World.
Terrorist actions in Europe during this period were often prompted by the
desire to avenge fellow anarchist revolutionaries. This was the case in France
in the first half of the 1890s, when a string of intertwined bombings killed only
a handful of victims but horrified and entranced the nation. The attacks were
carried out, in two separate threads, first as responses to the suppression of
a parade and a strike and then proceeded as reactions to the arrests of the
others. Also notable was the nature of the targets, which included the home
of a judge and a prosecutor, the headquarters of a mining company, cafés, the
French Chamber of Deputies itself, and finally, in 1894, the French president,
Sadi Carnot, who was stabbed to death by an Italian anarchist. The terrorists
used their trials to rail against the evils of capitalism and state power and to
plead for other anarchists to take up the fight. Although these anarchists did
not personally know each other, their actions created the impression – fanned
by the government and the newly ascendant mass-circulation newspapers –
that France was beset by a widespread anarchist conspiracy. The irony was
that the combination of the state’s lopsided monopoly on the use of legit-
imate violence and the development of a labour movement that alternated
between compliance and mass organisation meant – again contrary to the
perception of most – that terrorism primarily existed as an individual cri de
cœur against the power of the state.
The same could be said for Russia, where, after a nearly two-decade lull,
terrorism reached dizzying heights of destructiveness during and shortly after
the 1905 Revolution. In that year, terrorism was only one of many kinds of
violence and disruption alongside organised political opposition, peasant
revolts, massive labour strikes, and mutinies by soldiers and sailors. Only
Tsar Nicholas II’s last-minute concessions of a limited constitution,
a legislature and limited civil rights prevented the collapse of the state.
Even then, terrorist violence was only finally brought down to manageable
levels by 1911.
The most frequently told story of these years is the return of targeted
assassination by the Combat Organisation, a small, secret group that carried
out terrorist operations on behalf of the populist Socialist Revolutionaries
(SRs). The SRs, who aspired to build a mass movement, valued terror for its

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ability to attract recruits, keep pressure on the state, and potentially create
a revolutionary situation. The Combat Organisation assassinated two ministers
of the interior (essentially national police chiefs) and a host of other officials,
including the tsar’s own uncle, the Grand Duke Sergei Aleksandrovich.
While these attacks garnered headlines at home and abroad, they did not
and could not seriously undermine the state itself. Far greater damage was
done to both the state and society by a tidal wave of uncoordinated terrorist
violence that swamped Russia during and for some time after 1905. Anna
Geifman has estimated that nearly 17,000 people were killed or wounded in
these terrorist attacks from 1905 to 1910.13 While local Socialist Revolutionary
cells were responsible for some of these attacks, the vast majority were
carried out by anarchists. While some were undoubtedly political, many
were crimes sheathed in ideology, such as was the case with so-called
‘revolutionary expropriations’. These were robberies and murders carried
out to raise funds for revolutionary purposes or, as was often the case, for
personal gain but with the Bakuninist claim that such crimes struck at the
capitalist system.

Anarchist Terrorism in the United States

The United States has a long and bloody history of labour-related violence,
which formed the backdrop for sporadic outbursts of terrorism. The first
such eruption occurred in the eastern Pennsylvania coal fields in the 1860s
and 1870s. When a few dozen company managers and bosses were killed,
the authorities blamed their deaths on the Molly Maguires, supposedly an
underground group with roots in the Irish Whiteboys and other secret
societies. Twenty miners were eventually executed after sensationalistic
trials based on flimsy evidence. Today, historians doubt that the Mollies
even existed as an organised group. But the spectre of conspiratorial
violence carried out by immigrants with ties to Old World movements
set the tone for much of what was to follow. Middle America, the country’s
political leaders and the mainstream media came to understand American
terrorism as essentially the work of outsiders or hyphenated Americans. For
the next fifty years, the dominant image of the American terrorist was of
a heavily whiskered foreigner with an unpronounceable name and a bomb
hidden under an overcoat.

13 Anna Geifman, Thou Shalt Kill: Revolutionary Terrorism in Russia, 1894–1917 (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 21.

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It is important to note, however, that the bulk of labour-related violence

was carried out not by terrorists but by state militias or armed strike breakers,
such as during the Homestead strike (1892), the Pullman strike (1894), the
Ludlow massacre (1914) and the Battle of Blair Mountain (1921). A second key
point is that the majority of the workers who went on strike or organised
were relatively non-ideological, and those who did profess an ideology could
be classified as socialists. Socialists and labour activists did occasionally use
terrorism, though, such as the October 1910 bombing of the headquarters of
the Los Angeles Times, which was locked in a debilitating dispute with its
union. The blast killed twenty-one non-union employees. This sort of vio-
lence tended to be closely connected to specific labour grievances and
economic issues.
Most sub-state labour-related terrorism in the USA was carried out by
anarchists who always formed a radical fringe of the labour movement; one
estimate puts the number of anarchists in the USA at the time of the move-
ment’s peak in 1885 at 7,000. Even then, violent anarchists lay at the fringe of
the fringe. Not surprisingly, they attracted the lion’s share of national atten-
tion, in part because of their violent rhetoric. One anarchist paper, for
instance, exhorted its readers: ‘Dynamite! . . . It brings terror and fear to
the robbers . . . A pound of this good stuff beats a bushel of ballots hollow –
and don’t you forget it!’14 Anarchist rhetoric also differed from that of the
mainstream labour movement by focusing significant energy on the state and
its war against individual liberty. Quite tellingly, most anarchist violence in
the USA was carried out by individuals or extremely small cells, even as it was
characterised by authorities and the mainstream press as the leading edge of
a massive and violent revolutionary movement.
The story of anarchist violence in the United States begins with the
Chicago Haymarket Riot of 1886. After hundreds of thousands of workers
marched and went on strike across the United States on 1 May demanding the
eight-hour work day, demonstrations continued in Chicago, in part to protest
police violence at a local strike. On 4 May, as a demonstration led by
anarchists wound down, someone threw a bomb, killing eight policemen.
What followed was America’s first red scare, a nationwide panic during
which the authorities went on a witch hunt for violent revolutionaries and
newspapers fanned the fears of middle America. Chicago police rounded up
anarchists and used the hysteria to suppress socialists and union activists.

14 Quoted in Paul Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1984), p. 170.

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Despite a paucity of evidence, eight defendants were found guilty and five
were sentenced to death. Those on the left loudly denounced the verdict as
a miscarriage of justice. By 1893, the governor of Illinois agreed and issued
pardons. But there had been a bomb, and trial evidence revealed that a small
group of anarchists had made bombs and plotted to use them at some time.15
In a country rife with labour-related tension and conflict, terrorism had
become the fault line, crystallising for the bulk of the population the danger
of labour, immigrants and even rampant individualism, while clarifying for
those on the left the horrifying demagogic power of the state.
The first red scare of 1886 stigmatised the American labour movement and
the campaign for the eight-hour work day, but labour organisation soon
picked up again. In fact, from 1897 to 1920, total union membership increased
tenfold. Just as importantly, evidence suggests that wages grew and the
average work week shrank during this period for unionised workers more
than for non-union workers.16 Ironically, the creeping success of American
labour organisers alarmed not just industrialists and their government back-
ers but also anarchists, who – as in Europe – feared that the slow amelioration
of working-class disaffection threatened their claims that only a revolution
could fundamentally right society’s wrongs. Afraid that they would lose their
audience, anarchists doubled down on terrorism. But they also shifted even
more clearly towards a rhetorical emphasis on the evils of statism and the
importance of individual liberty.
Thus it is significant that the most high-profile incidences of American
anarcho-terrorism around the turn of the century were individual acts of
propaganda of the deed. In 1892, the Russian-American anarchist
Alexander Berkman attempted to kill Henry Clay Frick, chairman of
the board of Carnegie Corporation, in retaliation for Carnegie’s violent
clampdown on striking steel workers in Homestead, Pennsylvania. And
in September 1901, Leon Czolgosz shot and killed US President William
McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. Just
before his execution, Czolgosz, an anarchist and former steelworker
born in the United States to Polish immigrants, stated, ‘I killed the
President because he was the enemy of the good people – the good
working people. I am not sorry for my crime.’17

15 Timothy Messer-Kruse, The Trial of the Haymarket Anarchists: Terrorism and Justice in the
Gilded Age (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 59–63, 77–8, 119, 187-8 n. 5.
16 Leo Wolman, The Growth of American Trade Unions, 1880–1923 (New York: National
Bureau of Economic Research, 1924), p. 33, http://papers.nber.org/books/wolm24-1.
17 Robert J. Donovan, The Assassins (New York: Harper, 1955), p. 107.

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Record-setting foreign immigration, the Russian Revolution of 1917 and

American involvement in World War I stoked fear in the United States of
Bolshies, workers, anarchists, terrorists and unassimilated foreigners. The
Immigration Act of 1917 legalised the deportation of resident aliens who
promoted assassination, and the Sedition Act of 1918 prohibited anti-
government speech. In 1919, these laws were used to take into custody
Luigi Galleani, an Italian immigrant who had taken Johann Most’s place as
America’s loudest and most notorious proponent of anarchism and propa-
ganda of the deed. That June, eight bombs set off outside the homes of
officials associated with the legislation produced three fatalities: a guard,
a bystander and one of the bombers. Pamphlets signed by ‘The Anarchist
Fighters’ that were found at the scene stated, ‘there will have to be murder:
we will kill, because it is necessary; there will have to be destruction; we will
destroy to rid the world of your tyrannical institutions’. The dead bomber
was a colleague of Galleani; no other terrorists were arrested.18
A new moral panic ensued. US attorney general A. Mitchell Palmer
declared that America was under assault from ‘alien anarchists’, and a beefed-
up Bureau of Investigation rounded up 10,000 suspects over seven months.
The government eventually deported about 500 of those seized. The climax
of American anarchist terror came soon after. On 16 September 1920, a bomb
exploded on New York City’s Wall Street, killing thirty-eight and wounding
over 200 – the most destructive American terrorist attack until the 1995
Oklahoma City bombing. The authorities never found the culprit, but suspi-
cion fell on the few Galleanists who remained, in large part because of the
discovery of a nearby note from a group claiming to be the American
Anarchist Fighters. The note seemed to reference recent arrests: ‘Free the
political prisoners or it will be sure death for all of you.’19

White Supremacist Terrorism in the United States

The tragic irony surrounding the American caricature of the foreign terrorist
was that in the Ku Klux Klan the United States produced a wholly domestic
terrorist movement during Reconstruction that gleaned more support and
shed more blood than any in Europe or Russia. Most importantly, Klan

18 Paul Avrich, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1991), p. 149.
19 Quoted in Joseph T. McCann, Terrorism on American Soil (Boulder, CO: Sentient, 2006),
p. 64.

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terrorism actually proved to be successful, unlike most other sub-state terror

campaigns described in this chapter.
The American Civil War left over 600,000 men dead and devastated the
infrastructure of the American South. Moreover, it fundamentally trans-
formed the region’s culture, society and economy as well as destroying its
moral and ideological centre by ending slavery. Aided by the newly estab-
lished Freedmen’s Bureau, African Americans set up businesses, bought
property, worked their own land, attended schools and learned to read,
held public assemblies, and, in short, sought to live as free citizens for the
first time on a large scale in the American South. But Southern states
essentially tried to re-enslave African Americans through Black Codes,
which used vagrancy laws, employment contracts and penal labour to restrict
their movement and liberty. After ‘Radical’ Republicans surged into
Congress in 1866, they passed legislation that stripped former soldiers and
administrators of the Confederacy of the right to vote and sent troops to
reoccupy the South in order to safeguard African Americans’ newly won
franchise. Although they remained a majority in most areas of the South,
former Confederates – nearly all of them Democrats – quickly found them-
selves ruled by Republican coalitions of freed blacks, black and white
Northern ‘carpetbaggers’ who had come south, and white Southern ‘scala-
wags’ who cooperated with the new authorities.
Having lost the rebellion and unable to wage another open war of resistance
to protect their lost world, militant southern white Democrats responded by
launching a campaign of terrorism. The Ku Klux Klan became the centrepiece
of this resistance. Formed by early 1866, the Klan briefly existed as a centrally
organised movement but soon flourished as a patchwork of independent
chapters. Other extravagantly named local terrorist groups, such as the
Knights of the White Camelia, also emerged. Disparate in dress, ritual and
rhetoric, what united these cells was their devotion to white supremacy, an
unwillingness to buckle to renewed northern ‘aggression’, and a willingness to
use symbolic violence on a vast scale. The Klan and related groups killed
thousands of blacks who sought to live free and public lives, as well as
thousands of blacks and whites who supported the Republican Party – the
party of Abraham Lincoln, the North and emancipation.
Because of poor record-keeping and broad popular support in the South
we do not know the true extent of the casualties. What we do have are the
occasional local body counts. For example, twenty-five murders and 115
assaults on ‘innocents’ were reported between June and October 1867 in
Tennessee. Two hundred racially based murders occurred in Arkansas

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between July and October 1868. And perhaps one hundred people were killed
in a single Florida county from 1865 to 1871.20 An avalanche of anecdotes from
memoirs, official reports and congressional testimonies make clear that
violence such as this was epidemic across most of the former Confederacy.
Across the South, masked riders delivered beatings and whippings, raped
women, burned down houses and schools, and shot, burned or lynched their
victims. Blacks were targeted when they registered or voted, acquired parcels
of land, taught or attended school, armed themselves or formed local militias
out of self-defence. According to a Mississippi Klansman, ‘when a leading
negro would make himself particularly obnoxious . . . and was considered
dangerous, he was selected as an example’.21 White Republicans who acted in
concert with blacks or supported them as teachers, business partners, tax
collectors, election officials, sheriffs or politicians were also attacked.
The US Congress passed laws to mobilise resources against the KKK, and
President Ulysses S. Grant sent federal troops on several occasions to take on
the Klan. But this was expensive, extended the divisiveness of the Civil War,
and created increasing resentment in the North. Federal support for
Reconstruction dried up, troops were slowly withdrawn, and courts were
starved of money to prosecute and punish Klan members and other white
supremacists. Violence against Republicans, black and white, grew, and white
supremacist cells evolved from nighttime arson, beatings and murder to open
organisation in militias. So too did the purpose of white supremacist violence
evolve: from instrumental terror meant to influence to functional violence
designed to occupy spaces and physically keep African Americans and white
Republicans away from polls. In 1876–7, the last Reconstruction era govern-
ments elected by blacks and whites were driven from office, and Union troops
fully withdrew. Soon thereafter, Klan violence largely evaporated – not
because the Klan had been suppressed, but because the Klan had won.
White supremacist violence was, of course, specifically intended to restore
the racial hierarchy upset by the Civil War. But it was often couched in the
rhetoric of protecting the people and their rights from an intrusive, aggressive
government. After all, the first white supremacist blow against Reconstruction
was struck when the actor John Wilkes Booth uttered the immortal words ‘Sic

20 Wyn Craig Wade, The Fiery Cross: The Ku Klux Klan in America (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1998 [1987]), p. 46; George C. Rable, But There Was No Peace: The
Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction (Athens: University of Georgia Press,
1984), p. 105; Allen W. Trelease, White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern
Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995 [1971]), pp. 310–11.
21 Quoted in Trelease, White Terror, p. xliii.

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 RANDALL D. LAW

semper tyrannis’ (‘Thus always to tyrants’) while assassinating Abraham

Lincoln in April 1865. As for the southern campaign of violence itself,
a South Carolinian Klan manifesto described it thus: ‘Defeated on the battle-
field, defrauded at the ballot box, we have but one remedy – the dagger that
was made illustrious in the hands of Brutus.’22 Anti-federal vitriol only
increased in the immediate aftermath of Reconstruction, as can be seen in
the words of I. W. Avery, a historian and newspaper editor, from 1881:
‘Georgia was ruled under a scorching travesty of law, alternating with bayonet
despotism governed by mob caprice; [an] era of whimsical yet savage
tyranny.’23 As whites, southerners rebelled against black equality, ‘negroism’
and ‘negro rule’; as Americans, they rebelled against tyranny, statism and
outside intrusion. While those unsympathetic to the clearly racist argument
by which ‘negro rule’ and ‘savage [i.e., federal] tyranny’ were conflated might
wish to deny it, such an argument attracted many in the South during and after
Reconstruction and was instrumental in mobilising support for what we today
recognise as terrorism.
It is important to observe that white supremacist terrorism did not cease
with the end of Reconstruction. In the 1890s, the states of the former
Confederacy adopted new constitutions and new laws that fully implemen-
ted racial segregation. This is what we know as Jim Crow, but it was to all
intents and purposes American apartheid. It was enshrined in the law and
maintained by the authorities to be sure, but what really preserved it was
lynching. According to the Equal Justice Initiative, over 4,000 African
Americans were lynched from 1877 to 1950.24 Lynchings were mob violence
ostensibly carried out to achieve justice, but the accusations used to trigger
these murders were often fabricated. Victims were sometimes chosen arbi-
trarily or under the flimsiest of circumstances. In other words, individuals
were primarily lynched to send a message to the rest of the targeted popula-
tion to remain subservient. The author Richard Wright said in his autobio-
graphy, ‘The things that influenced my conduct as a Negro did not have to
happen to me directly; I needed but to hear of them to feel their full effects in
the deepest layers of my consciousness.’25 One would be hard-pressed to

22 Quoted in J. Michael Martinez, Carpetbaggers, Cavalry, and the Ku Klux Klan: Exposing the
Invisible Empire during Reconstruction (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007),
p. 119.
23 Quoted in Alan Conway, The Reconstruction of Georgia (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1966), p. 40.
24 Equal Justice Initiative, Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror, 3rd
edn (2017), https://lynchinginamerica.eji.org/report/.
25 Richard Wright, Black Boy (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007 [1944]), p. 172.

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 The Origins of Modern Terrorism

come up with a clearer description of how terrorism – or, for that matter,
state terror – operates. Jim Crow established the legal basis for segregation.
But lynchings – that is, terrorism – were the occasional outbursts of violence
that helped preserve segregation.

Epilogue
Conspiratorial sub-state terrorism petered out in the 1920s and virtually
disappeared by the 1930s. One observer wrote in the 1933 Encyclopedia of the
Social Sciences that terrorism had become something ‘irrelevant and
unnecessary’.26 Indeed, after the 1920 Wall Street bombing, anarchist vio-
lence precipitously declined. But terrorism did not go away; it simply reap-
peared in different guises. As noted above, white supremacist violence
moved from nighttime violence to daylight lynchings, which enjoyed
broad public support and quasi-state involvement – this was closer to state
terror than sub-state terrorism. And while sub-state Russian revolutionary
terrorism evaporated, it was replaced by Soviet state terror on a scale never
before seen (and probably not even dreamed of by Maximilien Robespierre
and Karl Heinzen). The 1930s and 1940s were, in fact, the age of state terror,
when totalitarian regimes in the USSR, Germany and Italy used mass,
organised violence to rid themselves physically of opponents but also – as
the terrorists of the nineteenth century – to intimidate enemies, motivate
supporters and shape societies.
But sub-state terrorism itself had not gone away; it had merely gone
dormant. It re-emerged in its classic guises in the decades after World War
II, at first principally as part of larger insurrectionary strategies by ethno-
nationalist groups seeking independence from European imperial powers. In
Palestine, two Zionist organisations – Irgun and LEHI – successfully spear-
headed the expulsion of the United Kingdom via a two-pronged effort that
highlighted the vulnerabilities of modern democracies. First, Irgun and LEHI
attacks undermined support among a war-weary British public to the point
that by 1947 newspapers back home began to call for British withdrawal from
the region. Second, these groups rallied support among the international
community, in part by demanding that Western powers live up to their
principles of promoting democracy and national self-determination as pro-
claimed in the Atlantic Charter of 1941 and the United Nations Charter of 1945.

26 Quoted in Joseba Zulaika and William A. Douglass, Terror and Taboo: The Follies, Fables,
and Faces of Terrorism (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 17.

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Algeria’s struggle to free itself from France provides more insight into how
terrorism spread in the twentieth century at the paradoxical juncture of state
power and individual entitlement, particularly within the context of postwar
democracy. In 1954, the National Liberation Front (FLN) began its war of
independence against France, but its efforts to force Paris to the negotiating
table via a semi-conventional military campaign in the Algerian hinterland
made little headway. In a desperate but calculated bid to force Algerians inside
Algeria to choose sides and to garner attention beyond the territory’s borders,
the FLN launched a terror campaign in the colonial capital of Algiers, attacking
civilians, police and symbolic targets. This succeeded in provoking the French
military and settlers into disproportionate, reactive violence, which turned the
moral strength of liberal democratic France against itself, since constitutional-
ism appeared hypocritical in the light of the violence committed by French
counterterrorist forces when rooting out enemies who hid amidst the local
population. While FLN violence – against both French and Algerians – was
gruesome and widespread, the list of French human rights abuses was even
more appalling: massive cordon and arrest operations, the wholesale suspen-
sion of habeas corpus, the extensive use of torture, and perhaps 3,000 extra-
judicial executions.27 By 1960, the FLN was leading a mass movement that
could support a semi-conventional army in the countryside and enormous
popular demonstrations in the cities. In response, settlers demanded a hard line
in Algeria, which precipitated a constitutional crisis in metropolitan France and
to French departure from Algeria in 1962.
The Algerian conflict also produced an influential argument in favour of
terroristic violence. The psychiatrist-turned-anti-imperialist Frantz Fanon
argued that European colonialism had turned the colonised of Africa, Asia
and Latin America into self-loathing peoples who – in a twentieth-century
twist on Kropotkin – had become enablers of their own enslavement.
‘Violence’, Fanon wrote, ‘is a cleansing force . . . [It] frees the native from
his inferiority complex and . . . restores his self-respect.’28 And while Fanon
did not specifically prescribe terrorism as his preferred means of violence, its
use made perfect sense to colonised organisations and peoples that had little,
when compared to the great European imperial nation states in the way of
arms, funds, logistical support and trained troops. What independence-
minded groups knew, though, was that potentially they had overwhelming
numerical superiority, if only the native populace could be roused to action.

27 Ted Morgan, My Battle of Algiers: A Memoir (New York: Collins, 2006), p. 236.
28 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2005), p. 94.

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Ethno-national separatists and liberation groups embraced terrorism as the

great equaliser, one that they believed could bridge the gulf between vastly
powerful modern states and oppressed, marginalised peoples.
In fact, the FLN’s strategy became a model for others. In Northern Ireland,
Palestine and the Basque region of Spain, independence movements sought
to use terrorism as the springboards from which to mount broader cam-
paigns with mass participation. While, respectively, the Provisional Irish
Republic Army, the various factions of the Palestine Liberation
Organization, and Basque Homeland and Liberty (known as ETA from its
name in Basque) occasionally gained significant support, none succeeded in
mounting widespread insurgencies. Not surprisingly, none of these move-
ments achieved full independence, although several gained partial autonomy
and increased rights for their peoples. In the case of Malaya in the 1950s, the
Malayan Communist Party fought against the local authorities and the British
Empire to achieve national independence under the guise of Marxism. But
the communist insurgency – which made liberal use of terrorism – failed at
least in part because it remained rooted in ethno-nationalist grievances that
appealed only to a small ethnically Chinese base.
During the second half of the Cold War, Marxist radicals in Europe, the
United States and Latin America used terrorism in an attempt to spur class-
based revolutions. But the ethno-nationalist movements of the mid century
cast a long shadow, since the most prominent groups – including the
Tupamaros of Uruguay, the Red Army Faction (originally known as the
Baader-Meinhof Gang) in West Germany, the Red Brigades in Italy and
Weatherman/Weather Underground in the United States – also invoked
Fanon’s anti-colonial rhetoric of violence-as-empowerment. Moreover, they
explicitly linked ethno-racial issues to economic concerns by identifying the
USA and its allies as imperial powers that oppressed Third World peoples
abroad (such as via the Vietnam War) and racial minorities and the poor at
home. Similar to the violent anarchists of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, the leftist revolutionaries of the 1960s and 1970s operated
as individuals or in very small cells that used symbolic violence to publicise
their cause, to produce a crackdown from the fascist state and a revolutionary
crisis (as articulated by the Brazilian revolutionary Carlos Marighella), and
subsequently a mass uprising. While US and European radicals attracted
a great deal of attention from media and the state and even a certain measure
of sympathy, primarily from middle-class students, in the end they did little
more than generate support for the authorities and discredit more moderate
movements. In Uruguay, the Tupamaros’ terrorism backfired even more

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spectacularly when mounting violence triggered a right-wing crackdown on

the radicals that was at first largely welcomed by the population but led to
more than a decade of police-state rule.
Since the 1980s, terrorism has been most associated with the rise of
jihadism and radical Islamism. Their origins stretch back to the formation
in Egypt in 1928 of the Muslim Brotherhood, which sought to create
a parallel, insulated society in which devout Muslims could seek spiritual,
social and cultural rejuvenation. Although the movement was mostly peace-
ful, occasional government crackdowns provoked violent responses and
halting efforts to create a secret organisation capable of exacting revenge.
By the 1970s, the Muslim Brotherhood, which by this time had spread
throughout most of the Sunni Muslim Middle East, had failed to achieve
much success against the region’s authoritarian regimes which promoted
varying combinations of pan-Arab nationalism, Soviet-oriented socialism or
Western-oriented crony capitalism. As a result, the most radical Islamists
began to gravitate towards more widespread sub-state conspiratorial activity
and a willingness to use terrorism to facilitate a coup or build a larger
movement. But Sunni Islamist uprisings and terrorist campaigns in Syria,
Egypt and Saudi Arabia in 1979–81 failed to produce larger revolutionary
movements and instead led to violent state repression.
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan opened up a new front and new
possibilities. Radical Islamists who had not found success at home travelled
to Afghanistan to fight in defence of Islam. The most famous of these
Islamists, Osama bin Laden, created the precursor to al-Qaeda in 1986 to
recruit and train Muslims from across North Africa, the Middle East and Asia
to fight against Soviet troops and the Soviet-backed Afghan government. The
Soviet Union withdrew its troops in 1988–9, and the Soviet-backed Afghan
government was defeated several years later. With no more reason to exist,
al-Qaeda nearly broke up in the mid 1990s, but bin Laden reimagined the
group, transforming al-Qaeda from an organisation devoted to local radical
Islamist insurgency to global jihadist terrorism.
The concept of Lesser Jihad – the defence of an Islamic community so as to
insure its ability to live under sharia – underpins radical Islamism. Groups
that embrace it essentially substitute Islam for other ideological organising
principles. But in jihadism, jihad became, in the words of Reza Aslan, the
basis of a ‘cosmic war’.29 Jihadism is characterised by a transnational effort to
recreate the Caliphate and a global understanding of the moral and cultural

29 Reza Aslan, How to Win a Cosmic War (New York: Random House, 2009), pp. 5–6.

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fault line between Islam and the other, between good and evil. Another key
feature of jihadism is particularly relevant in the context of this chapter:
jihadists emphasise the ability of martyrdom essentially to erase personal sin,
even – or particularly – for secular Muslims who have only recently embraced
faith. This has meant that jihadist terrorist violence has become in recent
decades the ultimate expression of individual empowerment vis-à-vis statist
authority.
Bin Laden committed al-Qaeda to fighting against the United States, the
‘far enemy’ that some radical Islamists had long identified as the great power
that propped up the Middle East’s authoritarian regimes as well as the Jewish
state of Israel. Al-Qaeda’s escalating campaign of terrorist violence culmi-
nated with the attacks of September 11, 2001, that killed nearly 3,000 civilians
in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. The USA and its allies invaded
Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, which changed jihadist violence again.
Al-Qaeda evolved from a centralised conspiratorial organisation that planned
and carried out terrorist operations to an isolated band of leaders that sought
to influence global jihad by promoting a brand and backing what have been
called ‘franchises’ by many observers. In this manner, al-Qaeda eventually
endorsed local insurgent and/or terrorist operations in Iraq, Saudi Arabia,
Northern Africa, the Caucasus, Central Asia, Indonesia and the Philippines.
Meanwhile, al-Qaeda and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria – a rival that
emerged from the chaos of the Syrian Civil War and the United States’
decision to withdraw from Iraq in 2011 – used slickly produced pamphlets,
extensive social media and gruesome videos to appeal directly to disaffected,
marginalised Muslims in Europe and the United States. Some travelled to
Afghanistan, Libya, Syria or Iraq to take part in insurgencies against local
authoritarian regimes or Western interveners, but others – variously referred
to as ‘self-radicalised’ or ‘lone wolves’ – remained at home where they carried
out jihadist attacks against soft targets. Examples of attacks that were inspired
but not directed by al-Qaeda or ISIS include the Fort Hood, Texas, mass
shooting (November 2009), the Boston Marathon bombing (April 2013), an
attack on several Parisian sites including the satirical paper Charlie Hebdo
(January 2015), the San Bernadino massacre (December 2015), the Nice,
France, truck attack (July 2016) and the London Bridge attacks (June 2017).
While the motivation in each of these terrorist attacks was ostensibly jihad-
ism, the pattern has been strikingly similar to the anarchist attacks of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: terrorist attacks carried out by
individuals or small cells that are personally unaware of each other but that
are drawn together into a widely dispersed movement via propaganda.

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These recent developments have brought us full circle. What we see in the
decades since the 1950s are refinements of tactics and strategies pioneered
from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. As it developed
across the nineteenth century, terrorism emerged as a strategy of symbolic
violence used against the few in order to influence the many. This was
true when used from above, as it was by French revolutionaries and
later Bolsheviks, Nazis and Italian Fascists, and from below, as by Russian
populists, European and American anarchists, and, in the USA, white
supremacists.
As described in this chapter, modern terrorism took on its particular forms
in large part because of a peculiarly modern paradox: the side-by-side devel-
opment of powerful states and entitled individuals. This paradox remains at
the core of both democracy and terrorism, linking two facets of the modern
world in ways that continue to surprise and befuddle. Within this context, the
truism that one man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter takes on new and
startling meaning.

Bibliographical Essay
The best single-volume introductions to modern terrorism are Bruce Hoffman, Inside
Terrorism, 3rd edn (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017) and Charles Townshend,
Terrorism: A Very Short Introduction, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Also
see Alex P. Schmid, The Routledge Handbook of Terrorism Research (London: Routledge,
2011).
The most-cited effort to organise all of modern terrorism into a historical framework is
David C. Rapoport, ‘The Four Waves of Modern Terrorism’, in Audrey Kurth Cronin and
James M. Ludes (eds.), Attacking Terrorism: Elements of a Grand Strategy (Washington, DC:
Georgetown University Press, 2004), pp. 46–73. Martha Crenshaw [Henderson] (ed.),
Terrorism in Context (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001 [1995])
provides a valuable methodological introduction and surveys of key movements and
periods. Two standard works that survey the history of terrorism are Randall D. Law,
Terrorism: A History, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016) and Gérard Chaliand and
Arnaud Blin (eds.), The History of Terrorism: From Antiquity to ISIS, rev. edn (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2016). For an extensive reference work, see Randall D. Law
(ed.), The Routledge History of Terrorism (London: Routledge, 2015). Particularly valuable for
its analysis and descriptions of the interaction of state and sub-state terrorisms is Martin
A. Miller, The Foundations of Modern Terrorism: State, Society and the Dynamics of Political
Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
The most important work to examine terrorism as a cultural and linguistic construct is
Joseba Zulaika and William A. Douglass, Terror and Taboo: The Follies, Fables, and Faces of
Terrorism (London: Routledge, 1996). For a primer on critical terrorism studies, see
Richard Jackson et al., Terrorism: A Critical Introduction (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,

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2011). On the development of the field of terrorism studies itself, see Lisa Stampnitzky,
Disciplining Terror: How Experts and Others Invented Terrorism (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2013).
The best anthology of primary sources is Walter Laqueur (ed.), Voices of Terror:
Manifestos, Writings and Manuals of al Qaeda, Hamas, and Other Terrorists from around the
World and throughout the Ages (New York: Reed, 2004).
On terror/ism in the French Revolution, see David Andress, The Terror: The Merciless
War for Freedom in Revolutionary France (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005). On Karl
Heinzen, see Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon, ‘From the Dagger to the Bomb: Karl Heinzen
and the Evolution of Political Terror’, Terrorism and Political Violence 16.1 (2004), 97–115.
The best work on the political and social milieu in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries that produced modern terrorism is Adam Zamoyski, Phantom Terror: Political
Paranoia and the Creation of the Modern State, 1789–1848 (New York: Basic Books, 2015).
On Russian revolutionary terrorism, see Franco Venturi, The Roots of Revolution:
A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1960) and Anna Geifman, Thou Shalt Kill: Revolutionary
Terrorism in Russia, 1894–1917 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
For general works on anarchism and anarcho-terrorism, see James Joll, The Anarchists,
2nd edn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980) and Richard Bach Jensen, The
Battle against Anarchist Terrorism, 1878–1934: An International History (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2014). On Johann Most: Frederic Trautmann, The Voice of Terror:
A Biography of Johann Most (Westport: Greenwood, 1980). For France: John Merriman, The
Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-de-Siècle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror (New York:
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009). For Spain: J. Romero Maura, ‘Terrorism in Barcelona
and its Impact on Spanish Politics 1904–1909’, Past & Present 41 (1968), 130–83.
The literature on terrorism in America is large and growing quickly. On the Molly
Maguires, see Kevin Kenny, Making Sense of the Molly Maguires (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1998). The classic study of the Haymarket Riot is Paul Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). For a revisionist account, see
Timothy Messer-Kruse, The Trial of the Haymarket Anarchists: Terrorism and Justice in the
Gilded Age (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). The best work on terrorism in the United
States in the nineteenth century is Michael Fellman, In the Name of God and Country:
Reconsidering Terrorism in American History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). For
anarchist violence and the Red Scare of the 1910s–20s, see Beverly Gage, The Day Wall Street
Exploded: A Story of America in its First Age of Terror (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
The most valuable survey of the Ku Klux Klan is Wyn Craig Wade, The Fiery Cross: The
Ku Klux Klan in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998 [1987]). On Reconstruction,
see Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877, rev. edn
(New York: HarperPerennial, 2014). The two best studies of Klan and white supremacist
violence during Reconstruction are George C. Rable, But There Was No Peace: The Role of
Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984) and Allen
W. Trelease, White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995 [1971]). On lynching in America, see
Philip Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America (New York:
Random House, 2002). For a pictorial account, see James Allen, Without Sanctuary:
Lynching Photography in America (Santa Fe: Twin Palms, 2000). The Equal Justice

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Initiative has published the most complete tally of racially inspired lynchings in Lynching in
America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror, 3rd edn (2015). The full report can be found
at https://lynchinginamerica.eji.org/report/.
For a general overview of ethno-nationalist terrorism, see Daniel Byman, ‘The Logic of
Ethnic Terrorism’, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 21.2 (1998), 149–69. Not surprisingly, there is
a large and growing body of literature on the various ethno-nationalist/anti-colonial conflicts
of the 1940s–70s. For an excellent analysis of the various struggles waged against Britain mid
century, see Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon, Imperial Endgame: Britain’s Dirty Wars and the End of
Empire (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). On the role of terrorism and insurgency in the
formation of Israel, see Bruce Hoffman, Anonymous Soldiers: The Struggle for Israel, 1917–1947
(New York: Knopf, 2015). A well-regarded account of the Malayan Emergency is Noel Barber,
War of the Running Dogs: Malaya, 1948–1960 (London: Cassell, 2004 [1971]). The classic study of
the Algerian War of Independence is Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–1962
(New York: NYRB, 2006 [1977]); the new standard is Martin Evans, Algeria: France’s Undeclared
War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). For two excellent comparative analyses, see
Gil Merom, How Democracies Lose Small Wars: State, Society, and the Failures of France in Algeria,
Israel in Lebanon, and the United States in Vietnam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2003) and John A. Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya
and Vietnam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005 [2002]). For two distinctly different
takes on Yasser Arafat and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, see Barry Rubin and Judith
Colp Rubin, Yasir Arafat: A Political Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) and
Saïd Aburish, Arafat: From Defender to Dictator, rev. edn (New York: Bloomsbury, 2004).
A comprehensive account of the Basque struggle is Ludger Mees, Nationalism, Violence, and
Democracy: The Basque Clash of Identities (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). On the IRA
and Northern Ireland, see Richard English, Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2003).
For a valuable survey and analysis of the radical leftist movements of the 1960s–80s, see
Michael Freeman, Freedom or Security: The Consequences for Democracies Using Emergency
Powers to Fight Terror (Westport: Praeger, 2003). A definitive history of the Tupamaros is
yet to be written. In the meantime, the best account is Pablo Brum, The Robin Hood
Guerrillas: The Epic Journey of Uruguay’s Tupamaros (Scotts Valley: CreateSpace, 2014). See
also Carlos Marighella, Mini-Manual of the Urban Guerrilla (Montreal: Abraham Guillen
Press, 2002 [1969]). On the various movements in the USA and Europe, see
Bryan Burrough, Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten
Age of Revolutionary Violence (New York: Penguin, 2015); Stefan Aust, Baader-Meinhof: The
Inside Story of the R.A.F. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Donatella Della Porta,
‘Left-Wing Terrorism in Italy’, in Martha Crenshaw [Henderson] (ed.), Terrorism in
Context (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001 [1995]), pp. 105–59.
In recent decades, the market has been flooded with books on jihadism and radical
Islamism; many are deeply polemical and of limited value. Among the best works are
Reza Aslan, How to Win a Cosmic War (New York: Random House, 2009); Mary Habeck,
Knowing the Enemy: Jihadist Ideology and the War on Terror (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2007); Gilles Kepel, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2002); Bernard Lewis, The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror
(New York: Modern Library, 2003). For the early history of the Muslim Brotherhood, see
Brynjar Lia, The Society of the Muslim Brothers in Egypt: The Rise of an Islamic Mass Movement,

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1928–1942 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998). On the key figure in the modern
history of Islamism, see John Calvert, Sayyid Qutb and the Origins of Radical Islamism
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2010) and Albert Bergesen (ed.), The Sayyid Qutb
Reader (London: Routledge, 2007).
On Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda and 9/11, see Peter Bergen, The Osama bin Laden I Know:
An Oral History of al Qaeda’s Leader (New York: Free Press, 2006); Steve Coll, Ghost Wars:
The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden (New York: Penguin, 2004); Leah
Farrall, ‘How al-Qaeda Works’, Foreign Affairs 90 (March–April 2011), 128–38;
Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Knopf,
2006). Bin Laden and al-Qaeda’s statements are collected in Raymond Ibrahim (ed.), The Al
Qaeda Reader (New York: Doubleday, 2007). The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are
exhaustively covered in Jason Burke, The 9/11 Wars (New York: Penguin, 2011) and
Steve Coll, Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan
(New York: Penguin, 2018).

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 part v
*

REPRESENTATIONS
AND CONSTRUCTIONS
OF VIOLENCE
 27
Criminal Violence and Culture in Europe
clive emsley

In 1970 a senior civil servant in the British Home Office could publish a book
called The Conquest of Violence which chronicled what he considered to be a
social triumph within the United Kingdom.1 The book was an expression of
the way that many felt in the liberal democracies of Europe a generation after
the Second World War. It built on perceptions that seemed to be growing
during the nineteenth century that violence, especially criminal violence and
harsh responses by those in authority, was alien to what were essentially
progressive and humanitarian developments within European culture and
society. More recently the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker has taken the
decline in violence in the West as a given and sought to explain it with a
description of how ‘the better angels’ of human nature alongside the spread
of good government and cosmopolitanism, together with an empathy with
fellow human beings, have encouraged a rejection of different forms of
violent behaviours and responses.2 This chapter has two principal aims:
first, to probe past beliefs about criminal violence and the responses to it;
and second, to explore some of the ways in which European cultural forms
portrayed such violence and to compare these with might be termed the
reality, such as it may be constructed.

The Vicarious Thrill of Violence and Crime

Most of the individuals brought before the various criminal courts of different
European countries during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were
charged with some kind of property crime; such crime rarely involved vio-
lence. Nevertheless, it was violence that often characterised crime and crim-
inals in the popular mind, and it was violent crime that most worried people.

1 T. A. Critchley, The Conquest of Violence: Order and Liberty in Britain (London: Constable,
1970).
2 Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature (London: Penguin, 2012).

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 CLIVE EMSLEY

Moreover, such crime provided particularly exciting stories and gave vicarious
thrills to the readers of novels, newspapers and ‘penny dreadfuls’, and, subse-
quently, to the audiences of films and television. Violent offences that were
particularly horrendous and hence newsworthy prompted moral panics, nota-
bly when the victims were well-to-do or wealthy, or when they were vulner-
able children, women or elderly people. The British press whipped up
concerns over ‘garrotters’ in the 1850s and 1860s, and over ‘muggers’ a century
later. Essentially these offenders were committing the same crime – street
robbery – but the name suggested something alien and novel. The London
garrotting panic of 1862 gained a singular boost from the fact that the first
victim – or at least the first individual identified as such – was a member of
parliament returning from a late-night parliamentary debate. Some of the
garrottings mentioned in the press over the following months were not violent
robberies at all, but this did not prevent them being portrayed as such.3 The
French press fostered similar alarm over the Parisian equivalent of garrotting –
le coup du père François – during the 1830s and 1840s, and also over the youth
gangs, or apaches, at the close of the nineteenth century. The murder of a 9-
year-old girl in Berlin in the summer of 1904 sparked another big-city panic but
helped also to shape an understanding of the city through breathless press
reporting of the different areas of danger, delight, poverty and social intermix-
ing in the city. A few years later a series of knife attacks on young women in
Berlin prompted a press panic about a ‘ripper’, but it also encouraged the police
to establish a policy of working together with the press. The hope among the
police hierarchy was that feeding newspapers with detail to pass on to the
public would encourage both the collection of useful information and public
confidence in the police management of criminal offending.4 Other police
institutions, most significantly the Metropolitan Police of London, took much
longer to seek press assistance; rather they appear to have wished to remain
aloof and, by so doing, to emphasise that they were experts with skills that
should be acknowledged and respected.

3 Jennifer Davis, ‘The London Garrotting Panic of 1862: A Moral Panic and the Creation of
a Criminal Class in Mid-Victorian England’, in V. A. C. Gatrell, Bruce Lenman and
Geoffrey Parker (eds.), Crime and the Law: The Social History of Crime in Western Europe
since 1500 (London: Europa, 1980), pp. 190–213.
4 Peter Fritzsche, ‘Talk of the Town: The Murder of Lucie Berlin and the Production of
Local Knowledge’, in Peter Becker and Richard F. Wetzell (eds.), Criminals and their
Scientists: The History of Criminology in International Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006), pp. 377–98; Philipp Müller, ‘Covering Crime, Restoring Order:
The “Berlin Jack the Ripper” (1909) and the Press Policy of the Berlin Criminal
Investigation Department’, Crime, Histoire & Sociétés / Crime, History & Societies 15.1
(2011),85–110.

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 Criminal Violence and Culture in Europe

Newspaper editors and owners had their own agendas. In the opening years
of the twentieth century, for example, the Petit Parisien used the panic over
apaches and the brutal sexual murder of 11-year-old Marthe Erbelding by Albert
Soleilland to launch a referendum on the death penalty.5 In this instance, and in
most others, the impression offered, and sometimes directly stated by media
outlets, was that violent criminality was getting worse. Academics might insist
that violence and violent crime have decreased and, indeed, statistics have been
deployed to demonstrate a decline in murder rates across Europe since the early
modern period;6 but within the media thrilling stories of criminal violence rarely
came with any suggestion that they were exceptional and running against a
trend of decreasing violence. Moreover, virtually no one, other than an aca-
demic of some kind, posed the question about what constituted criminal
violence in any given society and how it might best be measured. At the end
of the nineteenth century the criminologist Enrico Ferri compared the homicide
figures of seventeen European countries to demonstrate that areas of southern
Europe had far more people convicted of killing than northern Europe.
According to the figures deployed by Ferri there were 9.69 killings per 100,000
inhabitants in Italy, fewer than 2 per 100,000 in France and Germany, and even
fewer in England and Scotland.7 Yet even here the question was not posed as to
whether the incidence of homicide ought to be taken as the measure of criminal
violence. It is conceivable that societies with fewer homicides had more violent
assaults than the more murderous societies. And if this was indeed the case,
should that lead to them being considered more violent or less? Moreover, some
forms of violent assault were condoned or tolerated by large numbers of people
in the less murderous societies; the courts in England, for example, began to
move more positively against wife beaters and against organised but unregulated
pugilism during the nineteenth century. In such instances, however, juries could
take a more sympathetic and supportive attitude towards the accused than
judges and magistrates.8 And just as popular attitudes might be rather different

5 Robert Nye, Crime, Madness and Politics in Modern France: The Medical Concept of National
Decline (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 194–211.
6 See, for example, Manuel Eisner, ‘Modernization, Self-Control and Lethal Violence:
The Long-Term Dynamics of European Homicide Rates in Theoretical Perspective’,
British Journal of Criminology 41 (2001), 618–38.
7 Enrico Ferri, Atlante atropologico-statistico dell’ omicidio, originally published as an appen-
dix to his L’omicidio nell’ antropolologia criminale (Omicida nato e omicida pazzo) (Turin:
Fratelli Bocca, 1895).
8 Martin J. Wiener, ‘Judges v. Jurors: Courtroom Tensions in Murder Trials and the Law
of Criminal Responsibility in Nineteenth-Century England’, Law and History Review 17.3
(1999),467–506; Wiener, Men of Blood: Violence, Manliness and Criminal Justice in Victorian
England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

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 CLIVE EMSLEY

towards some acts of violence as compared with those managing the state and
their officials, so rough and sometimes violent popular justice might be exacted
on anyone who broke traditional mores, which may or may not have been
defined as ‘crime’ in legislation or penal codes. While, probably, they were
decreasing in number, incidents of charivari in France, Katzenmusik in Germany,
rough music in England, scampenate in Italy and their other European counter-
parts continued long after the early modern period. In Russia, village commu-
nities often took the law into their own hands in acts of samosud, literally judging
for oneself; and samosud could be especially violent towards those stealing
things of particular value, such as horses. Rural areas were increasingly the
most common settings for such justice but similar demonstrations, sometimes
resulting in physical violence, might also be found in urban districts, especially
amongst recent migrants from rural areas. Newspapers in England made jibes
about Irish migrants behaving in such fashion in their cities. The problem with
assessing popular justice in rural areas is that little written evidence remains.
Moreover complaints from the local population were rare since, while the state’s
law would have considered it as criminal violence, whatever the cause or
provocation, the perpetrators did not. Popular justice was an element of the
view of the world shared by many.9

Heroes and Gangs

Even if there were a stable definition of what constituted criminal violence in
general, whether or not it was increasing or decreasing is a statistical question
which the statistics are incapable of answering. The principal problems here
are that the reporting and the perception of what constituted criminal
violence have not remained consistent over time and, in addition, many
incidents of criminal violence have never made their way into official statis-
tics, since some victims prefer to hush matters up, or seek an opportunity to
revenge themselves personally rather than make a formal report to the
police. Surviving Occurrence Books and Refused Charge Books for British
police forces contain incidents of individuals refusing to press charges against
family members for violent behaviour, even when the evidence of physical
injury has been plain for the investigating officers to see. Hospital records
have been little used in this respect, but they appear to contain similar
evidence of violence which was not taken any further because of family

9 There is no comparative account of charivari, but see Jacques Le Goff and Jean-Claude
Schmitt (eds.), Le charivari (Paris: Éditions de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences
Sociales, 1981).

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 Criminal Violence and Culture in Europe

links, fear, possible embarrassment, or possibly the intention of seeking

private revenge later.10
In parts of southern Europe particularly, throughout the nineteenth and
well into the twentieth centuries the feud and the vendetta remained facts of
life; this, in turn, most probably led to the greater incidence of homicide in
comparison with northern Europe. A vendetta killing was committed as a
matter of personal or family honour. Among the groups involved it was a
matter of ‘justice’, and those involved could often employ the language of
state power to justify their actions; the local leaders had ‘jurisdiction’ and
‘office’, they were responsible for ‘administration’, they collected ‘taxes’, and
they demanded ‘loyalty’ and the silence of their subordinates. Yet there were
also instances where the official courts were used as a means of continuing a
feud, as the British found in the courts that they administered in the Ionian
Islands during the early nineteenth century. Here the court became a theatre
where a ritual knife fight could be refought with defendants, plaintiffs and
witnesses justifying the incident, apportioning blame, celebrating the victor
or excusing the loser.11 Yet elsewhere, where the state was weak or imposed
by outsiders, as in southern Italy and Sicily, the alternative society might also
seep into the new state’s political framework. Sicily provides a particularly
good example, with politicians – both local and national – as well as bankers,
lawyers, police officers and others working with or directing the activities of
gangsters. There was a serious attempt to break the mafia in Sicily during the
fascist period but, while this hurt some of the clans, the honoured society
lived on; and so too did its counterparts in Naples (the Camorra) and Calabria
(the ‘Ndrangheta).12 In the aftermath of the Second World War these so-
called ‘honoured societies’ expanded their activities to link with similar
groups elsewhere in the world in the supply of illicit goods, particularly
drugs; indeed new such societies were formed, such as the Puglian Sacra
Corona Unita, or emerged in the wake of political upheaval such as the
collapse of the Soviet Union. Violent enforcement and punishment remained
central to their criminality; they maintained links with local politicians and in
some instances with national ones. Even as violent villains, however, a
degree of romance has sometimes surrounded the portrayal of these

10 Clive Emsley, Hard Men: The English and Violence since 1750 (London: Hambledon, 2005),
pp. 7–8.
11 Thomas W. Gallant, Experiencing Dominion: Culture, Identity and Power in the British
Mediterranean (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002).
12 Stephen Wilson, Feuding, Conflict and Banditry in Nineteenth-Century Corsica (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1988); John Dickie, Blood Brotherhood: Camorra, Mafia,
‘Ndrangheta: The Rise of the Honoured Societies (London: Sceptre, 2011).

565
 CLIVE EMSLEY

gangsters, as well as other bandits and armed robbers in different forms of

media representation.
During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, ballads were sung and
sold, together with rapidly produced dying-speeches, around the scaffolds
where offenders were executed. As often as not the printer of a broadside
for sale at the scaffold would cannibalise an old wood-cut or print for the upper
portion of the sheet. Some violent offenders who caught the popular imagina-
tion through their deeds were celebrated and glamourised in these broadsides,
such as the French smuggler Louis Mandrin who was broken on the wheel in
1755. Johannes Bückler, popularly known as Schinderhannes, enjoyed a crim-
inal career in the Hunsrück region of Germany both before and after it was
occupied by French troops. He was captured and guillotined but his deeds
against the French and other groups disliked or feared by the local population
ensured that he lived on in ballads as a Robin Hood character.

I wandered through the land, and in the wood lay low

And plundered all the rich, and also many a Jew
In pitiless fashion! To set my conscience free
I’d give some to the poor, perhaps one time in three.13
Schinderhannes robbed in rural districts, but it was not just in rural areas or
weak states that violent gangs emerged. A century after Schinderhannes large
German cities were home to the Ringvereine, literally ring clubs or associa-
tions which some suggested took their name from the German word for
wrestling, Ringen. These clubs were officially chartered groups collecting fees
and imposing fines on members for infringements of their rules. They were
initially established to provide mutual aid for their members, who were
mainly convicted offenders. Women were barred, but might receive financial
assistance if their husband or other male breadwinner was in prison or had
died. The clubs, however, appear also to have engaged in criminal activity
themselves, notably prostitution, drug trafficking and extortion. And if they
generally avoided violence, the threat of such and its occasional use were
ways of ensuring that authority was maintained and orders were obeyed. The
Ringvereine had unofficial links with the police, usually related to assistance
in dealing with sex offences and murders. They were also reported as running
Ganovengerichte (hoodlum courts) to try and if necessary punish those that
offended their rules. The Ringvereine were largely destroyed by the Nazi

13 Quoted in Richard J. Evans, Rituals of Retribution: Capital Punishment in Germany

1600–1987 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 179.

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 Criminal Violence and Culture in Europe

Law on Preventive Custody and extra-legal methods.14 Generally speaking

they were no threat to most ordinary citizens, and to this extent they were
like the British gangs of the same period whose main concern was profit-
eering from the bookmakers at racecourses. The racecourse gangs were the
milieu for Graham Greene’s violent young thug Pinky in his novel Brighton
Rock (1938). Ordinary citizens, once again, were not much threatened by the
gangsters of interwar Britain, nor by those of the postwar period when the
violent Kray brothers attracted a degree of personal celebrity not least by
attracting rather silly actors, politicians and other attention seekers to bask in
the celebrity of their nightclub. Towards the end of the twentieth century the
collapse of the Soviet empire fostered the emergence of mafias that profited
from the turmoil and opportunities of the changing market conditions.
Violent gangs, however, did not necessarily organise for the purpose of
financial gain. In the industrial cities of nineteenth- and twentieth-century
Britain gangs of young men fought over territory, over insults, over girls;
weapons from knuckle dusters to knives, razors and even pistols were used.
As with the Ringvereine, outsiders were rarely at risk, unless they got in the
way; although on occasions gang members specifically targeted people for
robbery, and the members did not take kindly to police officers seeking to
suppress their behaviour. The press gave the gangs group labels – hooligans,
peaky blinders and scuttlers respectively in London, Birmingham and
Manchester at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth
centuries. Half a century later came Teddy Boys, then Mods and Rockers in
the 1960s, and the Skinheads in the 1970s. Some of these titles suited the
gangs, though they often took names from their local streets and neighbour-
hoods, something that appealed to their group pride, such as the Protestant
sectarianism of the Glaswegian ‘Billy Boys’. On other occasions a gang might
use a place name for personal identification, like the scuttler gang whose
members called themselves the ‘Bengal Tigers’ after their home-base in
Bengal Street in Ancoats, Manchester. A couple of miles north-west of
Ancoats a gang based in the colliery district of Whit Lane, Salford, chose
the more exotic title of ‘Buffalo Bill’s Gang’ after the veteran American scout
who had become an international showman.15 The gangs in Paris in the
decade or so before the First World War became known collectively as
apaches; the term was chosen deliberately to link them to the allegedly

14 Arthur Hartmann and Klaus von Lampe, ‘The German Underworld and the
Ringvereine from the 1890s through the 1950s’, in Mark Galeotti (ed.), Organised
Crime in History (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 108–35.
15 Andrew Davies, The Gangs of Manchester (Preston: Milo Books, 2008), pp. 8–11, 15.

567
 CLIVE EMSLEY

cruel and violent Native American tribe. The gangs themselves assumed
similar titles to those in Manchester; there were names alluding to a district
(Bande d’Auteuil, Courbeaux de l’Île Saint-Louis, Loups de Montmartre) and
to dress (Casquettes Vertes, Habits Noirs). In the late 1950s, following a term
devised by the daily newspaper France Soir, Parisian gangs acquired the
collective name of blousons noirs. This linked them with the youth cult
emerging in the United States which, with its rock and roll music and cultural
icons such as Marlon Brando in The Wild One (1953) and James Dean in Rebel
Without a Cause (1956), was so distasteful to many of their parents’ generation.
Cocking a snook at the older generation appealed to the gang members in
France and elsewhere, and their violence, commonly directed towards estab-
lishing superiority over another gang, appears like the violence of earlier
gangs, principally as a means of expressing their masculinity.16
Gang violence made good stories for the press and later for television
news. So too did other forms of violent assault and murder, although up until
the middle of the twentieth century stories of sexual violence and rape tended
to be restrained and wrapped in euphemism. It has often been suggested that
the statistics of murder and manslaughter are the closest criminal statistics to
actual levels of criminal offending since there is usually solid evidence of the
crime in the form of a corpse. There remain problems, however, in equating
the statistics from different countries as well as different regions to assess
whether or not everywhere experienced the same kinds of patterns and
fluctuations. At the end of the First World War, for example, an eminent
criminologist suggested that across Europe there was an increase in murder;
yet the scale of the increase varied from country to country and was scarcely
perceptible in England and Wales.17 Moreover, the different legal definitions
to be found in different countries mean that comparisons have to be made
with caveats and qualifications. Hermann Mannheim, who fled Nazi
Germany for Britain in 1933, pointed out that the English concept of ‘murder’
was much wider than the German Mord.18 The media, however, has always
tended to shy away from complexity; it also has shown a short memory and
has focused on the stories of individual murders, or other exceptional crimes,
to make the points that it wishes to stress about the ills of society.

16 Dominique Kalifa, L’encre et le sang: récits de crimes et société à la Belle Époque (Paris:
Fayard, 1995), p. 163; Dominique Kalifa and Jean-Claude Farcy, Atlas du crime à Paris du
moyen âge à nos jours (Paris: Parigramme, 2015), pp. 125–8, 180–2.
17 Thorsten Sellin, ‘Is Murder Increasing in Europe?’, Annals of the American Academy of
Political and Social Science 126 (1926), 29–34.
18 Hermann Mannheim, Social Aspects of Crime in England between the Wars (London:
George Allen & Unwin, 1940), p. 48.

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Relics and Remains

In addition to the crime story itself, especially during the nineteenth century,
the most notorious incidents commonly witnessed an aftermath during
which relics of the event might be exhibited in museums such as Madame
Tussauds. By the same token, artefacts were constructed for viewing or even
for sale in remembrance of the incident. Media representations or imaginings
were (and are) often deliberately constructed to thrill audiences, and they
invariably build on stereotypes and existing plot structures. Such was the
case, for example, with the melodramas written around William Corder’s
murder of Maria Marten in the Red Barn at Polstead in Suffolk in 1827.
Similarly Fritz Lang’s film M (1931) loosely echoed the killings of Peter
Kürten in Weimar Germany, although scripted before his arrest; and that
appears to have been how many in the audience understood the story.
Tangentially it is interesting to note that the film also portrayed the
Ringvereine, demonstrating its members’ revulsion at child murder; and
allegedly the Ringvereine threatened to sabotage the production if some of
its members were not employed as extras.19 The persistence of what might be
called the Jack the Ripper genre provides, perhaps, the best example of this
constant returning to plot, structures and images. Robert Louis Stevenson’s
novella Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) preceded the Whitechapel murders by
two years; a stage play preceded them by a few weeks and had to be closed
because of the panic. While initial representations of ‘the Ripper’ represented
him as a man from the working class, he became increasingly perceived as a
top-hatted gentleman, like Stephenson’s Mr Hyde. The term ‘the ripper’ has
been applied to subsequent assailants and serial killers of women such as
Joseph Vacher, the French Jack l’Ėventreur du Sud-Est (active 1894–7), the
mysterious knife-wielding attacker of early twentieth-century Berlin men-
tioned earlier, Gordon Cummins ‘the Blackout Ripper’ (1942) and Peter
Sutcliffe ‘the Yorkshire Ripper’ (1975–80). And, in addition to dozens of
films on the original ripper or updating him in some supernatural fashion,
the notion of a man brutally killing women, often with some kind of sexual
deviance as a cause, has become grotesquely popular and commonplace in
novels, films and television dramas.
Possibly Jack the Ripper did send letters and body-parts to the police and
others to boost his (or less likely her) celebrity, but equally these might have
been sent by hoaxers. Some offenders, however, did seek self-publicity,

19 Hartmann and von Lampe, ‘German Underworld’, pp. 108–9.

569
 CLIVE EMSLEY

even some form of immortality, in writing memoirs which publishers were

happy to print and members of the public were delighted to read for
vicarious pleasure. Pierre-François Lacenaire, guillotined in Paris for a
double murder in 1836, was among the first and most striking of such
individuals, but he was followed by a string of others, especially in the
twentieth century. Sometimes the authors (though their books were invari-
ably the work of ghost writers) sought to cash in on a popular image, such
as George Smithson who called his autobiography Raffles in Real Life,
seeking to echo E. J. Hornung’s short stories of A. J. Raffles, celebrated
cricketer and gentleman thief, or Billy Hill, a razor-wielding thug who
claimed, in his book title, to be Boss of Britain’s Underworld. Jacques
Mesrine was equally boastful but possessed perhaps of a little more literary
skill in writing his L’instinct de mort inside La Santé Prison and having it
smuggled out shortly before he escaped. Mesrine died in a shoot-out with
the gendarmerie in Paris in 1979; like Lacenaire, he has featured in cinematic
versions of his life. The problem with being a killer who boasts some form
of Robin Hood, anti-establishment persona is that such individuals have
rarely lived to see themselves on celluloid. The Sicilian bandit Salvatore
Giuliano did not pen any romantic autobiography and was shot dead in 1950
after a career which some have described as Robin Hood-like, while others
have seen him as the instrument of unscrupulous politicians and mafia
leaders. Yet personally Giuliano was very conscious of how his image was
projected and, since his death, he has been the subject of two films, directed
respectively by Francesco Rosi in 1961 and Michael Cimino in 1987, a novel,
The Sicilian, by Mario Puzo (1984) on which Cimino’s film was based, and an
opera by Lorenzo Ferrero (1985).

Theories of the Violent Criminal

Theories were constructed about criminals as different from ordinary people;
they were trapped in an earlier stage of evolution or were possessed of
something different, more primitive, in their make-up. The best-known
theorist behind this perception was the Italian doctor Cesare Lombroso,
whose Criminal Man was first published in 1876 and went through five
editions, ever expanding and developing his ideas before his death in 1909.
Above all, it was his notion of the criminal as an atavistic being – a notion that
he greatly refined and qualified over time – that struck chords with so many
who wanted the criminal to be different and some sort of exception among
‘ordinary’ European people. The brain of the criminal was smaller,

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suggesting ‘not the sublimity of the primate, but the lower level of the rodent
or lemur, or the brain of a human fetus of three or four months’.20 Moreover,
while he considered that novelists overemphasised the appearance of crim-
inals, in his first edition Lombroso explained that, after studying offenders in
various prisons,
one has to conclude that while offenders may not look fierce, there is nearly
always something strange about their appearance …
In general, thieves are notable for their expressive faces and manual
dexterity, small wandering eyes that are often oblique in form … Like rapists,
they often have jug ears. Rapists, however, nearly always have sparkling
eyes, delicate features, and swollen lips and eyelids …
Habitual murderers have a cold, glassy stare and eyes that are sometimes
bloodshot and filmy; the nose is often hawklike and always large; the jaw is
strong, the cheekbones broad … 21
Such descriptions were ideal for novelists, but it is also true that novelists
such as Harrison Ainsworth and Eugène Sue had been portraying crim-
inal offenders in this way long before Lombroso’s earliest theorising
provided what appeared to be a scientific underpinning. Ainsworth’s
eponymous Jack Sheppard, for example, had a physiognomy that
betrayed his cunning and knavery: his mouth was ‘coarse and large’,
his nose ‘was broad and flat’ and ‘the expression pervading [his] counte-
nance … was vulgarity’.22
Gender played a major role in the idea of the criminal, especially the
violent criminal. The violent offender was perceived as male; generally the
female equivalent of such men was the prostitute. Again Lombroso out-
lined this in his criminological theorising; in 1893, between the fourth and
fifth editions of his Criminal Man, he published The Delinquent Woman, the
Prostitute and the Normal Woman. Generally women appeared in European
courts charged with criminal offences in far fewer numbers than men.
Among them there were some women accused of violent acts, and these
were often doubly stigmatised: first, they had committed violence but
second, and more importantly, their action appeared a denial of what was
seen as natural to their sex. Abortion was an obvious example, though for
the offender it may simply have been an attempt to preserve an element of
respectability and avoid the stigma of illegitimacy. Poison was popularly

20 Cesare Lombroso, Criminal Man, trans. and with a new introduction by Mary Gibson
and Nicole Hahn Rafter (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), p. 48.
21 Ibid., p. 51.
22 Harrison Ainsworth, Jack Sheppard, 3 vols. (London: Bentley, 1839), vol. I, p. 75.

571
 CLIVE EMSLEY

seen as a means by which women, in another perversion of their domestic

role, killed family members. Yet the evidence does not suggest that women
used poison to any greater degree than men in acts of homicide. In the
context of fin-de-siècle France it has been forcefully argued that female
criminality, which at the time hit the headlines with a series of vitriol
attacks on unfaithful husbands and lovers, became linked with debates
about women’s role in the public sphere. Notable in highlighting the
problem was Alexandre Dumas fils who, in 1880, published an essay Les
femmes qui tuent et les femmes qui votent [WomenWho Kill and Women Who
Vote).23
In the same way that violent female offenders were considered to be part
of a movement challenging the natural social order, so it was a relatively easy
step to describe an especially violent individual who supposedly had the
visual appearance of a ‘criminal’ as a ‘monster’ – someone or something
not entirely human. The perpetrator of a series of knife attacks on young
women in London at the end of the eighteenth century was labelled as a
‘monster’. A cheap print with an engraving and a doggerel verse beneath
explained his modus operandi:
It is of a Monster I mean for to write,
Who in stabbing of Ladies took great delight;
If he caught them alone in the street after dark,
In their Hips, or their Thighs, he’d be sure cut a mark.24

One hundred years later the front pages of Le Petit Journal and Le Petit Parisien
regularly carried vivid and violent representations of murderous monstres and
ogresses setting about their victims – especially tragic when they were poor
little enfants martyrs. Albert Soleilland, for example, was described as both a
‘monster’ and a ‘satyr’. London’s mid-century garrotters seem to have been
given their label to imply a foreign or alien nature – garrotting, for example,
was a Spanish method of public execution; they were also labelled ‘thugs’,
which linked them with the Indian bandits who had strangled travellers using
a Rumāl (a scarf, usually coloured some sort of yellow, which might be worn
as a turban or a cummerbund). The horrors of Thugee had recently been
exposed and supposedly suppressed by the East India Company; the events
had been described and popularised in the accounts of Captain W. H.

23 Ann-Louise Shapiro, Breaking the Codes: Female Criminality in Fin-de-Siècle Paris

(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).
24 Jan Bondeson, The London Monster: A Sanguinary Tale (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press,
2002), pp. 86, 114.

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Sleeman, who was personally involved in the suppression, and Colonel Philip
Meadows Taylor.25

The Alien and the Soldier

Aliens and migrants were commonly feared, perhaps in a few instances with
some justification. Irish migrants into British cities during the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries were uniformly perceived as violent. Corsicans were
believed to have brought a distinct brand of violence to the criminality of
Marseilles and Paris, especially in the interwar years. Jews were also ‘aliens’
and the suspicion of Jews led to them being seen as behind what popular
culture occasionally, and generally quite wrongly, perceived as ritual mur-
ders. Jack the Ripper was variously labelled as a Thug, a Bavarian and also,
most notably by W. T. Stead in the Pall Mall Gazette, a Frenchman. In Stead’s
view Jack had to be a French practitioner of black magic and necromancy,
since the poor French working class despised prostitutes as much as they
despised Jews, and murdering prostitutes was ‘peculiarly a French crime’.26
For others, however, Jack was obviously a Jew himself, and throughout the
century, particularly it seems in central and eastern Europe, there were
accusations against Jews that they ritually murdered Christian children.
There were at least seventy-nine such accusations during the 1890s, of
which roughly half were made in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.27
In English literature the most celebrated nineteenth-century Jewish crim-
inal is Charles Dickens’s Fagin, not a murderer but a fence who trained boys
to steal for him. Across Europe there were popular assumptions that crim-
inals started with small offences, often as children, and progressed to becom-
ing murderous burglars. The two ends of this spectrum were portrayed,
along with Fagin, in Dickens’s Oliver Twist; Jack Dawkins, ‘the Artful
Dodger’, was at the youthful end and Bill Sikes was the fully developed
adult criminal. Male members of this ‘criminal class’ were considered to use
violence to settle disputes among themselves and to abuse female partners
and children. There were social groups that regularly used violence to settle
disputes, ranging from the ‘hard men’ of the poorer districts of cities or

25 Mark Brown, ‘Crime, Governance and the Company Raj: The Discovery of Thugee’,
British Journal of Criminology 42 (2002), 77–95.
26 L. Perry Curtis Jr, Jack the Ripper and the London Press (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2001), pp. 206–8.
27 Helmut Walser Smith, The Butcher’s Tale: Murder and Anti-Semitism in a German Town
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), p. 123.

573
 CLIVE EMSLEY

industrial villages to the landowners and peasant entrepreneurs, such as the

Sicilian mafiosi, who could be found in other, similar societies. The people
most at risk from such ‘hard men’, however, were not members of the
general public but rivals or individuals who challenged their position. It is
particularly frustrating here that the raw statistics which reveal a higher rate
of homicide in southern Europe than in the north rarely provide the detail
and nuances necessary to explain precisely who were victims and why –
something that would enable the historian to get beyond the conclusions that
might be drawn from other sources.
Another group often stigmatised as dangerous to the public were soldiers.
War was considered to have a brutalising effect on the men that fought it. The
brigand bands that affected eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe
were commonly seen to have deserters or former soldiers present in their ranks;
similarly the brigands in southern Italy immediately after unification had a
backbone of men from the old, beaten Bourbon army. Several English high-
waymen enjoyed adopting military trappings; they rode to commit their crimes
armed with sword and pistols and delighted in military rank, notably ‘captain’.
Some brigands liked to pose as heroic Robin Hoods, though there was little
romantic about either their threats or the occasions on which they opened fire;
the poor rarely if ever profited from highwaymen robbing the rich. Yet a
highwayman brought to the gallows in Britain, or broken on the wheel in
France or elsewhere, might make a good, courageous death in the eyes of the
crowd that assembled to witness his end – the kind of death associated with a
good and courageous soldier. One of the first attempts to explore the impact of
a military campaign on violence committed by young men was undertaken in
the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War by Wilhelm Starke, a senior figure in
the Prussian Ministry of Justice. Looking at the criminal statistics for both
France and Prussia over several years before and after the conflict, Starke
concluded that, among some significant shifts in criminal offending, there
was an increase in violent crime immediately following the war.28
Unlike other European powers, the British had an army composed of
volunteers until the introduction of conscription in 1916, and though before
the end of the Victorian period old soldiers were increasingly regarded
sympathetically – not surprisingly given the common move of British veter-
ans from the barracks to the workhouse – those still serving were often feared
as ‘criminal types’ and drunkards. In the British Army the punishment of

28 Wilhelm Starke, Verbrechen und Verbrecher in Preußen, 1854–1878: Ein Kulturgeschichtliche

Studie (Berlin: Enslin, 1884) pp. 61, 152.

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flogging continued until 1881; its replacement, Field Punishment Number 1,

known as ‘crucifixion’ by soldiers, could be ferocious and was known occa-
sionally to result in death. A press campaign towards the end of the First
World War led to its abolition. The Royal Navy, however, remained a law
unto itself and flogging continued to be listed as a punishment in King’s
Regulations up until the beginning of the Second World War; as a deterrent
all ships carried a cat, with which the punishment was administered. As had
been noted by Starke for France and Germany at the end of the Franco-
Prussian War, there was a slight increase in assaults in Britain at the end of
both world wars. At least some of this can be put down to violence meted out
by returning soldiers on wives and girlfriends who had been or were said to
have been unfaithful during the war. In a number of such incidents juries
were inclined to give a wronged soldier the benefit of the doubt when
charged with assaulting an unfaithful wife, and magistrates and judges were
similarly inclined to pass a very lenient sentence.29 Such incidents do not
appear to have been confined to Britain. At the same time, communities were
inclined to exact popular justice without recourse to any formal court on
women guilty of what was euphemistically termed la collaboration horizontale.
Usually such women were dragged from their homes, sometimes had their
clothes torn away, had their heads shaved in front of jeering crowds and were
then paraded before their communities. Some such assaults took place before
the war’s end, but most commonly they became a part of the celebration of
liberation.30 In many respects they need to be considered as another and an
especially violent and degrading manifestation of the traditional practice of
charivari.

Violent Punishment: Civilising Violence

Until well into the nineteenth century the European patriarch had the duty of
disciplining the family; this might involve physical punishment. In Victorian
Britain, however, while schoolboys particularly could be severely chastised
with canes and leather straps, wife beating was increasingly considered to be
a working-class fault in need of correction. Men from the middle and upper

29 Clive Emsley, Soldier, Sailor, Beggarman, Thief: Crime and the British Armed Services since
1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 19–20 and chapter 6; Emsley, ‘Why
Crucify Tommy?’, History Today 62.11 (2012), 29–35.
30 See, for example, Fabrice Virgili, La France virile: des femmes tondues à la Libération (Paris:
Payot, 2000).

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 CLIVE EMSLEY

classes rarely appeared on such charges, though these social groups seem to
have included a number of very violent husbands and fathers.
In the same way that, particularly in Britain, the respectable classes
generally considered that a beating was a reasonable way to correct and
‘civilise’ schoolboys, they tolerated or simply closed their eyes to violent
behaviour by the new, bureaucratic police bodies that emerged during the
nineteenth century. As long as their focus remained on what a police official
in France described as the ‘dangerous classes’, the police were perceived to
be disciplining the uncivilised. The Italian police and particularly the
gendarmerie-style Carabinieri were deployed partly to persuade the pea-
sants that they were now part of the newly united state; to enforce their
position they employed brutality and violence, and even an unsuspecting
British tourist who got in their way could find himself suffering the pain
inflicted by a pollici (thumbscrew).31 In late nineteenth-century Paris leaders
of the police and their non-critical media advocates boasted that they were
so well acquainted with criminals that, once a crime was committed, they
could rapidly identify the offender from the modus operandi. Yet this did not
prevent le rafle by which usual suspects were rounded up; nor did it prevent
la cuisine de la sûreté or le passage au tabac as tough interrogations or beatings
were popularly termed. In interwar Britain there were concerns that
Hollywood films and stories of American crime might foster some sort of
‘third degree’ among the ‘best police in the world’, though it does not seem
that British policemen needed too much encouragement to bully suspects
or to get their retaliation in first.
Popular culture often made fun of police officers, and there were figures
such as Mr Punch or the Lyons silk weaver Guignol who could raise laughs at
puppet plays for beating up policemen – in Guignol’s case the victim was a
gendarme. The incidence of assaults on gendarmes in rural France appears to
have declined over the nineteenth century, but across Europe violent assaults
on policemen still occurred, notably during strikes or political
demonstrations.32 The police responded with violence of their own. A strike
in a Durham colliery in 1891, during which fifty county police charged and

31 William Mercer, How the Police Manage Italy (Rome: Italo-American School Press, 1876),
pp. 25–6.
32 Aurélien Lignereux, La France rébellionnaire: les résistances à la gendarmerie (1800–1859)
(Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2008); Clive Emsley, The Great British Bobby:
A History of British Policing from the 18th Century to the Present, rev. edn (London:
Quercus, 2010), pp. 144–53.

576
 Criminal Violence and Culture in Europe

batoned a crowd of miners with their wives and children prompted a parody
of Tennyson’s patriotic Charge of the Light Brigade:
Flash’d all their batons bare,
Flash’d as they turned in air,
Thumping at back-skulls there,
Mauling away because
Someone had blunder’d
Pounding at ev’ry head,
Quiet folks’ blood was shed;
Women and children
Reeled from the blows that sped,
Moaning and sunder’d
Then they marched back again
Gallant half hundred!33

Criminal assaults by police could be investigated, and yet, while in Britain a

violent policeman could be tried, found guilty, sentenced and as a conse-
quence lose his job, in Germany at least he was quite likely to return to his old
post after he had served his sentence. The Blutmai in Berlin in 1929 began with
some assaults on traffic policemen by youths, and ended with thirty-three
people killed and another 198 wounded after the police responded with
ferocious violence.34 The police of Weimar Berlin appear to have shared
the thinking of many respectable householders across Europe that the
‘dangerous classes’, a concept so easily extended to the bulk of the working
class, had now morphed into communists. Problems arose when police
violence was meted out to the respectable, but this was rare and, in
England particularly, when any such complaints were made against the
police, or about scandalous police behaviour in general, these were investi-
gated by the authorities usually with more care than elsewhere.35
There was a fascination with criminal violence that continued in Europe
across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This went together with a
possible decrease in such violence, and a belief among the educated and well-

33 Quoted in Clive Emsley, The English Police: A Political and Social History, 2nd edn
(Harlow: Longman, 1996), p. 69.
34 Peter Lehrmann-Faust, ‘“Blood May”: The Case of Berlin 1929’, in Richard Bessel and
Clive Emsley (eds.), Patterns of Provocation: Police and Public Disorder (New York:
Berghahn, 2000).
35 Anja Johansen, ‘Complain in Vain? The Development of a “Police Complaints Culture”
in Wilhelmine Berlin’, Crime, Histoire & Sociétés/Crime, History & Societies 13.2 (2009),
119–42; Johansen, ‘Keeping Up Appearances: Police Rhetoric, Public Trust and “Police
Scandal” in London and Berlin, 1880–1914’, Crime, Histoire & Sociétés / Crime, History &
Societies 15.1 (2011), 59–83.

577
 CLIVE EMSLEY

to-do that European society was increasingly shifting away from the idea of
using violence to settle disputes. This developing view of interpersonal
violence survived the ferocity of the two world wars and the bureaucratic
and industrialised mass murder of the 1930s and 1940s. The Holocaust was
seen to be exceptional. The sharp rise in the criminal statistics from the 1950s,
which continued until the mid 1990s, together with a growing politicisation
of these statistics prompted increasing nervousness. Non-violent property
offences continued to dominate the number of crimes reported and brought
before the courts but the cultural forms of news media, popular literature and
films very rarely picked up on this. The supposed ‘conquest of violence’ did
not easily fit with the narrative chosen by sections of the media, or with
political debate, though it did not prevent the steady and continuing abolition
of violent punishments for offenders. Yet, at the same time, any rough
behaviour employed by the state and its functionaries to repress or discou-
rage aggressive behaviour by those perceived as ‘criminal’ continued often to
be excused or ignored.

Bibliographical Essay
Like so much cultural and social history, the history of criminal violence tends to be
written from national perspectives. Moreover, while the subject is increasingly popular,
much of the work remains in the language of the country dealt with. Some sections of
Clive Emsley’s Crime, Police and Penal Policy: European Experiences 1750–1940 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2007) address criminal violence. Richard Bessel, Violence: A Modern
Obsession (London: Simon & Schuster, 2015) focuses mainly on the twentieth century
and addresses the violence of wars as well as the shifting sensibilities to, for example, forms
of sexual abuse. Bessel concludes that in the West there is generally less tolerance towards
all forms of violence. The shifting attitudes in Europe towards the most violent of crimes,
murder, is to be found in Pieter Spierenburg’s wide-ranging A History of Murder: Personal
Violence in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Present (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008).
For England criminal violence and culture are explored extensively in James Sharpe, A
Fiery and Furious People: A History of Violence in England (London: Random House, 2016).
For the shorter period of this volume see Clive Emsley, Hard Men: The English and Violence
since 1750 (London: Hambledon, 2005) and John Carter Wood, Violence and Crime in
Nineteenth-Century England: The Shadow of Our Refinement (London: Routledge, 2004).
Martin J. Wiener, Men of Blood: Violence, Manliness, and Criminal Justice in Victorian
England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) focuses particularly on male
violence towards women and the sometimes contrasting attitudes of the courts and at
least some of the populace. While it seems probable that the Victorians moved
increasingly towards a critical view of violence, they also celebrated violent anti-heroes
such as Mr Punch and Sweeney Todd, an area vividly explored in Rosalind Crone, Violent
Victorians: Popular Entertainment in Nineteenth-Century London (Manchester: Manchester

578
 Criminal Violence and Culture in Europe

University Press, 2012). Unfortunately the excellent work by Dominique Kalifa remains
untranslated; his L’encre et le sang: récits de crimes et société à la Belle Époque (Paris: Fayard,
1995) is especially significant for this topic.
British gangs have been well covered by Andrew Davies, The Gangs of Manchester: The
Story of the Scuttlers, Britain’s First Youth Cult (Preston: Milo Books, 2008) and City of Gangs:
Glasgow and the Rise of the British Gangster (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2013), but the
best work on the French apaches remains largely in French, notably Michelle Perrot ‘Dans
le Paris de la Belle Époque, les “Apaches”, premières bandes de jeunes’, in her collection
Les ombres de l’histoire: crime et châtiment au XIXe siècle (Paris: Flammarion, 2001). The
violent criminal and semi-criminal groups of southern Europe are better served with
significant English-language volumes such as Stephen Wilson, Feuding, Conflict and
Banditry in Nineteenth-Century Corsica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988)
and John Dickie, Blood Brotherhood: Camorra, Mafia, ‘Ndrangheta: The Rise of the Honoured
Societies (London: Sceptre, 2011).

579
 28
Extreme Violence in Western Cinema
james kendrick

Violence in the cinema has been and will continue to be fraught with
controversy because there is still no fully agreed upon consensus as to what
constitutes the very subject itself. The types of violent representation –
physical, emotional, psychological, symbolic, systemic, and so forth – present
in Western cinema since its inception are as broad and varied as any other
element of the cinematic experience, yet there remains a stubborn tendency
to subsume this vast and diverse arena into a singular entity called ‘violence’.
Film violence is not some monolithic and therefore easily understandable
‘thing’, but rather a complex mode of stylised representation that needs to be
thoroughly grounded in historical, cultural, aesthetic and industrial contexts.
This chapter will look specifically at various forms of ‘extreme violence’ in
Western cinema, which is generally understood as violence that pushes past
current cinematic norms in its intensity and graphic qualities. Extreme
violence is emotionally upsetting, causes discomfort, shocks, and may even
physically assault the spectator’s body by causing uncontrollable physiologi-
cal responses. While various films produced in the United States and Europe
have achieved such levels of violence, not all of them (or even most) are still
defined as such, having been surpassed by even more extreme depictions.
How those definitions have changed and continue to change can tell us much
about the interrelationships of social and political sensibilities, changing
ethics, and the ever-evolving aesthetics of filmmaking.

Violence in Early Western Cinema

The cinema, which was born almost simultaneously in the United States and
Europe, has always been violent.1 The prevalence of violence in the earliest

1 Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907, History of the
American Cinema 1 (New York: Scribner’s, 1990), p. 78.

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 Extreme Violence in Western Cinema

movies is not surprising given that the medium emerged in the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries when violence of varying sorts was
already a constituent part of many entertainments. In the United States and
Europe, violence was integral to both high culture (Shakespeare, operas)2 and
low culture (dime novels, Punch and Judy shows, murder ballads). The
French had the notorious Théâtre du Grand Guignol, England had penny
dreadfuls, Germany had gruesome fairy tales, and Spain had bullfights (see
Chapter 10 in this volume). The penny press, which flourished across Europe
and the USA in the mid 1800s, focused intently on violent crime, drawing
people together in mutual fascination with the ghastliest of details.3 In the late
1800s and early 1900s, many state-sanctioned executions were still performed
in public and drew enormous crowds.
While the earliest films were documentaries that captured innocuous, every-
day moments, it was not long before filmmakers started turning their cameras
towards more violent subjects, both real and recreated. The Execution of Mary,
Queen of Scots (1894), a Kinetoscope film produced by the Edison Company,
depicts the beheading of the Scottish monarch in 1567. While it appears to consist
of a single take observing Mary as she kneels down in front of the executioner’s
block and has her head hacked off with a single axe stroke, it is actually a trick
film in which an edit disguises the replacement of the actor with a dummy body
that is then beheaded (a technique that came to be known as ‘stop-motion
substitution’). As one commentator notes, ‘It’s difficult to know how viewers in
1895 would have responded to this. It’s hard to imagine that they could have
been technically savvy enough to understand the way in which the effect was
achieved, even if they believed (or wanted to believe) that a real human head
wasn’t actually being severed.’4 The film’s illusion that the beheading was caught
in a single take enhances its sense of realism, providing strong evidence that the
desire for graphic film violence is as old as the medium itself.
Other late nineteenth-century Edison films such as Indian Scalping Scene and
Lynching Scene (both 1895) ‘indicate a curious penchant for the gore of murders
and executions’.5 The British distribution company Maguire & Baucus’s 1897

2 Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America,

The William E. Massey, Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilization 1986 (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 41–2, 92.
3 Karen Halttunen, Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), pp. 69–70.
4 Matt Barry, ‘Alfred Clark: Narrative and Special Effects Pioneer’, The Art and Culture of
Movies, 8 March 2010, http://artandcultureofmovies.blogspot.com/2010/03/alfred-
clark-narrative-and-special.html.
5 Charles Musser, Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing
Company (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), p. 56.

581
 JAMES KENDRICK

film catalogue reveals numerous films centred on violent subject matter: Cock
Fight, Duel With Pistols, a series of bullfight films, numerous French and English
military ‘views’, Mexican Knife Duel, Joan of Arc (which depicts the French
martyr being burned at the stake), as well as the aforementioned Lynching
Scene, two different films depicting Indiana scalpings, and The Execution of Mary,
Queen of Scots.6 The French film company Pathé Frères also produced its share
of violent films, including History of a Crime (Histoire d’un crime, 1901), in which
a thief stabs a man to death, is arrested, imprisoned, and then executed via
guillotine (again depicted using stop-motion substitution). Writing in The
Photo-Era in 1908, journalist Carl H. Claudy described one film in which he
saw ‘a knife plunged deep into the breast of a woman by a jealous lover . . .
and, by the art of the picture-maker, the knife really seems to enter the flesh
and the blood to spurt forth, after which the victim writhes, rolls her eyes and
finally dies in agony! Ugh!’7 Importantly, not all the violence in this era was
recreated; some early films recorded actual executions, including The Hanging
of William Carr (1897)8 and An Execution by Hanging (1898), which is described in
the American Mutoscope & Biograph Company’s 1902 catalog as ‘A very
ghastly, but very interesting subject’.9
From a social standpoint, concerns about depictions of sexuality were
typically more pressing than concerns about violence, which is why, when
the major Hollywood studios agreed to the Production Code, an industry-
wide document that was adopted in 1930 to govern content in their films, the
initial version offered far less regulation of violence than of sex. The original
text stipulated that ‘Brutal killings are not to be presented in detail’, that rape
‘should never be more than suggested’, and that ‘repellant subjects’, which
included ‘actual hangings or electrocutions’, ‘third degree methods’, ‘brutal-
ity and possible gruesomeness’, ‘branding of people or animals’, ‘apparent
cruelty to children or animals’ and ‘surgical operations’, were to be ‘treated
within the careful limits of good taste’.10 Hollywood’s Movie Commandments,

6 ‘Maguire & Baucus, Ltd. Fall Catalogue 1897’ (Maguire & Baucus, Ltd., 1897), Rutgers
University Community Repository: Motion Picture Catalogs, https://rucore
.libraries.rutgers.edu/rutgers-lib/23938/PDF/1/.
7 C. H. Claudy, ‘The Degradation of the Motion-Picture’, Photo-Era 21.4 (1908), 162.
8 Amy Louise Wood, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America,
1890–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), pp. 128–31.
9 ‘Picture Catalogue’ [‘Picture Catalog’], 1902, 240, Rutgers University Community
Repository: Motion Picture Catalogs, http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.7282/T3M9090H.
10 The original text of the Production Code is reproduced as an appendix in numerous
publications, including Stephen Prince, Classical Film Violence: Designing and Regulating
Brutality in Hollywood Cinema, 1930–1968 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
2003), pp. 293–301.

582
 Extreme Violence in Western Cinema

a guide for screenwriters to help them avoid running afoul of the Production
Code, noted that, without the Code, ‘movie audiences would be exposed to
such visual details in the films as disfigured, dismembered, bloodstained and
mutilated bodies, close-up views of dying men, and hair-raising details of
inhuman treatment’.11 While the Production Code Administration (PCA)
actively enforced the Code from 1934 to the mid 1960s (also dictating the
content of foreign films distributed in the USA), such extreme imagery was
largely absent from mainstream Western cinema. There were always excep-
tions – the gangster film cycle, Universal’s gothic horror films, combat films
during World War II, and various low-budget exploitation films that were
produced outside the studio system – but, for the most part, Hollywood film
violence was relatively sanitised and unrealistic.
However, starting in the 1960s, depictions of violence throughout Western
cinema began to change. What had been left off-screen or depicted with
minimal detail was now on-screen and graphically depicted with new special
effects and make-up. As Philip French noted, there was no increase in violent
content – ‘It [was] the form and intensity of violence that . . . changed, rather
than its quantity.’12 While there have been instances of what we would now
call extreme violence throughout film history, its presence became decidedly
more pronounced in the latter half of the twentieth century, to the point that
it is now a common and constituent part of the cinema.

Conceptualizing Extreme Violence

In 2004, film programmer and critic James Quandt was among the first to
identify a new trend in European, specifically French, cinema, which he
labelled ‘the New French Extremity’.13 According to Quandt, these films,
which include Gaspar Noè’s I Stand Alone (Seul contre tous, 1998), Virginie
Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi’s Baise-moi (2000), Claire Denis’s Trouble
Every Day (2001), Marina de Van’s In My Skin (Dans ma peau, 2002), and Bruno
Dumont’s Twentynine Palms (2003), marked a new kind of cinema that was
‘suddenly determined to break every taboo, to wade in rivers of viscera and
spumes of sperm, to fill each frame with flesh, nubile or gnarled, and subject

11 Olga J. Martin, Hollywood’s Movie Commandments: A Handbook for Motion Picture Writers
and Reviewers (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1937), pp. 123–4.
12 Phillip French, ‘Violence in the Cinema’, in Otto N. Larsen (ed.), Violence and the Mass
Media (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), pp. 59–70, at 61.
13 James Quandt, ‘Flesh & Blood: Sex and Violence in Recent French Cinema’, Artforum
International (February 2004), 126–32, at 126.

583
 JAMES KENDRICK

it to all manner of penetration, mutilation, and defilement’.14 The emergence

of these films coincided with a number of similarly extreme cinematic trends
in other Western countries around the turn of the twenty-first century. Given
the increasingly transnational nature of global film production, spurred by
DVD and Blu-ray distribution, streaming services like Netflix, Amazon
Prime, The Criterion Channel and Hulu, and the vast amount of information
available on millions of web sites, it should come as little surprise that films
characterised by extreme violence would emerge all over the globe within
a relatively short period of time.
Around this same time the United States saw the emergence of ‘torture
porn’, a term coined by film critic David Edelstein15 to describe a cycle of
horror films ‘defined by its extensive and graphic depiction of torture’.16 This
cycle was exemplified by the Saw series (2004–10) and Eli Roth’s Hostel (2005)
and Hostel: Part II (2007); a spate of horror remakes of low-budget films from
the 1970s and 80s such as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974; remade in 2003)
and Halloween (1978, remade in 2007); and what Paul Gormley has termed ‘the
new brutality film’, a trend in 1990s commercial Hollywood cinema that
‘attempt[ed] to renegotiate and reanimate the immediacy and affective
qualities of the cinematic experience’17 and included Quentin Tarantino’s
Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994), Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days
(1995) and David Fincher’s Seven (1995). Extreme cinema also emerged in
other parts of Europe as well, including Austria (Michael Haneke’s Funny
Games, 1997), Denmark (Lars von Trier’s Antichrist, 2009), the Netherlands
(Tom Six’s The Human Centipede, 2009) and England (Ben Wheatley’s Kill List,
2010). Similar developments were happening throughout Asia, including
Japan, Thailand, Hong Kong and South Korea. ‘Asia Extreme’ became
a familiar term among cult film enthusiasts after the UK-based video dis-
tribution company Tartan Films adopted it in 2001 as a brand for a wide range
of films made in various Asian countries – including Hideo Nakata’s Ringu
(1998), Takashi Miike’s Audition (Ôdishon, 1999), Chan-wook Park’s Oldboy
(Oldeuboi, 2003) and Kim Jee-woon’s A Tale of Two Sisters (Janghwa, Hongryeon,
2003) – which for Western viewers collapsed regional and generic distinctions
into a singular category that invoked ‘the Western audience’s perception of

14 Ibid., 127–8.
15 David Edelstein, ‘Now Playing at Your Local Multiplex: Torture Porn’, New York
Magazine (2006), http://nymag.com/movies/features/15622/.
16 Isabel C. Pinedo, ‘Torture Porn: 21st Century Horror’, in Harry Benshoff (ed.),
A Companion to the Horror Film (Malden: Wiley Blackwell, 2014), pp. 345–62, at 346.
17 Paul Gormley, The New-Brutality Film: Race and Affect in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema
(Bristol: Intellect, 2005), p. 8.

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 Extreme Violence in Western Cinema

the East as weird and wonderful, sublime and grotesque’.18 The circulation of
extreme Asian films on video, Hollywood’s remakes of several titles in the
late 1990s and early 2000s, and Oldboy’s winning the Grand Prix at the 2004
Cannes Film Festival raised awareness of these films and enhanced their
influence on other film industries.
For an early twentieth-century viewer, today’s film violence would be
extreme in a way that he or she probably could not have conceptualised at the
time. Technological advances in the motion picture medium itself (higher
resolution and larger format celluloid and now digital, the ability to repro-
duce a wide spectrum of colour, multichannel surround sound, stereoscopic
images) as well as advances in the artistry used to create the illusions of
violence (make-up special effects and prosthetics, explosive squibs, and now
computer-generated imagery and ‘bullet time’) have greatly enhanced the
perception of violence on screen. At this point, filmmakers can represent any
form of physical violence they can imagine, leaving absolutely nothing to the
imagination except what they choose. This is not to say, however, that
extreme violence was absent from early twentieth-century cinema screens.
In fact, as we have already seen, there was a great deal of extreme film
violence in that era, although the parameters by which such violence was
considered extreme were vastly different from the ones we use today. Thus,
what was visually shocking, appalling and dreadful in 1900 will likely strike
today’s viewers as antiquated, even as they recognise the fundamental brutal-
ity of what they’re witnessing. This is in part because our fundamental
understanding of violence is constantly shifting according to all manner of
cinematic, cultural and historical criteria. This is why Martin Barker argued
that ‘[T]here simply isn’t a “thing” called “violence in the media”.’ Such an
absolutist claim seems counterintuitive because we all know violence when
we see it, but the varying definitions and heated contests over the years about
the nature of film violence and its various impacts both personal and cultural
speak to its eternally contested nature. As J. David Slocum put it, ‘violence
both marks prevailing coherencies and punctuates changes’.19
The subjective nature of film violence does not mean, however, that we
cannot conceptualize it in its various forms, including extreme violence,

18 Chi-Yun Shin, ‘The Art of Branding: Tartan “Asia Extreme” Films’, in Chin-hee Choi
and Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano (eds.), Horror to the Extreme: Changing Boundaries in Asian
Cinema (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009), pp. 85–100, at 86.
19 J. David Slocum, ‘Violence and American Cinema: Notes for an Investigation’, in
Slocum (ed.), Violence and the American Cinema, AFI Film Readers (New York:
Routledge, 2001), pp. 1–34, at 18.

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according to its fundamental components. Violence in the cinema is the

stylised depiction of action that harms or is intended to harm and its
subsequent effects. Building on that definition, then, we can say that extreme
violence is a depiction of violence that is experienced by the viewer as
particularly explicit in comparison to contemporary cinematic norms. Such
a definition involves numerous interlocking components, which are worth
examining individually in some detail.

Behaviour and Style in Film Violence

In defining film violence as the stylised depiction of an action and its
subsequent effects, we must first take into account the fact that we are
simultaneously talking about two interrelated concepts that both tend to
be labelled violence without any additional terminological distinction. First is
the behavioural act itself – a stabbing, a shooting, someone hitting someone
else, a building exploding, a car crashing, and so forth. There are myriad
violent behaviours – physical, interpersonal, sexual, social – that can be and
have been shown on screen, which means that filmmakers are essentially
drawing from an enormous well of possibilities. For the most part, we tend to
agree on what actions count as violence, although there are always discrepan-
cies (a parent striking a disobedient child, for example, is seen by some as
justifiable punishment and by others as child abuse; the first group would not
describe the action as violent, the second group would). However, film
violence is not just the action itself, but also the manner in which the action
is depicted via the tools of cinematic representation. This brings us into the
realm of poetics – ‘how filmic devices are used to depict violence with the
purpose of producing certain effects in the spectator’.20
Stephen Prince has conceptualised the interrelationship of the behavioural
and stylistic components via a two-dimensional coordinate system on which
film violence can be visually charted.21 On the x-axis, Prince places what he
calls ‘the referential component’ (the action itself), and on the y-axis he places
what he calls ‘the stylistic amplitude’ (how the action is depicted). He notes
that stylistic amplitude is the function of two elements: (1) graphicness – the
amount of explicit visual detail used to depict the violence, as well as the
portrayal of suffering and pain; and (2) duration – how long the violence is
held on screen. When we describe film violence as extreme, it usually

20 Henry Bacon, The Fascination of Film Violence (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015),
p. 8.
21 Prince, Classical Film Violence, pp. 34–6.

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involves an intensification of both graphicness and duration in the depiction

of a violent act that is understood to be particularly aberrant.
For example, midway through Hostel: Part II, one of the exemplars of
torture porn, there is a six-and-a-half minute sequence in which Lorna
(Heather Matarazzo), one of several college-age backpackers who are lured
to a Slovakian hostel that serves as a front for an underground business in
human slaughter, has been captured, stripped naked and hung upside down
in chains in a cavernous warehouse. Director Eli Roth generates maximum
discomfort by taking several minutes to reveal her fate, during which time
she hangs helplessly with a gag in her mouth, moaning and whimpering
while large, frightening-looking men wrench her along a pulley system until
she is hanging over a recessed bathtub in the floor. Eventually a tall, dark-
haired woman (Monika Malácová) in a robe emerges from behind Lorna,
undresses, and lies down in the tub beneath her, from which she draws
a long-handled scythe.
At this point it becomes frighteningly clear what will happen – that Lorna
is to be the victim in an Elizabeth Bathory-inspired killing – but Roth
continues to draw out the tension by having the woman slide the scythe’s
lengthy blade across Lorna’s back and buttocks and face before cutting away
the gag so we can fully hear her screams and cries for mercy. It is only then
that the woman begins cutting Lorna’s back with the scythe and bathing in
the blood that rains down on her. The wanton cruelty and sadism of the act is
intensified by the manner in which Roth depicts it. The first three times the
woman slices Lorna’s back, we do not see the cuts, but instead hear the
heightened sound of cutting on the soundtrack and see the blood beginning
to run down Lorna’s neck and face and drop onto the woman lying beneath
her. However, Roth then shows us the next three slices (albeit in quick cuts
lasting no more than a second or two), as copious amounts of blood begin to
pour down and the woman rubs it all over her body. She finally kills Lorna by
slicing her throat, which we see in full detail, as Roth cuts into a closer shot as
her throat opens and begins spraying arterial blood.
While the graphic violence of the scene lasts just over a minute, it feels
interminable, partially because of the deliberately slow build-up in which we
learn along with Lorna what her horrific fate is to be; partially because of the
shrieking, agitating orchestral strings on the soundtrack; and partially
because Roth focuses so intently on Lorna’s abject and inescapable suffering.
Lorna, who has been depicted earlier in the film as an awkward outsider
looking for acceptance and therefore already somewhat pitiable, is comple-
tely and utterly helpless, with no means of protecting herself or even trying to

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escape. Matarazzo’s performance effectively conveys Lorna’s absolute terror,

and the apparent physical discomfort in which she was placed as an actress,
hanging naked upside down with the veins in her neck bulging from
physical stress and the pull of gravity while a real blade was pushed and
drawn against her skin with genuine pressure, gives the scene a graphic,
unrelenting sense of realism.

Changing Cinematic Norms of Violence

Because judging film violence as extreme is reliant upon changing cinematic
norms, our understanding of what constitutes such violence is never fully
stable. Further complicating matters is the fact that different cultures and
nations have different criteria for defining extreme violence and different
standards regarding its acceptability as entertainment. And, within those
different cultures, the criteria employed are likewise shifting and changing.
However, despite the lack of stability in the standards by which film violence
is judged extreme, there are broad patterns that can be traced across the
history of Western cinema, with specific challenges to those norms marking
new developments in how film violence is depicted by filmmakers and
understood by audiences.
Take gun violence, for example. For many years the normative mode of
depicting someone being shot by a gun was the clutch-and-fall, where the
victim, upon being shot, does not react with great pain or distress, but rather
gracefully sinks out of frame, often grabbing at a particular part of his or her
body (usually the chest) to indicate where the bullet hit. Audiences usually
did not see a bullet hole or blood or any visible violation of the body, thus
ensuring a kind of visually sanitised death.22 This was acceptable to audiences
during Hollywood’s classical era, although such a representation today
would likely provoke laughter due to its immediately recognisable unreality.
As Stephen Prince points out, ‘Once new thresholds of permissibility [are]
established’, filmmakers cannot return to ‘prior norms’.23 There are some
examples of films rejecting the clutch-and-fall during the classical era, includ-
ing George Stevens’s Shane (1953), which depicts a character being forcibly
blown backward by a shotgun blast to the chest. However, it was in the 1960s
that the stylistic amplitude of gun violence started escalating quite rapidly
with films like Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Sam Peckinpah’s The
Wild Bunch (1969), leading us to watch gun violence under a new set of
expected norms, which generally involve seeing a bullet hole and a strong,

22 Ibid., pp. 153–5. 23 Ibid., p. 165.

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involuntary physical reaction from the victim that reflects the violable nature
of the human body.
The visual evolution of the stylistic amplitude of gun violence can be
examined in some detail by comparing the aesthetic differences between
similar scenes in Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot (1959) and Roger Corman’s
The St Valentine’s Day Massacre (1967). Both films include a scene in which
a group of men are lined up against a brick wall and shot at close range in the
back with tommy guns by three or more men. Some Like It Hot avoids
showing any graphic instances of wounding by focusing instead on reaction
shots of the two main characters (Jack Lennon and Tony Curtis) grimacing as
they witness the event from their hiding place behind a car. The film does
show a small amount of blood on one of the victims who is not killed in the
first round of gunfire, but it is confined to two patches of dark liquid on his
coat (without any corresponding damage to the material) and another dab at
the corner of his mouth after he is shot again off-camera. Corman’s film,
however, shows the violence of the machine gunning in comparatively
graphic detail, with squibs used to depict the bullet hits accentuated by
a rapid editing style that cuts aggressively among shots of the three men
firing machine guns, reverse close-ups of the shocked and agonised victims’
faces, some of whom spit blood from their mouths, and medium shots of the
men’s bodies being pummelled with bullets and falling to the ground.
Genre certainly has some hand in dictating the tone of the violence in
each film. Some Like It Hot is a comedy that uses gangland violence as a plot
mechanism to explain why its protagonists must dress up like women and
hide with a travelling all-girls band, while The St Valentine’s Day Massacre is
a dramatic film about the real-life organised crime boss Al Capone.
However, one cannot discount the fact that the seven years between the
two films saw significant evolution and experimentation in on-screen
violence. The fact that The St Valentine’s Day Massacre is in colour, while
Some Like It Hot is in black and white, amplifies the former’s violence, as the
red of the blood on the men’s bodies and faces draws even more visual
attention. The duration of the violence is also quite different, with the initial
volley of gunfire in Some Like It Hot lasting barely 5 seconds, whereas in The
St Valentine’s Day Massacre it goes on five times as long, a little more than
26 seconds. Thus, the stylistic amplitude of the violence in Corman’s film is
decidedly more extreme in comparison to Wilder’s film in terms of both the
graphicness of the violence (the use of squibs and visible blood, as well as
focus on the victims’ suffering and pain) and duration (taking up five times
as much screen time).

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The instances of violence in films like The St Valentine’s Day Massacre,

Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch were viewed by audiences and critics at
the time as extremely graphic because they deviated from the norm. Andrzej
Wajda’s A Generation (Pokolenie, 1955) is generally considered the first film to
employ a squib to create a bloody eruption on the body to simulate a bullet
strike. As Wajda put it, ‘nobody had as yet been able to convincingly create
the effect of a bullet hitting the human body’, so he tasked his assistant
director Kazimierz Kutz with developing the effect. Katz assembled
a contraption whose ‘main component was a detonator, the kind used in
coalmines to set off dynamite. Kutz fixed it with a bandage onto a lead sheet
to protect the actor’s body. On top of the affixed detonator he attached
a condom filled with blood-coloured liquid. Once the detonator’s cables were
drawn out under the actor’s trousers . . . and connected to a battery, we could
have our explosion.’24 However, such graphic visualisations were not at all
common prior to the late 1960s, particularly in Hollywood, whose produc-
tion practices regarding the depiction of graphic violence were circumscribed
by the Production Code, whose stipulation that ‘brutality and possible grue-
someness’ were to be treated within the careful limits of good taste generally
meant not showing it (as in Some Like It Hot, which was produced while the
Code was still being enforced, although even The St Valentine’s Day Massacre
leaves some violence to the imagination, as Corman chooses not to show the
results of the final use of a shotgun at close range on the dead or dying men).
Today, the use of blood squibs is the norm in depicting bullet wounds and,
while still recognised as a form of graphic violence, is not considered
particularly extreme. Instead, extreme forms of gun violence have evolved
into heads being eviscerated by shotgun blasts (e.g., Drive, 2011), appendages
being blown off (e.g., RoboCop, 1987), and entire bodies being reduced to
bloody shreds by close machine gun fire (e.g., Rambo, 2008). The spurting and
sprays of blood that were previously accomplished with physical effects are
now augmented or replaced entirely by computer-generated imagery in films
such as David Fincher’s Zodiac (2007), Zack Snyder’s Watchmen (2009),
Sylvester Stallone’s The Expendables (2010), Matthew Vaughn’s Kick-Ass
(2010) and Nicholas Winding Refn’s Only God Forgives (2013).
These shifts in what is considered extreme can also be charted by how
films are handled by various ratings and censorship boards. In the United
States, films distributed by the member studios of the Motion Picture
Association of America (MPAA) are assigned an age-appropriate rating by

24 Andrzej Wajda, Wajda Films (Warsaw: Wydawnictwa Artystyczne i Filmowe, 1996), p. 33.

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the Classification and Ratings Administration (CARA), which was instituted

in November 1968 by the MPAA as a replacement for the increasingly
outdated Production Code. Kevin S. Sandler has argued that the key to the
functionality of the MPAA ratings system is its stability of meaning over time,
with each rating category25 being ‘historically stable, but always transitory’;26
in other words, the overall meaning of each category must remain relatively
the same over time even if the specifics of what content warrants each rating
changes. CARA has long been accused of being more lenient towards
violence than sex when applying its two age-restrictive ratings – R (no one
under 17 admitted without a parent or guardian) and X (no one under 17
admitted), which was replaced in 1990 by NC-17 – which is why people took
notice in 1974 when the board, under the leadership of the newly installed
chairman Richard Heffner, gave the Japanese martial arts film The Street
Fighter (Gekitotsu! Satsujin ken, 1974) an X rating for its violence, something
that had never happened before.27 Heffner openly proclaimed that he
intended to be stricter than his predecessor in rating violent films, especially
violent horror films, which is why so many of them had to return repeatedly
to the editing room in order to secure a market-friendly R-rating during his
tenure from 1974 to 1994.28 A number of independent producers and directors
refused to accept an X rating and instead released their films unrated; these
included George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978), William Lustig’s
Maniac (1980), Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead (1982) and Evil Dead II (1987), and
Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator (1985). Yet, viewing these films today, graphi-
cally violent as they are, it is difficult to conclude that they are any more so
than recently released R-rated films like Rob Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects
(2005), Neil Marshall’s The Descent (2005), Alexandre Aja’s Piranha remake
(2010), Fede Alvarez’s The Evil Dead remake (2013), and Eli Roth’s The Green
Inferno (2015), or any given episode of the AMC cable television series The
Walking Dead (2011–).29

25 The current MPAA age-based ratings system includes five ratings: G (general
audiences), PG (parental guidance suggested), PG-13 (may not be appropriate for
children under 13), R (no under 17 without an adult), and NC-17 (no one under 17).
The PG-13 rating was added in 1984 and the NC-17 replaced the X rating in 1990.
26 Kevin S. Sandler, ‘Moving Ratings as Genre: The Incontestable R’, in Steve Neale (ed.),
Genre and Contemporary Hollywood (London: BFI, 2002), pp. 201–17, at 209.
27 Gerard Jones, ‘The Man Who Gave an “X” Rating to Violence’, New York Times,
11 May 1975, sec. D.
28 James Kendrick, Hollywood Bloodshed: Violence in 1980s American Cinema (Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press, 2009), pp. 144–52.
29 For an example, see the detailed discussion of how The Evil Dead remake pushes the
R-rated envelope in Drew McWeeny, ‘Did “Evil Dead” Just Break the R Rating?’,
HitFix, www.hitfix.com/motion-captured/did-evil-dead-just-break-the-r-rating.

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In England, films are classified by the British Board of Film Classification

(BBFC), which was founded in 1912 as the British Board of Film Censors. While
the board began classifying films in just two categories – U (Universal, suitable
for children) and A (Adult, children must be accompanied by an adult) – it has
grown and evolved over the years, particularly in the 1980s in response to the
growing home video industry and the attendant ‘video nasty’ scare, when the
country was thrown into a social panic over the easy availability of graphically
violent horror films.30 The BBFC now has seven rating categories, ranging
from U (Universal, suitable for all) to R18 (Restricted 18, restricted to those aged
18 and older at licensed premises only).31 However, unlike the MPAA rating
system, the BBFC can also ban certain films outright from distribution in the
UK, a power it has exercised throughout its history, particularly with regard to
extremely violent films. The BBFC also employs different standards for certify-
ing films on home video versus cinemas, resulting in films that were approved
to play theatrically, but had to be edited for home video distribution or were
banned outright.
But, just as attitudes and expectations have shifted over the years in the
USA, the same has happened in England, and numerous films that were
previously banned or edited for their violent content have since been
approved for distribution in their original, uncut forms. For example, Wes
Craven’s The Last House on the Left (1972), which was initially released on
home video in the early 1980s when the market was unregulated, was banned
by the BBFC for decades once the government required films on home video
to be classified under the Video Recordings Act of 1984. The uncut version of
the film was eventually approved for home video distribution in 2003 with an
18 certificate.32 Similarly, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, despite having played
in London theatres in the early 1970s, was banned from home video distribu-
tion until 1999, when it was approved with an 18 certificate.33 Sergio
Corbucci’s spaghetti western Django (1966) was initially rejected in 1967 by
the BBFC due to its ‘excessive and nauseating violence’; another distributor
pulled it from consideration in 1974 after the board informed them the film

30 James Kendrick, ‘A Nasty Situation: Social Panics, Transnationalism, and the Video
Nasty’, in Steffen Hantke (ed.), Horror Film: Creating and Marketing Fear (Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi, n.d.), pp. 153–72.
31 ‘What Is Classification? British Board of Film Classification’, www.bbfc.co.uk/what-
classification.
32 ‘The Last House on the Left | British Board of Film Classification’, www.bbfc.co.uk
/releases/last-house-left-1972.
33 ‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre | British Board of Film Classification’, www
.bbfc.co.uk/releases/texas-chain-saw-massacre-1974.

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could not be classified without heavy cutting. Yet, it was eventually released
uncut on video in 1993 with an 18 certificate, which was then downgraded to
a 15 certificate when it was resubmitted in 2004.34 Thus, a film that was
deemed so violent in the late 1967 that it couldn’t be shown is now considered
acceptable viewing for teenagers not yet old enough to legally drive.

Viewer Reaction
Regardless of the rating assigned to a film according to its violence, we are
ultimately at the whim of our autonomic nervous systems while watching it.
When we see an act of film violence that seems particularly explicit or
extreme in comparison to the norms to which we have become accustomed,
there will invariably be a strong, visceral reaction – diverting our eyes away
from the gruesome imagery, clutching at a person seated nearby, shrinking in
our chair, and even feeling physical sensations of nausea, light-headedness
and muscle constriction. In fact, one could argue that extreme film violence is
the kind that most thoroughly erases the distance between the spectator and
the act he or she is witnessing, forcing the physical body to react involunta-
rily, which typically marks such violence as an aspect of disreputable ‘low’
culture. Linda Williams, writing about the genres of horror, pornography
and melodrama, noted that they are considered to be low culture due to the
‘perception that the body of the spectator is caught up in an almost involun-
tary mimicry of the emotion or sensation of the body on the screen’.35 Paul
Gormley defines ‘new-brutality films’ in similar physical terms: ‘All these
films attempt to assault the body of the viewer and make the body act
involuntarily . . . these films all make the viewer’s body act in such a way
that it imitates and mimics the actions of the cinematic body, or the bodies
that the viewer experiences on the screen.’36
Interestingly, the idea of a motion picture forcing involuntary reactions
from spectators’ bodies dates back to the earliest projected images, starting
with the accounts of audiences screaming, leaning back in their chairs and
even running panicked from the theatre while watching the Lumières’ short
documentary The Arrival of a Train (L’arrivée d’un train à La Ciotat, 1896),
which depicts a passenger train moving towards and past the camera before
stopping at the station. Although the story of extreme audience panic in

34 ‘Django (1967) | British Board of Film Classification’, www.bbfc.co.uk/case-studies/

django-1967.
35 Linda Williams, ‘Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess’, Film Quarterly 44.4 (1991),
2–13, at 4.
36 Gormley, New-Brutality Film, p. 8.

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response to this film is entirely apocryphal,37 it remains a potent origin point

for the connection between movies and visceral physical reactions.
Given our innate responses to violence, it is not surprising, then, that such
physical reactions became frequently associated with films featuring extreme
forms of violence. Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) is an instructive example,
as it induced in its initial theatrical audiences an intense physical response that
Linda Williams describes from personal experience: ‘I vividly remember
a Saturday matinee in 1960 when two girlfriends and I spent much of the
screening with our eyes shut listening to the music and to the audience’s
screams.’38 The idea that spectators could be literally harmed by the violence
in a film was exploited for marketing purposes by low-budget filmmakers like
William Castle, who took out insurance policies with Lloyd’s of London
against death by fright while watching Macabre (1958), and director Herschell
Gordon Lewis and producer David Friedman, who passed out white vomit
bags for their gory drive-in shocker Blood Feast (1964),39 a gambit that was
used decades later by the distributors of the horror film Bite (2015) when it had
its world premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal.40
In some instances, extreme film violence can and has generated literal
revulsion and physical sickness. When unsuspecting audiences were given
a sneak preview of The Wild Bunch in Kansas City and Fresno in the summer
of 1969, the reaction cards submitted after the screenings provided copious
evidence of how strongly affected many of the spectators were, with reports
of watching the film with one eye closed from behind one’s arms, perspiring
and feeling physically nauseous (these ranged from viewers who said ‘It
made me want to vomit’ and ‘The picture made me want to PUKE’, to at
least one who wrote ‘I vomited’).41 Even today’s supposedly jaded, har-
dened audiences find themselves reacting uncontrollably to the violence in
certain films. In the introduction of their book The New Extremism in Cinema:
From France to Europe, Tanya Horeck and Tina Kendall note that the
reception of the new wave of extreme art-house films coming out of
Europe in the early 2000s, ‘whose brutal and visceral images appear

37 Martin Loiperdinger, ‘Lumière’s “Arrival of the Train”: Cinema’s Founding Myth’, The
Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists 4.1 (2004), 89–118.
38 Linda Williams, ‘Learning to Scream’, Sight and Sound 4.12 (1994), 14–00, at 15.
39 Christopher Wayne Curry and John W. Curry, A Taste of Blood: The Films of Herschell
Gordon Lewis (London: Creation Books, 1999), p. 61.
40 Dave Gonzales, ‘Body Horror Film Bite Is Making Audience Members Faint’, www
.geek.com/geek-cetera/bite-the-body-horror-film-that-is-making-audience-members-
faint-1630319/.
41 Kjetil Rødje, Images of Blood in American Cinema: The Tingler to The Wild Bunch
(Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 140–3.

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designed deliberately to shock or provoke the spectator’, were charac-

terised by ‘Reports of fainting, vomiting and mass walkouts’.42 After the
2002 Cannes Film Festival screening of Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible, which
features a graphic 10-minute rape scene, fire wardens administered oxygen
to twenty people who fainted;43 the premiere of Bite resulted in two people
fainting and one person vomiting, which led to an ambulance being called
to the theatre;44 and there were reports of multiple viewers passing out at
a screening of Raw at the 2016 Toronto Film Festival.45 Such responses are
not always confined to horror films and art-house provocations either;
there were numerous reports of viewers fainting or vomiting at screenings
of Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours (2010) when the protagonist is forced to cut his
own hand off with a pocket knife,46 and the premiere screening of Alejandro
G. Inarritu’s multiple-Oscar-winning The Revenant (2015) was marked by
a number of people walking out because they were unable or unwilling to
handle the film’s starkly realistic violence.47 Thus, the connection between
movies and visceral physical responses, symbolically originating with spec-
tators fleeing in fear of the image of a train coming towards them, remains
powerfully in effect.

Conclusion
Violent films have been, and continue to be, a staple of Western culture.
They are omnipresent – in the theatres, on television, on DVD and Blu-ray,
and streaming online. The presentation of graphic violence has become ‘an

42 Tanya Horeck and Tina Kendall, ‘Introduction’, in Horeck and Kendall (eds.), The New
Extremism in Cinema: From France to Europe (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2011), p. 1.
43 ‘Cannes Film Sickens Audience’, BBC, 26 May 2002, sec. Entertainment, http://news
.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/2008796.stm.
44 Gonzales, ‘Body Horror Film Bite’.
45 Vikram Murthi, ‘“Raw”: Cannibal Film Screening Causes TIFF Moviegoers to Pass
Out’, IndieWire, 14 September 2016, www.indiewire.com/2016/09/raw-tiff-2016-
toronto-film-festival-pass-out-cannibal-julia-ducournau-1201726575/; Tatiana Siegel,
‘Toronto: Multiple Moviegoers Pass Out During Screening of Cannibal Movie
“Raw”’, Hollywood Reporter, 13 September 2016, www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/
toronto-multiple-moviegoers-pass-screening-928431.
46 S. T. VanAirsdale, ‘Armed and Dangerous: A Comprehensive Timeline of Everyone
Who’s Fainted (Or Worse) at 127 Hours’, Movieline, 4 November 2010, http://movie
line.com/2010/11/04/armed-and-dangerous-a-comprehensive-timeline-of-everyone-
whos-fainted-at-127-hours/.
47 Scott Feinberg, ‘Leonardo DiCaprio’s “The Revenant” Debuts: Brutal, Gory, Oscar-
Bound? (Analysis)’, Hollywood Reporter, www.hollywoodreporter.com/race/leonardo-
dicaprios-revenant-debuts-brutal-843492.

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intrinsic part of contemporary cinema’,48 and it attracts large audiences all

over the world. Viewers in the USA, Europe and around the world spend
hundreds of millions of dollars every year at the cinema watching people
being shot, beaten, burned and dismembered. Yet we continue to have
a strange relationship with cinematic violence – at once drawn to and
repelled by it. As film critic Stephen Hunter noted: ‘We abhor the authentic
stuff, and turn in national revulsion from it. Then we go pay seven bucks to
watch it in Technicolor in the mall.’49 Questions persist about the place of
extreme violence in our entertainment, the purposes it might serve, and how
it might affect and be affected by societal and cultural norms and limits. The
continual presence of such violence throughout the history of Western
cinema – from single-shot primitive documentaries of executions and boxing
matches, to today’s epic spectacles costing hundreds of millions of dollars –
speaks to its fundamental appeal and endless source of fascination. In his book
The Fascination of Film Violence, Henry Bacon asks, ‘Is it even possible to depict
horrific violence in a way that would not be potentially fascinating?’50 The
past 120 years of cinema seem to suggest that the answer is no.

Bibliographical Essay
Prior to the 1960s, the vast majority of writing about film violence was confined to empirical
effects research, whose goal was to find causal connections between viewing of violent
content and subsequent behaviour. Even after its mid-twentieth-century institutionalisation
as an academic discipline, film scholarship has often treated violence as a secondary concern,
which for a long time left a gap in the research literature that seems all the more obvious
when one considers how other humanities disciplines, such as literary studies and
anthropology, often privilege violence as a primary mode of signification.
However, since the millennium an upsurge in film violence scholarship has created an
ongoing discourse among scholars about the role it plays. Three of the classic works that
helped push this dialogue forward are L. Alloway, Violent America: The Movies 1946–1964
(New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1971), J. Fraser, Violence in the Arts (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1974) and T. R. Atkins (ed.), Graphic Violence on the Screen
(New York: Monarch Press, 1976).
There are a number of fine anthologies, histories and overviews. For general, concise
overviews of the subject, see J. Kendrick, Film Violence: History, Ideology, Genre (London:
Wallflower, 2009) and S. Prince, ‘Graphic Violence in the Cinema: Origins, Aesthetic
Design, and Social Effects’, in Prince (ed.), Screening Violence (New Brunswick: Rutgers

48 Laurent Bouzereau, Ultraviolent Movies: From Sam Peckinpah to Quentin Tarantino

(Secaucus: Citadel Press, 1996), p. ix.
49 Stephen Hunter, Violent Screen: A Critic’s 13 Years on the Front Lines of Movie Mayhem
(New York: Dell, 1995), p. xix.
50 Bacon, Fascination of Film Violence, p. 101.

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University Press, 2000). Anthologies that offer a wide variety of perspectives include
J. D. Slocum (ed.), Violence and American Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2001); S. Prince
(ed.), Screening Violence (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000); S. J. Schneider
(ed.), New Hollywood Violence (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004); C. Sharrett
(ed.), Mythologies of Violence in Postmodern Media (Detroit: Wayne State University Press,
1999); M. Barker and J. Petley (eds.), Ill Effects: The Media/Violence Debate (London:
Routledge, 1997); K. French (ed.), Screen Violence (London: Bloomsbury, 1996).
For histories of film violence, see S. Prince, Classical Film Violence: Designing and Regulating
Brutality in Hollywood Cinema, 1930–1968 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003);
chapter 2 in J. Kendrick, Film Violence: History, Ideology, Genre (London: Wallflower, 2009);
chapter 1 in S. Prince, Savage Cinema: Sam Peckinpah and the Rise of Ultraviolent Movies (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1998); and several relevant sections in H. Schechter, Savage
Pastimes: A Cultural History of Violent Entertainment (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2005).
The poetics of film violence has only recently been explored and it challenges many of
our preconceptions regarding how film violence ‘works’. See chapter 3 in H. Bacon, The
Fascination of Film Violence (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); S. Prince, ‘Beholding
Blood Sacrifice in The Passion of the Christ: How Real Is Movie Violence?’, Film Quarterly
59.4 (2006), 11–22; S. Prince ‘The Aesthetics of Slow-Motion Violence in the Films of Sam
Peckinpah’, in Prince (ed.), Screening Violence (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press),
pp. 175–204; D. A. Cook, ‘Ballistic Balletics: Styles of Violent Representations in The Wild
Bunch and After’, in S. Prince (ed.), Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999).
The recent rise of extreme violence and torture porn has led to a new emphasis in the
scholarship, which can be seen in A. M. Kerner, Torture Porn in the Wake of 9/11: Horror,
Exploitation, and the Cinema of Sensation (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015);
T. Horeck and T. Kendall (eds.), The New Extremism in Cinema: From France to Europe
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011); J. Middleton, ‘The Subject of Torture:
Regarding the Pain of Americans in Hostel’, Cinema Journal 49.4 (2010), 1–24; G. Murray,
‘Hostel II: Representations of the Body in Pain and the Cinematic Experience in Torture-
Porn’, Jump Cut (Spring 2008), www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc50.2008/TortureHostel2/;
M. Brottman, Offensive Films (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2005); P. Gormley,
The New-Brutality Film: Race and Affect in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema (Bristol: Intellect,
2005); J. Black, ‘Real(ist) Horror: From Execution Videos to Snuff Films’, in X. Mendik and
S. J. Schnedier (eds.), Underground U.S.A.: Filmmaking beyond the Hollywood Canon
(New York: Wallflower, 2002).
There have also been a number of intriguing works that have interrogated the audience’s
relationship to film violence and its inherent fascination. See H. Bacon, The Fascination of Film
Violence (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); T. McGowan, ‘A Violent Ethics: Mediation
and the Death Drive’, in R. Bégin (ed.), Figures de violence (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2011);
B. W. Donovan, Blood, Guns, and Testosterone: Action Films, Audiences, and a Thirst for
Violence (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2009); J. H. Goldstein (ed.), Why We Watch: The
Attractions of Violent Entertainment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); S. Bok, Mayhem:
Violence as Public Entertainment (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1998); A. Hill, Shocking
Entertainment: Viewer Response to Violent Movies (Luton: Luton University Press, 1997).

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 29
Representing Violence through Media
jolyon mitchell

Representations of violence have become visual commonplaces, bringing distant

conflicts and faraway wounds close.1 Over the last century different media from
all over the world have offered audiences image after image of violence. They
have come in many different forms: from grainy black and white film footage of
the Battle of the Somme (1916), via the jerky colour Zapruder film of John F.
Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas (1963) to countless pictures of a plane crashing
into a skyscraper in New York (2001), or mobile phone footage of ‘democracy’
protestors being confronted by masked gangs or armed police in Hong Kong
(2019). These and other now familiar representations of violence have tended to
dominate the collective memory in Europe and North America. There are many
other images from around the world that also now circulate the globe: the
mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki (1945), a summary execution in
a Vietnamese street (1968), a photograph of a young man carrying the body of 12-
year-old Hector Pieterson in Soweto, South Africa (1976), a rare film of two
women in the distance being hacked to death in the middle of a street during the
1994 genocide in Rwanda, and more recently films of hostages in Iraq being
beheaded (c. 2014–16). Such representations have become ubiquitous, shaping
how events are remembered and interpreted, so becoming part of a symbolic
reservoir. Moments captured on film are often drawn upon metonymically to
illustrate wider historical movements and fault lines. Technological advances
have amplified the power of individual representations. Images both of actual
violence and of its effects are invariably now digitised and easily available online.
A few clicks on a smartphone or laptop, and these images, along with millions of
others, are almost instantaneously available. A global history of past and present
violence is there for the watching. With the development of the internet and the

1 This chapter draws upon, adapts and updates material from Jolyon Mitchell, Media
Violence and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), especially
chapters 1–3.

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World Wide Web these traces of bloodshed are easily accessed, preserved and
circulated.
In the pages that follow I analyse how audiences, journalists and producers
interact with media representations of violence. More precisely I examine the
practices of revealing, representing, redacting, remembering and responding to
images of violence, using a wide range of examples from different media. While
recognising the power of vivid journalistic written and verbal descriptions of
violence, this chapter primarily considers visual representations over the last two
centuries, starting from the 1810s, in the decade before the first photograph
(c. 1826), to the present day. As the previous chapter has considered cinematic
violence, this one will concentrate upon non-cinematic examples, such as
photographic portrayals of non-fictional violence. Other practices such as hiding,
selecting, overlooking, forgetting and recollecting will be juxtaposed with these
core practices of revealing, representing, redacting, remembering and respond-
ing. My argument is that these related practices contribute to the way violence
manifests itself around the circuit of communication, which begins with acts of
creation and production of images of violence, and which is then followed by
their dissemination, reception and recycling. Reflecting further on this circuit of
communication and these related practices will help answer questions such as:
Why do certain images of violence receive more attention than others? Why are
some media representations of violence remembered and others easily forgot-
ten? Before turning to these and related questions it is useful to reflect upon the
recurring tension between reticence and exposure, discernible in the evolution
of representations of violence.

Revealing: Reticence and Exposure

At first sight it is tempting to see representations of violence as evolving in a
straight line over the last two centuries from reticence to exposure. Early
photography, like Ancient Greek drama, typically shows the after-effects of
violence, rather than the actual moment of conflict and killing. Roger
Fenton’s The Valley of the Shadow of Death (1855) shows nothing but a rough
road with over fifty cannonballs littering the ground. Many believe that
Fenton personally ‘oversaw the scattering of cannonballs on the road itself’,
to portray the supposed location where over a hundred British soldiers met
their deaths in the Crimean War (1853–6), ‘even though the infamous charge
of the Light Brigade had not taken place there’.2 This ‘landscape of aftermath’

2 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003), p. 54.

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creates a ‘terrible beauty’.3 Often described as the first British war photo-
grapher, Fenton took over 300 pictures in Crimea. Most of his pictures are
peaceful portraits of soldiers, beside their horses or tents, as well as of
encampments in rough landscapes and ships docked in small ports. The
‘enemy’ are almost entirely invisible. It is possible, however, that some of
Fenton’s seeming reticence was born of technical necessity, as much as of
cultural sensitivity: cumbersome materials, combined with a photographic
process unable yet to capture movement, limited Fenton’s options for
representing violence.
Photographers of the American Civil War (1861–5) demonstrate far less
reticence. In July 1863 Alexander Gardner and Timothy O’Sullivan took
photographs of soldiers’ corpses, sometimes moving them to picturesque
sites and into more dramatic poses. Gardner, in his Photographic Sketch Book
of the War (1865–6), may have gone so far as to use the same corpses in
photographs representing both Union and Confederate dead. For Gardner
these photographs underline ‘the blank horror and reality of war, in opposition
to its pageantry. Here are the dreadful details! Let them aid in preventing such
another calamity falling upon the nation.’4 Many viewers were shocked by
what they saw: several of Gardner’s 1862 photographs of the dead at Antietam,
Maryland, were displayed in a New York gallery, and, said the New York Times,
did ‘something to bring home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war.
If he has not brought the bodies and laid them in our dooryards and along the
streets, they [the photographs] had done something very like it.’5 By photo-
graphing corpses, Gardner overcame the technical difficulties of representing
extreme violence in photography, to produce images that pulled new punches.
Other media than photography, however, have been used to portray
violence realistically. The Disasters of War (Los desastres de la guerra, 1810–20),
a series of eighty-two monochrome prints by the Spanish painter Francisco
Goya, is a good example. They reveal the consequences of war between the
French and the Spanish for both civilians and soldiers. Some are disturbing and
hard to look at, revealing acts of brutality, cruelty and violence: a man is about
to bring down his axe and decapitate a soldier on the ground (plate 3), soldiers
attempt to rape women (plates 9 and 10), dismembered and mutilated corpses

3 Simon Grant, ‘A Terrible Beauty’, Tate etc. 5 (Autumn 2005), www.tate.org.uk/context-

comment/articles/terrible-beauty.
4 Alexander Gardner, Photographic Sketch Book of the War, 2 vols. (Washington, DC: Philip
& Solomons, 1865 and 1866), see plates 36 and 37. See also William Frassanito, Gettysburg:
A Journey in Time (New York: Scribner’s, 1975), pp. 186–92, and also 222–9.
5 Editorial, New York Times, 26 October 1862. See also Bob Zeller, The Blue and the Grey in
Black and White: A History of Civil War Photography (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005).

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are depicted impaled or hanging from trees (plates 37 and 39). Plate 60 shows a
weeping woman, with three women’s bodies at her feet. It is entitled: ‘There is
no one to help them’ (No hay quien los socorra). This cry of pain illustrates the
potential of visual representation to expose the realities of violence on indivi-
duals. ‘The uniqueness and power of much of Goya’s imagery of war lie in the
fact that he isolates individual vignettes, giving the paradigmatic “inhumanity
of war” an all too human face. Often that face is transformed by the violence it
imposes or suffers.’6 Goya puts it well with the ironic title of one of his prints:
‘One cannot look at [this]’ (No se puede mirar, plate 26).
Of course, one can be both drawn and repulsed by what is portrayed in
these forms of realistic art and subsequent news photography. ‘Whereas
earlier artists (and many of Goya’s successors as well) were concerned with
their ability to transform realities into a pleasing or instructive picture, Goya
and the modern news photographer convey observations with uncompro-
mising immediacy.’ Several scholars have pointed to the parallels between
these communicative practices. For Fred Licht, ‘Goya and news photogra-
phers do not allow us time to enter their pictorial space gradually but
aggressively arrest our attention with the incontrovertibility of a blow.’7
By contrast, even today creators of news will show reticence: there are
many images that news editors will not publish or broadcast. Most stopped
broadcasting live film of people jumping from the Twin Towers in
Manhattan on 9/11 once they realised what was happenning. The extent of
restraint varies from region to region: in Carnage and the Media Jean Seaton
observes how a ‘chairman of an international television conference after the
attacks of 11 September’ remarked that ‘there had been a real “difference
between the kind of pictures that were shown on the northern-European TV
and the much greater detail of carnage that was shown in the south … I think
you have to conclude that religion made a difference. The Catholic south was
more comfortable with death on screen.”’8
While it is possible to describe the evolution of representing violence as a
move from reticence to exposure, this would be too simple. Even in the earliest
days of photographic reporting some sought to reveal through their work the
human costs of violence. Modern photographers who reflect the effects of
violence are part of a long tradition. Some images have an iconic quality, such

6 Janis A. Tomlinson, ‘Images of Women in Goya’s Prints and Drawings’, in Tomlison

(ed.), Goya: Images of Women (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2002), p. 63.
7 Fred Licht, Goya (New York: Abbeville Press, 2003), p. 180.
8 Jean Seaton, Carnage and the Media: The Making and Breaking of News about Violence
(London: Allen Lane, 2005), p. 224.

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as the shot of a 9-year-old girl running naked, screaming, away from a Napalm
attack in Vietnam (1972). Nick Ut, who took this picture, said ‘The photo was as
authentic as the Vietnam War itself.’9 This act of exposure became a persuasive
witness to the impact on fragile bodies of dropping Napalm, and, beyond that,
symbolic of how civilians and children can all too easily be caught up in conflict.
But as the example of Goya shows, this was not new.

Representing: Spectacular Violence

Why do certain kinds of violence attract more coverage than others? The
most obvious example of an instance of violence that attracted a great deal
of coverage is that of the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York
on September 11, 2001. Within a few minutes of American Airlines Flight 11
hitting the North Tower numerous cameras were trained on the scene and
were able to film the second plane crashing into the South Tower, and the
subsequent collapse of both towers. These images were repeated again and
again over the next hours and days, often in slow motion, allowing
audiences around the world to watch the images again and again.
Repeated viewing led some young children to believe similar attacks
were still occurring. This was unarguably an event of great significance
and, above all, a terrible personal tragedy for those killed, injured or
otherwise caught up in it. In the words of an experienced BBC reporter,
James Robbins, speaking on a BBC 1 news report, following these attacks:
‘an entire society feels violated by terror’. The ripples spread throughout
North America and became the catalyst for the global ‘war on terror’.
Nevertheless, a question can be asked about the scale of the media
representation. Many commentators claimed this was ‘the biggest story’ of
their lifetimes or the ‘biggest since the end of the Second World War’, many
networks devoting their entire schedules to the story for several days. For
Dan Rather, ‘September 11 was unlike anything we’d seen before’; Tom
Brokaw said he ‘never thought there would be a story of this magnitude or
a story this horrifying’.10 A BBC executive passed a note to the experienced
broadcaster Robin Lustig while on air: ‘This is the biggest global story for 50

9 William Kelly, Art and Humanist Ideals: Contemporary Perspectives (South Yarra:
MacMillan Art, 2003), pp. 284–5.
10 Alison Gilbert et al. (eds.), Covering Catastrophe (Chicago: Bonus Books, 2002), p. 245.
See also Barbie Zelizer and Stuart Allan (eds.), Journalism after September 11 (London:
Routledge, 2002), p. 5; Guy Gugliotta, ‘Magnitude beyond Anything We’d Seen
Before’,Washington Post, 12 September 2001, p. A18.

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years.’11 One of Fox News’s vice-presidents said ‘I think at first our audience
and all the television news were like moths to the flame … We were addicted
to the video of the horrific event.’12 It is worth asking why editors were so
addicted.
New York is the news-media capital of the USA. The news personnel,
production facilities and infrastructure were situated near to the attacks. Both
Rather and Brokaw recall being able to see the event for themselves the
moment after they heard of it through the media. Several journalists were
nearby covering other stories and retrained their cameras onto the ‘smoke
pouring out of the World Trade Center’. Breaking news broke, as it seldom
does, in the domestic spaces of a generation of reporters.
The 2003 Iraq War provides an interesting contrary case. The 700 or so
embedded journalists were able to provide close-up pictures of fighting, but by
their own admission were often unable to describe the ‘big picture’. The
journalists at the media centres in Qatar found themselves in an even more
frustrating situation than those trapped in the media pools at Dahran in the 1991
Gulf War: many returned home early. Their access to news stories and pictures
was severely limited by the military press minders. Only a few unilateral
journalists working independently of army units were able to capture the kind
of distinctive footage and interviews available to all journalists during 9/11, and
this at the cost of being exposed to considerable physical danger.
In short, where the journalist is, where the output is produced and where
the events take place make a difference to what is reported on. Whether or
not you can see the event, and perhaps are caught up in it, influences
perception of what is newsworthy. Imagine how news values would alter if
most major news networks had their executive offices and editing suites in
north-eastern Congo. Location matters.
Moreover, some locations are more symbolic than others. Nancy Gibbs
wrote in Time: ‘If you want to humble an empire it makes sense to maim its
cathedrals. They are symbols of its faith, and when they crumple and burn, it
tells us we are not so powerful and we can’t be safe.’13 And of course the
symbolism of the Twin Towers was by no means the most important layer of
tragic meaning. These buildings were populated. The victims came not just

11 Lustig thought of one story more significant: ‘I can just remember the Cuba missile
crisis in 1962, and to me, that was even bigger, because it carried with it the threat of
nuclear war between the two main super-powers. But it was close.’ British Journalism
Review 12.4 (2001), 14–26.
12 Zelizer and Allan (eds.), Journalism after September 11, p. 4.
13 Nancy Gibbs, Time, 14 September 2001, 158.12.

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from the USA, but from some eighty-three other nations from around the
world. All of this helped to personalise the story, for viewers and editors alike.
The economics of production also shapes news. Stories originating in
Africa tend to be less profitable than those in wealthier nations with a larger
media presence, partly because of what richer news consumers want to view,
and partly because of the cost of providing the images. Many Western news
organisations closed foreign bureaux to save costs in the 1980s and 1990s,
which had questionable effects on framing of news stories in the West, effects
that have not been reversed by the keener interest in foreign news after 9/11.
News organisations still rely on ‘fire-fighter’ journalists ‘parachuted’ into
conflict zones equipped with highly portable cameras but often lacking the
linguistic, cultural or historical knowledge to make sense of what they film.
Given such practices, it is not surprising that many journalists are drawn
towards covering the spectacular. Guy Debord, the French theorist and
author of The Society of the Spectacle, argued that spectacle depoliticises and
pacifies the public, whilst affirming the power of the ‘ruling order’.14 Reliance
by news organisations on daily spectacles of relatable violence can contribute
to an incomplete understanding of the nature and causes of conflict. As Eddie
Adams reflectively said of his own work: ‘Still photographs are the most
powerful weapons in the world. People believe them; but photographs do lie,
even without manipulation. They are only half-truths.’15

Redacting: Hidden Violence

The other side of this coin is that much violence is overlooked or hidden in
the news media. The recurring, daily violence against women around the
world, the hidden, ongoing war between the Turkish government and Kurds,
and the regular strafing by helicopters of villagers in central or southern
Sudan to clear the way for oil exploration rarely make it into the frames of
Western news channels. There are exceptions. Some commentators write
about the ‘Hidden truth of violence against women’, or the ‘Hidden violence
blighting women’s lives’.16 Nevertheless, celebrity stories take priority. For
instance, in June 2005, CNN, Fox News, NBC, ABC and CBS ‘collectively ran
55 times as many stories about Michael Jackson as they ran about the

14 See Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red, 1967), paragraph
24. See also Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (London: Verso, 1990).
15 Eddie Adams, ‘Eulogy: General Nguen Ngoc Loan’, Time, 27 July 1998,
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,988783,00.html.
16 http://weareagenda.org/hidden-violence-blighting-womens-lives/.

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genocide in Darfur’, leading one writer for the New York Times to muse: ‘If
only Michael Jackson’s trial had been held in Darfur.’17 Likewise, the war in
the Democratic Republic of the Congo, described by Fergal Keane as ‘Africa’s
Forgotten and Hidden War’,18 supposedly claimed over 6 million lives in two
decades, but received limited coverage in Western media. Even a small
fraction of this number of casualties in North America or Europe would
have received far more global media attention. Consider, for example, the
extensive coverage of the lorry attack in Nice on Bastille Day, 2016, as
opposed to the near silence regarding the ongoing conflicts and violence in
parts of North and sub-Saharan Africa and Yemen. If such violence is covered
in the West it is often towards the end of news bulletins in abbreviated
reports, or hidden away inside broadsheet newspapers or specialist sections
on news internet sites.
Journalists repeatedly use the phrase ‘Africa’s Forgotten War’ to describe
these and similar conflicts. Even coverage of violence in Syria and Iraq
commonly eclipses most stories from Africa. At times during 2016 the bombing
of east Aleppo or the struggle for Mosul dominated many Western news
reports. Aid workers often describe the country where they work as suffering
from a ‘forgotten war’ as a way to wrench the West’s attention onto potential
humanitarian disasters. For example, in 2016 Amnesty International described
the conflict between Saudi Arabia and the Huthi in Yemen as ‘the Forgotten
War’. Over ten years earlier the British development charity Action Aid’s chief
executive Salil Shetty claimed that ‘Liberia is Africa’s forgotten war.’19 Or more
recently Radio Free Europe described the ‘simmering conflict’ in Donbas as
‘Ukraine’s Forgotten War’ (26 July 2016). Such descriptions and predictions are
then used by journalists or NGOs to frame particular conflicts, as they attempt
to awaken Western public opinion.
Religious leaders have sometimes made use of the ‘forgotten war’ motif as
a way of pleading for aid, dialogue and peace-making. Under the headline
‘John Paul II Recalls “Forgotten Wars”’, the Vatican’s international news
agency Zenit described how the then pope, during one of his general
audiences in Rome, reminded his audience of around 25,000 that, while the

17 Nicholas D. Kristof, ‘All Ears for Tom Cruise, All Eyes on Brad Pitt’, New York Times, 26
July 2005. See also the Tyndall Report for detailed monitoring statistics, www.tyndallre
port.com/yearinreview.php3.
18 Fergal Keane, ‘Africa’s Forgotten and Ignored War’, BBCi News UK Edition, 18 October
2003.
19 See UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Irin News.Org (Integrated
Regional Information Networks) ‘LIBERIA: 30,000 displaced people living in a sta-
dium’, 12 June 2003.

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media may have forgotten them, there are conflicts ‘lacerating Africa’ which
are sowing death, hatred and poverty:
From Angola to the Great Lakes, from Congo-Brazzaville to Sierra Leone,
from Guinea Bissau to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, from the
Horn of Africa to Sudan, there is a long and bitter series of internal conflicts,
as well as inter-Nation conflicts which, above all, strike innocent peoples and
affect the lives of the Catholic communities.20

Earlier studies show that ‘Third World’ coverage in the Western press has
a long-term tendency to focus on violence, conflict and disorder. On rare
occasions where African conflicts are covered, reports tend to highlight
brutality and the predicament of victims. African countries are often
caricatured as isolated places of little hope whose troubles are home-
grown, ignoring how inextricably connected the continent is with the
rest of the global and political economy. In a brief news report it is hard to
investigate whether violence has roots in the colonial divisions of the
nineteenth century, the Cold War hostilities of the twentieth century, or
the economic power exerted by multinational companies in the twenty-
first century. Exceptions can be found in documentaries, weekend news-
paper supplements or alternative news websites: but news which focuses
on the spectacular or proximate contributes to forgetfulness of other
places.
The redaction of violent events ‘elsewhere’ is the other side of the focus on
spectacular violence closer to home. In a well-known piece of research, ‘The
Structure of Foreign News’,21 Galtung and Ruge suggest that if a news story is
culturally proximate, concerned with elite nations or elite people, and is
negative and unexpected, it is more likely to be selected for coverage by
journalistic gatekeepers than a story that is not. While Galtung and Ruge’s
work has been both criticised and developed, with political, cultural, eco-
nomic and geographic factors being included in explaining why news tends in
the West to ignore African wars, their work is still widely cited; 9/11 fulfilled
all their criteria, whilst the civil war in the Congo and other chronic violent
stories fulfilled few, if any. Journalists rarely reflect formally upon news
criteria, relying on ‘gut instinct’ and ‘local debate’, which has been described
as their habitus, doxa or lifeworld: but that does not mean that implicit

20 John Paul II in The Daily Dispatch: The World Seen from Rome (Rome: Zenit), 21 April
1999.
21 Johan Galtung and Mari Holmboe Ruge, ‘The Structure of Foreign News: The
Presentation of the Congo, Cuba and Cyprus Crises in Four Norwegian
Newspapers’, Journal of Peace Research 2 (1965), 64–91.

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criteria are not applied. African wars are seen as ‘business as usual’ among
elite audiences, so senior journalists and editors perceive audience interest as
lacking, and such stories fall out of the dominant Western news frames. Even
with the apparent democratisation of news, through many internet sites and
citizen journalists, Western news organisations remain dominant in many
parts of the world because of the economic power they hold, allowing them
to dictate what makes it into the news.

Remembering: Amnesia and Recollection

Since the 1980s, memory researchers have explored how recollections move
from temporary short-term memory to longer-term storage. Why do some
painful or traumatic memories persist? Why do some violent news reports or
violent films stick so firmly in the memory? Research suggests that emotional
resonance is implicated.22 If an event is associated with or coincides with a
heightened emotional state, then the memory will be retained firmly.
Viewers of news may sometimes remember even more clearly than partici-
pants or eyewitnesses: many viewers of 9/11 have clear memories of the
attacks, while many actually involved were so traumatised that their mem-
ories are far more blurred.
To explore how this works in detail I draw on some of my empirical
research, which included asking over 400 respondents in mixed groups from
all over the UK and beyond which images of violence from the news they
could remember. Most of this questioning took place before the 7 July 2005
London bombings, but over three years soon after 9/11. It now provides a
historical insight into some of the most remembered stories during that
period. The most commonly recalled violent images included many from
Iraq: vehicles ablaze after car bomb explosions in Baghdad; a marine shooting
an injured man in a mosque in Fallujah. Many recollected pictures of children
running out of School No.1 in Beslan, South Russia; a shattered train after a
terrorist attack in Madrid; and, most consistently, a number of images related
to the events in Manhattan on 11 September 2001. Many were able to describe
exactly where they were when they saw this news. Such remembering,
where individuals recall precise details, is often described as ‘flashbulb
memory’.23 Fifteen years later many can still recall where they were and

22 See A. D. Baddeley, Working Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), which is
an update of his 1974 work with G. J. Hitch. See also Jackie Andrade, Working Memory in
Perspective (London: Taylor & Francis, 2001), pp. 3–30.
23 Martin Conway, Flashbulb Memories (New York: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1995).

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what they saw of the 9/11 attacks. Images from Sarajevo, Rwanda and Darfur
were less commonly recalled. Two factors implicated in the patterns of
remembering are proximity and repetition. Despite the access of residents
of what Marshal McLuhan famously described as our ‘global village’ to
images of the violence experienced by their ‘electronic’ neighbours, the
violence that was most remembered tended to be that physically, or some-
times psychologically, close to where viewers lived. And repeated viewing,
typified by the experience of so many people who watched the 9/11 footage,
also appears to embed these memories firmly in viewers’ minds.
Of course, not all viewers live in the USA and Western Europe: all violence
takes place where someone lives. Viewers who live close to conflict or who
experience violence first-hand, find this colours their memories. A Serbian
academic from Belgrade recalls pictures of the state television station
damaged by NATO bombing in April 1999, and she admits that her memory
of the media coverage is reinforced by having seen the devastation with her
own eyes. Others found that the recycling of graphic news images led to
more immediate recall. A middle-aged Korean man vividly recalled images
from the 1980 Kwangju massacre, in part he said, because twenty years later
images from the massacre, such as a student being beaten by a soldier, were
commonly reused by local Korean television stations and newspapers. These
media images reinforced his own actual memories.
Alongside proximity and repetition/recycling there is another reason for
viewers remembering news images: identification. In Northern Ireland, out
of thirty Protestants aged between 39 and 69 years old not one recalled
images from ‘Bloody Sunday’ (30 January 1972), where thirteen Catholics
had been killed, whereas they did recall images of IRA violence. Memories
which make a significant emotional impact tend to be retained in what is
often described by cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists as the episodic
or autobiographical memory. And emotional impact is connected with
identification: the more closely you identify with the people involved in the
violent situation, the more emotional impact the image will have, and the
deeper will be the memory. Thus many Muslims found the depiction of
violence against fellow Muslims in both Iraq and Afghanistan distressing or
enraging, which contributed to their recalling the related images.
Identification can substitute for proximity. Take as an example the massive
response to the shooting of fifteen 5- and 6-year-olds and their teacher in
Dunblane, Scotland, on 13 March, 1996, by people from all over the world.
News about the shootings at a Port Arthur tourist site in Tasmania (1996) and
at Columbine high school in Colorado, USA (1999) were remembered by

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many respondents in Scotland even though they were many thousands of

miles away from the event. Resonating with the Dunblane story,
these distant tragedies were brought close by immediate news images and
reports.24 Many respondents also did not distinguish between seeing specta-
cular acts of terrorism and seeing images from recent wars. It was easier to
remember the spectacular event rather than the context in which it was set.
Domestic violence, which, as suggested earlier, is normally left outside the
news frame, was never recalled, despite its being ubiquitous and terrible.
It is also important to note that, alongside television, the internet, news-
papers and other channels play an important role. One respondent said: ‘The
most powerful images I had from July 7 were from narratives in newspapers.’
He contrasts the constant flow of images on television, which he believes
‘reduces or replaces analytical content’, with the narratives in newspapers
and analysis on the radio, which he often finds far more memorable. Since
‘the mid 1950s the majority of viewers have identified television as their main
source of world news, ahead of the press’, with 69 per cent of respondents in a
large 1994 survey in Britain putting television as their primary source for
world news.25 But television news is not produced and received in a
communicative vacuum. Younger viewers, and now also older ones, are
increasingly turning to web-based news. Dramatic news images are
regularly reused and discussed in different media. Circulation and discussion
contribute to certain images being remembered more than others.
Having said all this, there is truth in Montaigne’s widely quoted aphorism:
‘Memory tells us not what we choose, but what it pleases.’ There is an
untameable quality to memories that makes it hard to control or to predict
which ones will persist or recur. Nevertheless, repetition, proximity and
identification will continue to be important in determining which media
images of violence are remembered.

Responding: Passively and Actively

We do not simply view media: it has an effect on what we do next. This is not
to resurrect early models of audience responses which claimed a simple,

24 More recently the Scottish playwright David Greig wrote The Events (2013), which
explored the effects of a mass shooting in a small seaside community. Performed to
critical acclaim in both Scotland and Norway it resonates with the attacks not only in
Dunblane (1996), but also on Utøya Island (2011), where Anders Behring Breivik killed
sixty-nine people with an average age of 20.
25 Jackie Harrison, Terrestial TV News in Britain: The Culture of Production (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 45.

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direct impact on behaviour, and which are now rightly out of fashion.26 As
active moral agents, audiences can respond to and interact creatively with the
news media and memories of what has been seen. News about violence
arguably influences viewers, shapes memories and in some circumstances
even sets agendas. ‘Acknowledging that audiences are “active” does not
mean that the media are ineffectual. Recognising the role of “interpretation”
does not invalidate the concept of “influence”.’27 Violent news events in the
media shape the symbolic environment in which we act, dream and believe.
One response is to switch off or switch over. In States of Denial Stanley Cohen
suggests there are many ways to block out what is seen.28 Susan Moeller
shows how the viewer ‘resorts to compassion fatigue as defence mechanism
against the knowledge of horror’.29 The never-ending repetition of images of
suffering and violence can lead to a sense of powerlessness. On the other
hand it may also provoke anger and even violent reactions, for example the
attacks on Asians, assumed to be Muslims, in Britain and the USA following
recent terrorist attacks. It is no surprise that photographs of Muslims being
held in orange jump suits in Guantánamo Bay, being paraded naked or
hooded in Abu Ghraib Prison or being massacred in Srebrenica, Bosnia
(1995), are often cited negatively online and appear also to have contributed
to the radicalisation of some young Muslims. Resentment can grow into the
desire to meet violence with violence. And repeated viewing of these images
feeds that resentment. In this way passive viewing can lead to active
responses.
The Norwegian scholar credited with laying many of the foundations for
modern Peace Studies, Johann Galtung, argued that news can contribute to
violent situations, with journalists tending too often to misframe or even
misremember violence, and to focus on apparently irrational acts rather than
structural causes. Elements of John Birt and Peter Jay’s well-known argument
in the seventies, that news reports had a ‘bias against understanding’, remain
valid today.30 Galtung notes how many reports tend to reduce the number of

26 See Paul Manning, News and News Sources: A Critical Introduction (London: Sage, 2001),
pp. 202–27.
27 John Eldridge, Jenny Kitzinger and Kevin Williams, The Mass Media and Power in
Modern Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 160.
28 Stanley Cohen, States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocity and Suffering (Cambridge: Polity
Press. 2001).
29 Susan D. Moeller, Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and
Death (London: Routledge, 1999).
30 See the introduction of John Eldridge (ed.), Getting the Message: News, Truth and Power
(London: Routledge, 1993). See also Jake Lynch and Annabel McGoldrick, Peace
Journalism (Stroud: Hawthorn Press, 2005).

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parties in a conflict to two, and ignore the goals of outside interventionists,

leading to what he describes as Manichaeism, with a good side and an ‘evil’
side. He sees a related weakness in the failure to explore the causes of
escalation, and indeed the impact of media coverage itself. Violence is
presented as inevitable; alternatives are ignored. This viewpoint finds some
support in Media and the Path to Peace in which Gadi Wolfsfeld concludes that
‘the news media generally play a negative role in attempts to bring peace’.31
Galtung goes further, claiming that ‘when news about attempts to resolve
conflicts are absent, fatalism is reinforced. That can engender even more
violence.’32 Images of peaceful outcomes are often left outside the news
frame, and hence are easily forgotten. Robert Entman claimed that news
frames offered prior to the Gulf War marginalised those proposing a nego-
tiated settlement.33
The result of ignoring structural elements in this episodic news process,
according to Shanto Iyengar, ‘is the trivialization of public discourse’ and the
lack of evidence to help audiences make informed moral choices in response to
violence.34 Even in the supposedly more interactive internet, news providers
work under constraints, including the necessity of framing stories to fit their
site. So a popular blog such as Baghdad Burning interacted with television news.
Yesterday they were showing Sunni and Shia clerics praying together in a
mosque and while it looked encouraging, I couldn’t help but feel angry. Why
don’t they simply tell their militias to step down – to stop attacking mosques
and … to stop terrorizing people? It’s so deceptive and empty on television –
like a peaceful vision from another land.35
This passage may be critical of television news, but it illustrates how news
coverage, broadcast visual memories, provoke a strong response.
Such frustration with the limitations of the tools of their trade is shared by
many journalists, as well as by their audiences. Fergal Keane writes of his
work in Rwanda:

31 Gadi Wolfsfeld, Media and the Path to Peace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2004), p. 220.
32 Johan Galtung, in Colleen Roach (ed.), Communication and Culture in War and Peace
(London: Sage, 1993), p. xi.
33 Robert M. Entman, ‘Framing: Toward Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm’, Journal of
Communication 43 (1993), 51–8.
34 Shanto Iyengar, Is Anyone Responsible? How Television Frames Political Issues (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 143.
35 Posted on 27 February 2006, at http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/. The first year of
the blogs are now published as Riverbend, Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog from Iraq
(New York: Feminist Press, 2005).

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To this day I am at a loss to describe what it was really like. That smell. On
your clothes, on your skin … This was not something I could convey with
words or photographs or film … Our trade may be full of imperfections and
ambiguities but if we ignore evil we become authors of a guilty silence.36
As Jean Seaton says, ‘Journalists … are … travellers between moral worlds.
They go from where you must not kill people, to where you have to.’37 The
journalist in these situations acts as a witness of tragic suffering and tangible
evil. They aim to ensure it is not forgotten.
Their efforts are not always wasted. Pablo Picasso famously created
Guernica in response to news reports of aerial bombing, an artistic expression
of grief, protest and rage,38 not only bearing witness to the horrors of the
Spanish Civil War (July 1936 to April 1939) but also anticipating the impact of
conflict upon civilian populations in the World War soon to follow.

Conclusion
Images of violence and images related to violence now permeate across
global communicative environments. The ways they are circulated and
disseminated have evolved. Even as recently as the 1960s pictures had to be
flown back from Vietnam.39 Politicians had more time to digest the implica-
tions of a news story. Journalists had more time to interpret a set of pictures.
From the 1970s, film crews and reporters began to visit exotic or dangerous
locations to be the audience’s eyewitnesses of ‘foreign violence’, and the
audience watched news as it happened. Today some journalists claim
the ‘feast of digital pictures generated by anyone and everyone’ renders the
official ‘reporter’s presence on the spot well-nigh obsolete’.40 This is signifi-
cant because it means local specialist correspondents with time to learn about
the distinctive contours of their patch are replaced by reporters parachuted in
for a few days or by journalists interpreting footage or social media at a

36 Fergal Keane, Letter to Daniel: Dispatches from the Heart (London: BBC Books and Penguin,
1996), pp. 157–63, written in Nairobi, October 1995, first published in The Guardian.
37 Seaton, Carnage and the Media, p.200.
38 See Russell Martin, Picasso’s War: The Destruction of Guernica, and the Masterpiece that
Changed the World (New York: Dutton, 2002). It is possible that Picasso was also
influenced by seeing earlier news reports of bombings on other civilian targets.
Picasso was commissioned to create a mural for the Spanish Display at the 1937 Paris
International Exposition.
39 See Daniel C. Hallin, The ‘Uncensored War’: The Media and Vietnam (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1989 [1986]).
40 See Jon Snow, Shooting History: A Personal History (London: Harper Perennial, 2004),
p. 311.

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distance. This leads to a preference for the spectacular at the expense of

reporting hidden forms of violence.
Representations of spectacular violence can contribute to a sense that
while the current status quo is unfortunate it is almost unavoidable. The
noise created by media spectacles drowns out the cries of those who suffer
daily and die from treatable diseases, and related forms of structural violence.
The dominance of spectacle puts non-dramatic pictures outside the news
frame, and so beyond attention and memory. Chronic, hidden or structural
violence can all too easily be overlooked.
It is commonly believed that the more dramatic the pictures, the more
likely a story will find its way to the top of the news schedule. While there is
some truth in this, spectacular pictures are not always the defining criterion
for a news story’s precedence. Some stories are more spectacular than others,
with or without pictures of the actual violence. The sinking of the Titanic, the
assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the suicide of Hitler are a few
examples of major news stories, lacking pictures of the event. If this is so, then
what makes something spectacular is partly in the imaginative eye of the
beholder. Seeing the world differently can lead not only to different kinds of
definitions of the spectacular, but also to different kinds of questions. How far
is there a moral obligation for spectators to dissent from the accounts of
reality dominated by violent spectacle? How far is there a moral responsi-
bility for viewers and journalists to look beyond the screens in search of
unspectacular stories? What is the role of both audience and broadcaster in
settings where ‘post-truth’ politics and the echo-chambers created by
Facebook and other social media can trump more established forms of
news reporting? And in what ways will peaceful practices responding to
media visions of violence lead towards peace?

Bibliographical Essay
Media violence remains one of the most hotly debated topics in media, communication
and cultural studies. For example, the extent, if any, to which media violence affects or
influences viewers has provoked numerous qualitative and quantitative studies. Some
argue there are no or very few discernible causal effects, while others posit significant and
specific impacts. While questions about the impact of media violence regularly recur,
other topics have also been investigated. For a helpful collection of essays on the
relationship between media and violence see C. Kay Weaver and Cynthia Carter (eds.),
Critical Readings: Violence and the Media (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 2006). This
includes a range of voices, exploring theories, productions, representations and audiences.

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There is related and extensive literature regarding portrayals and receptions of violence in
film (see Kendrick’s bibliographical essay to Chapter 28 in this volume).
There is a broad diversity of scholarly analysis of media representations of violence. For
comprehensive and critical overviews, from different perspectives, see W. James Potter,
On Media Violence (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1999); Cynthia Carter and C. Kay Weaver, Media
Violence (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 2003). Jolyon P. Mitchell, Media Violence
and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) considers not only the
role of journalists and producers, but also the responsibilities and responses of audiences.
Critical reflection and narrative descriptions in the numerous memoirs or
autobiographies of journalists and photographers who covered conflict include: Martha
Gellhorn, The Face of War (London: Granta Books, 1998 [1959]); Fergal Keane, Season of
Blood: A Rwandan Journey (London: Penguin, 1995); Don McCullin, Sleeping with Ghosts: A
Life’s Work in Photography (London: Jonathan Cape, 1999); John Simpson, The Wars against
Saddam: Taking the Hard Road to Baghdad (London: Pan MacMillan, 2004). More critical
analysis of journalistic coverage is to be found in Phillip Knightley, The First Casualty: From
the Crimea to the Falklands: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist and Mythmaker, 3rd
edn (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004) and Jean Seaton, Carnage and the
Media: The Making and Breaking of News about Violence (London: Allen Lane, 2005).
There is also growing scholarly literature relating to media, conflict and war. See, for
example, the journal Media, War and Conflict (Sage, from 2008). Some focus on a single conflict
or geographical area, while others on various wars. These include: Mark Thompson, Forging
War: The Media in Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina (Luton: University of Luton Press,
1989); Daniel Hallin, The Uncensored War: The Media and Vietnam, rev. edn (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1992); Howard Tumber and Jerry Palmer, Media at War: The
Iraq Crisis (London: Sage, 2004); Susan L. Carruthers, The Media at War, 2nd edn (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Broader themes are considered in Colleen Roach (ed.),
Communication and Culture in War and Peace (London: Sage, 1993).
Increasingly, scholars agree that many different kinds of violence appear in the media. This
has led some to analyse issues relating to form and content. Representative texts include Barrie
Gunter and J. Harrison, Violence on Television: An Analysis of Amount, Nature, Location, and Origin
of Violence in British Programmes (London: Routledge, 1998); Barrie Gunter, J. Harrison and M.
Wykes, Violence on Television: Distribution, Form, Context and Themes (Mahwah: Lawrence
Erlbaum, 2003); on the effects on an audience see Martin Barker and Julian Petley (eds.), Ill
Effects: The Media/Violence Debate (London: Routledge, 1997); on how different viewers interact
with what they see, Philip Schlesinger et al., Women Viewing Violence (London: BFI, 1992) and
Barrie Gunter and Mallory Wober, Violence on Television: What Viewers Think (London: John
Libbey, 1988). Others interrogate commonly held beliefs about media violence, e.g. James W.
Potter, The 11 Myths of Media Violence (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2003).
Several authors have reflected upon how violence entertains and how news media are
commonly drawn towards spectacularly dramatic forms of violence. Sissela Bok, Mayhem:
Violence as Public Entertainment (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1998). Scholars have
reflected upon violence as a form of communication for several decades. See Alex P.
Schmid and Janny de Graaf, Violence as Communication: Insurgent Terrorism and the Western
News Media (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1982). Following the 9/11 attacks in 2001, more studies
were produced reflecting upon the relationship between terrorism and media. These
include Joseph S. Tuman, Communicating Terror: The Rhetorical Dimensions of Terrorism

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(Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2003) and Pippa Norris et al. (eds.), Framing Terrorism: The News
Media, the Government, and the Public (New York: Routledge, 2003).
A recurring concern is about the impact of media violence upon youngsters. See, for
example, Edward L. Palmer and Aimee Dorr (eds.), Children and the Faces of Television:
Teaching, Violence, Selling (New York: Academic Press, 1980). Some become more
polemical or advocate changes in policy or practice, such as Dave Grossman and Gloria
DeGaetano, Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill: A Call to Action against TV, Movie and Video Game
Violence (New York: Crown, 1999). Some argue that representing violence is necessarily
morally problematic or dangerous. From this perspective, viewers need to be inoculated
or protected. David Buckingham critically describes this view in Media Education: Literacy,
Learning and Contemporary Culture (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003).
In ‘Violence, Peace and Peace Research’, Journal of Peace Research 6.3 (1963), 167–91,
Johan Galtung argues the need for an ‘extended concept of violence’. Distinctions are now
made between the role of different media in making violence visible and invisible, such as
domestic violence, that often takes place behind closed doors against women and children.
Structural violence, as considered by Paul Farmer in Pathologies of Power: Health, Human
Rights and the New War on the Poor (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), is also
often overlooked.
Several writers argue that what is shown and what is not shown has implications for
how audiences react to representations of violence. See Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of
Others (New York: Picador, 2003); Susan D. Moeller, Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell
Disease, Famine, War and Death (New York: Routledge, 1999); John Taylor, Body Horror:
Photojournalism, Catastrophe and War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998); Luc
Boltanksi, Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999).
Finally, some scholars do not confine themselves to contemporary examples from the
so-called modern or Western media, as many of the issues raised by the phenomenon of
violence in the media are by no means new. Consider for example Jody Enders, The
Medieval Theater of Cruelty: Rhetoric, Memory and Violence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1999) and Richard Raskin, A Child at Gunpoint: A Case Study in the Life of a Photo
(Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2004); and for a study drawing on a range of
international examples from different periods see Jolyon Mitchell, Promoting Peace,
Inciting Violence: The Role of Religion and Media (New York: Routledge, 2012). Many
studies described above illustrate the value of developing a more nuanced approach,
demonstrating that violence in the media is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon,
which merits creative, critical and thoughtful engagement.

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 30
‘Never Forget that This Has Happened’:
Remembering and Forgetting Violence
joy damousi, jordana silverstein and mary tomsic

Never forget that this has happened.

Remember these words.
Engrave them in your hearts
When at home or in the street,
When lying down, when getting up.
Repeat them to your children.
Or may your houses be destroyed,
May illness strike you down,
May your offspring turn their faces from you.
Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz (1947)

In the seventy-three years since Primo Levi extolled us to ‘never forget’ the
genocide of Auschwitz, remembering the violence of the Holocaust has
assumed many and varied forms. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries
there has not been one universal way this indelible event is remembered or
represented. Indeed, all acts of atrocity committed throughout the twentieth
century are now recalled through a multiplicity of media and with many
varied messages. Scholars have examined a range of cultural sites that have
served the purpose of remembering as well as forgetting acts of violence.
These include analyses of memorials, the use of oral history, family histories,
personal memories, pilgrimages, artworks and sculpture, museum exhibi-
tions, violence on the physical landscape, material artefacts of violence and
state-sanctioned commemorations. Cultural media such as film and photo-
graphy have been examined as forms of commemoration. In the digital age,
social media offer a new vehicle for commemorative practices recalling
experiences of violence and enduring aftermaths.1

1 With the memory boom, different forms of remembering and forgetting violence have
become a major theme in historiography from the late twentieth century onwards.
Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan (eds.),

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In this chapter, we attempt to capture some of the sites of memory – in Jay

Winter’s enduring phrase – that have emerged and are continuing to emerge
in response to violent events during the twentieth century. These commem-
orative practices, and the sites upon which these are manifest, are not static
rituals frozen in time, but are changing, contested and fluid, constantly
evolving to reflect contemporary perspectives. Here we chart the shifting
nature of remembrance and the forms it has taken and continues to take
across a range of historical events. These include world wars, civil wars, the
Holocaust, colonisation, truth and reconciliation, gender and violence, and
child sexual abuse. Together, we identify the range and complexity of
remembrance that has been transformed by new technologies, shifting
ideologies and reinvented cultural practices.

Blood, Bodies and Bones

In the early twenty-first century, remembering violence has increasingly
focused on three sites: blood, bodies and bones. In the first part of this
chapter, these three sites form the basis of considering the remembrance
and forgetting of past violent events that took place during the First World
War, the Armenian Genocide of 1915 and the Spanish Civil War of 1936. The
remembrance of these cataclysmic events more broadly brings into focus
forms of commemoration that have recently concentrated exclusively on the
body. These involve new technologies such as DNA testing and the retrieval
and exhumation of bones of the victims of violence.
The aim is to explore this new wave of commemorative practice and argue
that in the twenty-first century new technologies have ushered in distinctive
forms of such practices surrounding the dead body. This is evident in many
circles – especially for the families of the dead – as a highly respectful and
appropriate way of remembering victims of violence. In his work on the
dead, Thomas Lacquer argues there emerged a new respect for the dead from

War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1999). The literature on Holocaust memorialisation is voluminous, and includes
Claudio Fpgu, Wulf Kansteiner and Todd Presner (eds.), Probing the Ethics of Holocaust
Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016); Saul Friedländer (ed.), Probing
the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the ‘Final Solution’ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1992); Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and
Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); online environment,
Colleen Morgan and Pierre Marc Pallascio, ‘Digital Media, Participatory Culture, and
Difficult Heritage: Online Remediation and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade’, Journal of
African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage 4.3 (2015), 260–78.

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the eighteenth century that began a significant shift for the ‘visibility and
accountability of the dead’.2
The focus adopted in recent scholarship on the victims of violence has
been to consider how human remains have become a distinctive part of
commemorative practice. In 2015, Sévane Garibian wrote in a special issue of
Human Remains and Violence of the need for scholars in genocide and memory
studies to consider the importance of human remains in commemorations.
He wrote that the ‘function of human remains in commemorative practices is
multiple, be it memorial, cognitive, probative or cathartic’.3
Does this focus on human remains reflect a new attempt to access the
‘true’ experience of war? Is the appeal of this exercise that it somehow gives
a more ‘accurate’ representation of the infliction of violent acts and how
these should be remembered – that is, through the forensic analysis of the
dead? The issue of ‘true’ commemoration of violent acts was raised during
the debate that took place over the centenary of memorialisation of the First
World War in London, to which we will now turn.

Blood: Symbolism of Violence

Blood Swept Land and Seas of Red was the exhibition constructed at the Tower of
London in 2014 to commemorate the century of the beginning of the First
World War. Comprised of 888,246 red ceramic poppies each to represent
a British fatality in the war, it was designed by artists Tom Piper and Paul
Cummins. Over 5 million people visited this exceedingly popular memorial.4
Guardian journalist Jonathan Jones was not so impressed. He attacked it, noting
that it was based on a nationalistic paradigm that was romantic and narrow. It
was a celebration of blood and patriotism, he argued, in the quintessential
nineteenth-century tradition. It narrowly focused on mourning only British not
German, French or Russian victims. More than that, it was ‘a deeply aesthe-
ticised, prettified and toothless war memorial’, which elevated war to a noble

2 Thomas W. Lacquer, ‘Mourning, Pity, and the Work of Narrative in the Making of
“Humanity”’, in Richard Ashby Wilson and Richard D. Brown (eds.), Humanitarianism
and Suffering: The Mobilisation of Empathy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2009), p. 51.
3 Sévane Garibian, ‘Editorial, Special Issue: Human Remains and Commemoration’,
Human Remains and Violence 1.2 (2015), 2–4, at 3.
4 Poppies have also featured in recent public installations commemorating war,
for example in Melbourne 2015 for ANZAC Day and the 2016 Chelsea Flower Show,
https://5000poppies.wordpress.com/about/ and https://web.archive.org/web/20170219
015242/http://www.phillipjohnson.com.au/our-work/showsandexhibitions/chelsea-
flower-show-2016.aspx.

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form. War was everything but noble and should be represented as such. ‘A
meaningful mass memorial to this horror would not be dignified or pretty’,
Jones insisted. ‘It would be gory, vile and terrible to see. The moat of the
Tower should be filled with barbed wire and bones. That would mean
something.’5 The designer, Piper, defended his artwork, insisting it was
about ‘loss and commemoration’ and a ‘communal tribute to a great loss of
human life’. Piper argued that the representation of violent loss of life did not
need to be overtly violent. He wished to make it accessible and not ‘state the
obvious’, as we had been ‘all inured to scenes of violence on TV and film’. Each
of the ceramic poppies was sold for £25 and funds were given to charities.6
Critics believed ‘blood’ in this instance was a purely aesthetic representation. It
did not ‘truthfully’ represent the impact of violence or the authentic experience
of death. The violence of war was not fully captured. For some, the answer to
doing so was to retrieve the bodily remnants of the victims themselves.

Exhuming Bodies and Bones

Sculptured bodies are erected on most memorials that commemorate
violence. In the traditional form, whether on war memorials, or memorials
of uprisings, or social movements, the clear articulation of a typically male
face or body is central. In more recent times, the forensic identification of
bodies through DNA testing as a form of remembrance of violence has
emerged. Bodies are exhumed for identification and to ascertain what
happened to them, which can also redefine how the genocide is not only
remembered but more fully understood by closer explorations of the
wounds inflicted.
This practice has now taken place with the commemoration of two events
in the early twentieth century: the First World War and the Spanish Civil War.
In 2009, a systematic effort was made to exhume the bodies of dead
soldiers of the First World War. Between May and August, 250 remains of
Australian and British soldiers were removed and DNA samples were taken
from bones and teeth found in the clay. The attention to detail of removing
these remains ensured that this was undertaken with ‘great care’.

5 Jonathan Jones, ‘The Tower of London Poppies Are Fake, Trite, Inward-Looking –
a UKIP-Style Memorial’, Guardian, 28 October 2014, www.theguardian.com/artandde
sign/jonathanjonesblog/2014/oct/28/tower-of-london-poppies-ukip-remembrance-day.
6 Vanessa Thorpe, ‘Designer: Tower of London Poppies Are Tribute to Human Cost of
WWI’, Guardian, 2 November 2014; 3 December 2014, www.theguardian.com/uk-news
/2014/nov/01/designer-tower-london-poppies-wwi-tom-piper; www.theguardian.com
/artanddesign/2014/dec/02/why-did-you-buy-a-tower-of-london-ceramic-poppy.

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This process allowed for the discovery of details of height, facial features
and prewar conditions that assisted in further identification. The serious and
severe traumatic injuries of the battle were clearly apparent. In the process of
this excavation 6,200 artefacts were discovered. The items found constituted
a form of remembrance and included buttons and buckles, as well as more
personal items such as a fountain pen, a bible, a French phrase book, a leather
pouch with coins inside, a rail ticket. Objects were conserved to see how they
could illuminate an individual’s identity.
Once the exhumation process had been completed, the individual process
of identification began.7 This was important for families for their own
remembrance and commemoration of members lost. While the Australian
Army formally initiated and sanctioned this process, families of deceased
soldiers have embraced this as a vital part of their own commemorative
endeavours and practices.

Reburial: Fromelles Military Cemetery

In similar exercises, by the end of February 2010, 249 of 250 bodies recovered
from Pheasant Wood in the Fromelles – where in July 1916 the first major
battle was fought by Australian troops on the Western Front – had been
reburied in the new cemetery. Again, DNA matching with descendants
identified soldiers, and their names were inscribed on headstones. A formal
commemorative ceremony involving Australian and British dignitaries took
place with full military honours together with traditional rituals of hymn
singing and prayers.8
In 2014, the families of soldiers buried in unmarked graves began
a campaign in Australia to exhume mass graves of fallen Gallipoli soldiers.
According to John Basarin, chairman of the Friends of Gallipoli committee,
the arguments put forward were that ‘people have paid their ultimate
sacrifice and deserve to be treated – if they’re found – in the normal manner
they should be accustomed to, with a headstone at a proper burial place
where the descendants can go and pay their respects on location’.9 There has
been controversy and debate about the uses of this technology and the state’s

7 www.ww1westernfront.gov.au/fromelles/pheasant-wood/exhumation-and-
identification.php.
8 www.ww1westernfront.gov.au/fromelles/pheasant-wood/reburial.php.
9 Hayden Cooper, ‘Anzac Day Triggers Fresh Calls to Exhume Mass Graves of Fallen
Gallipoli Soldiers’,
www.abc.net.au/news/2014–04-24/calls-to-exhume-mass-graves-of-fallen-gallipoli-
soldiers/5409622.

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use of it.10 Families and descendants have been active in supporting this form
of commemorative practice to honour the dead by identifying them and
providing a full reburial and ceremony. The centenary of World War I has
especially drawn attention to these practices. But they have also now been
applied to commemorative practices of other violent events such as civil
wars.

Reburial
Almost two decades after the end of the First World War, the Spanish Civil
War (1936–9) erupted and set the prelude to the Second World War. It was
a brutal civil war with high casualties and shocking atrocities.11
In remembering this conflict and its cruelty and violent crimes, families,
communities and governments have undertaken exhumations of bodily
remains. In the location of many of the battles of the civil war, DNA testing
has been undertaken. These are especially connected to family burials and
commemorative practices, and are crucial to how families are now drawing
on this process to remember and commemorate the violence inflicted on
their relatives. As Zahira Araguete-Toribio argues, ‘DNA technology has
reconvened families with their disappeared relatives and become a political
agent in the mediation of complex identification demands in the aftermath of
mass atrocity.’ In Spain, this commemorative practice was initiated not by the
state, but by individuals and families. There have been acts of reburial and
these have informed particular commemorative practices. For families of
communists, this has become an act of justice.12 But it has connected families,
scientists and the state. It is a ‘grass roots’ movement, one in which a family is
mobilised to define a distinctive commemorative practice in the twenty-first
century.
Resisting forgetting has been a central aspect of this process and attempts
to keep remembering – through the medium of photography – is a perennial
theme, which we will now consider.

10 S. E. Wagner, To Know Where He Lies: DNA Technology and the Search for Srebrenica’s
Missing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).
11 Paul Preston, The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century
Spain (London: Harper, 2012).
12 Zahira Araguete-Toribio, ‘Negotiating Identity: Reburial and Commemoration of the
Civil War Dead in Southwestern Spain’, Human Remains and Violence 1.2 (2015), 5–20, at
7, 15.

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The Erasure of Bodies

There is a voluminous literature on the way photography serves as a form of
remembrance of violence and how throughout the twentieth century it has
served this purpose. Scholars draw a direct connection between this visual
form and its vital role in constructing narratives about the urgent need to
remember atrocities.13
But how do we examine cases when there is no visual representation of
atrocity? Anouche Kunth explores the Armenian Genocide of 1915 and the
attempt to erase any visual evidence through censorship. The extermination
of the Armenians was quickly erased from memory and disappeared from the
political agenda as the abandoned corpses in the desert were destroyed. The
photographs of Armin Wegner, a nurse, powerfully represent how visual
material was vital in the representation of genocide. However, any attempts
to seek justice for victims became impossible as efforts failed ‘to move the
lines of international law to encapsulate the specificity of crimes against
humanity’, with the result that the genocide would soon potentially be
erased.14
But the visual material would soon provide the material evidence that
genocide had taken place. Two significant commemorations drew on these
photographs to put the case that genocide had been committed against the
Armenian population.
On the fiftieth anniversary of the genocide in 1965, the families of the
survivors demonstrated around the world to demand justice, after decades of
indifference. With the advent of the Convention on the Prevention and
Punishment of the Crime of Genocide adopted by the United Nations in
1948, this offered a new opportunity to present a case for genocide. In 1975, on
the sixtieth anniversary, a pioneering work was published: Jean-Marie
Carzou’s An Exemplary Genocide, Armenia 1915, which was accompanied by
a booklet of photographs, which were crucial to the remembrance of the
event.15 The photographic representation of bodily remains was a powerful
form of remembrance when such remains could not be retrieved. The
compulsion to never forget through bodily remains continued after the
Second World War. Collecting the ashes of the dead became more common,

13 Liam Kennedy and Caitlin Patrick (eds.), The Violence of the Image: Photography and
International Conflict (London: I. B. Tauris, 2014); Geoffrey Batchen et al. (eds.), Picturing
Atrocity: Photography in Crisis (London: Reaktion Books, 2012).
14 Anouche Kunth, ‘Traces, Bones, Desert: The Extermination of the Armenians through
the Photographer’s Eye’, Human Remains and Violence 1.2 (2015), 71–87, at 77.
15 Ibid.

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but this was not a new practice. In the context of the genocide against
European Jewry this practice was especially poignant.

Holocaust Ashes
Between 1945 and 1960, Holocaust ashes were part of the personal commem-
oration and remembrance of the victims of violence. In the immediate
postwar period this became a common form of remembrance, involving
bringing home ashes of the atrocity. As in earlier periods, pilgrimages
occurred to concentration camp sites. In the postwar period, the transfer of
ashes acted as a form of substitution for the body. The ashes symbolised the
whole, standing for all the dead. Through these there was a form of com-
memoration and remembrance, in a context where bodies could not be
returned for formal burial or religious rites.16
In the immediate aftermath of war, respect for the dead was paramount in
communities. As new technologies have emerged, family members – as
a way of extending this respect – have embraced further knowledge of the
violence inflicted on them. Where the violence enacted in the first half of the
twentieth century is remembered today through the vectors of blood, bodies
and bones, as outlined above, the violent events explored in these next
sections – namely, the Holocaust, decolonisation and settler colonialism,
and the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions of the 1990s and 2000s –
have had their memory enacted through pilgrimages, places and gatherings.
In the next section, we will take each of these in turn.

Pilgrimages: Remembering the Holocaust

through Travel
The Holocaust stands within European, and Western, memory as a landmark
event in the twentieth century, and has played a significant role in the
development and shaping of traditions of memorialising violence. Its pro-
found status is such that, as Saul Friedlander has written, ‘for many these
events are so extreme and so unusual that they are considered events at the
limits, posing unique problems of interpretation and representation’.
Memories of the Holocaust – or, more precisely, modes of remembering
the Holocaust – are today largely shaped by questions of universality,

16 Jean-Marc Dreyfus, ‘The Transfer of Ashes after the Holocaust in Europe, 1945–60’,
Human Remains and Violence 1.2 (2015), 21–35.

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particularity and responsibility, and when questions of what it means to

participate in the remembering of this moment of radical violence are raised,
it is often reflected that Holocaust memory makes a ‘demand’. In the words
of Deberati Sanyal, which are reflective of a much larger discussion within
both scholarly writing and the broader memorial world, the demand centres
around ‘our duty to remember and our collective responsibility for the past
and present, but also our vigilance toward new Holocaust dormant in every-
day practices’.17
While such questions have provided a framing, journeys to the sites of the
Holocaust have become a central form of representing and embodying mem-
ory in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Such journeys,
pilgrimages or tourist ventures stand at the intersection of many of the
questions surrounding embodiment, space, and memory, which shape mem-
ory studies and violence studies today. All of these aspects come together in
pilgrimages to former sites of violence, as journeyers both remember what
occurred and reflect on the ways in which memories and histories continue.
The journey itself plays a key role in remembering violence, asking travellers
to change their perspective – to become something new and gain new knowl-
edge – through the process of embodied movement. These sites and journeys
compel those visiting to participate in remembering and creating memories
into the future. There are ‘spectral traces’ present which implore those visiting
these sites of haunting to ponder the ‘behavioural norms’ appropriate to this
embodied and emplaced remembering.18 Moreover, as Brigitte Sion has noted,
‘death tourism . . . raises complex questions about ethics, politics, religion,
education and aesthetics’. These questions include a meditation on what it
means to make a pilgrimage to a site, and how one should act when there. At
Auschwitz one can have an ice-cream while waiting for the bus to Birkenau,
but is that what should be done? Laurie Beth Clark argues that for those
attending such spaces ‘the most widespread [behavioural] mimicry is of
cemeteries, but trauma sites also frequently look like places of worship or
museums, all of which imply solemnity and reverence’.19 Yet this is not always
the case, as any visit to such a site can demonstrate.

17 Saul Friedlander, Memory, History and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), p. x; Deberati Sanyal, Memory and
Complicity: Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance (New York: Fordham University
Press, 2015), p. 12.
18 Karen Till, quoted in Laurie Beth Clark, ‘Ethical Spaces: Ethics and Propriety in
Trauma Tourism’, in Brigitte Sion (ed.), Death Tourism: Disaster Sites as Recreational
Landscape (London: Seagull Books, 2014), p. 17.
19 Brigitte Sion, ‘Introduction’, in ibid., p. 4; Clark, ‘Ethical Spaces’, p. 12.

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Travels, by those acting as tourists and memory-keepers, to sites of

death, disaster and trauma are not unique to the Holocaust, with sites as
diverse as the Killing Fields in Cambodia, Ground Zero in New York,
and the Hôtel des Mille Collines in Kigali drawing tourists interested in
affective travel in order to remember and bear witness.20 Yet the notion
of a pilgrimage of remembrance to a historical place of violence attaches
most closely, perhaps, to those seeing themselves as descendants of the
victim group, with large numbers of individuals, families, and school
and community groups travelling to the former homes of their
compatriots.21 But like any form of memory or memorial, such journeys
necessarily condition the memories created, passed on and retained.
Amongst the remembering there is as much forgetting.22 Auschwitz is
both, as Tim Cole noted, ‘A site of mass tourism and a site of pilgrim-
age’; those who journey there can be considered ‘tourists of guilt and
righteousness: guilt at an almost pornographic sense of expectancy of
the voyeurism ahead. And yet guilt tempered by a sense of righteous-
ness at choosing to come to this place.’23 Holocaust pilgrimages cannot
be characterised as any one thing, occurring as they do both as part of
the everyday and as an exceptional moment in a journeyer’s life. Their
memorial-meaning is potentially ever changing, pointing us to the com-
plexity of remembering violence.
But it is evident that, for many, visiting such sites, or ‘traumascapes’, in
Maria Tumarkin’s terminology, engages those making the journey within
notions of trauma. To be present at a site, to sit with its hauntings, is
potentially to be present with memories of trauma. A site then can act as
a form of testimony, testifying to a space and place of violence, and to
the ways in which its past traces continue into the present. In these
trauma-laden spaces, past and present collide while also remaining deter-
minably apart. The traumatic memory and history they contain is, for

20 For example collected essays in Sion, Death Tourism.

21 For example, ‘International March of the Living’, http://motl.org/. For a discussion of
such trips in the context of Israeli schoolchildren, Jackie Feldman, ‘Marking the
Boundaries of the Enclave: Defining the Israeli Collective through the Poland
“Experience”’, Israel Studies 7.2 (2002), 84–114, and Alon Lazar et al., ‘Jewish Israeli
Teenagers, National Identity, and the Lessons of the Holocaust’, Holocaust and Genocide
Studies 18.2 (2004), 188–204.
22 On forgetting amidst remembering the Holocaust, for example, Barbie Zelizer,
Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera’s Eye (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1998).
23 Tim Cole, Selling the Holocaust: From Auschwitz to Schindler, How History is Bought,
Packaged, and Sold (New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 116, 97.

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those in the following generations, a postmemory: as Marianne Hirsch

explains, these memories raise the question of how ‘we [are] implicated in
the aftermath of crimes we did not ourselves witness?’ This postmemory
is structured by both a belatedness and a sense of being entangled; it is
both linear and disruptive. Like Michael Rothberg’s conception of ‘multi-
directional memory’, which places memories of different events together
in a manner which ‘borrows’ and is ‘productive’, postmemory is one of
the new structures through which memories of Holocaust violence are
given meaning for new generations.24 Building collective Holocaust mem-
ories – through pilgrimage and narration – is never an isolated project.
Remembering such mass violence is embroiled in ongoing questions of
politics and ethics, drawing in questions, for instance, of what an embo-
died memory involves, how feminist narrations come into play, and what
a multilinear memory looks like.

Places: Histories of Colonisation

While slavery in the British Caribbean, Mauritius and the Cape was abol-
ished by British parliament in 1833, the ongoing legacies of enslavement
continue into the present day. Slavery, one aspect of global histories of
colonialism, served to structure both British and slave societies, and in the
2010s a project was established by University College London, led by
historian Catherine Hall, to track the ‘compensation money’, a ‘grant of
£20 million in compensation, [which was] paid by the British taxpayers to
slave owners’. The first part of the project paid careful attention to where
this money was spent, ‘tracking, in so far as it is possible, what they did with
the money’. In this way, new memories about places were created: new
histories of Bloomsbury and Fitzrovia, for instance, were produced, as maps
were made of the Fitzrovia and Portman areas of London showing where
this compensation money went.25 In this way, this project acts as a situated

24 Maria Tumarkin, Traumascapes: The Power and Fate of Places Transformed by Tragedy
(Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2005); Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of
Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2012), pp. 2, 5; Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory:
Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2009). Also Bryan Cheyette, Diasporas of the Mind: Jewish and Postcolonial Writing
and the Nightmare of History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013).
25 ‘Legacies of British Slave-Ownership: Context’, www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/project/context/;
‘Slaveowners in Fitzrovia and on the Portman Estate’, www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/project/fitz
roviamap; ‘Rethinking Bloomsburg: A Public Roundtable at the Petrie Museum, UCL,
London’, www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/project/bloomsbury.

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memorial which seeks to overturn a history of forgetting slave ownership in

Britain generally, and in London in particular. This historical and memorial
project remembers the way that the benefits of violence were reaped not
only in close proximity to the physical violence but across the globe; the
ways that colonisation was – and is – a global project, and so requires
a global memory of the violence. Such memorials present an idea that the
violence perpetrated was not only physical but can exist in the forgetting, or
disremembering, that has occurred, as well as in the making of profit from
physical violence and the dispossession of land.
Alongside such projects sit others which remember violent histories of
settler colonialism. One such recent memorial established in Melbourne
in September 2016 commemorates the hanging of Tasmanian Aboriginal
men Maulboyheenner and Tunnerminnerwait in 1842. Sitting at the
site where they were executed, the memorial, named ‘Standing by
Tunnerminnerwait and Maulboyheenner’, narrates the story of how
‘The two men and three Tasmanian Aboriginal women – Truganini,
Pyterruner and Planobeena – had waged a guerrilla campaign, robbing
and clashing with settlers from Dandenong to South Gippsland.’ At the
dedication of the memorial it was narrated that ‘the memorial “will
forever stand as an unambiguous reminder of the brutal impacts of
displacement, dispossession and despair that was inflicted upon our
people and their homelands and of those who bore the brunt of that
invasion and paid the ultimate price”’. This memorial was important,
Carolyn Briggs, a Boon Wurrung elder, explained, as it represents ‘a first
step towards acknowledging our stories of the past’.26
Indeed, settler colonial violence is predicated on a certain forgetting of that
violence, both its initial moments of contact and the continuing violence of
dispossession.27 The very land, or place, on which colonisation (and decolo-
nisation) occurred remains an important facet of memory making. Site-
specific memorials to colonial violence, then, serve as one way in which
colonial forgetting can be undone, or colonial memory can be made more
vivid. Memorials to this historic, and continuing, violence, serve to intervene
in the colonial situation.

26 Carolyn Webb, ‘Monument to Aboriginals’ 1842 Execution “First Step” to Recognising

Brutal Past’, The Age, 11 September 2016, www.theage.com.au/victoria/monument-to-
aboriginals-1842-execution-first-step-to-recognising-brutal-past-20160911-grdvbx.html;
Rob Anders and Netty Shaw in ibid.
27 Chris Healy, Forgetting Aborigines (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2008), pp. 7–9.

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Gatherings: Coming Together in Truth

and Reconciliation
Just as Holocaust memorialisation provides an opportunity to reflect on
responsibility and complicity, as individuals and as societies, and as memor-
ials to colonialism stand on site in order to attempt to create new stories, so
too do Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (TRC).28 TRCs – to utilise
a broad term emanating from post-apartheid South Africa to encompass
a wide variety of commissions, hearings and movements – have now
occurred across the world and have served to air a series of accounts of
violence: testimonies both of the perpetrators and the victims, those who
have enacted violence and those who have been subjected to it. TRCs have
become a staple of national and international governing, understood widely
as a foundationally important moment for a nation to gather together, both
physically and symbolically.
The hearings associated with the South African TRC served as an opportunity
to produce memories, as well as forgettings, about violence pursued under
apartheid rule. One documentary about the TRC, Long Night’s Journey into Day
(2000), asserted that the commission raised ‘some of the most profound moral
and ethical questions facing the world today – questions about justice, truth,
forgiveness, redemption, and the ability of brutalized and brutalizing individuals
to subsequently coexist in harmony’. The TRC sits within a paradigm of
‘reconciliation’, a political formation which ‘has emerged as a potent and alluring
form of utopian politics’ across ‘contemporary settler societies’. Such reconcilia-
tion movements and moments – such as the bridge-walks which occurred across
Australia in 2000 – can act as a moment of gathering, a performative expression
of a vast set of emotions. In Australia, people were urged by Mick Dodson ‘to see
today, this day, as the beginning of the reconciliation process. This day, this day
is the dawning of that brand new day.’29
In other countries, such gatherings to speak and hear have led to formal
government reports and apologies. What though are the implications when
there is ‘structural injury’ at stake: when what is being testified to,
recounted, remembered and gathered together is not a passing phase of
violence but a violence which is structural to the state which initiates the

28 Sanyal, Memory and Complicity, p. 13.

29 ‘Long Night’s Journey into Day’, www.irisfilms.org/films/long-nights-journey-into-
day/; Penelope Edmonds, Settler Colonialism and Re(conciliation): Frontier Violence,
Affective Performances, and Imaginative Refoundings (London: Palgrave Macmillan,
2016), pp. 1, 90–125; ‘Howard Stands Firm after Reconciliation Walk’, 7.30 Report,
ABC, 29 May 2000. Transcript www.abc.net.au/7.30/stories/s132204.htm.

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gathering?30 Some scholars, such as Jennifer Matsunaga, caution against

seeing truth commissions as one thing, writing that while they are incom-
patible with projects of decolonisation, some survivors find validation in
sharing their stories. Matsunaga argues that truth commissions, operating
as part of transitional justice work, serve as vehicles for memory but
‘generally remain silent on land-centred decolonization and Indigenous
resurgence knowledge’.31 These gatherings then contain the same inherent
contradictions as any memory source. For some they serve as a chance to
restore one’s place in society, or to confess past wrongs; for others they act
as a screen, preventing difficult and violent memories from being fully
reckoned with.
We turn now to examine the contemporary practice of public apologies,
looking in particular at the memories created through apologies surrounding
the violence of colonisation, violence of family separation, violence against
children in institutional care and sexual violence against women. Public
apologies are modes through which states and institutions frame, remember
and forget violent pasts. We first focus on the meaning of apologies and then
consider specific examples.

Saying Sorry – States’ (Non)Recognition

of Violence
Our age has been deemed one of Apology by Roy L. Brooks, given the
number of apologies offered by contemporary world leaders to various
groups. In an academic context, Melissa Nobles has identified seventy-two
public apologies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (until 2007) from
around the world. Nobles’s list covers heads of state, governments and
religious institutions as well as formal groups and organisations. These are
all public statements responding to histories of violence linked to war,
religious persecution, internment, genocide, slavery, colonisation, apartheid
and forced sterilisations.32

30 Jennifer Balint, Julie Evans and Nesam McMillan, ‘Rethinking Transitional Justice,
Redressing Indigenous Harm: A New Conceptual Approach’, International Journal of
Transitional Justice 8.2 (2014), 194–216, at 195–7.
31 Jennifer Matsunaga, ‘Two Faces of Transitional Justice: Theorizing the
Incommensurability of Transitional Justice and Decolonization in Canada’,
Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society 5.1 (2016), 24–44, at 26, 38.
32 Roy L. Brooks ‘The Age of Apology’, in Brooks (ed.), When Sorry Isn’t Enough: The
Controversy over Apologies and Reparations for Human Injustice (New York: New York
University Press, 1999), pp. 3–11, at 3; Melissa Nobles, The Politics of Official Apologies
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 155–66.

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Public apologies are a historically specific response to past and present

violence and injustice. Elazar Barkan has identified morality and justice as
exerting a strong presence in national politics and international diplomacy
since the conclusion of World War II, and increasing since the end of the
Cold War. What has followed is a ‘demand that nations act morally and
acknowledge their own gross historical injustices’. Truth commissions,
inquiries and investigations have a common focus on ‘stressing personal
suffering and feeling’. In this political context, apologies have been offered,
and Rhoda Howard-Hassmann and Mark Gibney suggest that, through
them, states and social institutions showed ‘empathy to those they had
harmed’. From the end of the twentieth century, Judith Brett classifies
government apologies as being made ‘directly to the victims of state
actions’ rather than used as instruments of international diplomacy and
peacekeeping. The possibility of a state apologising and assuming a moral
persona is identified by Mark Finnane as a novel function of national
governments since the 1960s.33
In addition to apologies offered, demands made for formal apologies also
require attention. In this way victims and those affected by historical violence
are calling for formal recognition, for states and institutions to speak directly
to them. In terms of numbers, demands for apologies far exceed those given,
and these demands, according to Alice MacLauchlan, should be understood
as a call ‘for a change in the authoritative historical record’.34
Theorising apologies is a recent topic of scholarly attention. Melissa
Nobles sees public apologies as future-focused symbolic gestures about the
past, with implications for shaping politics. Jason Edwards has examined
collective apologies as a rhetorical genre. Judith Brett identifies apologies as
a government technique ‘to restore civic harmony at those moments when
the wrongs of the past erupt into the present’.35 Public apologies, and

33 Elazar Barkan, The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices, 1st
edn (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), p. xvi; Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann and Mark
Gibney, ‘Introduction: Apologies and the West’, in Mark Gibney et al. (eds.), The Age of
Apology: Facing up to the Past (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008),
pp. 1–9, at 4; Judith Brett, ‘Apologizing to the Stolen Generations’, in Katie Holmes and
Stuart Ward (eds.), Exhuming Passions: The Pressure of the Past in Ireland and Australia
(Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2011), pp. 71–90, at 74; Mark Finnane, ‘Memories of
Violence and the Politics of State Apologies’, in ibid., p. 93.
34 Alice MacLachlan, ‘The State of “Sorry”: Official Apologies and their Absence’, Journal
of Human Rights 9.3 (2010), 373–85, at 374.
35 Nobles, The Politics of Official Apologies, pp. 2–3; Jason A. Edwards, ‘Apologizing for the
Past for a Better Future: Collective Apologies in the United States, Australia, and
Canada’, Southern Communication Journal 75.1 (2010), 57–75; Brett, ‘Apologizing to the
Stolen Generations’, p. 74.

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demands for them, reanimate the past at specific points, and while formal
public apologies are a global trend (at times for global audiences) the meaning
and impact of them are strongly tied to local and national contexts.36
Examining specific apologies is vital to interrogate the meanings made of
violent pasts through the apologies offered and the basis for them being
offered at particular times.
There is currently widespread public remembering of historical abuse of
children. One significant case is the over 170,000 children committed to the
Irish industrial schools system between 1936 and 1970 due to poverty. Lindsey
Earner-Byrne argues that the 1999 apology by then Taoiseach Bertie Ahern to
the children abused in these schools placed attention on responsibility and
national narratives, rather than nuanced historical interrogation. Earner-
Byrne argues the apology and debate functioned to compartmentalise
blame, first with the Roman Catholic Church and then the state, and failed
to open space for examining publicly and holistically the Irish society that
facilitated the large-scale abuse of children within these institutions.37 While
there had been pressure to examine institutions like the industrial schools
since the 1940s, alongside formal inquiries, it was not until the 1990s when
widespread sexual abuse within the Catholic Church was being revealed and
believed, accompanied by popular television documentaries revealing the
abuse, that public interest created the political context for the state to respond
with an apology. Feminist activism of the 1970s and 1980s had provided an
intellectual framework to consider the political structures and power
dynamics that supported and enabled abuse within institutions like schools
and the Catholic Church. Feminist analysis provided survivors with language
and concepts to use to make sense of their experiences. Linked to this, the
early 1990s marked the beginning of a period that saw a shift in Western
cultures, with increasing familiarity with personal stories of survival, trauma
narratives and survivors’ accounts of traumatic pasts in the public sphere.38

36 Katie Holmes and Stuart Ward, ‘Introduction: “Poison and Remedy”: The Pressure of
the Past in Ireland and Australia’, in Holmes and Ward, Exhuming Passions, pp. 1–18, at
9, discuss the global and national in a broader context of memory studies.
37 Lindsey Earner-Byrne, ‘Child Sexual Abuse, History and the Pursuit of Blame in
Modern Ireland’, in Holmes and Ward, Exhuming Passions, pp. 51–70, at 51.
38 Brett, ‘Apologizing to the Stolen Generations’, p. 87; Shurlee Swain, ‘Why Sexual
Abuse? Why Now?’, in Johanna Sköld and Shurlee Swain (eds.), Apologies and the Legacy
of Abuse of Children in ‘Care’: International Perspectives (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2015), pp. 83–94, at 90; Christina Twomey, ‘Wounded Minds: Testifying to Traumatic
Events in Ireland and Australia’, in Holmes and Ward, Exhuming Passions, pp. 37–50,
at 37.

631
 JOY DAMOUSI, JORDANA SILVERSTEIN AND MARY TOMSIC

Personal experiences of childhood abuse have not always found a receptive

public space to be heard. Peter Tyrrell wrote a survivor memoir of his time in
industrial schools in the early 1960s but was unable to secure publication. His
campaigns to have his experiences recognised were ignored, disbelieved or
thought of as blackmail. Tyrrell’s death in 1967 was deemed a suicide and the
memoir was published in 2006 after it was found amongst someone else’s
personal papers. His experiences and reporting of physical and sexual abuse
were also included as evidence in the Child Abuse Commission in 2009. As
Earner-Byrne notes, Tyrrell’s ‘ability to write about this experience meant
that he posthumously became a central witness to the realities of the system
that has so damaged him’.39 In this case we see the contingent nature of when
victims of violence are listened to, and correspondingly spaces that emerge
for violence to be heard and remembered rather than forgotten.
Johanna Sköld and Shurlee Swain suggest that an increased emphasis on
children’s rights had played an important role in shaping apology politics. The
1990s was when Western political attention began to focus on historical abuse
of children in out-of-home care. This interest saw formal avenues employed to
document, collect testimony and make future focused recommendations
about historical violence based on adult memories. In the Australian federal
context, the forced removal of Indigenous children from their families began to
be investigated by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission
beginning in 1995, and in Canada the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples
also looked at the forced removals and abuse of Aboriginal Children in
residential schools.40 The histories that these inquiries document are ones of
settler colonial violence and control. The demands and silences involved in the
various apologies and non-apologies in Australian and Canadian cases cannot
be examined here, but we draw attention to two moments to highlight how
past violence has been understood.
The limits of public apologies reveal how violence at the heart of settler
colonial projects is (and is not) acknowledged. In Canada in 1998, ten years
before the formal apology to former students of Indian Residential Schools
was offered by the prime minister, a ‘Statement of Reconciliation’ was made
in Ottawa, in response to the abuses of Indigenous children in residential

39 Earner-Byrne, ‘Child Sexual Abuse’, p. 66; Peter Tyrrell’s account is presented under
a pseudonym. Final Report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (The Ryan
Report) dated 20 May 2009, vol. I, chapter 8, www.childabusecommission.ie/rpt/pdfs/
CICA-VOL1-08.PDF.
40 Johanna Sköld and Shurlee Swain, ‘Introduction’, in Sköld and Swain, Apologies and the
Legacy of Abuse, pp. 1–2, 4.

632
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schools. Jeff Corntassel and Cindy Holder note the ‘nondescript and guarded
language’ in this statement that described residential schools’ legacy. The
only explicit apology offered was ‘to those individuals who experienced the
tragedy of sexual and physical abuse at residential schools’.41 No apology was
given for impacts of a cultural, political, economic or psychological nature.
The language used to describe historical violence in apologies reveals the
significance placed upon that violence. On 26 May 1997, the day the ‘National
Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children
from Their Families’ was tabled in the Australian Federal Parliament, Prime
Minister John Howard spoke at the opening of the Australian Reconciliation
Convention in Melbourne. He expressed his personal ‘deep sorrow for those
of my fellow Australians who suffered injustices under the practices of past
generations towards indigenous people’ and for the ‘hurt and trauma many
people . . . may continue to feel as a consequence of those practices’. In saying
this, he refused to apologise on behalf of the nation. On this occasion and
others, Howard spoke of ‘blemishes in Australia’s history’. This elided the
violent structure of colonisation and the ongoing impacts of it; we see here
the power of the state carrying out reconciliation on its own terms. In the
personal apology given we also see historical remembering of violence
framed in personal terms and largely confined to the past. The response
from the audience at the Convention, however, was clear, with people
standing and turning their backs while others booed. The prime minister
concluded his address in ‘a state of mild hysteria’.42
Official apologies produce a public discursive space within which meaning
is made. Ruth Rubio-Marian, examining responses to sexual and reproductive
violence committed against women, argues this interpretative context is vital
to provide victims with ‘due recognition and some form of repair’.43 One

41 Jeff Corntassel and Cindy Holder, ‘Who’s Sorry Now? Government Apologies, Truth
Commissions, and Indigenous Self-Determination in Australia, Canada, Guatemala,
and Peru’, Human Rights Review 9.4 (2008), 465–89, at 473; see ‘Statement of Apology to
Former Students of Indian Residential Schools’, 3 November 2008, www.aadnc-
aandc.gc.ca/eng/1100100015644/1100100015649. In the contemporary context, sexual
abuse has become the key marker of child victimization; Swain, ‘Why Sexual
Abuse?’, p. 85.
42 Haydie Gooder and Jane M. Jacobs, ‘“On the Border of the Unsayable”: The Apology
in Postcolonizing Australia’, Interventions 2.2 (2000), 229–40; also Brett, ‘Apologizing
to the Stolen Generations’, p. 78; quotations from apology taken from full transcript
http://pmtranscripts.pmc.gov.au/release/transcript-10360; and BBC interview
quoted in Corntassel and Holder, ‘Who’s Sorry Now?’, pp. 476–7, http://pmtran
scripts.pmc.gov.au/release/transcript-10387 for full transcript, 20 June 1997.
43 Ruth Rubio-Marin, ‘Reparations for Conflict-Related Sexual and Reproductive
Violence: A Decalogue’, William and Mary Journal of Women and the Law 19 (2012),69–
104, at 94.

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 JOY DAMOUSI, JORDANA SILVERSTEIN AND MARY TOMSIC

example of historical sexual violence in which continued demands for

apology have been made is the case of survivors of Japanese military sexual
slavery during World War II. While evidence of the system of military
prostitution had been available since the late 1940s, Vera Mackie notes
a new discursive context was required for public debate. This came from
the intellectual framework developed by feminist analysis of violence against
women. From this, forces of gender, class and ethnicity were understood
within the internationalised industry of prostitution, which included the
military. This, Mackie argues, transformed activism around women’s rights
as human rights and developed a discursive space for past experiences of
sexual violence to be recognised.44 From the early 1990s survivors of Japanese
military sexual slavery from Korea (and later from China, the Netherlands,
the Philippines and Indonesia) actively demanded an apology and compensa-
tion. In December 2015 South Korea and Japan reached a ‘final and irrever-
sible resolution’ of the issue, with Japan apologising and financial payment
promised to provide care for the survivors. Survivors, however, were not
involved in the negotiations and continue to make demands as to how their
experiences are recognised: survivor Lee Young-soo was reported as saying:
‘The agreement does not reflect the views of former comfort women’ and ‘I
will ignore it completely.’45 Here Young-soo demands her personal history be
remembered on her terms. You-me Park argues for the importance of
examining the culturally specific gendered assumptions embedded in the
language used in describing this history and case. Park suggests that ‘a
genuine apology . . . can only come in the form of recognizing the impossi-
bility of making a suitable apology or making amends’.46 In this case, we see
the limits of language and apology, and the demands that survivors continue
to make.

44 Vera Mackie, ‘In Search of Innocence: Feminist Historians Debate the Legacy of
Wartime Japan’, Australian Feminist Studies 20.47 (2005), 207–17, at 209; Muta Kazue,
‘The “Comfort Women” Issue and the Embedded Culture of Sexual Violence in
Contemporary Japan’, Current Sociology 64.4 (2016), 620–36; Katharine McGregor,
‘Transnational and Japanese Activism on Behalf of Indonesian and Dutch Victims of
Enforced Military Prostitution during World War II’, Asia-Pacific Journal, Japan Focus
14.16 (2016), http://apjjf.org/-Katharine-McGregor/4945/article.pdf.
45 Choe Sang-Hun, ‘Japan and South Korea Settle Dispute over Wartime “Comfort
Women”’ New York Times, 28 December 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/12/29/worl
d/asia/comfort-women-south-korea-japan.html.
46 You-Me Park, ‘Comforting the Nation: “Comfort Women,” the Politics of Apology
and the Workings of Gender’, Interventions 2.2 (2000), 199–211, at 210.

634
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Conclusion
The resurrection and erasure of blood, bodies and bones have become central
to current forms of commemoration of violence. With enhanced technolo-
gies, the world wars and civil wars of the twentieth century are increasingly
being remembered through these new forms. Whether these are perceived to
bring more immediacy to the memory of the dead or a connectedness to and
respect for the dead, retrieving bones and bodies through DNA testing has
become a new, public form of remembrance. The phenomenon of pil-
grimages, the formation of places and the instituting of gatherings have
over time taken up important roles in the cultural expression of remembering
atrocities and genocide across many contexts. The concept of the apology has
been manifest in a range of cultural and political settings – from sexual crimes
of war to child abuse, particularly the forced removal of Indigenous children
from their families.
How we remember violence, what we choose to forget and why, and what
form this takes, is a dynamic and constantly shifting cultural, political and
social phenomenon. What remains constant is the enduring presence of the
traces of acts of violence, however defined, at the individual, community and
state level, whether they are officially sanctioned or not. These are perma-
nent reminders of the impact of violent acts, whether these are privately
engraved on people’s hearts, as Levi so eloquently describes it, or recalled in
public forums. The haunting shadows that have been cast by atrocities
indelibly remain with us.

Bibliographical Essay
Recent scholarship on the intersection between memory and violence has highlighted the
centrality of religion and its role in how violent events are remembered. This is a key
theme in J. Shawn Landres and Oren Baruch (eds.), Religion, Violence, Memory and Place
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006). Religious understandings of space and
place are central to these discussions as they argue that memory and violence are often
fused with religious frameworks. Scholars have also explored the role of religion and
violence in relation to reconciliation and human rights, for example R. Scott Appleby,
Religion, Violence and Reconciliation (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999).
While the literature on religion and remembering violence is significant but not
voluminous, there is a vast body of literature on physical memorials to the Holocaust,
with James E. Young providing perhaps the definitive overview in The Texture of Memory:
Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), alongside texts
such as Edward Linenthal, Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America’s Holocaust
Museum (Princeton: Columbia University Press, 2001). Projects such as the Stolpersteine

635
 JOY DAMOUSI, JORDANA SILVERSTEIN AND MARY TOMSIC

(www.stolpersteine.eu/en/) in Europe, as well as other memorials and museums, provide

places for physical, embodied and emplaced memory. Studies of Holocaust memory and
memorialisation have provided some important avenues for greater understanding of
traumatic memory in the aftermaths of violence. Vital works include Dori Laub and
Shoshana Felman, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History
(New York: Routledge, 1992), Cathy Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), Eric Santner, ‘History beyond the Pleasure
Principle’, in Saul Friedländer (ed.), Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the
‘Final Solution’ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 143–54, Primo Levi, If
This Is a Man (London: Abacus Books, 1987) and Eva Hoffman, Lost in Translation: A Life in
a New Language (London: Heinemann, 1989).
A central aspect of memory and violence needing further exploration is gender.
Scholars have made compelling cases for focusing on gender in visual representation of
violence. This is significant, given a dominant mode of remembering violence is through
the visual, particularly in film and photographs. Ulrike Weckel’s analysis of depictions of
women in films documenting the liberation of concentration camps in 1945 and 1946 is
notable: Gender & History 17.3 (2005), 538–66. Griselda Pollock argues for the power of
dominant cultural scripts of feminine suffering, which circulate at the expense of historical
and political analysis through the continued use of a particular photograph taken during
the Holocaust; and Nancy Miller examines how two photographs of Kim Phuc (known as
the ‘Napalm Girl’), taken in 1972 and 1995, publicly function as gendered narratives of
American national history in the context of the Vietnam War; see two chapters in
Jay Prosser (ed.), Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis (London: Reaktion Books, 2012),
pp. 65–78 and 147–54.

636
 Index

Abdulhamid II, Ottoman Sultan 268, 273, 277 interpersonal violence and indigenous
abolitionism 10 beliefs 199
abortion 571 media reporting 604
abuse and Second Cold War 462
‘cycle of’ 158 see also British Empire; Congo, DRC;
see also child sexual abuse; sexual violence Kenya; Nigeria; Rwanda; South
Aceh, northern Sumatra Africa; Sudan
Dutch war of conquest with 24 African Americans (former slaves) 89, 546–547
Gayo Expedition (1900–1903) 25 Freedmen’s Bureau 546
Achebe, Chinua 252 lynchings 173, 265, 548
Action Aid 605 see also racial violence, United States
Adana, 1909 massacre of Armenians 276 African historiography 248–253
adultery, charges against rape victims 152 and interdependence of Europeans and
aerial bombing Africans 249, 257
Cambodia 514 treatment of violence 250
of cities 286 view of Europeans 249
Vietnam 514 age of consent 149, 169–170
aeroplanes, in warfare 2 Britain 149, 171–172
al-Afghani, Jaffar 134 India 174
al-Afghani, Tayyib 134 overridden by marriage 170
Afghanistan 141 prostitutes in Japan 339
jihad 132, 552 Agulhon, Maurice 348
Mujahadeen movement 117 Ahern, Bertie, Irish Taoiseach 631
Soviet Union invasion 131, 552 Ahmedabad, Gujarat, massacre (2002) 119
Taliban in 13, 110, 117 Aidit, D. N., PKI general secretary 435, 440
US invasion (2001) 117, 553 and kidnapping of generals 441
war in (from 2001) 134, 136 and land reform 437
and recruitment of fighters 132 move towards militancy 437
Africa visit to China 436
anti-colonial nationalism 300 Ainsworth, Harrison 571
child marriage 183 Akbar, Mughal ruler of India 116
child prostitution 183 Akçam, Taner 393
European need for labour 249 AKP (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi), Turkey 263
expansion of African states 249 and national-Islamist authoritarianism 280
First World War internment camps 391 Al-Qaida organisation 135, 552
‘forgotten wars’ in 605 in Middle East 553
French empire 2, 474 and self-sacrifice (suicide bombing) 135
HIV/AIDS in children 182 and September 2001 attacks in USA 553
influence on Europeans 251 Alabama, Scottsboro Boys 101

637
 Index

Alawis (Alawites), in Syria 272 anti-Semitism, and violence 191

Albania, and First Balkan War (1912) 378 apaches, French youth gangs 562, 567
Aleppo, 1850 anti-Christian pogrom 274 Apia Harbour, Sāmoa 36
Alevis (Shia Muslims), in Anatolia 272 New Zealand firing at peaceful protest
jihad against 276 march (1929) 38
military campaign in Dersim (1937–38) apologies, for violence 629–634, 635
272, 279 child abuse 631–633
Alexander II, Tsar 537, 539 demands for 630, 633
Alexander III, Tsar 539 Aquinas, Thomas 534
Algeria 129, 250 Arab nationalism 140
civil war 134 Arafat, Yasser 130, 133
France and 194, 249, 254, 258 Araguete-Toribio, Zahira 621
links with Holocaust 254 Arendt, Hannah 246–260
rise of FIS 134 and ‘boomerang thesis’ 253–258
Algerian War (1954–62) 399 on concentration camps 386, 393, 394
and terrorism 550 and Conrad 252
Aliens Restriction Act (1914) 391 and decolonisation 248, 252
Alison, Miranda 163 on imperialism 253, 258
Allende, Salvador, President of Chile 14 On Violence (1970) 248, 260
Alpaugh, Micah 363 The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) 246, 248
Alsace, expulsion of Germans from 298 and power 258–260
American Anarchist Fighters group 545 on totalitarianism 253, 256
American Civil War (1861–65) 10, 89, view of Africa 251–253
90–91, 546 Argentina
photography 600 duelling 190
American Humane Association (1876) 214 homicide rates 197
American Mutoscope & Biograph memorials 18
Company 582 Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo 13
American Psychiatric Association 151 power of armed forces 500
American Revolutionary War 89, 534 treatment of murder 199
Ames, Jessie Daniel, ASWPL 100, 101 and Triple Alliance 496
Amin, Hafizullah, Afghanistan 131 Ariège, France, War of the demoiselles
Amnesty International 605 (1829–32) 353
Amritsar Arkansas, mob violence 98
Golden Temple 111 armed forces
massacre (1919) 76–77, 300 Latin America 497
anarchists political power of 494, 495, 497
and leftist revolutionaries 551 see also French army; Germany army;
publicity of trials 541 Indian army; Japanese Imperial Army;
and working classes 539 Red Army; US army
anarcho-terrorism 539–542 Armenia
France 541 1895 massacre 268, 269, 276, 279
motivations 540–541 1909 Adana massacre 276
and propaganda of the deed 540, 544 lack of international sanctions 270
Russia 541–542 and state confiscations 270
United States 542–545 Armenian genocide (1915) 267, 278, 282, 286,
Anderson, David 398 290, 370
Anfal campaign in Kurdistan (1988) 139, 281 commemoration with photographs
animals 622–623
objections to mistreatment of 210, 212 deportations to Syrian camps 375, 392
sanctions on violence against 7, 209–218 Armenian Question 267
see also hunting Armenian Revolutionary Federation 277
anthropology, theories about Indian castes 72 Armenians, in Ottoman Empire 270

638
 Index

arson 90 indigenous connection to land 236

Artemovsk, murder of Jews in underground internment of Germans 294
shafts 323 legal system 31
artillery, and deaths in First World War 293 memorial to executed Tasmanians 627
asabiyya (group solidarity) 126 native police forces 240, 241, 242, 243
Ashin Wirathu, Buddhist monk 121 native-on-native killing 195
Asia and New Guinea 36
anti-colonial nationalism 300 Northern Queensland indentured
Cold War in 454, 456–458, 465 labourers 34
extreme cinema 584 payback killings 236
see also Cambodia; China; India; Japan; penal settlement at Sydney 29, 31
Korea; Pacific Ocean; Vietnam reconciliation movements 628
Asia–Pacific War (1941–45) 13, 38, 329–331 relations with indigenous people 233
Askin, Kelly Dawn, ICTY 162 removal of mixed race children
Aslan, Reza 552 (‘The Stolen Generations’) 10, 177, 632
al-Assad, Bashir, Syria 138, 139 retribution for wreck of ship Maria 238
al-Assad, Hafez, Syria 130, 133 Returned Service League parades 16
Association of Southern Women for the seizure of Aborigine lands 388
Prevention of Lynching (ASWPL) settler violence 234
(1930) 100 use of martial law in New South Wales 238
Assyrians, in Ottoman Empire 270 Australian Army
genocide (1915–16) 278 exhumation and identification of
Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal 264, 278 soldiers 619
see also Kemalism reburial of soldiers 620–621
Atlantic Charter (1941) 549 Australian Reconciliation Convention
atrocities (1997) 633
Balkan War 379 Austria, extreme cinema 584
Boxer Uprising 56 Austria-Hungary
Evangelical inquiry into Pacific 31 internment and deportation of enemy
German First World War 288, 291, 295, 311 aliens 390
Indian Mutiny 71 Jews 388, 573
Japanese at Nanjing 160, 335 Viennese uprising (1848) 408
see also atrocities, Nazi; massacres authoritarianism
atrocities, Nazi 288, 295, 304–323 Costa Rica 495
discovery of mass graves 319 Indonesia 444
murder of Jews at Babi Yar 311 Ottoman Empire 273
photographic evidence 315 populist, Mexico 499
Soviet reports of 304, 306, 311, 316–323 Turkey 263, 280
Soviet witnesses to 305, 312–315 Avery, I.W. 548
see also Auschwitz; Holocaust Ayodhya, India, Hindu attack on mosque
Atta, Muhammad 135 (1992) 118, 119
Atwan, Adel Bari 138 Azzam, Abdullah, and Afghan jihad 132
Augustine, St 534
Auschwitz 382, 616 Ba’ath party 130, 280
gas chambers 310 Babi Yar, massacre of Jews 311
Soviet reports of 321 Bacon, Henry, The Fascination of Film
tourism at 624, 625 Violence 596
Australia badger-baiting 208, 211
arrival of First Fleet (1788) 235 Baghdad Burning, blog 611
Bringing Them Home report (1997) 177 al-Baghdadi, Abu Bakr, IS 139, 140
frontier violence 234, 243 Baise-moi (2000 film) 583
and Gallipoli campaign 289 Bakunin, Mikhail, on anarchism 540
homicide rates 196 Bali, cockfighting 216

639
 Index

Balkan League 378 Belich, James 229, 230

Balkan Wars 277 Belize (British Honduras), treatment of
First (1912) 276, 278, 378 murder 199
Second (1913) 379 Ben-Gurion, David 267
Balkans 367 Bengal, famine (1942) 84
diversity in 373, 377 Benhabib, Seyla 259
and expulsion of Muslims 378 Benjamin, Walter 247
in First World War 289 Berghoffen, Debra 163
independence movements 267 Berkman, Alexander 544
and nation-state building 368 Berlin
Second World War 381 Center for Cold War Studies 452
and Turkish nationalism 378 police force 577
Western cultural assumptions about 368 Red Army mass rapes 154
see also Bosnia; Bulgaria; Greece; street violence 562
Macedonia; Serbia; Thrace; Berlin, Treaty of (1878) 277, 281
Yugoslavia Bernal, Martin 253
Baltic states, rise of nationalism 300 Berthier de Sauvigny, Louis, murder of (1789)
banditry 352, 353, 356, 357–358
bands of brigands 574 Bessel, Richard 305
Belgium 196 Bhindranwale, Sant Jarnail Singh, Sikh activist
in China 42, 49, 412, 414 110, 112
Latin America 195 Bhutan, Buddhist nationalist state 121
Bangladesh Bhutto, Benazir 153
child marriage 182 assassination 118
independence 112 Bhutto, Zulfikar Ali 117
al-Banna, Hassan, Muslim Brotherhood Biafra, war of secession (1967–70) 11
130 Bigelow, Kathryn, Strange Days 584
Baqr Sidqi, Iraq 128 Bilbo, Theodore, US senator 101
Barbie, Klaus 256 Bin Laden, Osama 132, 135, 140, 552
Barbusse, Henri, Le Feu (1916) 297 and USA 553
bare-knuckle fighting 209, 219 Birmingham, Alabama, civil rights protest
Barkan, Elazar 630 campaign (1963) 104
Barker, Martin 585 Birt, John 610
Basarin, John 620 Bismarck, Otto von 539
al-Bashir, Omar, Sudan 133 bison, on Canadian prairies 232
Batista, Gen. Fulgencio, Cuba 502 Bite (2015 film) 594, 595
Battle of Blair Mountain, USA (1921) 543 BJP (Bharitiya Janata Party), India 118
Bauman, Zygmunt 374, 386 diaspora support for 122
bear-baiting 208, 211 as government 119
behaviourism 429 Black Hole of Calcutta 70, 74
beheadings Black Panthers (US) 105
of corpses 28 blockades, and famine 286
Iraq, hostages 598 blood, and symbolism of violence 618–619
and parade of heads 347, 352, 359, 443 Blood Feast (1964 film) 594
symbolism of public 359 blood sports, working classes and 212
Beijing, Monument to the National People’s Blood Swept Land and Seas of Red exhibition
Heroes 16 618
Beik, William 357 bodies
Belgium commemoration for unrecoverable 291
banditry 196 exhumation and identification of soldiers
First World War casualties 288 619–620
German occupation 289 reburial of soldiers 620–621
refugees from 391 and respect for the dead 617

640
 Index

Bodu Bala Sena (BBS) movement, Sri ‘logic of elimination’ of indigenous

Lanka 121 peoples 228
Boer/Xhosa wars 231 military response to indigenous
Boko Haram Islamist movement, Nigeria 139 resistance 236
bombardment paramilitary policing 239–242
artillery 292 settler colonisation 229, 242
of cities 286 treaties and warfare 229–235
Bonnie and Clyde (1967 film) 588 use of martial law 237–239
‘boomerang thesis’ Brokaw, Tom 602
Arendt and 253–258 Brooks, Roy L. 629
definition 257 Broome, Richard 243
Booth, John Wilkes 547 brothels
Borglum, Gutzon 17 Japanese ‘comfort stations’ 339–341
Bosnia Japanese Recreation and Amusement
propaganda value of rape 150 Association (RAA) 340–341
Srebrenica massacre (1995) 4 Japanese recruitment for 339, 340
Boston Marathon bomb attack 553 used by occupying Allied forces in Japan
Bounty, HMS, mutineers on Pitcairn Island 27 341–342
Boxer Uprising (1900) see also prostitution
China 53–58 Broughton, Jack, rules of boxing 219
Eight Nations Expeditionary Force and 55 Brown Berets, Chicano youth in
murder of Chinese Christians 56, 57 California 105
Red Lanterns Shining girls movement 55 Brownmiller, Susan, Against Our Will 148
violence of suppression 56 brutalisation
boxing, rules for 219 concept of 298
Boyle, Danny, 127 Hours 595 of Europe 254
boys Buchenwald concentration camp 404
school beatings 575 Buck-Morss, Susan 253
as victims of sexual abuse 171 Buddhism
Brailsford, H. N. 367, 377 and nationalism 110
Brazil 495 as political majority 13
criminal control of cities 506 and political violence 120–122
homicide 189, 194 Bulgaria 367, 374
independence from Portugal (1822) 493 claims to territory 380
interpersonal violence 194 displacement of Greek population 380, 381
power of armed forces 500 First World War 380
and Triple Alliance 496 and Jews in Macedonia-Thrace
Brett, Judith 630 (‘Belomorie’) 382
Briggs, Carolyn 627 Second World War 381
British Army, crime and punishment in 574 war with Greeks in Thrace 379–381
British Board of Film Classification 592 Bulgarian Exarchists 377
British Empire 2, 228 bull-baiting 208
acquisition of land for settlement 228, campaign to prohibit 210–211
235–236 bull-fighting 208
civilising mission of 227, 239 Spain 215, 581
and concept of protection of indigenous bull-running 208
people 234 Tamil Nadu 208
death tolls in frontier violence 243 Burke, Edmund 532
expansion 242 Burton, Antoinette, The Trouble with
frontier violence 227–244 Empire 227
imposition of law and administration 228 Bushfield, Samuel, and cockfighting 214
legal treatment of murderers 199 Byrd, James, murder in US (1998) 107

641
 Index

Cáceres, Berta, murder 506 frontiers 230

Cairo 274 Khoisan cattle raids 236
Calabria, ’ndrangheta 565 native police force 240, 241
Calcutta use of martial law 238, 239
Muslim–Hindu violence 84 capitalism
riots (1945–46) 83 and imperialism 259
California, racial violence against Asians 100 and power 259
Cambodia 510–530 Capra, Frank, Mission to Moscow (1943) 318
1975 Constitution 517 Carbonari terrorist group 535
agricultural exports 512 Carlyle, Thomas 347
agricultural policy 521–528 Carnegie Corporation 544
communist factions in 513 Carnegie International commission, on
and CPK increase in rice production Balkan War atrocities 379
524–525 Carnot, Sadi, President of France 541
engagement in global economy 512, 521 Carrigan, William and Clive Webb 97, 100
food controls and rationing 527–528 Carzou, Jean-Marie, An Exemplary
homicide rates 204 Genocide 622
independence (1953) 513 Casement, Roger
infrastructure 516 ‘Congo Horrors’ report (1904) 9
Khmer People’s Revolutionary Party execution (1916) 12
(KPRP) 513 Cassagnau, Ivan 288
Killing Fields 12, 510 Castan, Nicole and Yves 361
labour for irrigation schemes 525 Castle, William 594
and Non-Aligned Movement 512, 516–521 Castro, Fidel, Cuba 502
S-21 security centre 510 casualties see death tolls
social classifications 526–527 Catholic Church, and child abuse by clergy
‘Standard Total View’ (STV) 511 176–177, 631
terror campaign 528–530 Catholic missionaries, in China 52, 60
US covert bombing campaigns 514 Caucasus, rise of nationalism 300
work schedules and quotas 527 cause and effect (Arendt) 246
see also Khmer Rouge cell phones see mobile phones
cameras see photography; video Cemal Pasha, Ottoman proconsul in Syria
Camorra, Naples 565 128
Canada censorship 318
homicide rates 196 of accounts of rape 152
Indian Act (1876) 233 Indonesia 428, 444
indigenous reserves 233 of violence in films and games 15, 590–593
National Inquiry into Missing and ceremonial, as exhibition of power 68
Murdered Indigenous Women and Césaire, Aimé 470
Girls 178 Challaye, Félicien 471, 473
Royal Commission into Aboriginal People Chandler, David 513
(1996) 178, 632 charivari 563
settlement and negotiation with Charleston, S. Carolina, 2015 church
indigenous people 232–233 shootings 107
Canetti, Elias 360 Chauri Chaura, India, killing of Indian police
Cannes Film Festival 585, 595 officers (1922) 77
cannibalism chemical weapons 3, 291
during Chinese Great Leap Famine 423–424 First World War 290
by Japanese servicemen 329 Japan 337
by Magellan’s crew 23 used in Iraq 139
by Māori 30 see also poison gas
Pacific islands 26, 27 Chemin des Dames offensive (1917) 289
Cape Colony, South Africa Cheoung Ek, Cambodian killing field 510

642
 Index

Chicago demons 46
Haymarket Riot (1886) 543–544 Eight Trigrams Uprising (1813) 43
mob violence 98 Europeans in port cities 193
child marriage 174, 182 and hippie movement 198
India 174–175 and Japan 16, 33
child pornography 181, 183 labourers in Japanese mines 333
child sexual abuse 8, 168–185 laogai camp system 401–402
and age of consent 169–170, 171–172 lineage feuds 53
boys as victims 171 lineage organisations 42
continuing global concern 169, 182–184 martial arts 53, 222
definitions 169–170 kung fu 222
detection and prosecution of 184 millenarianism 43
effect on child 181 Muslim rebellions 51–52
focus on (1970s and 1980s) 180–182 nationalism 16
and focus on ‘sexual psychopath’ 178–180 natural disasters 53, 54
in institutions 176–178 Nian armed bands 49–50
lack of records 168 North China Famine (1876–79) 49
legal controls on 170 Opium Wars 31
media reporting 182 population
mob violence against 173 depopulation (Taiping rebellion) 49
and moral panic (1980s) 182 gender imbalance 44
public apologies for 631–633 growth 44
research on 180 and religion
sex tourism 183 Christianity in 52–53
sex trafficking 183 eschatology of Eternal Venerable
and trauma 180, 184 Mother 43, 59
unreported 170, 175 martial arts networks 53
Victorian moral perspective 171–173 religious militarisation 43
within the family 175–176, 185 religious violence 41–66
child-soldiers 158 secret societies 42
children sworn brotherhoods 42, 50
abuse of indigenous 177–178 Taiping Rebellion 41, 45–49
beating of schoolboys 575 White Lotus Rebellions (1796–1804) 43
and boundaries of childhood 169, 171 see also China, People’s Republic of; China,
cannibalism of 424 Republic of; Nanjing; Qing dynasty
and collective violence in China 421 China, People’s Republic of (from 1949) 41,
exposure to mediated violence 15 408–424
female genital mutilation 184 agricultural collectivisation 417
HIV/AIDS in Africa 182 Anti-Hiding Campaign (grain and
killed by Nazi soldiers 304, 313, 314 food) 419
massacres of (First World War) 288 fall in grain production 419
prostitution of 171, 172, 183 banditry 412, 414
rights of 8 criminality 423
Chile 495 Cultural Revolution (1966–69) 62
CIA operation in 14 ethnic autonomous regions 62, 65
massacre of strikers (1907) 498 Falungong movement, campaign against
memorials 18 63–65
and War of the Pacific (1879–84) 496 Great Leap Famine 417–424
China, imperial 44(map) Great Leap Forward 12, 417
anti-Japanese demonstrations (1919) 300 hatred in 410
banditry 42, 49 illegal logging 412
Boxer Uprising (1900) 53–58 and Korean War 457
cockfighting 216 Lolo tribes in Xikang province 413

643
 Index

China, People’s Republic (cont.) Christianity

Mao Zedong personality cult 62 in China 52–53
Monument to the National People’s conversion to 22
Heroes, Beijing 16 eschatology of 269
Nanjing Massacre Museum 16 and Sunni eschatology 283
Nationalist army resistance 408 see also Catholic Church; Orthodox Church
Peasant Association (village militia) 410 Christians, Sunni Ottoman violence against
People’s Commune 417, 418–419 274, 276, 280
Public Security Police 410 Churchill, Winston 78, 319
Rectification Campaign 420 CIA (US Central Intelligence Agency),
rehabilitation of Japanese prisoners 336 Operation Condor (in South America)
and religion 14, 18
expulsion of Catholic missionaries 60 Cimino, Michael 570
and New Religious Movements 64 cinema 15, 580–596
religious rehabilitation 63 behavioural act of violence 586
Religious Services Law (2006) 65 British wartime 318
suppression of religious groups 59–62 changing norms of violence 588–593
removal of moral constraints 410, 424 computer-generated imagery (CGI) 590
resurgence of ethnic violence 65, 412–415 definition of extreme violence in film
sectarian violence 423 583–586
and standardisation of martial arts 222 depiction of gun violence 588–590
and Tibetan revolt (1959) 61–62 depictions of sexuality 582
train robberies 423 early films 580–583
see also Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and evidence of Nazi atrocities 315
China, Republic of (1912–49) 41, 58 films of executions 582
armed groups 58 graphicness and duration of violence
Communist insurgency 59 586–588
and Paris Peace Conference (1919) 300 physiological reactions to 580, 593–595
see also Taiwan portrayal of murderers 569
Chinese, in America ratings and censorship 590–593
Chinese American Citizens Alliance 100 recreations of violent events 581
racial violence against 89, 92, 95 regulation 582
Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and special effects 583
Campaign to Suppress Counter- stories of violent crime 562
Revolutionaries 409, 415 technological advances 585
and cases of suicide 416 The Battle of the Somme documentary 297
‘grain procumbent policy’ 415–416, 417 Circassian peoples, deported from Russian
killing quotas 409 Caucasus 375
Land Reform (1950–53) 409, 410, 415 cities
public meetings to promote terror 420 bombing of 286
‘struggle meetings’ 418 criminal control of (Latin America) 506
‘thought reform’ 416 Civil Disobedience Movement, India 78
and uncontrolled violence 411, 418–419 civil rights movement, United States 104–107
use of total terror 408, 417 and black power violence 105–106
use of violence by local officials 411, 415, early campaign 99
418 Freedom Rides 104
view of religion 59 and Nazi propaganda 102
Christian missionaries tactics and targets 104
in Africa 250 Truman’s Presidential Committee on 103
and colonial violence 9 violence against 105
India 116 civil wars
see also Catholic missionaries; Protestant Algeria 134
missionaries Colombia 495, 503

644
 Index

Iraq 138, 139 Latin America 501–503

Japan 327 and Middle East 128, 129
Latin America 494 plurality of 461–462, 463
Lebanon 130, 132, 281 political violence 459
Mexico 498, 499 proxy wars 14
Nigeria 11 regional (peripheral) violence 450, 461,
Sāmoa 35 464
Spain 621 Second (Africa) 462
Syria 138, 139, 263, 281, 282, 605 Cole, Tim 625
civilians collective violence
and Armenian genocide 290 China
and Chinese Muslim rebellions 52 people-beating squads 421
deaths in battle of Okinawa 331 uncontrolled 411
First World War 286, 288, 289 within villages 410
Islamist legitimisation of violence domestic jihad
against 136 justification of 265
Islamist throat-cutting of 269 Levant 265–266, 283
Korean War 457 see also jihad; Ottoman Empire
mass killings as strategic objective 305 France 347–364
propaganda and images of war 297, 311 appropriation of state power of
treatment in war 3, 295, 390 punishment 356
see also internment camps; massacres cultural anthropology of 351–355
civilisation decapitations and parade of heads 347,
imperial role in 227, 239, 471 352, 359
to justify violence 9, 10 and deliberate cruelty 351
Cixi, Empress of China 55 emotional agenda 357–358
Clark, Laurie Beth 624 and humiliation 358
class improvised courts 356
Cambodia 526–527 and mutilations 359–362
and sport 207, 213–214 reactive and proactive 349
and wife beating 575 and social tensions 351
see also elites; middle classes; working and targeted victims 352, 354, 358
classes Latin America 490, 497
Classification and Ratings Administration and power 490–491
(USA films) 591 see also mass violence; mob violence
Claudy, Carl H. 582 Colombia 496
Clegg, Stewart 511 civil wars 495
cockfighting 208 ‘La Violencia’ 503
in Asia 216–217 homicide rates 203
bans on 216 and Panama 501
hidden 211, 212 War of the Thousand Days 499
prohibition (1849) 211 colonialism 470
Cohen, Stanley, States of Denial 610 ‘civilising mission’ of 227, 239, 471
Cold War (1945–89) 14, 449–465 and economic development 475
and American racial violence 103 French theory of 486
American understanding of 451–452 and independence movements 2, 10
Cambodia and 512–513 and interpersonal violence 193
as contest of power 449 memorials to violence of 626–627
and decolonisation 450, 458–462 and propaganda 5
global politics of 460 and psychology of colonised 80
historiography 452 settler 228
as imaginary war 449 and violence against colonised peoples 9
Japan and 461 see also imperialism; indigenous people

645
 Index

colonies and unwanted elements 404

concentration camps in 388, 398 use by totalitarian regimes 397
see also Africa; British Empire; French see also Auschwitz; Holocaust; internment
Empire; India camps; POW camps; refugee camps
commemoration 616–635 Confucianism, moral framework removed by
of colonial violence 626–627 CCP 410, 424
of conflict 15 Congo, Democratic Republic of (DRC)
First World War memorials 291, 618 female violence 156
of holocaust 18, 616 forgotten war in 605
as implicit violence 73–75 sexual violence 160
and inclusion of enemies 16 Congo Free State 9
media and 616 Congress Party, India 119
memorial to victims of lynching 88 Connor, Eugene ‘Bull’, police chief 104
modern forms of 635 Conquest of Violence (Critchley, 1972) 561
with photographs 622–623 Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness 250, 252
pilgrimages 623–626, 635 consent
for unrecoverable bodies 291 age of 149, 169–170
of victims of state-building 17 proof of 152
war memorials 17, 292 and sexual violence 149, 154, 156
see also memorials constitutionalism, Western support for in
commerce Levant 270
Dutch 24 contentious politics, and mass violence
effect on Pacific islands 28 431–432, 445
communalism, and Indian nationalism 80–82 Contet, Pierre 484
communication Convention Concerning the Exchange of
cell phones 201, 598 Greek and Turkish Population
digital 1, 4, 598, 612 (1923) 298
and promotion of violence 6 Cook, Captain James 26, 27
social media 5 murder of 27
and state control 2 Corbin, Alain 355, 360
see also information; internet; media; Corbucci, Sergio, Django 592
newspapers; records Corday, Charlotte 534
Communist parties Corder, William 569
Middle East 130 Corman, Roger, The St Valentine’s Day
see also Chinese Communist Party; Khmer Massacre 589, 590
Rouge Corntassel, Jeff 633
Communist Party of Indonesia see PKI Cornwall, Frank, Sāmoa 35
concentration camps 386–405 Corsica, homicide rates 188
colonies 388, 398 Cortés, Hernán 22
definitions 387 Costa Rica 495, 496
economic function 389, 396, 402 coups d’état
guerrilla warfare and 389, 399 Iraq 128, 129
Hannah Arendt on 386, 393, 394 Middle East 129, 137
imagery of 387 Cowan, James 243
as ‘laboratories of human behaviour’ 393 CPK (Communist Party of Kampuchea) see
as ‘model form of government’ 402 Khmer Rouge
nation-states and 393 crime passionnel 193
Nazi 394–395, 404 punishment of 193
pilgrimages to 623–626 Crimean War, charge of the Light Brigade 599
and politics of occupation 403 criminal behaviour, social causes of violence 8
Soviet Gulag 395–397 criminal gangs 198, 202, 566–568
terminology 397 international 199, 203
transnational nature of 386, 389, 397 Latin America 505

646
 Index

names of 567 campaign against counter-

and youth cult 568 revolutionaries 409
criminal violence 561–578 famine 422
definitions 564 Cold War 459
and homicide 563, 568 Latin America 503
relics of 569 Cuban revolution 502
statistics on 564, 578 First World War
street robbery 562 French 287, 289
vicarious thrill of 561–564 German army 287
see also homicide Japanese servicemen (Asia–Pacific war)
criminals 329–331
aliens and immigrants as 573–574 Mexican civil wars 499
appearance (physiognomy) 571 Ottoman public violence (1914–23) 281
as monsters 572 Partition (1947) 85, 112
romanticised 565–566 Reign of Terror (French Revolution) 534
self-publicity and memoirs 569–570 Russian terrorist attacks (1905–10) 542
soldiers as 574–575 Second World War 305
theories about 570–573 Taiping Rebellion 47
Croatia, and Serbian Chetniks 381 Triple Alliance war (1864–70) 496
Cromer, Lord 248 Vietnam War 514
Cuba 493, 504 white supremacist victims 546
Ladies in White 13 ‘death tourism’ 624
liberal-democratic revolution (1959) 502 Debord, Guy, The Society of Spectacle 604
US intervention (1898) 501 decapitation see beheadings
culture see cinema; media; paintings; popular decolonisation
culture; popular literature Arendt’s view 248
Cummins, Gordon 569 and Cold War 450, 458–462
Cummins, Paul 618 defeat, culture of, after First World War 299
CUP (Committee of Union and Progress) Delaware, USA, age of consent 172
(Young Turks) 270, 273, 277 Delhi Durbar (1911) 74
and atrocities in Thrace 380 democracy
putsch (1913) 278 Indonesia 428, 445
and relocation of non-Turkish national Latin America 492, 503–507
groups 375 middle classes and 539
and Turkish nationalism 375, 378 in Middle East 128, 133, 137
Custer, George Armstrong 92 and terrorism 534–537
Czolgosz, Leon 544 and violence (France) 362–364
Democrat Party, US
Dalai Lama, exiled 61–62 and Jim Crow era 94
Daniels, Roger 400, 401 and white supremacist violence 91
Darfur, mass rape 152, 160 Denis, Claire, Trouble Every Day 583
Das, Veena 161 Denmark, extreme cinema 584
Davis, Natalie Zemon 353 Dersim, massacre of Kurdish Alevis (1937)
De Witt, Lt. Col. John L. 400 272, 279
death penalty desecration, crimes of 288, 314
move towards abolition of 4 Despentes, Virginie and Coralie Trinh Thi,
see also executions and death penalties Baise-moi 583
death squads, state 13 destruction
death tolls of buildings and monuments, First World
Armenian genocide 290 War 288
Cambodia 511 Chinese villages 336
China 336 Detroit, race riot (1943) 103
Anti-Hiding Campaign 421 Dhofar, guerrilla war in 127

647
 Index

diasporas Dubrulle, Paul 292

support for religious nationalist duelling 189–190
movements 122–123 pistols 190
and terrorism 122 rapiers 190
Dickens, Charles, Oliver Twist 573 Dumas, Alexandre (fils), Les femmes qui
Die Freiheit (Freedom) anarchist newspaper 540 tuent. . . 572
Dieulefils, Pierre 472 Dumézil, George 293
digital technology 1 Dumont, Bruno, Twentynine Palms 583
and dissemination of news 598, 612 Dungan rebellion, northwest China 51
and instant communication 4 Dunning, William Archibald 90
Dikötter, Frank 409 Durham, colliery strike (1891) 576
Dinant, Tschoffen Wall Massacre 288 Durtain, Luc 474
diplomacy Dutch East India Company, and Jakarta
and Eastern Question 267 24
as realpolitik 271 duty of care, principle of 7
Turkey and Lausanne Treaty (1923) 271 Dworkin, Andrea 148
‘disappearances’, of opposition citizens 13, 504 Dyer, General Reginald 76, 77, 300
disease Dyer, Leonidas, anti-lynching legislation 99
sexually transmitted 28
smallpox 28 Earner-Byrne, Lindsey 631
transmission to Pacific islanders 28 East India Company 70, 572
Django (1966 film) 592 East Indies, Dutch rule 24
DNA testing 617, 619 East St Louis, massacre (1917) 98
documentation Easter Island see Rapa Nui
of genocides 3 Eastern Front, First World War 287
and state control 2 Eastern Question 264, 273
Dodson, Mick 628 ethno-religious social unrest 267
dog-fighting 208 economy
ban on 211 ‘Cuban model’ of development 502
hidden 212 development debt 518
domestic jihad see collective violence; export-driven growth (Latin America) 497
Ottoman Empire illegal (Latin America) 505
domestic violence import-substitution
and child sexual abuse 175–176, 185 Cambodia 522–523
criminalisation 7 Latin America 501, 503
punishment 575 see also commerce
Dominican Republic 501 Ecuador 496
Dompierre-sur-Mer, France 360 Edelstein, David 584
Donald, Michael, lynching of (1981) 106 Edison Company, films 581
Dovzhenko, Aleksandr, ‘Battle for Our Soviet Edwards, Jason 630
Ukraine’ 316, 320 Eguchi Keiichi 338
Drevet, Camille 474 Egypt 127, 130
Drieu de la Rochelle, Pierre 291 2011 uprising 137
drones (armed robots) 2 Gama’a Islamiya 134
drowning, death by, Japanese servicemen 330 homicide rates 197
drug addiction Muslim brotherhood 128, 130, 137
and homicide 202 recognition of Israel 131
and organised crime 203 Sinai Peninsula 137
drug trade Ehrenburg, Ilya, Soviet writer 304, 321–323
international 203 German interest in 321, 323
Latin America 505 on Nazi atrocities 304, 311
drugs, Japanese use in China 337 radio appeal (1941) 316
Du Bois, W. E. B. 93 Red Army evidence of atrocities 313, 323

648
 Index

El Salvador criminal violence 561–578

independence 496 hunting 216
rural rebellion (1932) 498 interpersonal violence 190–192
US intervention 503 Islamist attacks in 136
elites left-wing movements 131
co-option of Indian 74 modernisation 273
rejection of violence 190 and rule of law 273
Emergency Detention Act (1950, USA) 400 see also Eastern Question; European per-
enemies iphery; France; Germany; Italy;
commemoration of 16 Netherlands; Spain; United Kingdom
‘enemy aliens’ in wartime 387, 390 European periphery (rimlands)
representations (demonisation) of 294–295 delineation 372
within the state 2, 3, 11, 13, 498, 503 diversity of 373
Engle, Karen 163 as fault lines 372
English Civil War 534 genocides 367–384
Enlightenment Western forms of nationalism 373
and idea of nation-state 115 see also Balkans; Bulgaria; Greece;
and rhetoric of imperialism 37–38 Macedonia; Ukraine
Entman, Robert 611 European Union, and Turkey 280
Enver Pasha, Ismail 378 Evangelicals, British, and inquiry into
Epirus, Albanian-speaking Chams 383 atrocities in Pacific 31
Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), Lynching in Evans, Raymond 243
America (2015 report) 88 An Execution by Hanging (1898 film) 582
Equatorial Africa, French treatment of executions and death penalties
servants 474 filmed 582
Erbelding, Marthe, murder of 563 mass public (Indonesia) 443
Erdoğan, Recep Tayyip 263, 280 public 581
eschatology strangulation, China 41
China 43, 59 see also beheadings; punishments
of IS/ISIS (Islamic State) 269, 283
modern Wahhabism 272 Falola, Toyin 251
projections in Ottoman Empire 266 Falungong (Dharma Wheel Practice),
and violence 269–272 campaign against 63–65
Essebsi, Beji Caïd 137 families see children; domestic violence;
ethnic cleansing women
Bhutan 121 famines
Gujarat 120 Bengal 84
Macedonia and Thrace 377–384 and blockades 286
of native populations 388 China 49, 417–424
rape and 162 India 73
Soviet Union 375 Fanon, Frantz 80, 469, 550
in suppression of Chinese Muslim Fantasia International Film Festival 594
rebellions 52 Farge, Arlette 351
see also genocide FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) (US),
ethnic nationalism 11 Counter Intelligence Program 106
and political use of rape 153 fear
ethnic violence American fear of terrorism 542, 545
China 65, 412–415 culture of 295
Europe 191 of ‘fifth columnists’ 391
Poland 298 and myth of ogre 295
see also racial violence see also moral panic
Europe Fefer, Itzik 317
‘brutalisation’ of 254 female genital mutilation (FGM) 184

649
 Index

feminism war of movement (early stages) 287

and focus on child sexual violence 180, 631 weaponry 290–291, 293
and view of rape 148 see also Germany
Fenton, Roger, The Valley of the Shadow of FIS (Front islamique du salut)
Death (1855) 599 Algeria 134
Ferdinand VII, King of Spain 493 and GIA (Groupe islamique armé) 134
Ferrero, Lorenzo 570 flamethrowers, First World War 290
Ferri, Enrico 563 Flinders Island, Tasmania 389
feuding 565 FLN (National Liberation Front), Algeria 550
and homicide rates 188 Foner, Eric 91
‘fifth columnists’, fear of 391 food controls and rationing
fighting Cambodia 527–528
bare-knuckle 209, 219 China 419, 422
with fists 191 see also famine
with knives 191, 192, 197, 565 forced labour
lethal outcomes 197 Belgium 289
sports 218 Cambodia 527, 528
working-classes 191 Chinese camp system 402
see also sports in concentration camps 389
film see cinema Japanese prisoners of war 334
Fincher, David mistreatment of workers 35
Seven 584 Operation Anvil 398
Zodiac 590 Pacific region 33, 35
Finkelhor, David, Sexually Victimized Foucault, Michel 247, 255, 257
Children 180 Foulon de Doué, Joseph, murder of (1789) 352,
Finlason, W. R. 237 356, 357–358
Finnane, Mark 630 Fowler, Will 494
First World War 286–301 France
Armistice (1918) 297 accusations against Maggi company 295
centenary commemorations 618 and Algeria 194, 249, 254, 258
civilians 286, 288, 289 concentration camps 399
and culture of fear 294 anarcho-terrorism 541
cultures of violence 293–297 ancien régime 347
demobilisation 298 collective violence 347–364
and ethnic changes in Balkans 375 colonial ministry 477, 484–485, 486–488
exhumation and identification of soldiers Corsicans 573
619, 620–621 crime
extreme violence of 287 female criminality 572
historiography of 286 homicide rates 563
images and words 287, 291 serial killers 197
industrial warfare 287, 291 street crime 562
internment camps 388, 390 crime passionnel 193
legacy of violence 300–301 democracy and violence 362–364
mass rapes 160 duelling 189
Middle East 128 Flour War (1775) 353
and Ottoman Empire 270, 278, 369 ‘Grande Peur’ (1789) 350, 352
in Pacific 36–37 Le Chapelier law (1791) 350
and post-war conflicts 298 nature of violent protest in 348
prisoners of war 390 and Ottoman Empire 274
refugee camps 391 and Pacific colonies 32
soldiers’ experience of warfare 289, 291–293 police use of violence 576
soldiers’ war journals 288, 296 political protest 348–351
United States 97 political violence 356–359

650
 Index

remobilisation (1917) 296 Fujiwara Akira 329

rural strikes 350 Furet, François 286
Second Empire 355
Second Republic 348, 349 Gabon
September Massacres (1792) 352, 356, Awalo murder case 481–482
361, 362 protests at French mistreatment 474
sub-state conspiratorial groups 535 torture and murder of Massima 483–484
and Taiping rebellion 47 Gaddis, John Lewis 459
Third Republic and democracy 347 Galagoda Aththe Gnanasara, Buddhist monk 121
tradition of animal sports 215 Galleani, Luigi, anarchist 545
urban growth 349 Gallipoli campaign 289, 292
view of Germany as enemy 294 exhumation of mass graves 620
War of the demoiselles (1829–32) 353 Gallup Poll, US (1955) 451–452
see also French Empire; French Revolution Galtung, Johan 610
La France Australe, article on Kanaks 478 Galtung, Johan and Mari Holmboe Ruge,
Franco-Prussian War (1870) 355 ‘The Structure of Foreign News’ 606
Frederick, John 177 gambling, and sports 208, 214
French army Gandhi, Mohandas (Mahatma)
and collective violence 357 and Civil Disobedience Movement 78
First World War casualties 287, 289 and Congress 80
French cinema, trend to extreme violence 583 and Hindu nationalism 118
French Empire 468–488 and Muslims 80
in Africa 2, 474 and negotiations with Britain 78, 79
central government investigations into Non-Cooperation Movement 76, 77
abuses 486–488 Gardner, Alexander, Photographic Sketch Book
colonial administration 254, 480, 484 of the War (1865–66) 600
colonial judicial system 480–486 Garibian, Sevane, in Human Remains and
international criticism of brutality 483 Violence 618
need for labour 472, 475–480 ‘garotters’, London (1862) 562
postcards of killed rebels 471 Garrioch, David 362
reports of abuses 471 Gaspar Noé, I Stand Alone 583
and state use of violence 470 al-Gaylani, coup d’état Iraq 128
treatment of indigenous people 469, 472, Geifman, Anna 542
473, 478–480 Gémenos, France, murders 359
vigilantism 481 gender, and rape 149, 156–157
violence by settlers 470 A Generation (Pokolenie) (1955 film) 590
see also Cambodia; Indochina; New Geneva Conventions, failures of 3
Caledonia genocides 162, 257
French, Philip 583 documentation of 3
French Revolution 348 European periphery (rimlands) 367–384
collective violence 347 First World War 290
Reign of Terror 534 geographic range 371
and use of terror 534 and ‘indigenous question’ 249
Frick, Henry Clay 544 origins of 369
Friedländer, Saul 394, 623 rape as strategy 160, 161
Friedman, David, Blood Feast 594 as systemic 371
Fromelles Military Cemetery 620 theories of 254
frontiers ‘third world’ post-colonial 371
British Empire 227–244 UN Convention on 290, 622
lawlessness 273 Yezidis 276
Middle East 132 see also Armenian genocide; Bulgaria;
see also European periphery Cambodia; ethnic cleansing; Herero
Frontiers, Battle of the (1914) 287 people; Holocaust; Rwanda

651
 Index

genre, and film violence 589 Gewald, Jan-Bart 250

geography, role of 367–368 Ghana
Georgia, US, segregation laws 94 leopard attack murders 199
Gerlach, Christian 430 marital rape 158
germ warfare, Japanese use of 337 Gibbs, Nancy 603
German army Gibney, Mark 630
demonisation of 295 Gide, André 471
Einsatzgruppen commandos 307, 309 Gilligan, James 415
First World War atrocities 288, 291, 295, 311 Girard, René 296
indoctrination 310 Giuliano, Salvatore 570
invasion of Belgium 288, 295 globalisation
and Nazi ideology 308, 309 Cold War politics 460
German East Africa 249 of ideology 14
German Southwest Africa and imperialism 1
concentration camps 389 of interpersonal violence of 199–204
see also Namibia Goebbels, Joseph 308, 318
Germany Gökalp, Ziya, pan-Turkism 267, 277, 279
duelling 189 Gordon, Linda 176
fairy tales 581 Göring, Hermann, ‘Green Folder’ policy
First World War directive 310
casualties 287 Gormley, Paul 584, 593
effects of 298 Government of India Act (1935) 82
fear of Russians 294 Goya, Francisco, The Disasters of War 600
French view of as enemy 294 gradualism 539
humiliation of defeat 299 Graham, Hugh Davis 106
internment of enemy civilians 390 Grain, Nicolas-Joseph 357
rumours of enemy aliens 295 Grant, Ulysses S., US President 547
Spartacist uprising (1919) 298 Greco-Turkish War (1919–22) 298
and Turkey 271 Greece 374
Weimar Republic 299 Allied support for ultra-nationalists 383
handguns 192 ELAS liberation movement 383
homicide rates 563 homicide rates 188
military culture 257 population exchange with Turkey 298,
Red Army Faction 551 376, 380
Ringvereine criminal gangs 566, 569 population in Thrace 380
and Sāmoa 35 ritual knife fights 565
serial killers 198 and Salonika Jews 382
see also Berlin Second World War 383
Germany, Third Reich and Slavophone communities in
campaign against Judeo-Bolshevism 306, Macedonia 383–384
307–310, 318 war with Bulgarians in Thrace 379–381
efficiency of operation 2 Greek Patriarchists 377
Freikorps 298, 300 Greene, Graham, Brighton Rock 567
Fremde Heere Ost office (FHO) 321–322 Greensboro, N. Carolina, Ku Klux Klan gun
General Plan Ost 376 attack (1979) 106
Ministry of Propaganda 5 grenades 293
Nazi policies 255 Griffin, Susan, ‘Rape, the All-American
occupation policy 307 Crime’ 148
and Second World War 304–323 Griffith, D. W., Birth of A Nation 100
and Soviet evidence of atrocities 321–322 Gromaire, Marcel 291
transgression of moral norms 305 Guam 23, 34
Volksgemeinschaft camps 394 Guantánamo Bay internment camp 388, 401
see also Holocaust Guatemala 155, 160

652
 Index

and Mexico 496 New England missionaries 30, 33

US interventions 502, 503 sugar plantations 33–34
guerrilla warfare Hayashi Hirofumi 331
concentration camps and 389, 399 Hayes, Bully, labour recruitment in Pacific 35
indigenous people 236 Hazareesingh, Sudhir 348
by Kurds in Turkey 281 Heffner, Richard 591
Gultung, Johan, Peace Research Institute Hegel, G. W. F. 458
Oslo 327 Heizen, Karl, and theory of terrorism 536
gun violence Hentig, Hans von 155
film depictions of 588–590 Herero people, German genocide (1904–08)
mass shootings 106, 553 255, 257
guns Hezbollah, Shia movement 132
accidents with 192 and Syrian civil war 138, 139
in American schools 2 Hideo Nakata, Ringu 584
for interpersonal violence 192 Hierl, Konstantin 395
machine 291 highwaymen 574
regulation of ownership 192 Hill, Billy, Boss of Britain’s Underworld 570
Gurr, Ted Robert 106 Himmler, Heinrich, SS 307, 308, 309, 397
Guru Ka Bagh, Amritsar, Sikh protest at Hindu nationalism, India 110, 118–120
(1922) 79 and Gujarat massacre (2002) 120
Hinduism
Haarmann, Fritz, serial killer 198 and diversity 114
Haber, Fritz 291 and Indian national culture 114
Hague Convention, failures of 3 hippie movement, and interpersonal violence
Haiti 253, 501 198, 201
Haitian Women’s Solidarity Group 165 Hirsch, Marianne 626
political use of rape 153 Hitchcock, Alfred, Psycho 594
Hajime, Kondō 158 Hitler, Adolf 114, 255
Hale, Sir Matthew 157 and extermination of Jews 376
Haley, Sarah 91 war against Judeo-Bolshevism 308
Hall, Bruce 250 see also Holocaust
Hall, Catherine 626 Ho Chi Minh trail 514
Halliday, Fred 459 Hobsbawm, Eric 348
Halloween (1978/2007 film) 584 Hobson, J. A., Imperialism: A Study (1902) 259
Hama, Syria, Islamist uprising (1982) 131 Hofstadter, Richard 89
Hamas organisation 126, 136 Holden, Robert 445
Hamburg, S. Carolina, massacre of black Holder, Cindy 633
militiamen 92 Hollywood
Hamidism (Turkish Muslim nationalism) Production Code 582, 590, 591
268, 277 see also cinema
hangings, public, by Nazis 313, 314 Hollywood’s Movie Commandments 582
Hara Yoshimichi 334 Holocaust 370, 376, 382
Hardy, Georges 486 links with conquest of Algeria 254
Harriman, W. Averell 320 Nazi concentration camps 394–395, 404
Hautefaye, France, torture and murder of and non-Jewish victims 306
nobleman 355, 357, 361, 363 pilgrimages to sites of 623–626
Hawai’i remembrance of 18, 616
annexation by USA 34 return of ashes 623
Cook at 27 see also Auschwitz
Great Māhele (1848) 33 Holodomor (Ukraine) 370
imported labour 33 Homestead strike, USA (1892) 543
Kamehameha ruling family 28, 30 homicide 187–204
monarchy 34 crime passionnel 193

653
 Index

homicide (cont.) national laws on 4

criminal gangs 198 Human Rights Watch, and Gujarat massacre
and drug addiction 202 (2002) 119
in intimate relationships 197 human trafficking
Latin America 506 of children 183
legal definitions 568 in Japan 338
lives saved by medical intervention 201, 203 humiliation see public humiliation
by poisoning 197 Hungary 367
serial killers 197–198 Red Army mass rapes 152, 154
of strangers 202 Hunter, Stephen 596
women as victims 202 hunting 208
and youth gangs 202 criticism of 210
see also interpersonal violence with dogs 208, 215–216
homicide rates tigers, India 75
calculation 188 Hunting Act (2004) 215
collection of statistics on 189 Huntington, Samuel 429
and lifestyle 201
methodologies 200–201 I Stand Alone (1998 film) 583
non-European 196–197, 203–204 ICTR (International Criminal Tribunal for
trends in Europe 187, 196, 563 Rwanda) 163
inner and outer European zones 188 ICTY (International Criminal Tribunal for the
homosexuality former Yugoslavia) 162, 163
age of consent 169 identity
classified as disorder 151 lack of, in European periphery 373
as criminal offence 151 national cultural, India 114
linked with paedophilia 179 ideology
and rape 151 globalisation of 14
Honduras 496 and Indian nationalism 78
homicide 506 Latin America 492
Hong Xiuquan, Taiping Rebellion 45–47 secular 266
Hongi Hika, Māori leader 29 see also political ideologies
honour Ieng Sary, Khmer Rouge 517
in colonial interpersonal violence 195 and Non-Aligned Movement 519–521
concept of women’s 155 Ilbert Bill (amendment to Indian Criminal
and duelling 190 Procedure Code) 75
and masculinity 361 immigrants, as criminals 573–574
honour killings 7 immigration, United States 100, 106, 545
Horeck, Tanya, and Tina Kendall, The New imperialism
Extremism in Cinema 594 Arendt’s view of 253, 258
Hornung, E.J., Raffles 570 and capitalism 259
horror films, graphic depictions 584 and globalisation 1
Hostel films, Eli Roth 584, 587–588 rhetoric of enlightenment 37–38
Howard, John, Australian Prime Minister 633 see also colonialism
Howard-Hassmann, Rhoda 630 implicit violence 86, 490
Huard, Raymond 359 in memorials 73–75
Hufton, Olwen 362 In My Skin (2002 film) 583
Hughes, Charles Evans, and National Inarritu, Alejandro G., The Revenant 595
Conference on Lynching (1919) 99 incest, laws against 175
Hughes, John, on mass violence 429 indentured labour
Hui, Chinese Muslims 51, 52 ‘blackbirding’ (kidnapping) 35
Hull, Isabel 257, 258 Northern Queensland 34
human rights 260, 429 independence movements
development of discourse 4, 6 Balkans 267

654
 Index

colonial 2, 10 and Kashmir 85

Ireland 12, 551 and legitimate monopoly of violence 68,
and terrorism 550 85–86
see also national liberation movements mechanisms of violence 69
India 68–86 treatment of regional insurgencies 85–86
Amritsar massacre (1919) 76–77 Indian Army (British) 70, 71
Calcutta riots (1945–46) 83 deployment 71
child marriage 174–175 and Peshawar protesters 82
Christian missionaries 116 Indian National Army (INA) 83
cockfighting 217 Indian National Congress
colonial use of excessive force 69, 76–77 formation (1885) 75
coloniser-on-native violence 195 government ministries 82
communalist violence 80–82, 84 and Quit India Movement 82
Criminal Tribes Act (1871) 72 religious divisions in 80
Deccan riots (1890s) 71 and Second World War 82
durbars 74 Indian nationalism 68
economy 73 and ideology 78
famines 73 and political violence 78
Government of India Act (1935) 82 see also Hindu nationalism; Sikh
Hindu nationalism 110, 118–120 nationalism
homicide rates 197 Indian Penal Code, amendment (1891) 174
and Ilbert Bill (1883) 75 Indian Penal Code (1860) 70
independence 10, 85 Indian police, state violence inflicted by 81
inter-war anti-colonial violence 77 Indian Rebellion (Indian Mutiny) (1857) 5, 70
interpersonal violence 195–196 Indian Scalping Scene (1895 film) 581
legitimacy of colonial state violence indigenous people
69–72, 79 abuse of children 177–178
Moplah Rebellion (1920s) 71 assimilation 234
native-on-native killing 195 and colonial hierarchy 469, 471
paramilitary groups 81, 85 in colonial paramilitary police forces
Partition (1947) 11, 84–85, 112, 160 240–242
penal code 195 concept of protection 234
Pink Sari Gang vigilante group 164 cultural re-education 228
Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act and disease 28
(1960) 217 fighting sports 218
rebellions (as illegitimate violence) first encounters 21, 23, 24, 235
69–72, 82 French colonial treatment of 469, 472,
Rowlatt Act (1919) and imposition of 474–475
martial law 76, 77 guerrilla warfare 236
rule of law 68, 69, 75 imposition of British jurisdiction 228
Salt March 79 and interpersonal violence, Africa 199
Santal Rebellion (1850s) 71 Latin America 497
secular colonial rule 110, 116 ‘logic of elimination’ of 228, 479
Sikh separatism 110–112 and memorials 17
statues to British ‘heroes’ 74 Natal landholding (‘Shepstone system’) 231
tiger-hunting 75 racialised violence against 89, 92
traditional view of religion 113, 116 resistance by 230, 235–237, 241, 243, 486
use of martial law 237 revenge violence by 30, 37
see also BJP; India, independent; Indian seizure of land from 33, 235
National Congress stereotypes of ‘savagery’ 26
India, independent treaties and warfare with 229–235
Armed Forces Special Powers Act (1958) 86 violent control of 31
and Hyderabad 85 see also Māori

655
 Index

individual(s) industrial warfare

and empathy with victims 15 First World War and 287, 291
rising power of 6–8 removal of interpersonal violence 293
risk of violence to 18 information
stories of experience of violence 15 power/knowledge nexus, India 72–73
Indochina 32 rapid transmission of 5
campaign against De Tham (1908) 472 see also communication; records
colonial Vietnamese murder cases institutions, state
482–483, 484 and individuals 6
First Indochina War (against France) 455, Indonesia 434
459, 513 Latin America 492, 497–501, 504
French colonial treatment of Vietnamese secular nature of 115
454, 473 International Labor Defence (ILD), Lynching
treatment of domestic servants 473–474 Negro Children in Southern Courts 101
see also Cambodia; Vietnam International Labour Organization (ILO), and
Indonesia 268, 427–446 French empire 483
aksi occupation of land by farmer groups international law
437–439 global frameworks on conflicts 3
anti-communist violence 427–446 and prosecution of war crimes 3
context 432–436 and rape 160, 161
denial of killings 429 rape as breach of humanitarian law 162
interpretations of 429–432 rape as crime against humanity 163
mass executions 443–444 International Military Tribunal, for Far East
middle classes and 444 (1946) 3, 160, 335
military coordination of 428, 441–443 International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg
popular support for 427, 428 trials (1945) 3, 160, 306
torture 444 internet
anti-democratic actions of Sukarno 436 film streaming 584
arc of political contention 436–445 and interpersonal violence 202
authoritarianism 444 news images 609
ban on Masyumi Islamic party 436 internment camps 393
democratic transition 428, 445 for ‘enemy aliens’ 387, 390
economy 432–433, 444 First World War 294, 390
institutions 434 United States 399–401
Irian Jaya campaign 435 see also concentration camps
Kostrad (mobile military force) 435 interpersonal violence 578
and land reform 437 duelling 189–190
Madiun rebellion, East Java (1948) 434 in Europe 190–192
and Malaysia 436, 441 globalisation of 199–204
and patron–client relations 432 in India 75, 195–196
PKI call for elections 437 and industrial warfare 293
politicised bureaucracy 432, 434 and internet 202
populist politics 433 legal constraints on 4, 7, 563
power of military 434–436 and macho culture 202
social mobilisation 434 in war 159
socialism 432, 434 see also fighting; homicide; sport
and United Liberation Movement for West Intifada see Palestine
Papua 11 Iqbal, Muhammad 113
see also PKI; Sukarno Iran
Indonesian Farmers Union (BTI) 433, 437, 438 1979 revolution 127, 131
Industrial Revolution 1 and Syrian civil war 138
and machine-breaking 349 violence in 127
and state power 536 Iran–Iraq war (1980–88) 132, 281

656
 Index

Iraq 138 religious shift (after 1967) 280

Anfal campaign in Kurdistan 139, 281 wars 281
Barzani rebellion (1961) 126 Yom Kippur war (1973) 132
civil war 138, 139 Zionism 266
coups d’état 128, 129 Italy
hostage beheadings 598 duelling 189
IS in 13 Fascist concentration camps 398
US occupation (2003) 136, 263, 281, 603 homicide rates 188, 196, 563
Ireland internment camps 390
Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse invasion of Libya (1911) 278
(2000) 177, 632 Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana 16
historical child abuse 631 police use of violence 576
homicide rates 188 Red Brigades 551
Republican independence movement Iyengar, Shanto 611
12, 551 Izvekov, V., Red Army soldier 313
war of independence (1919–21) 298
Irgun, Zionist terrorist group 549 Jack the Ripper 573
Irian Jaya, Indonesian campaign 435, 437 persistence of genre 569
Irish Republican Army, Provisional 551 Jacoby, Karl 107
Irreversible (2002 film) 595 Jakarta 24
IS/ISIS (Islamic State) Jalal, Ayesha 113
emergence of 13, 138, 272 Jallianwalla Bagh (Amritsar) massacre (1919)
eschatology of 269, 283 76–77
genocide of Yezidis 276 Jamaat-e Islami, Pakistani Muslim party 113
religious violence (jihad) 263 Jamaica, use of martial law 237
use of media 553 James, Selwyn, South of the Congo (1943) 252
Islam Janes, Regina 356, 359
in China 52 Janowitz, Morris 106
Deoband reform movement 117 Japan 326–342
eschatological traditions 266, 269–272, 283 Allied occupation 341–342
forced conversions to 269, 276 child labour 332
and justification of mass violence 267 and China 16
and martyrdom 271, 553 civil war (1868–9) 327
in Pakistan 117 and Cold War 461
political doctrine 125 Constitution (1947) 340
radicalisation of 142, 283 Dutch commercial access to 24
socio-religious hierarchies 266 and German Micronesia 37
Sunni–Shiite divide 263, 282 homicide rates 189
see also Islamism imperial ambitions 32
Islamic terrorism 13–14, 552–553 legal incapacity of women 338
influence of 553 martial arts 220–222
see also jihad, jihadis ju-jitsu (Kodokan Judo) 222
Islamism kendo 222
as alternative to left-wing discourse 131 naginata (for girls) 222
appeal of 134 sumo-wrestling 220–221
hegemonic development in Levant 280 sword-fighting 221
religious orthodoxy and social wrestling 220
conservatism 135 Meiji period 326, 328, 338
rise of radical 131, 135, 552–553 patriotism 332
see also jihad, jihadis penal reforms 326
Israel post-war pacificism 342
creation of state of (1948) 114, 126, 128, 270 rise of nationalism 221
Egyptian recognition of 131 Satsuma Rebellion (1877) 327

657
 Index

Japan (cont.) in Russia 290, 309

Second World War see also concentration camps; Holocaust
atomic bombing of 598 jihad, jihadis (Islamic militants) 263, 552–553
and Burma-Thailand railway 334 in Afghanistan 132, 552
ethnic minorities as guards for prisoners against Yezidis 275, 276
of war 334 coercive nature of power of 140
Information and Propaganda domestic jihad 265–266, 283
Department 5 and generational changes 133, 140
and Pacific War 13, 38 internationalism of 552
Recreation and Amusement Association Lesser Jihad 552
(RAA) 340–341 and martyrdom 271, 553
violence of imperialism/militarism military camps 135
327–334 and modern Levant wars 281, 283
violence of racism 334–338 and regional conflicts 138
violence of sexism 338–342 rise of 132, 135
see also Japanese Imperial Army and Sharia law 276
Shōwa period 327 see also Al-Qaida; IS/ISIS (Islamic State);
Taishō period 327 Islamic terrorism
Tokugawa Shogunate 24, 32, 221, 326 Jim Crow era, United States 94–102
use of colonial labour 333 Jinnah, Muhammad Ali 110
use of violence 33, 326 call for semi-autonomous state 113
war with China (1894–5) 327 and national cultural identity 114
war with China (1937–45) 33, 335–337 and secularity 115
war with Russia 294 Joffre, Joseph, Marshal 289
Yasukuni Shrine 16 John Paul II, Pope 605
Japanese American Citizens League (1929) 100 John of Salisbury 534
Japanese Americans, internment 103 Johnson, Lyndon Baines, US President,
Japanese Imperial Army National Commission on the Causes
conscription 327–329 and Prevention of Violence 106
death toll (Asia-Pacific war) 329–331 Jones, Heather 390
discipline and punishment in 329 Jones, Jonathan 618
ethnic minorities in 328 Jordan, Black September repression (1970)
killing of Chinese 334, 336 126, 130
military sexual slavery (‘Comfort Women’) Journal of Criminal Law and Criminal Behavior
7, 158, 339–341, 633 (1940) 155
size 328 journalism and journalists 5, 610–612
suicide attacks 330–331 and interpretation 612
Three-All campaigns 335–337 and spectacular violence 602–604
use of chemical and biological weapons 337 written 599, 609
Japanese Imperial Navy 328 see also media; photography
suicide attacks 330–331 judicial systems
Jaspers, Karl 403 and definition of rape 148, 149
Jay, Peter 610 failure of (Latin America) 506–507
Jewish Antifascist Committee (JAC), French colonial 480–486
Moscow 316 and legal constraints on interpersonal
Jews violence 4, 7, 563
anti-Semitic violence 191 Judt, Tony 459
Austria-Hungary 388, 573 Junger, Ernst, ‘Battle as Inner Experience’
Balkans 382 (1922) 297
and concept of national culture 114
forced into ghettos 307 Kaddafi, Muammar, Libya 130
perceived as criminals 573 Kaiser, Hilmar 393
rape of women in extermination camps 151 Kalakaua, King of Hawai’i 34

658
 Index

Kaldor, Mary 165, 449, 463 knife fighting 191, 192, 197
Kalyvas, Stathis 457 Knights of the White Camelia 546
Kano Jiguro 222 Kodnani, Maya, and Gujarat massacre
Karakozov, Dmitri 537 (2002) 119
Karmen, Roman 319 Kolsky, Elisabeth 195
Kashmir 85 Korea
Katma (Ghatma) camp, Syria 392 and ancestral commemoration of war 452
Katyn, murder of Polish officers at 306, 318 annexed by Japan (1905) 33, 329
Katzenmusik 563 economic development of South Korea 462
Keane, Fergal sexual slavery in Japan 634
on DRC 605 Korean War (1950–53) 451, 453, 457–458, 459
on Rwanda 611 civilians and 457
Keegan, John, The Face of Battle (1976) 286 family displacement and divisions 458
Kemalism (Turkish nationalism) 264, 267, 278 pre-emptive and retaliatory violence 457
and lack of social contract 280 Koreans, in Japanese mines 333
and pan-Turkism 279 Kosovo 379
rejection of political Islam 279, 282 Kotov, Ivan Ivanovich 312
as secular ideology 266 Kramer, Paul 94
and ‘Turkish History Thesis’ 279 Krasnodar, trial of Soviet collaborators 312
Kempe, Henry 181 Kravchinsky, Sergei 537
Kennedy, John F., film of assassination 598 Kray brothers 567
Kenya, Mau Mau uprising 398 Kropotkin, Peter, propaganda of the deed 540
Kerch, German execution of civilians 311 Ku Klux Klan 100, 105, 546
Kerner Commission, report on US urban riots 1970s attacks 106
(1968) 106 as domestic terrorism 545
Khaled, Leyla 133 murder of civil rights volunteers 105
Kharkov 313 Kurdistan 126
mass grave 316 Kurds
Khmer Rouge (Communist Party of and demand for independent
Kampuchea, CPK) 510 Kurdistan 12
agricultural policy 521–528 guerrilla wars in Turkey 281, 604
campaign against perceived enemies and Turkish War of Independence 278
528–530 Kürten, Peter 569
‘Four-Year Plan’ 521, 524 Kutz, Kazimierz 590
import-substitution policy 522–523
‘Report of Activities. . . (1976)’ 523 La Rochelle, murders 359
Revolutionary Army of Kampuchea labour camps
(military wing) 516 Chinese People’s Communes 402, 418
rise of 515 Nazi 394
Standing Committee 517 see also concentration camps
see also Cambodia Lacenaire, Pierre-François 570
Khoisan peoples, Cape Colony 231 Lacquer, Thomas 617
Khomeini, Ayatollah 133 Ladrones Islanders 23
Kick-Ass (2010 film) 590 LaFeber, Walter 450, 459
Kiernan, Ben 516 Lamballe, Princess de, torture and murder
Kim Ham-Bin, Cambodian victim 510 358, 361
Kim Jee-woon, A Tale of Two Sisters 584 Lang, Fritz, ‘M’ (film) 569
King, Martin Luther 104 Laos
Kipling, Rudyard child marriage 183
‘Gunga Din’ 73 and Viet Cong trails 514
Kim 74 Las Casas, Bartholomé de 25
Kiribati Islands 26, 35 The Tears of the Indians 23
Knauth, Percy 404 Latierce, M., murder of 351

659
 Index

Latin America 490–507 Lee, Steven 457

ban on cockfighting 216 Lee Young-soo 634
banditry 195 Lefebvre, Georges 363
changing boundaries 496 left-wing political movements
chronology 490 crisis of (1980s) 131
Cold War insurgencies 501–503 in Middle East 126, 128, 129, 130
commissions of inquiry (‘truth terrorism 551
commissions’) 504 LEHI, Zionist terrorist group 549
criminalisation of state 505 Leimena, Johannes, Indonesia 437
defined 490 Lemkin, Raphael 290, 370, 375
democratisation 492, 503–507 Leopold, King of Belgium 9
development of state institutions 492, Lesotho, medicine murders 199
497–501, 504 Levant 263–283
failure of criminal justice systems 506–507 defined 263
homicide rates 196, 203 lack of social contract in 264, 266, 282
independence era (great rupture) (1808–24) modern wars 281
493 public violence (domestic jihad) 265–266,
indifference to rule of law 490, 505 281, 283
international wars 496 see also Iraq; Lebanon; Ottoman Empire;
mass violence 459 Syria; Turkey
military dictators 497–498, 502 Levi, Primo 300, 616
mobilisation for development 492, 501 Lewis, Herschell Gordon, Blood Feast 594
patrimonialism 490, 495 Leyte Gulf, Battle of (1944) 330
state formation period 491, 492–497 Li Jingquan, Sichuan province 420
uprisings and civil wars 494 Liady, Russia, liberation of 313
US support for counterinsurgencies Liaison Society for Returnees from China 337
502–503 liberalism 260
see also Argentina; Brazil; Chile; in Latin American states 497
Guatemala; Mexico; Nicaragua; Libya 129, 139
Uruguay de facto partition 138, 139
Latreille, Gabriel, and son Gonzague 354, Italian invasion (1911) 278
359, 362 proposed Italian ‘extermination camp’ 398
Laubreaux, Alin, article in Le Messager (New under Kaddafi 130
Caledonia 1920) 478 Licht, Fred 601
Lausanne, Treaty of (1923) 264, 267, 271, 280, Lie, John 115
281, 298 Liebknecht, Karl 298
and expulsion of Muslims from Thrace 384 lifestyle
and population exchanges 376, 380 and fall in homicide rates 201
Lawrence, John, statue 74 urban street culture 202
Le Cour Grandmaison, Olivier 254 Ligue des Droits de l’Homme 474
Coloniser, exterminer 254 on colonial abuses 471, 487
reviews of 256 criticism of colonial murder trials 485
Lê Van Da, murder of 482 protest at Gabon murder case 481
League of Nations 37 report on slavery in New Caledonia 475,
and French empire 483 477, 486
and mandate system 37 response to report 478–480
League of United Latin American Citizens and treatment of Kanak workers 476
(1929) 100 Lili’uokalani, Queen of Hawai’i 34
Lebanon 126, 138 Lilly, J. Robert 160
civil war 130, 132, 281 Lincoln, Abraham, US President 547
Israeli invasion (1982) 132 Little Big Horn, Battle of (1876) 92
Leconte, Léon, beating of Chief Tieou Liu Wenhui, Xikang province warlord 413
468–469 Locke, John 115, 534

660
 Index

Lombroso, Cesare Jews 382

Criminal Man (1876) 570 rising political violence 377
Lezione de medicina legale 157 Slavophone communities in 383–384
The Deliquent Woman 571 see also Thrace
Lon Nol, General, Cambodia 515 Mackie, Vera 634
London McKinley, William, US President 544
areas built with slavery compensation MacKinnon, Catharine 148, 161
money 626 MacLauchlan, Alice 630
crime and policing 562 Madagascar, French ‘Old Colonist’s view
London Bridge attacks (2017) 553 of 479
Round Table Conference (1931) 78, 79 Madame Tussauds museum 569
Tower of 619 Madras, India, statue of General Neill 74
London Prize Ring Rules on boxing 219 mafia
Londres, Albert 471 post-Soviet Russia 565
Long Night’s Journey into Day Sicily 565, 573
(documentary) 628 Magadan Gulag camp 395
Los Angeles, Zoot Suit Riots 103 Magellan, Ferdinand, voyage to Pacific 22
Los Angeles Times, bombing (1910) 543 magic and sorcery, in China 42, 43, 53, 56, 59
Lu Dingyi, Minister of Propaganda 416 Maguire & Baucus, film distributors 581
Lucas, Colin 352, 356, 359 Maizles, Etta 313
Ludlow massacre, USA (1914) 543 Majdanek death camp, Poland 319
Lumière brothers, The Arrival of a Train 593 Malacca
Lundestad, Geir 450 Dutch conquest (1641) 24
Luo Ruiqing 402 Portuguese conquest (1511) 22
Lusitania, sinking of 291 Malaya
Lustig, Robin 602 communist insurgency 551
Luxemburg, Rosa 298 ‘villagisation’ 399
Luxor, Egypt, attack on tourists (1997) 134 Malgara, Thrace, genocidal massacres 379
Lynching Scene (1895 film) 581 Mali, jihadist state 139
lynchings 95, 265, 548 Mamdani, Mahmood 251
of child abusers 173 Mandrin, Louis, smuggler 566
Cleo Wright 102 Manila to Acapulco trade, Spanish treasure
decline (late 1930s) 101 ships 23
during First World War 98 Mann, Michael 430
Emmett Till (1955) 103 Mannheim, Hermann 568
federal anti-lynching law (1937) 101 Mantena, Karuna 251
and first anti-lynching legislation 99 Mao Zedong
of Mexicans 88, 97–98 Anti-Hiding Campaign (grain and food) 419
Michael Donald (1981) 106 and People’s Commune 417
national memorial to victims (US) 88 personality cult 62
as public spectacle 95 and use of violence 408
ritualistic 95 Maoism, religious characteristics of 62
see also mob violence; racial violence Māori
Lyttleton, Oliver 398 attack on Boyd whaling ship 30
and British colonisation 21
Ma Rulong, Muslim leader 51 and Dutch 24
Macabre (1958 film) 594 response to colonialism 25
McDougall, James 250 and Treaty of Waitangi 32, 230
Macedonia 367 maps, mapping
genocidal ethnic reordering 377–384 Balkans 377
independence (1991) 384 and states 367
Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Marat, Jean-Paul 534
Organisation (IMRO) 383 Maria, shipwreck, Australia 238

661
 Index

Marighella, Carlos 551 El Salvador (1932) 498

marital rape 157 of ethnic Hui in China 412
Marne, Battle of the 292 First World War 288
Marquesas Islands, French annexation France, September (1792) 352, 356, 361, 362
(1842) 32 Gujarat (2002) 119, 120
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia 459 Hamburg, S. Carolina 92
marriage, overriding age of consent 170 Kurds (1937) 272, 279
Marten, Maria, murder of 569 Latin America 504
martial arts 209 Ludlow, USA (1914) 543
China 53, 222 of Mexicans in south Texas 97
Japan 220–222 Nanjing 47, 48
martial law Oradour-sur-Glane 307
India 76, 77, 237 Partition 112
as instrument of terror 238 Rosewood, Florida (1923) 100
and summary powers of detention 239 San Bernardino, USA 553
use in British settler colonies 237–239 Srebrenica (1995) 4
Martin, Richard, Act to prevent cruelty to Thrace 379
cattle and horses (1822) 211 Tlatelolco, Mexico (1968) 504
Martin, Terry 372 Tschoffen Wall, Dinant 288
martyrdom, in Islam 271, 553 Tulsa, Oklahoma (1921) 100
Marx, Karl, on revolutionary terror 408 Wilmington (1898) 94
Marxism 539 Wounded Knee (1876) 92
and ethno-nationalist terrorism 551 Massoud, Ahmad Shah, Afghanistan 141
and imperialism 259 Matsunaga, Jennifer 629
masculinity Maudadi, Maulana Abul Ala 113
and honour 361 Mbembe, Achille 251
and violence 361 Meaux, France, September Massacres (1792)
mass rape 7, 159 352, 356
of Christians in Ottoman Empire 278 Mecca, occupation of Ka’ba by Islamist group
Darfur 160 (1979) 131
First World War 160 media 598–613
former Yugoslavia 161 archives of violence 14, 598
Red Army 152, 154 celebrity stories 604
Rwanda 151, 160 depictions of violence 5, 71
Second World War 160 and economics of production 604
by Turkish bashi-bazouks 380 and forms of commemoration 616
mass violence 1 illustrated magazines 297
behaviourist explanation 429 reporting of violent crime 578
contentious politics approach 431–432, 445 responses to 609–612
Fort Hood shootings (2013) 553 reticence of news editors 601
human rights perspective 429 social 5
Islamic justification of 267 spectacular violence 602–604, 613
Latin America 459 see also cinema; internet; journalism;
and political participation 430 newspapers; photography; propa-
see also collective violence; Indonesia; mob ganda; television; video
violence medicine, and deaths from homicide 201, 203
massacres Meier, August 106
Amritsar (1919) 76–77, 300 Meiji emperor, Japan 326
Armenia 268, 269, 276, 279 Melbourne, Australia, memorial to executed
on Australian frontiers 237 Tasmanians 627
Chile (1907) 498 memorials see commemoration
of civilians in wartime 295 memory
East St Louis (1917) 98 identification 608

662
 Index

proximity and repetition 608 Muslim Brotherhood and 552

and response to violent images 607–609 nature of violence in 125–142
of trauma 625 regional instability 141
men revolutions (2011–12) (‘Arab Spring’)
as rape victims 151, 156 137–140
sexuality and aggression 148 scale of sectarian war (2010s) 138
single (‘bare branches’) in China 45 sectarian affiliations 140
and sport 207, 218 trans-border affiliations 138
see also masculinity as ‘Tri-Continental Region’ 129, 133
Mesrine, Jacques, L’Instinct de Mort 570 tribal loyalties 127, 140
Metropolitan Police force, London 562 violent ‘national resistance’ 129
Mexicans and Mexican Americans, lynching weak states 140
of 88, 97–98 see also Iran; Iraq; Islam; Islamism; Israel;
Mexico Levant; Ottoman Empire; Palestine;
1917 Constitution 499 Saudi Arabia; Syria; Turkey
1968 Tlatelolco massacre 504 Mikhoels, Solomon 316
civil war (1910–20) 498 military dictators, Latin America 497–498, 502
collective and interpersonal violence 194 military transhumance
counter-revolution (Cristero War) expansion of 138
(1926–29) 499 to Pakistan and Afghanistan 132
criminal justice system 506 millenarianism, China 43
‘disappearances’ 504 Miller, Web, journalist 79
duelling 190 Millett, Kate, Sexual Politics 148
and Guatemala 496 mines, in warfare 290
homicide rates 189, 196, 203 Minsk ghetto, mass killings 313
Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) 499 Le Miroir, French weekly 297
marital rape in 158 missionaries see Catholic missionaries;
‘Plan de San Diego’ manifesto 97 Christian missionaries; Protestant
sexual violence 151 missionaries
use of pronunciamiento 494 Mississippi
war with United States (1845–48) 496 black disenfranchisement 94
Mezentsov, Nikolai 537 Citizens’ Councils 104, 105
Mhadli, Sana Youssef 136 lynching of Emmett Till (1955) 103
Micronesia 23 White Line terror campaign (1875) 91
middle classes Mississippi White Knights 105
and anti-communism 444 Missouri, lynching of Cleo Wright 102
and liberal democracy 539 mob violence
and personal experience of violence 6 against Armenians (1895) 268
Middle East against child abusers 173
anti-colonial riots 127 against Chinese 89, 92
and Cold War 128, 129 dynamite attacks (Birmingham, Alabama)
conflicts of 1990s 133–135 104, 105
coups d’état 129, 137 and National Emergency Committee
and democracy 128, 133, 137 Against Mob Violence (US) 103
effect of violence on social structure Ottoman domestic jihad 276
140–141 tarring and feathering (US) 90
enlargement of 139 torture 95
fragmentation 139 United States 88, 95
frontiers as ‘bordered power containers’ 132 and vigilantes 97
historical cycles 127–130 see also arson; collective violence; lynching;
influence of intelligentsia 128, 129 mass violence; racial violence
left-wing political movements 126, 128, mobile phones
129, 130 and call for assistance (in homicides) 201

663
 Index

mobile phones (cont.) formation (1908) 96

photographs and videos on 598 interracial alliances 100
Modi, Narendra, Indian Prime Minister 119 Lynching Goes Underground (1940) 101
and Gujarat massacre 119 National Conference on Lynching (1919)
Moeller, Susan 610 99
Molly Maguires, US underground group 542 Silent Protest Parade (1917) 98
Monéys, Alain de, murder 355 Thirty Years of Lynching, 1889–1918 report 99
Mongolia, Japanese sale of opium in 337 Truman address to 103
monotheism, origins in Levant 266 Naga insurgency, India 85
Montgomery, Alabama, memorial to victims Nahdatul Ulama (NU) Islamic party,
of lynching 88 Indonesia 437
Moore-Gilbert, Bart 76 Namibia 255
moral panics 545, 562 see also German Southwest Africa
about child sexual abuse 182 Nanjing (Nanking)
Moro, Aldo, Italian Prime Minister 131 Japanese atrocities (1937) 160, 335
Moro Islamic Liberation Front, Philippines 11 storming of (1864) 47, 48
Morocco 127 as Taiping capital 46
Morozov, Nikolai 538 Nanking, Treaty of (1842) 32
Morsi, Muhammad, Egypt 137 Naples, Camorra 565
‘Moscow Strikes Back’ (film 1941) 317, 320 Nasif Pasha, Ottoman general 274
Mosse, George 255, 298 Nasser, Gamal Abdel 128, 130, 133
Most, Johann, and justification for Nasution, General A. H. 437
terrorism 540 nation-states
Mostert, Noel 231 and cultural homogenisation 368, 377,
Motion Picture Association of America 590 381, 393
Mountbatten, Earl, Viceroy of India 114 Enlightenment view of as secular 115
Moyd, Michelle 249 as European concept 113
Mufti, Aamir, Enlightenment in the Colony 113 former colonies 12
Mühlhahn, Klaus 387, 389 and marginalisation of religion 114
murder see homicide and minorities 374
museums, and relics of criminal violence and monopoly of ‘legitimate’ violence
16, 569 11–14, 68, 85–86
Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt 128, 130, 137 political function of commemoration
and radical Islamism 552 sites 16
Muslim League, India 83, 84, 113 and transnational terrorism 13–14
Muslim rebellions trappings of 11
China 51–52 see also state formation; state violence
violence against civilians 52 national development programmes, former
Mussolini, Benito 16 colonies 12
mutilations National Emergency Committee Against
cutting off ears 27, 52 Mob Violence (US) 103
female genital 184 national liberation movements 2
post-mortem 352, 443 Algeria 550
symbolism of 359–362 Greece 383
mutually assured destruction, Cold War see also independence movements; PLO
449, 450 nationalism
Myanmar (Burma) anti-colonial 300, 460
Buddhist violence 121 Arab 140
and Muslim Rohingya 13 and Buddhism 110
development of 374
NAACP (National Association for the rise of 2, 221, 300
Advancement of Colored People) see also ethnic nationalism; Hamidism;
anti-lynching committee 98 Indian nationalism; Kemalism

664
 Index

Native Americans First Taranaki War (1860–64) 21

American Indian Movement 105 Newinson, C. R. W. 291
forced relocation 388 newspapers
racial violence against 89, 92 and criticism of French colonial
NATO, and Turkey 280 administration 481–482, 485
’ndrangheta, Calabria 565 mass daily 4
Necker, Jacques 352 names for youth gangs 567
Nehru, Jawaharlal, Indian Prime Minister power of written reports 609
85, 110 reporting of crime 562, 563
Discovery of India (1946) 114, 115 Nga Puhi, New Zealand tribe 29
and national cultural identity 114 Ngô Viêt Ly, murder of 482
and secularity 115 Nian Rebellion, China (1851–68) 49–50
Neshoba County, Mississippi, murders 105 Nicaragua
Nestorian Christianity, in China 52 independence 496
Netherlands Sandinista Front 502
and Cape Colony 231 US interventions 501, 502
and duelling 189, 190 Nice, France, attack (2016) 553, 605
emphasis on commerce 24 Nicholas II, Tsar 541
extreme cinema 584 Nigeria
homicide rates 200 Boko Haram Islamist movement 139
and Indonesia 432, 436 child marriage 183
and Japan 24 civil war (1967–70) 11
and Pacific exploration 24 independence 11
plantations in East Indies 33 leopard attack murders 199
Neuilly, Treaty of (1919) 380 Nikolaev, Lev 314, 316
New Caledonia 472 Nobles, Melissa 629, 630
French penal settlement 32 Noé, Gaspar, Irreversible 595
Kanak insurrection (1878) 486 Nolte, Ernst 397
Leconte case 468–469 Non-Aligned Movement 517–518
Ligue des Droits de l’Homme in 477 5th Summit Conference, Sri Lanka 518
recruitment of Kanaks as plantation labour Cambodia and 512, 516–521
475, 478 Non-Cooperation Movement, India 76, 77
New Guinea 21 Non-Detention Act (1971, USA) 401
Australian occupation 36 non-violence
gold rush 37 American civil rights movement 104
New Hebrides 472, 476 Gandhi and 76, 77, 80
New York, Wall Street bomb (1920) 545, 549 and political violence 78, 79
New York Times 317, 320, 600 resistance in Sāmoa 38
New Zealand North American Man/Boy Love Association
colonial violence 25 (NAMBLA) 181
deaths in frontier violence 243 North Carolina, black disenfranchisement 94
discovery 24 Northern Ireland 551
effect of colonialism on indigenous nuclear disarmament 6
warfare 29 nuclear weapons 2, 449
‘Flying Column’ attacks on Māori 237 Nuon Chea, Khmer Rouge 517
Māori raids 236 Nuremberg trials (1945) 3
Musket Wars (1820–40) 29 and rape 160
native police force 241 Nussbaum, Martha 120
occupation of Sāmoa 36, 37 Nyiramasuhuko, Pauline, Rwanda 156
Treaty of Waitangi (1840) 32, 230
use of martial law in North Island 238, 239 Offences Against the Person Act (1875) (UK) 171
see also Māori Okinawa, Battle of (1945) 331–332
New Zealand Wars (1840s-1916) 21 Okuda Akiko 338

665
 Index

Oliver, Roland 249 Tanzimat reform state (1839–76) 266,

Olympic Games 273, 275
boxing 219 Reform Edict (1856) 273
women’s boxing 220 Turanism 270, 277
Omar, Mullah, Taliban 141 Young Turk Revolution (1908) 277
Ōmura Masujirō 328 see also Turkey
127 Hours (2010 film) 595 Ouest-africain français newspaper 481–482
Only God Forgives (2013 film) 590 Ouzounian, Naomie 392
Onoyo, Ferdinand, Une vie de boy 474 Overy, Richard 404
Operation Anvil, Kenya 398
Operation Barbarossa (German war against Pacific Ocean 21–38
Soviet Union) 308, 309 application of British law to shipping and
opium, Japanese use in China 337 crews 31
Oradour-sur-Glane, Nazi massacre at 307 economic exploitation 28, 29, 30
Orthodox Church European exploration 21, 22, 24
Bulgarian-Greek divisions 377 First World War 36–37
forced conversion of Muslims to 379 French colonies 32
Orwell, George 464 indigenous warrior culture 26
Nineteen Eighty-Four 449 plantation economies 33–35
O’Sullivan, Timothy 600 port towns 28, 29
al-Otaybi, Juhayman 131 Second World War 38, 329
Ottoman Empire 263–283 see also Australia; China; Hawai’i; Japan;
and Berlin Treaty (1908) 277 Kiribati; New Guinea; New Zealand;
Constitution (1876) 273 Philippines; Sāmoa; Tahiti
CUP regime (from 1913) 278, 279 paedophilia
decline of 368, 377 justification of 181
diversity 264, 266, 273 linked with homosexuality 179
domestic jihad against Christians 274, Page, Wade Michael, attack in Milwaukee 122
276, 280 paintings, of war 600, 612
envy of non-Muslims (zimmi) 275 First World War 291
eschatological traditions 266, 269–272 Pak Yong-sim, Korean ‘comfort woman’ 340
European influence and 273 Pakistan
and First World War 270, 278 call for independence 83
and France 274 Hudood Ordinances on rape 152
jihad against non-Muslims 268, 270, 272, Muslim violence in 117–118
274, 276 opposition to independence 113
lack of democratic rule of law 274 Partition (1947) 11, 84–85, 112, 160
last decade (1912–22) 264, 270, 277–281 political use of rape 153
and Macedonia 378 Taliban in Baluchistan 117
millet system 266, 275 Palestine 126, 128, 549, 551
and Muslim nationalism (Hamidism) First Intifada (1987–93) 126
268, 277 Gaza Strip 137
power of imperial myth 282 Second Intifada (2000–04) 125, 126
power of 264, 273 Palestinian movement
Protestant missionaries in 270 fragmentation 130
public domestic violence (1915–16) 278 see also PLO
reaction to Western modernity 267, 268 Palestinian refugee camps 132
refugees from Balkans and Caucasus in militants in 126
276, 375 Tel al-Zaatar 130
refugees from in Europe 274 Palmer, A. Mitchell 545
state toleration of jihad 276 pan-Islamism 268
Sunni Islam view of state 267 Panama, US and 501

666
 Index

Panthay Rebellion, Yunnan province, Piper, Tom 618

China 51 pistols, duelling 190
Paraguay, war with Triple Alliance 496 Pitcairn Island 27
Paris PKI (Communist Party of Indonesia)
apaches (youth gangs) 562, 567 45th anniversary celebrations 427, 440
Bataclan theatre attack (2015) 140, 598 call for elections 437
Charlie Hebdo attacks (2015) 140, 553 kidnapping and killing of six generals
Commune (1871) 363 430, 441
mob violence 363 relations with military 440–441
Paris Peace Conference (1919) 300 relations with Sukarno 434
Paris, Texas, mob violence 95 and rural confrontation 439–440
Park, Chan-wook, Oldboy 584 support for 433, 434
Park You-me 634 PKK, Kurdish 136
Parks, Rosa, civil rights campaigner 91 ‘Plan de San Diego’ (Mexican manifesto) 97
Partition (1947) (India and Pakistan) 11, plantation economies
84–85, 112 Hawai’i 33–34
sexual violence 160 imported labour for 33
Pashtun tribal community, Afghanistan, New Caledonia 475, 478
Taliban and 117 Pacific 33–35
Pathé Frères, History of a Crime film 582 PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) 126,
patriarchy, women’s fight against 7 532, 551
patrimonialism, Central America 490, 500 military defeat (1982) 132
Patterson, Orlando 96 poison gas 291
Patterson, Robert, Citizens’ Council 105 factory on Ōkuno Island, Hiroshima 332
Peckinpah, Sam, The Wild Bunch 588 First World War 290
Peill, Arthur, missionary, Boxer Uprising 56 gas chambers 310, 319
Penn, Arthur, Bonnie and Clyde 588 gas vans 310, 312
Penn, Nigel 231 used by Japanese in China 336, 337
Perry, Matthew, US naval captain 32 poisoning 197
Persian Gulf war (1991) 281 as women’s means of killing 571
Peters, Carl 248 Pol Pot 511, 517
Le Petit Journal 572 purges 529
Le Petit Parisien newspaper 563, 572 on rice production 524
Philippines see also Cambodia
Mactan island 23 Poland
Moro Islamic Liberation Front 11 ethnic violence (1919) 298
US conquest of 34 German invasion (1939) 307
US racialism 93 Red Army move into (1944) 319
The Photo-Era journal 582 rise of nationalism 300
photography police forces
American Civil War 600 American 103, 104
commemoration 622–623 colonial 240
early 599 armed and mounted 240, 241
evidence of Nazi atrocities 315 native 241, 243
and French postcards of killed rebels 471 criminal assault against 576
images and sounds of violence 4 Indian 77, 81
mobile phones 598 recording of criminal violence 564
and record of brutality 79 relations with press 562
war 297 urbanisation and 536
Picasso, Pablo, Guernica 612 use of violence 576–577
pilgrimages, of commemoration 623–626, 635 Polish-Soviet war (1919–21) 300
Pinker, Steven 18, 561 political ideologies
Pinochet, Augusto, Chilean dictator 14 Cold War and 14, 460

667
 Index

political ideologies (cont.) First World War 390

and national development movements 12 Nazi treatment of Soviet 309, 323
and state violence 13 POW camps 390
and terrorism 534–537 rules on treatment 3
political violence prisons 8
France 356–359 Chinese People’s Communes 418
and Indian nationalism 69, 78 rape in American 156, 165
Latin America 504 reforms 164
politics see also concentration camps; internment
militarisation of 494, 495 camps; labour camps
morality and justice in, since Second World Prix Goncourt 297
War 630 Procknow, Greg 511
Pomaks (Bulgarian-speaking Muslims) 379 Production Code Administration,
popular culture Hollywood 583
representations of violence in 15, 581 pronunciamiento, as means of political change,
ridicule of police 576 in Latin America 494
see also cinema; media; popular literature propaganda 5, 296
popular justice, against local demonisation of enemy 295
transgressions 563 Nazi 5, 102, 306, 311
popular literature printed 4
melodramas 569 rape as 150
pre-First World War 294 Western suspicion of 318
romanticised villains 566 propaganda of the deed 540, 544
stories of violent crime 561, 581 property crime 561
war photos in 297 Prost, Antoine 299
population exchange, Greece and Turkey prostitution 7
(1923) 298, 376, 380 child 171, 172, 183
population growth, and risk of violence to criminal women as 571–572
individual 18 Japan 338
populist-authoritarianism, Mexico 499 Japanese ‘comfort women’ 7, 158, 339–341
Porfirio Díaz, Gen. Luis de la Cruz, New Zealand 29
Mexico 498 see also brothels
pornography Protection of Animals Act (1835) 211
child 181, 183 Protestant missionaries
and sexual violence 165 in China 52
Portugal Hawai’i 30, 33
and conquest of Malacca (1511) 22 in Levant (American) 269
and conversion to Christianity 22 in New Zealand 29
and independence of Brazil (1822) 493 psychiatry, and measures against child sexual
power abusers 179
and capitalism 259 Psycho (1960 film) 594
and ceremonial 68 public humiliation
and ideology in Latin America 492 in China 422
of media 609 and collective violence 358
and public violence 490–491 of non-Muslims 276
and violence 258–260, 271 sexual violence 164
Pravda public opinion, on consequences of violence 6
on Nazi atrocities 311 public violence see collective violence
publication of German policy directives 310 Puerto Rico 493
Price, Richard 233 Pullman strike, USA (1894) 543
Prince, Stephen 586, 588 Pulp Fiction (1994 film) 584
prisoners of war Pulteney, Sir William, Bill against bull-baiting
and Burma-Thailand railway 334 210

668
 Index

punishments Ransome, Arthur 373

abolition of violent 4, 578 Rapa Nui (Easter Island) 26
British Army 574 rape 166
changing view of 8 in American prisons 156, 165
chopping of hands (Congo) 9 and charge of adultery 152
corporal 7 children born of 153, 163
for crime passionnel 193 and credibility of victims 150
exile 41 as crime against humanity 163
food deprivation (China) 422 discrimination against victims 150, 154
tarring and feathering (US) 90 ‘domestic interaction’ after 155
within family 575 and evidence 150
see also mutilations; torture and evidence of resistance 155
Punjab state, India and gender 149, 156–157
division (1960s) 111 as genocidal strategy 160, 161
Unionist Party 113 homosexual 151
Puritans, and animal sports 210 and lack of consent 149
Puzo, Mario, The Sicilian 570 marital 157
and masculinity 161
al-Qadir, Amir ‘Abd 251 perpetrators as victims 158–159
Qianlong, Emperor of China 43 personal harm of 153
Qing dynasty (1644–1911) 41 physical coercion 149, 152
decline of 49 as political weapon 153
fall of 58 proof of lack of consent 152
and religious offences 41 racialisation (US) 173
Taiping opposition to 46 shame and guilt of perpetrator 150, 158
Qotb, Sayyid, Muslim Brotherhood 130 as ‘victim-precipitated’ crime 154–155
Quandt, James 583 victim’s fear of reporting 150
Queensbury Rules on boxing 219 violence of 154–156
Quit India Movement, repression of 82 as war crime 7
as weapon of war 150, 151, 162
race of women in Chinese Anti-Hiding
European notions of 250 Campaign 422
and white supremacy 10 see also mass rape
racial violence rape crisis centres 165
1970s and 1980s 106 rapiers, duelling 190
interracial violence in India 75 Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh movement
Japan 334–338 118, 120
see also ethnic cleansing; racial violence, Rather, Dan 602
United States ratting 208
racial violence, United States 88–107, 173 Rauschning, Hermann, ‘Conversations with
against Chinese 89, 92, 95 Hitler’ 310
against emancipated African Americans 89, Ravot d’Ombreval, Nicolas, Paris police 353
546–547 Raw (2016 film) 595
against Mexicans 88, 97–98 rebellion
against Native Americans 89, 92 as illegimate violence 69–72
and civil rights movement 104–107 response of military dictator states 498
memorialisation 88 Reclus, Elisée 367
nature and definitions of 106 Reconstruction, post-Civil War (US) 90–91
by police 104 depictions of 90
race riots 97 records
and Second World War 102 of child sexual abuse 168
and sexual violence 91, 172, 173 Indian census 72
see also lynchings; mob violence of Indian rebellions 71

669
 Index

records (cont.) revenge violence

media archive of violence 14, 79, 598 collective 357
police 564 by indigenous people in Pacific 30, 37
Red Army by ships’ crews 28
advance into Germany (1945) 304 Revue Franco-Annamite 485
evidence of atrocities 313, 323 Reynolds, Henry 243
as liberators 320 Rhodes, Cecil 248, 258
mass rape by (Second World War) 152, 154 right-wing political movements, Middle
Meetings of Vengeance 315 East 128
publication of Nazi atrocities 312 rights
Red Army Faction (Baader-Meinhof), of children 8
Germany 551 individual 534
Red Barn murder (1827) 569 traditional 534
Red Brigades, Italy 551 see also civil rights movement; human
‘Red Shirt’ militias, South Carolina 91 rights
‘Red Summer’ of violence, 1919 (US) 98, 100 Ringelblum, Emmanuel 307
Refn, Nicholas Winding, Only God Forgives Ringvereine criminal gangs, Germany 566, 569
590 riots
Reformation 534 India 71, 83
refugee camps, First World War 391 Middle East 127
refugees subsistence (France) 349, 362
deaths in Macedonia-Thrace 382 United States 96, 97, 106
First World War 286, 290 Robben Island, South Africa 239
from Middle East wars 132, 140 Robbins, James 602
from Southeast Asia 106 Robespierre, Maximilien 534
Reichenau, Field Marshal von 310, 315 Robinson, Geoffrey 431
religion Rocquevaire, France, murders 359
and identity in European periphery 373 Rodrigo, Javier 403
monotheism 266 Rohingya Muslim minority, Myanmar 121
political power of 282 Romania 374
and use of animals in sport 210 Rome, homicide rates 188
see also Buddhism; Catholic Church; Römer, Michal 301
Christianity; eschatology; Hinduism; Roosevelt, Franklin D., US President 400
ideology; Islam Roosevelt, Theodore, US President 34
religious leaderships and lynching 101, 102
political influence of 12–13 Rosen, Hannah 91, 111
and political power 13 Rosenfeld, Isaac, ‘The Meaning of Terror’
religious movements (1949) 402
appeal of 46 Rosewood, Florida, massacre (1923) 100
diaspora support for 122–123 Rosi, Francesco 570
and political use of rape 153 Rostov, Nazi atrocities 311
utopianism 46 Roth, Eli, Hostel films 584, 587–588
religious orders, abuse of children 8 Rothberg, Michael 626
religious violence rough music 563
China 41–66 Rowlatt Act (1919), India 76
definitions (China) 42–43 and Gandhi’s Satyagraha 77
India 110, 118–120 Royal Indian Navy, mutiny (1946) 83
Pakistan 117–118 Royal Navy, flogging 574
and secularism 123 RSPCA (Royal Society for the Prevention of
and self-affirmation 263 Cruelty to Animals) (1824, 1835) 211
South Asia 110 Rubio-Marian, Ruth 633
see also Islamic terrorism; Islamism Rudé, George 348, 363
Reservoir Dogs (1992 film) 584 Rudwick, Elliott 106

670
 Index

rule of law Sant Fateh Singh, Sikh leader 111

Europe 273 Sanyai, Deberati 624
India 68, 69, 75 Saudi Arabia
and lack of democracy in Ottoman and Syrian civil war 138
Empire 274 Wahhabism 272
Latin American indifference to 490 and Yemen 138
Russia Savarkar, Vinayak Damodar, Hindu
Combat Organization 541 Mahasabha 118
deportation of Circassian peoples 375 Saw series of films 584
duelling 189 scampenate 563
homicide rates 199 Schama, Simon 347
samosud 564 Schinderhannes (Johannes Bückler),
scorched earth policy in First World robber 566
War 290 schools
Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) 541 corporal punishment 7, 575
The People’s Will conspiratorial terrorist guns in American 2
organisation 538 Schumann, Dirk 299
‘war communism’ (1918–21) 300 Seaton, Jean 612
see also Soviet Union Carnage and the Media 601
Russia, post-Soviet secessionist movements
mafia in 565 suppression of 11
and Syrian civil war 138, 139 see also civil wars; independence move-
Russian Revolution (1917) 2, 298 ments; national liberation move-
refugees from 391 ments; nationalism
terrorism of 537–539 Second World War 304–323
Russo-Japanese War (1904–5) 327 Balkans 381
Rwanda behaviour of Red Army 152, 154
female violence 156 government information management 5
genocide (1994) 4, 598 India and 82–83
mass rape 151, 160 and internment 399–401
mass rape 160
Sachsenhausen 310, 397 Pacific Ocean 38, 329
sacred time rape of Jewish women in camps 151
concept of 43, 59 United States 102
Maoism as culmination of 62 see also Germany, Third Reich; Holocaust;
al-Sadat, Anwar 130 Japan
assassination 131 secularism
Saddam Hussein 133 of British rule in India 110, 116
Sahlins, Peter 354 Enlightenment and 115
Salonika, Macedonia, deportation of Jews to and religious violence 123
Auschwitz 382 security forces, state 11
Sāmoa 35–36 and internal enemies 13
Chinese indentured labourers 36 see also armed forces; police forces
civil war (from 1870s) 35 self-control, violence as loss of 7
Mau resistance movement 38 self-sacrifice see martyrdom; suicide bombing
New Zealand occupation of 36, 37 Seoul, Association for Cold War Studies
non-violent resistance 38 meeting 452
plantations 35 Seraw, Mulugeta, murder in US (1988) 107
samosud, Russia 564 Serbia 374
San Bernardino, USA, massacre 553 and Croat Ustasha state 381
San people, Cape Colony 231 German invasion (1915) 290
sandalwood, Pacific islands 28 mass rape by Serbian forces 161, 163
Sandler, Kevin S. 591 and propaganda value of rape 150

671
 Index

Sergei Aleksandrovich, Grand Duke 542 Sino-Japanese War, First (1894–5) 222, 327
serial killers 197–198 Sino-Japanese War, Second (1937–45) 33,
servants, beating of 335–337
India 75 Sion, Brigitte 624
Indochina 473–474 Sirik Matak, Prince Sisowath, Cambodia 515
Seven (1995 film) 584 al-Sisi, Abdel Fattah, Egypt 137
sexual equality, and sexual violence 165 Sköld, Johanna 632
sexual violence 7, 147–166 slave markets, Mesopotamia 278
against children 168–185 slavery
and consent 149 abolition of 10, 626
definitions 147–150 compensation money 626
former Yugoslavia 161 and ‘consent’ to rape 155
Japanese, in China 33, 160 Dutch colonialism and 24
language of 151 in French colonies 475, 477, 486
laws against 164, 165 sexual, Japanese Imperial Army 7, 158,
military brothels 7, 33, 158, 633 339–341, 633
perpetrators 148, 150, 179 see also forced labour; indentured labour
as victims 158–159 Sleeman, Captain W. H. 572
physical coercion 149 Slocum, J. David 585
public humiliation 164 Slutsky, Boris, on Red Army mass rape 154
racialisation of, southern US 91, 172, 173 Smaal, Yorick 175
range of 149 Smithson, George 570
silence and reporting of 150–153 Snyder, Timothy 370–371
society and 166 Snyder, Zack, Watchmen 590
solutions to 164–165 social contract
victim-blaming 164 essential to modern coexistence 264
victims 148, 150 failure in Levant 264, 266, 282
and war 159–164, 286 lacking in Kemalism 280
by women 156 Social Darwinism 10
see also mass rape; pornography; prostitu- applied to nations 294
tion; rape in Middle East 128
Shane (1953 film) 588 social media 5
Sharfstein, Daniel 92 socialism
sharia law Indonesia 432, 434
and domestic jihad 276 revolutionary (China) 12
and sexual activity 170 working-class and 539
Shark Island, Namibia 389 Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs), Russia 541
Shetty, Salil 605 Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
Shiism Animals (USA) (1866) 214
eschatology 282 soldiers
Mahdism 283 as criminals 574–575
Shinto, Japan 13 fear of resistance in invasions 295
Sicily, mafia 565, 573 and nature of First World War combat 289,
Sierra Leone 160 291–293
child prostitution 183 post-war indifference to violence 299
Sihanouk, Norodom, Prince of Cambodia, Red Army letters to Ehrenburg 323
and alliance with CPK 515 US Army 102, 159
Sihanouk Trail, Cambodia 514 war journals and letters 288, 296
Sikh nationalism 110–112 Soleilland, Albert 563, 572
and 1960s demands 111 Solomon Islands, child marriage 183
1980s conflict with government 110, 111 Solovetski Islands, Gulag 395
diaspora support for 122 Somalia 133
religion and 111 Some Like It Hot (1959 film) 589, 590

672
 Index

Somme, Battle of the (1916) 291, 292 human combat 209, 218–223
film footage 598 humanitarian reformers and 209, 212
South Africa hunting 208
colonial frontiers 230–232 martial arts 209, 220–222
concentration camps 387 regulation of 207, 209, 218, 223
gang rape 153 team (non-contact) 209
homicide rates 203 and tradition 215, 216–217
Robben Island 239 wrestling 220
Soweto 598 see also hunting
Truth and Reconciliation Commission 628 Springfield, Illinois, riot (1908) 96, 97
see also Cape Colony Srebrenica massacre (1995) 4
South America see Latin America Sri Lanka
South Dakota, USA Buddhist violence 121
Mount Rushmore National Memorial 17 diaspora support 122
Wounded Knee Memorial 17 and Tamil separatists 13, 122
South Korea, economic development 462 Stalin, Joseph
Soviet Union (USSR) and ethnic deportations 375
and Afghanistan 131, 552 and German military orders 310
censorship of accounts of rape 152 post-war Western view of 306
and Cold War 14, 449 response to German fascism 306
dissemination of evidence of Nazi Stalinism, compared with Nazi Germany 314
atrocities to West 305, 316–323 Stallone, Sylvester, The Expendables 590
ethnic deportations 375 Starke, Wilhelm 574
Extraordinary State Commission (ChGK) starvation
on Nazi crimes 311 of Chinese peasants in Anti-Hiding
German invasion (1939) 307 Campaign 420
Gulag camps 395–397 deaths of Japanese servicemen from 329
and Kemalist Turkey 279 of deported Armenians 278
moral outrage at Nazi atrocities 304, 310 see also famine; food
occupation policy 307 state of emergency
political meetings after liberation 315 use of 86, 392
and propaganda on Nazi atrocities 306, 311 see also martial law
and Second World War 304–323 state formation
‘special settlements’ 395, 397 Latin America 491, 492–497
see also Red Army; Russia see also Israel; nation-states
Soweto, South Africa 598 state violence
Spain and civil wars 11
Basque separatists (ETA) 551 implicit 73–75, 86, 490
bull-fighting 215, 581 as legitimate 11–14, 69–72, 85–86
end of empire (1898) 34, 493 as means of total control (China) 417, 424
Francoist concentration camps 397 see also Chinese Communist Party
and Pacific 23 states
Spanish Civil War, exhumation and and concentration camps 393
identification of victims 621 control of populations 2
spectacular violence criminalisation of (Latin America) 505
representation of 602–604 management of information (propaganda)
see also cinema; media 5, 296
sports 207–223 measures against revolution 535–536
animal combats 208, 210, 215 and public apologies for violence 629–634
move towards prohibition 209–218, 223 violence against enemies within 2, 3, 11,
bare-knuckle fighting 209, 219 294–295, 498, 503
boxing 219 see also institutions; nation-states; terror,
and gambling 208, 214 state use of

673
 Index

Stead, W. T. 573 Wallis expedition to (1767) 27

‘Maiden tribute’ articles 172 Tahitians, on Pitcairn Island 27
Stephen, James, Colonial Under-Secretary 237 Taiping Rebellion (Heavenly Kingdom of
Stevens, George, Shane 588 Great Peace) (1850–64) 41, 45–49
Stevenson, Robert Louis, Dr Jekyll and Mr appeal of 46
Hyde 569 ban on vices 46
Strange Days (1995 film) 584 death toll 47
strikes effect of suppression 49
Chile 498 Taiwan, as Japanese colony 328
Durham (1891) 576 Takashi Miike, Audition 584
France 350 Talaat, Mehmed (Pasha) 277, 279
USA 543 Taliban 141
Struve, Pyotr 300 in Afghanistan 110, 117
Subandrio, Indonesia 437 and Haqqani network 118
submarine warfare, sinking of Lusitania 291 Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan 13
subsistence crises 352 Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and
and riots 349, 362 Prevention of Vice 13
Sudan 133, 604 Tallien, Jean Lambert 534
Sue, Eugène 571 Tamil Nadu, bull-running 208
Suharto, General, and operation against PKI Tamil separatists, Sri Lanka 13
430, 441–443 Tan Zhenlin 418
Suhrawardy, H. S., Bengal Premier 84 Tannenberg, Battle of 292
suicide Tarantino, Quentin
to avoid violence in revolutionary China Pulp Fiction 584
(1953–54) 415–416 Reservoir Dogs 584
kamikaze attacks by Japanese servicemen Tarnovskaia, Maria 193
(1944–45) 330–331 Tartan Films 584
self-immolation 63 Tasman, Abel, and New Zealand 24
suicide bombings 126, 135 Tasmania 234, 238, 239
Sukarno, President of Indonesia 433 Taylor, Col Philip Meadows 572
ban on political parties 436 Te Morere, Battle of (1864) 21
leadership of 435–436 Te Whiti O Rongomai, Māori 21
and PKI anniversary celebration 427, 440 technology
Suny, Ronald 393 DNA testing 617, 619
Sutcliffe, Peter 569 military 2
SVAC (Sexual Violence in Armed transport 1
Conflicts) 160 and violence 1–6
Swain, Shurlee 632 see also communication; digital technology;
Sweden, boxing 219 weaponry
Sydney, Australia, British penal settlement television
29, 31 power of image 609
symbolic violence 533, 534, 554 violent crime on 562
Syria 130, 272, 392 see also cinema
2012 uprising 138 terror, state use of 13, 533
civil war 138, 139, 263, 281, 282 Cambodia 528–530
escalation 139 China 408, 417, 420
news coverage 605 French Revolution 534
Kurdish areas 139 Soviet Union 549
and Lebanon 139 totalitarian regimes 549
terrorism 408, 532–554
Tahiti and Algerian War (1954–62) 550
French annexation (1842) 32 and cell organisation 538
Pomare ruling family 28 definitions 532

674
 Index

and diasporas 122 Till-Bradley, Mamie 104

ethno-nationalist insurrections 549, 551 Tilly, Charles 348, 363
evolution of 533 The Times, on Belgian refugees 391
and ideology of democracy 534–537 Timor 160
and independence movements 550 Tohu Kākahi, Māori 21
international 532 Tominaga Shōzō 336
Islamic 13–14, 552–553 Tordesillas, Treaty of (1494) 22
origin of term 532–533 Toronto Film Festival 595
Russian revolutionary 537–539, 542 torture
as strategy 533 Indonesia 444
sub-state actors 533, 535 Latin America 504
sub-state conspiratorial groups 535, 538, 549 mass (Ottoman Empire) 278
symbolic nature of 533, 534, 554 mob violence 95
target assassination 537 state use of 13
see also anarcho-terrorism; jihad see also torture, China
Terry, Karen 176 torture, China
Texas, Fort Hood mass shooting (2013) 553 Anti-Hiding Campaign 420
Thailand, child prostitution 183 campaign against counter-revolutionaries
Thalerhof camp, Graz 391 409
The Arrival of a Train (1896 film) 593 of fellow villagers 410
The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots (1894 methods of 415, 419
film) 581 People’s Communes 419
The Expendables (2010 film) 590 use by local officials 411
The Hanging of William Carr (1897 film) 582 ‘torture porn’ films 584
The Revenant (2015 film) 595 Touré, Samori 251
The St Valentine’s Day Massacre (1967 film) Toynbee, Arnold 373
589, 590 trauma
The Street Fighter (1974 film) 591 of child sexual abuse 180, 184
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974/2003 film) memories of 625
584, 592 Traverso, Enzo, Origins of Nazi Violence 247
The Wild Bunch (1969 film) 588, 594 Trepov, Fyodor 537
Théâtre du Grand Guignol, France 581 Triad brotherhood, China 50
Thiepval, war memorial 292 Tribune Républicaine 485
Third World Triple Alliance, war against Paraguay 496
and Cold War 450 Troianovskii, Mark, filmmaker 312
Western news coverage 606 Trotsky, Lev (Leon) 539
Thompson, E.P. 353 Trouble Every Day (2001 film) 583
Thrace Truman, Harry S., US President, presidential
exchange of Greek and Bulgarian Committee on Civil Rights 103
populations 380 Truth and Reconciliation Commissions 623,
genocidal ethnic reordering 377–384 628–629, 630
Greco-Bulgarian conflict 379–381 Tshushima, Battle of (1905) 294
rising political violence 377 Tulsa, Oklahoma, massacre (1921) 100
see also Macedonia Tumarkin, Maria 625
‘thugs’, and Thuggee 572 Tunisia, 2011 uprising 137
Tiandihui (Heaven and Earth Society), Tupamaros group, Uruguay 551
China 50 Turanism, political messianism 270
Tianjin, China, attack on French church 53 Turkey
Tianjin, Treaty of (1858) 52 anti-Kurdish war policy 281, 604
Tibet, suppression of Lhasa revolt (1959) 61–62 and Armenian genocide 271
Tieou, Chief, New Caledonia 468–469 and European Union 280
Tikhomirov, Lev, People’s Will 538 foundation of Republic (1923) 267
Till, Emmett, lynching of (1955) 103 and Gallipoli campaign 289

675
 Index

Turkey (cont.) and Soviet evidence of Nazi atrocities

Kemalist putsch (1980) 280 317, 318
and NATO 280 and sport with animals 207, 209, 218
persistence of Ottoman political-religious and Taiping rebellion 47
tradition 271, 279 see also British Empire; India
population exchange with Greece 298, United Nations (UN) 3
376, 380 Charter (1945) 549
return of political Islam 280 Convention on the Prevention and
and Syrian civil war 138 Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
turn to authoritarianism 263, 280 (1948) 290, 622
violence in 127 Convention on the Rights of the Child
war with Greece (1919–22) 298 (1989) 182
War of (Turkish-Muslim) Independence limits of power of 4
(1919–22) 278 peacekeeping forces 3
see also Kemalism; Ottoman Empire Resolution 1820 (on rape as war crime)
Turkism 277 7
Tuskegee Institute, US, lynching database United States of America
95, 98 abolition of slavery 10
Twentynine Palms (2003 film) 583 age of consent 149, 172
Tyrrell, Peter 632 anarcho-terrorism 542–545
anti-federalism 548
Ukhtpechlag Gulag camp 396 arrest of Germans as spies 295
Ukraine 605 attack on Sikh gurdwara 122
Ukraine in Flames (film 1944) 316, 320 black migration to North 96
underworld see criminal gangs child sexual abuse
UNICEF, on child sexual assault 168, 183 moral panic about (1980s) 182
United Kingdom Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) 93
and age of consent 149, 171–172 Civil Rights Act (1964) 105
Belgian refugees 391 Civil War (1861–65) 10, 89, 90–91, 546,
and colonial independence 10 600
criminal gangs 567 Reconstruction 90–91, 546, 547
duelling 189 and cockfighting 214
extreme cinema 584 duelling 190
ferocity of warfare by 70 fear of foreign terrorists 542, 545
fist-fighting 191 First World War 97, 296
homicide rates 563 foreign relations
House of Commons Select Committee on annexation of Hawai’i (1898) 34
indigenous people (1837) 234, 240 and Cold War 449, 461
and hunting with dogs 215–216 colonial acquisitions 93–94
and internment camps 387 covert bombing of Cambodia 514
Irish migrants 573 and Cuba 502
and Kenyan concentration camps 398 geopolitical policy 136, 513
Ministry of Information 5, 318 and Indonesia 436, 442
moral panic about child sexual abuse international reputation 97, 102
(1980s) 182 and Japan 32
and Opium Wars with China 31 and Korean War 451, 457
‘penny dreadfuls’ 581 military interventions in Central
police force Occurrence Books 564 America 500–501
and religious minorities in India 113 and proxy wars 14
remobilisation (1917) 295 and Sāmoa 35
and Sāmoa 35 and South America 14
Sikhs 122 support for Latin American
and South African concentration camps 387 counterinsurgencies 502–503

676
 Index

and Vietnam War 513–515 use of martial law 238, 239

war with Mexico (1845–48) 496 Van, Marina de, In My Skin 583
homicide rates 196 Vancouver, George 30
hunting 216 Varaize, Charente-Inférieure 351
Immigration Act (1917) 545 Varges, A. L. 79
immigration restrictions 100, 106 Vast Yang religious uprising, China 58
Indian Wars 92 Vaughn, Matthew, Kick-Ass 590
industrialisation 92 vendetta, southern Europe 565
and international communism 318, 453 Venezuela 496
internment of Japanese-Americans 399–401 abolition of elections 504
and Islamic terrorism 553 military dictators 500
and Jewish Antifascist Committee (JAC) 316 Veracini, Lorenzo 229
labour movement 544 Verdun, Battle of (1916) 291, 292
labour-related violence 542–543 Vergès, Jacques 256
New Deal 101 Versailles, Treaty of 298, 299
Office of War Information 5 Vickery, Michael, on Cambodia 511
and race Victoria, Queen, patron of RSPCA 212
enforcement of colour line 93–96 video, home industry 592
Jim Crow era 94–102, 548 video games 15
race riots 97 Video Recordings Act (1984) 592
racial police violence 104 Vietnam 453–457
racial violence 88–107, 173 ancestral remembrance 453
segregation and disenfranchisement in Communist Party 513
South 92, 94 family displacement and reconciliation 454
rise of religious right 280 First Indochina War (against France) 455,
Second World War 102 459, 513
Sedition Act (1918) 545 influence on Cambodia 513
and Soviet evidence of Nazi atrocities 317, Nguyên Penal Code 152
318, 320 xoi dau experience 456–457
Voting Rights Act (1965) 105 Vietnam War (Second Indochina War) 159,
Weatherman/Weather Underground 551 455, 456, 513–515, 598
white supremacist terrorism 545–549 image of Napalm 601
attacks on Republicans 546, 547 US aerial bombing 514
youth cult 568 use of trails in Laos and Cambodia by Viet
see also US Army Cong 514
Uruguay 551 vigilantes
and Triple Alliance 496 France 481
US Army lynchings by 101
black servicemen 102 and mob violence 97
Winter Soldiers’ Investigation (1971) 159 and sexual abusers 164
women servicemen 159 Villesèque, Narbonne, murder of the
US Supreme Court, Brown v. Board of Latreilles 354, 359, 360, 362
Education (1954) 104 Viola, Paolo 356, 359
USSR see Soviet Union violence
Ut, Nick, Vietnam image 601, 604 causes of 1, 15
Uyéno Nisaku, murder of Vietnamese changing justification for 9–11
worker 482 definitions of 326
and democracy 362–364
Vacher, Joseph 569 and eschatology 269–272
Vajpayee, Atal Bihari, Indian Prime increase and decline in 18, 561, 563
Minister 119 and masculinity 361
Valin, Claudy 359 personal experience of 5
Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) 234 and power 258–260, 271

677
 Index

violence (cont.) Wavell, Lord, Viceroy of India 83

social rejection of 4, 6 Way of Penetrating Unity (Yiguandao)
structural 327 movement, China 60, 61
vicarious 14–18 weaponry
see also collective violence; interpersonal artillery 293
violence; mass violence; mob vio- biochemical 3, 337
lence; racial violence; religious vio- British forces in settler colonies 236
lence; sexual violence; state violence drones 2
Virtual Reality 15 for duels 190
Vishwa Hindu Parishad organisation First World War 290–291
118 grenades 293
vitriol (sulphuric acid), use in crime hand-to-hand combat in war 293
passionnel 193 indigenous Pacific islands 26
vivisection, by Japanese in China 337 machine guns 291
Vorkuta Gulag camp 396 missiles 2
Vovelle, Michel 348 nuclear 2, 449
used for Japanese kamikaze attacks 331
Wachsmann, Nikolaus, KL 394 see also chemical weapons; guns; poison gas
Wahhabism (radical Sunni movement) Weatherman/Weather Underground,
272, 282 USA 551
Waitangi, Treaty of (1840) 32, 230 Weber, Eugen 348
Māori infringements 238 Wegner, Armin 622
Wajda, Andrzej, A Generation 590 Wells-Barnett, Ida B., anti-lynching crusader
Wallerstein, Immanuel 462 91, 95, 96
Wang Lishi 416 Werth, Alexander, journalist 313, 320
war West Papua, Indonesia, secessionist
and battlefield violence 289 movement 11
bayonet attacks 293 West, the
definition of battle 292 and homogenisation of European
distinction between combatants and periphery 376, 377
noncombatants 286 influence of Soviet anti-fascism on 305
international limits on 3 post-war anti-totalitarianism 306
length of battles 292 and Soviet evidence of Nazi atrocities
media reports of 598 316–323
and perpetrators as victims 158 Westad, Odd Arne 450
and post-war crime 574, 575 Western Front, First World War 287
propaganda value of rape 150 whaling
and sexual violence 157, 159–164, 165 American 32
silence of rape victims 151 and missionaries in Hawai’i 30
and thresholds of violence 287 in Pacific 29, 30
see also American Civil War; civil wars; Wharton, Edith 289
First World War; guerrilla warfare; whip, used against plantation workers
industrial warfare; internment camps; 35
Korean War; Second World War; White Line pro-Democrat group, US 91
Vietnam War; weaponry White Lotus Rebellions, China 43
war crimes, courts and tribunals 3, 312 white supremacy 10
war memorials anti-civil rights violence 105
as product of civil society 17 in post-Civil War America 89–93
Thiepval 292 terrorism 545–549
see also commemoration women and 91
War of the Pacific (1879–84) 496 see also mob violence
Warsaw ghetto 307 White, Walter F., NAACP report 99, 102
Watchmen (2009 film) 590 Wiener, Martin 195, 199

678
 Index

wife beating 575 World Trade Center attacks (September 11,

Wilder, Billy, Some Like It Hot 589 2001) 14, 136, 532, 553
Williams, Linda 593, 594 pictures of 598, 601
Wilmington, N. Carolina, massacre (1898) Wounded Knee, massacre (1876) 92
94 Wright, Cleo, lynching of 102
Wilson, Woodrow, US President 98, 296, Wright, Richard 548
300 Wu, Harry 401
Windham, Sir William, and Bill against bull- Wyschogrod, Edith 464
baiting 210
Winter, Jay 617 Xhosa peoples 235, 237
Wolfe, Patrick 228, 243 and use of martial law 238, 239
Wolfsfeld, Gadi, Media and the Path 611 wars with 231
women 7–8
and American white supremacists 91 Yalta conference (1945) 376
brutalisation of, in Pacific region 26 Yamato, Japanese battleship 331
and crime passionnel 193 Yan Jingming, governor of Shandong
and criminal gangs 566 province 50
as criminals 571–572 Yang Kuaisong 409
female genital mutilation 184 Yang Xiuqing, Taiping leader 47
global movement for independence 7 Yani, Indonesian army commander
hidden violence against 604 440
and honour killings 7 Yaqub Beg, Chinese Muslim rebel 51
Japanese violence against 338–342 Yassin, Sheikh 133
massacres of (First World War) 288 Yellow Cliff Teaching (Huangya jiao)
in Ottoman Empire 275 movement, China 50
as prostitutes in New Zealand 29 Yellow Yang religious uprising, China 58
Red Lanterns Shining movement, Boxer Yemen 126
Uprising 55 war 127, 138, 281, 605
return of kidnapped women to Hawai’i by Yezidis
Vancouver 30 ISIS genocide of (2014–17) 276
sale of female children in China 44 jihad against 275, 276
serial killers of 569 in Ottoman Empire 270
in sport 207, 219 Yonne, Charles, murder of Vietnamese coolie
status as victims of sexual violence 157 482–483
support for Armenian massacre (1895) 269 Yoshimi Yoshiaki 332
as symbols of family and national honour Young Turk Revolution (1908) 277
8 Young Turks party see CUP
treatment of wartime collaborators 575 Ypres, third Battle of (1917) 292
as victims of murder 202 Yuan Shikai, governor of Shandong
see also domestic violence; feminism; pros- 56
titution; rape; sexual violence Yuasa Ken 336
Women in Black feminist group 162 Yugoslavia, former, war (1991–99) 150,
Woodward, Isaac, police attack on 103 161
workers, ban on violence against 7 Yunnan province, China, Panthay
working classes Rebellion 51
and anarchists 539 Yuxian, governor of Shanxi 56
and blood sports 212
fighting 191 Zangrando, Robert 103
reduction in violence 197 Zarkov, Dubravka 150
and socialism 539 al-Zarqawi, Abu Musab 135
state reforms and 539 Zasulich, Vera 537
World Health Organization (WHO) 151 al-Zawahiri, Ayman 135
on child sexual assault 168, 169 Zeng Guofan, Hunan Army 47

679
 Index

Zervas, Colonel 383 Zimmerer, Jürgen 254, 255

Zhou Enlai, Chinese Premier, and Zionism
Sihanouk 515 and Irgun terrorism 549
Zia-ul-Haq, Muhammad, Pakistan as secular ideology 266
and conservative Islam 117 Zodiac (2007 film) 590
Hudood Ordinances on rape 152 Zuo Zongtang, Qing general 51

680