Between Pinochet and Kropotkin: state terror, human rights and the geographers

Abstract

The lecture develops a civil perspective on states engaged in systematic but arbitrary armed violence against their home populations: what the Nürnberg Tribunal called ‘government by terror. Civilians, or most of them, appear uniquely vulnerable to such violence and the gross violations of human rights accompanying it. Moreover, this, rather than wars as usually understood, involved the largest uses of armed force in the twentieth century. It was the main cause of violent death of civilians. Two geographical concerns are addressed: the ‘geographic' nature of such violence, and its implications for the thought and practice of geographers. They are explored especially through the work of two geographers whose lives bracket the past ‘century of violence, Peter Kropotkin and Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet's dictatorship in Chile fully illustrates the scope of state terror. Geographies of coercion are seen in the system of political prisons and torture, the making of a society and landscapes of fear, and the unmaking of civil life. The atrocities also violated Chile's former commitment to human rights initiatives. Pinochet's geographical work, especially the geopolitics, is in accord with, or offers no counter to, the repressive, authoritarian regime he headed, Kropotkin's descriptions of imperial Russia show many parallels to the Chilean case, and the kind of repressive state power that he rejected to dedicate his life to its vulnerable and innocent victims. Almost alone among geographers he developed a coherent, influential vision of violence, social justice and interpersonal ethics, based on geographical investigations as well as an anarchist perspective. These two may also seem to represent conceptual and lived extremes ‐ respectively, an extreme deployment of state violence, and a total rejection of the state because of the facts and potential of violent repression. Unfortunately, enquiries into violence and the state, let alone terrorist states, are virtually absent from contemporary geographical scholarship. Its emergence as an essentially ‘civil field' has reinforced this ‐ when it should have had the opposite effect. In part this involves a failure to temper our long, and less‐than‐critical, service to the state in all areas, and a continuing governmental mind‐set. It is suggested that the absence of critical reflection on the contested relations of civil society and the state, especially as they involve state violence, undermines the intellectual value and ethical standards of our work.