Collective Violence and the Shifting Categories of Communal Riots, Ethnic Cleansing and Genocide

Abstract

Forms of collective violence such as riots and ethnic cleansing pose an analytical challenge to social science for the political plenitude inherent in categories of collective violence makes it very difficult to separate facts and values. In political theory wars are distinguished from other forms of collective violence on the principle that states, which are recognized collective entities in international law, declare war on each other and are expected to conduct these wars under the rubric of contractual rules. This formulation reflects the privileged position that states apportion to themselves as entities that have control over legitimate violence. In the course of this chapter I will argue that there is a slippage between the various categories that we use to describe collective violence.2 However, instead of trying to delineate which kind of discrete reality each category corresponds to I suggest we shift our attention to the conditions under which one or the other term comes to signal a state of crisis. I argue that indeterminacy of reference is not incidental to the slippage between different terms such as riots, ethnic cleansing, or even genocide but is a result of the way that assemblages of actors, institutions and discursive forms are actualized. One important corollary of this formulation is that we need to pay close attention to all forms of collective violence and the related practices of the state since these carry the potential of being transformed into ethnic cleansing and into genocide. An alarmist perspective, as Lawrence Langer has argued, is better than ‘business as usual’ in addressing forms of violence that can acquire lethal forms if not addressed critically and in a timely fashion.3