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Full Description
How can we comprehend the sociopolitical processes that give rise to extreme violence, ethnic cleansing, or genocide? A major breakthrough in comparative analysis, Purify and Destroy demonstrates that it is indeed possible to compare the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina while respecting the specificities of each appalling phenomenon. Jacques Semelin achieves this, in part, by leading his readers through the three examples simultaneously, the unraveling of which sometimes converges but most often diverges. Semelin's method is multidisciplinary, relying not only on contemporary history but also on social psychology and political science. Based on the seminal distinction between massacre and genocide, Purify and Destroy identifies the main steps of a general process of destruction, both rational and irrational, born of what Semelin terms "delusional rationality." He describes a dynamic structural model with, at its core, the matrix of a social imaginaire that, responding to fears, resentments, and utopias, carves and recarves the social body by eliminating "the enemy."
Semelin identifies the main stages that can lead to a genocidal process and explains how ordinary people can become perpetrators. He develops an intellectual framework to analyze the entire spectrum of mass violence, including terrorism, in the twentieth century and before. Strongly critical of today's political instrumentalization of the "genocide" notion, Semelin urges genocide research to stand back from legal and normative definitions and come of age as a discipline in its own right in the social sciences.
Contents
Foreward by Stanley Hoffmann Acknowledgementsintroduction: Understand?I. The Imaginary Constructs of Social DestructivenessUnpromising Avenues The power of imaginary constructs From the identity narrative to the figure of Traitor From the quest for purity to the figure of the Other in excess From the security dilemma to the destruction of the enemyII. From Inflammatory Discourse to Sacrificial ViolenceThe intellectual springboard Reaching political legitimacy From the religious to the sacrificial Societies torn between adhesion, consent and resistanceIII. International Context, War and the MediaA structure of political opportunities Spilling into war Telling the world: a last resort?IV. The Dynamics of Mass MurderThe decision-making process and the deision-makers The organisation of mass murder and the actors involved From collective indifference to popular participation Morphologies of extreme violenceV. The Vertigo of ImpunityCrossing the threshold into violence The tipping mechanism The dual learning process of massacre The killers' profiles: revisiting 'the banality of evil' Sexual violence and other atrocitiesVI. The Political Uses of Massacre and GenocideInstrumentalisations of a word that is impossible to define? Distancing genocide studies from the frame of law Destroying to subjugate Destroying to eradicate Destroying to revoltConclusion: The 'Never Again" RefrainCrisis prevention: arguments and illusions An ethics of responsibility 'The revenge of passions'Appendices A. Investigating a massacre B. Comparing massacresBibliography Notes Name Index Subject Index
