nafeez mosaddeq ahmed - semantic scholar · nafeez mosaddeq ahmed(*) structural violence as a form...

Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed(*)

STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE AS A FORM OF GENOCIDE

THE IMPACT OF THE INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC ORDER(VIOLENCIA ESTRUCTURAL COMO UNA FORMA DE GENOCIDIO. EL IMPACTO DEL ORDEN ECONÓMICO INTERNACIONAL)

Abstract:

Structural violence is rarely seen as a form of genocide. Significant deficiencies in existing conceptualizations of both genocide and structural violence suggest that this is unwarranted. The concept of genocide must be expanded to include a wider variety of target human groups, whereas the concept of structural violence must be extended to include a greater appreciation of the role of agential intent in the production and reproduction of unequal violent structures. This reveals logical and analytical connections between structural violence and genocide in several historical cases, including episodes of capitalist imperialism and communist collectivization. Applying this theoretical framework to an analysis of the structural violence of the international economic order indicates that its impact possesses distinctly genocidal features.

Keywords: International Economic Order, Structural Violence, Genocide.

Resumen:

La violencia estructural rara vez es vista como una forma de genocidio. Diferencias significativas en las conceptualizaciones existentes, tanto de genocidio como de violencia estructural, sugieren que esto es injustificado. El concepto de genocidio debe ser ampliado a fin de incluir una variedad más amplia de grupos humanos objetivo, en tanto que el concepto de violencia estructural debe ser extensible a una mayor comprensión del rol de las intenciones 'agenciales' en la producción y reproducción de violencia estructural desigual. Esto revela conexiones lógicas y analíticas entre la violencia estructural y el genocidio en varios casos históricos, incluyendo episodios de imperialismo capitalista y colectivización comunista. Aplicar este marco teórico a un análisis de la violencia estructural del orden económico internacional indica que su impacto posee evidentes rasgos genocidas.

Palabras clave: Orden Económico Internacional, Violencia Estructural, Genocidio.

JEL: P00, P50, P19.

(*) Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed teaches International Relations at the School of Social Sciences and Cultural Stud-ies, University of Sussex, Brighton, where he is currently engaged in Doctoral research. Author of The London Bombings: An Independent Inquiry (London: Duckworth, 2006) and The War on Truth: 9/11, Disinformation and the Anatomy of Terrorism (New York: Olive Branch, 2005), Behind the War on Terror: Western Secret Strategyh and the Struggle for Iraq (2003) and The War on Freedom: How and Why America was Attacked, September 11, 2001 (2002). Executive director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development in London, former Senior Researcher for the Islamic Human Rights Commission, with UN consultative status. Member of Executive Committee of the British Muslim Human Rights Centre at London Metropolitan University's Human Rights & Social Justice Research Institute. Writer in the Independent on Sunday, New Criminologist and Raw Story, political commentator on BBC World Today, BBC Asian Network, BBC Southern Counties Radio, Chan-nel 4, Sky News, C-SPAN, FOX News, PBS Foreign Exchange and other radio and TV shows in the USA, UK, and Europe. More information at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nafeez_Mosaddeq_Ahmed

Entelequia. Revista Interdisciplinar, nº 5, otoño 2007 Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed / 3

enocide is conventionally associated with direct physical violence targeted against national, ethnic, or religious

groups, in whole or in part. However, although there is no doubt that this form of genocide is devastating, there is another form of violence that is comparatively invisible, to some extent acceptable, numerically far more prevalent than the former, and largely ignored in the literature on genocide. This form of violence is associated with indirect, structural violence targeted against vulnerable individuals and communities across ethnic and national boundaries, albeit largely situated in the South.

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This form of structural violence, through the international economic order’s systematic generation of human insecurity, has led to the deaths of countless hundreds of millions of people, and the deprivation of thousands of millions of others. Most of the literature on human security, development, and genocide fails to see this phenomenon of global mass death and marginalization —a consequence of structurallyinduced deprivation— as a form of genocide. In this paper, I question this failure and attempt to explore whether this form of structural violence should indeed be seen as a form of genocide. The main premises for my argument are that there are a variety of inadequacies in existing conceptualizations of genocide and structural violence.

In Chapter 1, I argue that conventional conceptualizations of genocide must be revised in order to account for a broader range of potential targeted groups. The categories of groups that can constitute targets of genocidal acts must be widened to include not only concepts of nationality, ethnicity, and religion, but also concepts that include other bases of collectivity and group identification/organization relevant to both the victims and perpetrators of genocide such as cultural, ideological, class and political forms. I begin by examining the UN Convention on Genocide and predominantly ethnically focused definitions. By critiquing

conceptualizations of ethnicity as problematic, in some senses subjective, and fraught with definitional ambiguity, I argue that the exclusion of other forms of group identity is arbitrary and illfounded. Thus, I will argue that the logical underpinnings of the concept of genocide require a broader application than that espoused by the UN.

In Chapter 2, I argue that the categories of method that can be employed in genocidal acts must be widened to include not merely direct, physical forms of violence, but also indirect, structural forms of violence. While there is certainly some significant recognition of this in the literature, its implications for the international economic order have been little explored. Nor has a more systematic theoretical articulation of the relationship between structural violence and genocide been conducted. This argument is premised on the idea that existing conceptualizations of structural violence must be expanded. Structural violence is often viewed as a distinct form of violence to that produced directly, physically, militarily by specific agents, resulting instead from the operation of a given social system possessing a particular unequal structure and hierarchy. Due to this more abstract causal context, the role of specific agents in producing structural violence is often excluded or not properly recognized. Indeed, I will argue that no structure can be abstracted from the activity of specific agents. The actions of human agency are reciprocally related to the operation of social systems. This inevitably means that in any critical analysis of unequal social structures, the pivotal role of agents such as states, governments, and institutions and their policies, intentions and interests cannot be ignored. For structures to be fully understood, the relevant agents must also be included in the analysis. Hence, a slightly revised conceptualization of structural violence is intrinsically connected to the question of responsibility. While the causes of structural violence lead us to critically analyze social structures and sys


tems, the critique needs to be extended to include the agents responsible for erecting the very architecture underlying or constituting these structures and systems. I intend to integrate a Weberian theory of the relationship between structure and agency with the concept of structural violence. Doing so may, in some cases, suggest a deepseated intentionality underlying the structural violence produced by the international economic order against the South, which is relevant to assessing its genocidal import.

In Chapter 3, I apply the previous theoretical formulations of genocide and structural violence to several case studies from different historical periods, including episodes of capitalist imperialism and communist collectivization. These case studies are used to examine whether the concept of genocide can be usefully applied to structural violence, and if so, to establish an empirically and historically grounded theoretical framework for the analysis of genocidal structural violence.

In Chapter 4, I apply this theoretical framework to the contemporary international economic order. I firstly attempt to isolate the key systemic components of the global economic regime, and secondly concisely review the impact of the latter’s policies on human security, especially in the South. I specifically examine two leading international financial institutions the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and the often neglected role of the most powerful Northern states (predominantly the United States) and their interests in the former. I argue that the devastating impact of the global economic regime is to some extent intentional, consciously orchestrated to secure powerful Northern interests to the detriment of the South. In this context, I will examine the extent to which the impact of the contemporary international economic order constitutes genocidal structural violence.

Due to space limitations, it is impossible to discuss any of these issues in a comprehensive manner. However, it is hoped that this paper provides a preliminary critical analysis of the existing literature, demonstrating some basic grounds for a reconceptualization of genocide and structural violence, and setting out lines of inquiry for further research.

A Reconceptualization of Genocide

The United Nations Genocide Convention

The most widely held conception of genocide is contained in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in December 1948, and effected in January 1951. In Article II, the Convention defines genocide as “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.1

1 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide Approved and proposed for signature and ratification or accession by Gen-eral Assembly resolution 260 A (III) of 9 Decem-ber 1948 entry into force 12 January 1951, in ac-cordance with article XIII. Available online at Of-fice of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/p_genoci.htm (viewed 20 July 2004).


A large number of critics have argued convincingly that the Convention’s restriction of target groups to the four categories of nation, ethnicity, race or religion, is illogical. Kuper (1983: 39), for example, describes the exclusion of political groups as a “major omission.” Indeed, the original unanimously approved UN General Assembly resolution on the Crime of Genocide which prompted the later 1948 Convention, issued on 11th December 1946, adopted a far broader definition of genocide as “a denial of the right of existence of entire human groups, as homicide is the denial of the right to live of individual human beings… crimes of genocide have occurred when racial, religious, political and other groups have been destroyed, entirely or in part.” The resolution also stated that the crime of genocide can be “committed on religious, racial, political or any other grounds.”2

Here, the definition of target groups of genocide was extended to not only include political groups, but further to include any other identifiable human collectivity.

Raphael Lemkin (1945: 3943) is largely known for having originated the conceptualization of genocide as focusing on “national, religious, or racial” groups. Throughout his work on genocide, Lemkin retained these categories as his principal objects of reference, although in 1933, he proposed to the International Conference for Unification of Criminal Law in Madrid “to declare the destruction of racial, religious or social collectivities a crime under the law of nations” (Lemkin, 1947: 145151).

Lemkin (1944: 7995) later defined genocide as “a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.” But immediately after the ad

2 UN General Assembly Resolution, The Crime of Genocide, Fifty-fifth plenary meeting, 11 Decem-ber 1946, http://ods-dds-ny.un.org/doc/RESOLU-TION/GEN/NR0/033/47/IMG/NR003347.pdf?OpenElement (viewed 20 July 2004).

option of the 1946 General Assembly resolution on the Crime of Genocide, he wrote more generally of genocide as actions “subordinated to the criminal intent to destroy or to cripple permanently a human group. The acts are directed against groups, as such, and individuals are selected for destruction only because they belong to these groups” (Lemkin, 1947: 145151).

The broader 1946 General Assembly definition of genocide as targeted against any identifiable human group was rejected in the ratification of the 1948 Genocide Convention, largely under pressure from the Soviet Union, whose principal argument against the inclusion of political groups was that: “… a political group had no stable, permanent and clearcut characteristics in that it did not constitute an inevitable and homogeneous grouping, being based on the will of its members and not on factors independent of that will.” There was also concern that this would unnecessarily widen the definition of genocide to include many other categories, for instance, raising “the question of protection under the Convention for economic and professional groups” (Whitaker, 1985: 18, cl. 35). Rummel (2002) offers a similar justification of the Convention’s definition, arguing that national, ethnical, racial or religious groups are “indelible groups” since they are “groups that one is born into.” Although he concedes that “one may choose to leave a religious group as an adult, it is rarely done and one may nonetheless remain identified with the religious group by virtue of physical characteristics, as for Jews.” Therefore, all other identifiable human groups must be excluded from the application of the crime of genocide, including “intent to destroy political, ideological, economic, military, professional, or other groups.” Otherwise, he argues, the conceptualization of genocide becomes too generalized and overextended. “The linking of all such diverse acts or deaths resulting from together under one label has created an acute conceptual problem,” such


that any form of “intentional government murder” can be subsumed under the definition of genocide (Rummel, 1998).

The Problem of Group Identity

The critique of a broader conceptualization of genocide is fundamentally premised on the idea that national, ethnic, racial and religious categories constitute stable, permanent and indelible human collectivities. The problem begins with the fact that no specific definition of these categories of national, ethnical, racial or religious group identity are provided by the 1948 Genocide Convention. But far more significantly, a large volume of anthropological research throws significant doubt on the presumption of the indelibility of these categories, suggesting instead that they are very much subject to historical and subjective contingencies.

Primordialism

There are three broad approaches to understanding national and ethnic identity. The primordialist approach takes the position outlined above, that ethnicity is a fixed characteristic of individuals and communities arising either from biological traits or centuries of past practice beyond the ability of individuals or collectivities to change. Primordialism therefore stresses the fixed uniqueness of ethnic identity (Lake and Rothschild, 1996: 67). According to Geertz (1963: 107113), primordial attachments of individuals to particular collectivities arise from the “givens” of social existence, which include one’s community, religion, culture, language and associated social practices. Hence, rather than emerging from social interaction, national and ethnic ties emerge instead from a natural affinity rooted in longstanding social circumstances. Van den Berghe offers a sociobiological theory of primordialism, arguing that kin selection explains national and ethnic ties. At the root

of these ties is an instinctive preference for relatives derived from a genetic imperative to pass on genes through one’s kinship with similar genes. This phenomenon, argues van den Berghe (1978: 402411), arises from childhood experiences of interpersonal kin relations, laying the foundations for similar social attitudes toward national and ethnic identities perceived almost as an extended form of kinship. As Giesan (1998: 1323) thus concludes: “Primordial boundaries cannot be moved socially, and passing them is extremely difficult.” Clearly, primordialist assumptions are fundamental to the idea that genocide should solely concern target groups defined by the indelible categories of national, ethnic, or racial identity.

Instrumentalism

The instrumentalist approach, on the other hand, advocates a more social constructivist perspective where national and ethnic identities are in fact manifestations of culture, which in turn is malleable to the social and political needs of the community (Hutchinson and Smith, 1996: 314). Instrumentalists argue that national and ethnic identities constitute a set of symbolic ties serving as tools by which individuals, groups and elites attempt to secure political or material advantages. Instrumentalism therefore sees national and ethnic identity as fundamentally politicized, since national and ethnic identities often coalesce in correspondence to the geographic concentration of individuals with common social or economic backgrounds. As a political tool ethnicity is powerful and frequently used, and hence is not fundamentally distinguishable from political identity (Lake and Rothschild, 1996: 7).

Welldocumented examples of this process are evident in the colonial construction of ethnic identities, whereby precolonial traditions and models of identity were laden with multiple meanings to invent boundary markers (‘tribes’) thus dividing and stratify


ing colonies in accordance with the political and economic objectives of colonists. Ethnicity was such a powerful political tool precisely because increasing ethnocentrism among multiple tribal units enabled leaders to mobilize political power by reference to an imagined common origin of a unit’s group members (Jerman, 2002; Lentz, 2000).

Hence, national and ethnic identities are certainly not ineffable. Rather, instrumentalists regard these identities as a rational reaction to social demands within the community or from another community. They are constructed and undergo alterations during an individual’s development. Indeed, as Barth (1969) has convincingly documented, none of the characteristics of an ethnic community language, culture, religion, territory are constant or fixed. On the contrary, they undergo spontaneous changes throughout history, as a consequence of a continuous process of selfdefining, defining others and being defined by others. Barth thus emphasizes the contingency and fluidity of ethnic identity, emerging within specific historical contexts rather than existing merely as a given.

In significant respects, therefore, the instrumentalist critique of primordialism is quite powerful. As Eller and Coughlan (1993) argue, it is incoherent to assert the existence of a set of ineffable givens lacking a social source, since all symbols and concepts that constitute a collective identity are in some manner socially constructed. At the same time, however, primordialism’s recognition that there are certain givens appears to be valid, to the extent that ethnic identities largely cannot be chosen at will by individuals like other political affiliations. Rather, ethnic identity is more a function of certain wider social processes. Hence, while primordialism’s presumption of the ineffability of national and ethnic identities is significantly flawed, instrumentalism perhaps advocates an opposite extreme (Esman, 1994: 13).

Constructivism

Constructivism offers a useful synthesis between the primordialist and instrumentalist approaches, representing an emerging scholarly consensus, according to which ethnicity is constructed from webs of social interaction. Therefore, while ethnicity is not ineffable, neither is it entirely open to individual choice. Nevertheless, conceptions of national and ethnic identity undergo transformations in accordance with changing social interactions (Lake and Rothschild, 1996: 7). A prime example of this is provided by how the cosmopolitan national Yugoslav identity that joined Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and other republics into a single federation in the 1980s, fragmented as the state collapsed under a variety of economic and other pressures, leading individuals to mobilize more particularistic national and ethnic identities (Kaldor, 2001: 3244, 6989). The constructivist consensus concords with the general instrumentalist position, that national and ethnic identity constitutes “a strategic instrument” of a social collectivity mobilizing in the pursuit of its perceived interests. Hence, although from a constructivist perspective individuals tend to have a more limited ability to choose their national or ethnic identity, such identity is ultimately “invented” or socially constructed for an aim which may not “objectively” exist, except in the conceptions of a particular group of individuals (Bacal, 1990; Brass, 1991).

Group Categorization and the Logic of Genocide

On this basis, it is difficult to see how the UN Convention’s restriction of target groups of genocide solely to national, ethnic and racial identities can be justified, given that such categories are ultimately no more immutable than other possible group categories. As Weitz (2003: 23) observes, the UN


definition of genocide is flawed precisely because it arbitrarily “excludes from the category of genocide killings on political and social class grounds.” Indeed, he notes that no genocide has ever occurred in which “a regime has killed people only because of ethnic, national, religious, or racial reasons. In all genocides, there is a range of political violence and killings.” Thus, in any genocide the targeting of certain identified groups always has a fundamental —if not overriding— political component. Since genocide entails the identification of particular groups, the very “act of classification, of identifying and categorizing populations, is an ideological and political act. There is nothing ‘natural’ about classifications.”

The act of classification is an integral part of the process of the social construction of identities, whether they are national, ethnic, religious, political or classbased, and this process itself is inseparable from a complex web of social and political interactions. Thus, the socially constructed nature of both “race” and “nation” illustrates that these categories cannot be seen as simply “natural” or “common sense.” On the contrary, they are “placespecific ideologies of ‘race’ and nation”, not fixed entities (Jackson and Penrose, 1994: 202, 13). If race, nation, and other such categories are socially constructed ideologies, it is illegitimate to focus the definition of genocide solely on national or ethnic groups. For instance, as Weitz points out, the word “race” was only introduced into European languages by the late fourteenth century, and still failed to garner common usage until the sixteenth century, developing conceptually in tandem with colonial expansion and New World slavery. Even the word “nation”, which has a far longer history, had its meaning fundamentally transformed in the modern era after the French Revolution (Weitz, 2003: 5; Eickelmann, 2002). Geddes (2001) thus argues that “group hatred based on race versus class” is “remarkably similar:

“Both rely on the identification and classification of people by categories. Both condemn a person not for any crime perpetrated by an individual but for his or her group identity. Both promote an ‘us versus them’ mentality. Both have been manipulated by the state to extend its power. And both have been used to justify appalling violence against the disfavored group, resulting in humanity’s worst genocides.”

Indeed, class hatred can be “even more pernicious than racial hatred” because while racism limits the availability of victims to a particular group, political or class categories of groups targeted for persecution “can easily be redefined according to political necessity, as was frequently done by Stalin and Mao,” and even Hitler, who targeted not only Jews, but a wide range of nationalities, ethnicities and other groups on a variety of political and ideological grounds rooted in Nazi ideology (Markusen and Kopf, 1995).

As Shaw (2003: 36) thus concludes, the UN Convention’s exclusion of groups “defined by other characteristics, such as class or political affiliation” is “clearly untenable”, since it suggests that “the destruction and mass killing of some sorts of human group (races, nations or religions) should be regarded as a particularly heinous crime, while that of others (class, professions or political groups) should not.” In practice, this restrictive definition assigning “special status” to the former categories makes little sense given that “perpetrators of mass killing often target both kinds of group, in some combination.” Citing the example of the Cambodian genocide, Shaw rightly asks: “Are we to say… that when the Khmer Rouge targeted people because of their Vietnamese origins, they were practicing genocide, but when they killed Cambodians because of their education and social class, they were not?” Such a distinction is clearly a purely legal issue serving to give a fragmented depiction of what actually


happened, which was essentially “the criminal destruction of the Cambodian people as a single, if multitargeted, process.”

Indeed, for Shaw, the logic of genocide tends towards the multiplication of enemies, such that political opposition and social classes can be targeted contemporaneously alongside ethnic and national groups. The schemes of social classification hatched by a genocidal regime may not necessarily be ‘objective’ or even relevant for the victims, and indeed are liable to transform according to the regime’s shifting political objectives. This means that genocidal regimes often construct universal homogenizing categories of ‘the enemy’ which are not adhered to by the target groups themselves. The identification of multiple groups as enemies or targets by a genocidal regime can include individuals who do not actually recognize themselves as a community or collective as such (Shaw, 2003: 4041).

From this perspective, a defining criterion of genocide is not which categories of group are targeted, but rather the very act by the perpetrator of identifying a particular category of group to be systematically targeted. Although this conclusion is not commensurate with the 1948 UN Genocide Convention, it concords perfectly with the original 1946 UN General Assembly Resolution.

Structural Violence and the StructureAgency Debate

Structural Violence as a Component of Genocide

According to Galtung, violence “where there is an actor that commits the violence” is “personal or direct”, whereas violence “where there is no such actor” is “structural or indirect.” In structural violence it is difficult to trace back the cause of the violence

to concrete persons as actors – rather, “violence is built into the structure and shows up as unequal power and consequently as unequal life chances” (Galtung, 1975: 113114). Thus, if the social structure inside and between nations is constituted such that “some people are permitted to live full, complete, long, creative lives with a high level of self realization – whereas others are killed slowly because of the wrong nutrition, protein deficiency, inadequate health facilities, deprivation of all kinds of mental stimuli,” this is quintessential structural violence (p. 251).

Within the UN Convention’s definition of genocide, there is significant scope for the recognition of forms of structural violence constituting a key contributory factor in genocide. Thus, clause (c) of the Convention refers to the act of: “Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” Here, “conditions of life” can include a wide variety of political, economic and social factors structured in such a way as to lead systematically to the marginalization and ultimately death of particular groups. Such “conditions of life” can lead to what Galtung describes as unequal social structures leading to “differential life expectancy” (p. 251).

The key problem here, however, is the question of intention and agency. Galtung seems to draw a firm distinction between cases of violence where there is and is not a subject who acts, the latter constituting structural violence. This distinction carries through into the difference between intended and unintended violence. The former concept, Galtung argues, “will easily fail to capture structural violence,” implying that structural violence is largely a question of subjectless, unintended action on the part of a given social system (p. 115).

Simultaneously, however, Galtung recognizes that there is nevertheless a relationship between personal and structural viol


ence. He argues that all cases of structural violence can “be traced back to personal violence in their prehistory. An exploitive caste system or race society would be seen as the consequence of a largescale invasion leaving a thin, but powerful top layer of the victorious group after the noise of fighting is over.” Thus, Galtung hints at the historical role of agency in the establishment of social structures. He also notes that the intentionality underlying certain structures can become apparent when the structure is threatened and “those who benefit from structural violence, above all those who are at the top, will try to preserve the status quo so well geared to protect their interests.” Here, Galtung further hints at the more contemporaneous role of various agents in actively pursuing measures to “preserve” an existing social system due to their “interest in maintaining the structure” (p. 1245).

Unfortunately though, Galtung does not provide a detailed and systematic exposition of these issues, neither here nor in his other work on structural violence (Galtung, 1994). Moreover, his apparent recognition that structural violence can have a fundamental intentional and agential component, firstly does not clearly explore the relationship between structure and agency, and secondly is in tension with his primary definition of structural violence as being “indirect” and devoid of an “actor.” If that definition – premised on a fundamental distinction between personal/direct and structural/indirect violence is correct, then it is difficult to reconcile this with the concept Galtung also articulates, that structural violence can be preserved, maintained, or even historically constructed, by various agents or actors with a vested interest in those structures. Indeed, it is certainly problematic to argue that this subjectless definition of structural violence is commensurate with the concept of genocide. To be considered genocidal, the impact of social structures on the “conditions of life” of a group is in need of a deepseated intentionality and agency.

Galtung’s formulation of structural violence, therefore, is inadequate and requires a more systematic analysis of the relationship between structure and agency to be useful in understanding its role in genocide.

Structure and Agency

A great deal of sociological theory tends to privilege either structure or agency in explaining social phenomena. On one end of the spectrum, for example, are structuralist theories which see social structures as the most significant feature of sociological analysis. Structuralism advocates that the individual’s social experiences are merely a “gloss” masking the “hidden reality” of social structure. Individual action is ultimately “contingent” upon structure, and the “task of the theorist is to elucidate the connection between action and structure in such a way as to render action as the transparent product of structure” (Waters, 1994, 93). Although individual actions are explained in terms of the socializing power of prevailing structures, such an approach is inadequate precisely because it depicts structures as the product of deterministic historical forces that are effectively ontologically separate from the activities of agents, a narrative that fails to capture the sheer dynamic complexity of social processes. In this way, it ultimately fails to provide a satisfactory explanation of the emergence of social structures.

On the other end of the spectrum is symbolic interactionism which emphasizes the subjective meaning of human behaviour and social processes, rather than the structural features of a given social system. Interactionism sees individuals as pragmatic actors who adjust their actions according to the actions of other actors based on interpretations of them. Not only the actions of others, but also an individual’s own actions, are viewed as symbolic objects in relation to which we are able to think, imagine alternative actions, and react. Individuals are therefore active, creative participants in the


construction of the social world, which emerges from patterns of interactions between individuals. Hence, interactionism focuses on the meaning of events for participants and fluid social processes, as opposed to stable norms and values (Blumer, 1969). While this approach serves well to demonstrate the creative role that individuals play as agents in the construction of the social world, it fails to sufficiently acknowledge the extent to which prevailing structures impinge upon, condition and enable individual behaviour.

A number of attempts have been made to bridge this apparent gulf between theories focusing on structure and agency respectively, perhaps the most prominent of which is Gidden’s theory of structuration. According to Giddens (1984: 376) structure and agency are not two separate concepts, but rather two sides of the same coin of social action – these two sides cannot be conceived apart from the other. Structuration refers to “the structuring of social relations across time and space, in virtue of the duality of structure.” The “duality of structure” consists of on one side, agents who conduct social action and interaction on the basis of their interpretations of various situations, and on the other side structures composed of rules, resources, and social relationships produced and reproduced in social interaction (p. 2526). Giddens’ approach thus provides a useful theoretical framework that reconciles seemingly opposing views of structure and agency:

“The basic domain of study of the social sciences, according to the theory of structuration, is neither the experience of the individual actor, nor the existence of any form of social totality, but social practices ordered across space and time. Human social activities, like some selfreproducing items in nature, are recursive. That is to say, they are not brought into being by social actors but continually recreated by them via the very means

whereby they express themselves as actors. In and through their activities agents reproduce the conditions that make these activities possible” (p. 2).

In other words, regular and habitual forms of social action and interaction are the substance of macrolevel social structures and institutions, which simultaneously constrain, influence and enable social action and interaction. This is why Giddens argues that social systems constitute “enduring cycles of reproduced relations” (p. 131).

Giddens’ general thesis resembles Weber’s ideas on the relationship between social structure, change and action. Although much of Weber’s work focuses on understanding how macrolevel structures such as the economic order, religion, ideas, status and bureaucracy affect the lives of individuals over time and space (Hadden, 1997: 126127) simultaneously Weber was acutely aware of the role of human action in these structures. He complements his structuralist method of analysis with the concept of verstehen, which espouses an essentially interactionist perspective in that it requires the analyst to empathize with individuals and the meaning they ascribe to actions, and other individuals (Ritzer, 1992: 116). Weber (1968: 4) defines action as social “insofar as the acting individual attaches a subjective meaning to his behavior [and] takes account of the behavior of the other and is thereby oriented in its course.” On this basis, he defines a social relationship as “the behavior of a plurality of actors insofar as, in its meaningful content, the action of each takes account of that of the others and is oriented in these terms” (p. 2627). The repeated occurrence of social relationships leads to the development of enduring patterns from which emerge social structures and institutions. The increasing regularization of social relationships further leads to the establishment of traditions, customs, norms, values and ultimately laws (p. 28). Hence, like Giddens, Weber argues firstly


that agency does not occur in the absence of structures which effectuate individual motives into social action, and secondly that structures do not exist independently of the regularized social relationships from which they emerge. Indeed, in true Weberian fashion, Giddens goes so far as to argue that: “… structure has no existence independent of the knowledge that agents have about what they do in their day to day activity” (Giddens cited in McAnulla, 1998). Hence, structure and agency are ultimately a reciprocally conjoined duality.

McAnulla, however, argues that Giddens’ Weberian conceptualization of structure is “problematic” because “many people would argue that the powers and tendencies of structures can exist independently of whether or not actors have an awareness of them” (McAnulla, 1998: 3). But in fact this is a misrepresentation of Giddens’ actual position, which is not that structures have no existence independent of actors’ awareness of them, but rather that structures have no existence independent of actors’ knowledge of their own activities. Indeed, Giddens does not say that agents must always be aware of structures. Rather, he adopts a Weberian approach in positing that because structures constitute “enduring cycles of reproduced relations” between agents, they cannot be ontologically independent of those agents. Instead, they exist as the cumulative patterns of agential action and interaction that are enacted in context with the subjective meanings, interpretations and knowledge that agents attach to themselves and others.

Colin Hay (2001), however, has taken these arguments a step further. He argues that “the distinction between structure and agency is a purely analytical one.” Therefore, neither agents nor structures can be described as “real” in an independent sense, “since neither has an existence in isolation from the other — their existence is relational and genuinely dialectical.” Even Giddens makes the mistake of converting what is merely an analytical distinction into “a rigid

ontological dualism.” Thus, while structure and agency can be analytically conceived as separate, they “are in practice completely interwoven.” Hence it is more useful to regard structure and agency as conceptual “abstractions from a reality in which they are complexly and necessarily interlinked.”

The key mechanism that clarifies the relationship between structure and agency is that actors are strategic – “capable of devising and revising means to realise their intentions.” This concept of strategy is thoroughly Weberian, implying that an actor projects the probable consequences of different courses of action based on judging, however imperfectly, “the contours of the terrain.” Hay develops Weber’s recognition of how individuals attach subjective meanings to other individuals and their actions, by noting that strategic action implies orienting “potential courses of action to perceptions of the relevant strategic context” – whether consciously or more intuitively which implies a “dynamic relationship… between the actor (individual or collective) and the context in which she finds herself.” Therefore, Hay convincingly shows that the very nature of agency itself implies the existence of a wider strategic context constituted of a structure of other agents, in relation to which different courses of action are imagined and particular courses of action are pursued.

As Hay rightly observes, this analysis suggests that Margaret Archer’s assertion that structure and agency are actually independent, existing in separate temporal domains, is incorrect. According to Archer’s theory of morphogenesis, social interaction possesses emergent properties that are separate and irreducible to the actions and interactions from which they are produced. In turn, these separate emergent structures act upon individual actions and interactions. Moreover, structures preexist agents, constituting a precondition for the functioning of agency. She writes that: “… structures, as emergent entities are not only irreducible to


people, they preexist them, and people are not puppets of structures because they have their own emergent properties which mean they either reproduce or transform social structures rather than create them” (Archer, 1996; 1995; McAnulla, 1998: 3). Archer’s ideas on the relationship between structure and agency draw significantly on the work of Roy Bhaskar (1997: 25), who argues that “societies are irreducible to people” and that “social forms are the necessary conditions for any internal act.” Society is therefore not created by human agents it is only reproduced and transformed by them:

“People do not create society. For it always preexists them and is a necessary condition for their activity. Rather, society must be regarded as an ensemble of structures, practices and conventions which individuals reproduce or transform, but which would not exist unless they did so. Society does not exist independently of human activity (the error of reification). But it is not the product of it (the error of voluntarism)” (p. 36)

Despite the contention that society is not in any manner “the product” of human agency, Bhakshar also concedes that social structures “exist only in virtue of the activities they govern and cannot be empirically identified independently of them.” He thus concurs with the Weberian realization, adopted also by Giddens and Hay, that structure is not independent of the meanings and interpretations that agents attach to their own activities. Indeed, Bhakshar further asserts that society is an articulated ensemble of “tendencies” and “powers” that:

1) exist only as long as they are exercised;

2) are exercised through human intentionality; and

3) are not necessarily universal and ahistorical (p. 3839).

The recognition that the tendencies and powers comprising society are “exercized through human intentionality” and “would not exist unless” individuals reproduce or transform them, suggests that human agency is indeed integral to the construction of social forms. But if this is the case, as Bhakshar seems to argue, this contradicts the idea he simultaneously puts forth that social structures are not at all a product of human agency. In fact, Bhakshar’s own argument indicates that strategically and subjectively creative actors are fundamentally interwoven with the rules, practices and powers that constitute social structures. Indeed, it is difficult to agree with the apparent distinction drawn by both Bhakshar and Archer between “transforming” and “creating” social structure – agents, they argue can only do the former, but not the latter. In fact, given that they both concede that agents do indeed reproduce or transform structures, the transformation of any given structure so as that it adopts new and unprecedented configurations certainly can be construed as the effective “creation” of a new structure. This distinction is, therefore, solely one of semantics, not of reality. It is more plausible to argue that structure and agency perpetually produce and reproduce one another.

Archer’s theory that structure and agency actually inhabit separate temporal domains implicitly offers a depiction of structure as constituting an autonomous reality. Bhakshar’s ontology makes a similar mistake, in arguing that the “preexistence” of social forms grants them an autonomous “causal power” that determines their reality (p. 25). He adopts a critical realist approach delineating three levels of reality: empirical, actual, and real, the latter consisting of structures from which emerge observable events. This level equates with his preexisting social forms. Therefore, like Archer, Bhakshar locates social structure in an ontologically separate domain to that of human agency.


Although Hay (2001) disagrees with Archer’s – and by extension Bhakshar’s theory, the strength of his argument is weakened because he believes that the veracity of his own argument cannot be determined empirically, but rather is simply a matter of “ontological choice.” It would therefore seem that both Archer’s theory and Hay’s response to it are mistaken and inadequate. Indeed, Hay’s analysis requires a more firm rational and empirical foundation to be taken seriously. Arguably, the invalidity of Archer’s and Bhakshar’s arguments – contrary to Hay’s opinion can be discerned empirically. From a purely empirical perspective, one cannot perceive social structure as an independent physical reality to that of human agents. On the contrary, if one is to actually describe what clearly exists in a wholly material sense, one would have to assert that what exists is a large collection of physical units, a unit constituting an individual human agent. For example, a physical structure by definition is a particular organization/relationship of various physical components. It is logically incoherent to argue that a physical structure is separate or independent from the very relationship of physical units from which it is composed. Extending this sociologically, an economic structure, for instance, is by definition inseparable from the relationship of monetary units, financial flows, individual and collective economic actors, and their respective strategic interests. It is therefore logically incoherent to assert that an economic structure is independent from its own myriad of economic agential components. Simultaneously then, it is also logically incoherent to argue that either structure or agency could preexist one another, since they are fundamentally ontologically fused.

Even adopting an Archeresque emergentist perspective, a simple physical example of emergence demonstrates the fallaciousness of ontological dualism: The physical structure that is water, for example, is composed of a particular organization of physic

al units – atoms – known as hydrogen and oxygen. Two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen, when combined together in a specific relationship, form a single physical structure — water — possessing a variety of distinctively new physical qualities to that of its individual components. Hence, these new qualities cannot be reduced to that of its constituent atoms, and can therefore be said to have emerged from the collective organization of those atoms. While it can then be concluded that the properties of the overall structure are distinct to the properties of the structure’s components, from which they emerge, nevertheless it would be entirely wrong to suggest that water as a certain physical structure is independent of its own atomic components (Bickard and Campbell, 1996).

In this sense, one cannot conceive of social structure as a reality physically separate to or independent from the physical units of individual agents. The only way in which social structure can be said to exist as ontologically independent from agents, is to posit the transcendental existence of an invisible suprametaphysical reality in which the rules, practices and powers constituting social structures can be said to subsist. But this is clearly an unwarranted ontological leap, lacking entirely in any rational or empirical evidence. Indeed, both Bhakshar and Archer recognize that social forms are reproduced and transformed by the intentional actions of individual agents. Thus, it is far more plausible to conclude that rather than subsisting in a separate domain to that of agents, structure is formed from the rules, practices and powers that are envisaged within the symbolic meanings, expectations and interpretations of agents. Simultaneously, these meanings, expectations and interpretations are both enabled and conditioned within the framework of structures. Therefore, structure and agency provide two complimentary conceptual methods of analyzing a single physical reality consisting of an empirically discernable collective of acting


and interacting individual human units. Agency denotes the internal meanings, interpretations and choices pertaining to individual actors, while structure denotes the patterns, rules and relationships of activity which are transformationally bound to the former agential internalities.

Structure, Agency and the Hierarchy of Power

Hay’s (2001) critique of the conventional academic depiction of globalization as a “process without a subject” provides some further pertinent insights. As he notes, globalization is largely regarded as an inevitable and immutable process delinked from the impact of specific actors, and therefore proceeding with its own internal deterministic structural logic. But using his analytic unification of structure and agency, Hay develops a number of key concepts which fundamentally challenge this perspective, and that can be fruitfully applied to our reconceptualization of structural violence. The first concept is strategic selectivity, which means that given a certain structural context, only specific courses of strategic action are capable of being realized. In this way, highly contoured social, political and economic structures are “selective of strategy”, because they “present an unevenly distributed configuration of opportunity and constraint to actors,” producing temporally and spatially specific patterns of strategic selectivity. Hence, the concept of strategic selectivity reveals the crucial function of power in determining the relationship between structures and agents. Although social structures may facilitate the ability of “resource and knowledgerich actors to further their strategic interests, they are equally likely to present significant obstacles to the realisation of the strategic intentions of those not similarly endowed.” Therefore, social, political and economic structures can be configured in such a manner as to marginalize and disenfranchise certain groups

while benefiting and increasing opportunities for other groups. This recognition of the role of agential power in social structures is hence linked directly to the concept of structural violence.

But the concept of power has other connotations, regarding the ability to directly manipulate the structural contexts within which less powerful actors formulate strategy. These contexts are “shaped and reshaped” by more powerful actors. Hence, Hay refers to “levels of structuration”, where firstly higher levels of structure are less and often nonaccessible to relatively powerless agents, and secondly the range of strategies and actions available to the latter are conditioned by the social, political and economic configuration of those higher levels of structure. Nevertheless, over a longer timeframe agents identifying a collective interest may pool their resources and constitute themselves as strategic actors at higher levels of structuration, capable of transforming extant structures. Hence, the hierarchy of power corresponds to the hierarchy of structuration. On a global scale, this hierarchy corresponds to increasing spatial scales. The higher an actor is on a spatial scale, the greater its influence on the context in which actors on lower spatial scales strategically operate. At the highest spatial scale – that of the global – there is no single strategic actor capable of unilaterally reconfiguring the entire global system. However, a wide variety of actors operating at subnational, national, multinational and transnational spatial scales do clearly contribute cumulatively to a multiplex of global processes, tendencies and countertendencies, which together comprise the dynamic complexity of globalization. Thus, the dense network of social, political and economic structures constituting the global system is the product of processes pursued consciously by strategic actors situated in multiple, interacting, and overlapping spatial scales – although the global processes res


ulting therefrom may not necessarily be specifically foreseen or intended.

In this context, structural/indirect violence cannot be universally analytically divorced from personal/direct violence. Indeed it would be incorrect to adopt Galtung’s specific definition of structural violence as “violence where there is no actor”. On the contrary, although structural violence is clearly the product of highly contoured social, political and economic structures systematically disenfranchising and excluding relatively powerless actors, it cannot be separated from the activities of powerful individual or collective agents operating at multiple, interacting spatial scales who are instrumental in producing, reproducing and transforming —intentionally or unwittingly— the configuration of structures that generate violence. Therefore, structural violence can be conceived of as the consequence of agents acting and interacting in enduring patterns of behaviour at multiple, interacting spatial scales, in a manner that discriminates against relatively powerless groups. While the distinction between structural and personal violence may therefore be useful in some contexts, it certainly does not hold universally. The discriminatory practices generated may or may not be specifically intended or foreseen. However, if there is evidence of an intentional component to the impact of structural violence on the part of powerful agents involved in the historical construction or preservation of extant discriminatory structures, then a firm distinction between structural and personal violence has clearly dissolved.

Case Studies of Genocidal Structural Violence

Colonization and Imperialism

A significant amount of literature on European colonization recognizes that im

perial violence often had a systematic genocidal component. Establishing control over land and manipulating regional environments in accordance with colonial aims usually implied the use of violence against indigenous people to eliminate opposition and ensure compliance. In many cases, this arguably amounted to a form of genocide. As Horowitz (1976: 1920) argues, for example, “the conduct of classic colonialism was invariably linked with genocide.”

The Americas

The destruction of indigenous people under the auspices of European imperial expansion between the 14th and 19th Centuries consisted of four key components, identified by Fein:

1) The introduction of settler diseases to local populations which lacked immunity.

2) Destruction of the indigenous economy and usurpation of land.

3) Deculturation of the indigenous population and introduction of alcoholism, both contributing to demoralization;

4) Wars and slaughter by the colonists (Fein cited in Reynolds, 2001: 27).

Thus, a multiplicity of actors, causes and methods linked to the functioning of the imperial system was responsible for the largescale destruction of indigenous peoples. Churchill (2000: 434436) records that at the inception of the colonization of the New World in 1607, “England’s Jamestown colonists arrived in present day Virginia with instructions to ‘settle’ the already heavily populated coastal area.” By 1830, the United States pursued “a policy of ‘removing’ all native people from the area east of the Mississippi River.” Through a combination of “internments and thousandmile forced marches which followed, entire


peoples were decimated. The Cherokees, for instance, suffered 50 percent fatalities during the ‘Trail of Tears’; the Choctaws, Chickasaws, Seminoles and Creeks, 25 to 35 percent apiece.” MayburyLewis (1997: 2) points out other factors. Initially the native population of the Americas “were massacred; later they were worked to death in the mines or on the plantations; but the greatest killer of all was disease and the famine and dislocation that went with it,” which killed “whole populations.” Using statistical data, Cocker (1998: 5) depicts the resulting devastating impact:

“[E]leven million indigenous Americans lost their lives in the eighty years following the Spanish invasion of Mexico. In the Andean Empire of the Incas the figure was more than eight million. In Brazil, the Portuguese conquest saw Indian numbers dwindle from a preColumbian total of almost 2, 500, 000 to just 225, 000. And to the north of Mexico… Native Americans declined from an original population of more than 800, 000 by the end of the nineteenth century. For the whole of the Americas some historians have put the total losses as high as one hundred million.”

Australia

Unlike the New World, in Australia frontier violence resulting in the killings of vast numbers of Aborigines did not generally take the form of “largescale or systematic massacres.” Rather, Elder (1998: 30) notes that they were “simply disposed of in ones and twos and threes and dozens by occasional shootings.” Clive Turnbull, another expert on the extermination of Aborigines, describing how the latter were killed “one by one” in various nefarious ways some were shot, “some brained with musket butts, others rotted with drink and disease.” Others were “raped, emasculated, flogged, roasted and starved,” as well as “badgered

from place to place, taken from their country to an unfamiliar island and brought back to die in the pestiferous ruins of a gaol” (Turnbull cited in Elder, 1998: 41).

The Transatlantic Slave Trade

Slavery also played an instrumental role in imperialism, involving the construction of an international structure maintained by a variety of subnational, national and multinational actors. The slave trade contributed substantially to the protracted deaths of vast numbers of Africans. According to Drescher (2000: 517518), the transatlantic slave trade, lasting from the 1450s to the 1860s, consisted of “a series of exchanges of captives reaching from the interior of subSaharan Africa to final purchasers in the Americas.” According to his estimate, up to “12 million Africans were loaded and transported across the ocean under dreadful conditions. About 2 million victims died on the Atlantic voyage (the dreaded ‘Middle Passage’) and in the first year in the Americas.”

Rummel (1994: Ch. 3) provides other detailed estimates of the death toll from the transatlantic slave trade. Even before being sold, he notes that “millions of people were killed while being pressed into legal slavery during slave raids, transportation on slave ships and in overland convoys or they died from associated deprivation and disease.” From the 16th to 19th centuries, the total death toll among African slaves being transshipped to America alone was as high as 2 million. Although the many millions who died “in capture and in transit to the Orient or Middle East” is unknown, among the slaves “kept in Africa some 4,000,000 may have died.” Overall, in five centuries, between nearly 17,000,000 and by some calculations perhaps over 65,000,000 Africans were killed in the transatlantic slave trade.


The Question of Imperial Genocide

In all the above cases of deaths and killings resulting from the impact of imperialism, the process of mass destruction of the indigenous population occurred:

1) by a combination of methods, from direct physical massacres and murders, to death by disease and starvation in conditions imposed by colonists;

2) over a prolonged period of time lasting up to several centuries;

3) as a decentralized process perpetrated by a multiplicity of actors operating, however, with a clear set of imperial national and subnational objectives.

4) in a consistent and regular manner that resulted in the slow, but systematic and inevitable, decimation of peoples.

Using Dadrian’s (1975: 201212) typology of genocide, one can argue that the overall pattern of violence and coercion throughout the impact of imperialism can be categorized as a form of “utilitarian genocide” – that is, mass murder whose primary intent is to undermine and eliminate indigenous opposition to imperial access and control over economic resources. Thus, Israel Charney (1994: 80) offers a specific definition of ‘colonial genocide’:

“Genocide that is undertaken or even allowed in the course of or incidental to the purposes of achieving a goal of colonisation or development of a territory belonging to an indigenous people, or any other consolidation of political or economic power through mass killing of those perceived to be standing in the way.”

But is this definition sufficient? To answer this question —which is essentially to explore whether the mass deaths of indigen

ous populations through imperialism constituted either genocide per se or at least bore clearly genocidal qualities— it is essential to clarify precisely how these cases of imperial violence and coercion relate to our reconceptualization of genocide.

Imperialism as such constituted a system of relationships between the dominant core European powers and the subordinate peripheral nonEuropean colonies. Thus, imperialism can be understood both as a web of particular international social, political and economic structures, as well as a dynamic complex of policies, interests and ideologies pertaining to multiple subnational, national and multinational actors. This means that imperialism was simultaneously a structural and agential phenomenon. The conduct of imperial violence and coercion, however random or spontaneous it may seem on close inspection of specific incidents, was nevertheless a systematic process determined by the logic of the imperial system. Imperial violence was an integral function of imperial consolidation and expansion.

This has been noted by Chalk and Jonassohn (1990: 36), who see European imperial expansion “into the Americas, Asia and Africa” as producing “a number of genocides intended to acquire and keep economic wealth.” Colonists in search of “greater wealth found it in the possession of others. When such wealth was in the form of fertile land and other primary resources, it could not be carried off as loot but could only be acquired by occupation of the land and enslavement or extermination of the indigenous population” (Chalk and Jonassohn, 1987: 13). The imperial imperative, therefore, permitted no logical alternative. Imperial violence and coercion against indigenous people was the only available method “to secure both occupation and trading ‘rights’” (Loomba, 1998: 112). Thus, although the primary intent of imperialism was to secure wealth, a secondary implicit intent logically entailed by the former – was to enslave and exterminate a specific


target group (the indigenous population) to fulfil the primary intent of acquiring control of indigenous economic resources. The primary intent could not have been implemented in the absence of the secondary intent. In this sense, direct massacres of indigenous people; deaths due to imposed imperial conditions of subjugation inducing starvation and disease; countless incidents of brutal shootings, murders, rape, and so on; were all ultimately intrinsic to the very essence of imperialism itself. Although viewed individually each such incident of imperial violence and coercion was obviously a case of personal violence, viewed holistically the collective pattern of such incidents constituted an overall product of the logic of the social, political, economic and ideological structure of the international imperial system in other words, a case of protracted, global structural violence.

But for imperial violence and coercion to meet the definition of genocide, it is necessary to clearly establish the existence of “intent to destroy, in whole or in part” a particular human group. Even if the mass deaths caused by imperial violence and coercion can be seen as structurally inevitable, a product of the structure of the imperial system, this does not in itself prove that they were genocidally intentional. This problem can perhaps be best articulated in the example of mass deaths of Aborigines under the British Empire’s imperial system in Australia. The difficulty of defining these and many other cases of colonial fatalities as genocide is due to the fact that most indigenous fatalities were not due to a clearly intended policy of extermination, but rather occurred as the result of a plurality of factors including disease, malnutrition, alcohol, and a myriad of smallscale killings and massacres (Moses, 2000: 90).

Tony Barta attempts to bypass this problem by arguing that, given the structural logic of the imperial system, “there is a relationship of genocide with the Aborigines which cannot be understood only in terms

of a clear intention to wipe them out… [genocide] was inevitable, rather than intentional” (Barta cited in Renolds, 2001: 29). Thus, rather than proving a conscious plan to exterminate the Aborigines, he argues that colonists lived in “relations of genocide” with the indigenous population. Their eventual death was an inevitable consequence of colonial terms of settlement in the form of the violent appropriation and occupation of indigenous land (Barta, 1987: 237251). Sartre (1968: 57f, 78f) had earlier argued similarly that it is necessary to study “the facts objectively, to discover implicitly in them… a genocidal intention.” The perpetrators of genocide may not even be “thoroughly conscious of their intention” – but the implicit existence of such an intention would be “apparent on the battlefield in the racism” of the perpetrating force.

While the recognition of the oftignored structural features of genocide is valuable, these positions can be criticized due to their overemphasis on the function of structures at the expense of the pivotal role of agential intention, as a result of which genocide as conventionally defined cannot be proven (Fein, 1990: 15f, 79f). However, Sartre does conclude that “colonial troops maintained their authority by perpetual massacre aimed at the destruction ‘of part of an ethnic, national or religious group’ and were thus genocidal in character.” He therefore concedes that in many cases colonial aims were not to exterminate the entire population, but rather to destroy the target group “in part” in order to eliminate resistance to colonial rule and secure an adequate indigenous labour supply (Sartre cited in Kuper, 1988: 56). Indeed, it is difficult to contend the opposite, that imperial violence and coercion had no intent at all to exterminate the indigenous population, at least partially. The recognition that genocidal intent can be implicit and discernable from the pattern and logic of the perpetrators’ behaviour is crucial. As Chalk and Jonassohn (1990: 26) observe, although “there is no intent to kill


the entire victim group” in cases of colonial frontier violence, “its disappearance is intended. In these cases, a part of the victim group will be killed in order to terrorise the remainder into giving up their separate identity or their opposition to the perpetrator group.” Therefore, “the many incidents resulting in indigenous death were cases of genocidal massacres” (Chalk and Jonassohn cited in Reynolds, 2001: 28).

One may go further than this in arguing that even if colonists may not have initially intended to exterminate indigenous peoples, this soon became an obvious outcome of systematic policies of imperial violence and coercion which continued to be implemented regardless. Indeed, underlying the entire colonial project was a fundamental racism that dehumanized indigenous peoples, viewing them as inherently inferior and therefore effectively irrelevant to colonial objectives. Colonists promised either to civilize the “barbarians,” or in the event of indigenous resistance to imperial objectives, to enslave or conquer them (Vitoria, 2002; House of Commons, 1837: 36, 7476). Hence, their partial but systematic destruction when considered necessary to secure access to land and resources was not only an inevitable result of the structure of the imperial system, it was foreseeable and implicitly intended.

As Reynolds (2001: 28) argues, for example, given that the perpetrator recognizes the debilitating impact of the imperial system on an indigenous population: “To persist in these circumstances is to intend the death of a people.” Indeed, this argument remains in force not only when considering the effect of the imperial system’s legitimization of countless killings and massacres in the pursuit of imperial interests, but also in considering mass deaths due to disease, malnutrition, declining birthrates and so on, produced as a direct consequence of the colonization process. Churchill, for example, compares the European imperial system

with the Nazi regime in the Second World War:

“[A] considerable portion of those who died in the Nazi death camps as well as in forced marches died from starvation as well as epidemics of diseases such as dysentery and typhus. Yet the Nazis were nonetheless found culpable under international law after the war for such deaths by deliberately imposing the conditions which led to the spread of starvation and sickness among them.”

Although colonists may not have originally envisaged the devastating impact that the spread of European diseases would have on indigenous peoples, in time they were certainly not oblivious to the consequences. As Churchill notes: “English Puritans rejoiced that diseases like smallpox were having a catastrophic effect” (Curthovs and Docker, 2001: 13). In other words, once the consequences of a set of actions becomes clear, given the continuance of those actions, intent can be said to have formed.

The same principle applies to the transatlantic slave trade, through which over several centuries several million Africans died during the Atlantic voyage alone – another case of imperial structural violence. At face value, the contention that these deaths were not the outcome of a conscious plan of extermination on the part of the subnational, national and multinational colonial actors who were instrumental in the construction and functioning of the international slavery system appears accurate. However, this is ultimately misleading. Although a conscious plan of extermination did not exist at the outset, the actual consequence of the slave trade in terms of the protracted mass deaths of African slaves yearbyyear obviously soon became apparent to the colonial organizers of the international slavery system. However, the system was preserved and perpetuated regardless of this consequence.


It therefore cannot be credibly maintained that there was no intent to destroy “in part” the African population on the part of colonial actors, as a structural function of imperial interests.

Thus, it can be concluded that imperialism as a matrix of social, political, ideological and economic structures constituted an international system of global structural violence produced from the convergence of conscious policies pursued by multiple actors at interacting subnational, national and multinational levels. In this context, imperial violence and coercion, although primarily designed to pursue economic and political imperial goals, was genocidal in its originally implicit and later explicit intent to destroy in part various target groups consisting of indigenous peoples, by (a) killing group members (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to group members, and (c) deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to physically destroy the group in part.3 Imperialism thus provides a powerful illustration of how structural violence can be genocidal.

Artificial Famines

A number of other case studies provide a much more direct example of structural violence that many scholars consider, on arguably strong grounds, to have been either genocidal or pure cases of genocide per se. The following examples all concern major instances of largescale famines that were deliberately manufactured by various national and subnational actors through the drastic reconfiguration of social and economic structures.

3 This is obviously based on the definition of geno-cide contained in the 1948 UN Convention. Clauses (c) and (d) of the Convention have not been mentioned here because, although they refer to other crucial methods employed by colon-ists to eliminate and control indigenous resistance to colonization, I have not discussed them here in any detail.

Stalin’s ‘FiveYear Plan’

Between 1932 and 1933, the leader of the Soviet Union Joseph Stalin imposed a system of land management known as collectivization. His first FiveYear Plan, adopted in 1928, called for patently unrealistic goals a 250 percent increase in overall industrial development and a 330 percent expansion in heavy industry (Electronic Exhibit, ‘Collectivization’, 1996). The collectivization programme entailed the extermination of the entire landowning peasant class, the kulaks, which constituted over 80 per cent of the entire population. Stalin initially attempted to persuade the kulaks to cooperate with collectivization, but their refusal led him to conclude that they represented a mortal threat to the success of the communist revolutionary programme. Therefore, to “eliminate” the kulaks as a class was considered a legitimate and indeed integral dimension of communist social engineering. In a speech to Marxist agrarians before the Soviet Central Committee, Stalin stated: “From a policy of limiting the exploitive tendencies of the Kulaks, we have gone over to a policy of liquidating the Kulaks as a class” (Volkogonov, 1991).

All privately owned farmland and livestock was seized and placed under government control. Farmers resisting this appropriation of land and crops faced a myriad of brutal sanctions. Some were deported to remote regions, others imprisoned in concentration camps and their families deported, others still simply killed. As Lewin (1968: 506) observes: “The mere sight of the trainloads of deportees, frequently referred to as ‘death trains,’ produced a shattering effect.” Peasants were crammed into wagons, dying of “cold, hunger and disease.” Although collectivization had a disastrous impact on agricultural productivity, Stalin imposed impossible grain quotas, increasing them by 44 per cent and stipulating that peasants would be prevented from accessing grain to eat until quotas were met. He simultaneously ordered the forcible seizure of all crops


which were stored and even exported to generate cash to aid the FiveYear Plan. This condemned millions of peasants to death by starvation. As a result of these artificial food shortages, between 6 and 7 million Ukrainians died (Electronic Exhibit, ‘Ukranian Famine’, 1996). One of Stalin’s officials in Ukraine commented at the time: “It took a famine to show them who is master here. It has cost millions of lives but the collective farm system is here to stay” (Conquest, 1986: 47).

Mao’s ‘Great Leap Forward’

Mao Tsetung, leader of the People’s Republic of China, largely replicated Stalin’s policies in his 19581961 campaign, “Great Leap Forward.” As with Stalin’s programme, this was “aimed at accomplishing economic and technical development of the country at a faster pace and with greater results” (Rummel, 2000: 150151). Implausible production goals included increasing coal production from 30 to 270 million tones; grain from 185 to 525 million tones; and so on throughout the economy (Mosher, 1984: 264). However, the “Great Leap Forward” did the very opposite, destroying the agricultural system and manufacturing a devastating famine. As grain was forcibly confiscated from peasant communes to meet raised quotas, much of which was exported to the Soviet Union, starvation spread rapidly in the provinces (Spence, 1990: 583).

A cycle of outputexaggeration and unrealistic government demands effectively eradicated any agricultural surplus, to the point that by 1961, “100 million people only had onehalf tin of grain to eat per day and… edema and even starvation occurred in many places” (Joseph, 1986: 440). By the end of May 1960, grain reserves in Beijing, Tianjin, and Shanghai were entirely exhausted (Becker, 1998: 80). According to Rummel, approximately “27 million people starved to death” in the collectivization

campaign. Moreover, for the next 6 years, agricultural growth remained devastated, only beginning recovery in 1965 (Clark, 1976: 244).

Mao and his subordinate officials responded to the famine not by adopting a drastic change in policy, but rather by enforcing the collectivization campaign with even greater brutality. Even when Mao was confronted about the famine by the old Red Army general Peng Dehuai, the latter was denounced, demoted, and eventually tortured and executed (Becker, 1998: 80). Although Mao’s original intention was obviously not to create mass death on such a massive scale, as Shaw observes, the famine was “a direct and foreseeable consequence of Mao’s attempt to subordinate the peasantry to his will.” Obsessed with his fantastical ideological visions of engineering the ideal communist utopia, “Mao continued his policy long after it was evident that millions were dying; he exported grain while refusing it to starving peasants, and he enforced his policies with brutal repression” (Shaw, 2003: 39).

Late Victorian ‘Holocausts’

Mike Davis (2000; 2001: Ch. 1) argues convincingly that the “Third World” – the division of humanity into “haves” and “havenots” – was a product of interactions between drastic climatic events and British imperial economic policies during the last quarter of the 19th century. At this time, the El NiñoSouthern Oscillation (ENSO) — the vast oscillation in air mass and Pacific ocean temperature — was responsible for creating largescale droughts in many countries peripheral to the European empires, including Asia (India, China, Java, the Philippines and Korea), Brazil, southern Africa, Algeria and Morocco. British imperial policy, Davis shows, systematically converted droughts in these regions into foreseeable but preventable deadly famines, multiplying deathtolls


to gross proportions without any historical precedent.

In India, for example, between 5.5 and 12 million people died in the artificiallyinduced famine, although millions of tonnes of grains were in commercial circulation. As Davis (2000) observes:

“Although rice and wheat production in the rest of India had been above average for the previous three years, much of the surplus had been exported to England. Londoners were in effect eating India’s bread. ‘It seems an anomaly’ wrote a troubled observer, Cornelius Walford, ‘that with her famines on hand, India is able to supply food for other parts of the world.’”

India’s newlyconstructed modern railway system was used not to ensure the supply of grain to faminestricken areas, but to do the very opposite. Merchants shipped grain by train from areas of drought “to central depots for hoarding.” Local supply trends were bypassed so that exorbitant price hikes could be “coordinated in a thousand towns at once,” sending food prices rocketing out of the reach of “outcaste labourers, displaced weavers, sharecroppers and poor peasants.” Consequently, “the poor began to starve to death even in wellwatered districts ‘reputed to be immune to food shortages.’” Especially in northwestern India, Davis argues, the “drought was consciously made into famine” by British imperial decisions. In 187476, northern harvests were more than sufficient to provide reserves for the 1878 autumn crops deficit. But most of the grain from northwestern subsistence farming was controlled by a captive export sector designed to stabilize British grain prices, which from 187677 had increased due to poor harvests. This generated a British demand that absorbed almost the entirety of northwestern India’s wheat surplus. Meanwhile, profits from

these grain exports were monopolized by wealthy property holders, moneylenders and grain merchants, as opposed to poor farmers.

Although the British Governor of Madras, the Duke of Buckingham, was appalled by the manner in which modern markets imposed by the British empire “accelerated rather than relieved the famine,” British Viceroy Lord Edward Lytton resisted his efforts to interfere with market forces. Indeed, he remained “unswayed by images of destitute villages and rejected out of hand” proposals to postpone the collection of land tax that would have minimized the impact of the famine. Lytton used military force to prevent a starving population from stealing food, British law to stop private charities from donating food to a desperate populace, and India’s modern railways to collect and export Indian grain to earn foreign exchange. By continuing land taxes, he ensured subsequent foreclosures of droughtstricken land which permitted rich British and Indian elites to buy it cheap (Davis, 2000; 2001: 36, 4344).

Thus, between 1877 and 1878, grain merchants exported a record 6.4 million hundredweight of wheat to Europe while millions of Indian poor starved to death. This pattern was replicated in many other regions for instance, 2030 million people died from similar artificial famine conditions in China, and 2 million in Brazil. Davis (2000) concludes that the millions who died across the ‘Third World’ as a consequence of the convergence of El Niño with British imperial economics, did so “not outside the modern world system, but in the very process of being forcibly incorporated into its economic and political structures. They died in the golden age of liberal capitalism; many were murdered by the application of utilitarian free trade principles.” As Shaw (2003: 39) thus observes: “It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that there was a quasigenocidal element in these events: colonial administrators and their masters saw an op


portunity to weaken the colonial peasantry and increase their dependence on the imperial state.”

The Question of Structural Genocide

All the above cases have the following components in common:

1) They are severe examples of structural violence, that is, configurations of social, political and economic structure generating systematic deprivation against particular human groups, resulting ultimately in their death.

2) Simultaneously, this violence was the product of policies pursued deliberately by powerful agents possessing pivotal positions in social, political and economic structures, which they were capable of manipulating.

3) The targets of the said policies were clearly defined human groups. In the first two cases, the groups targeted by the perpetrator regime were identified according to political or class categories. In the last case, the groups targeted were identified according to a combination of national, political and/or class categories.

4) The target groups became targets primarily because they were categorized by the perpetrating regime as ultimately disposable, that is, irrelevant to the pursuit of other interests or goals that were elevated to a more significant level. In this respect, relative to those interests or goals, they were fundamentally dehumanized or otherized.

Notably, in all cases, the determining factor behind the adoption of structural violence as official government policy was rooted not only in powerful political and economic interests, but also in a particular socioideological vision. Although for Stalin

and Mao this vision was a communist utopian fantasy, in the third case, a no less utopian fantasy known as marketoriented liberal capitalism dominated the consciousness of policymakers.

Stalin’s ‘terror famine’, however, is perhaps the most clearcut case of genocide per se. Stalin’s intention to “liquidate the kulaks as a class” was an unambiguous and openly articulated goal of collectivization, almost from its inception. The kulaks as a whole were seen simply as obstacles to the blossoming of Stalinism’s grand scheme of communist social engineering, whose elimination was therefore considered an entirely legitimate component of the revolutionary programme. The only qualification that could be added is that the crime does not concord with the restrictive definition of genocide espoused by the UN Convention. However, as already discussed in detail, the exclusion of political, class and other groups from the definition of genocide is flawed, not least because one of the key powers responsible for limiting the original UN definition of genocide articulated in the 1946 General Assembly Resolution was the Soviet Union. However, the USbased Ukrainian Famine Foundation mobilized Congressional support resulting in a joint 1988 resolution declaring that the famine was indeed an intentional genocide (Campaign to End Genocide, undated).

At first glance, Mao’s ‘Great Leap Forward’ campaign appears more ambiguous, primarily because Mao’s original intention was not to cause deaths by famine on such a massive scale. However, the historical record indicates that Mao and his leading officers became aware of the catastrophic impact of the collectivization campaign, but deliberately continued with the policy regardless, driven by the conviction that the revolutionary programme would eventually succeed (Becker, 1998). Therefore, in a somewhat similar fashion to Stalin, Mao’s regime saw the escalating deathsbystarvation largely pertaining to a particular hu


man group (the poorest peasant class) as merely a necessary, if unsavoury, byproduct of enforced collectivization and utopian social engineering. Intent to destroy in part the Chinese peasant class can therefore be said to have eventually formed when the actual impact of collectivization became apparent.

The last example is perhaps most relevant to this study, due to its continuity with the current international economic system. British imperial policy was consciously designed to exploit extant climatic conditions in order to consolidate imperial control. In true faithfulness to Malthusian doctrine, the deaths of the poorest Indians were considered an inevitable, and irrelevant, consequence of imperial market economics. In addition to India, a large number of ‘Third World’ nations were systematically targeted by British imperial policy. As with Mao’s campaign, the ensuing catastrophes were not the result of a specific exterminationist plan. However, although British imperialists became wellaware that their policy had exacerbated, if not actively manufactured, the conditions of famine leading to mass deaths of the lower classes in multiple ‘Third World’ nations, they continued to pursue the same policy. Intent to destroy in part the dehumanized lower classes of subordinate/peripheral national groups was therefore implicit in this policy.

Indeed, there is little to differentiate these Britishmade ‘late Victorian holocausts’, pursued in the name of the capitalist free market, from the artificial famines manufactured by Stalin and Mao in the name of communist utopianism – their inner logic is fundamentally the same. Although all these cases constitute examples of structural violence, they all bore critical agential components demonstrating that the social, political and economic structures responsible for generating violence were inseparable from the conscious decisions and policies of key, powerful actors. Moreover, in all cases, intention as to the destruction

of a particular group – in whole or in part, depending on the case was present at a certain stage. This genocidal intent was therefore not only a function of agents, but due to the pivotal positions of those agents in relation to prevailing social structures was also actively implicit in the configuration of those structures. It can therefore be concluded that these are examples not merely of structural violence, but of a particular form of structural violence linked to a genocidal agential intent to partially or wholly destroy a human group. In this context, it is necessary to recognize a new concept in relation to structural violence, that of genocidal structural violence, or rather structural genocide.

Globalization: A Case of Structural Genocide?

Malthusian explanations of the 19th century famines ascribed them not only to weather conditions, but also to the factors of “too many people, too little land, too little food.” This sort of explanation of mass hunger and deprivation in the ‘Third World’ as an inevitable consequence solely of constraints of nature prevails today in much conventional globalization discourse (Ross, 1998). British marketoriented economic policies closely resemble the contemporary policies being enthusiastically promoted and imposed by Western governments and international financial institutions as a corollary of the globalization process (Murshed, 2003). As Davis (2000) thus comments, a revised understanding of the connection between 19th century imperial economics and the phenomenon of artificial famines in India, China and elsewhere, “throws light on the origins of many of the current challenges of socalled ‘development’: it also calls into question the wisdom of development policies that are still pursued today and the justifications given for them.”


The Structure of the Global Economic Regime

Agential Intention

In his attempt to link structure and agency in understanding the operation of the international economic order, Robert Cox (1987: 29, 7) emphasizes the mediating influence of institutions functioning within the framework of a “world order” centred on a single hegemonic power (the United States). These powerful intergovernmental agencies and institutions actively reproduce the structure of global trade, production and finance regimes. These in turn are responsible for increasingly transnational class structures that effectively set the ‘rules of the game’ in ways that systematically create patterns of advantage and disadvantage in the world economy (Beeson and Bell, 2003: 18).

Countries that industrialized early, thus establishing a dominant position in the global hierarchy of political and economic power, thereby benefit from structurally entrenched advantages reinforced by a powerful transnational regulatory framework (p. 22). Thus, as Cox (1987: 359) observes, a “transnational managerial class” attempting to construct world order in a manner that conforms to its perceived interests operates through international institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

The function of agential intention here is at first glance problematic. Hay, for example, notes that due to the inability of strategic actors to foresee all possible consequences of an act, “there is a whole host of actors capable of contributing unintentionally to a series of global processes, tendencies and countertendencies.” His classic example of this is global environmental degradation, which constitutes a global structuration process produced from the generally “unintended consequences” of the ac

tions of a “complex array of subnational, national, multinational and transnational actors.” Thus, although this global process emerges cumulatively from the globally significant acts of individual and collective agents on multiple spatial scales, he asserts that little can be done to counter this process due to the lack of a specific intentional component to the policies of these agents (Hay, 2001).

However, this argument is significantly flawed. Although a specificallydesigned conscious plan to escalate global environmental degradation certainly has never existed, policymakers have been long aware that this global process has been systematically generated by the global economic regime for decades. It is now no longer credible to claim that powerful governments, agencies and institutions are unaware of the devastating ecological impact of the policies of the global economic regime. Yet the same array of policies continues to be implemented and actively promulgated by Western international financial institutions. Thus, implicit intention as to the global process of environmental degradation can be said to have formed on the part of these governments, agencies and institutions, which are implementing policies to secure their perceived interests with reckless indifference as to their impact on much of the world. The same argument in principle can be applied to the escalation of impoverishment that has accompanied globalization as promoted by two key Western financial institutions, examined here as principal examples: the IMF and the World Bank.

The Bretton Woods System

The IMF and the World Bank were founded at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference, having been jointly conceived as early as 1941 by the United States and Britain. As Michael Hudson (2003: 137144) documents, these two institutions – constituting an administrative core of the international


economic order were established by the United States with the specific intention of preserving and promulgating US global financial hegemony. The US had originally desired to establish international institutions capable of organizing and administering the growth in postwar debt, in order to finance the continued purchase of US goods and services by Allies.

Although foreign governments held some shares in these institutions, the US government held the “dominating veto.” Hence, the former could “do little to control the use of capital of these bodies”, except facilitate their own debtservicing. Thus, the establishment of these two institutions enabled the US economy to “draw the finances of other governments into an international cartel directed by its own policymakers, dominated by US officials and their appointees.” The IMF and the World Bank were thus able to recommend policies that would promote a specifically US conception of world financial stability, conceived of then “as an expansion in foreign economic life and its adjustment to the needs and capacities of America. US Government claims thus were formalized into an institutional edifice of world economic domination” (p. 139). US officials ensured that European loan repayments were not simply poured directly into the US economy. Rather, they were recycled to allow the IMF and World Bank to maintain a large reserve of further loanable funds. This constituted a pool of intergovernmental capital that was, however, dominated by the United States and used “to finance a worldwide Open Door policy and to facilitate the breaking up of colonial spheres of influence.” Subsequently, the IMF, World Bank, GATT and US foreign aid programmes were used as “a formal system for the political implementation of American economic strength” (p. 140).

The Open Door policy, moreover, was a product of the logic of US economic selfinterest. Europe and Asia were required to dispense with protectionist measures to per

mit US producers to expand abroad. This was achieved by providing other countries with foreign assistance to induce them to “adhere to free trade, stable currency parities, general dependence on American food and industrial exports, and to open their investment markets to private capital” (p. 143). The Cold War provided a crucial ideological background of legitimacy to this active promulgation of market economics by the US. As historian Joseph Stromberg (2001: 69) thus notes: “‘defense of the Free World against Communism’ became the most potent slogan veiling US imperial activities and justifying Open Door intervention everywhere. It did overlap reality, because the triumph of revolutionary nationalism, usually under communist leadership, could, indeed, exclude American business from certain markets.”

It is therefore no surprise that since its inception, the IMF has always been dominated by the policydecisions of the US government. Membership of the IMF is a prerequisite to membership of the World Bank and therefore eligibility to receive World Bank loans. Until 1956, US control of the IMF was so complete that its decisions were effectively made by the US Secretary of the Treasury, while the IMF’s own staff lacked the authority to negotiate conditions. Although US unilateral domination of the IMF has declined since the 1960s with the rise of European and Japanese economic power, it remains impossible for the IMF to produce policies in contradiction to the major policy interests of the US. For example, then IMF Managing Director PierrePaul Schweitzer resigned in 1973 only when the US insisted that it had lost confidence in him. Indeed, the IMF Managing Director by both tradition and agreement must always be European, and since 1949 the IMF’s Deputy Managing Director has consistently been American. Similarly, the President of the World Bank is always American. Ultimately however, the IMF is controlled by its members in proportion to their quotas. The US


continues to hold the largest quota at over 20 per cent. Since key issues require an 80 per cent majority to be decided, the US has formal veto power. Five members with the largest quotas (the US, UK, France, Germany and India) and the two countries whose currency is most drawn from the IMF appoint an executive director each. As for the IMF’s US Executive Director, s/he cannot vote at his own discretion, but is legally bound to follow instructions from the Secretary of the Treasury. Thus, the IMF is principally dominated by the US, and secondarily dominated by the world’s other wealthiest powers (Payer, 1974: 217218).

Although the fundamental components of the Bretton Woods system – the gold exchange standard and the par value system – were dispensed with in the early 1970s, the fundamental structure of the international economic order has remained in place. It is safe to conclude in this context that the key institutions of the global economic regime are ultimately instruments of capital in the service of the most powerful states and financial entities (Cohen, 2001; .Dooley, 2004). As former UNCTAD economist Clairmont (1996: 12) observes: “What the US imperial master demanded, and still does was not allies but unctuous client states. What Bretton Woods queathed to the world was a lethal totalitarian blueprint for the carve up of world markets.”

It is therefore clear that the structure of globalization is inseparable from the webs of financial activities pertaining to various individual and collective agents. Globalization is a complex of processes emerging from a multitude of policies being consciously pursued primarily by national, multinational and transnational actors. The IMF and the World Bank are two prominent institutional agents of the global economic regime, representing the interests of the wealthiest Northern nations, especially that of the United States (Stiglitz, 2002: 171172; Biel, 2000).

The Impact of Globalization

IMF/World Bank stabilization and structural adjustment programmes have consistently advocated and implemented essentially the same package of promarket policies throughout the world, designed fundamentally to allow debtor nations to perpetually service their everexpanding debt. Essentially, these programmes foster an increased “outward orientation”, involving for example “devaluation, trade liberalization and incentives for exporters” policies that “are widely believed to lead to social hardships, increased inequality of income distribution and increased poverty” (Singer, 1995). The focus of these policies, then, is not poverty alleviation, but economic restructuring conducive to the expansion and concentration of capital (see Appendix A).

Thus, the logic of market economics tends towards a form of market imperialism, in which key agential entities like the World Bank are cognizant of – but simultaneously indifferent to the devastating impact of their policies on victim populations (see Appendix B). As former US Federal Reserve Board economist Martin Wolfson observes, when the IMF loans funds to alleviate a growing economic crisis – such as in Asia – the funds are intended to allow Asian borrowers to repay capital investors. Meanwhile, further IMF austerity measures such as continued deregulation and slowgrowth policies are designed “restore the ‘confidence’ of investors and to make it again profitable for them to return.” In other words, market economics is consistently focused “on restoring the investments of the wealthy, not on helping the people” (Wolfson, 1998). The people are simply irrelevant to the equation.

Africa provides an illuminating caseinpoint. Naiman and Watkins (1999) heavily critique the impact of IMF interventions in Africa based largely on the IMF’s own data. They document that less developed coun


tries (LDCs) worldwide participating in the IMF’s Enhanced Structural Adjustment Facility (ESAF) programmes have experienced lower economic growth, and even drastic declines in per capita income, compared to those outside these programmes. Although increasing numbers of millions of Africans are suffering due to lack of appropriate health, education and sanitary facilities, the IMF is forcing African countries to further decrease public spending on such services, including a longterm decline in such spending between 1986 and 1996. External debt has also escalated exponentially. In subSaharan Africa, for instance, debt rose as a share of GDP from 58% in 1988 to 70% in 1996.

This has had tangibly devastating results for the African population. According to the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO, 1996), between 1985 and 1990, under the policies of the global economic regime, the number of people living in poverty in subSaharan Africa increased from 184 to 216 million. By 1990, 204 million people suffered from malnutrition – a situation that is drastically worse off than the previous 30 years. Indeed, the proportion of Africa’s population living on less than a dollar a day increased from approximately 18% in 1980 to 24% in 1995. The numbers living on less than a $1000 a year increased from 55% to 70% (Serioux, 1999). Data from the World Health Organization shows that corresponding to the massive increase in impoverishment and indebtedness under the global economic regime, parts of subSaharan Africa now have adult mortality rates that are higher than 30 years ago. In Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland and Zimbabwe, for instance, life expectancy for men and women has reduced by 20 years. In Africa, 40 percent of deaths occur within the age range of below five years. Of the 10 million children who die worldwide unnecessarily every year, half occur in Africa. Of the 20 countries with the highest child mortality rates, 19 are in Africa. Of the16 countries with

higher mortality rates than in 1990, 14 are in Africa. Of the 9 countries whose child mortality rate is higher than those recorded over 20 years ago, 8 are in Africa. The vast majority of these deaths were not only foreseeable; they were entirely preventable, resulting largely from malnutrition, diarrhoea, malaria and infections of the lower respiratory tract. Simple investments in clean water, improved sanitation and basic precautionary health care such as insecticidetreated nets and more effective malarial drugs made available to the population could easily prevent much of these deaths (WHO, 2004). Now over 1 million children die annually —3,000 every day— of malaria, simply due to lack of access to appropriate medication (WHO/UNICEF, 2003).

While these mortality rates have steadily increased over decades, the global economic regime has continued to conduct the same fundamental pattern of marketoriented policies designed to cut spending on health care and sanitation ultimately in the interest of transnational capital. But the example of Africa is not isolated. On the contrary, it is representative of a decadeslong pattern of Southern deathbydeprivation generated systematically by the global economic regime (Nef, 1997).

Conclusions

Globalization as promoted by powerful bearers of capital, including Western governments, banks and transnational corporations, is clearly of benefit to those who have already accumulated considerable amounts of capital, or who otherwise retain professional skills that can be sold or traded on the market. The poor, lacking both capital and the necessary professional skills, are increasingly marginalized, disempowered and periphalized in both developed and less developed countries, not only between the North and South, but even within both Northern and Southern countries. The inter


national economic order is thus systematically shifting resources and power in favour of predominantly Northern transnational capital, at the expense of the predominantly Southern multinational poor.

Given the consistency with which these policies have produced the same pattern of mounting deathbydeprivation, and given the extent to which this pattern has been thoroughly publicly documented by numerous official government and intergovernmental agencies (including the IMF and the World Bank themselves), it is impossible to credibly claim that the key actors in the global economic regime are not cognizant of the impact of their policies (Kim, 2000; Chossudovsky, 2003). Even if it may be quite unfounded, if not patently absurd, to assert that transnational deathbydeprivation constitutes the outcome of a conscious plan to exterminate millions of people located in African, Asian and other Southern nations peripheral to the world capitalist economy, it is similarly absurd to suggest that the principal agential entities – Northern governments, institutions, and corporations – responsible for erecting and preserving the fundamental architecture of the global economic regime, are completely ignorant of the structural violence produced by globalization. As with the global process of environmental degradation, intent with regards to the systematic rise of Southern deathbydeprivation by now can be said to have formed, on the part of these key Northern governmental, institutional and corporate actors.

Indeed, the vast bulk of the policies of the global economic regime are underpinned by neoMalthusian principles derived from the logic of neoliberalism (Nair and Kirbat, 2004). Former editor of Population and Environment Virginia Abernethy (1991: 323, 326), for example, defends the “legitimacy of unevenly distributed wealth,” on the basis of conserving scarce resources and protecting the “legitimacy of ownership.” Her emphasis on overpopulation as

the most prominent destructive force in LDCs is also representative of a general ideological trend in much developmental discourse. Similarly, Nobel Prizewinning economist Arthur Lewis argued that since the key to growth is capital accumulation, inequality was good for development and growth, because the rich save more than the poor. Simon Kuznets, another Nobel Prize winner, saw inequality as an inevitable byproduct of the initial stages of development, but believed that later this trend would reverse (Kuznets cited in Stiglitz, 2002: 79). These highly influential perspectives propose that the generation of inequality – structural violence – is an inevitable and legitimate dimension of a desirable and successful marketoriented economic policy. Neoliberal ideology therefore sees violence and progress as two sides of the same coin.

As to the target groups of these destructive economic policies, they clearly consist of a multiplicity of national groups that are peripheral to the world economy, and as such are functionally subordinate to the interests of transnational capital. Consequently, the wellbeing and even survival of these national groups is considered ultimately irrelevant to the protection and promulgation of those interests. But more specifically, although these national groups are generally targeted, the specific victims of global structural violence are largely the most impoverished classes within these national groups, classes that entirely lack the ability to access or connect to the market. Thus, the intrinsic logic of market economics categorizes the class of multinational poor – largely members of Southern national groups – as irrelevant, indeed, as disposable relative to the more significant interests of transnational capital, to which the former are subordinated.

Heggenhougen (1996) describes this as “functional apartheid”, a process of structural “discrimination against or the socalled ‘setting apart’ of ‘disposable people.’” This sense of ‘disposability’ applies largely to the


populations of LDCs, whose primary function is to serve as “open economic territories and ‘reserves’ of cheap labour and natural resources” for the North, whose role and position in the global economy is defined by its “unequal structure of trade, production and credit” (Chossudovsky, 1991: 2527). Indeed, the term “unpeople” was originally coined by historian and development specialist Mark Curtis (cited in Pilger, 1998: 55) to describe “those whose lives have been deemed expendable, worthless, in the pursuit of foreign policy objectives”, including the imperial imperatives underlying the marketorientated economic order. Unpeople are therefore “human beings who impede the pursuit of high policy and whose rights, often lives, therefore become irrelevant” (Curtis, 2004). The concept of “unpeople” is thus intrinsic to the logic of globalization which concentrates capital in fewer and fewer hands while marginalizing increasing numbers of people in LDCs, in the pursuit of lofty market values (Opotow, 1995).

This is, moreover, an arguably genocidal logic, rooted in an ultimately genocidal intent. The key actors in pivotal positions of power within the global economic regime are cognizant of the devastating impact of globalization on the world’s multinational poor. Hence, they can no longer be absolved of responsibility by reckless but intentional indifference toward this global structural violence that generates mass deathsbydeprivation of millions of people across the globe. Returning to the example of Africa, although millions of African children die annually due to a variety of preventable diseases —a fact that is welldocumented and known to the key actors in the global economic regime— rather than endorsing increases in public spending on urgent health and sanitation requirements, the global economic regime enforces the very opposite, thus deliberately depriving these children of the facilities and medication necessary to prevent and/or cure the savage conditions

of life that lead to such swift and high mortality rates. In doing so, the global economic regime is obviously not only complicit in, but principally responsible for, these deaths, by perpetuating – indeed worsening – the artificial structural constraints that exacerbate the incidence of mass deaths.

Moreover, such policies of the global economic regime are clearly targeted principally against multiple peripheral national groups in the South, and specifically against the poorest classes of those groups. The key agents of the global economic regime are by now fully aware that an inevitable consequence of their marketoriented policies is the periphalization and eventual death of such unpeople.

Thus, these key actors in the global economic regime have demonstrated implicit intent to destroy in part multiple national and lower class groups of the ‘Third World’ in the pursuit of capital accumulation, by deliberately creating and perpetuating conditions of life that will bring about their partial physical destruction. This is therefore a form of global structural violence with distinctly genocidal features, bearing strong parallels with previous cases of genocidal structural violence such as colonization and collectivization. It therefore seems justifiable to see the impact of the international economic order as not merely a case of structural violence, but more specifically a form of structural genocide. At the very least, it must be seen as possessing markedly genocidal or quasigenocidal characteristics.

Of course, coming to this conclusion brings up a whole host of further questions. For example, the question of agential intentionality inevitably leads to issues of criminal responsibility, and further to issues of legal accountability and the prospect of prosecuting key actors. There are also other controversies raised by this inference, such as the very validity of the central argument forwarded here, which is essentially to subsume a particular form of structural viol


ence into the concept of genocide. Certainly, many other scholars will disagree with this perspective, depending on their preferred definitional approach to understanding genocide. In recognizing this, it is perhaps prudent to point out that this argument is by no means intended to be any sort of decisive answer to the complex theoretical and historical problems tackled so far, but is hoped to provide a preliminary critique of certain dominant approaches. Clearly, there is a need for a new conceptualization of the structural violence generated by the international economic order in particular, and by socioeconomic systems where agential intent can be located in general. The approach followed here has been to develop

the logical and analytical connections between the concept of genocide and cases of intentional structural violence. It may be the case, however, that a new concept entirely is required to capture the distinct qualities of this form of violence. However, these lines of inquiry are beyond the scope of this study. It suffices to conclude here that based on the theoretical and historical data discussed, structural genocide provides a useful conceptual framework not only for capturing the complex, devastating dynamic of the violence that is intrinsic to the logic of the international economic order, but also for holding this order and its architects to account.

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Appendix A:

The 4Step World Bank Country Programme

A stepbystep account of the policies of the global economic regime as pursued by the IMF and World Bank is provided by Nobel Prizewinning economist and former Chief Economist of the World Bank, Joseph Stiglitz. According to Stiglitz – who was also Chairman of President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisors every country receives “the same fourstep programme” consisting of the following fundamental measures:

1) Privatization: The World Bank demands

that state industries, such as water and electricity companies, are sold off at massively reduced prices to private foreign investors. In Russia, for instance, Russian oligarch’s backed by the US government “stripped Russia’s industrial assets, with the effect that national output was cut nearly in half.”

2) Capital market liberalization: Although this theoretically allows investment capital to flow in and out, often it only flows out due to the first sign of economic instability. The IMF responds to the escalating capital flight by raising interest rates to 30%, 50% and 80%, with “predictable” results, according to Stiglitz, including plummeting property values, drastic cuts in industrial production and massive losses to national treasuries.

3) Marketbased pricing: This entails massive price hikes on essential commodities such as food, water and cooking gas, leading to what Stiglitz terms “the IMF riot”, yet another “painfully predictable” result. In the World Bank’s 2000 Interim Country Assistance Strategy for Ecuador, for example – a secret report obtained by BBC Newsnight – “the Bank several times


suggests with cold accuracy that the plans could be expected to spark ‘social unrest’… The secret report notes that the plan to make the US dollar Ecuador’s currency has pushed 51% of the population below the poverty line.” The ensuing spiral of increasing capital flight and government bankruptcy is accompanied by the buying up off remaining assets at the

lowest possible prices by foreign investors.

4) Free trade: This is concerned fundamentally with simply “opening markets” to Western investors, while simultaneously protecting Western markets from ‘Third World’ agriculture (Palast, 2001; Stiglitz, 2002).

Appendix B:

Memo by World Bank Chief Economist, Lawrence Summers

DATE: 12th December 1991TO: Distribution FR: Lawrence H. SummersSubject: GEP

‘Dirty’ Industries: Just between you and me, shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Less Developed Countries]? I can think of three reasons:

1) The measurements of the costs of health impairing pollution depends on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality. From this point of view a given amount of health impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages. I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.

2) The costs of pollution are likely to be nonlinear as the initial increments of pollution probably have very low cost. I’ve always though that underpopulated countries in Africa are vastly UNDERpolluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City. Only the lamentable facts that so much pollution is gen

erated by nontradable industries (transport, electrical generation) and that the unit transport costs of solid waste are so high prevent world welfare enhancing trade in air pollution and waste.

3) The demand for a clean environment for aesthetic and health reasons is likely to have very high income elasticity. The concern over an agent that causes a one in a million change in the odds of prostrate cancer is obviously going to be much higher in a country where people survive to get prostrate cancer than in a country where under 5 mortality is 200 per thousand. Also, much of the concern over industrial atmosphere discharge is about visibility impairing particulates. These discharges may have very little direct health impact. Clearly trade in goods that embody aesthetic pollution concerns could be welfare enhancing. While production is mobile the consumption of pretty air is a nontradable.

The problem with the arguments against all of these proposals for more pollution in LDCs (intrinsic rights to certain goods, moral reasons, social concerns, lack of adequate markets, etc.) could be turned around and used more or less effectively against every Bank proposal for liberalization (Summers, 1991).


The Economist (cited in Korten, 1992) rightly criticized the memo for suggesting that the life of a wealthy citizen in the North is more valuable than that of a poor citizen in the South. Nevertheless, it still endorsed Summer’s recommendation of “causing great, if wellintentioned harm to the world’s poorest people” by dumping toxic waste in LDCs, noting that: “If clean growth means slower growth, as it sometimes will, its human cost will be lives blighted by a poverty that would otherwise have been mitigated.”

Thus, this internal World Bank memo clearly articulated the intent to pursue policies that would escalate structural violence against the world’s poorest populations in accordance with the logic of the market. The logic of the market, therefore, generates categories of dehumanized ‘disposable’ human groups according to their membership of Southern national groups, and their lower class status, against whom structural violence in the pursuit of the protection and perpetuation of transnational capital is thereby legitimized. Moreover, the memo also noted that arguments against dumping toxic poisons on poor nations were irrelevant because the same arguments could be used to expose the illegitimacy of the entirety of the Bank’s marketoriented agenda. It is difficult in this context to contend that the Bank is unaware of the increasing marginalization and deprivation of the world’s poor under its policies. On the contrary, the Bank seems to be perfectly cognizant of the same, but considers this a necessary and even desirable corollary of the logic of globalization.


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