Benjamin Meiches. The Politics of Annihilation: A Genealogy of Genocide. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019. 344 pp. $28.00 (paper), ISBN 978-1-5179-0582-8.
Reviewed by Tyler Correia (York University)
Published on H-Socialisms (August, 2020)
Commissioned by Gary Roth (Rutgers University - Newark)
Genocide and Annihilation
Benjamin Meiches’s The Politics of Annihilation: A Genealogy of Genocide is a valuable contribution to current scholarship on genocide, considerably expanding the scope of the field. Its originality is compounded by an extensive and demonstrable breadth of knowledge, and its critical appraisal makes it both a pertinent resource and a rich point of departure for future research. This is in large part due to an aspirational gesture the author makes to invite exploration outside of conventional reflection and discussion. It is in this gesture, though, that Meiches’s contribution, while being an assuredly original point of departure, has not yet fulfilled the goals it sets for itself. It opens the field of scholarship to the possibility of building relationships with actors who would otherwise be excluded and establishes a critical framework that institutionalizes the demand to center the voices and concerns of those actors, even if it does not reflexively recognize that in proposing another discursive theoretical framework, The Politics of Annihilation has not yet fulfilled the conditions upon which meaningful political action can be built. Instead, Meiches does very well to recognize that particularly anticolonial activists and critical scholars are already engaged in those struggles.
Meiches uses a genealogical framework, drawing on Michel Foucault, to analyze the contestations of the concept of genocide in political and historical context. He focuses not only on instances of violence, but on the consolidated discursive frames of actors, relations, processes, institutions, and principles that arise as predominant modes for understanding genocide. Drawing upon Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, he notes how the relation between contention and consolidation within a discursive field is the product of an initial demand to make sense of inscrutable events in light of their originary lack of sensibility; a discourse must be fashioned in response to events that do not otherwise prefigure themselves discursively, to render them sensible. Resulting assemblages of genocide discourse form, reform, and transform over time.
In this way, Meiches draws a critical distinction between what he calls genocide as politics from what he concentrates much of his analysis on, the politics of genocide. The former can be understood as, immanently, the mode of politics that gives rise to destructive processes, a mode that instrumentalizes various forms of mass violence. The latter, the politics of genocide, captures meta-politically the discursive strategies and contestations, as well as affective, moral, and personal investments, surrounding the concept of genocide. This leads Meiches to propose a hegemonic understanding of genocide around which the concept coalesces. The hegemonic understanding is well trodden, even presented as apolitical and uncontroversial, within an unacknowledged field of political contestation. Marginalized but equally tenable conceptions are then disregarded. This includes Raphaël Lemkin’s conception of genocide, having coined the term in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944). For this reason, Meiches traces a genealogy of this hegemonic consolidation, bookended by Lemkin’s originally ambivalent and complex early statements on one hand, and on the other, contemporary critical scholarship that seeks to substantially open this restrictive discursive field.
Meiches often uses the term “reification” to denote the process by which the hegemonic understanding makes the concept of genocide “real” by binding it with a metaphorical-discursive structure with certain anchoring concepts—ones that are not themselves under scrutiny. In this way, the hegemonic understanding demonstrates itself as undergoing an inverted process which is presumed to be guided by sound judgment but is instead oriented by moral “intuitions” of powerful actors. Thus, the definition of genocide has cemented in such a way as to be inadequate at responding—both conceptually and concretely—to emergent and less tangible forms of mass violence. The conception and application of the term “genocide,” then, is not neutral, but the product of a great many strategic, self-serving, self-legitimating practices within a global framework of liberal institutions (specifically nation-states of the Global North and intergovernmental organizations like the UN and its agencies). This is observable in their attempts—often successful—to fix the concept as apolitically moral, the cases to which it is applied or not applied as “irrefutable.” This is so both in terms of the unwillingness of Global North states to recognize definitions of genocide that would prefigure responsibility for contemporary colonial practices of “slow” or “cultural” genocide. It is also crucial for explaining how capable actors implicitly authorize themselves to respond “late” to cases of ongoing violence which they can argue have not met a threshold of mass killing but are otherwise costly, time-consuming, or disadvantageous.
Meiches organizes much of his discussion around four characteristic aspects of genocide scholarship that circle around the hegemonic understanding but also provide space for reflection on the concept within a general field of discursive contestation that decenters it. These aspects are groups and group identities, mereology (the parts-whole distinction), destruction, and desire. To these aspects we might also categorize four forms of reification taken on by the hegemonic understanding (not theorized by Meiches himself) as essentialization, materialization, moralization, and intentionalization. We ought to take each on its own for a moment.
The first aspect, regarding groups and identification, explores the initially nonessentialized definition of “groups” offered by Lemkin, who originally defined them in terms of practices, processes, and (primarily cultural) products. As such, their contributions to humanity at large and the universal travesty of losing those contributions due to mass violence did not rely on the essentialization of these groups as static categories. This definition is progressively displaced by a hegemonic understanding that seeks to replace group identity as static ethnic, national, religious, or racially reified categories—both depoliticizing and dehistoricizing. The results of this shift are manifold: groups must be presumed essentially permanent while facing the possibility of destruction, purchase is placed on the bare life of surviving members even under vast suffering, groups are then reframed to be in “states of permanent condition of injury,” and a typology of perpetrator, victim, intervener flattens the dynamics of violence (p. 68).
Second, Meiches introduces mereology to account for multiple dynamics in which a parts-whole distinction produces a metonymic-metaphorical fabric within which institutions can presume to interpret instances of partial violence as aspiring to totalizing destruction. The parts-whole distinction provides a background from which “civilizing” practices of mass violence of Global North colonial states are legitimated through the necessity to establish and maintain democratic and pluralist societies. These societies, unlike Global South counterparts, could not conceivably possess the requisite intent toward complete destruction of the other, even while also acknowledging that transitioning toward democracy seems “paradoxically” to coincide with the need to assert a singular national-ethnic identity. Equally detrimental, the parts-whole distinction materializes a calculus of genocide by which mass killing becomes an exclusive criterion for determining what is or is not genocide, reliant on a crude threshold number of deaths. This is so even if a presumed minority group suffers in less materially explicit ways in the meantime.
Third, the hegemonic understanding conceals the creative dimensions of the destructive process by which even less explicit destructive practices (displacement, as well as cultural or linguistic destruction, for example) require expansive and complex structures to be carried out. Generally, this forms the social and historical relations within a colonial context marked by “social and nonkilling practices of destruction” (p. 124). Meiches explores the example of the forced distribution of narcotics on indigenous groups which—not merely as a material, but a psychological practice of destruction—requires robust distribution networks, economic policies, popular compliance, supply chains, surplus profit and production, and the recoding of administrative laws and regulations. Further systemic necessities include tightly interwoven trade regimes, individual consumption, practices of cruelty and drug habituation, and more broadly, forced labor, destruction of indigenous governmental or other institutions, and the spread of famine. Atop these structures, the Nazi genocide as the paradigmatic case of genocide as mass killing contributes also a need to analyze performative elements predicated on cruelty beyond bare materiality; ritualistic, theatrical, and aesthetic dimensions of mass violence, for example. In contrast, the materialization of genocide implied by the hegemonic understanding, one that reduces genocide to mass killing, also establishes a reductively moral framework. In terms of a depoliticized international arena, this speaks to the conditions whereby an actor gains moral credibility simply by opposing a simplified notion of genocide as mass killing, while concomitantly contending on strategic grounds to narrowly restrict the definition of genocide in order to safeguard themselves from accusation or responsibility.
Finally, Meiches traces the structuring of discourses of intentionality which rely on the reification of complex desires and their sites into a reductive legalistic subjecthood, effectively objectifying subjective intent. In this way, the hegemonic understanding can produce a normative frame of preemption as a structure of presumption of the intent of complex agents. This works equally in reverse, shielding actors from responsibility when their actions can be explained as “passive” (neglect or abandonment), or when they contribute structurally or conditionally to an otherwise vague “confluence of circumstances” (p. 159). This produces the uncomfortable realization that “humanitarian intervention may be materially complicit in the production of destruction” (p, 161). This is so, Meiches argues, in the case of a petition launched by the Faculdade de Direito de Santa Maria (FADISMA) to the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights (IACHR) alleging that the United Nations’ gross negligence in response to the Haitian cholera epidemic in October 2010 is tantamount to involuntary genocide.
In the final section of the book, the latter three chapters outline sites of political contestation surrounding the politics of genocide against the hegemonic understanding. First, the logistical or structural formation of the hegemonic understanding often depoliticizes genocide through blueprints, framing strategies, and the pre-establishment of organizations that attempt to turn genocide and response into a calculus. In opposition to this, Meiches politicizes the reproduction of organizations and proliferation of responsibilities of actors that assert a legitimate right to intervene. This is particularly apparent under Responsibility to Protect (R2P), and visible in American foreign policy strategy documents that reframe genocide response as part of the “U.S. national interest” so as to preemptively justify military action. This critique is forwarded in light of the rather few tangible or concrete results of these actors to prevent genocide. Second, Meiches contends with the relationship between the static elements of causal models from the hegemonic position and concomitant construction of narratives of “horror” to demonstrate the inability of these models to accurately predict the outbreak of violence. He opposes this with Catherine Malabou’s turn toward plasticity, which allows for a dynamic exploration of destructive processes both as formative and transformative. Finally, Meiches refuses the depoliticization of a futurity of genocide—in which the political imaginary of the hegemonic understanding places an ambiguously inevitable and unpredictable violence on the horizon. He opposes this with a demand for accountability, charging international institutions with inadequately responding to mass violence using their own mechanisms.
In some of his most brilliant passages, Meiches navigates the position that forms of mass violence and destructive processes are predicated on formation and creation within a discursive-genealogical framework. This would be impossible from the vantage point of a hegemonic understanding that treats mass violence as apolitical, static, and objective. Proposing a predominantly linguistic framework, as well, allows for a flexible response to less material processes of violence. Models forwarded by the hegemonic understanding simply cannot attend to—are horrified by, cannot even imagine—the plasticity of genocide as politics. This appraisal would further support critical analysis of the hegemonic understanding itself, which could be invaluable; in his book, Meiches turns to the ways in which a coalescing hegemonic understanding as hegemonic consistently avoids attention to fluid causes, creative processes, the complexities of genocide. Ultimately, the hegemon does “little to tangibly affect mass violence while producing expansive redefinitions of the scale and complexity of international governance” (p. 202). System upon system legitimates regimes of international order that are incapable of contending with mass violence concretely. In keeping with this, Meiches is careful to note that his genealogy of the politics of genocide primarily seeks to expand the scope of current debates regarding what does or does not constitute an act of genocide, and is sensitive to the potential for suffering that the hegemonic understanding refuses to contend with.
Nonetheless, there is an enduring deficiency of a linguistic framework purporting to contend with genocide, even one positioned as critically genealogical or discursive. Such a framework creates a familiar problem of linguistic “cases,” whose stakes are all the more heightened. Meiches makes note of this problem, too, in the final section of his book when his focus shifts toward the question of genocide as politics: “Restrict the definition of genocide too much and borderline cases will plague the value of any analysis, but stretch the definition too far and every practice seems like a potential part of genocide, almost as if, at the limit, the concept of genocide becomes strangely plastic” (p. 205). Meiches’s response is to embrace the plasticity of such a conception, but perhaps he does not contend with it as a problematic. If he did, it might proceed as follows: a framework attempts to set limits on a large and as yet indistinct pool of potential cases of mass violence as genocide. The work of the framework is to distinguish what is included against what is excluded as a definitive case. However, this pool of potential cases must precede the framework as already possibly bearing the marks of genocide. If this is the case, language operates as the immaterial signification of a signified matter, its plasticity a benefit insofar as mass violence is always-already particularly fluid. Language—a discursive framework—would also, however, be heavily limited in its scope if, as Meiches states himself, part of the point is to demand instead of a purely reactive approach to genocide one that centers political action. In this way, the problem of the hegemonic understanding is the problem of genocide itself; always capable of radical transformation, always potentially catching us off-guard or unable to respond unless it is asserted to be “fixed,” if just for a moment. In turn, this powerful and important critique is relegated to the position of a response to the structure of response, a reaction to the reactivity of the hegemonic understanding.
The work remains important. No such critique could divest it of its rich contribution to the field of genocide scholarship. However, it does not resolve a primary tension in itself that it proposes is central to the hegemonic understanding it critiques. The Politics of Annihilation, then, is at its best when attesting to the value of anticolonial resistance already taking place, refusing the mechanisms that translate it into “low-intensity armed conflict rather than insurgency in response to genocide” (p. 100). In this way, Meiches’s account of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which centers works of critical commentators (particularly Glen Coulthard’s analysis of government apology as ideological performance), is striking. The text, though, can serve only in a limited capacity to “countersign” the hegemonic performance, to add another voice to the outspokenness of a critique of hegemonic legitimacy and legitimation, and to draw attention to anticolonial activisms as radical opposition and departure from this narrative frame; all of which must take place after the fact.
None of this counts to the detriment of this book. In all of these ways, Meiches contributes an important study of genocide. Although I feel that the work of this framework is incomplete, this is because it opens the possibility to further explore the question of genocide as politics genealogically—alongside the discursive framework of hegemonic and marginal understandings of a politics of genocide. This would be to use a linguistic approach that can highlight the transformative dimensions of mass violence no longer as an objective material exclusively but as a constellation of significatory practices, their ontogenesis not a product of well-defined causes but of more elusive substances, opposing the presumption of a foreclosed future of inevitable genocide with the political demand for the universal end of mass violence. If it is possible to think this through, perhaps such a robust framework will also illuminate unforeseen avenues for political action. For this contribution, and for the possibility that he will continue to contend with this set of problems in the future, I remain grateful in anticipation.
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Citation:
Tyler Correia. Review of Meiches, Benjamin, The Politics of Annihilation: A Genealogy of Genocide.
H-Socialisms, H-Net Reviews.
August, 2020.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55011
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