If you are looking for a study on mass violence against civilians that will leave your intuitions intact, this original and comprehensively researched book is not for you. This is because The Problems of Genocide exposes the conundrums that the international definition of genocide in 1948 has occasioned, rather than solved. The book mounts a forceful critique of genocide as the “crime of crimes” via an exhaustive historical analysis of the forces driving mass atrocities (permanent security) and the intellectual history of their denunciations (the language of transgression) across five centuries of imperial warfare, colonial conquest, and modern state-building. Dirk Moses argues that genocide’s “sacral aura” (p. 465) has in fact normalized a wide range of civilian killings. The Problems of Genocide makes essential contributions to the fields of security studies, intellectual history, international law, political memory studies, and genocide studies.
The stakes of the book emerge in Moses’s contextualization of the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and Raphael Lemkin’s influence on it, as a momentous turning point in denouncing mass killings of civilians. This convention defines genocide as an international crime, prescribing attacks on “national, ethnical, racial or religious groups” with the specific intent of physically destroying these groups “as such … in whole or in part.” The crime thus excludes political groups and motivations. This definition of genocide, Moses demonstrates, has dramatically constricted “the language of transgression” that furnished outcries against atrocities during roughly 500 years of Europe’s imperial expansion. This language in which critics condemned excessive imperial coercion as “shocking the conscience of mankind” provided a stable and deeply politicized repertoire for distinguishing imperial rule “gone wrong” from humanitarian empire as an alleged vehicle of civilization between the sixteenth century and the interwar period. By contrast, the language of transgression enshrined in the 1948 Convention excludes from genocide the killing of people for their political affiliation or political agency. Civilian killings that follow the suppression of national liberation struggles or wartime aerial bombardment—no matter how widespread—are most likely excluded from the narrow definition of “genocide.” Political violence of these kinds may qualify perhaps as crimes against humanity or war crimes, but not as the “crime of crimes.”
The depoliticization of genocide is hence its first problem, which we owe in no small part to Lemkin, who stripped the language of transgression of its political dimensions during the 1930s. Against the image of Lemkin as a conceptual revolutionary who highlighted problems of racism and minority oppression, Moses shows that he narrowed the notion of genocide, prioritizing the protection of small nations and cultural self-determination and excluding contemporary debates about colonial labor exploitation and the awful destruction of aerial technology during armed conflict. The analysis in the first part of the book (Chapters 1–5) exhaustively demonstrate how denunciations of colonial conquest in European intellectual history differed from Lemkin’s depoliticized vocabulary of genocide. These chapters contribute to critical approaches to international law that ask how law illuminates certain kinds of violence while normalizing—and thus tacitly legitimizing—others.
The book’s second part answers the question why such an impoverished notion of genocide as an apolitical hate crime has remained dominant (Chapters 6–9). Moses argues that the postwar curation of a Holocaust remembrance regime elevated the Holocaust to genocide’s archetype. Another “problem of genocide” then is that atrocities against civilians now must resemble the Holocaust to count as genocide. Criticizing this association, Moses disembeds the Holocaust from its dominant understanding as an unprecedentedly racist, antisemitic hate crime that signifies a unique civilizational implosion at the center of Europe and that therefore bars comparative analysis. This is where “permanent security” enters the picture. Moses takes this phrase from the Nuremberg Tribunal’s trial against Otto Ohlendorf, who stated that the Nazis’ extermination of the Jewish people aimed at permanently eradicating them as a security threat.
Moses’s discussion yields at least three crucial interventions. First, he establishes that the Holocaust was central to the Nazis’ imperial pursuit of permanent security, because National Socialism cast the Jews as a political threat. Murderous racialization in this perspective emerges as subservient to political objectives, rather than as a self-standing problem. Second, Moses analyzes the extermination, displacement, and cultural eradication of groups as key features of permanent security efforts, liberal and illiberal alike, that have been integral to imperial expansion, the consolidation of the modern state, and the formation of the modern international order. Third, the highly constrained international legal codification of genocide obscures the crime’s connection to permanent security.
As a book that intervenes in many scholarly fields, The Problems of Genocide leaves some questions and issues clamoring for elaboration. My queries pertain to Moses’s theorization of the “language of transgression” and “permanent security” across five centuries. His turn to Las Casas’s excoriation of Spanish imperial rapacity as the first articulation of “the language of transgression” raises the question of the (dis)continuities between Christian and secularized constructions of the “thresholds” that, if crossed, “shock the conscience of mankind.” Two issues stand out here. The first is whether such continuities can coherently be claimed. William Bain has convincingly argued that uses of Vitoria to support contemporary theories of third-party military intervention must necessarily divest Vitoria’s thought of its theological substance and thus its cogency (“Saving the Innocent, Then and Now: Vitoria, Dominion and World Order,” History of Political Thought, 39[4], 2013). Considering the Christian origins of claims to “shocks to the conscience of mankind,” the second point asks when and to what extent—if at all— languages of transgression were secularized. This is important if we think that theologically inflected invocations of the “conscience of mankind” hamper their universal validity. To illustrate, Samuel Moyn has argued that the Christian moorings of postwar Western European human rights institutions compromise their claims to universality (Christian Human Rights, 2015).
Given that Moses makes expansive use of the concept of “permanent security” by dividing it into its illiberal (Spanish imperialism, fascism) and liberal (Vietnam, the global war on terror) variants, the concept could have been clarified by juxtaposing it to a notion of transient security. If European imperialism and colonialism, as well as twentieth-century international military aggression, are all driven by (il)liberal permanent security, then one wonders whether concerns for transient security also occasion warfare and, if they do not, whether all security is actually permanent security. Furthermore, how do states distinguish between a permanent and a transient threat? And can we observe historical shifts of the dividing lines between the two? International relations scholars such as Neta Crawford and Martha Finnemore have demonstrated large-scale historical changes in what states consider morally outrageous and how states practice and justify foreign intervention (Crawford, Argument and Change in World Politics: Ethics, Decolonization and Humanitarian Intervention, Cambridge University Press, 2002; Finnemore, The Purpose of Intervention: Changing Beliefs about the Use of Force, 2003).
Lastly, I was very much intrigued by the roles that intentions and consequences seem to play as an undercurrent in Moses’s argument. On the one hand, he insightfully problematizes arguments that privilege the element of intent to normatively rank genocidal and nongenocidal instances of civilian mass killings. Although genocide is internationally defined as a special intent crime, the concept of “collateral damage” that informs the international law of armed conflict permits unintentional civilian killings as a byproduct of military targeting. The book therefore occasionally reads as though Moses wishes for international criminal law to consider less heavily the intentions for and more strongly the consequences of large-scale political violence. This is an exceedingly interesting perspective—if I am discerning it correctly. On the other hand, what distinguishes permanent security practices as particularly vicious is precisely the specific intent to eradicate certain threats forever. Elucidating the relationship between intentions and consequences for judging political violence would have been thought provoking.
Moses announces in the preface that the book “may not be to everyone’s liking” (vii). This is a reasonable expectation, considering that the book’s third part speaks to the fields of political memory studies and (comparative) genocide studies (Chapters 10–12). The Problems of Genocide will stoke the debate over commitments to Holocaust remembrance, which, as memory studies scholars and historians have argued, overshadows the commemoration of colonial genocides. An exemplary case in point is the ongoing discord over Germany’s refusal to take legal responsibility for its colonial massacres of the Nama and Herero peoples. Moses’s bid to view the Holocaust as an extreme instantiation of the dictates of imperial warfare, rather than as an unprecedented collapse of Western “civilization,” prompts us to reassemble our understanding of mass atrocities. The Problems of Genocide is written from an unrelenting concern for the sanctity of human lives. Its plea is for recognizing more types of civilian exterminations as genocidal, not less. We are asked to become more sensitive to mass civilian deaths, not more callous toward the Holocaust. As such, the book is a landmark study that redefines perspectives on mass atrocities across political science, history, and international law.
