Scott Straus has written an extremely important book, arguing that genocide has crucial ideological foundations, but that these conditions only lead to genocide when situational incentives drive a process of escalation. This contribution highlights the central role of ideas as a cause of genocide, while also outlining forces of restraint that can hold mass categorical violence at bay. Anyone interested in political violence must engage with this book.
Making and Unmaking Nations is driven by two observations. First, many existing explanations of genocide heavily overpredict its onset. Second, much of this literature does not systematically study “noncases” in which genocide could plausibly have occurred but did not. According to Straus, thin theories and sparse empirics limit our understanding of genocide and mass killing.
Straus offers several correctives to the unsatisfying state of the field. The most important is to insist on the causal importance of ideas. This is a leading contribution to a nascent ideational turn seeking to systematically incorporate ideas into our understanding of political violence. It marks a break from recent political violence research, which too often avoids or takes for granted political preferences, fears, and commitments in favor of purely organizational, strategic, and military explanations.
Straus argues that political systems are most likely to be sites of genocide when state-building elites create a “foundational narrative” that identifies a “primary identity-based population whom the state serves” (p. 64). These exclusionary narratives lead elites to perceive threats from excluded groups that are seen as both subordinate and dangerous, and to make their annihilation as a social category seem both thinkable and necessary. He contrasts these exclusionary narratives with inclusionary narratives that “have little to do with primary political communities” (p. 64). In these contexts, social groupings are not arranged into hierarchical categories and mass categorical violence is consequently not seen as a solution to political challenges. Straus argues that these foundational narratives can be measured and compared (p. 67), focusing on the discourses advanced by leaders at moments of decolonization and regime change. Leaders, he argues, have substantial, though not unconstrained, agency in how they forge these narratives. Threats are interpreted and state strategic interests are constructed, rather than given or obvious.
Yet this is not a simple unicausal argument, since foundational narratives are potentially compatible with a wide range of state policies. The book offers two lines of argument to explain when exclusionary ideologies actually contribute to genocide. First, Straus notes that genocide generally occurs in contexts of warfare and political instability, in which material security fears combine with ideological frames to heighten threat perception and incentives for exterminatory violence (pp. 34–41). Genocide is the result of a process of escalation, often over years, rather than a single decision. He provides cross-national quantitative evidence from sub-Saharan Africa that shows the importance of threat and security for explaining variation in mass killing (Chapter 4).
Second, there are important overlooked sources of restraint that can put brakes on an escalatory process. Straus emphasizes, correctly, national-level forces in contrast to micro- and meso-level forms of restraint that, he suggests, can be overridden by determined elite efforts (pp. 42–48, p. 53). Restraint at the level of state leadership may occur through any or all of four mechanisms: ideological counternarratives, state capacity, international pressure, and economic costs (pp. 75–79). These can push back against escalatory pressures, helping to explain why so many cases that seem primed for mass killing come back from the brink.
Straus combines the ideological, security, and restraint strands of the theory most fully in five detailed case studies of both genocide and nongenocide. He compares state responses to armed challenges in Cote D’Ivoire, Mali, Senegal, Rwanda, and Sudan. We see mass categorical violence in Sudan and Rwanda, but much more restrained, accommodative state strategies in the other three less-well-known cases. Straus’s extensive interview and historical research lend serious credibility to his argument: His systematic comparative reconstructions of founding narratives in each case are carefully researched and presented. He has done the hard empirical work of tracking down surviving policymakers, compiling extensive public statements by key leaders, and delving into the operational activities of state counterinsurgent forces. I learned an enormous amount from the cases even beyond their value for probing the theory’s plausibility.
The theory and evidence Straus provides are compelling. They force scholars to take seriously the ideological foundations of politics and the agency of elites in imagining the political community. After Making and Unmaking Nations, it is no longer sufficient to distinguish regimes by their Polity score, per capita GDP, and/or military power and then call it a day. Understanding the deeper politics of elites’ definitions of state and nation is essential for understanding genocide.
Nevertheless, there are limitations to Straus’s approach. His dichotomy between inclusionary (good) and exclusionary (bad) narratives creates two kinds of problems. First, even inclusionary discourses define inclusion on the terms of state elites. Discourse here remains an exercise of power: What looks like a pluralistic, inclusionary conception in the eyes of national leaders may be seen as a hegemonic, assimilatory, and ultimately malevolent political project from the perspective of those who have little interest in the ostensibly pluralistic inclusion on offer.
Regardless of whether one likes the substantive results or not, state and elite political discourses discipline and define the political arena. Invocations of the nation, unity, or shared culture often silence or ignore dissident mobilization. Indeed, elites who herald “unity in diversity” (as in Senegal, p. 226) and pluralistic democracy feel compelled to garrison the political arena against threats to these commitments. Senegal and Mali have experienced recurrent, long-running insurgencies despite narratives that Straus praises for their inclusion and accommodation.
The discourse of inclusion and opportunity that is so powerful in the United States does important political work by eliding key hierarchies and exclusions that are also foundational to American politics. Whether in postwar Europe’s militant democracies or Nehruvian India, elite visions of pluralism and nationalism have been haunted by the specter of enemies within. This book would have benefited from a more cold-eyed understanding of discourse and ideas as intertwined with political power and nationalizing projects. While the expansiveness of boundaries certainly matters, so too does the location of those boundaries. In both inclusionary and exclusionary regimes, ideology helps to determine where to lay down coercive cordons sanitaires against dangerous ideas.
The second challenge created by the inclusion/exclusion dichotomy is what to do with ambiguous or “in-between” social groupings. The author’s evidence repeatedly shows political leaders neither fully including nor completely excluding particular social categories. Many social groups seem instead to straddle the boundaries of the body politic. Straus struggles in the empirics with exactly how to deal with ambiguous, contested, or changing elite discourses about the political community. Even in his seemingly straightforward cases of exclusion, we are told that in Rwanda, President Habyarimana’s “record is not clear-cut” (p. 287) over 25 years, while in Sudan, “it was also not that non-core groups lacked citizenship rights entirely” (p. 272). Agency and structure operate in an ultimately (and understandably) unresolved tension with one another as these discourses emerge and evolve.
The important variation is therefore not whether states seek to make or unmake a nation; it is instead about the content of the nation. Straus’s brilliant invocation of “the political grammar of the state” (p. 172) moves us into a terrain of power, contestation, and imagination that remains to be fully exploited.
The author makes a major contribution by emphasizing restraint. Yet future work would do well to tighten and better specify his arguments. At present, they are numerous and multifaceted, even at the macro level (leaving aside the complex interactions among elites, local powerholders, and individuals). This complexity is both a feature and bug: It valuably reveals diverse mechanisms of both escalation and de-escalation, but opens the door to post hoc explanations that could allow less scrupulous scholars to explain away cases that would otherwise challenge the argument.
For instance, “capacity” alone has four distinct dimensions (p. 77). It is not clear how these subcomponents aggregate, much less how the four overall forms of restraint relate to one another and when they should be most/least powerful. Straus has done valuable work in putting restraint more fully on the scholarly agenda, but the next wave of research on genocide needs to prioritize and structure theories of restraint in order to generate more specific predictions.
Making and Unmaking Nations is a major achievement. Not only does it help us better understand the ever-vexing question of genocide, but it also identifies key open questions for future research and offers a set of useful policy diagnostics and prescriptions. As the prospect of mass killing looms over ongoing conflicts in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, this is a particularly timely and important work.
