Historical and social scientific analyses of genocide have proliferated in recent years. Yet, in spite of this, most monographs remain conceptual. This theorising may provide some basis for discussion but it often fails to produce empirical results or truly original lines of inquiry. Deborah Mayerson's On the Path to Genocide succeeds in providing a new perspective on genocide by focusing on the temporal dimensions of its process. However, her work still succumbs to some of the shortcomings of comparative models. Most genocide scholars now recognise that genocide, as a complex social phenomenon, demands layered, multi-causal analysis. Yet, in seeking the historicity of genocide and the comparative frame, some still have a tendency to de-emphasise the specificity of cases and the complexity of individual mobilisation and agency.
Mayerson's book uses Rwanda and Armenia to examine the ‘timing of genocide and the role of precipitants and constraints'. While not an entirely unique or new focus, it distinguishes itself through its analysis of the episodes of violence which sometimes precede genocide. These massacres are often said to be precursors of genocide, yet there has been far less analysis of why genocide does not occur in such cases. Her analysis of constraints is particularly interesting (albeit quite brief) and her discussion of the cycles of pre-genocide escalation and de-escalation of violence in Rwanda and Ottoman Turkey is thoughtful. Episodes of violence such as the Hamidian and Cilician Massacres of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire (1894–6 and 1908–9, respectively) and the massacres of Tutsis following the Rwandan Revolution (1963–4) appear relatively rarely in comparative analyses of genocide.
A great deal of scholarship depoliticises and dehistoricises genocide. It focuses exclusively on the immediate pre-genocide period, rather than placing genocide within an analysis of broader historical developments. Mayerson's temporal approach emphasizes that genocide may develop over years, if not decades. She argues that earlier massacres may contain many necessary conditions for genocide but that genocide does not occur in these periods due to other constraints. A risk of European intervention constrained the Ottoman government in earlier massacres from pursuing genocide, while the immediate postcolonial state in Rwanda was too weak to contemplate the totality of genocide.
Mayerson notes that the fact that these earlier massacres were met with impunity from the United Nations informed the use of mass murder in Rwanda in the 1990s; the Habyarimana Government, like the Kayibanda Government, believed that the international community would, again, fail to respond to the widespread political violence. Mayerson also stresses the political instrumentality of genocide as a means of consolidating power in the face of perceived existential threat to the regime – imperial decline in the Ottoman Empire, or economic contraction and imposed power-sharing in Rwanda. Arguably this survival discourse is what most separates genocidal narratives from those employed in more limited forms of ethnic violence.
Habyarimana, Mayerson argues, instrumentalised massacres to shift the focus from regional and ideological schisms to a shared ethnic threat. Consequently, Habyarimana presented himself as a source of stability in the face potential defeat by the Tutsi-dominated Rwanda Patriotic Front. Even while his own political party negotiated the Arusha Accords Habyrimana presented himself as defending Hutus against impending Tutsi domination.
Mayerson argues that massacres represent politically-constrained violent outbursts, which must be considered in light of the genocides that followed. Perhaps, in emphasising the long-term process of genocide with ‘cycles of escalation and retreat’, she underplays the discrete goals of individual massacres, ethnic cleansing, or even genocide. Anachronistic reasoning can be tautological – in hindsight these earlier massacres easily become part of the assumed genocidal process. Every genocide seems inevitable in retrospect.
Consequently, Mayerson seeks to build a forward-looking model that accounts for the non-linear progression of genocide, where episodes of escalation may be followed by retreat, then by further escalation. Yet her model only provides a general frame within which more specific indicators of genocidal escalation would need to be identified. It is also unclear how periods of escalation and massacre that do not result in genocide could be clearly distinguished from those that do precede genocide.
While there is no doubt that many cases of genocide (and non-genocide) involve periods of escalation and de-escalation, as recently noted by Straus, it is questionable whether the Holocaust or Cambodian genocide could be characterised in this manner (where there seems to have been relatively rapid escalation without historical antagonism). This illustrates well the dangers of model-construction. Models, of course, can be useful conceptual bases for analysis and discussion but they are never truly universally-applicable. On the Path to Genocide is a valuable contribution to comparative genocide studies particularly through its approach, which seeks to historicise our understanding of genocide by showing that genocide is more political and contingent than inevitable. Its predictive power unfortunately remains limited.
