In a July 2004 radio interview, then–U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell was asked to explain the “reluctance” of the U.S. administration to describe violence in Darfur as “genocide.” Powell, who was speaking from the Sudanese capital of Khartoum, told the interviewer that genocide is a legal designation, and it is not “reluctance” to note that events in Darfur did not meet the legal test for that designation. Responding to the interviewer’s evocation of “Rwanda”—a name that has come to signify the dangers of inaction in the face of genocide—he responded: “This is not Rwanda ten years ago; it is Sudan now.” Surprisingly, within months, Powell told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee unequivocally that “genocide has been committed in Darfur.” Names matter, and the name genocide matters more than most. As Mathias Thaler stresses in this lucid and thoughtful book, the names used for violence, such as “genocide,” “terrorism,” or “torture,” themselves interact with, and become part of, the phenomena named. Dramatically different consequences follow from designating events as genocide or civil war, or from characterizing actions as torture or “enhanced interrogation techniques.”
Naming Violence offers an incisive and thought-provoking account of “the politics of naming” (p. 3). Thaler adapts this term from Mahmood Mamdani’s 2009 Saviours and Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror (from which I take the account of Powell’s shifting designations of the violence in Darfur). Following Mamdani, Thaler stresses that every attempt to name violence is subject to political contestation. Yet he rejects a strong account of the politics of naming (expressed in Mamdani’s attribution of Powell’s shifting characterizations of Darfur to the weight of political pressure) for which all designations of violence serve the strategic ends of hegemonic actors. Instead, Thaler upholds a weaker reading: while we cannot escape political conflicts over names, we can nonetheless make judgments about the adequacy of existing ones and attempt to develop better ones.
Methodologically, Naming Violence is situated uneasily between the realist contention, starkly articulated by Carl Schmitt, that “[a]ll political concepts, images and terms have a polemical meaning,” and the moralist attempt to avoid the politics of naming altogether through reference to first principles. From the realists, Thaler takes his emphases on context and conflict, and from the moralists, a commitment to spelling out “the normative commitments on which judgments rest” (p. 9). The book’s goal is to remain close to real political conflicts while sustaining judgments that enable normative evaluation and change.
This attempt to straddle realist and moralist positions is the source of both the book’s methodological innovations and its unresolved tensions. What is most original about this book is its contention that overcoming the chasm between realism and moralism requires the mobilization of the imagination. Thaler argues that imaginatively viewing the world from a new angle can sharpen the theoretical instruments used to designate violence. By focusing on storytelling, thought experiments, and genealogy, he aims to show that the capacity to imagine otherwise may help in adapting concepts to new realities.
Borrowing a term from Sally Haslanger’s Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique (2012), Thaler terms this adaptation “amelioration” (p. 20). Haslanger’s ameliorative use of concepts begins with the normative question of why we have the concept in the first place, then aims to reshape the concept so that it better serves these “critically examined purposes.” Her ameliorative approach to the concept “woman,” for instance, aims to serve the preestablished end of revealing and combating structures of sexist oppression. For Thaler, amelioration requires that we “examine the perspectives we employ to examine and assess social reality and contextually inquire how we may improve them such that they successfully achieve the goals they are supposed to serve” (p. 164).
The problem is that it is unclear what normative goals Thaler’s ameliorative approach to the names of violence is supposed to serve. Although Thaler expresses a number of normative convictions—for democracy, a less violent world, and sensitivity to human frailty, for instance—the clearest account he provides of his critically examined purposes is his repeated statement that amelioration can rectify those conceptual shortcomings that “prevent the cultivation of ethical sensibility and institutional preparedness” (p. 165). Yet, what “institutional preparedness” looks like would differ starkly depending on whether the institution in question is a national liberation movement or the Central Intelligence Agency, and ethical sensibility may generate dramatically different understandings of the appropriate names for violence. after all, as Talal Asad stresses in On Suicide Bombing (2007), “terrorists themselves often talk about what they do in the language of necessity and humanity” (p. 21).
Answering the question of why we have concepts of genocide, torture, and terrorism in the first place requires an interrogation of this “we.” In an endnote, Thaler defends his references to “we” and “our” (as in, “the world as we know it” and “our conceptual apparatus”) from charges of homogenization. Well aware that names are performative, he describes this “we” as “a collective identity that is perhaps not fully formed” but that is ultimately the book’s audience: “all those who grapple with the forms of violence this book analyses” (p. 71, n. 1). Yet the question of this pronoun is also the question of whose ends concepts of violence are intended to serve. Without clarifying this, the book tends to universalize and avoid the deep disputes about ends expressed in the politics of naming genocide, terrorism and torture. The author’s lack of attention to questions of race and colonialism is particularly concerning, given the centrality of racial and civilizational hierarchies in shaping who can be tortured, who is deemed a terrorist, and who is licenced to name genocide and intervene to prevent it.
Genocide is the subject of the book’s first case study, and Thaler defends the value of storytelling in shifting perspectives about what counts as genocide. Rejecting the foundationalist search for a stable legal or moral definition, he argues that in mobilizing the emotions, narrative may dispel “genocide blindness”—a term he coins to designate “the inability to perceive and interpret an occurrence of violence as genocidal” (p. 65). His discussion of “genocide blindness” usefully foregrounds the ways in which new forms of violence challenge existing definitions. Yet the pathologizing description of genocide blindness as “an affliction one can suffer” (p. 65) that requires “diagnosis” and “cure” (p. 70) is inadvertently depoliticizing. The consequences of the designation genocide may include encouraging impunity among those deemed to be confronting genocide, encouraging external military intervention, and privileging punitive responses over reconciliation, as Mamdani notes. It cannot be assumed that those who resist such a designation in concrete circumstances are afflicted by blindness.
The third and fourth chapters focus on the question of context, by examining thought experiments about torture and genealogy as a means to thinking differently about terrorism. Again attempting to straddle realism and moralism, Thaler seeks to uncover the histories of the norms that shape designations of terrorism and to “arrive at a definition of terrorism that is not simply a vehicle for surreptitious interests or a sociological artefact of power” (p. 118). He usefully argues that revealing the contingent emergence of a norm—the prohibition on targeting the “innocent,” for instance—does not require us to abandon that norm. Yet it does perhaps require a deeper engagement with history, and particularly with the history of the fraught and unsuccessful attempt to formulate an internationally acceptable definition of terrorism, than Naming Violence provides.
It takes significant imaginative capacity to envisage a reconciliation between moralist and realist approaches to political violence. In inviting his readers to imagine such reconciliation, Thaler offers a thought-provoking revision of accepted certainties on both sides of the realist/moralist divide, and a critical contribution to political theorizations of violence.
