Editor's Choice, March 15, 1999
Violence and the Nation-State
In the past six months, three reports have been released to the public that document
the terror and violence that nation-states unleashed on their own citizens. The first was
the Final Report of the Truth and
Reconciliation Committee that documented the violence committed by the apartheid
state of South Africa largely against its Black majority. Then there is the report from
the American Association for the Advancement of Science entitled State Violence in Guatemala,
1960-1996: A Quantitative Reflection that carefully documents the killing and
disappearance of over 37,000 people (out of an estimated total of 200,000 to 300,000
killed) at the hands of government forces. The third report, also on Guatemala, is Guatemala: Memory of Silence, issued by the
Guatemalan Historical Clarification Commission (CEH) and submitted to the Secretary
General of the UN. In addition to documenting the state killing of its own citizens, this
report reveals also the role of the American Central Intelligence Agency in aiding
Guatemalan security forces in the genocide committed against indigenous peoples.
Also on the Internet you can find Updates
on the International War Crimes Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia , and the Verdicts on the Crime of Genocide by the
International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. At the Web site for the Cambodian Genocide Program at Yale University
you can find out about one of the worst cases of state-sponsored killing ever recorded.
Between 1975 and 1979 the Cambodian state under the control of the Khmer Rouge, killed
some 1.5 to 2 million citizens of the state, or 20% of the population. And finally, there
is Teacher's Guide to the Holocaust, an
award winning site on the Holocaust that contains a wealth of information for students and
teachers. For example, for a chilling document on cold-blooded state planning of genocide,
just read The
Wannsee Protocol.
All of these sites are remarkable examples and/or testimonies in themselves, but they
also raise an issue of direct relevance to anthropologists-- why do states kill?
While we can't answer that in this Editor's Choice column, we can point the direction to
some resources on the Internet that addresses the problem. But first a little
anthropological background.
A major area of anthropological research is the manner in which communities are
governed, that is, how are rules for behavior established and enforced. In small-scale
communities, such as gatherers and hunters, rules tend to be enforced by consensus and by
various types of supernatural sanctions. Thus people follow community
rules because they fear spiritual or non-material retribution such as the anger of
ancestral spirits or the power of sorcery or witchcraft. In somewhat larger
communities there are often chiefs or elders who, because of their position in the
community's family structure or their age or wisdom, are imbued with authority to
establish or enforce rules of behavior or mediate interpersonal disputes. It is not
until the emergence of large-scale state organizations, that death and violence become
official means of maintaining authority. This is the reason why most definitions of
the state, following Max Weber’s
revolve around the state's claim to a monopoly on the instruments of death and
violence. What is often neglected, however, is that most state violence is directed
against its own citizens, and not, as one might suppose, against the citizens of other
nation states. You can find out for yourself the extent to which states kill their own
citizens at Freedom, Democracy, Peace; Power,
Democide, and War , Rudolph Rummel's site that focuses on his proposition that the
greater the degree of power held by a nation-state, the more it will kill, or, as Rummell
puts it, " the more power at the center, the more violence. In short: power
kills." In brief, he estimates that at least 170,000,000 citizens were killed by
their own states from 1900 to 1987.
While Rummel is correct in saying that most of the killing is done by totalitarian
states, clearly democratic societies can be guilty of mass murder; one need only review
the colonial records of countries such as the United States, Australia, Belgium, Great
Britain, and France to appreciate that fact (see Editor's Choice,
February 15, 1999) . Some anthropologists would claim that the nation-state, in
itself, is a genocidal institution, forced to murder and persecute persons and groups that
refuse to assimilate into the nation-state, or who demand greater autonomy and freedom or
greater recognition of their human rights.
The extent to which states are guilty of human rights abuses are well-documented by
various groups, whose reports are available on the Internet. Amnesty International is perhaps the foremost
agency working to protect human rights and the abuses of nation-states. Amnesty
International works to promote all the human rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights .
Each year they issue a report, Amnesty International Annual
Report: 1998 on human rights abuses around the world. (What does the report have
to say about the United
States ? Human Rights Watch another group
dedicated to exposing human rights violations of nation-states, also issues a yearly
report on the human rights situation in regions and countries around the world. Checkout
the World Report for 1999.
The U.S. State Department also issues a yearly report on human rights, the latest being
the Country
Reports on Human Rights Practices for 1998 The report contains a brief overview
of each country’s political and economic systems and a detailed review of its record
on respecting "internationally recognized individual, civil, political, and worker
rights, as set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights." However the State
Department does not, unlike Amnesty International, include reports of alleged human rights
abuses in the United States. But you can check out Shielded from Justice: Police
Brutality and Accountability in the United States of America that contains
reports on the illegitimate use of force by members of the military or the police in the
United States. As the report states, "The excessive use of force by police officers,
including unjustified shootings, severe beatings, fatal chokings, and rough treatment,
persists because overwhelming barriers to accountability make it possible for officers who
commit human rights violations to escape due punishment and often to repeat their
offenses."
Finally there are Internet resources that address the issues of human rights in a
broader perspective. These include Concise Guide to Human Rights on
the Internet which is an excellent source for finding information on human
rights on the Web. Another is For the Record
1997: The UN Human Rights System , a six volume description of different areas of the
world describing United Nations evaluations and reports of human rights abuses in each
country. Finally there is Internet
Resources on Genocide and Mass Killings , an extensive compilation of primary
materials and annotated links related to "twentieth-century genocidal and mass
man-made killing occurrences."
You can find additional resources on the subject of violence and the nation-state at
the Editor's Web
site .
