When we talk about genocide, we often cite only direct mass killing. However, I also include genocide by attrition (deprivation of food leading to starvation and disease) and systematic sexual violence and interference with group reproduction, practices defined as means of genocide (when based on victims’ group identity) according to the UN Genocide Convention (Article 2, b-e) and decisions of the ICTY/RWANDA. This focuses on a wider range of observations.

The roots of genocidal violence can be explained on the psychological level1 and on the social structural and political level. The latter asks: what situations and assumptions lead toward genocide and genocidal massacres – political mass killing and deadly ethnic pogroms or riots? Because the motives of most individual participants do not explain the onset of genocide or genocidal massacres, I will concentrate on the social structural and political level to show how and when genocides and genocidal massacres are instigated.

Despite the frequent expression of collective emotions (anger, fear, hate, joy) during genocide and mass killing, these are usually rational crimes – means to attain the given ends of their instigators. They are most likely to be used in non-democratic States and in times of war for several reasons. War justifies and masks aggression, blurs the visibility of genocide, and often enables the genocidaire to blame the victims. The victims’ group may be blamed for the war or may be ethnically related to the enemy. Genocidaires are apt to be two-time (or more) users and they can expect success because they have gotten away with murder earlier.

Most genocide is committed by the state but organized paramilitaries and bands can also commit such murders. Deadly communal massacres, pogroms, and riots show aspects of genocide (victims are selected because of group identity) but there are differences: they does not last as long; they are not likely to be organized at the highest level of the state; and some are bilateral. E.g., genocidal massacres during the transfer of power to India and Pakistan in 1948 which claimed perhaps a half-million lives were begun by leaders of competing communal groups and gangs in the absence of effective state power. State motives for genocide in the 20th–21st centuries typically focus on goals related to a) maintaining power against real or potential threats (retributive or pre-emptive responses), b) implementing an exclusionary ideology which says one class, one people, one race has the right to live, or c) developing in regions inhabited by indigenous peoples. Motives can be mixed.

In the second half of the 20th century, most genocides were primarily retributive – murderous responses by a regime which were preceded by threats from the victims’ group. Political exclusion and discrimination often produced group-based rebellions which instigated state genocide and other state massacres. The conditions favouring genocide and politicide were more likely to occur in poor countries than in rich countries. There are several pre-conditions for genocide. None alone are sufficient but together they make genocide more likely:

1) Moral exclusion: Assumptions about who belongs and should be protected. The victims are excluded from the universe of obligation of the dominant group; they need not be protected and can be killed with impunity. The universe of obligation can be defined by religion or race or ethnicity (the victims are non-Muslim, non-Christian, non- Aryan, non-Hutu or Tutsi). The universe of obligation is observable from traditions of contempt and exclusion as well as contemporary expressions and ideologies about who belongs or should belong.

2) A crisis or opportunity, which is viewed as caused by or impeded by the victim. Crises include war (previously discussed), social upheaval and transfer of power (revolution and decolonization) and the breakdown of empires and multi-national states (e.g., Yugoslavia). The three instances in the 20th century of almost total genocide of groups of citizens occurred during wars: the genocide of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during World War 1, that of the Jews in Nazi Germany during World War 2, and that of the Rwandan Tutsis in 1994 during a truce in the war between the Rwandan Patriotic Front and Rwanda (1991–1994). The victims’ groups were all blamed for the war or deemed disloyal.

Opportunities are often related to expansion to regions of the interior, which threaten indigenous people who have their own uses for the land and are seen to threaten development. This was paralleled in the 17th–19th century by violence sometimes leading to mass deaths during European colonial expansion to new continents. In both cases, racial and ethnic differences between colonizer and indigenes enabled the colonizer to look down on the indigenes (as barbarians, savages, etc.) and exclude them from their universe of obligation, viewing them as obstacles in their path who deserved no protection.

3) The state is governed or taken over by a dictatorial elite or movement relying on violence without any checks. When the elite is based on a minority group or holds an exclusionary ideology (Marxist-Leninism, fascism, “national security state” [state terror in the name of anti-communism], ethnonationalism, exclusionary Islamism, etc.), genocide becomes more likely.

4) Expectations of impunity. State leaders anticipate on the basis of past experience that more powerful states, bystanders (patrons or allies) either will aid the genocidaires or fail to check them.

Notes
1. On the individual level, needs, identification, motives, human tendencies and group pressures have been identified. The latter include the identification with our kind versus their kind, willingness to sacrifice for kin and the group, and obedience to authority. We have no reason to assume such tendencies are more apt to occur in any group or nation and no comparative research confirming hypotheses about national differences in the tendency to obey. Research examining behaviour in particular genocides usually shows a range of motives: belief, greed (looting and expectation of economic gain), and response to situational pressures and obedience to authority – all motives governing other behaviours.

2. While both the genocide of the Jews and the Armenians were triggered by ideologies of exclusion – neither group represented a threat to the state – that of the Rwandan Tutsis appears to have been impelled by both the perception of threat (the RPF was led by Tutsis in Uganda) as well as by collective accusations against the Tutsis as alien invaders of a different race.