Session 3: New Vantage Points
Chair: Viola Brisolin

Genocide or the Aporia of Collective Violence
Leonhard Praeg
Political and International Studies Rhodes University Grahamstown, South Africa

This paper resulted from research into the Rwanda genocide of 1994 and forms part of a larger research project on violence in post-colonial Africa. Here, I focus specifically on the category of “foundational violence”.
From the theoretical perspective of René Girard, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida et al the Rwanda genocide of 1994 appears as an instance of foundational violence that typically accompanies the formation of all collective entities such as nations and states. In this case, given the constant reference in genocide discourse to the failed revolution of 1959, we are perhaps presented with a case of deferred foundational violence. Useful as this notion of “foundational violence” may be, as theoretical category it is also hugely challenging because the claim implicit in the notion of “foundational violence” is not just historical (“states are routinely founded on genocides and massacres”) but analytical (“founding moments are per definition violent”). The result is an aporia that I will address.
The aporia manifests in two equally valid and compelling imperatives that are by all accounts mutually exclusive. On the one hand there is the imperative to understand the Rwanda genocide as inescapably violent, as typical instance of “foundational violence”. It suggests that the people of Rwanda did what people have always done at the founding moment of new socio-political orders. On the other hand, there is the imperative to judge genocide unreservedly as an outrage and to defer our understanding to the “never again” invoked by the genocide convention of 1948. This, then, is the aporia: how can we understand genocide as inescapable founding violence and judge it unreservedly as an outrage? Any response to aporia requires that we honour the integrity of both imperatives however mutually exclusive they appear.
To do this I will explore the logic of criminalization represented by the genocide convention of 1948. As an emerging juridical order, internal law has to convert, thereby limiting, any claim to natural ends (here foundational violence) into positive ends. As juridical order it can permit only the pursuit of such ends as can be realized without recourse to violence. To criminalise an act (such as genocide) is to acknowledge the natural and inescapable logic of its recurrence (a tension represented by the anticipation implicit in the statement “never again”) while insisting on the necessity of creating a socio-juridical order that can exists only on the basis of its criminalisation. Viewed from a juridical perspective, genocide is no different from any other form of criminalised violence. It is criminalised not because it should not exist but exactly because the desire it represents is as natural and inescapable as its repression in the name of (global) order.

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The Uses of Adversaries: Normalizing Violence through the Construction of the Other
Thomas Cooper
Collegium Budapest, Budapest, Hungary

In this paper I examine the ways in which, during recent political crises in Hungary and the United States, images of enemies were crafted by the regimes in order to lend gravity to appeals to an alleged normalcy, appeals that were used as a means of creating and reinforcing perceptions of danger and thereby demanding acceptance of violent responses.  A comparison of these two contexts is of particular interest because of the fundamental differences between them.  While the crisis in Hungary was entirely domestic (demands placed by protesters that the Prime Minister resign following the release of a recording of his confession that he repeatedly lied to the population about the state of the country’s economy), the crisis in the United States involved the crafting and the maintenance of an enemy on the outside (the “terrorists”).  In each case, however, the construction of an enemy served not only the purpose of nurturing perceptions of danger, it also enforced compliance by designating deviation from alleged normalcy as a menace.  Drawing on the writings of Emmanuel Levinas, I examine the ways in which the demarcation of an alleged “other” functions as a tool through which to delimit notions of normalcy and construct images of consensus.  I consider this constructed consensus as a means of encouraging complacency and peremptorily invalidating criticism as aberration. Moreover, I examine the uses of appeals to this consensus as tools through which to justify violent responses and normalize violence itself.  It is my intention to recast the notion of normalcy as an ideological means of legitimizing violence by equating difference with threat.

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National Liberation Narratives
Gerald Cromer
Department of Criminology, Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel

An analysis of the propaganda of the Fighters for the Freedom of Israel (LEHI), the most extreme of the groups that fought against the British mandate and for the establishment of the State of Israel, led to the development of a model of national liberation narratives that relates to their internal structure, the nature of the interaction between them and the different ways in which they are in dialogue with rival stories.
The propaganda of national liberation movements takes the form of a morality play in which the forces of good are pitted against the forces of evil and ultimately prevail. This configuration is repeated and thereby reinforced in a series of nested narratives: the story of the contemporary struggle within the history and meta-history of the nation, the story of the particular nation within the universal striving for national self-determination, and the life histories of individual fighters within the history of the nation. Their biographies are constructed so as to show how they first learnt, then lived, and finally became part of the movement's projective narrative.
All these liberation narratives are in constant dialogue with the competing tales of the occupying power, of other nationalists and of the religious authorities. Each colloquy is characterized by a particular kind of discourse (form) and a different dichotomy (content). While in total disagreement with these rival stories, national liberation movements cannot be oblivious to them. In fact, the foreign, dominant, and prior narratives do not only have sufficient dialogic force to compel attention; to a large extent at least they provide the inferential structure for terrorist propaganda. In the war of words it is not the freedom fighters but their rivals who set the contours of the conflict.