The atrocities of Genocide are too immense that the Australian Representative, United Nations General Assembly, on 9th December 1948, said, “Genocide was such a vile act that even savages and wild beasts were incapable of committing it.” Genocide is the deliberate killing of people from a given ethnic group or a particular nation to wipe them out from the face of the earth (Shaw, 2015). Many historical and social contexts describe the acts of Genocide, and because of this, it is impossible to provide a general theory that will describe the event. The different approaches will therefore account for different aspects of the phenomenon. The approaches provide different perspectives that will go a long way to deliver a better understanding of the reality of Genocide. The lack of methodological or theoretical coherence is not a problem because Genocide is exceedingly complex, given that it occurs across a wide variety of time places and involves different collective actors (perpetrators, victims, collaborators, and rescuers, etc.) and several variables and processes that would make it impossible to fit into a generalizable explanatory model. The difference in the approaches will be given to the structural factors, individual or group agency, or processes accounting for the unfolding genocidal extremities. The purpose of this paper is to compare and contrast two theoretical approaches to Genocide (agency-oriented approach and structural approach)
Agency-Oriented Approach
Elites
The first way scholars have tried to explain Genocide is by providing the different roles individuals played. Elite decision-makers play a role in human activities. In this case theoretical approach, they focus on the roles played by specific leaders, from Hitler to Stalin to Pol Pot, in the genocidal process. Agency-Oriented Approach argues that leaders make decisions through personal psychology, ideological beliefs, life experiences, and leadership experiences to exterminate a particular ethnic group (Hagan and Rymond-Richmond, 2008). The argument makes the individual leader the sole reason or ultimate source of the genocidal event.
However, this argument is countered by Fleming (1987), that Hitler, for instance, did not sanction the killings of the Jews and that his subordinates lied about it. Yet, they were to blame for the atrocities that occurred during the time or simply put, Hitler was not aware of the adversities happening to the victims. Other aspects shed light on the leader’s personal life and biographical histories that highlight the connection to their role in a genocide. This raises a question; are genocides the primary actions of the elites? When we focus on the biographical histories, they offer explanations of the roles played by the individual leaders in the initiation and perpetuation of Genocide. For instance, Holocaust might not have happened if Hitler was not a leader, and maybe Killing Fields would not have occurred if Pol Pot was not around.
The influence of the historical figures can be left aside but keep the focus on the elite agency, which can account for the conditions that motivated the elite leaders to initiate Genocide. Genocide is immoral, barbaric, and illogical, but it is a product of a rational choice made by the elites with a given goal in mind (Beigbeder, 2021). This is not an end but an idea to achieve an end. In other words, the elite agency decided to initiate Genocide in pursuit of a specific policy goal. The perpetrators commit the violence to force the given subgroup to force their members to do something to realize a radical policy goal. They would rather not commit the atrocities, but without the violence, it is impossible to attain the specific policy goals. The decision to initiate Genocide is when the elites have concluded that there is no other way to commit violence against the target group. Mass murder is the cheapest way for elite perpetrators to overcome resistance from people who are perceived to be on the way. Indigenous groups are often the targets for these strategic decisions because their presence is seen to be decreasing the economic value.
Frontline Killers
The agency-oriented approach attempts to explain that genocide results from the behavior of the state and societal actors, who, in this case, are committing the atrocities. The human agency is the one that is the driving force in the genocidal process. It does not focus on why or how the decision is made but on how ordinary individuals follow orders of the military and political superiors to kill their fellow humans due to their differences in ethnicity, religion, or race (Charny, 2017). The ordinary people who are the perpetrators of Genocide have psychologically extraordinary or fanatical beliefs but rather follow the bureaucratic ideas of their leaders and commit the acts as evident by the Nazi perpetrators. Normal human beings are motivated by psychological needs, goals, and emotions because when they motivate leaders, they come up with a convincing way to convince them of mutually reinforcing motivations. Convenience is the driving force that makes people political killers because the elites calculate to eliminate a given ethnic group. The love of one’s group essentially means hate for the other group, and this way, people are motivated that if they do not succumb to the pressure from the elites, they will be eliminated. Because of fear, they will become part and partisan of the violence.
The people’s actions to commit acts of human violence are based on the ideology that they re psychologically abnormal and their actions are due to brainwashing or indoctrination. These people have been living together over a given period, and when there is a political motive, they lose their human insights and begin slaughtering one another like animals. The relationship between the elite agency and the genocidal killers is based on psychological characteristics and emotions (Hiebert, 2010). Elite agencies shape human behaviors and therefore convinces one group that the target group has poor or bad intentions and is standing in the way of their progress.
Society
Society is the third actor in the agency-oriented approach. Society means the role that people play as bystanders and, through their conscience, allow the initiation of Genocide. Societies are psychologically predisposed to victimize a specific marginalized group. Members of a given society often project their frustrations toward a marginalized group (Jacobs and Straus, 202). The members of majority groups view those from the marginalized group as winners, and these majorities feel that they are suffering because of the existence of the marginalized group. The state begins to use repression and violence as crises rise, and the larger society becomes psychologically disposed to victimize the group and is therefore ready to be brainwashed to become genocide low-level killers.
Structural approaches
Culture
Culture is not sufficient even though it is a necessary condition to explain Genocide. Culture is a macro and micro-level variable when explaining Genocide. In the Holocaust, Cultural indoctrination played a major role where Germans became the “eliminationists antisemitism” (Ankersmit, 2022). The argument here is that everything can go wrong when a cultural difference in society. The Germans were indoctrinated to believe that the Jews, who were the minority, were inferior and did not belong to that community, and this prompted the perpetrators to eliminate them (Banwell, 2016). Antisemitism and eliminationism are unique to Germany and the Holocaust.
Another effective use of culture to define Genocide is the local influences of low-level perpetrators who turn the local minorities in a country again. The Khmer Rouge leadership in Cambodia used culturally salient language and cultural practices to motivate the Khmers to participate in human violence (Boua, 2019). One cultural practice that stood out is KUM, which was a long-standing grudge due to public loss that has always resulted in revenge (Hiebert, 2008). These cultural practices are well known by the Cambodians and were used by the regime to motivate individuals to participate in violence. The examination of the Rwandan Genocide also identifies local culture to have played a role in motivating the Hutus and the Tutsis to commit violent atrocities (Straus, 2019). The Hutu majority believed that the Tutsis were a threat along culturally specific lines believed to be in the deleterious effects of “obstructions” in the body that brought an interruption to the proper flow of fluids. The Tutsis then became the sacrificial lambs where. The Hutus believed they were doing a mass purification in the event that they focused on eliminating the “obstructing beings.”
Divided societies
Divided societies are another factor in a structural approach that suggests that societies split by religious, ethnic, socioeconomic, and other factors are vulnerable to Genocide. In other words, plural societies are the base for Genocide, but it does not make Genocide inevitable. When persistent and pervasive cleavages split the society, they are more likely to develop enmity that will make it likely for the groups to experience Genocide, especially when economic inequality and political inequalities are imposed on the religious, racial, and ethnic differentiation (Giordano, 2022). This structure aggregates the population into distinctive sections that will motivate crimes against collectiveness. The pervasive and consistent divisions in many spheres can lead to issues of conflict which can move one sector to another until the entire society is polarized. For example, the Armenian Genocide of 1915 was caused by the plurality of the society, which consisted of clearly defined religious, racial, and cultural differences.
Regime
The structure of political regimes determines the political stability and nature of the people in that given nation. When the existing regime exerts total political, social, and economic control over all aspects of society ends up creating a new breed of people who are hostile and are deemed outside the group (Tobin, 2022). The total expression of totalitarianism was used by the Nazi and the Stalinist regime, who exercised total domination where superfluous people were exterminated. Pol Pot’s regime is an example of a regime that perpetrated Genocide against a segment of its population (Karpinski, 2021). Totalitarianism does not necessarily lead to Genocide. But it is right to note that when a regime has too much power, the elites’ desires will make it possible to target their own citizens.
Modernity
Conceptions of inferiority and superiority influence societies, which bureaucratic states can exploit through social engineering and their capacity to implement changes and policies evident by the gardener states. For gardener states, Genocide is not a destruction policy but a grand construction project (Martin, 2003). The gardener states to construct a new system of demographic, social, economic, or political order, and therefore, the gardener states weeds out people who do not belong to the new order (Ahram, 2014). Just as weeds are pulled out of the garden, human beings who seem to bring destruction to the new political system are eliminated by the gardener state to facilitate the introduction of the new system. Understanding a group of people who are upset about the new system makes it possible for the gardener state to introduce policies that will motivate the larger majority to eliminate the subgroups against the new policies. For instance, according to Katz (2019), the Holocaust looked at the Jews as a disease that was weakening the human body, and therefore, they should be removed through radical eugenics measures to preserve the purity of the majority.
Similar revolutionary ideas focus on the theory that people are divided due to the ownership of the means of production into separate groups and conflict. McCauley and Moskalenko (2016) state that these are the inspired genocidal revolutionary movements and regimes that focused on certain classes as counter-revolutionaries and exploiters who did not fit into the new systems; hence, they were to be eliminated in genocidal purges in states such as democratic Kampuchea and Stalinist Soviet Union.
Conclusion
Agency-centered and structural approaches provide different points of view on the factors that led to the initiation of genocides. These two theoretical approaches highlight the significance of using different dimensions to understand Genocide. The agency-oriented approaches focused on human psychology to offer a foundation where we can try to explain how the elite leaders, individuals, and societal behaviors lead to Genocide. Although they give clear explanations, they cannot account for the explanations offered by the structural approach. The structural approach provides the cultural, social, political, security, and ideational texts that shape genocidal behaviors, policies, and occurrences. It highlights how regimes, divided societies, culture, and modernity contribute to Genocide.
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