Britain and genocide: historical and contemporary parameters of national responsibility

This article (originally given as the Annual War Studies Lecture at King's College, London, on 25 January 2010) challenges the assumption that Britain's relationship to genocide is constituted by its `vigilance towards the genocide of others. Through a critical overview of the question of genocide in the historical and contemporary politics of the British state and society, the article suggests their wide-ranging, complex relationships to genocide. Utilising a conception of genocide as multi-method social destruction and applying the interpretative frames of the genocide literature, it argues that the British state and elements of identifiably British populations have been involved directly and indirectly in genocide in a number of different international contexts. These are addressed through five themes: the role of genocide in the origins of the British state; the problem of genocide in the Empire and British settler colonialism; Britain's relationships to twentieth-century European genocide; its role in the genocidal violence of decolonisation; and finally, Britain's role in the genocidal crises of the post-Cold War world. The article examines the questions of national responsibility that this survey raises: while rejecting simple ideas of national responsibility as collective guilt, it nevertheless argues that varying kinds of responsibility for genocide attach to British institutions, leaders and population groups at different points in the history surveye

Strategy and slaughter

Colin Gray's ‘Clausewitz Rules, OK’ was the one contribution to the Interregnum special issue of this Review that engaged the problem of modern war in general. Issues of war and peace were represented only patchily in a volume aiming to reflect on the ‘post-Cold War’ decade, but put together before ‘9/11’ brought it to an abrupt end. The Balkans didn't play a large part in William Wallace's account of Europe; unstable Asian great-power rivalries and local wars, which could make Rosemary Foot and Andrew Walter's ‘Pacific Century’ anything but pacific were barely noted; while Caroline Thomas wrote about the Third World without mentioning Africa's wars. The Middle East, Rwanda and genocide were not covered. Bruce Cumings' wise reflections on the military bases of American liberalism, a brief discussion of the ‘new interventionism’ by Geoffrey Hawthorn, and dutiful mentions of Kosovo across the chapters, hardly compensated for these omissions

The unfinished global revolution: intellectuals and the new politics of international relations

More than a decade after the revolutions of 1989, we can see these as a high point of a new, worldwide and increasingly global wave of democratic revolution and counter-revolution. Violent struggles between the political forces unleashed have produced genocidal wars and stimulated global state formation. These developments present concerned citizens and students of international relations and politics with new challenges. This article criticizes two trends in the responses of political intellectuals in the West: the ‘new anarchism’ of some critical thinkers in the academic discipline of international relations, and ‘yesterday's radicalism’ which has led some left-wing critics to revive the defence of sovereignty for repressive and genocidal non-Western states. The lecture concludes by outlining an alternative ‘new politics’ of international relation

Risk-transfer militarism, small massacres and the historic legitimacy of war

The perception of initial success in the `war against terrorism' appears to strengthen a general relegitimation of war in Western society that has been gathering pace over the last two decades. This article considers the war in Afghanistan as the latest example of the new Western way of war, and analyses its casualties compared with previous campaigns in the Gulf and Kosovo. It identifies the new type as `risk-transfer war', a central feature of which is a `militarism of small massacres'. This new type thus offers only a partial answer to the problems, for the legitimacy of warfare, caused by the systematic targeting of civilians in earlier `degenerate war'. Despite a closer approximation to `just war' criteria, inequalities of risk between Western military personnel and civilians in the zone of war revive the question of legitimacy in a new form. The article suggests that in our concern for relatively small numbers of civilian casualties, we may be applying to war those standards from which it has historically been exempt. In this context the contradictions of the new Western way of war reinforce a `historical pacifist' position towards the legitimacy of warfare

Session texts

Welcome to this, the beginning of the year programme. Glad you found us! I think we may be in for even more rain over the weekend. Over the programme we will study seven main stories and their relationship to initiatory rites-of-passage. A core of you will go on to undergo the wilderness fast itself I am going to lay some introductory ground over the next couple of hours - on both initiation and myth - and touch on our first story. The stories we will explore over the year are thick with paradox - they are not moral allegories in the normal sense of that phrase. Their sympathies are wide, not just with the human community. They are stories of rupture. They are all initiation myths, and have the severance/threshold/return progression at their core. There is certainly heroism within them, but also trickery, compromise, and loss. They seem to originate from the tribal idea that a culture requires certain rituals, certain stories, to accommodate wildness within the wider remit of its laws and traditions, a kind of funnel back and forth between the pastoral and the prophetic. Without this funnel, the wildness goes underground, loses the sophistication of an art form of a story or dance, and re-emerges as savagery. These stories are not neat but tangled, and anything I have to say about them is a kind of informed speculation. What binds them - Norwegian, Welsh, Russian, Siberian, Irish, Romanian - is both the initiatory cycle and that they all contain an intense relationship between humans, animals and wilderness - shape shifting is key in most of them

The inter-relation between policy and practice for transitions from hospital to home: An ethnographic case study in England’s National Health Service

© 2014 Shaw et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.No abstract available (poster presentation)

The Stranger, from Water Folk (1932)

Martin Shaw (1876-1958) from Water folk (1932) I. The Stranger text by Heinrich Heine, poem 4 of Die Nordsee (Buch der Lieder

Ten challenges to anti-war politics

No description supplie

Conceptualising and Theorising Antisemitism and Racism:The Structural Context of Israel-Palestine

This paper provides a basis for re-examining the contemporary connections of antisemitism and racism through an examination of the conceptual and theoretical parameters of the concept of racism. It argues that racism is a broad and dynamic category, the forms of which must be seen as varied and constantly changing. Thus although ‘new antisemitism’ arguments are wrong to propose a strong connection between opposition to Israel and antisemitism, they are correct to argue that antisemitism has changed and that its current forms are connected to the changes that Israel has brought about for the position of Jews. However, examining antisemitism as a variety of racism requires us to investigate racism in general in the conflicts in, and surrounding, Israel-Palestine. The paper argues for a structural concept of racism in these conflicts. While criticising the ‘apartheid’ framing of Israeli racism, it argues that anti-Palestinian racism is structurally embedded in Israeli society at many levels, and that recent wars have exacerbated this racism on a much larger scale than the antisemitism which they have also stimulated. </jats:p

Poseidon, from Water Folk (1932)

Martin Shaw (1876-1958) from Water folk (1932) III. Poseidon text by Heinrich Heine, poem 5 of Die Nordsee (Buch der Lieder