Blood, Power, and Bedlam: Violations of International Criminal Law in Post-Colonial Africa

By Christopher W. Mullins and Dawn L. Rothe
New York, NY: Peter Lang, 2008

For Mullins and Rothe, genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and other atrocities represent a test for criminology. They write, “A criminology that cannot explain the sorts of widespread violence, destruction, and chaos examined here is not much of a criminology at all” (p.4). To respond to this challenge, they fashion an “integrated theory of crime” (p. 5) to explain incidents of post-colonial international criminal law violation in Rwanda, Uganda, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The result is one of the more thorough criminological analyses of mass violence to date. Their model is sufficiently broad, allowing them to evaluate each case study at the international, macro (state), meso (organizational), and micro (individual) levels. At each level they examine the motivations, opportunities, constraints, and controls that facilitated or hampered collective violence. In this manner, they move beyond simply stretching existing criminological theory to fit situations of mass violence and instead offer a grounded conceptual approach for gauging the multiple antecedents to destructive situations.

What is surprising, however, is that they carry out this project without engaging the genocide studies and crimes against humanity literatures. This oversight does not take away from their goal of demonstrating that criminology can pass the test of mass violence. But criminology should strive for more; in particular, it should ideally contribute to what is already a lively and multi-disciplinary field of study. Such an engagement with genocide studies would, for example, allow the authors to draw upon the wealth of scholarship that already examines the motivations, opportunities, controls and constraints that are the conditions of mass violence. It also would allow them to demonstrate what criminology has to offer to this broader discussion.

Blood, Power and Bedlam is strong in its discussion of the International Criminal Court and the technical details of emerging international criminal law. The authors have clearly given careful attention to the development and uncertain status of the patchwork of international laws governing crimes of mass violence, although more critical interrogation of the Eurocentric and liberal-modernist assumptions embedded in discourses of human rights and international justice would have been appreciated.

The case studies offered by the authors are richly detailed, even though the authors rely primarily on secondary sources, especially reports from human rights non-governmental organizations (NGOs). At times, their case studies replicate the list-like qualities of these reports; however, overall, Mullins and Rothe show themselves to be shrewd readers of the secondary data and they manage to capture the complexity of each case study and to correct Western media biases. The cases are most insightful with respect to the international and macro dimensions of analysis, where Mullins and Rothe discuss the role of global economic forces in each conflict. The meso and micro levels, in contrast, receive thinner treatment, which is likely a consequence of relying upon secondary data that lacks the ethnographic depth needed to fully animate the local and individual conditions of the cases.

Given the authors’ knowledge about most facets of international criminal law, it is somewhat disappointing that they commit basic errors in their discussion of genocide. For example, they mistakenly claim  Raphael Lemkin coined the term in 1933 (the year that he in fact proposed the terms “vandalism” and “barbarism” to describe sustained attempts to destroy the cultural and physical existence of specific groups). The discussion of genocide also could have been supplemented by the vast critical literature on the United Nations (UN), the International Criminal Court (ICC), the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR)  notions and interpretations of genocide.

These are minor quibbles, but they reflect a hastiness that is often reflected in the book. Indeed, some sections are very poorly edited and marred by multiple typographic errors (e.g., Chapter 4). In others, fact checking was not carried out, such as when the French are credited with constructing ethnic differences among Rwandese rather than the Germans and Belgians (p.36). As well, the text ends abruptly, with no attempt to draw together the multiple strands of argumentation that run throughout.

Another quibble: the text focuses on Central Eastern Africa and the Horn, but this regional emphasis is misrepresented in the title and publisher information, which promise a study of violations of international criminal law in “Africa”. This sweeping generalization continues an unfortunate Western scholarly tendency that treats this diverse continent as a single entity. To their credit, Mullins and Rothe are quite aware of the regional specificity of their case studies (see pp. 6-7 and Chapter 3). But the title page featuring the African continent splattered with blood only serves to confirm inaccurate assumptions about life and death in Africa, leaving one to wish that more care had been taken in packaging their solid, although at times uneven, study.