Darfur and the Crime of Genocide

By John Hagan and Wenona Rymond-Richmond
New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2008

Criminology has come late to cosmopolitanism. Focused narrowly upon the laws and interests of nation-states, criminologists have too rarely engaged with matters of international law violation. John Hagan and Wenona Rymond-Richmond seek to correct this limitation in Darfur and the Crime of Genocide. In so doing, they place themselves on a path previously trod by Sheldon Glueck when, between 1943 and 1946, his influential writings helped shape the Nuremberg concepts of crimes of war and crimes against humanity. And just as Glueck offered a framework for criminalizing the Nazi regime, Hagan and Rymond-Richmond hope to help readers think through the crimes transpiring in Darfur. In the end, they offer one of the most serious and provocative criminological treatments of genocide to date. Although the remainder of this review offers criticisms of their work, one cannot dismiss its value. Hagan and Rymond-Richmond provide a coherent and lucid examination of the racist motivation behind the mass violence in Darfur. Their arguments for designating as genocide the destruction wrought by the Sudanese government and the Janjaweed militias are compelling. They draw skilfully upon the U.S. government sponsored Atrocities Documentation Survey of Darfur refugees in Chad (2004, hereafter ADS) – an ambitious victimization survey of those fleeing genocidal attacks – to offer powerful empirical evidence that the crimes we are witnessing do indeed meet the standards of the United Nations Convention on the Punishment and Prevention of Genocide (1948, hereafter UNGC). For these accomplishments they deserve much credit. 

However, their approach does raise a few issues. The first concerns the redemptive approach evident in their attempt to create a “scientific criminology of genocide” (p. 29). Here, Glueck is upheld as a “forgotten voice” (p. 36) of global criminology. But other less-than-admirable criminological voices from the Holocaust era are overlooked. For example, Robert Ritter was a German criminologist who like Glueck was an expert in juvenile delinquency, but instead used scientific criminology to facilitate human destruction. Indeed, Ritter’s criminal-biological studies of the Roma and Sinti peoples offered a rationale for their annihilation in the forests, fields and death camps of Nazi-controlled Europe (see Wetzell 2000). Because of criminologists like Ritter, criminology cannot be presented solely as a neutral and objective science that stands outside of genocidal contexts; its criminalizing power makes it a potential participant in extermination. Therefore, Hagan and Rymond-Richmond’s final prescription that “The next generation of criminologists need never again be bystanders to genocide” (p. 222) should be modified to acknowledge the danger of criminological complicity in genocidal projects. 

Second, the emphasis on race and racialization practices in the text is satisfying to the extent that it counters attempts to dismiss the application of the UNGC to Darfur. However, this emphasis also tends to overshadow other contributing factors to the perpetration of genocide. Hagan and Rymond-Richmond draw upon Alexander Laben Hinton’s (2005) notion of “genocidal priming” to describe the processes of readying a population for genocide and the need for a spark to set destruction in motion (p. 168). This notion allows them to isolate the racial nature of the Darfur genocide and to stress the importance of their empirical findings concerning the frequent usage of racial epithets in the Janjaweed and Sudanese military attacks on non-Arab villages. But Hinton’s ethnographic approach to Cambodia provides a much richer description of the multiple and interlinked factors leading to genocide, demonstrating the combined influence of cultural, economic, political, historical, emotional, and social factors. While Hagan and Rymond-Richmond are not unaware of the broader context of their case study, other salient elements of genocidal priming are dampened due to the authors’ methodological commitment to quantifying dehumanization. Even within their focus on race, one is left to wonder about the specific context of racialization: What does race mean “on the ground” in Sudan? What local cultural meanings are embedded in processes of racialization? What are the habituated and non-conscious cultural assumptions about race and ethnicity in this region?

This loss of locality is magnified in the final chapter where the authors attempt a sweeping comparison between street crime and genocide that is directed toward bringing lessons of the “Global North” to the “Global South” (p. 195). This analysis is likely to draw two further criticisms. First, there is the danger of minimizing the death and destruction of genocide through its comparison to more mundane street crime events. Second, the notion that the Global North can provide the tools for understanding the Global South could be taken as a form of scholarly imperialism that imports crisis resources from the periphery and sells back fully manufactured academic products built through the North’s already well-established experience in crisis management. The primary benefactor of this exchange appears to be criminology, which gets to expand its research domain and its scholarly breadth.
 

These criticisms reflect, to some degree, a different approach to the topic of genocide, but one worth articulating since it points to potential criminological blind spots in the study of genocide. However, despite these concerns, I would recommend Darfur and the Crime of Genocide as both a resource and a teaching text. In terms of classroom use, the book reads clearly and has the potential to broaden students’ criminological horizons by introducing them to an issue rarely considered in most criminology classes. As a resource, the authors are very thorough in their review of the ADS data and also make a convincing case for their enumeration of the scale of atrocities in Darfur. While accurate death toll counts may not be sufficient to spark the political will to take action in Darfur, they nonetheless provide a chilling reminder of the magnitude of global indifference in the face of mass violence.

Hinton, Alexander Laban. 2005. Why Did They Kill? Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Wetzell, Richard F. 2000. Inventing the Criminal: A History of German Criminology, 1880-1945. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.