Naming Violence: A Critical Theory of Genocide, Torture, and Terrorism 9780231547680

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
1. POLITICAL THEORY BETWEEN MORALISM AND REALISM
2. TELLING STORIES: ON ART’S ROLE IN DISPELLING GENOCIDE BLINDNESS
3. HOW TO DO THINGS WITH HYPOTHETICALS: ASSESSING THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS ABOUT TORTURE
4. GENEALOGY AS CRITIQUE: PROBLEMATIZING DEFINITIONS OF TERRORISM
5. THE CONCEPTUAL TAPESTRY OF POLITICAL VIOLENCE
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

NAMING VIOLENCE

NEW D IR EC T ION S IN C R IT I C A L TH E O RY

N E W DI RECTI O NS I N CRI TI CAL TH E ORY

Amy Allen, General Editor New Directions in Critical Theory presents outstanding classic and contemporary texts in the tradition of critical social theory, broadly construed. The series aims to renew and advance the program of critical social theory, with a particular focus on theorizing contemporary struggles around gender, race, sexuality, class, and globalization and their complex interconnections.

For the list of titles in this series, see page 237.

NAMING VIOLENCE

A CRITICAL THEORY OF GENOCIDE, TORTURE, AND TERRORISM

M AT H I A S T H A L E R

Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2018 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Thaler, Mathias, author. Title: Naming violence : a critical theory of genocide, torture, and terrorism / Mathias Thaler. Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2018. | Series: New directions in critical theory | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018007539 | ISBN 9780231188142 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Political violence—Philosophy. | Critical theory. | Genocide— Political aspects. | Torture—Political aspects. | Terrorism—Political aspects. Classification: LCC JC328.6 .T54 2018 | DDC 303.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018007539

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Cover design: Noah Arlow Cover art: copyright © Nigel Killeen/Getty Images

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

vii

1. POLITICAL THEORY BETWEEN MORALISM AND REALISM1 2. TELLING STORIES: ON ART’S ROLE IN DISPELLING GENOCIDE BLINDNESS45 3. HOW TO DO THINGS WITH HYPOTHETICALS: ASSESSING THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS ABOUT TORTURE85 4. GENEALOGY AS CRITIQUE: PROBLEMATIZING DEFINITIONS OF TERRORISM117 5. THE CONCEPTUAL TAPESTRY OF POLITICAL VIOLENCE157

Notes 171 Bibliography 205 Index 229

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

D

ebts can be onerous, weighing heavily on one’s shoulders. They can prevent us from envisioning a future liberated from the burdens of the past. Yet, there is also another sense of being indebted: in terms of a recognition of one’s own limitations and dependencies. In my experience, nowhere are these limitations and dependencies more apparent than in intellectual endeavors. On this view, debt is not so much something we need to be relieved from, but rather a reminder of the essentially collaborative nature of any academic project—even the most solitary one, such as trying to write and revise a lengthy text. It is in this second sense that I want to speak to my feelings of indebtedness while working on this book. Several colleagues in Edinburgh have helped me to think through violence and the imagination. I am grateful to all of them. Within our group of political theorists, Kieran Oberman and Philip Cook in particular made the effort to comment on various aspects of the project. Toby Kelly has been a conversation partner for quite some time now, and there is clearly so much more to discuss. I have also learnt a lot from discussions with Zenon Bankowski, Christine Bell, Donald Bloxham, Stephan Malinowski, and Neil Walker. Over the past years, Christina Boswell has kindly served as an ever-reliable mentor at my new institutional home. Since arriving in the United Kingdom, I have been lucky to benefit from the friendship and mentoring of a number of senior colleagues. The

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most important of these have been Kimberly Hutchings and Anthony Lang Jr. Kim and Tony have often surprised me with their enthusiasm, engagement, and congeniality. I hasten to add two more names to this list: First, Rainer Bauböck, whose mentorship started during my PhD studies more than ten years ago. That it continues to this day is a blessing for me—and I hope not too much of a burden for him. Second, Alessandro Ferrara, whose writings have been a tremendous inspiration for this book. That he would show interest in my own thinking seems almost too good to be true. From Verena Erlenbusch I learnt more about the topic of genealogy than from any other colleague and friend. Much of what I am trying to say in the chapter on terrorism as well as in the introduction has been shaped through conversations with her. Moreover, my book can perhaps be read as a companion piece to Verena’s recently published Genealogies of Terrorism (also with Columbia University Press), which examines with masterful erudition and in more depth some of the historical themes I explore in this book. Likewise, I hope to have elaborated on a few topics that Verena has touched upon. This leads me to suggest that, maybe, our books can be best appreciated when read in conjunction with each other. The entire manuscript was discussed during a workshop with Cian O’Driscoll, Louis Fletcher, Mihaela Mihai, Vassilios Paipais, and Niall Whelehan. In a collegial and productive spirit, this gang of five brought various problems with the book to my attention. My PhD student Louis Fletcher also undertook exceptional research assistance throughout the project, for which I am deeply thankful. Among the wider circle of colleagues, whose kind feedback has found its way into the manuscript, are Matteo Bonotti, Alexandre Christoyannopoulos, Elizabeth Cripps, Claire Duncanson, Guy Fletcher, Elizabeth Frazer, Patrick Hayden, Andy Hom, Dustin Howes, María Pía Lara, Bronwyn Leebaw, Alexander Livingston, Andrew Neal, David Owen, Nicola Perugini, Nicholas Rengger, Andrew Schaap, William Scheuerman, and Yves Winter. Even though their influence is perhaps not always immediately evident on these pages, I note with deep gratitude their impact on my writing about violence and the imagination. I have presented parts of the book at workshops and conferences in Copenhagen, Cambridge, Durham, Edinburgh, Glasgow, London, Prague, Sheffield, San Francisco, Southampton, St. Andrews, Stirling, Vienna,

AC K NOW LE D GM E NTS I X

and York. Questions from the audience and comments from fellow panellists pushed me hard to reconsider my initial thoughts on the topic. For this I am grateful. The book benefited, finally, from two excellent referee reports solicited by Columbia University Press, which prompted me to revise the original manuscript. Both reports were extremely constructive and incisive. Needless to say, the remaining errors on the following pages are entirely my responsibility. The research for this book was funded by a Marie Curie Career Integration Grant (618277—JUDGEPOL). I am obliged to the European Commission for sponsoring my work. In Edinburgh, I was initially appointed to a Chancellor’s Fellowship. This research-intensive post allowed me to dedicate important time to launch the project from which this book springs. My thanks extend to everyone involved in the scheme, but especially to Charlie Jeffery and Jo Shaw for early guidance. At the press, I wish to thank my editor, Wendy Lochner, for her invaluable help in preparing the book. For continuous support and encouragement I owe immense thanks to Amy Allen, the editor of the series in which this book is published. Finally, Robert Demke diligently copyedited the entire manuscript, for which an author whose native language is not English naturally feels a lot of gratitude. Chapters 2 and 3 draw on previously published material, which was much improved by reviewer comments the journals provided me with: “Political Imagination and the Crime of Crimes: Coming to Terms with ‘Genocide’ and ‘Genocide Blindness.’ ” Contemporary Political Theory 13, no. 4 (2014): 358–79. © Springer, reprinted with permission. “Unhinged Frames: Assessing Thought Experiments in Normative Political Theory.” British Journal of Political Science (2016) 1–23. [online first] © Cambridge University Press, reprinted with permission. To the Thaler and Mihai families I am grateful for their affection, kindness, and attention. Life as an academic nomad is often exciting, but can sometimes be frustratingly difficult. In these bleaker moments, it has been deeply reassuring for me to know that I can count on support “at home.” Speaking of emotional support, without my friends in Edinburgh, writing this book would have been much harder. I consider Adham, Bashir, Cris A, Cris J, Debbie, Guy, Kerri, Niall, Nicola, Nur, Sossie, Toby, and Vas my closest companions in Scotland and thank them for all their care.

X AC K NOW LE D GM E N TS

As per convention, I conclude this preface by acknowledging the person whom I owe most: practically every thought you will find on these pages has first been examined in discussions with the person who shares her life with me. From the moment we met, Mihaela Mihai has been incredibly supportive, generous, and caring. I doubt I will ever be able to reciprocate in equal measure, but I can promise to try.

1 POLITICAL THEORY BETWEEN MORALISM AND REALISM

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his book opens up a novel perspective on political violence, by examining the ways in which genocide, torture, and terrorism are conceptualized in contemporary political theory and by scrutinizing the role that the imagination plays in this process. The reason for this attention to practices of naming is simple: how we conceptualize violence affects what we do to contain and mitigate it.1 The theoretical as well as practical challenge is that our discursive tools need to remain responsive to the reality on the ground: when the agents and structures of violence change, we must learn to account for these shifting circumstances. The imagination can perform an important yet often neglected function in this learning process. This book seeks to fill this lacuna, by examining how best to engage the imagination—through artistic, hypothetical, and historical means. Given the ever-changing character of violence, tracing the limits of our conceptual frameworks, our empathy, and our awareness is of utmost importance. In order to highlight the role of the imagination, the book zooms in on three forms of violence: genocide, torture, and terrorism. In the following pages, I explore how imagining things otherwise can help revise the concepts we employ to describe and assess these types of violence, and can then go on to augment both ethical sensitivity and institutional preparedness.2

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Let us start with a simple, yet consequential observation: that academic discourse, or indeed any form of reflection about genocide, torture, and terrorism, is intertwined with the social reality of these atrocities. Whenever we discuss whether an act of violence should count as genocide, torture, or terrorism, we issue a judgment as to what these terms mean and whether a specific phenomenon fits the generic category. Yet, such judgments—even when they are anchored in domestic or international law—are inherently contestable. That is to say, the meaning of the terms genocide, torture, and terrorism remains open to different and often conflicting interpretations, both on the level of concept-formation (what the terms signify) and on the level of concept-application (when the terms cover a specific act). It is easy to illustrate this by looking at controversies around how to describe violent situations, actions, or agents. Politically speaking, it matters significantly whether a particular conflict is labeled a civil war or a genocide; it equally matters whether we capture certain interrogation techniques in the language of “torture” or whether we believe that notions such as “torture lite” or “enhanced interrogation techniques” are more apt; and finally, how we grasp “terrorism” by way of its actors, means, and goals has obvious effects on the kinds of responses we expect from political agents and from civil society. This observation gives rise to a number of questions: Does the flexibility and malleability of our vocabulary imply that anything goes when it comes to judging genocide, torture, and terrorism? How does the semantics of these concepts relate to their pragmatics? In what ways is our talking about violence, our thinking through violence, entangled with the practical fight against violent actors and structures? In the scholarly debate of the past decades, we encounter two opposing rejoinders to address these issues: The first one—which I call the moralist response—seeks to withdraw from the field of contestations altogether by devising ideal-types of political violence that may guide our engagement with real-world cases. Following this route, we arrive at decontextualized descriptions of genocide, torture, and terrorism that are supposed to be beneficial for evaluating situations in which the applicability of these terms remains contentious. Put differently, moralists attempt to disavow the judgments upon which conceptualizations of political violence rest by presenting their proposals at a high level of

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idealization. They aspire to serve as Olympian arbiters of interpretations of genocide, torture, and terrorism in the real world. The second response—which I call (unreconstructed) realism—favors the opposite route: by foregrounding the contingent emergence of notions of political violence, realists tend to assume that each judgment of genocide, torture, or terrorism is merely partisan. Put otherwise, they fully accept that judgments form the basis of our thinking about genocide, torture, and terrorism, but frequently collapse this insight into a generic skepticism toward all uses of the language of political violence; often, they end up promoting a hermeneutics of suspicion, which lacks any ambition to develop evaluative standards or provide general orientation when it comes to judging violent phenomena.3 By zooming in on the role of the imagination, this book tries to overcome the standoff between moralism and (unreconstructed) realism. It does so by acknowledging the contested character of all conceptualizations of political violence, without denying the importance of evaluative standards with which to assess the employments of terms such as genocide, torture, and terrorism.

1 .1 . O N T H E P O L I T I C S O F N A M I N G

Let us continue by clarifying the problem that the upcoming reflections seek to illuminate. One of the key assumptions of this book is that naming violence is ineluctably entangled with politics. The way we capture what violence is matters for how we identify and respond to it. Mahmood Mamdani calls this constellation the “politics of naming,” which he thinks is deeply entrenched in international relations.4 Mamdani asserts that all definitions of violence are susceptible to strategic appropriation by political actors. What this means for political theory will be explored in the next section, so I want to stay for a moment with Mamdani’s basic diagnosis, take it as seriously as it deserves to be taken, and ask what its implications are. If we look more closely, we can see that there are actually two readings of the phrase politics of naming, which are often conflated with each other. Both readings highlight the importance of tracking the real-world impact

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that concepts can have; they assume that naming matters a great deal in politics. When participants in the public debate use notions such as genocide, torture, and terrorism, they typically do so in an attempt to achieve specific goals that require the shoring up of wider support; or they employ these notions to denounce opponents who have willfully mischaracterized an international conflict, a government action, or a rights violation. On a strong reading, the phrase politics of naming highlights that all acts of labeling serve the pursuit of hegemonic interests. Only the powerful can name. In this vein, Mamdani surmises that the term genocide is selectively applied to various conflicts around the globe. This suspicion is fueled by the cases brought to the International Criminal Court, which have been predominantly concerned with African perpetrators.5 A dangerous hypocrisy is at work when only one geographical area is targeted for its genocidal activities, while other comparable situations receive less attention. Both torture and terrorism have come under close scrutiny as well, based on similarly strong readings of Mamdani’s expression. The argumentative logic in all these cases appears to be that, beneath the seemingly neutral definitions of specific acts of violence, we can detect the machinations of hegemonic interests. Political language is an instrument in the hands of the powerful. To name the social world simply is a form of political intervention; words are deeds. Hegemonic actors exert their symbolic and material influence to capture the terms of the debate in order to gain advantages that often lead to tangible gains in terms of power resources; or, if they cannot completely control the semantics, they at least seek to channel how the concepts are applied in different settings.6 The most succinct manifestation of this thought probably stems from Carl Schmitt, who noted in his notorious tract The Concept of the Political from 1932: All political concepts, images, and terms have a polemical meaning. They are focused on a specific conflict and are bound to a concrete situation; the result (which manifests itself in war or revolution) is a friend–enemy grouping, and they turn into empty and ghostlike abstractions when this situation disappears. Words such as state, republic, society, class, as well as sovereignty, constitutional state, absolutism, dictatorship, economic planning, neutral or total state, and so on, are

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incomprehensible if one does not know exactly who is to be affected, combated, refuted, or negated by such a term.7

On this view, language itself is the battlefield on which political struggles are fought, and where the agonistic division between friends and enemies becomes visible. A second, weaker interpretation of Mamdani’s thought emphasizes that all accounts of political violence can, at least potentially, become instruments in real-world struggles. Here, the phrase politics of naming indicates that the terms we employ to understand, evaluate, and orient ourselves in reality are themselves part of that reality. This does not automatically commit us to the belief, however, that only hegemonic actors are able to influence the semantic content or application of definitions of violence. Rather, it implies that we cannot ever escape the concrete context within which definitions of violence are advanced. On this view, it is impossible to demarcate an arena that would be fully insulated from material and symbolic struggles over conceptualizations of violence. Recognizing this impossibility is a necessary starting point for political theory’s ambition to come to terms with violence. Here is the position I shall defend. The idea that the terms we use in academic and public debate are not only influenced but comprehensively determined by hegemonic interests strikes me as both epistemically dubious and politically defeatist. The strong reading is epistemically dubious because it relies on the problematic assumption that we could somehow stand entirely outside of the conceptual frameworks that we have set out to clarify. What is more, it is also politically defeatist insofar as it makes any endeavor to subvert and reclaim existing vocabularies appear futile. This book therefore promotes the weaker reading, which strikes me as more attractive, precisely because it avoids the stronger reading’s determinism and defeatism. This has ramifications both for what political theorists ought to do when they participate in discussions about genocide, torture, and terrorism, and, more broadly, for what I consider political theory to be in the first place. There is no final escape from the politics of naming. Yet, from this it does not follow that hegemonic interests manage to fully capture all definitions of political violence, or that we could not issue judgments about the appropriateness of labels such as genocide, torture, or terrorism at specific moments in time. The approach

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favored in this book (and further explicated later) commits us to a dialogical and democratic view of political theory that recognizes its place in a common world, while also affirming the need for critical distance and normative amelioration. The reader may have noticed that I added the qualifier unreconstructed to characterize the kind of realism that I object to. When speaking of unreconstructed realism I mean a type of realism that is radically skeptical of evaluation and orientation as tasks for political theory. The kind of realism I am more drawn to—sober realism,8 in my terminology—rejects such skepticism and puts evaluation and orientation on a par with understanding the real world of politics and power. In order to hold these two types of realism apart, we must first look at the position against which all types of realism gain plausibility: the moralist tendency in political theory. Moralism is an umbrella term for a set of foundational assumptions about the very purpose of political theory, which translate into specific methodological approaches.9 It denotes, in the broadest sense, the attempt “to make the moral prior to the political,”10 to quote Bernard Williams’s memorable slogan. Moralists aspire to construct first principles of justice that are independent of, and isolated from, the messy universe of politics. In this sense, their main theoretical device is idealization.11 In a second step, the principles arrived at through ideal theorizing are applied to identify and address injustices in the real world. In Kantian language, this model could be termed determinant judgment. Thus, the moralist perspective usually shies away from dealing with the complexity of social phenomena in the real world, by sharply drawing a line between facts and principles.12 Many substantive positions in political theory are compatible with such a moralist outlook, but liberalism is most often associated with it.13 Our starting point has been the intertwining of scholarly and public discourse with real-world politics: every seemingly neutral account of genocide, torture, or terrorism can in principle become a tool in political struggles. Since moralists seek to make the moral prior to the political, they consider the politics of naming a considerable threat to their ambitions. In fact, as the following chapters will demonstrate, many authors who could be classified as moralists either deny the existence of a politics of naming altogether or attempt to defuse its explosive consequences by decontextualizing the terms of the debate.

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What do I mean by decontextualization here? Friedrich Nietzsche’s aphorism in On the Genealogy of Morality that “only something which has no history can be defined”14 might help us tease out the underlying thought. Even though Nietzsche had a rather limited understanding of what a definition is—on his account, nothing that is humanly constructed could be subject to a definition—the suggestion that history might derail attempts at defining is insightful. Nietzsche’s idea entails that objects undergoing historical transformations cannot be captured through a definition, precisely because their characteristic features are unstable and liable to change. Violence is, of course, a perfect example of something that does have a history in that sense. What counts as violence depends on circumstances that change over time. To elaborate, consider how Hannah Arendt began her reflections on this topic with exactly this observation: that we use the term violence equivocally, by intermingling it with concepts such as power, strength, force, and authority.15 No matter whether we agree with her substantive account of violence as the antithesis to power, Arendt was surely right in claiming that any definition of violence needs to occupy a place within a force field staked out by other, adjacent concepts. Without understanding the web of influences between these concepts, no clear sense of what should count as violence can emerge.16 By way of illustration, consider two influential ways of capturing violence. Roughly speaking, either violence can be understood widely, as encompassing a variety of forms of coercion, violation, or injustice, or it can be conceptualized more narrowly, by emphasizing the physical or psychological harm done to people or sentient beings.17 A prominent representative of the first view is Johan Galtung, with his idea of “structural violence”—violence enacted not necessarily and invariably by identifiable subjects, but by system-wide institutions, such as bureaucracies oppressing people in often diffuse ways.18 The second view has a greater resonance with the ordinary usage of the term violence. Many will associate violence with physical force or psychological pressure, intended to injure or intimidate.19 In chapter 2, we will grapple with the ramifications of each definitional strategy in the context of representations of climate change: describing the effects of climate change as violent, or even genocidal, only becomes an option if we adopt a framework for capturing violence that moves beyond the exercise of physical force or psychological pressure. What

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interests me at this point is not so much the actual content of these opposing definitions of violence, but rather the methods by which different theorists go about the process of defining. How do those who wish to make the moral prior to the political deal with the fact that on the most basic level of defining violence there is much disagreement about the concept? The moralist response involves the attempt to “decontest” the terms genocide, torture, and terrorism by identifying an essential, stable feature of these terms. In so doing, they seek to turn social facts into something that “has no history.” Decontestation is a theoretical operation whereby the multiple conflicting meanings of a given concept are reduced to one definitive account that is supposed to settle the semantic struggles.20 Moralists thus aspire to develop definitions of violence that would somehow remain unaffected by the politics of naming, in both the strong and the weak sense mentioned earlier. We can clearly observe this move in debates around genocide, torture, and terrorism, where a number of authors interpret the role of political theory as, primarily, delivering conceptual clarification. They believe that the politics of naming can only be surpassed if we grasp what these types of political violence actually mean. This is the essence of moralism. Political realists of all stripes reject the notion that the moral is prior to the political. They militate against idealizing interpretations of politics, and argue that politics constitutes an arena of human (inter)action in which power relations are ubiquitous.21 Due to the pervasiveness of power relations, politics cannot be reduced to a mere application of principles of justice. Hence, realists object to and try to reverse the “displacement of politics,”22 which they identify with moralist approaches. Much of the methodological discussion within political theory of the past decade pivots around controversies within the realist camp. In this book, I am not particularly interested in this discussion on its own terms, largely because I believe that the true value of a realist outlook on politics must be redeemed in actual processes of better understanding and responding to specific issues and challenges.23 There is a considerable degree of irony in the fact that what had started as a genuine challenge to a constricted, single-minded approach to politics turned into an increasingly scholastic controversy about the internal operations of political theory.24

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Yet, it is still useful to explore realism by looking at the broader goals it seeks to attain. We may say that at the core of the realist project lies an ambition to develop a robust framework for understanding, evaluation, and orientation in politics.25 Understanding is a goal insofar as political theory in a realist vein is committed to taking power in the real world seriously. That is to say, the moralist assumption that we should assess the justice or legitimacy of an institution under idealizing circumstances is a total nonstarter for realists. On a very crude and (on my view) erroneous interpretation, this is all there is to the realist project: a push toward a more nuanced understanding of the status quo. But many defenders of realism have underscored that evaluation— what I shall call the faculty of judgment—remains an integral part of the realist project too. Apart from enhancing our capacity to understand a given situation in terms of the power differentials that are at play, realism thus also seeks to supply us with the tools to critically evaluate a political constellation that is marred by oppressive structures. Finally, orientation can be said to form a central goal of realism insofar as we require a general sense of how our evaluative stances hang together. To suggest that political theory in a realist vein must provide orientation thus implies that it needs to at least try to explicitly spell out the normative commitments on which judgments rest. Accepting evaluation and orientation as goals for political theory is not the same as prioritizing the moral over the political. As Raymond Geuss succinctly observes: There is no obvious single dimension along which we distinguish the good, the bad, the better, the worse, the best. One social system is more productive; another gives better subsidies to its symphony orchestras; a third has an especially perspicuous and flexible legal system. It is an assumption that there is always one single dimension for assessing persons and their actions that has canonical priority. This is the dimension of moral evaluation; “good/evil” is supposed always to trump any other form of evaluation, but that is an assumption . . . which one need not make.26

We are now able to see more clearly what unreconstructed realism is and why it should be rebutted. It is a type of realism that rightly prides itself

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on its interpretive achievements, without, however, paying sufficient attention to the tasks of evaluation and orientation. What Michael Freeden calls “interpretive realism”27 does, on my account, not go far enough, for it fails to acknowledge both evaluation and orientation as central objectives of political theory. A sober version of realism, on the other hand, puts evaluation and orientation on a par with the aspiration to contribute to a deeper understanding of the status quo. These three tasks cannot, strictly speaking, be separated from one another. We cannot hope to evaluate any given situation without having a sound grasp of what is really going on. Similarly, unless we somehow already possess an orientative structure, however provisional it may be, within which our concrete judgments are guided, we would not be able to determine where to start with our endeavors to make sense of realworld politics. Thus, if realism is to live up to its full potential, it must conceive of these three ambitions as integrated and coequal. To illustrate this claim, take the term terrorism, which will be explored in more detail in chapter  5. Many scholars and activists opine that, at least since the inception of the so-called War on Terror after 9/11, the term has been so contaminated with hegemonic interests that we should either abandon it altogether or only use it in quotation marks. On this account, the concept cannot be subjected to an exercise of reclamation— what I shall call amelioration—because of the depth of its manipulative degradations. Many proponents of critical terrorism studies, for example, refuse to go beyond meticulous reconstructions of existing discourses when they criticize the abuses of the term. This attitude—albeit pivotal for a thorough comprehension of how the term is actually used in a variety of contexts—can degenerate into a veritable flight from judgment. That is to say, critics who ignore the tasks of evaluation and orientation can be charged with curtailing the realist project’s full potential. Their radical skepticism about evaluation and orientation engenders an unwillingness to engage in ameliorative projects. This diagnosis does not imply that critical inquiry always needs to produce normative claims regarding the goodness or justice of certain ideas. Critique can also be exercised through the problematizing of existing patterns of thought and behavior. Often this type of critical intervention turns to history to unearth the conditions of emergence of putatively

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“natural” categories. The normative status of these genealogical approaches is disputed, as we shall see when examining the category of innocence as one of the building blocks of definitions of terrorism. It should be evident from the discussion that moralism and unreconstructed realism are at the extreme ends of a spectrum of possible positions within political theory. All the authors I am grappling with in this book can be located somewhere on that spectrum.28 Hence, it is important to note from the outset that the sober kind of realism underpinning my approach—a realism that equally appreciates understanding, evaluation, and orientation, yet rejects decontextualized judgments—attempts to mediate between these extremes. Moving beyond the impasse between moralism and realism requires us to reflect on how political theory should position itself vis-à-vis the politics of naming. The dilemma appears clear: if we are too aloof from the real world, denying the political dimension of naming, we lose sight of the murkiness and messiness of actually existing violence (the moralist horn of the dilemma); if, on the other side, we remain too close to the real world, we forsake the ability to formulate normative standards that can sustain judgments (the realist horn). Moralism without an orientation toward the real world is empty, realism without evaluation and guidance remains blind. Throughout this book, I shall be driven by the conviction that both approaches to political theory in their extreme instantiations are misguided. They are flawed insofar as they misunderstand what it means to define social facts; they are flawed insofar as they misconstrue the purpose of political theory; and, finally, they are flawed insofar as they misinterpret who the audience of political theory is. Each of these weaknesses will become evident in the process of explaining my positive accounts of defining social facts, of imaginative judgments, and of democracy and dialogue as guiding practices for political theory. Although I object to some of the current trends in political theory, this does not mean I do not take them seriously or do not appreciate their refinement and intelligence. On the contrary, since I am skeptical of both moralist and unreconstructed realist approaches to violence, I aim to avoid a trap into which many contributions to this debate frequently fall: in each of the concrete cases explored in the following, we can identify an intellectual stalemate between moralists and realists, which has its

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origin in a general policy of hermeneutical nonengagement and containment. The respective positions are often so rigidly inward-looking that very little movement, let alone a proper conversation across the trenches, would appear feasible. Scholarly debates about genocide, torture, and terrorism are today not only compartmentalized in various disciplines across the humanities and social sciences, advancing in almost complete isolation from one another; worse still, even within specific disciplines, such as political theory, we have now become accustomed to excessively parochial controversies that rarely make the transition to wider public discussion. This is probably not (only) due to individual or collective inertia on the part of professional academics; rather, it indicates that scholasticism has become the norm within political theory too. As I illustrate, for example, in chapter 4 on terrorism it is genuinely astonishing how deeply divided the debate around its definitions has become, to a degree that makes one wonder whether different scholars still address the same subject when they discuss what terrorism is supposed to mean. Perhaps this scholastic tendency is explicable as the unavoidable by-product of academic specialization. But maybe it also testifies to a general decline in deliberative spirit, which can be detected in many fields of social inquiry today. This book is therefore also intended as an invitation to probe anew the terms of the settlement between moralists and realists, rekindling the deliberative spirit that should undergird all social inquiry in its attempt to make the world a less violent place.29

1 . 2 . A DY N A M I C- N O M I N A L I S T AG E N DA W IT H A T W I S T

For this purpose, we need a new framework for conceptualizing violence, one that escapes the twin dangers of moralism and realism. Such a framework has to satisfy two basic requirements: it must be able to account for the changing circumstances in which discourses on violence are situated; and it needs to insist on political theory’s normative calling—its ability to equip various conceptualizations of political violence with a critical edge to dismantle manipulative uses of concepts such as genocide,

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torture, and terrorism. In short, what is called for is our ability to judge: to render visible the judgments that went into the institutionalization of a legal category, such as genocide or torture; and to retain the capacity to judge atrocities in light of new forms of violence emerging in the real world. Defending the faculty of judgment against the countervailing proposals of both moralism and unreconstructed realism is the purpose of this introduction. In order to better understand how we may overcome the impasse between unreconstructed realism and moralism in political theory, we need to first reflect on the process of defining social facts. This is important for the upcoming reflections insofar as the politics of naming raises concerns about political theory’s standing: Should it try to extract itself from it, by occupying a moral plane from which the polemics around the usages of specific terms of violence could be both coolly observed and equitably settled? Or should political theory mainly be concerned with reconstructing the ways in which power relations have formed and disfigured the vocabulary we use to describe violence? These questions motivate the next step of my inquiry. Let us begin with a seemingly naïve question: What is it that we do when we define an act of violence? To answer that question, we must start by unpacking the operation of defining an object or an act in general. In a second step we shall more narrowly focus on the peculiar features of definitions in the realm of social relations. A quick glance at the philosophical discussion reveals that it is possible to distinguish between various types of definitions:30 • • • • • •

real and nominal definitions; dictionary definitions; stipulative definitions; descriptive definitions; explicative definitions; ostensive definitions.

For our discussion, three of these types are especially relevant: stipulative, descriptive, and explicative ones. (1) Stipulative definitions attach meaning to a term without paying attention to earlier or current uses of that term. Stipulatively defining an object or an act is thus similar

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to naming or renaming it. This can happen with entirely new things— the neologism laser stipulatively defined a novel, hitherto unknown phenomenon—or with existing things that are given a different meaning.31 Thus, proposing a stipulative definition can be seen as an effort to fundamentally transform the existing usage of a term. (2) Descriptive definitions are different from stipulative definitions in that they try to link up with the actual use of a term at a given point in time. Descriptively defining something relies on giving an accurate account of the object or action requiring a definition. For example, one way, but probably not the only one, of defining who Donald J. Trump is would be to say that he is currently (on November 1, 2017) the forty-fifth president of the United States. This statement is objectively falsifiable and fits with the existing usage of the term president, while a stipulative definition is not subject to a similar reality check. (3) Explicative definitions are hybrids between stipulative and descriptive definitions. This means that they endorse some aspects of existing usages of a term, but try to add new elements to it or subtract old ones. In outlining the meaning of a word through an explicative definition “one neither intends simply to be reporting the existing usage of the community, nor would [one’s] purposes be satisfied by substituting some brand new word.”32 A typical candidate for such an explicative definition is John Rawls’s attempt to give the meaning of justice in terms of fairness through the establishment of a “reflective equilibrium.” Applying this framework to the discussion around violence reveals that all three types of definition appear to circulate in both the public and the academic debate. Consider the following examples: (1) When Raphael Lemkin invented the word genocide to capture what he considered a novel form of collective atrocity, he stipulatively defined the meaning of the term. This led to a number of subsequent revisions, which eventually culminated in the definition of genocide in international law that still serves today as the background for debates in political theory. (2) When the Bush administration attempted to exclude water boarding from the legal definition of torture so as to shield its operatives from liability, it engaged in an act of descriptive definition. This was contradicted by opposing descriptions whose purpose was to disclose the problematically narrow manner in which the Bush administration captured torture and belittled water-boarding. (3) When moral philosophers try to explain the meaning of the word terrorism by way of focusing on the killing of innocent

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people, they employ an explicative definition. They hence combine stipulative elements—innocence is best thought of as the absence of responsibility for wrongdoing—with descriptive statements about terrorism as an observable phenomenon in the real world. Each of these cases—genocide, torture, and terrorism—will be explored in depth in the following pages. Yet, there is one indelible feature that all attempts at defining an act of violence share and that has not yet been articulated: the very process of naming (or renaming) a phenomenon, action, or agent is intertwined with the reality it seeks to confront. This is so because each of the attempts at defining hinted at in this discussion concerns objects, institutions, and actions within the social, rather than natural, world. Defining something within the social world is different from defining things or beings governed solely by the laws of nature. When political agents or scholars stipulate, describe, or explain the meaning of genocide, torture, or terrorism, their definitions interact with the very phenomena they hope to comprehend. Hence, “pure” description and, by extension, explication based on “pure” description is not an option when we speak of the social world. To elucidate this thought, which is essential for understanding political theory’s engagement with any form of violence, we need to elaborate on what classifying objects and actions in the social world entails. The fact that our ways of speaking about the social world can enter into and influence that world has, of course, not gone unnoticed. Even though he intended his analysis to apply mainly to categorizations of human beings, Ian Hacking’s work in the philosophy of science provides a helpful starting point for further exploring this issue. The question Hacking seeks to answer relates to one of the oldest puzzles in the history of philosophy: How do names relate to the reality they refer to? Or, put otherwise: What is it that we are doing when we class objects or actions into categories? There are, roughly speaking, two broad schools of thought, which have throughout history been bitterly divided over how to answer this question. On the one hand, we find those who believe that there is an intrinsic connection between the way things are and the way we name them. Call them, in philosophical parlance, “realists.” On the other side are those who mistrust claims about such an intrinsic connection and propose that the names we possess for the things of the world are thoroughly contingent. This position is called “nominalism.”

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While there is no need to plunge into a millennia-old controversy, what matters for the purpose of our argument is Hacking’s observation that “our practices of naming interact with the things that we name.”33 Hacking illustrates this claim by analyzing how, in nineteenth-century Europe, the statistics of “suicide, prostitution, drunkenness, vagrancy, madness, crime” did not merely record the occurrence of “deviant” behaviors, but rather “elaborately, often philanthropically, create[d] new ways for people to be.”34 Hacking rejects the suggestion that categories and definitions in the social realm are merely describing or explaining reality: rather, there is a “two-way interaction”35 between the way we describe and explain reality and reality itself. This marks an important difference between the natural and the social world. While categories classifying elements of the natural world are anchored in observable reality, the social world is fundamentally different: there is a feedback link between concepts and the social world. Hacking calls this feedback “looping.” Looping occurs when the two-way interaction between the way we describe and explain reality and reality itself becomes fully interdependent. This process can be summarized as follows: To create new ways of classifying people is also to change how we can think of ourselves, to change our sense of self-worth, even how we remember our own past. This in turn generates a looping effect, because people of the kind behave differently and so are different. . . . Next, because the kind changes, there is new knowledge to be had about the kind. But that new knowledge in turn becomes part of what is to be known about members of the kind, who change again. This is what I call the looping effect for human kinds.36

This insight is of vital importance for grasping not only the phenomena described by Hacking, such as mental health disorders, but also attempts to define acts of violence. Looping effects are a common and ineliminable feature of debates about genocide, torture, and terrorism. Consider the following case, which will receive more attention in chapter 2: defining the term genocide in international law created the opportunity to prosecute perpetrators of that crime. This process eventually culminated in the setting up of the International Criminal Court through the Rome

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Statute. While Lemkin’s account thereby became institutionalized, it simultaneously opened the door for perpetrators to experiment with new forms of violence that have so far been excluded from the definition of genocide. The systematic use of sexual violence to oppress and destroy a political community provides an illustration of this point: during the wars in Ex-Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Serbian forces resorted to concerted campaigns of sexual violence so as to deflect accusations of committing genocide. Once a concept like genocide is legally defined, perpetrators potentially targeted by the concept will have an interest in circumventing the charge at all costs. If the deterrence effect works, they will likely refrain from further acts of violence; but if they feel compelled to continue their agenda, they might do something else altogether, namely, use the institutionalized concept as a negative benchmark against which to tailor their actions. That is to say, they may engage in “anticipatory denial”37 by strategically adjusting their behavior to a political environment in which certain crimes come with heavier penalties than others. The widespread and systematic use of rape during the wars in Ex-Yugoslavia illustrates this maneuver, whereby perpetrators used violence in such a way that the more consequential charge of genocide could at least for some time be averted. We can therefore conclude that one of the unforeseen consequences of institutionalizing the prosecution of génocidaires has been the actual proliferation of violence. This is, of course, not to suggest that those who created and later institutionalized the notion of genocide are in any meaningful sense responsible for the spreading of violence. Rather, the case of anticipatory denial illustrates that the labels that we use to name acts of violence, once they enter into society, can have effects that are completely detached from their creators’ original intentions. Another way of fleshing out the basic insight that feedback loops will surface whenever political theorists intervene in a public debate is to insist on the necessarily reflective character of critical social inquiry. “Reflection” here means that any theory, which is meant to explain and evaluate reality, “is itself always a part of the objectdomain which it describes.”38 Once we recognize that the way we speak about the social world can influence the very constellation of objects and actions we try to illuminate, a series of methodological concerns arises: If “pure” description or

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“pure” explication is not available for developing definitions in the social world, what is the best way of conceiving of political theory’s efforts to capture acts of violence that are both permanently in flux and affected, through looping processes, by the concepts used to describe and explain them? If definitions of violence can have unintended and highly dangerous consequences, such as effectively enabling or encouraging actors to invent new forms of oppression, what is the right kind of posture vis-àvis the real world: withdrawal or immersion? Should political theorists ideally strive for a plane that remains untainted by the looping effects identified earlier (the moralist route) or should they try to trace the power structures behind the application of the label genocide, torture, or terrorism in concrete situations (the realist route)? These are essentially questions not only about how political theory ought to proceed when dealing with violence, but they also concern the very essence of what political theory is or aspires to be, a fact that has been recently recognized by several historians of political thought.39 This is why I dedicate section 1.5 to outlining my substantive account of political theory as a democratic enterprise geared toward informing public debates. Before that, however, I want to elucidate the question of which general framework is best suited for definitions or conceptualizations of violence within political theory. Such a framework will have to avoid what Mark Osiel has called the twin challenges that any scholarly engagement with violence faces: Stray too close to the fire, then, and one is quickly immersed in the wrenching passions of the calamity itself. Effacing the line between spectacle and spectator, this approach easily ends as low entertainment, high melodrama, or both. Stray very far from the horror, however, and one soon finds oneself gazing down on its frail human participants from too high above the battle, at a contemplative remove. . . . There is comfort in the safety of spectatorial distance, to be sure, and the prospect for ethical judgment it may afford. But we surely recoil from any tranquil taxonomizing of mass atrocity, an academic exercise more suitable to a collection of sea shells.40

This caveat is important for this book: anyone who grapples with genocide, torture, or terrorism in the rarefied air of academe must remain

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acutely aware that such discourse is qualitatively different from talking about more mundane issues in politics that are unaffected by the kind of horror that surely rises up in all of us when we read about acts of cruelty. The challenge—one that is very difficult to tackle—is to cultivate a stance that is “scholarly, yet humane; ‘disinterested,’ yet not disengaged.” 41 Of course, quite a few people across the social sciences and humanities would disagree with this assessment. On a more traditional view of theorizing, there is no relevant distinction between the way we should approach phenomena involving violence and other phenomena within the social world. Whether we examine a country’s tax code or its recent history of violent upheaval makes, for proponents of this view, no difference with regard to the scientific tools we require to describe and explain reality: quantitative analysis contributes to an evidence-based picture of both the causes and the effects of collective action. What this action is directed at—say, the distribution of wealth or the prosecution of a minority—is of secondary importance from within this framework because we can interpret how individuals and collectives behave as expressions of their deliberate and purposeful decisions, what economists like to call “rational choice.” 42 But these positivist perspectives crucially miss what I have tried to capture through the notion of dynamic nominalism. If we accept Hacking’s general observation about the pervasiveness of looping effects, the allure of being “contemplatively removed” from phenomena such as genocide, torture, and terrorism turns out to be self-deceiving. Among other things, this becomes evident once we lose sight of human vulnerability. In this book, I conceive of vulnerability, with Judith Butler, as arising from mutual interdependence and bodily precarity.43 This means that vulnerability is not merely a symptom of temporary frailty that could somehow be surpassed if only we built up enough material and spiritual reserves to ward off external intrusions; rather, it results from the fact that all human beings share in the experience of having to rely on one another. As bodily creatures, we are inevitably susceptible to one another. Our shared vulnerability also gives grounds to ethical and political responsiveness.44 This is, in a nutshell, the crux of Butler’s social ontology, which pivots around relationality as the key feature of humans qua social beings. Given this “weak universalist claim,” 45 any approach to politics and violence that displaces the relational character of our common humanity must

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be faulted for misconstruing the basis on which theorizing rests. I take this picture to be persuasive and consequential for our reflections on violence. The disavowal of vulnerability, however, is common not only in economistic models, with their predilection for methodological individualism;46 it also surfaces in the sanitizing logic of moralism. This will become fully apparent in each of the ensuing chapters, where I examine what exactly happens when political theorists distance themselves so much from social reality that their imagination becomes quite literally unhinged from the world as we know it. Political theorists who seek to come up with “moral definitions” of genocide, torture, and terrorism often erase all traces of human vulnerability; they construct their concepts in such an abstract way that human beings appear as thoroughly atomized and lacking in relationality. This is a problem that this book hopes to expose and address.

1 . 3 . T H E FAC U LT Y O F J U D G M E N T: C R I T I Q U E , N O R M AT I V I T Y, A N D A M E L I O R AT I O N

In light of Hacking’s observations, we thus need to begin anew and rethink the role of definitions. The proposal in this book is that a promising path forward is to interpret political theory’s effort in terms of an ameliorative project sustained by imaginative judgments. This is, on my account, the most auspicious way to think about how we might continue to define categories of violence against the backdrop of a dynamicnominalist research agenda. The best response both to the ever-changing character of violent phenomena and to the feedback links between concepts and the social world involves concentrating on the faculty of judgment in its capacity to productively engage the imagination. Let us unpack this programmatic statement by exploring each of its building blocks. First, I refer to amelioration in this context to foreground a specific understanding of what conceptualizations or definitions do to help us exercise critique when dealing with looping effects. Sally Haslanger, in her thoughtful and illuminating analysis of how race and gender are socially constructed, distinguishes between conceptual, descriptive, and

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ameliorative attempts to define something. The first two approaches roughly correspond to the definitional strategies of explication and description outlined earlier. As we have already remarked, these strategies fail to register the feedback loops in which all attempts at defining social facts and processes unavoidably become entangled. What, then, is distinctive about an ameliorative approach? Ameliorative projects, in contrast, begin by asking: What is the point of having the concept in question? . . . What concept (if any) would do the work best? In the limit case, a theoretical concept is introduced by stipulating the meaning of a new term, and its content is determined entirely by the role it plays in the theory. If we allow that our everyday vocabularies serve both cognitive and practical purposes that might be wellserved by our theorizing, then those pursuing an ameliorative approach might reasonably represent themselves as providing an account of our concept—or perhaps the concept we are reaching for—by enhancing our conceptual resources to serve our (critically examined) purposes.47

Amelioration matters for definitions of political violence insofar as it focuses on pragmatics (what works best) rather than semantics (what they essentially mean); it thereby allows us to raise a number of questions about the very nature of such definitions: “What cognitive or practical task do they (or should they) enable us to accomplish? Are they effective tools to accomplish our (legitimate) purposes; if not, what concepts would serve these purposes better?” 48 One case to illustrate how the ameliorative approach functions in practice is with regard to the concept of woman. To put her highly sophisticated account in a nutshell, Haslanger proposes that “woman” ought to be interpreted such that it buttresses the combat against “structures of sexist oppression.”49 Gender is a category for hierarchical social positioning whereby women are identified by virtue of being subordinated to men. If we start from this premise, Haslanger contends, then the objective of the concept woman must be to make such subordination visible and criticizable. Driving the ameliorative project is a concern with inequities in our contemporary societies. The first task is to interpret empirical evidence that assists us in identifying the relevant social and ideological conditions that sustain a sexist order. In the course of tackling

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inequities, we will need to employ and transform concepts that we have inherited from past instances of oppression, such as woman as well as man. But the way we revise the meaning of these concepts will now depend on the target concept, which can be described as the one that we should ideally be employing so as to best achieve the goal of fighting sexism. This implies that the ameliorative approach must commence with an appraisal of the aims of a concept—what Haslanger calls our “critically examined purposes.” Such a judgment will always remain normatively laden in the sense that one can only decide what counts as a critically examined purpose by referring to certain valuations and prioritizations. As a consequence, the identification of a target concept will always carry the risk of reductionism.50 However, the approach’s inherent flexibility allows for contextually sensitive rectifications in response to claim making.51 To this framework a skeptic could object that any attempt at amelioration already encompasses an arbitrary and ultimately unfounded preference for specific normative standards. Why should x rather than y figure as the purpose toward which an ameliorative intervention is directed? Who has the standing to decide which target concept should be selected? These are tough questions for anyone arguing in favor of a political theory that seeks to explore what works best in our concrete engagements with inequities. However, the objection’s grip can be weakened by insisting on the need for self-refection and deliberation. For the judgments involved in identifying specific inequities are not arbitrary or unfounded. Whether or not, for example, the overcoming of social hierarchies based on gender is a worthwhile endeavor that should take priority over other struggles can obviously be debated. But the focus on gender as one privileged site of exclusion and oppression within a stratified social field appears to be well justified, despite the fact that other, intersecting categories of exclusion and oppression exist as well. Thus, the motive behind amelioration is not to suggest that a specific target concept is the one and only telos of emancipatory strivings; its content is evidently open to contestation and transformation. What our “critically examined purposes” are will change over time, affected by movements and struggles within the political space we share and build with others. This implies also that the exercise of detecting “critically

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examined purposes” must remain continuously sensitive to critique. Otherwise the danger of reification looms, permanently privileging one category of exclusion and oppression at the expense of others, such as race or class. The trenchant critiques of white feminism track this problem of unduly hedging the realm of social hierarchies.52 A static understanding of social hierarchies undermines the practical goal of amelioration, with its ambition to work toward political responses to challenges in the real world. For our project, Haslanger’s insight pertains to the fundamental way conceptual resources are connected to practices. The ameliorative approach endorsed in this book thus starts from the assumption that grappling with the social world necessitates an entirely different toolbox than observing and taxonomizing the natural world. Since we make use of definitions not only to describe or explain but also to reflectively intervene into the social world, by way of exercising critique and by applying normative standards, it is imperative to conceive of conceptualizations as serving specific goals that cannot be divorced from broader concerns about how we may respond to violence. The advantage of this ameliorative approach can be illustrated by again looking at the case of genocide. As indicated earlier, during the war in ExYugoslavia, the Serbian army launched a concerted campaign of sexual violence in reaction to the threat of prosecution for genocide. If we start by asking what the practical point of having a specific definition is and which goals it is supposed to serve, then we are in a position to question a rigidly legalistic interpretation of the notion of genocide, which at that time did not include rape as genocidal. Claudia Card’s suggestion to capture the evil of genocide as causing “social death”53 is an ameliorative intervention of exemplary quality: against the predominant account in international law, Card marks out what she proposes as specific about genocide as opposed to mass murder—the former targets a group’s social vitality, while the latter intends its physical destruction—and then refers to this specificity to expand the notion of genocide such that it covers types of violence that have hitherto not been recognized as genocidal. This involves a double act of naming, whereby an existing definition is first revised and then used to denounce genocidal acts in the real world. An ameliorative move like this cannot put an end to looping effects, of course. Perpetrators will inevitably continue to invent new forms of

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violence that might escape the purview of current definitions of genocide. Yet, what matters most is the practical direction of Card’s project: instead of taking the legal instruments for granted, she asks how we can make the best of the word genocide such that it enables us to account for, and respond to, a specific kind of violence. Amelioration in this sense crucially hangs on the capacity not only to develop new definitions or adapt existing ones (as political theorists typically aspire to do), but also to draw on the imagination in various creative ways. This is why it is one of the book’s ambitions to push the ameliorative project beyond the traditional confines of political-theoretical discourse and look at artistic narratives for triggering what I shall call aspect change. Before I turn to this idea, however, more needs to be said about the faculty of judgment. If political theory is concerned with the practical side of our vocabulary, then we must reflect on the underlying purposes and tasks that concepts ought to perform. How do we examine them successfully? I shall suggest that judging is crucial for the sake of defining political violence insofar as it permits us to identify the purposes and tasks that our conceptualizations ought to fulfill. By judgments I mean positions that have a peculiar character, one that is markedly different from what we colloquially mean when we speak of judgments: they do not derive from preestablished principles or idealized norms about the way the social world ought to be organized, but emerge in concrete situations and aim at reaching validity beyond the context from which they materialized. In spite of significant differences, the proponents of the recent turn to judgment in contemporary political theory conceive of politics as pertaining to complex situations where no easily applicable formulae are available. Judgment pays tribute to the singularity of each situation and does not attempt to legitimize decisions by referring to historically invariable principles of justice. If anything can be said to unite the diverse approaches to judgment, it is a deep-seated aversion to methodological approaches and practical ideologies that conceive of norms as context-insensitive. Thinking about judgment in this way is a venerable tradition within the history of philosophy: from Aristotle’s concept of phronesis, to Immanuel Kant’s distinction between determinant and reflective judgment, to Hannah Arendt’s celebration of the faculty of judgment in political affairs, some of the most influential philosophers have developed

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sophisticated accounts of why judgment matters for morality and politics alike.54 A quick survey of these seminal authors will help shape the distinct conception of imaginative judgments undergirding the subsequent chapters. For our purpose, the lineage connecting Immanuel Kant to Hannah Arendt is of exceptional relevance, for it provides the background for today’s appropriations of the faculty of judgment. In the following, I shall thus quickly rehearse both Kant’s and Arendt’s views on judgment and then point to contemporary interpretations of these views that showcase the wide spectrum of what can be done with the faculty of judgment. Needless to say, there are other trajectories of thought from which one could draw similar conclusions about the centrality of judgment. In his Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), which contains reflections on both aesthetics and teleology, Kant introduces a distinction between two types of judgment: determinant and reflective. Determinant judgments concern situations where we are in the possession of the universal rule or principle and try to establish whether a particular case falls under that rule or principle. When engaging in determinant judgment, we use deductive reasoning to decide about a particular case. The work of courts can sometimes be described through this mode of judgment: When attempting to decide whether a suspect has engaged in a crime like genocide, torture, or terrorism, the judges will have to first make sense of a variety of authoritative texts (the law) and then assess the evidence in order to determine the suspect’s culpability. Here, the authoritative texts form the benchmark against which a particular case is assessed. Without that benchmark, determinant judgment would simply be impossible. Contrast this with the notion of reflective judgment. Kant claims that, when we do not possess a rule or principle that could sustain our deductive reasoning, we examine the particular case in view of “creating” the universal. Reflective judgment is predicated on the ability to extrapolate from a particular case to a rule or principle that could be shown to subsume that case. To return to our fictional tribunal: sometimes judges must examine a case where the authoritative texts are insufficiently developed or where the law is simply not yet equipped to address a specific issue. In such a situation, the court will have to first analyze the existing legal instruments and practices and then interpret them in such a way that the particular case under scrutiny can serve as an example of a new law.55

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Judgments of taste entail feelings of pleasure and displeasure,56 which are for Kant noncognitive and thus impermeable to ratiocination. Kant’s definition of the beautiful as that “which pleases universally without a concept”57 is clearly meant to demarcate aesthetic and teleological judgments from the realm of pure reason. This implies that we do not have objective standards at our disposal to rationally assess an object’s claim to beauty. When making a judgment of taste, reflection in the specific sense used by Kant requires one to move from the particular case (a specific painting or poem or song) toward a universal category—that which is beautiful. Although aesthetic judgments cannot claim to be objective, neither is their content merely subjective.58 Since they must be “capable of being universally communicated,”59 they can be shared with others. This condition is central to Kant’s interpretation of what is special about judgments of taste. It is because we are able to deliberate over why a specific painting or poem or song is beautiful that aesthetic judgments are more than idiosyncratic expressions. Kant’s thoughts on the reflective nature of a certain class of judgments have spawned an impressive list of interpretations and appropriations, some of which remain more faithful to the original than others. For our purpose, Hannah Arendt’s reading of reflective judgment as political judgment is especially important. Arendt developed her ideas about political judgment in what would have been the final volume of The Life of the Mind,60 had she not died in 1975, at sixty-nine. The first two volumes, published only posthumously, deal with two central dimensions of the vita contemplativa: thinking and willing. The final volume was supposed to grapple with the capacity to judge, a theme that had preoccupied her for a great deal of time already, and perhaps most notably in her portrayal of Adolf Eichmann as a thoughtless perpetrator of unspeakable atrocities.61 We thus only have rudimentary writings at hand when trying to reconstruct Arendt’s theory of judgment. But there is sufficient material for us to tease out what distinguishes judgment from her point of view.62 Arendt sought to appropriate Kant’s notion of aesthetic judgment for politics. Her starting point is that judging concerns our “ability to tell right from wrong, beautiful from ugly.” 63 Here we can already see where Arendt departs from Kant: for Kant, questions of right and wrong were governed by moral reasoning and as such were to be held apart from aesthetic

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concerns. Judging is a distinct human capacity that shares some features with thinking, yet does not collapse into it. In bringing the individual faculty of taste and the collective nature of politics together, Arendt anchored her theory in the relation between the subject’s standpoint and its judgment’s appeal to generality. The Kantian notion of taste is thus essential to Arendt’s endeavor, precisely because it contravenes what is ordinarily perceived as the idiosyncratic character of judgments of beauty. As we have seen earlier, the Critique of the Power of Judgment introduces a distinction between “reflective” and “determinant” modes of judgment that is crucial for Arendt’s project. The differentia specifica of aesthetic judgments lies in an appeal to generality that is not based on a preestablished rule or principle. The lack of a concept, under which a particular could be subsumed, separates aesthetic judgments even more from logical reasoning, where arguments are compelling insofar as they refer to the truth. Judgments of beauty do not compel others to agree, as Kant emphasizes, for the claim to generality implicated in aesthetic judgment is made possible by common sense, not by pure reason. In addition, taste is a matter of discussion: it must be communicable and open to debate. The best way to achieve this is to employ an “enlarged mentality.” 64 For judgments of beauty to be both subjective (as opposed to the objective knowledge generated by pure reason) and impartial (in contrast to the relativism of De gustibus non est disputandum), it is indispensable to endow the judging person with this ability to think representatively. The validity of a proposition regarding beautiful objects can be secured because it has an exemplary status. For Arendt, thinking representatively has relevance for politics, as the following lengthy quotation underlines: That the capacity to judge is a specifically political ability in exactly the sense denoted by Kant, namely the ability to see things not only from one’s own point of view but in the perspective of all those who happen to be present; even that judgment may be one of the fundamental abilities of man as a political being insofar as it enables him to orient himself in the public realm, in the common world—these are insights that are virtually as old as articulated political experience. . . . The difference between this judging insight and speculative thought lies in that the former has its roots in what we usually call common sense, which the latter

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transcends. Common sense . . . discloses to us the world insofar as it is a common world. . . . Judging is one, if not the most, important activity in which this sharing-the-world-with-others comes to pass. What, however, is quite new in Kant’s propositions in the Critique of Judgment is that he discovered this phenomenon precisely when he was examining the phenomenon of taste and hence the only kind of judgments which, since they concern merely aesthetic matters, have always been supposed to lie outside the political realm as well as the domain of reason.65

The fact that we share the world with others is a condition of possibility of political judgment. To train our imaginative abilities in the public realm will only work if we acknowledge the world as a common one. The enlarged mentality of the subject needs to be linked to the (imagined or real) presence of others from whom agreement to particular judgments can be elicited. As judges, we can rise above idiosyncrasies only if we place ourselves in the position of those who inhabit and negotiate a common world with us. The goal of this endeavor is to reach a point where impartiality is not imposed as a rule- or principle-governed directive, but rather emerges out of civic deliberations and practices of freedom. Thinking representatively will, therefore, generate political judgments that are, strictly speaking, neither subjective nor objective. Their validity will be guaranteed by “incessant talk,” which guarantees that the “world we have in common is usually regarded from an infinite number of different standpoints.” 66 The reception of Arendt’s account of judgment has been complex, differentiated, and creative. While it is not vital to delve into the depths of the secondary literature, it might help to simply locate the notion of judgment, as developed by Arendt, in relation to both moralism and realism. The very idea that judgments emerge where no universal principle is available tells us that moralists will not be able to concur with a broadly Arendtian outlook. The faculty of judgment is not only necessary to “apply” theoretical knowledge to real-world cases; it is crucial for illuminating the ways in which concepts are formed and adapted in view of new developments on the ground. This characteristic feature of judging is conducive to responding to the speed and scale of all kinds of social change: it allows one to react to adverse looping effects. A major problem with

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moralist approaches to defining violence is that they are insensitive to the fact that such looping effects can occur at all times. Once we abstract from the messiness of real-world politics, once we ignore the existence of the “politics of naming” altogether, we end up with normative standards that elide the profound ways in which our judgments are conditioned by our particular contexts. As I have claimed, such a move cannot provide a solution to the fundamental challenge that social change poses. Rather, what we need is a process in which the interaction between our concepts and the social world can be actively shaped in an ameliorative fashion. The contextualized nature of judgment makes this possible.67 In this process, determinant and reflective modes of judging might go hand in hand, mutually enforcing each other.68 To give one example in which this is clearly the case, consider again Card’s engagement with the notion of “genocide.” Any attempt to redescribe the meaning of “genocide” will have to start somewhere, and it is usually, and with good reason, the legal definition of a specific form of violence that serves as the launchpad for critical interventions. Card thus takes a general category and seeks to explore whether it fits with her reasoned observations of social phenomena, such as rape, that might eventually be subsumed under a revised version of the general category. Thus, there is a back-andforth between determinant and reflective modes of judging.

1 . 4 . I M AG I N I N G OT H E RW I S E : F R O M D I S R U P T I O N TO I N S T R U C T I O N

The prior section has shown why the faculty of judgment matters for political theory in its aspiration to ameliorate existing vocabularies, but we have not yet established how the imagination connects to this framework. If judging entails a move from the particularity of a specific situation to a putatively general claim (and back), a question about the place of the imagination arises. Why should one focus on the imagination in this context? Certainly, Arendt herself assigns a prominent role to the imagination in her account of judgment. After all, enlarging one’s mentality

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involves the ability to “put oneself in thought in the place of everyone else” 69—an ability that must not, under any circumstances, be mistaken for what Arendt derisively calls an “enormously enlarged empathy.”70 Arendt argues that thinking “with an enlarged mentality means that one trains one’s imagination to go visiting.”71 “Going visiting” is an operation that hinges on the imagination: by attempting to envision a problem from the point of view of others, one abandons idiosyncratic preferences and opinions in favor of an impartial perspective. Judging, on Arendt’s account, thus crucially depends on the individual’s capacity to occupy imaginatively the position of others with whom a common world is shared and constructed. A person “going visiting” is therefore someone who steps back from his private occupations and takes a “position that enables him to see the whole.”72 The imagination as a faculty is related to perception, to the way we organize disparate appearances—or “intuitions,” in Kant’s terminology—into a coherent image.73 While I share Arendt’s interest in connecting the imagination to the faculty of judgment, I believe we need to be more specific about what precisely imagining things otherwise means in the context of discussions around genocide, torture, and terrorism. The reason for my departure from Arendt is this: the notion of an “enlarged mentality” only makes sense in conjunction with the idea of a common world; but surely there are aspects of the imagination that differ from “going visiting” in the sense outlined by Arendt. Not all types of imagining are about trying to hypothetically occupy the political standpoints of others; impartiality is not necessarily the goal of all registers of the imagination. What is more, Arendt’s proposal has been rightly criticized for failing to factor in the social and material determinants of change within a world viewed by several spectators.74 Put simply, the sensus communis underpinning acts of judgment and imagination can be as much a source of emancipation as it can debilitate and cripple attempts at enlarging one’s mentality.75 Given these worries, we would be well advised to expand Arendt’s analysis and elaborate on how the imagination can be put to use for the sake of amelioration. The suggestion is thus to think with Arendt beyond Arendt. What is it, then, that makes the imagination uniquely suitable for investigating conceptualizations of violence? The imagination matters for our ability to grapple with the social world for two different reasons: On the one hand, it allows us to break free from conventional

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understandings of the here and now that tie us to the real world. This happens when we build the proverbial castles in the sky or let our minds wander freely. Seen from this angle, imagining things otherwise can be a source of valuable estrangement such that what is taken for granted suddenly reveals its contingent character.76 The imagination thus conceived disrupts our habitual forms of perception and cognition. Such disruption is an essential mode of critical thinking more generally.77 Fredric Jameson speaks to this issue when he analyzes the ways in which utopian fiction dispels the myth of the unchangeability of the status quo: Disruption is, then, the name for a new discursive strategy, and Utopia is the form such disruption necessarily takes. And this is now the temporal situation in which the Utopian form proper . . . has its political role to play, and in fact becomes a new kind of content in its own right. For it is the very principle of the radical break as such, its possibility, which is reinforced by the Utopian form, which insists that its radical difference is possible and that a break is necessary.78

In parallel to the disruptive effects of estrangement, however, the imagination also enables us to acquire and deepen knowledge about the here and now. This transpires, for example, when thought experiments successfully fulfill the function of informing judgments about the real world, as I shall demonstrate in chapter 4. If we refer to the imagination in this vein, we ascribe an instructive side to it, in a fashion similar to Arendt’s celebration of an “enlarged mentality.” This implies that the imagination can teach us something about the world we currently inhabit, even if what is being imagined is purely fictional, outside of the domain of reality. Amy Kind and Peter Kung call this double quality of the imagination the “puzzle of imaginative use.”79 How can one mental capacity serve two radically different purposes? Their solution to this puzzle is to introduce specific and locally variable constraints on the imagination that explain how the tension between estrangement and instruction can be resolved. Once we focus on such constraints it becomes possible to perceive how the imagination may become a reliable source of knowledge. Constraining the imagination means that, whenever we are trying to imagine things differently, the process should be accompanied by consideration

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about the real-world effects that a specific register of the imagination might have.80 Insofar as the imagination can serve both disruptive and instructive purposes, it must actively affirm at least some relevant facts of the real world. Imagining in the service of amelioration can only be simultaneously disruptive and instructive if it facilitates, in various complex and often indirect ways, judgments in the real world. There are, then, some generic features that successful engagements of the imagination share across the cases surveyed in this book. The first such feature involves the willingness and ability to expand one’s conceptual horizon beyond the conventional boundaries of a given terminology. I call this dimension aspect change in chapter 2, borrowing from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s reflections on the interplay between cognition, perception, and the imagination. The ability to “see something as something” is important precisely because of the looping effects discussed earlier. Since we cannot predict the future shape of violence—including how our categories of violence will affect its practices—we must be capable of adapting our concepts to dynamic reality. Rigid adherence to legal terms, frequently found in debates over genocide, for example, obviates any attempt to creatively extend the reach of existing definitions. Second, while the imagination permits us to see things differently, it must retain a connection with the world as we know it for it to be beneficial. By this connection, I mean a recognition of some basic facts about human life, especially our shared condition of precariousness, that are often occluded in highly contrived thought experiments. Whenever we are invited to imagine a scenario in which torture is involved, we must not lose sight of human frailty. The point about introducing such a constraint on the imagination is to foreground the act of framing as constitutive of any exercise of the imagination. In any imaginary case, certain facts about the real world are screened out, while others are kept in full sight. Based on a social ontology of mutual interdependence and bodily precarity, my proposal is that recognizing human life in its precariousness and frailty must play a central part in this framing process. Third, the imagination helps avoid complacency about our normative commitments; it dispels intellectual lethargy with regard to what we care most about. The chapter on genealogy demonstrates how ostensibly

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innocuous notions, such as the concept of innocence, can be subjected to a critical-historical reading. Learning about the complex and hidden emergence of a value facilitates reflection on the potentially problematic nature of the norms sustaining our judgments. In this way, the imagination can put a check on naïve and short-sighted endeavors to come to terms with violence: moralists, in particular, tend to treat concepts such as innocence in a decontextualized way, simply identifying “innocent bystanders” as either those who are not actually threatening or those who bear no responsibility for an injustice. Both definitional strategies lack sensitivity to the real-world consequences that any appeal to innocence can have; genealogy as a form of engaging the imagination through history can help us remedy this blind spot. Fourth, all these features together do not, however, curtail the judging actor’s freedom. Aspect change, sensitivity to human frailty and precariousness, and the genealogical problematization of norms and values must not be understood as straightjackets that preempt the conclusions reached through processes of judgment. On the contrary, they are primarily enabling preconditions for the responsible use of the imagination. As Osiel reminds us, whenever we try to make sense of violence, our ethical sensitivity is either foreclosed or cultivated, depending on how we position ourselves toward the object of inquiry. Provided the imagination is engaged in a responsible manner, the challenge of establishing the right distance between spectator and spectacle can be met. This disruptive and instructive potential of the imagination has received considerable attention from political theorists over the past decade. Authors such as Raymond Geuss, Chiara Bottici, and Linda Zerilli have explored the manifold ways in which politics and imagination intersect with, and impact on, each other. Geuss, who is one of today’s most vociferous critics of moralism in political theory, praises the power to imagine things differently, when he proclaims that “any organized attempt at improvement of our situation will include some at least minimal exercise of the imagination, in that it will require agents to think of ways in which their environment or modes of acting could be different from what they now are.”81 What makes Geuss’s approach so insightful is his attention to the multifarious uses we can make of the imagination: it can serve progressive goals as much as it may reinforce reactionary agendas. This implies that the faculty of imagination is neither inherently

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beneficial nor essentially nefarious. The crucial question to ask is how we engage the imagination productively. Bottici takes a different route when she approaches the imagination in its capacity to generate images. Her rejection of the term imaginary in favor of imaginal signals a specific concern with the ways in which images make politics possible.82 Bottici argues that a focus on “imaginal politics” can shed light on a variety of disparate phenomena, such as human rights or religion in the public sphere. Her approach is quite unique in that it rejects the mainstream debates on the imagination in favor of investigating the “production of images at both the conscious and the unconscious level.”83 Finally, Zerilli builds on Arendt’s thoughts when she maintains that the imagination is “productive and spontaneous, not merely reproductive of what is already known, but generative of new forms and figures.”84 This creative capacity of the imagination is vital for what Zerilli calls “freedomcentered”85 feminist theory, because it allows us to radically disrupt the limits of the “thinkable.” Imagining things differently thus permits us to overcome and reconfigure ossified categories. Geuss, Bottici, and Zerilli offer important contributions to our understanding of the imagination, taking into account various perspectives. They each point to relevant aspects and disclose insightful perspectives on why political theorists should take this faculty seriously. However, my approach deviates in some respects from theirs. I maintain that the faculty of imagination takes many different forms, but three of its registers, that is, three ways in which the imagination gets engaged, stand out. In the following, I examine the faculty of imagination by probing the potential of narrative arts, thought experiments, and genealogy to broaden our understanding of, and our capability to respond to, political violence. Each of these registers—the artistic, the hypothetical, and the historical—can be activated to affect the viewers’ or readers’ imagination in both a disruptive and an instructive manner. In a nutshell, narrative artworks can devise new lenses for seeing political violence. The example of how we have come to recognize, under specific circumstances, rape as a form of genocide is illuminating: without artistic representations of recent conflicts, the theoretical debate would remain stuck. Storytelling can in practice trigger “aspect change”—the ability to switch from one perceptive and interpretive frame to another.

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Thought experiments aim to achieve something else: they confront us with possible scenarios that probe our preconceived ideas about what should be done in complex situations. While the “ticking bomb” scenario has taken center stage in recent years, I also look into other thought experiments, which test the permissibility of torture. The main argument in this chapter is that hypotheticals fulfill an important function in engaging the imagination if (and only if) they enhance the viewers’ and readers’ capacity to judge cases in the real world. Their goal should be defamiliarization, which is to be distinguished from the more problematic experience of alienation. Finally, genealogy is a method by which the historical emergence of an idea or practice is reconstructed. Later I explore how this method can help us in reflecting on what makes terrorism special. Many political theorists today promote so-called object-focused definitions, in which the status of the targets of terrorist acts is highlighted. In historicizing the notion of innocence, feminists plead for a reevaluation of one of Just War theory’s main pillars. This leads to the historical denaturalization of ostensibly uncomplicated notions, which in turn enables us to reevaluate how we define terrorism today. Genealogy thus teaches us about the way specific norms have come about. In sum, while I am influenced by the groundbreaking work of Geuss, Bottici, and Zerilli, my ambition in this book differs from theirs: I do not endeavor to develop a grand theory of the imagination, but rather wish to explore various roles that the imagination can perform for political theory. Much of what I have to say about the imagination will thus take the form of reflections around specific cases. To the extent that these reflections can be fleshed out toward a more systematic account of the imagination in general, the conclusion will outline its contours. We can at this point articulate with some precision the formal relationship between attempts at amelioration, the faculty to imagine things otherwise, and the human capacity to judge. This book’s novel approach to conceptualizations of violence depends on the prior identification of emancipatory purposes that serve as “targets” for ameliorative interventions. The kinds of contextualized judgment discussed earlier perform a pivotal function in this process as they arise from specific situations, yet appeal to generality in such a way as to elicit agreement from others. Note here that such locally embedded judgments do not generate formulae

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through which we might be able to revise existing vocabularies. Rather, they are bound up with the context to which they respond, without ever being determined by it. Judging is only possible if it is liberated from necessity. The faculty of the imagination ensures that the here and now does not become a paralyzing straightjacket. If we cultivate the crucially important ability to see things differently, through engagements with artistic narratives, thought experiments, and genealogies, we are in a better position to continually assess the purposes that the ameliorative approach serves.

1 . 5 . P O L I T I C A L T H EO RY A N D I T S AU D I E N C E

So far, we have rehearsed why and how the imagination can inform the ameliorative project of dealing with conceptualizations of violence. Yet, I still need to clarify one issue that is of crucial importance, namely, which ideal of political theory underwrites the project I hope to defend in this book. How can we characterize a political theory that contributes to the ameliorative project and is sustained by imaginative judgments? In answering this question, I want to direct attention toward the audience with whom political theory converses. The suggestion that any ameliorative project ultimately needs to enhance “our conceptual resources to serve our (critically examined) purposes,” as Haslanger remarks, implies that the work of the political theorist—her attempts at understanding, evaluating, and orientating—must strive to have some impact on the social world in which it intervenes. This reflection leads us quite naturally to interrogate the “listeners” to whom political theorizing is turning. On Bernard Williams’s view, political theory can only fulfill its vocation of being heard if its diagnoses and prescriptions somehow link up with the self-interpretations of those who have been spoken to.86 But in suggesting that political theorists ought to address themselves to those outside academe, I specifically do not mean by this that we ought to simply pontificate at the philosophically uninitiated. Such a perspective would have the unfortunate upshot of symbolically elevating the political theorist above her audience, an unattractively elitist image that needs dismantling.

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What, then, does it mean for political theory to speak to an audience in the sense described earlier? Since political theorists are concerned with practical as opposed to theoretical reasoning, their work is best understood as contributing, in various complex and often indirect ways, to discussions “with their fellow citizens as equals.”87 Yet another way of expressing this thought is to describe political theory’s attempt at amelioration as “principled social criticism.”88 Evidently, this does not entail that such a democratic orientation toward the public debate would be the sole criterion by which we may assess political theory’s propositions; but it provides us with a standpoint from which we are able to perceive more clearly when and how political theorists fail to take practical reasoning seriously. William’s account has the advantage of homing in on the relationship between political theorists and their audience. This relationship is rarely ever problematized, but from a soberly realist perspective its importance is clear. The downside of William’s argument is that it conceives of this relationship in a hierarchical manner. When the theorist speaks, her audience listens attentively. This is not the view that motivates the reflections in this book. Rather, I embrace a vision of political theory that not only stresses the significance for political theory to connect with the selfinterpretations of those who have been spoken to, but also acknowledges the need for political theorists to learn to listen to those who speak back. How can these potentially contradictory aspirations be reconciled? A few authors have taken steps toward an answer to that question. James Tully’s view of public philosophy, for example, contains one of the best accounts of political theory as an ameliorative project. It can be summarized in the following manner: 1. Political theory starts from the everyday practices of ordinary citizens. Their concerns are the effective triggers for what public philosophers do. 2. The primary task of the theorist is to reflect on these everyday practices, through historical reconstructions and critical engagements. 3. Simultaneously, the political theorist conceives of her role as an essentially critical one, by showing that certain practices themselves involve unfreedom and oppression. 4. This critical gaze of public philosophy aims to provide ordinary citizens with tools to resist unfreedom and oppression.

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Tully’s approach to political theory puts evaluation and orientation on a par with the wish to add to a more nuanced understanding of the status quo. Consequently, the relationship between public affairs—or politics more generally—and philosophy is dynamic and interactive. Using another one of Tully’s illuminating formulations, public philosophy operates through a relationship of “reciprocal elucidation.”89 It is, therefore, not only the ordinary citizen who may benefit from listening to the public philosopher; she herself learns something from attending to those at the forefront of social struggles against unfreedom and oppression.90 The crucial insight in Tully’s work is that the dialogue in which the public philosopher becomes entwined is thoroughly bidirectional and nonhierarchical. The theorist and the citizen are basically engaged in the same kind of activity when they fight against injustice, even though they employ different tools in their respective struggles. This point reveals a deep similarity between Haslanger’s ameliorative approach and Tully’s plea for “reciprocal elucidation.” Tully’s thoughts have ramifications for the skill set that political theorists need to acquire. Chief among those skills is the ability not only to engage with the problems of their audience, but also to learn to listen attentively to their viewpoints.91 Another angle to approach Tully’s work is to remark that his project is oriented toward practical, as opposed to theoretical, reasoning.92 “Practical reasoning” here implies that the goals of public philosophy are inextricably intertwined with the aspirations, hopes, and fears of other political actors. This has the consequence that political theorists do not pretend to provide final responses to issues encountered in the public sphere. Rather, these issues remain open to contestation and revision in light of the joint conversation. This is also the crux of what Iris Marion Young calls theorizing “with a practical intent”: a peculiar mode of argumentation that eschews comprehensive systematicity and instead aspires to “solve a conceptual or normative problem that arises from a practical context.”93 To invoke yet another source of inspiration for this mode of theorizing, consider Gilles Deleuze’s response to Michel Foucault, in a conversation about how their respective philosophies relate to their activism: “From the moment a theory moves into its proper domain, it begins to encounter obstacles, walls, and blockages which require its relay by another type of discourse (it is through this other discourse that it eventually passes a different domain).

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Practice is a set of relays from one theoretical point to another. No theory can develop without eventually encountering a wall, and practice is necessary for piercing this wall.”94 All these authors affirm, in their own idioms, that the traditional opposition of theory and practice needs to be overcome. The dialogical and democratic framework is uniquely suitable for making sense of political theory as an ameliorative project sustained by imaginative judgments. Since it is a hallmark of these judgments that they strive to secure agreement for their substantive positions, without enforcing such agreement, it follows that any suggestion how we may transform and improve the existing vocabulary is provisional and open to further revisions. The success of the ameliorative project thus also depends, to a certain degree, on the uptake it generates within the social world. As the ensuing chapters argue, this uptake by political theory’s audience is rarely straightforward. Storytelling, thought experiments, and genealogy operate on different registers of the imagination, and it is impossible to predict which interventions will bring about their desired effects on our ways of thinking. But what counts is the sustained and committed attempt to make such change happen. This view of political theory remains, in a basic sense, indebted to the luminaries of the Frankfurt School. In his seminal essay from 1937 “Traditional and Critical Theory,”95 Max Horkheimer asserted that theorizing has traditionally been underpinned by the Cartesian division between facts and values. Its main mode of inquiry was to abstract from the historical specificity of the subject’s “perceiving organ,”96 in order to proffer value-free and universally valid descriptions of reality. By contrast, critical theorizing radically departs from this epistemological model: it is fully conscious of its own positionality within the social world. As a consequence, it rejects the pretensions of a theory that proceeds by idealization. Horkheimer’s account of the relationship between theory and practice forms an important background assumption of the ensuing reflections. If this point is denied, political theory strays off the path it should in fact be treading. One of critical theory’s distinctive features is that it pursues truth not for its own sake; it “never aims simply at an increase of knowledge as such. Its goal is man’s emancipation from slavery.”97 That emancipatory drive also propels the ameliorative project. Accordingly, if the ambition is to theorize “with a practical intent,” to invoke Young’s

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dictum again, ideals of value-freedom and universal validity appear like dangerous illusions. But it is also vital to acknowledge the degree to which this dialogical and democratic account deviates from the early Frankfurt School perspective, or at least from the one articulated by Horkheimer.98 Horkheimer’s endorsement of the emancipatory drive of theory was often accompanied by a decidedly elitist self-conception of the privileged role of intellectuals in guiding progressive transformation. If we follow the lead of such diverse authors as Tully, Young, Foucault, and Deleuze, we will have to relinquish the desire to obtain such a privileged standpoint. Rather, the idea is to look in earnest at the ways in which the ameliorative project can gain traction if it crafts viable alliances with initiatives outside academe. This becomes as much evident in the narrative artworks I discuss in chapter 2 as it is in the thought experiments and historical problematizations that I examine in chapters 3 and 4. In all these cases, political theory’s role is circumscribed by practical concerns in the real world. This teaches us that modesty—not normally considered a disciplinary asset—is a virtue that political theorists should be guided by. As Amy Allen puts it so eloquently with regard to the implications that a fruitful conversation with “colonized and subaltern subjects” would have, adopting a modest stance “entails an active and ongoing problematization of our own point of view and of our belief in its cognitive and moral superiority.”99 Needless to say, this view of political theory as a dialogical and democratic enterprise is not an uncontroversial one. Among others, G. A. Cohen famously defended the speculative nature of political theory, asserting that “the question . . . is not what we should do but what we should think, even when what we should think makes no practical difference.”100 As should be clear from what has been said so far, within the framework informing the upcoming reflections, a strict separation between thinking and acting, as embraced by Cohen and many other authors whom we will encounter on the following pages, is not desirable for political theory. Or rather, such a strict separation betrays a moralist attitude toward politics, which ultimately negates the practical character of political theory. Moralism of this kind hence deploys a mode of reasoning and argumentation that Sheldon Wolin calls “theoretic theory”101—a scholastic posture of evading the real world of politics.

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Inasmuch as this book also contains a fair amount of criticism of the existing debate, I shall demonstrate that pure speculation favors a form of the imagination in which reality constraints are completely absent. Once the driving force behind political theory becomes “what we should think,” rather than “what we should do,” the very purpose of engaging the imagination shifts from action-guidance to abstract ruminations. As a consequence, the debate in political theory runs the risk of becoming overly self-referential and narrow-minded, detached from the wider issues that animate the public debate.102 Political theory in this vein resembles a one-way street where the direction of travel is strictly regulated and policed. Promoting pure speculation should hence be resisted, especially in cases where the use of violence is discussed. If we adopt the dialogical and democratic model, however, we openly acknowledge that a great variety of actors attempt to deliver innovative and productive responses to violence. The learning processes between political theorists and their audience are hence bidirectional. The moralist response to the politics of naming is usually to abstract away from the messiness of real-world politics, insisting on ideal standards by which we might manage to criticize existing inequities. The problem with this response, as David Miller recently observed, is that “if justice cannot be achieved on earth . . . then there is nothing left for political philosophy but lamentation over the size of the gap that unavoidably exists between the ideals it defends and the actual conditions of human life.”103 Despite the apparent radicalism of philosophers such as Cohen, political theory as lamentation is in fact profoundly conservative: the vast, unbridgeable distance between the Socratic-Platonic idea of justice and the reality of political affairs makes the posture of resignation vis-àvis the misère du monde appear inevitable. Lamentation, in short, erodes and contravenes the spirit of amelioration, even if all endeavors to improve existing frameworks surely start with the often-painful diagnosis of a specific shortcoming and deficiency. How we get from a litany of regrets to action-guidance is the crucial question for a dialogical and democratic vision of political theory, one that this book hopes to tentatively answer. We can now draw out the contrast between the practical ideal of political theory underwriting this book, on the one hand, and the moralist and realist models, on the other hand. I have intimated that focusing on

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the audience of political theory requires us to reflect on not only who might be its listeners but also why political theorists might have to learn to listen. This view, shared by a broad alliance of thinkers from different intellectual traditions, stands in contrast to both moralism and unreconstructed realism. Moralists, in their attempt to make the moral prior to the political, are simply not interested in the kind of nonhierarchical dialogue that Tully advocates: they are concerned with finding the one true answer and then communicating that answer in as clear a language as possible. As we shall see in chapter 2, this becomes especially evident in their efforts to decontest definitions of violence such that the politics of naming is finally overcome. Hence, the moralist model—perhaps best epitomized by Cohen’s fetishization of the supreme value of pure speculation—ultimately conceives of the relationship between political theory and its audience in a monological manner. On the realist model, political theory’s audience is fully acknowledged. Understanding the status quo requires a recognition of what Tully calls the “primacy of practice.”104 But if evaluation and orientation are important facets of a sober realism, we need to take seriously the suggestion that interpreting the current situation alone is not enough. One of the imperatives derived from political theory’s democratic and dialogical commitment is, to quote Tully again, to establish an on-going mutual relation with the concrete struggles, negotiations and implementations of citizens who experiment with modifying the practices of governance on the ground. This is not a matter of prescribing the limits of how they must think, deliberate and act if they are to be legitimate, but, on the contrary, to offer a disclosive sketch of the arbitrary and unnecessary limits to the ways they are constrained to think, deliberate and act, and of the possible ways of going beyond them in this context.105

1 . 6 . A S U M M A RY O F T H E A R G U M E N T

In concluding this introduction, I briefly sketch the arguments developed on the subsequent pages. Chapter  2 engages with the phenomenon of

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genocide, and how we may come to terms with it. It starts with the observation that conventional philosophical efforts to distill the essence of “genocide” down to a new and improved definition fail to register the ever-changing nature of political violence. Faced with this challenge, the chapter suggests that the contemporary debate on genocide (and its denial) should be complemented with a focus on transforming the perceptive and interpretive frameworks through which acts of violence are discussed in the public sphere. I argue that it is enlightening to speak of “genocide blindness” in cases where the members of the public sphere are simply incapable of seeing an instance of violence as genocidal. To diagnose “genocide blindness,” the chapter introduces Ludwig Wittgenstein’s reflections on “aspect-seeing” so as to underline the importance of changing how political violence is perceived and interpreted. In a second step, the chapter turns to María Pía Lara’s theory of storytelling as a concrete mechanism for triggering and instituting this kind of change. Storytelling, along with its effect on the viewers’ and readers’ imagination, is a crucial component for grappling with the fluid nature of political violence, this chapter argues. Two case studies are introduced to illustrate this claim: Jasmila Çbaniʉ’s film Grbavica (2006) and the documentary Climate Refugees (2010) by Michael Nash. Chapter 3 grapples with the recent torture debates and asks whether hypotheticals involving torture can be subjected to critical scrutiny. It develops a framework for normatively assessing these thought experiments. For imaginary cases within the realm of practical—as opposed to theoretical—philosophy to gain any “imaginative grip” at all, they must be action-guiding, or so I shall argue. This means hypotheticals ought to assist their addressees in making judgments about real-world dilemmas, even if they purposefully depict a possible world that is remote from reality. Against the widely held assumption that thought experiments are exempt from criticism because they only engage the readers’ imagination, the chapter argues that we should distinguish between productive, thisworldly hypotheticals and deleterious, otherworldly hypotheticals. This distinction is made according to a criterion of modality: while far fetched, the former construct imaginary cases that are possible for us, here and now; the latter depict imaginary cases that are barely conceivable at all. To establish this claim, the chapter interrogates, via a discussion of Susan Sontag’s and Judith Butler’s accounts of representations of violence, the frames through which hypotheticals construct possible worlds and

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concludes that some frames are better than others at sustaining a link with the world as we know it. Frames that disrupt this link can be charged with failing to offer action-guidance. Chapter 4 turns to the spectacle of terrorism and asks whether attempts to define terrorism via a focus on the primary victims of terrorist attacks— innocent noncombatants, in the parlance of Just War theory—are viable. While there is a vibrant debate about how best to define terrorism, little reflection has so far been dedicated to the issue of what a definition of terrorism is supposed to deliver. Following in the footsteps of two recent interventions in this debate, by Christopher Finlay and Verena Erlenbusch, the chapter suggests that a genealogical approach is needed for making sense of so-called object-focused definitions of terrorism. By genealogy, I mean a historical investigation into the complex and often unexplored “shameful origins” (Friedrich Nietzsche) of ostensibly natural categories and norms. Genealogy is critical in that it aims to disclose the ways in which our repertoire of norms and principles is constructed through and through. Innocence, as feminist scholars teach us, offers a prime example for this historicity. Far from being self-evident, references to the status of “noncombatants” are vested with particular meanings that can be shown to be thoroughly gendered. Reading “innocence” through this genealogical lens requires us to acknowledge the contingent and potentially problematic character of the values underpinning our ameliorative projects. In the final part, the coda, I draw together some of the insights developed in this book. The conclusion contains reflections on how a more systematic account of the imagination might look. It points to both the limitations and the potential of the three registers of the imagination discussed in the preceding chapters and explores the relationship between a realist political theory and the imagination.

2 TELLING STORIES On Art’s Role in Dispelling Genocide Blindness

I

f there is one common denominator in global politics today, it appears to be the universal abhorrence and condemnation of genocide. No matter where their political allegiances or ideological commitments lie, politicians and citizens around the world will concur that genocide is among the worst crimes human beings can commit. Indeed, some commentators have suggested we should consider it the “crime of crimes,” setting it apart from other horrific acts committed during war or in peacetime. If the twentieth century has taught us anything, it is surely that states whose sovereignty remains unchecked tend to engage in unspeakable atrocities. Genocide, as one prominent author intimates, is a “problem from hell,”1 not only for those directly affected by it, but also for the wider public witnessing these atrocities from afar. What needs to be done when genocides occur has become increasingly evident: simply standing by is not an option anymore. With the establishment of the International Criminal Court in 2002, and the emerging doctrine of a “Responsibility to Protect,” it now seems clearer than ever that perpetrators of genocide will have to face prosecution for their deeds. Impunity for mass violence can nowadays be countered in many different ways. A closer look, however, reveals that the condemnation of genocide is occasionally accompanied by a lingering suspicion about the ways in which the word genocide is abused in public discourse. It is often maintained that

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invoking genocide serves political purposes that are drowned out by the high pitch of public outrage: genocide figures, in Mahmood Mamdani’s words, as the “antithesis of the Nobel Prize, part of a rhetorical arsenal that helps you vilify your adversaries while ensuring impunity for your allies.”2 Critics point out that geostrategic interests explain the depiction of one conflict as genocide and another one as civil war. It matters enormously, on this perspective, whether states manage to attach specific labels to remain in control of the politics of naming—a genocide calls for a different kind of response than a civil war. How should political theorists react to the fact that notions like genocide are vulnerable to manipulation? Should we resign ourselves and conclude, “Well, so be it—politics is inherently messy, and political theory’s goal is not to take this messiness at face value, but rather to abstract from it so as to sketch a clearer picture of what makes ‘genocide’ special”? Earlier I stated that I find this rejoinder unsatisfactory for a variety of reasons: first, it betrays an understanding of how political theorists stand vis-à-vis their audience that seems undemocratic and monological. Political theory ought to talk to and in dialogue with the public, not speak at it. Withdrawal from the messiness of politics is a form of escapism that should be resisted. Second, even if withdrawal were an option, it misconstrues the role normative arguments play in public discourse. Although I reject the generalized suspicion of authors like Mamdani, I agree with their basic claim that definitions of political violence cannot simply be extracted from their everyday usages, lest we violate the democratic and dialogical premises on which political theory should rest. Third, the aforementioned attitude of shrugging off the messiness of “genocide” in public discourse fails to appreciate the dynamic forces driving conceptual transformations in light of changing social facts. Political theorists should, in the spirit of amelioration, try to redescribe terms so that they capture more appropriately the character of violence permanently in flux. But in these attempts at redescriptions, they are not isolated actors—writers as well as filmmakers and other artists offer rich resources too. In this chapter, I therefore hope to widen political theory’s horizon of engagements: from the conceptual to the aesthetic realm.

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2 .1 . A S H O RT H I S TO RY O F G E N O C I D E : CO N C E P T UA L I N N OVAT I O N

The concept of genocide has a peculiar history, which includes conceptual innovation, legal codification, political contestation, and theoretical redescription of the sort that we have called “amelioration.” In order to unravel how these distinct elements—innovation, codification, contestation, and ameliorative redescription—have been evolving, let us begin with the initial step in this history. How and when did the word genocide become part of our social and political vocabulary? Where did it originate? It was the Polish-American jurist Raphael Lemkin who first linked the Greek word for race or kind (genos) to the Latin root for murder (-cide).3 In Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, originally published in 1944, Lemkin dealt with various instances of mass violence that took on a characteristic form, which he argued was hitherto unknown to human societies.4 As a student at the University of Lvov in the 1920s, Lemkin learnt about the pogroms of Jews in Ukraine after the Russian Revolution and about the massacres of Anatolian Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman Empire.5 The knowledge of these extermination campaigns exerted a massive influence on the young scholar: since the perpetrators enjoyed absolute impunity from prosecution, Lemkin felt the urge to devise legal mechanisms to account for their crimes. During World War II, by now a refugee living and working in the United States, Lemkin started to examine historical as well as contemporary mass violence with increasing rigor. It is crucial to remember that Lemkin himself was a victim of the very phenomenon he set out to explore: almost his entire family was murdered in the Treblinka concentration camp. While the “industrial” killing of Jews—what we today call the “Holocaust” 6—provided an important impetus for Lemkin’s research, his engagement with mass violence was equally shaped by a deep interest in early modern as well as more recent colonial conflicts.7 What is it that makes genocide special, on Lemkin’s view? In what ways is it different from other murderous activities? Lemkin had a definite answer to these questions. For him, genocide

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does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups.8

Note here the contrast between “immediate destruction” and the “destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups”: Lemkin claimed that the latter was characteristic of all genocides, whereas the former applied only to some genocides.9 Contrary to later legal interpretations, Lemkin thus believed that mass killings were not intrinsic to genocide. Although some commentators now insist that there can be no genocide without mass killings, this was evidently not Lemkin’s position. Consider further that the paragraph speaks of “national groups” without specifying what constitutes such groups. Lemkin adhered to what we might now call a “communitarian” view of groups: as his autobiographical writings reveal, he averred that national groups possess intrinsic qualities that set them apart from looser voluntary associations.10 Due to their permanence, they provide the material and ideological basis for cultural development and human flourishing, and must therefore be protected in their own right, not only because these national groups are composed of individuals. Lemkin also thought that protecting national cultures in this broad sense was a precondition for the promulgation of “high culture” in a much narrower sense: the world’s cultural heritage would have been massively impoverished “if the so-called inferior peoples doomed by Germany, such as the Jews, had not been permitted to create the Bible or to give birth to an Einstein, a Spinosa; if the Poles had not had the opportunity to give to the world a Copernicus, a Chopin, a Curie, the Czechs a Huss, and a Dvorak; the Greeks a Plato and a Socrates; the Russians, a Tolstoy and a Shostakovich.”11

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We can, then, read his reference to groups in light of their significance for a diverse and multifaceted world, imbued with various cultural traditions and rich resources of collective meaning. If groups contain entire ways of life, the elimination of a group would not only eradicate the constituent members of that group, but diminish the potential of all of humanity. It is in this sense that Lemkin can be described as a “deep pluralist” about groups: an attack on one of them is effectively an attack on all of humankind.12 Lemkin stated that genocide always comprises two stages: a first phase during which the national characteristics of the oppressed group are being eradicated; and a second phase during which the oppressor group imposes its own cultural, social, and political identity on the oppressed group.13 This pattern of extreme domination can go hand in hand with attempts to completely eviscerate a people by killing all of its members. As Lemkin observed with regard to Nazi Germany, some national groups, which were deemed related by blood, such as the Dutch and the Norwegians, were targeted for “Germanization” measures, whereas others—the Jews of Eastern Europe in particular—were sent directly to the extermination camps.14 In creating the neologism genocide, Lemkin thus issued a distinct judgment about the specific kind of violence that he saw materializing, characterized by the targeted destruction of entire peoples. Even though his research reached back to early modern colonial enterprises, Lemkin also thought that the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries brought with them radically new forms of violence that were the result of imperial power politics. The inherited terms—mass violence or Germanization— were simply not suitable for describing the complex phenomenon he intended to capture. While the historical emergence of the concept of genocide has by now been thoroughly examined, foregrounding in particular Lemkin’s own research and activism,15 the legal codification of genocide in international law is also worthy of sustained attention. The backbone of this story can be reconstructed as follows. Before the end of World War II, the Allied Forces were already reflecting on how to hold the Nazi leadership to account. Various options were considered, but ultimately the idea was formed to prosecute and try them by an international tribunal. This plan

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was realized through the establishment of the International Military Tribunal (IMT), which operated in the German city of Nuremberg from 1945 to 1946. When speaking of the “Nuremberg trials” generically, we today refer to thirteen distinct trials that dealt with Nazis from different social and political spheres, ranging from the SS to the industry.16 The most prominent of these trials has been the so-called Trial of the Major War Criminals. Twenty-four Nazi leaders were indicted, among them Hermann Göring, in a highly publicized manner. Twelve cases ended in death sentences. Although it would take many years of scholarship to reveal the true extent of the Nazi atrocities, Nuremberg was indeed a “turning point”17 in our grasp of the Holocaust: it did not primarily concentrate on the extermination of the Jews, but still brought Nazi crimes to the fore that had hitherto been considered unthinkable. It is thus appropriate to interpret the Nuremberg trials as “collective pedagogy and as a salve to traumatic history.”18 How did the charge of genocide figure in these trials? In Article 6, the IMT’s Charter stipulated three crimes of which the defendants would ultimately be accused: crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. The fact that the IMT’s Charter referred to crimes against humanity, and not genocide, has been a source of perplexity. As we shall see shortly, in later days the two crimes became more disambiguated, but this was not yet the case during the Nuremberg trials, where the prosecutors “employed the word genocide as if it was more or less synonymous”19 with crimes against humanity. For example, the defendants in the Trial of the Major War Criminals were indicted with “deliberate and systematic genocide, viz., the extermination of racial and national groups, against the civilian populations of certain occupied territories in order to destroy particular races and classes of people, and national, racial or religious groups.”20 Even though genocide itself was not mentioned at all in the judgments of the Nazi criminals, the concept had gained increasing currency among lawyers and diplomats.21 Lemkin’s magnum opus, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, was extensively consulted by the delegation members in Nuremberg. But since it was not yet legally codified, the term genocide carried various meanings that roughly cohered around the charge of crimes against humanity, without really consolidating into a more definite concept. In line with the author’s original intent, Lemkin’s neologism therefore served the purpose

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of covering a “broad policy program, composed of a set of crimes, and of various ‘techniques’ directed against several victim groups, and with the broad aim of gaining new ‘living space’ for the purpose of colonization rather than being exclusively defined as a deliberate crime targeting an entire extermination of one single ethnic group.”22 This account testifies to the ambiguous reception of the concept of genocide in the immediate aftermath of World War II. While it was acknowledged by the Allied Forces that the Nazi’s crimes called for novel types of prosecution, the political as well as legal language with which to describe these crimes had not yet been fully developed. Although several postwar trials included prosecutions for genocide, these were not always motivated by a clear sense of what distinguished it from such crimes as denationalization, a war crime that had been recognized in international law since the end of World War I.23

2 . 2 . L EG A L CO D I FI C AT I O N : CO N S O L I DAT I N G M E A N I N G

The semantic openness of the term would eventually come to an end with the codification of genocide in international law. As the postwar world order began to take shape, the new United Nations Organization set itself the immediate task of creating a novel set of principles that would govern global politics without the resort to violence, while allowing for the possibility of collective and individual self-defense. The most prominent result of this process was the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948.24 It was clear from the outset that the UDHR would serve primarily as an aspirational document, whose full realization depended on the cooperation of actors that had, at the outset of the Cold War, become sworn enemies. The hope was that a prohibition of specific atrocities might hold a more realistic chance of implementation. To this effect, the UN General Assembly tasked the Economic and Social Council with devising a first draft of a convention on genocide. Lemkin was one of three scholars and jurists who served as experts to the committee.25 In the autumn of 1948, the Sixth Committee of the General Assembly analyzed the draft of the

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convention and finally submitted it to the General Assembly for adoption in December. Three years later, in 1951, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide became international law, as enough states had ratified it.26 With Lemkin as a legal consultant, the discussions during the drafting phase were naturally influenced by his conception of genocide. However, Lemkin’s impact was not always straightforward. Consider, for example, the way Article 1 of the draft defined the Convention’s purpose as preventing “the destruction of racial, national, linguistic, religious or political groups of human beings.”27 The groups protected by the draft Convention clearly go beyond the national communities envisaged by Lemkin. What is more, by including political groups, the draft covered collectives that were held together solely on the basis of voluntary association—a view not shared by Lemkin’s original conceptualization.28 This is why Lemkin opposed the subsumption of political groups under the Convention’s protective umbrella—they “lacked the required permanence.”29 Lemkin also observed that including “political groups” would be highly controversial, and risked dividing world opinion. Another expert advising the drafters, however, retorted that excluding “political groups” might have the effect of “justifying genocide in the case of such groups.”30 Although it has frequently been suggested that the Soviet Union alone opposed the inclusion of “political groups,” William Schabas has demonstrated that, in fact, a great variety of states rejected the initial draft. Stalin’s extermination campaign against “class enemies” and “enemies of the people” on the home front certainly influenced the Soviet Union’s reluctance to include “political groups,” but other states—and indeed Lemkin himself—rejected the draft’s position in this respect as well.31 A long-winded process of negotiations, both politically motivated and intellectually driven, thus propelled the Convention’s drafting process forward. While some elements of Lemkin’s original conception were readily absorbed into the agreed-on text, others were substantially modified or relinquished altogether. The controversy around “political groups” is just one episode among many testifying to these contested dynamics of legal codification. Focusing now on the final result, the Convention defines genocide in Article II as

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any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.32

This is not the place to add to the jurisprudential hermeneutics of each element of this definition. Needless to say, ever since the Convention came into force, interpreting the definition has become an enormous challenge for scholars and practitioners searching for “legal certainty.”33 What counts as a stable group, for example, is inherently underdetermined by the Convention, and was contentious even during the drafting phase, as we have already seen. A few comments will still be necessary to help us understand later attempts to theoretically redescribe genocide. The Convention remains the main anchor point for all the contemporary discussions around genocide, no matter whether they are purely interpretive or revisionist in nature. Within a few decades, the Convention has become a document with real institutional power: the ad hoc tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda as well as the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court simply adopted the Convention’s definition of genocide without modification. That the Rome Statute basically copied a fifty-year-old definition underlines that prosecuting perpetrators of genocide has now become a “customary international norm.”34 With regard to the definition in the Convention, let us merely highlight two aspects, which have triggered much controversy: (1) the idea that genocide must be committed with “intent” and (2) the idea that groups may be targeted “in whole or in part.” “Intent” on the part of the perpetrators is a necessary condition for the occurrence of genocide. That means that a genocidal act (actus reus) must be based on a volitional set of beliefs (mens rea). To be more precise, legal scholars speak of a “double mental element” when characterizing the intent condition of genocide.35 This means that the “intent to destroy” a particular group in whole or in

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part is judged independently from the volitional set of beliefs, the expression of which is the actus reus. To clarify this double mental element, consider the following: trying someone for genocide requires the court to establish both the perpetrator’s “general intent” to engage in a genocidal act and the “special intent” (dolus specialis) to will the destruction of a group, as defined by the Convention. The ultimate goal of the acts prohibited under the Convention must thus be shown to entail this destructive element. The intent condition with its double mental element can create significant hurdles for prosecuting génocidaires. While some perpetrators are reckless enough to openly announce their plans to engage in violence by directly threatening their enemies—as has been the case during the Rwandan genocide, which was incited by radio shows and other media outlets—the vast majority of perpetrators refrains from explicitly mentioning their “intent to destroy” a particular group. This has the obvious consequence that prosecutors usually attempt to examine the “general context” within which genocide takes place.36 In the absence of an openly available pronouncement on behalf of génocidaires, proving intent thus depends on the ability to systematically infer from their deeds that the perpetrators in fact pursued a premeditated plan when engaging in separate genocidal acts. Such techniques of reconstructing the “special intent” of perpetrators highlight a broader concern with international criminal law: the evidentiary basis on which these trials rest is more often than not rather thin. Given that “today’s international criminals no longer leave a clear paper trail of their offenses,”37 much of the forensic verification of genocide might amount to “factfinding without facts,” to borrow the title of a recent book on this topic. The second element of the definition of genocide I wish to highlight concerns the parenthesis “in whole or in part.” Recall that Lemkin described genocide simply as “the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group.”38 Lemkin did not specify whether a certain number of people would have to be killed for acts of atrocity to qualify as genocide. On this view, there is no threshold above which mass killings turn into genocide; what matters is the kind of destruction waged against the group as such. However, the Convention’s use of “in whole or in part” complicates matters significantly as it remains difficult to establish with certainty that the special intent to destroy a group can be deduced from a génocidaire’s

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actions, who has only succeeded in targeting a few victims. How many people need to be attacked for a court to deduce that the “double mental element” is indeed present? Samantha Powers calls this the “numbers problem.”39 In light of this challenge, international tribunals have begun to apply a “quantitative criterion” so as to render the inference of intent more workable. This move has raised concerns about the effect such a criterion might have for the overall goal of protecting groups—if only a sufficiently high number of victims ensures that intent can be inferred, this might undermine the very “object and purpose of the Genocide convention.” 40 Although there is a lot of confusion around the exact meaning of the phrase, “in whole or in part” applies to the perpetrator’s intent, and not to the result of his or her actions: it is about what génocidaires seek to achieve, not what they actually achieve. So how can, then, the “in whole or in part” clause be interpreted more specifically? With Schabas,41 we may distinguish between four hermeneutic strategies: The first interpretation is that the outcome of a génocidaire’s actions might be limited, but their intent must have been the destruction of an entire group. The second interpretation reads the qualification in terms of a substantial part of the targeted population. On this account, it is not necessary for a génocidaire to will the destruction of an entire group, but he still has to have the intention to target a substantial part of that group. The third interpretation emphasizes the character of the subgroup: if the perpetrator directly attacks a significant subgroup—usually a social, economic, or political elite—then it can be deduced that he or she has genocidal intent. The idea behind this understanding is that a group, as defined by the Convention, cannot survive without its leaders, who are involved in the management and promotion of the group’s affairs. The fourth interpretation focuses on the area in which the genocidal acts occur. For genocide to occur, it is not indispensable that the perpetrators hunt down a group around the globe. Here, “in part” means that the génocidaires restrict their actions to a geographically delimited zone. These observations on two prominent issues arising from the consolidation of the meaning of “genocide” shall serve as the background against which I explore how debates outside of the legal realm have unfolded. For, as I have suggested earlier, the genocide debate naturally exceeds the sphere of legal reasoning. The next section will therefore examine

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attempts at theoretical redescription: how political theorists have sought to grapple with the vulnerability of genocide to manipulation and abuse.

2 . 3 . T H EO R E T I C A L R E D E S C R I P T I O N S : T WO WAYS O F D ECO N T E S T I N G G E N O C I D E

Ever since Raphael Lemkin coined the term genocide to capture the horrors of collective violence targeted at groups as such, legal theorists, practical philosophers, and social scientists have been struggling over the exact meaning of the term. One reason for this struggle, as we have remarked, is the inherent indeterminacy of the definition, which has been causing significant challenges for lawyers and practitioners alike. Another reason, however, is independent of the indeterminacy of the definition. Due to its institutional power, raising the accusation of genocide bears some real weight in terms of exerting political pressure on perpetrating states. The ongoing controversies around genocide can thus be explained by an obvious fact: states accused of planning to commit, or of committing, or of having committed genocide are de facto outcasts of the international society, on whom economic, diplomatic, and even military sanctions might be imposed.42 In reaction to this, many perpetrators disguise their genocidal acts once they are met with allegations. This strategy extends to both past and ongoing genocides. For a recent example, consider the statement of Serbia’s former president Tomislav Nikoliʉ that there “was no genocide in Srebrenica”43—a proclamation that contradicts all the available evidence, twenty years after the massacres occurred. Recall also Turkey’s ongoing denial of what has become one of the most researched cases of genocide—the mass atrocities directed at Anatolian Armenians.44 People often vehemently clash over the question of whether a concrete outbreak of violence should be named genocide. As we can witness, for example, in the case of Darfur, the public debate usually goes through cycles of contestation, where the past, the present, and the future are turned into battlefields. These engagements with the social reality of violence can be summed up as the “genocide debate” in the widest sense,

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bringing together a multitude of actors, from academics, to political stakeholders, to affected victims.45 Given the confounding uses of the word genocide, several authors46 have intimated that the term might be considered, using W. B. Gallie’s terminology, an “essentially contested concept,” whose meaning cannot be settled through conceptual analysis alone.47 There is some confusion in the literature about what specifically constitutes a concept, so suffice it here to say that certain words in political discourse—such as genocide— have over time become “characteristically contested, but this is often because . . . they have historically accrued a great deal of either approbation or disapprobation.” 48 So, how ought one to react when faced with a word, like genocide, that has indeed accrued a great deal of disapprobation? The problem is not only that lawyers find it difficult to impute unequivocal meaning to the Convention’s definition, or that political actors do everything in their power to deflect charges of genocide, by claiming that actions performed under their control have not amounted to genocide. The challenge is also that the academic discussion has become gradually disconnected from public discourse. The legal definition of genocide is increasingly at odds with the ways in which ordinary citizens understand and make use of the word. One might, of course, retort that this is true for law’s vocabulary in general. After all, legal reasoning operates with a technical apparatus that is accessible only to those who have learnt to consistently apply it in concrete situations. But offenses in international law, such as genocide or crimes against humanity, reveal a deep rift between what the law prescribes and what the public discusses. Accordingly, David Luban asserts that the jurisprudential argument around the distinction between genocide and crimes against humanity is going into the opposite direction from media controversies. Examining the Darfur debate in 2007, he points out that the requirement to establish the perpetrators’ intent to commit genocide might run counter to everyday discourse, where “we think of genocide as deliberate annihilation of masses of civilians, regardless of the specific intention. That means that for non-lawyers . . . the crime against humanity of exterminating civilian populations is genocide.” 49

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One possible rejoinder to this conundrum would be to abandon the notion of genocide altogether. David Scheffer, for example, proposes to replace the legal term genocide with the concept of atrocity crimes, which would encompass crimes against humanity, the worst kinds of war crimes, and violations of humanitarian law.50 On this account, it might perhaps be more auspicious to start with a clean slate to remedy the shortcomings of the Convention. The so-called Albright-Cohen Report, a policy document to guide US lawmakers, suggests a similar route to circumvent “definitional traps” into which legal theorists frequently fall. Since the UN Convention proposes a narrow definition of genocide, which is hard to operationalize through legal proceedings, the “dilemma is how to harness the power of the word to motivate and mobilize while not allowing debates about its definition or application to constrain or distract policymakers from addressing the core problems it describes.”51 As we can see, the report’s proposal is somewhat ambiguous: to stick with the word genocide, yet to expand its remit such that it also covers mass atrocities and crimes against humanity, which would all qualify as “largescale and deliberate attacks on civilians.”52 The idea to relinquish the notion of genocide altogether, or to transform its definition to encompass various forms of mass atrocity, has been met with serious objections. In particular, the Albright-Cohen Report was criticized for lending legitimacy to unilateral military action on the part of the United States. The criticism went that a broader definition might allow for more responsive action as it would apply to a larger number of cases, but the worry remained that it would unleash unilateral adventurism in a way that was not intended by the UN Convention.53 The majority of theorists and practitioners envisage the task of sorting out the problems with the Convention differently from both Schaffer and the Albright-Cohen Report. While almost everybody recognizes the existing definition’s shortcomings, few would go so far as to abandon the concept of genocide. There is, then, a need to engage in conceptual redescription, or what I called “amelioration” earlier, if we acknowledge that such a category is needed to respond to mass violence. I shall now suggest that a useful way to approach attempts to reform the definition of genocide would be to envisage them as practices of decontestation. What does it mean to decontest a concept? Decontesting involves regulating and normalizing the various, often conflicting semantic layers of

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a specific word.54 For political discourse in general to function on a steady basis, it is vital that the meaning of the words is controlled. To illustrate this thought, take, for example, a word like justice, which is obviously very contestable. Decontesting justice implies that the meaning of the word is separated from concrete struggle over just or unjust policies. Michael Freeden emphasizes that decontestation is a vital element of our language use and proposes to understand it as an ideological mechanism to obtain control over the meaning of politically charged words.55 The two most common ways to engage in decontestation are (1) “the attempt to attach very precise allocations of meanings to indeterminate concepts” and (2) the “stipulative ascription of meaning to a term.”56 With regard to genocide, these two strategies translate into the following routes toward decontestation: many (analytical) philosophers grappling with the notion of genocide interpret their role as one of settling conclusively the dispute over its ambiguity and indeterminacy. In other words, these philosophers do not only believe that decontestation can be fully achieved; for them, the assumption that genocide might be characteristically contested proves to be fallacious. The goal, then, is to purify the word from its confusing elements such that an incontestable core can finally materialize. Consider briefly the following two strategies: (1) Paul Boghossian, for instance, engages with the UN Convention by distinguishing between the concept of genocide as defined therein and its normative purpose.57 The purpose of the concept of genocide is threefold: to denote a specific phenomenon that is different from other crimes (such as crimes against humanity, for example), to signify a moral wrong, and to highlight the distinctively evil character of certain actions. These are, for Boghossian, the constitutive elements of genocide. Through an in-depth analysis of the elements of the UN definition, he concludes, however, with a “very serious critique of the UN’s genocide concept, showing that it hasn’t succeeded in satisfying the aims that underlie its introduction.”58 Although Boghossian does not attempt to deliver an improved definition of genocide, which would remedy the shortcomings of the UN Convention, he expresses doubts about the ability of any single word to satisfy these three objectives. So, the supposition here is that the concept of genocide cannot but fail to realize its inherent purpose—the moral core of genocide simply is too expansive to be united under one concept. Replacing genocide

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with another concept, such as atrocity more generically, would not help us either. (2) Contrast this approach with Claudia Card’s, which goes beyond mere critique and tries to salvage the codification of “genocide.”59 She takes the UN Convention as a starting point for reflecting further on what is distinctively evil about genocide. Card’s argument is that genocide causes “social death”: “Specific to genocide is the harm inflicted on its victims’ social vitality. It is not just that one’s group membership is the occasion for harms that are definable independently of one’s identity as a member of the group. When a group with its own cultural identity is destroyed, its survivors lose their cultural heritage and may even lose their intergenerational connections.” 60 On this account, it is possible to recover the meaning of genocide by outlining why social death is even more heinous than physical death. Genocide denotes a crime that differs from war crimes and crimes against humanity. By focusing on the vitality of a group as such, Card revives a theme that we have discovered in Lemkin, namely, groups provide the cultural setting in which individuals can strive for a dignified life. This is why they need protection, and this is also why not all groups are the same. Harking back to Lemkin’s earlier assessment, Card points out that the central criterion for deciding which kinds of group deserve protection under a reworked Genocide Convention must be their capacity to create a safe and stable context in which its members can flourish. What unites these two proposals? We have observed that Boghossian and Card reach different conclusions as to how the UN Convention may be dealt with. But both approaches are similar insofar as they strive to give an account of what genocide really is, independently from what the law prescribes. The search for a moral core of genocide, its distinctively evil dimension, is clearly a strategy of decontestation, which we may call foundationalism.61 I employ this term in the sense of grounding the obligation to prevent and punish genocide in a feature that makes genocide uniquely relevant. How this feature is characterized differs from one foundationalist account to another, but they are all comparable insofar as they necessarily appeal to one such feature, or several such features. This philosophical approach can be juxtaposed with one that decontests the term by referring to existing instruments in international law. In today’s debate, lawyers and legal theorists often pursue this route. While

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acknowledging the need to revise the UN definition in light of new forms of violence, they deem the existing instruments as largely sufficient for the purpose of preventing and punishing genocide. I shall call this strategy legalism,62 wielding again a broad brush to paint a picture of rather diverse approaches. Legalism about genocide implies that international law serves as a barrier to the politics of naming. To conceive of the law as a bulwark against the manipulability of the word genocide is a characteristic feature of legalism. Legalists argue that, while the word genocide can be abused for political purposes, it is the very objective of legal definitions to facilitate the prosecution and prevention of atrocities. Legalism insists on law’s neutrality when it is needed most: namely, when it comes to attaching highly contentious labels to an invariably messy reality. Typically, legalists express an “excessive faith” 63 in the rather weak institutions of international law.64 If we look at both foundationalism and legalism, we see more clearly which unifying thread runs through their attempts to come to terms with genocide. They strive to decontest the word such that a stable core meaning emerges. Whether they do so by referring to the concept’s ultimate aims or to its legal codification matters less than the shared hope that one might be able to protect the word genocide from the politics of naming. The foundationalist and legalist attempts to decontest genocide are understandable as endeavors to defuse its internal tensions, but they are also, to various degrees, misguided in their overall aspirations. Given the unavoidably polemical character of the term, its radical openness to abuse, and its persistent exposure to cycles of contestation, it would be overly optimistic to ascribe the role of the final arbiter to either philosophical or legal discourse. This does not, of course, imply that there is no role at all to play for either philosophical or legal discourse in the wider genocide debate. We saw earlier that defining social facts can be fruitfully envisaged as an ameliorative project. Boghossian’s and Card’s interventions involve attempts at revising the legal meaning of genocide in precisely the spirit that I have celebrated in the introduction, even though Boghossian appears to believe that the internal problems of the concept are so great that it might be better to abandon the search for a unifying term. My proposal in the following is therefore to go beyond the foundationalist search for a core meaning of genocide. As the next section

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demonstrates, amelioration must reach further than merely examining the conceptual dimension, if it is to address the peculiar challenge of genocide blindness. Hence, the positive role (analytical) philosophers and legal theorists can play in tackling the politics of naming is rather less comprehensive than they tend to think. Focusing on the role of the imagination instead will help us reveal a counterperspective from which we may gain a better understanding of definitions of genocide.

2 . 4 . F R O M D E N I A L TO B L I N D N E S S : N EG AT I V E R E AC T I O N S TO G E N O C I D E

Why do these strategies of decontestation fall short, or rather, why should we abandon the hope, nurtured by both foundationalists and legalists, that the politics of naming can be completely overcome? A good point of departure for answering this question would be to examine negative reactions to genocide. The most prominent negative reaction is, naturally, to deny that a genocide has occurred or is occurring. Genocide denial can be described as the willful negation or misrepresentation of intersubjectively redeemable facts that prove the occurrence, in the past or in the present, of genocidal activities in a given territory. Hence, deniers proffer claims that reveal a sharp conflict with historical scholarship, even if they often mimic scholarly practices by purporting to put forward “revisionist” accounts of past events.65 In order to understand the complexity of denial, we need to realize that it is highly pervasive in contemporary politics. Many aspects of a shared past can be denied. Moreover, denial is not only a phenomenon that occurs at the fringes of society. Despite the persistence of anti-Semitism, Holocaust denial is today a rather marginal practice in the Western hemisphere, but other forms of denial sit right at the center of the societal mainstream. This seems to be especially true for racism.66 Consider what Charles W. Mills calls “white ignorance.” 67 Mills argues that we need a social epistemology that both explains and corrects the beliefs that uphold white supremacy. On his account, whiteness, understood not as a “colour at all, but a set of power relations,” 68 radically distorts reality by making aspects of past and present oppression invisible and thus uncriticizable.

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What the example of racism illustrates is that some forms of denial are so deeply entrenched in society that practically everyone is in some way complicit with it. What to do about denial and ignorance is, of course, a thorny question that authors such as Mills have taken important steps to answer. An intricate struggle along various front lines is required, for Israel Charny has shown that genocide denial, more specifically, comes in at least six different varieties, ranging from malevolent bigotry to the nihilistic depiction of violence as inevitable.69 Most participants in the debate around genocide, including those whom I have dubbed foundationalists and legalists, concentrate their efforts on the fight against various forms of denial. Even though, as we have remarked, there are considerable differences between the diverse strategies to improve the definition, they share the goal of inhibiting the willful negation or misrepresentation of genocide. So, one of the aspirations of both foundationalism and legalism is that these strategies of decontestation would make denial, at least of past genocides about which we have sufficient data, much more difficult. When dealing with an ongoing genocide, the situation looks rather different because the motivations for denial change. The reasons for not acknowledging the occurrence of a continuing genocide can often be traced back to a lack of political will on the part of those who might be capable of stopping the violence. Many have expressed the suspicion that the principal reason why the atrocities in Darfur, to name but one recent example, were not officially recognized as genocidal was that the signatories to the UN Convention feared that such recognition would trigger a duty to intervene.70 On this account, responding to ongoing genocides is hampered by the double standards of Western powers who regularly fail to live up to the self-professed “responsibility to protect.”71 Western powers, the argument goes, are loath to calling some forms of violence genocidal when this contravenes their strategic interests. From this perspective, the biggest challenge for preventing and punishing genocide is the hypocrisy of powerful “norm carriers.” The flipside of this argument is that potential interveners will show little hesitation to attach the label genocide to a conflict, if a military involvement is in their strategic interests. Realist authors, from Schmitt to Mamdani, have pointed to a hidden agenda behind ostensibly apolitical

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attempts to designate atrocities as genocidal: Western powers will invoke humanity in order to conceal imperialist projects. The humanitarian intervention in Kosovo, for example, has been interpreted as an interestdriven war whose justification was merely cloaked in the language of humanitarianism to obfuscate its true purpose.72 The conundrum around defining the word genocide, however, cuts even deeper. As Henry Theriault has stressed, capturing genocide through a binding definition is such a complex undertaking because any definition remains open to abuse: perpetrators and deniers will do everything in their power to ensure that certain acts of violence do not “really” amount to genocide. They cunningly exploit the “metaphysical indeterminacies”73 in the UN definition (what the Albright-Cohen Report calls “definitional traps”) to shield their actions from prosecution. While the denial of past and ongoing genocides is dominating media controversies, Theriault’s argument about “anticipatory denial” brings to the fore a more fundamental issue with any attempt to define genocide. Anticipatory denial occurs when perpetrators modify their planned actions so as to circumvent the charge of genocide. As an example of such a denial reaching out into the future, Theriault lists the widespread and systematic practice of rape by Serbian soldiers in the war against the Bosnians during the 1990s. By using rape as a weapon, the army temporarily succeeded in deflecting the charge of genocide.74 Today, our views of the violence during that war look different: “genocidal rape” is widely accepted as a description of the acts undertaken during the wars in Ex-Yugoslavia; it is now established, both in international law and in public debates, that sexual violence plays an integral part in any genocide.75 However, this new way of seeing violence is a consequence of the ingeniously planned actions of perpetrators, who used the thenhegemonic definition of genocide to commit heinous crimes. Confronted with this feedback loop between hegemonic definition and emerging violence, foundationalists and legalists insist on improving the definition in such a way that its indeterminacies are eradicated. Yet, the challenge seems to be that the very mechanism through which a definition might inadvertently contribute to generating new forms of violence reveals the inherent limitations of these attempts at decontestation. Let us now consider a different case that receives less attention than denial. What about those who simply fail to perceive and interpret an act

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of violence as genocidal? How should we judge their failure? Are they culpable to the same extent as Holocaust deniers, who deliberately distort historical records? Are we justified in attributing guilt to those observers who did not immediately recognize the genocidal character of mass rape during the war in Ex-Yugoslavia? And what about connecting anthropogenic climate change to genocide?76 Is this conjecture just a bizarre exaggeration, typical of ecological hypersensitivity; or is it rather a prophetic portrayal of the fate of states such as Tuvalu, whose inhabitants might soon be expelled from their atoll-country, due to rising sea levels?77 If the social reality of genocide is constantly in flux, it might be excessively demanding to expect the members of the public sphere to be fully alert to every new genocidal act. Perhaps they are not at all unwilling to see rape or climate change as genocidal, but their perceptive and interpretive frameworks—the apparatus through which they view the world—are ill equipped to subsume these new forms of violence under the existing rubric. Accordingly, it might be the case that those who fail to perceive and interpret an act of violence as genocide are capable of grasping genocide in those cases that neatly map onto the UN Convention. Yet, their overall understanding of genocide is so restrictive that it cannot be extended to novel cases. This is where we leave the realm of genocide denial. It is beyond any doubt that denial remains one of the most challenging issues in liberal democracies, where it is imperative to protect freedom of speech. But once we realize that new forms of violence arise permanently, and that the search for an improved definition of genocide cannot stop this emergence once and for all, we should direct our attention to what I call genocide blindness. Genocide blindness, the second negative reaction, is related to, but not identical with, denial maneuvers in past, present, or future conflicts. It is not a willful act at all, but rather a sort of affliction from which one can suffer, without necessarily having done anything to bring it on oneself. Genocide blindness denotes the inability to perceive and interpret an occurrence of violence as genocidal. Formulated like this, the meaning of genocide blindness hinges on the exact sense of perceiving and interpreting, which the following section will explore. Before I proceed with my argument, I still need to address a potential concern about my terminology: the metaphorical use of words such as blind, but also deaf and lame, has been criticized for its marginalization

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of disabled people.78 The argument is that allegorical talk of blindness as a deficiency has pernicious effects that exacerbate the oppression disabled people experience in the real world. Disability, on this perspective, serves to stabilize the underlying norm—in our case, the norm of “normal seeing” associated with successful aspect change.79 This is the core charge against ableist language. The quandary I find myself in stems from the fact that the chapter’s central interlocutor—Ludwig Wittgenstein—was throughout his life fascinated by visual perception, and by aesthetic puzzles more widely.80 Wittgenstein certainly did not think there was anything inherently problematic about metaphors of blindness or deafness. If anything, he was intrigued by the “deep grammar” of our language games, including those that rely on metaphors.81 One way forward, then, would involve translating Wittgenstein’s thoughts into a language that avoids ableist connotations as much as possible: I could use recognition instead of normal seeing, for example, and obliviousness instead of blindness. Prima facie, this is an attractive solution that might help mitigate oppressive tendencies in our ordinary language as well as in our specialized terminology. Still, I hesitate to implement this policy for a concrete reason: translating Wittgenstein’s ideas in this manner would lead to a potentially equivocal conceptual apparatus. For it was one of Wittgenstein’s explicit goals to lay bare the complex interplay between cognition, perception, and the imagination. This implies that something essential would get lost if we  simply substituted normal seeing for recognition, or obliviousness for blindness. Hence, I shall stick with the terminology originally employed by Wittgenstein, but urge the reader to bear in mind that this decision is not meant as an endorsement of ableist language under all circumstances; it simply seems unavoidable on this occasion.

2 . 5 . “ S E E I N G X A S G E N O C I D E ”: W IT TG E N S T E I N O N A S P EC T- S E E I N G

For us to devise an antidote to genocide blindness, we first need to better grasp the nature of this affliction. What kind of blindness are we talking

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about here? Can there be a remedy to it? In order to answer these questions, I will now mobilize Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later philosophy and interrogate its potential for addressing genocide blindness.82 Wittgenstein sheds light on our topic because he promotes a critical type of inquiry that “leaves everything as it is.”83 For some, this must be an odd claim, akin to the suggestion that one can be an effective social critic in defense of emancipatory ideals, while being attached to conservative principles. Yet, for our discussion Wittgenstein’s reconstructive method is an important inspiration, which can be enlisted to strengthen political theory as an ameliorative project. Trying to resolve the tensions within the term genocide does little, as we have remarked, to capture the social reality of genocide, which remains constantly in flux, thereby generating opportunities for anticipatory denial. However, broadening the discussion to also include the aesthetic realm, with a concern for transforming perceptive and interpretive frameworks through which acts of violence are viewed, permits us to attain a better sense of the variety of practices at play in dispelling genocide blindness. I will hence submit that one possible avenue for probing these practices in the context of genocide is to interrogate Wittgenstein’s thoughts on “aspect-seeing.” Several commentators84 remark that the most thorough exposition of aspect-seeing can be discovered in what had earlier been considered the second part of the Philosophical Investigations.85 In this text, Wittgenstein uses “picture-objects”—such as the famous duck-rabbit—to explain how an aspect of something can “dawn” on us, how we may, from one moment to another, recognize different aspects in the same thing. When looking at the duck-rabbit, we suddenly perceive it as a rabbit and then as a duck. Does new information impel us to “see something as something”? Or is it our mind that tricks us into perceiving things the way we perceive them? Wittgenstein’s approach to “aspect perception” locates this activity between normal seeing and interpreting or thinking: it is “half visual experience, half thought.”86 Thus, aspect-seeing entails an active imagination that normal seeing does not require: The concept of an aspect is related to the concept of imagination. In other words, the concept “Now I see it as . . .” is related to “Now I am imagining that.” Doesn’t it take imagination to hear something as a variation on a particular theme? . . . Seeing an aspect and imagining are subject to the

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will. There is such an order as “Imagine this!,” and also, “Now see the figure like this!”; but not “Now see this leaf green!”87

A crucial point in Wittgenstein’s remarks is that aspect perception is not a purely subjective activity: it can be communicated and shared with others, and thus resembles interpretation and judgment.88 Indeed, some commentators have maintained that aspect perception opens up the possibility for “certain moments of intimacy”89 with other people. Wittgenstein claims that aspect-seeing is paradoxically both similar to and yet distinct from normal seeing.90 This is illustrated through an elaborate discussion of the opposite of aspect-seeing, namely, “aspect blindness.” Wittgenstein uses this term in two different manners: aspect blindness denotes, on the one hand, the “inability to experience aspect-dawning.”91 This means that an aspectblind person cannot perceive the change from one aspect to another, but she can at least see one of the image’s aspects: either the duck or the rabbit. On the other hand, Wittgenstein also makes an instructive comparison with the “lack of a ‘musical ear’ ”92 in order to elucidate the particular deficiency that is aspect blindness. Thus, aspect blindness may also occur when a person cannot perceive any aspects at all. Such a person would be incapable of seeing either the duck or the rabbit in the image, perceiving instead just a randomly shaped line and a dot. In what ways can political theory benefit from this account of “seeing something as something”? Several authors—out of which I select two, whose interpretations are particularly in tune with this chapter—have sought to appropriate Wittgenstein’s discussion of aspect-seeing for their specific projects.93 Aletta Norval, our first interlocutor, attempts to use Wittgensteinian insights to make sense of “democratic identification” in transitional moments, taking as a starting observation her personal experience while voting in the first free elections in South Africa in 1994.94 She raises a hard question about these moments: What allows people to see themselves as democratic subjects when a new regime comes to power after a period of authoritarian rule? Against deliberative theorists, Norval maintains that to answer this question one must explore fundamental processes of identification. Founding and transitional moments necessarily induce a break in the “political grammars” we utilize to account for ourselves—and theorists are often at a loss when it comes to dealing with

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such disruptions. The substitution of “apartheid” with “equality” would count as an example of such a tectonic shift in political grammar. The point about grammars enabling a change in subject formation is that they must achieve two goals at the same time: to articulate a novel framework for citizens to view themselves as democrats and to remain intelligible to those who have not been democrats before.95 On Norval’s reading, Wittgenstein’s exploration of aspect-seeing is relevant for democratic identification insofar as it captures the puzzling effect that any political transition or founding moment generates: the exhilarating surprise over what is new is immediately accompanied by the sobering realization that not much has actually changed.96 This effect is important because it assures that the newly minted democrats still consider themselves as the same persons as before. Just as with the duckrabbit, the change in subject formation induced by a political transition or founding moment marks a discontinuity with the past, without necessarily following a singular rupture. Norval’s depiction of the democratic subject is therefore decidedly “anti-heroic”:97 transformations do not necessarily rely on exceptional individuals alone; they often proceed through incremental alterations in ethical habits and practices. Norval’s interpretation of Wittgenstein is enlightening because she draws a further distinction between aspect-dawning and aspect change. While admitting that this distinction cannot be found in Wittgenstein’s oeuvre, Norval argues that we find in his work the resources for parsing the first instantiation of a new political grammar (“dawning”) from the continuous efforts to keep novel forms of identification alive (“change”). Although the two moments are obviously intertwined with each other, they necessitate separate activities from citizens.98 David Owen contributes to the debate about Wittgenstein through his innovative concept of “aspectival captivity.”99 In an essay on the relationship between genealogy and Critical Theory, Owen juxtaposes “aspectival captivity” with “ideological captivity.” The difference between these two forms of being held captive can be substantiated in the following manner: “The primary feature of ideological captivity can be elucidated by reference to the concept of ‘false consciousness.’ . . . The main, contrasting, feature of aspectival captivity is that . . . the condition of captivity is independent of the truth or falsity of the beliefs held by the agent.”100 Owen argues that ideological captivity and aspectival captivity each

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require different forms of critical engagement. Overcoming ideological captivity calls for employing the tools of ideology critique in order to instigate processes of self-reflection that uncover “false consciousness.” The focus in ideology critique lies, thus, on the agent’s own capacity to fathom that her prior beliefs were false and are thus in need of correction. In the case of aspectival captivity, on the other hand, liberation will follow another path. The tools for liberation from aspectival captivity can be extracted from the Nietzschean and Foucauldian project of genealogy, about which we will hear more in chapter 4. While both ideology critique and genealogy contribute to “enlightenment and emancipation,”101 each proposes distinct ways in which liberation can be realized. Thus, genealogy does not aim at revealing the falsity of beliefs, but rather seeks to fulfill several interrelated tasks: (a) it identifies a picture which holds us captive, . . . (b) this account involves a redescription of this picture which contrasts it with another way of seeing the issue in order to free us from captivity to this picture, (c) it provides an account of how we have become held captive by this picture.102

Scrutinizing different contexts, in which practical reasoning and action take place, Norval and Owen emphasize the importance of “seeing things aright.” Norval’s distinction between aspect-dawning and aspect change as well as Owen’s notion of aspectival captivity are the two contributions to the secondary literature on Wittgenstein that are most consequential for exploring “genocide blindness.”

2 . 6 . N E I T H E R S AC R E D N O R B A N A L : H I S TO R I C A L P R EC E D E N T A N D P O L I T I C A L I M AG I N AT I O N

In this section, I turn from diagnosis to cure. The main pointer in Wittgenstein is that aspect blindness derives from a maladjustment of imaginative powers. It is not simply a failure to see “something as something”; it is also a failure to think and reflect, and perhaps even to interpret and judge

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appropriately. In that sense, it resembles, but is not identical with, ignorance and obliviousness. When making use of Wittgenstein, we should start by recalling the double meaning of aspect blindness. Genocide blindness, I have argued, pertains to the first semantic layer, that is, the inability to perceive aspect-dawning. A “genocide-blind” person is thus not someone who cannot see any violent act at all as genocidal. Even though some people might be “genocide-blind” in this sense, I am more intrigued by the difficulties that arise when people cannot experience a change in what ought to count as genocide. The crucial concern, then, is this: How may we cultivate the faculty to subsume new cases of violence under the rubric of genocide? In answering this question, let us look again into the case of “genocidal rape” that Theriault identified as an example of “anticipatory denial.” It is fair to assume that not everybody who failed to see the Serbian campaign of mass rape as genocidal was a denier. Rather, it is more plausible that at least some of those who have been blind to the genocidal character of mass rape were held captive by the prevailing definition. This fixation made it impossible, or at least very difficult, for them to perceive and interpret these crimes as genocide. Viewed from this standpoint, the negative reaction to “genocidal rape” does not entail the willful negation or misrepresentation of intersubjectively redeemable facts about genocide. In holding denial apart from blindness, I have not yet determined whether the cause for a particular case of blindness is ideological or aspectival captivity. Drawing on Owen’s account, it seems clear that both ideological and aspectival captivity might be causing genocide blindness. People who fail to see an instance of violence as genocidal might be under the spell of false consciousness, and therefore be victims of “ideological captivity.” Deniers might misinform them about the specificity of the violent acts so as to divert attention from the atrocities. In this case, what is needed to cure this affliction is ideology critique of the type described by Owen: enlightenment and emancipation through the self-reflection of the actors. But it is likewise possible to speak of aspectival captivity when engaging with cases of genocide blindness. Accordingly, an ingrained view of what genocide is can blind people to the possibility of an expanded understanding of what a genocide might look like. In this situation, enlightenment and emancipation will call for offering another way of seeing things.

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How could we succeed in devising such a remedy? Wittgenstein’s assertion that a deficiency in imaginative powers lies at the heart of “aspect blindness” offers a clue. It implies that the capacity to experience aspect change can be subjected to ameliorative interventions. Enhancing the imagination can help us tackle the challenge of “seeing x as genocide,” by steering attention toward the perceptive and interpretive frameworks through which violence is viewed. The cultivation of the imagination, I argue, hinges on narratives of past human suffering that change the public debate. Storytelling can disrupt the ways in which instances of violence are discussed, and thereby contribute to liberating participants in the public debate from aspectival captivity. In submitting that storytelling can transform perceptive and interpretive frameworks to become more sensitive to new forms of violence, I follow María Pía Lara’s “post-metaphysical” discussion of evil.103 This account is heavily indebted to Hannah Arendt’s notion of storytelling as disclosure.104 I will concentrate on Lara’s approach to storytelling for a simple reason: her ideas about how we may learn from the past dovetail with the spirit of this chapter. What sets Lara apart from other authors is that she ties storytelling to collective politics, while neo-Hegelians, such as Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor,105 associate narratives primarily with the constitution of individual selfhood. Lara’s suggestion is that narratives presented in various media—from intimate autobiographical testimonies to big screen blockbusters—help societies in their efforts to grapple with the past. Storytelling can unveil the historical conditions of evildoing and of human suffering in ways that academic scholarship alone cannot. Powerful stories entice the readers and viewers to grasp violence in a different light. This means that certain narratives initiate social learning processes when they impel the members of the public sphere to critically reflect on their community’s past: “My theory of reflective judgment focuses on the notion that disclosive language is an operation of opening up spaces for moral learning (i.e., seeing things differently). In this kind of exercise of judgment there is a conceptual connection between our historical understanding of an atrocity as a particular action (provided by different narratives) and the way we name it with a morally disclosive term.”106 This passage shows how Lara’s account of learning through storytelling might beneficially inform the debate around genocide blindness. Powerful stories construct a

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“moral filter,”107 through which the history of atrocities can be organized. They engage the reader’ and viewers’ imagination by devising a lens for reading and viewing the world, and by constructing an innovative vocabulary for talking about it. Lara cites the example of the word Holocaust to demonstrate the strengths of this approach. It took more than twenty years for the term to establish itself, through historical research into the murder of European Jews, but also through survivors’ biographical testimonials and later through divulgation in commercially successful movies and TV series. Neologisms emit “semantic shocks”108 that ripple through the public. Although far from being uncontroversial, the term Holocaust is today widely used to describe the Nazi crimes. Arguably, the term not only helped to account for the historical specificity of those crimes, but also widened the scope of public debates to such an extent that evils, which might previously have been deemed unimaginable, became effable. This example demonstrates that the most effective way to modify perceptive and interpretive frameworks is to grapple with historical instances of violence. Narratives of human suffering have a purpose: to enable “learning from catastrophes.”109 They thus create a link between a community’s past, its present, and its future. Such a link can spark a transformation within the fabric of a community, starting what Norval calls “aspect change.” Therefore, societal learning only occurs when the momentous effect of “aspect-dawning” leads to a broader pattern of “aspect change.” But referring to past instances of violence is under threat by two developments: any semantic shock may suffer from either sacralization or banalization.110 The danger is that the semantic shock soon solidifies into a paradigm that preempts the exercise of judgment and shuts down the public debate. Once a specific event, like the Holocaust, is turned into such a paradigm, commentators quickly take a further step and either belittle any other instance of violence when compared to the Holocaust (thereby sacralizing the Holocaust) or assimilate any instance of violence to the Holocaust (thereby banalizing it). Both uses of the past are problematic because they stifle the public debate. One upshot of Lara’s analysis is therefore that we should abandon the “quest for a sort of total equivalence”111 between atrocities and the Holocaust, which haunts historical scholarship even today.112

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Still, the perils of sacralizing and banalizing are here to stay: whenever we refer to a specific event from the past to exemplify evildoing and human suffering, we risk generating a paradigm that undermines subtle engagement. Eschewing all references to the past does not solve the problem since seeing things differently is premised on the wager that the exposure to historical experiences can render the members of the public sphere more susceptible to future modifications in the social reality of violence. If we accept this wager, it follows that we must tackle the question of what characterizes a proper lesson from history. Lara clarifies her view by stating that powerful narratives instigate a conversation between the author(s) and the public.113 It is, as such, characteristic of these stories that they actually reach their audience. What is more, the public must respond to the semantic shock in such a way that the story is taken up through ongoing deliberations. This implies that an agreement on the validity of the representation, however minimal, ought to obtain between the narrator(s) and the audience. Although such an agreement cannot be stipulated in generic terms, it is based on the idea that narratives are validated through “situated impartiality.”114 In order to flesh out the operation of storytelling, we can look at appeals to the Srebrenica massacre in the debate around the conflict in Libya in 2011 and around the conflict in Syria today. In 2011, several pundits, from both liberal and conservative media outlets, drew strong parallels between these two conflicts in order to justify military intervention in Libya.115 With regard to Syria today, Srebrenica is once again called upon—with exactly the same arguments, creating the same sense of urgency—to move the international community toward endorsing its “responsibility to protect.”116 This invocation of a specific event shows that Srebrenica has become a lieu de mémoire whose mere mentioning is supposed to short-circuit deliberations. Does this mean that all the comparisons between an act of mass atrocity and Srebrenica are problematic? Of course not. It is not that difficult to find examples of cinematic narratives that have led to productive “aspect-dawning” in the public’s eyes. The following section will concentrate on two such stories.

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2 .7. FI L M S A S T R I G G E R S O F A S P EC T C H A N G E

Why should we turn to cinema as an art form in this context?117 Several scholars recently put forth the claim that film is an underappreciated resource for political theory.118 One of the strongest pleas for the appreciation of film stems from Davide Panagia, who submits that cinema in itself, due to its “stochastic serialization of moving images,” offers political theorists with an opportunity to reflect on politics.119 This is so because the medium of film exposes unhelpful ways of understanding action and resistance, such as the idea of a stable identity that can be conveyed through a linear story. Crucially, Panagia tries to dissociate film’s potential for political theory from its pedagogical function. In another text, he goes so far as calling political theory’s dominant mode a “narratocracy,” which he describes as the “organization of a perceptual field according to the imperative of rendering things readable.”120 Panagia submits that the “rule of narrative” needs dismantling, for political theory should become more attuned to what he dubs the “political life of sensation.” Given my plea in favor of the force of storytelling, it is evident that I cannot endorse Panagia’s strategy. Luckily, there are rival arguments for the inclusion of cinema. To give but one example, which I deem more productive than Panagia’s approach, consider Stephen Esquith’s idea that movies can become vehicles of a “democratic political education.”121 He applies this idea to the specific issue of bystanders of violence and the benefits they accrue during mass atrocities. Esquith’s suggestion that films can exercise a pedagogical function reverberates with Lara’s turn to narrative. Following Esquith rather than Panagia, I submit that there is a place for film in the wider project of providing viewers with a new perspective on the past that can trigger aspect change. Evidently, such a generic claim needs to be redeemed through an interpretation of concrete narratives, which the following two sections will deliver.

2.7.1 . G RB AV I C A, O R V I E W I NG R A PE AS G E NO CIDE

Our first example is a fiction film dealing with the aftermath of the war in Ex-Yugoslavia. Jasmila Çbaniʉ’s movie Grbavica (2006) tells the story

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of Esma, a single mother, and her daughter, Sara. They live in a Sarajevo still ravaged by the war. Sara, who believes that her father has been killed by Serbian Chetniks and that he is thereby war hero, befriends a pupil from her school, Samir. When the school plans a trip, all the students whose fathers have been murdered during the conflict can join for free. For these orphans to be recognized as the offspring of war heroes, a certificate needs to be submitted. Since Esma is unable to produce this certificate, Sara is ultimately not on the list of those who can attend the trip for free. When she finally confronts Esma about her father’s true identity, the mother breaks down and reveals that she had in fact been raped multiple times by a Chetnik in a Serbian prison camp, screaming at Sara: “You are the daughter of a Chetnik!” Having realized that her father is not a Bosnian war hero, but rather a war criminal fighting on the enemy’s side, Sara ultimately seems to reconcile with her mother. The film ends on what could be interpreted as an optimistic note: the daughter leaving for the school trip, while the whole class enthusiastically sings a song about the beauty of Sarajevo. Çbaniʉ’s story of wartime rape and its devastating consequences for the generational bond won global acclaim when it was awarded the Golden Bear at the 2006 Berlin Film Festival. Later on, it gathered more awards on the international circuit, something especially noteworthy given that Grbavica was Çbaniʉ’s first feature-length film. Domestically, the reception of the film has been perhaps even more astonishing. In the first month after its release, the film was watched by more than 180,000 people in Bosnia alone. At the same time, NGOs started collecting signatures, right in front of movie theaters, to petition parliament for legislative acknowledgment of the victims of war rape.122 Although Çbaniʉ’s film was evidently not the only or even the main driver behind this push, it clearly served as a catalyst for civil society initiatives lobbying for reparation claims for rape victims.123 Grbavica is thus a prime example for how storytelling can “stimulat[e] public debate on dealing with the past.”124 What makes the movie so appealing is its powerful attempt to bring the past to bear on the present and the future. Its portrayal of gender relations has opened up the space for a nuanced discussion of the long-term effects of mass rape.125 This potential of artistic narratives to mobilize society-wide deliberations can be contrasted with storytelling in the more

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individualized setting of truth (and reconciliation) commissions or criminal trials in the aftermath of mass violence. One of the risks of putting narratives at the center stage of restorative justice mechanisms is that victims may become retraumatized in the process of giving testimony.126 This risk can be contained (if not entirely eliminated) in the process of sharing the narrative by interrogating works of art: while images on the screen or words on a page can trigger processes of retraumatization too, the mediated and mediating properties of art will enable viewers and readers to distance themselves from the scenes depicted in the story.127 To sum up the first example, Grbavica has managed to transform the viewers’ perceptive and interpretive frameworks as it makes anything but the recognition of mass rape’s genocidal character appear unlikely. Çbaniʉ’s film has furthermore inspired a societal conversation about the status of wartime rape and its ramifications for the pacified yet unreconciled polity.

2.7. 2. C L I M AT E R E F U GE ES, O R V IE WING CLIMAT E C H ANGE AS GE N O CIDE

My second case concerns climate change and its relationship to violence. I have already hinted at the idea, advanced by historians and social scientists, that climate change could be described as genocidal in character. While this suggestion contradicts the legal framework currently in use to identify and combat genocides, nothing prevents us from probing climate change-as-violence with the same conceptual apparatus as the case of rape.128 Chase Hobbs-Morgan has demonstrated why film might be an especially apt medium for telling a story that would permit viewers to see climate change as genocide.129 He starts from the observation that climate change can only be meaningfully described as violent if we liberate ourselves from a number of ill-conceived ideas about what violence is. Johan Galtung’s well-known concept of “structural violence”130 and Rob Nixon’s less familiar concept of “slow violence”131 enable us to interpret climate change in such a way that its violent aspects become visible. Violence is structural and slow when the following conditions pertain: (a) it is impossible to pinpoint perpetrators to whom blame can directly be attributed,

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even though it is evident that victims suffer from having been subjected to violence; (b) it is impossible to observe the immediate effects of violence because they unfold gradually and often invisibly. Traditional frameworks for grasping violence—those that equate violence more narrowly with physical force and psychological pressure—are premised on individualistic accounts of agency, which establish causal claims between perpetrators and the effects their actions have on victims. Since climate change cannot be captured through such frameworks, notions of structural violence and slow violence may assist us in seeing things differently. Hobbs-Morgan proposes that, once we theorize climate change as structurally and slowly violent, we need to reflect on ways to communicate this peculiar feature to the wider public. This is where cinema can contribute positively toward aspect change. To illustrate this, consider the documentary Climate Refugees (2010).132 As a nonfiction movie, the film serves the purpose of a contrasting foil when watched in parallel to Grbavica. Directed by Michael Nash, the documentary explores the upshots of climate change for human populations around the world. Footage from countries ravaged by large-scale environmental disasters is intermingled with statements from politicians, scientists, and NGO workers. Formally, Climate Refugees can be classified as a documentary in an expository mode: it clearly proposes a viewpoint and hopes to advance an agenda, sustained by specific truth claims.133 The film’s message is that climate change can be shown to be directly responsible for political conflicts and social crises across the globe. Its primary focus is on the inhabitants of those countries that have been heavily affected by rising sea levels: Tuvalu, but also the Maldives, parts of Indonesia and Bangladesh. By demonstrating the deeply troubling consequences of climate change for the everyday lives of hundreds of millions of people, Nash dispels myths about the uncertainty of climate change. Rather than sketching a potential scenario in the distant future, Climate Refugees starts from where we stand here and now. The reality of ecologically displaced people—from Hurricane Katrina to the large-scale flooding that devastated Pakistan in 2010—serves as a warning of the horrors to come. Throughout the movie, the director’s narrative strategy is to depict climate change as instigating the violent displacement of large populations

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in the Global South, which will ultimately also affect the Global North. In contrast to other ecodocumentaries, such as Before the Flood134 and There Once Was an Island,135 which mostly concentrate on the plight of local people affected by natural disasters, Climate Refugees also stresses the security implications of climate change across the globe.136 This means that, although at the current moment the risk of being harmed by climate change is disproportionally high in some parts of the world and very low in others, it is inevitable that the wider effects of climate-induced migration will spill over to the entire planet. In one sense, then, the film argues that there is no safe zone where the most privileged inhabitants of the planet could hide from the global consequences of climate change. Describing those who have been forced to migrate due to climate change as refugees involves a critique of the terms we employ to portray violence and its victims. Nash’s ambition is to make us see things differently, by turning the shared environmental space of planet Earth into the background on which political conflicts and social crises unfold. In so doing, he manages to translate the structural, slow violence of climate change into an incisive idea that penetrates the economy of attention of the privileged people of the Global North. This allows the viewers to envisage the genocidal character of climate change as an actual, and not merely remote, possibility. By demonstrating that the effects of climate change can be traced back to the consumer choices of the wealthy, Climate Refugees transforms the frameworks usually employed to ascribe blame for violence. It is interesting to note how the film begins: the opening shot is of Earth as observed from the moon, an image of extraordinary beauty that foregrounds both the oneness of our planet and its fragility. Robert Poole has analyzed the exceptional power of that single image to transform how people conceive of the Earth.137 Poole suggests that the first photographs of our planet from the Apollo mission, Earth Rise and Blue Marble, marked a turning point in religious, scientific, and artistic discourses about the environment. Viewing the Earth rising on the moon’s horizon provided the ecological movement with an opportunity to present the globe in an interconnected fashion. Nash’s documentary has been screened in more than forty countries and selected at many film festivals. It premiered at the 2010 UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. While we cannot identify the same

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kind of popular response to Climate Refugees as we did with Grbavica, the documentary still foregrounds the power of narrative. In order to better understand the aspect-changing capacity of Climate Refugees, we need to elaborate on a specific quality of documentaries: their ability to emotionally address the viewers.138 While fiction films do, of course, also elicit affective reactions from the viewers—Grbavica contains plenty of emotionally charged scenes— nonfiction films can be said to do so even more. Since documentaries depend on the audience responding to the assertion that what they are watching is an account of actual states of affairs, the scenes represented in a nonfiction film will make strong truth claims. If a person is interviewed about the reasons why they were displaced from their home, viewers will typically assume that a real person, rather than a professional actor, is speaking about her deplorable situation. Witnessing such firsthand accounts of those who have been negatively affected by climate change has an immediate impact on the emotions of the audience. This renders the case for viewing climate change as a form of genocide even more compelling. Once the viewers realize that the person being interviewed is a victim of a social and political injustice, rather than a casualty of a natural catastrophe, they are in a position to expand the concept of genocide to cover climate change. I do not mean to suggest here that every viewer of Climate Refugees will come to the conclusion that climate change must be considered genocidal; that would be an overdrawn suggestion and a misapprehension of the argument defended in this chapter. My proposal is, rather, that films like Climate Refugees woo us to see things differently and thereby potentially facilitate aspect change. This is not to intimate that documentaries, such as Michael Nash’s or others depicting climate change, are without genuine problems. To point out just two issues that critics have bemoaned: the role of race in discourses about climate change remains frequently unexplored. Accordingly, Andrew Baldwin observes that Climate Refugees suffers from a shortcoming that is indicative of the whole genre of documentaries about climate change: the victims of violence are portrayed as largely without agency; their representation is racialized, distorting the reality of climate change migrants.139 Another point of contention concerns the frame of securitizing that underpins the narrative. Scholars have argued that

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climate-induced migration is increasingly portrayed as a threat to security across the globe.140 The insertion of subjects such as climate change into a logic of securitization, critics aver, corresponds to a general trend in international politics. These important concerns notwithstanding, Climate Refugees reveals the ability of film to trigger aspect change. The documentary serves as an illustration of how artistic engagements with violence can contribute to tackling the challenge of coming to terms with genocide. As we shall see in the next section, artworks are by their very nature open to a variety of readings, which often turn out to be divisive, rather than harmonious. But through their storytelling, both fiction and nonfiction films address the audience in such a way as to transform the conceptual frameworks for capturing violence.

2 . 8 . W H Y T H E I N D E T E R M I N AC Y O F S TO RY T E L L I N G I S N OT I N T R AC TA B L E

In concluding this chapter, I want to address a legitimate worry about the role of artworks in debates about violence. A critic might object to my account of storytelling as a remedy against genocide blindness that it leaves too many issues uncertain, betting instead on the disclosive function of narratives. I have not elucidated, the critic might profess, with any precision how an agreement between the author(s) and the public might be reached; neither have I identified a criterion to determine whether some stories are more authentic or effective than others. In short, I have not yet grappled with the foundations of the narrative approach. Such foundations are indispensable, the critic might insist, because the appeal to stories as such remains indeterminate: they may in favorable circumstances and through their aspect-changing effects foster a sense of respect and empathy, but in other moments they may actually trigger atrocities. It is well documented, for instance, that the Rwandan genocide was incited by hate speech, mercilessly pitting Hutus against Tutsis.141 Radio stations and newspapers fanned the fires of hatred by spreading stories about “Tutsi cockroaches.” Nazi propaganda, too, depended on anti-Semitic narratives about Jews as the “enemy within the

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state,” disseminated through a thriving cinema and print industry.142 If both Grbavica and Jud Süß, Veit Harlan’s infamous movie from 1940, recount evildoing and human suffering—the Jew Oppenheimer in Jud Süß rapes a German girl and tortures her husband—how may we normatively distinguish them? If both Climate Refugees and Fritz Hippler’s antiSemitic film Der ewige Jude (1940) take an assertive stance toward reality and appeal to the audience’s emotions and affects, how may we separate acceptable from inacceptable ways of making the viewers feel anger, rage, or shame?143 These are undoubtedly hard questions. However, I believe the most convincing response is straightforward. Whereas it is true that an argument in favor of narratives cannot supply us with an unassailable guarantee that storytelling will succeed in achieving its goals,144 this should not send us on a quest for normative foundations—if by this we mean some form of transcendental, universal, ahistorical morality that ought to guard us against the specter of relativism. We require no ethical theory to fathom that Hutu and Nazi propaganda pursued only one goal, namely, to indoctrinate people so that they are turned into willing accomplices of murderous plans. The evildoing and human suffering depicted in these stories were purely instrumental, its purpose to instill fear, resentment, and fury in the audience. By contrast, stories that facilitate processes of learning from catastrophes and thereby militate against genocide blindness, such as the ones discussed earlier, do not proselytize their audience. Rather, these stories always remain open to deliberation, dispute, and contestation. In accordance with Arendt’s theory of reflective judgment, they should, of course, strive to elicit agreement from the public, but they must abstain from imposing their message with absolute assurance. This openness is a precondition for the kind of storytelling that might lead to aspect change. Without the possibility of deliberation, dispute, and contestation, genuine opportunities for seeing things differently remain severely limited. All we need, then, to normatively distinguish Grbavica from Jud Süß, or Climate Refugees from Der ewige Jude is the capacity to identify manipulative storytelling. In Kantian terminology, such storytelling treats the audience merely as a means to an end, rather than an end in itself. Nonmanipulative storytelling, on the other hand, woos the public, yet it refrains from coercing it into espousing a specific message. To be sure,

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powerful stories will often come perilously close to proselytizing, especially when their objective is to move the imagination of the public by way of emotional and affective appeals. But not all narratives transgress the line separating nonmanipulative from manipulative storytelling. There is nothing inherently problematic about the indeterminacy of artistic representations when it comes to debates around political violence. Manipulative storytelling curtails the interpretive freedom of the audience through the use of images and ideas that cancel out the humanity of the represented. As outlined in chapter 1, whenever the imagination is engaged, we need to make sure that the right kinds of constraints are upheld. The most important of these constraints pertains to the way human life is framed: either as disposable and useless or as precarious and frail. The depiction of human lives as disposable and useless in propagandist narratives has a tangible effect on the audience in that it deliberately stirs up fear, resentment, and fury. Another way of expressing this basic intuition would be to observe with Lisa Disch that a “skillful storyteller teaches her readers to see as she does, not what she does, affording them the ‘intoxicating’ experience of seeing from multiple perspectives but leaving them with the responsibility to undertake the critical task of interpretation for themselves.”145 In reply to the critic, I would thus contend that the narrative approach is ultimately grounded in the respect for the dignity of the stories’ addressees. Apart from this proviso, storytelling advances “without a banister,” to invoke Arendt’s memorable phrase.146 It remains an unfinished project that must go on so long as human suffering is experienced. However, there simply is no alternative to this project if the aim is to combat genocide blindness. This brings us back to the relationship between denial and blindness. From my discussion, it should be clear that both negative reactions to genocide are linked to each other. Deniers will have easy play if they advance their pseudoclaims and alternative facts in an environment dominated by genocide blindness. Conversely, deniers may “imprison” the members of the public sphere within a distorted vision of the world through the use of misleading narratives.147 Therefore, my argument in this chapter does not detract from the struggle against genocide denial, but rather complements it with a concern for remedying genocide blindness. Reading both Grbavica and Climate Refugees as political interventions in specific contexts reveals the advantages of theorizing in a dialogical

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and democratic fashion: social struggles around the meaning of violence are always fought on a local level, and the purpose of theorizing with a practical intent is not to prescribe from above what the correct use of words such as genocide should ideally be. This is the path taken by moralists, which inevitably leads to a dead end. By contrast, once we are equipped with the conceptual apparatus derived from Wittgenstein, we are in a much better position to reconstruct the complex ways in which aspect change can be instigated. This is the path favored by sober realists when they orient themselves toward the ameliorative task of adjusting existing vocabularies to a dynamic social world. As this chapter has shown, the judgments we issue when assessing these vocabularies can be prompted through necessarily open-ended conversations with artworks. This commits political theory to a “stance of humility”148 vis-à-vis the various actors trying to make sense of violence. This chapter has tackled the politics of naming by underscoring the centrality of nonmanipulative storytelling for the fight against genocide blindness. In contrast with foundationalist and legalist propositions, the emphasis on cultivating political imagination leaves no room for the notion that the practical struggle over genocide can be resolved through theoretical means alone. Rather, it exposes, less ambitiously, yet surely more realistically, how complex the process of coming to terms with genocide is. No banisters—but no false promises, either.

3 HOW TO DO THINGS WITH HYPOTHETICALS Assessing Thought Experiments About Torture

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his chapter deals with the ban on torture and the role that the imagination plays in exploring it. I will focus on the ways in which thought experiments can be used to probe the permissibility of torture. Like in the previous chapter, my discussion will be grounded in a specific context—the recent debates about torture, especially during the so-called War on Terror. This time, however, I will move away from artistic representations of violence and interrogate the imagination through the register of philosophical hypotheticals: from the movies to the proverbial armchair. On August 7, 2014, the executive editor of the New York Times, Dean Baquet, broached the question of whether the CIA’s questioning of terror suspects since 9/11 should be called “torture” in his newspaper, or whether other designations, such as “enhanced interrogation techniques,” preferred by the US government and its supporters, would be more appropriate. In assessing this issue, Baquet proposed a distinction between the “disputed legal meaning of the word ‘torture’ ” and the “common meaning: the intentional infliction of pain to make someone talk.”1 He argued that, given the US government’s continuous effort to shirk responsibility for what happened during the War on Terror, and especially in the Guantanamo prison camp, it was high time to recuperate once again the ordinary meaning of torture. Accordingly, the New York Times decided from then on to call torture by its common name—euphemisms such as

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“enhanced interrogation techniques” or “stress positions” would not be acceptable anymore. The murky evasiveness and double-talk of earlier reporting were to be replaced by a straightforward avowal of the “intentional infliction of pain to make someone talk.” Public debates about torture have abounded over the past fifteen years. We can make sense of these debates if we situate them within the wider context of the post-9/11 imperial agenda of the United States and its allies. This does not mean that there were no debates about the permissibility of torture before that watershed event: in many respects, it is evident that the current controversies merely echo earlier discussions about what constitutes torture. Yet, there is something peculiar about the contemporary constellation because many commentators had considered the ban on torture as robust a ban as one could imagine. This proved to be a mistaken and in hindsight dangerously naïve assumption. Is the torture prohibition appropriate for a time in which political and military actors engage in asymmetrical warfare? Can we still afford to categorically oppose torture when terrorists threaten “our” way of life? Does torture work? How effective is it? These and many other questions have been raised not only in the public at large but also in academe. Posed in these abstract terms, they might sound rather innocuous. But in reality these question touch on something more crucial than many who have been raising them would perhaps have thought. This becomes evident once we cast a glance at the ways in which the ban on torture is captured in everyday language. Sometimes we speak colloquially of a “torture taboo,” as opposed to a “torture prohibition,” to highlight what is actually at stake.2 The contrast between prohibition and taboo is interesting for a number of reasons. For anthropologists, a taboo entails a code that separates certain harmful practices from a community’s normal, healthy functioning. The dreaded breaking of a taboo is rooted in an anxiety about contagion, pollution, and infection. Once the code is damaged the taboo’s harm can spread into the community, dissolving its collective ties. Taboos patrol the boundaries between the pure and the impure, the benign and the dangerous, the permissible and the outlawed. From this angle, it becomes perhaps more transparent why many commentators speak of a taboo in the context of torture practices. The analogy tells us something about the torture prohibition’s centrality within

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our culture. To refrain from torturing under all circumstances, then, really is “a practice that marks the boundary between a community and what it treats as unconscionably reprobate or uncommonly terrifying.”3 In the following, I will try to explore how this boundary is drawn, and what it means to misunderstand its importance.

3 .1 . M A P P I N G T H E TO R T U R E D E B AT E S

Before turning to hypotheticals, we need to look more closely into the development of the prohibition of torture. While I will exclusively focus on academic discourse, it should not be forgotten that debates about the moral dimensions of torture have been conducted in the midst of public controversy, as the New York Times editorial illustrates. For once there can be little doubt that political theory has mattered in the real world—one author has even suggested that the work of torture apologists can be described as “philosophy for the White House.”4 After 9/11, it suddenly became attractive for academics from various disciplines to openly ask whether torture should really be illicit under all circumstances. In other words, it became possible to answer the question “when is torture right?”5 with a hesitant “sometimes.” 6 It is no secret that many democracies that are commonly considered promoters of human rights have been busy developing new forms of “clean” torture, which leave no marks on the body; and the rule of law on which democracies rely often does not provide a strong bulwark for stopping torture practices.7 However, what seems rather unique in the recent discussion is how much enthusiastic support the Bush administration received from scholarly circles, both in academe and in think tanks.8 Roughly speaking, two argumentative strategies were employed to erode the provisions in international and US law.9 Both strategies attempted to lend legitimacy to the administration’s policy of extending immunity to CIA operatives; but they differed with regard to their stance toward the legality of torture. Let us start by rehearsing the legal codification of the torture prohibition, which forms the backdrop of the torture debates in political theory. Just as in the previous chapter, the goal here is not to exhaustively explain

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how the prohibition came into being, but rather to foreground the complexity of any attempt to codify violence through legal instruments. Similar to the debate around genocide, the legal history we are interested in is set against the backdrop of post–World War II institutions and practices. Wider initiatives to ban or restrain torture, however, have a much longer historical trajectory. There is ample evidence that in ancient Greece and in the Roman Republic slaves and foreigners could be tortured without sanction; citizens were often exempted from such punitive practices, but this changed in the Roman Empire, where Christians, their status as citizens notwithstanding, were regularly tortured for failing to worship the emperor.10 From the European Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, torture was an integral element of the criminal justice system. This is why “juridical torture” existed in medieval law.11 The origins of juridical torture lie in the law of proof, which superseded the earlier system of ordeals, requiring the accused to go through trials in order to corroborate his or her innocence. Under the Roman-canon law of proof, convictions could only be achieved if the accused confessed, or if at least two eyewitnesses to the crime came forward. In the absence of these conditions, torture was legally applied to extract an admission of guilt from the accused. Such a confession was vital to the trial system so long as one eyewitness as well as some circumstantial evidence could be produced along with it. Thus, far from being external to the legal system, torture was for a long period pivotal for its functioning. In the eighteenth century juridical torture slowly disappeared in Europe. Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire and Beccaria branded juridical torture inhumane and barbaric,12 which led some absolutist rulers of that period to abolish torture for the purpose of extracting confessions. While it is true that these humanist efforts to condemn the cruelty of torture had an important impact on its eventual ban, it must also be highlighted that a shift in the law of proof was perhaps even more important for the actual abolition of torture in European societies. John Langbein has shown that the growing acceptance of circumstantial evidence in criminal procedures made torture as a means of evidence-generation superfluous. There simply was no need for it anymore.13 The abolition of judicial torture, however, did not lead to the complete disappearance of torture practices. On the contrary, in the twentieth

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century, fascist as well as communist regimes used torture on an unprecedented scale. If we retrace, in a highly compressed form, the development of how torture became a taboo in the twentieth century, the next crucial moment would be the end of World War II, for it was this war’s “atrocities [that] brought the need to prohibit the torture and ill-treatment of detainees to the fore.”14 Indeed, the ban on torture played an important role in the creation of the UN system itself. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) contains an article (5) on torture: “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” What we today call the human rights regime in international law is strongly rooted in the absolute prohibition of torture. However, from the first declarative statements to the full implementation of the human rights regime, many hurdles needed to be overcome. Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, from the 1950s onwards it was France that most vigorously opposed the ban on torture.15 Embroiled in the last throes of its colonial war in Algeria, the French military systematically resorted to torture to break the resistance of the Algerian National Liberation Front.16 Torture was also common in the British fight against the Irish Republican Army in the first decade of the “Troubles,” starting in the late 1960s.17 It is thus important to emphasize that the codification of the torture prohibition after World War II was far from linear and progressive. Many democracies in the developed world have been torturing even after the torture prohibition became jus cogens, that is, after it became international law that is “binding on those states that have failed to ratify treaties which explicitly outlaw torture.”18 If we keep focusing on the historical development, however, an important episode occurred in the 1980s. The UN “Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment” (UNCAT), which the General Assembly adopted in 1984, marks the culmination of earlier attempts to clearly define torture.19 How is torture understood in this document? UNCAT describes torture in Article 1 as “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind.”

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Several aspects of this definition are noteworthy. The first concerns the emphasis on “severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental.” The fact that UNCAT defines torture in this way is consequential for the subsequent controversy. For it remains naturally open to interpretation what constitutes “severe pain or suffering.” Defenders of so-called torture lite insist that certain practices should be exempted from the ban on torture, precisely because they fail to meet the threshold of systematically inflicting “severe pain or suffering.” The definition also covers both interrogational and punitive forms of torture. UNCAT’s Article 3 further specifies the extent to which the ban on torture should be considered universal. In pointing out that “no state shall expel, return, or extradite [refouler] a person to another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture,” the Convention upholds the view that the prohibition is universally applicable. Indeed, torture is today considered a crime on a par with genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes in that it falls under universal jurisdiction.20 Various regional treaties have contributed to the legal codification of the torture prohibition. The most important legal basis here is the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) established by the Council of Europe in 1950. In contrast with UNCAT, the ECHR refrains from defining torture and simply states in Article 3: “No one shall be subjected to torture or to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” In the European context, it was thus the adjudicating tribunal’s task to carve out a workable definition of torture. What is more, the “European Convention for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment” (ECPT), adopted in 1987, stresses the prevention of torture as its most important objective. Antonio Cassese underlines why prevention is so central to the monitoring of human rights abuses: “All too frequently, they [the legal instruments] simply cannot stop violations; those international implementing and remedial measures which exist do not appear to have a sufficiently strong and direct deterrent effect. Plainly, in a sphere such as human rights, where violations are in large measure irremediable, in the sense that nothing can ever efface the victim’s memory of suffering, . . . the key is prevention.21 The complex provisions on international and regional levels notwithstanding, torture practices have not been eradicated, even if monitoring mechanisms have enormously improved over the past decades. International NGOs have played a

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crucial role in making human rights violations visible to the public eye. But monitoring alone cannot lead to the eradication of torture practices. Darius Rejali’s provocative yet plausible thesis is that monitoring may actually lead to a diversification of torture practices: “Public monitoring leads institutions that favor painful coercion to use and combine clean torture techniques to evade detection, and, to the extent that public monitoring is not only greater in democracies, but that public monitoring of human rights is a core value in modern democracies, it is the case that where we find democracies torturing today we will also be more likely to find stealthy torture.”22 The dynamics identified by Rejali are troubling for the practical fight to prevent and stop torture. In the chapter on genocide, we have observed how the standard definition of a crime can inadvertently create occasions for perpetrators to strategically avoid charges. This is, in essence, how “anticipatory denial” works. In the case of torture, we are once again confronted with looping effects that cannot be simply ignored. After 9/11, two strategies were pursued to undermine the ban on torture. The first one involved the suggestion to abolish the legal prohibition of torture tout court. Alan Dershowitz has been the most outspoken proponent of the idea that in a liberal democracy judges should be allowed to issue “torture warrants” in exceptional circumstances.23 The openly stated objective of these warrants would be the judicial oversight of torture. Judges would then be in charge of rendering torture practices visible and holding interrogators accountable. Since interrogators would resort to torture anyhow when the lives of civilians are in immediate danger, it would be prudent to grant judges the right to decide when torture should be applied.24 Dershowitz, and others arguing in a similar vein, found that, in an era of asymmetrical warfare and counterterrorism, a legal regulation of torture would simply be the lesser evil.25 The second strategy involved the creation of a subcategory of the infliction of violence that, while being sufficiently harsh to “break” a prisoner into submission and to release vital information, would still fall short of torture. This form of coercion has been called “torture lite.”26 Jean Bethke Elshtain, a prominent champion of this notion, surmised that the word torture had so far been insufficiently disambiguated—there is a morally relevant discrepancy between “a beating to within an inch of one’s life” and a “slap in the face.” Bringing these two forms of coercion under the umbrella of torture would make “mincemeat of the category.”27 Hence,

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the suggestion was to remodel the definition of torture such that certain practices would be exempted from the absolute prohibition. Recall that the UNCAT defines torture as inflicting “severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental.” Defenders of “torture lite” interpret the meaning of torture very narrowly by excluding from it forms of coercion that fall short of “real torture.” Apart from Dershowitz and Elshtain, the most famous intervention came from John Yoo, a Berkeley law professor and author of the infamous “Bybee Memorandum,” who argued for the authorization of President Bush to executively order torture. These assaults on the prohibition have been met with strong criticism. The proposal that regulating torture through judicial oversight would be the lesser evil was denounced as a dangerous step towards barbarism.28 The suggestion that some forms of severe coercion, which have hitherto been covered under the torture prohibition, should be tolerated in times of emergency was rejected on the ground that the category of torture lite is nothing but a smokescreen to distract the public from the fundamental insidiousness of torture practices.29 Yoo’s part in particular has come under close scrutiny, with damning effects.30 Although the ban is once again under attack from the current president,31 I consider the earlier condemnations of the shameful complicity between lawyers and the US government to be conclusive. While it is to be expected that some academics will try to grant legitimacy to an executive branch bent on torture, their arguments will likely be similar to the ones proffered by Dershowitz, Elshtain, and Yoo. Therefore, I now shift attention to imaginative engagements with torture, which at first sight appear less offensive than straightforward rationalizations for breaking the torture taboo.

3 . 2 . T H O U G H T E X P E R I M E N TS I N N O R M AT I V E P O L I T I C A L T H EO RY

What role does the imagination perform in controversies around torture? To answer that question, we need a general picture of how reasoning through hypotheticals works. Readers of contemporary political theory will be familiar with thought experiments: they are invoked to bring out

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“our intuitions” about ethically controversial issues, such as abortion;32 they are employed to test assumptions about politically and morally relevant distinctions, such as the one between killing and letting die;33 and they are introduced to show the inherent limits of certain philosophical doctrines, such as hedonism.34 Thought experiments are especially important in applied ethics and political theory, where they serve various interrelated functions, such as stipulating counterexamples, creating mechanisms to tease out the implications of certain positions, providing clarification, and issuing invitations to reimagine age-old problems.35 We may define thought experiments as devices that invite the reader to examine the normative consequences of a hypothetical situation as though “the particular state of affairs described in the imaginary scenario were actually to obtain.”36 Thought experiments make present what is absent, and as such they structurally resemble narrative art forms. We have seen in the previous chapter how nonmanipulative storytelling may induce aspect change in such a way that novel forms of violence can be subsumed under existing conceptual rubrics. Some imaginary cases try to achieve exactly the same effect, and I will dedicate this chapter to identifying those thought experiments that manage to help us to see things differently.37 There is nothing new about the introduction of hypotheticals. From Plato’s Republic to John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, imaginary cases have preoccupied philosophers a great deal. Whether the proverbial armchair ought to be a privileged spot from which to reason and deliberate about politics has naturally always been contested. But over the past twenty years, a veritable methodological debate around the status of thought experiments has unfolded.38 In the following, I intervene in this general debate, which encompasses various subdisciplines in philosophy and political science, from metaphysics to international relations theory, by attempting to parse productive from unproductive hypotheticals. In focusing on normative political theory, I shall touch on three dimensions of thought experiments, namely, “what they are; how they work; their virtues and vices.”39 To tease out some of the account’s implications, I will probe a specific case study in more detail—thought experiments involving torture—that epitomizes the conditions under which imaginary cases might either fail or succeed.

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My concern with some types of hypothetical builds and expands on a well-established canon of criticism within political theory, which affirms that “artificial cases make bad ethics.” 40 To this statement, I am adding that some artificial cases make especially bad ethics and politics, by arguing that many hypotheticals violate basic premises that ought to be heeded whenever the imagination is engaged: they radically disrupt a link with reality as we know it, display no concern with human frailty and precariousness, and foreclose alternative frames of representation. While the chapter’s thrust is hence mostly critical, I also gesture toward a more constructive engagement with thought experiments. As a consequence, it treads new territory that followers of Henry Shue’s categorical indictment against artificial cases have so far shunned: in affirming that some hypotheticals can figure prominently in our normative theorizing of complex cases, I reject his wholesale skepticism and outline a novel defense of their usefulness under specific circumstances. The basis of this defense resides in a so far unexplored examination of the frames that conjurers of hypotheticals require when constructing their thought experiments. To connect my argument in this chapter to the wider concerns animating this book, recall what I dubbed the disruptive and instructive aspects of the imagination. Political theory can, with some justification, be exercised without much direct concern for the real world, from the armchair, as it were. But, to stick with the metaphor, the ultimate purpose of sedentary political theory surely is to get the audience moving, to elicit certain (positive or negative) reactions from them, to make them perform actions they would otherwise not. This is true even if the political theorist herself, wishing the audience to move in a particular direction, stands (or sits) still. Productive thought experiments engage the imagination in such a way as to enable these judgments. In that sense, they can be deemed instructive for understanding our current predicament. When hypotheticals fail, they fail for different reasons. I shall distinguish between two archetypical instances: (1) failure to develop “imaginary grip,” that is, the incapacity of a given hypothetical to engage the imagination of the reader or viewer; (2) failure to track certain key features of the real world, which must not be forfeited in imaginary cases, that is, the incapacity of a given hypothetical to account for what is possible for us, here and now. To further explain the heuristic terminology used in this chapter, I shall call

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productive thought experiments this-worldly, while reserving the term otherworldly for hypotheticals that do not manage to improve the audience’s capacity to judge real-world dilemmas.41 The vices and virtues of concrete thought experiments crucially depend, as I shall demonstrate in the following, on the frames that political theorists draw on when devising imaginary cases.

3 . 3 . “ I M AG I N E A S IT UAT I O N I N W H I C H . . .”: O B S E RV I N G TO R T U R E F R O M T H E A R M C H A I R

This section explains how thought experiments are normally defended in contemporary political theory. As any reader of this literature knows, thought experiments are used to fulfill a number of different functions, from illustrating abstract arguments to formulating counterexamples. The great variety of imaginary cases in the extant debate testifies to their vital importance for a discourse that stands at some critical distance to the real world. The use of hypotheticals plays an important part in this process for it allows the political theorist to perceive and present things from a new, illuminating angle. Thought experiments are, essentially, estrangement devices: they defamiliarize us from commonly held assumptions. In this process, the imagination is engaged in various ways. Beginning a conversation with a phrase such as “imagine a situation in which . . .” opens up a discursive space liberated from the conventions on which our comprehension of the real world rests. And yet, whenever hypotheticals are introduced in normative political theory, the question naturally arises how they relate to the real world—what their purpose is supposed to be. The reason for this worry is simple. The more we distance ourselves from the world as we know it, the more pressing becomes the imperative to clarify the imaginary case’s connection with reality. In other words, if one of the main goals of hypotheticals is to enable deliberations about complex cases, then we need to ensure that the thought experiment is sufficiently in tune with the reality to which it speaks, lest it become irrelevant for the specific situation under scrutiny. Imaginary cases about torture are exceptionally well suited to disclose this tension inherent in political theory’s engagement with hypotheticals.

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The most commonly invoked hypothetical in discussions around torture has been the so-called ticking-bomb scenario.42 Made popular through immensely successful TV shows such as 24, this scenario is a thought experiment intended to buttress a “utilitarianism of extremity,” 43 to use Michael Walzer’s words: that in “supreme emergencies” the absolute prohibition of committing a wrong should be overridden by consequentialist reasoning. The ticking-bomb scenario refers, in short, to a situation in which the ban on torture needs to be suspended to save innocent lives. There are several descriptions of this hypothetical, but they all share a roughly similar design: “(1) the lives of a large number of innocent civilians are in danger; (2) the catastrophe is imminent, therefore time is of the essence; (3) a terrorist has been captured who holds information that could prevent the catastrophe from occurring.” 44 The ticking-bomb scenario has clearly influenced the way people think about terrorism and weigh the appropriateness of using torture to stop it.45 While the scholarly literature has dealt extensively with the thought experiment, we still lack a clear sense of why political theorists draw on the ticking-bomb scenario, that is, what kinds of reason they invoke to justify their use of it and similar hypotheticals about torture. I shall suggest that defenders of this imaginary case typically come in two varieties. On the one hand, there are authors—let us call them “dramaturgists”—whose appeal to the thought experiment is intended as an attack on the absolute ban on torture in law and public policy. Alan Dershowitz, as we have seen, advocates the issuing of “torture warrants” by independent judges because he thinks that in exceptional situations interrogational torture would be practiced anyhow. On his account, the ticking-bomb scenario is not all that far fetched—it merely embellishes certain key facets of reality to bring out presumably widely held ideas about the problem of dirty hands.46 For dramaturgists, the thought experiment presents us with an “extraordinarily rare” but “real and recurring” 47 situation; far from being the figment of our imagination, it tells us something crucial about the way the world actually looks, albeit in especially stark colors. Oren Gross, who otherwise objects to Dershowitz’s endorsement of torture warrants, concurs with the proposition that hypotheticals like the ticking-bomb scenario are “real, albeit rare. Ignoring them completely, by rhetorically relegating them to the level of ‘artificial,’ is utopian or naïve, at best.” 48

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Contrast this with what one may call the “clarificationist” camp. “Clarificationists” emphasize that the ticking-bomb scenario is a powerful device because it functions as a counterfactual screen against which the moral permissibility of torture can be explored. On the clarificationist view, hypotheticals involving torture must not under any circumstances be mistaken for statements about the real world. Fritz Allhoff makes this point in his defense of torture when he stresses that “moral theory is logically distinct from moral practice.” 49 The underlying image of theorizing is one of complete disconnection from reality. In sharp contrast with authors like Dershowitz or Gross, Allhoff and others are thus agnostic as to whether there are actual situations that might somehow resemble the setup of the ticking-bomb scenario. Allhoff emphasizes that normative theorizing about torture should not be conflated with empirical observations about how torture works or when it should actually be allowed and implemented. When comparing the dramaturgic and the clarificationist interpretations, it becomes clear that those who believe the ticking-bomb scenario tells us something about the real world employ the hypothetical for radically different reasons than those who wish to investigate the moral permissibility of torture via the introduction of a thought experiment. Dramaturgists refer to thought experiments for the purpose of throwing a real and recurring, albeit rare, situation into sharper relief; clarificationists reject the notion that hypotheticals, such as the ticking-bomb scenario, reflect elements of the world as we know it, and insist on the counterfactual nature of their inquiry. In each of these camps, the imagination is engaged for different reasons: the former use the thought experiment to sharpen a specific representation of reality, the latter appeal to our sense of the possible to shine an unconventional light on a complex case. If one were to ponder a critical response to each of these defenses of imaginary cases, different routes would have to be chosen. A potentially effective rejoinder to the dramaturgic position would be to propose that the hypothetical fundamentally misconstrues the reality upon which it pretends to rely. Instead of approximating a real and recurring situation, the critic could point out that the ticking-bomb scenario in fact distorts crucial features of the world as we know it. However, this response will obviously not work when dealing with clarificationists—they acknowledge that reality is much messier than their imaginary cases, which is

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why it is much harder to formulate a cogent answer to the clarificationist camp. Among the most outspoken clarificationist defenders of thought experiments about torture are Frances Kamm, Uwe Steinhoff, and Jeff McMahan.50 In singling out these three authors, I intend to reconstruct the conceptual background within which thought experiments typically occupy a central place. The point of this reconstruction is not to delve into the minutiae of a few imaginary cases, but rather to delineate the rationale behind their invocation. Kamm’s method aims at the generation of hypotheticals whose primary purpose is to test moral intuitions. Her main supposition is that these intuitions remain stable even when imaginary cases become extremely detached from reality. This “technique of equalizing cases”51 entails modifying imagined scenarios such that morally salient factors can be treated discretely and in isolation from one another. In conjuring up thought experiments, Kamm thus grapples with intuitions as if they were “fixed data points in moral reflection.”52 The upshot of this method is the design of hypotheticals that certainly stretch the limits of what some would consider imaginable.53 Kamm introduces a number of thought experiments to unpack the permissibility of torture. Whereas she engages with existing definitions of torture, her main interest is to use moral intuitions to explore what torture is, philosophically speaking. Uwe Steinhoff’s use of imaginary cases resembles Kamm’s. He, too, employs hypotheticals to question the absolute ban on torture. Steinhoff suggests that torture is justifiable (and not only excusable) on the grounds of self-defense. Since people have a right to defend themselves against aggression, this right covers both lethal force and torture. Steinhoff’s is a rights-based defense of torture. Torturing somebody is not only permissible in “extreme emergencies,” when deontological constraints on what we ought to do are overridden by utilitarian concerns for saving the innocent in large numbers; it is permissible whenever innocent lives are endangered, independent of their numbers. His conclusion is neatly summarized in the following paragraph: “Since people have a right even to kill a culpable aggressor if, in the circumstances, this is a proportionate and necessary means of self-defence against an imminent threat, and since most forms of torture are not as bad as killing, then people must

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also have a right to torture a culpable aggressor if this, too, in the circumstances, is a proportionate and necessary means of self-defence against an imminent threat.”54 In order to flesh out this point, Steinhoff draws on a number of thought experiments that aim to disprove the position of absolutists. This strategy involves the construction of hypotheticals such as Innocent Jenny, who engages in what Steinhoff calls “justified selfdefensive rape”55 and about whom we will hear more at a later stage. The purpose of these examples is unmistakable: since absolutists lack the imagination to consider cases that challenge their seemingly steadfast commitment to the torture prohibition, we need extreme hypotheticals to awaken them from their dogmatic slumber. Finally, Jeff McMahan has not only contributed to the reinvigoration of analytical Just War theory;56 he has recently also reflected on methodological issues arising from the torture debates. McMahan concurs with Steinhoff that torture cannot be absolutely opposed. Since there is a moral equivalence between killing and torturing (in self-defense), it should be acknowledged that torturing the culpable to defend the innocent is permissible.57 Nevertheless, McMahan does not endorse the legalization of torture. Pace Dershowitz and Yoo, he is adamant about the requirement to separate moral permissibility from legal authorization. McMahan hence agrees with those who rebuff attempts to institutionalize torture in the real world. Yet, the reason why we should oppose torture warrants is not because torturing as such is morally wrong; it is rather that there is a high risk innocent people would be wrongly tortured if warrants were in fact issued.58 What are hypotheticals for, then? Their purpose, according to McMahan, is to “filter out irrelevant details that can distract or confuse our intuitions, thereby allowing us to focus on precisely those considerations that we wish to test for moral significance.”59 Thought experiments clean up the messiness of the real world in order to lay bare what the right course of action would ideally be. What is more, although he does not proffer any empirical evidence for this belief, McMahan maintains that imaginary cases have the potential advantage of generating consensus—perhaps even intercultural agreement—as regards intuitions about morality. References to historical cases, which have been notably present in much of the recent literature on Just War theory, will inevitably be tainted by superfluous facts that disorient the moral compass.60

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While there are, of course, considerable differences between Kamm’s, Steinhoff’s, and McMahan’s positions, they subscribe to a common rationale for the use of thought experiments and exhibit a kind of family resemblance not to be found in the “dramaturgic” camp. To characterize this resemblance, we may observe that the following argumentative steps are typically taken to defend hypotheticals about torture. 1. Since it is an open question whether torture should be absolutely prohibited or not, one must interrogate the ban with as much care as possible. This requires a “bracketing” of the taboo-like prohibition so as to inquire into the moral permissibility of torture. 2. One way of establishing the moral permissibility of torture is to refer to intuitions about other areas of human interaction in which the use of force might reasonably be justified, such as self-defense or the defense of innocent others. It is assumed that various acts of violence (killing, raping, torturing) can be subjected to the same kind of normative reasoning. 3. Thought experiments can then be designed to test those intuitions by eliminating distorting factors in reality. In so doing, they equalize otherwise morally overdetermined cases and thereby make them comparable. 4. It is normatively irrelevant how far-fetched and outlandish thought experiments become—intuitions will remain stable across the spectrum between standard and extreme hypotheticals.

Perhaps the most obvious respect in which this chain of arguments could be broken is by questioning the naïve appeal to intuitions. Kamm in particular has been challenged for her heavy reliance on intuitions to determine the meaning of torture.61 Intuitions, the objection goes, are not simply data points comparable to scientifically observable facts—they express particular views that are dependent on cultural backgrounds and social trajectories. In this respect, it is rather telling that no clarificationist defender of thought experiments about torture has ever seriously tried to find out whether a “large majority of people from a variety of cultures” 62 would actually subscribe to the same intuitions as an Oxford don or Harvard professor. This lacuna has been recognized as a major shortcoming in contemporary analytical philosophy. Polemically, thought experiments have

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been labeled “intuition pumps”: “fiendishly clever devices” that “cajole you into declaring your gut intuition without giving you a good reason for it.” 63 The burgeoning field of experimental philosophy has emerged specifically to compensate for the inadequacies of such an unexamined appeal to intuitions, by incorporating findings in psychology and by taking ordinary people’s views seriously.64 According to experimental philosophers, it might perhaps be possible to establish a commonly shared stance on torture, among ordinary people with diverse cultural backgrounds and social trajectories, but such a claim would have to be empirically substantiated, rather than simply postulated and “proven” through hypotheticals.65 I shall not continue this line of criticism, even though recent publications seem to have demolished at least some aspects of intuitionbased analytical philosophy.66 Others, moreover, have pointed out that experimental philosophy replicates some of the problematic aspects of “ideal theorizing.” 67 My subsequent inquiry zooms in on modality as the main criterion for assessing thought experiments. Before that, however, the chapter casts a look at the often-ignored effects of framing.

3 . 4 . T H E E F F EC T O F F R A M E S O N T H E INTELLIGIBILIT Y OF SUFFERING

In this section, I steer our attention to two authors who have grappled in depth with representations of violence: Susan Sontag and Judith Butler. My argument here is that Sontag’s and Butler’s observations on the linkages between framing, the intelligibility of suffering, and ethical responsiveness can be fruitfully utilized to elucidate imaginary cases. This applies not only to the debates around torture, but to thought experiments within normative political theory more generally. Sontag develops her account in a long essay on war photography and later in a newspaper article on the human rights violations in the Iraqi Abu Ghraib prison.68 In both texts, she is intrigued by the capacity of photography, and representations of violence more generally, to either prompt ethical responses or foreclose them. Sontag begins by suggesting that a “photographic image . . . cannot be simply a transparency of something that happened. It is always the image that someone chose; to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude.” 69

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The exclusionary act of framing is important for how we perceive wartime photography. While it might have been the case in earlier days that wartime photography had a cautionary and shocking effect on the audience—during World War I, the German photographer Ernst Friedrich was stopped by state censors from publishing his antimilitarist book Krieg dem Kriege!, with its gruesome images of mutilated bodies and wounds to the face, for fear of debilitating the national war effort—today, the situation looks patently different. Since conflict reporting turned over the past decades into a global business for news outlets, “ideologues of photography have become increasingly concerned with the issues of exploitation of sentiment (pity, compassion, indignation) in war photography and of rote ways of provoking feeling.”70 The fact that various emotions can be triggered through images, that the consumers of reportages are liable to be manipulated by embedded reporters, implies that war photography is radically open to abuse. When watching pictures of atrocity, different sensitivities can be cultivated: “To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb. To acknowledge the existence of the incorrigible.”71 The chief lesson to take from Sontag is that the frames of violence are inherently unstable and open to contestation: under favorable circumstances they can render distant suffering intelligible; under unfavorable conditions, visual representations of violence simply satisfy, and even exacerbate, voyeurism. War photography, or indeed any representation of violence, is never only about documenting historical events. It matters who takes the pictures, who makes them available, where they are published, and how we look at them. This uncontroversial observation is essential because Sontag maintains that photography is not the right medium for enhancing our understanding of violence at all. But images are exceptionally useful for remembering trauma: “Harrowing photographs do not inevitably lose their power to shock. But they are not much help if the task is to understand. Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us.”72 In Precarious Life and Frames of War, Judith Butler elaborates on some of the themes studied by Sontag. Her interest lies with the effects of framing on the intelligibility of suffering: Whether and how we respond to the suffering of others, how we formulate moral criticisms, how we articulate political analyses, depend upon

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a certain field of perceptible reality already being established. This field of perceptible reality is one in which the notion of the recognizable human is formed and maintained over and against what cannot be named or regarded as the human, a figure of the nonhuman that holds the place of the human in its unrecognizability.73

This discussion of framing is part of a larger project of interrogating various implications of the War on Terror. Butler scrutinizes the ways in which human life can become grievable: When does a human being count as worthy of sorrow and empathy? During the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, this question has been pressing. Butler surmises that the lives of the vanquished and oppressed simply do not appear grievable—at least to the Western mind. There is a “hierarchy of grief”74 that makes it impossible to recognize the discarded bodies as worthy of sorrow and empathy. While Western lives, and in particular those of the victims of the 9/11 attacks as well as the soldiers fallen in Iraq and Afghanistan, have been mourned on the front pages of Western newspapers, Butler observes, “there are no obituaries for the war casualties that the United States inflicts, and there cannot be. If there were to be an obituary, there would have had to have been a life, a life worth noting, a life worth valuing and preserving, a life that qualifies for recognition.”75 As one commentator has shown, this statement is slightly exaggerated.76 Ever since the wars have started, people in the affected countries have of course mourned the deaths of their loved ones and compatriots. Butler wants to make a point about the field of representability in which violence is enacted, perceived, and memorialized. Without symbolically discarding the lives of the vast majority of victims in Iraq and Afghanistan, it would have been impossible to embark on the war mission. In her analysis of torture and photography, concentrating in particular on the photos taken in the Abu Ghraib prison, Butler explores this thought further: [We] cannot understand this field of representability simply by examining its explicit contents, since it is constituted fundamentally by what is cast out and maintained outside the frame within which representations appear. We can think of the frame, then, as active, as jettisoning and presenting, and as doing both at once, in silence, without a visible sign

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of its operation and yet effectively. . . . Prior to the events and actions that are represented within the frame, there is an active, if unmarked, delimitation of the field itself, and so a set of contents and perspectives that are not shown, never shown, impermissible to show.77

If such delimitation predates the representation of violence, we may ask whether there are standards against which the legitimacy of the representable might be measured. Admittedly, Butler herself is not interested in this kind of normative probing; yet, she still seems to be committed to the notion that not all forms of framing are equally innocuous. If the existence of a hierarchy of grief cannot be denied, we should hence attempt to examine how steep the hierarchy is and how we may eventually flatten it. This implies asking whether all non-Western life is barred from the realm of compassionate engagement, or whether in exceptional circumstances ungrievable life can break through the frames initially set. Indeed, Butler highlights the malleability and contestability of what can be represented: There are ways of framing that will bring the human in its frailty and precariousness into view, allow us to stand for the value and dignity of human life, to react with outrage when lives are degraded or eviscerated without regard for their value as lives. And then there are frames that foreclose responsiveness, to be understood as the negative action of existing frames, so that no alternative frames can exist; for them to exist and to permit another kind of content would perhaps communicate a suffering that might lead to an alteration of our political assessment of the current war.78

Given our ameliorative interest in naming violence, the lesson of Butler’s approach is that novel frames are needed to oppose those that make responding to distant suffering impossible. Neither Sontag nor Butler suggests that frames, which are sensitive to the suffering of victims of war and torture, on their own would be sufficient to move spectators to act. This requires far greater change. Still, the idea of bringing the “human in its frailty and precariousness into view” provides a good starting point for rethinking the ways in which representations might be transformed so as to mitigate the inevitably exclusionary effects of framing.

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The point about foregrounding the precariousness and frailty of human life is not to categorically deny that some lives are strong and secure, even in extremely adverse conditions. After all, we possess ample evidence for heroic resistance to suffering. Rather, Butler reminds us that such strong and secure lives are exceptionally rare, and that representations of violence that prioritize them should be looked at with much skepticism. Ordinary lives, the argument goes, are characterized by precariousness and frailty. Butler’s position vis-à-vis the field of representability possesses vital implications for our topic: depictions of torture that steer the gaze away from the frail and precarious existence of the tortured not only symbolically harm them; they also manipulate the viewers insofar as they project an incomplete and one-sided picture of reality in which the value of some lives is discounted against the value of others. By suppressing the humanity of torture victims, such representations, imagined or not, perpetuate and entrench political agendas through which outrage at violence can be kept at a bare minimum. What is more, some depictions of torture quite literally crowd out alternative frames—the ticking-bomb scenario is a good example of this effect. A multiplicity of frames would allow the interrogation of hegemonic representations of violence. That is why Butler is adamant about the dire need for a plurality of frames. In sum, responsiveness to the plight of others, no matter who they are or what they have done, is one type of taking action in the face of violence. In this sense, responding in ethically appropriate ways to representations of violence means standing up for humanity and resisting dehumanizing policies.

3 . 5 . M O DA L I T Y M AT T E R S : A N I CO N O G R A P H Y O F T H I S - WO R L D LY A N D OT H E RWO R L D LY H Y P OT H E T I C A L S

This section asks how Sontag and Butler may help us reflect critically on imaginary cases and identify a yardstick to hold apart this-worldly from otherworldly hypotheticals. Recall how those whom I have dubbed “clarificationist” defenders of thought experiments maintain that contemporary or historical examples taken from the real world are inimical to

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fine-grained moral appraisal because they are suffused with scattered details, some of which deserve attention while others do not. Real-world cases mix up the normatively salient with the normatively extraneous. Imaginary cases, by contrast, have the benefit of stripping reality of all superfluous information so that intuitions can be tested in an environment free of interference: less noise, more sound. I have already gestured toward one respect in which this idea can be dismantled—by shattering the myth of intuitions as simply given, or as stable at the fringes of the imaginable, or as widely shared among people from different cultural traditions and social backgrounds. Apart from this route, is there another way in which thought experiments could be critically examined? Sontag and Butler open up an alternative path of critique, which has so far remained unexplored in the literature. According to their criticism, frames are not neutral devices that simply serve the purpose of rendering reality representable; they are the products of decisions that can be subjected to critical scrutiny.79 To be sure, thought experiments do not pretend to represent reality; they summon us to imagine a moral universe that is different from the one we currently inhabit. But in order to do so, they still need to latch on to something in the mental space of the readers so as to activate their intuitions, feelings, and reasons. A thought experiment that does not occupy this mental space will lack “imaginative grip.”80 One way in which hypotheticals might fail would thus be if they invited the audience to envision a situation that exceeds their imaginative powers. In one sense, such a case would barely qualify as a proper hypothetical: its incapacity to move the reader’s imagination would prevent it from taking off at all. Naturally, it remains empirically open to debate whether some of the scenarios conjured up by Kamm, Steinhoff, and McMahan manage to develop imaginative grip or not. It simply depends on the readers’ habits and sensibilities whether they will be able to accommodate certain extreme hypotheticals in the repertoire of their mental space. But I will assume here that we can accept the invitation to think about torture the way Kamm, Steinhoff, and McMahan want us to. Is there another way in which we could say that some imaginary cases fail to achieve what they have set out to do? Perhaps they move the audience, but in the wrong direction.81 Earlier, I proposed we draw a heuristic distinction between this-worldly and otherworldly thought experiments.

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Here is how this could be fleshed out. Assessing thought experiments requires us to look into what kinds of possible world they construct. We can distinguish two types of modality underpinning thought experiments: “possible simpliciter” and “possible for us, here and now.” In the following, I explicate in more detail how to separate these two kinds of modality, but I shall start by underlining the relevance of imaginary cases. Thought experiments that are possible for us, here and now, are relevant in the specific sense that they speak to the world we currently inhabit— they address an audience that goes beyond the boundaries of academe and facilitate the judgment of complex cases. In order to remain relevant, these hypotheticals need to incorporate in their setup certain key features that render them recognizable as instantiations of real-world cases from which they imaginatively depart. Thought experiments that are based on what is “possible simpliciter” slide into irrelevance precisely because they radically disrupt this crucial link with reality.82 As explained in the book’s introduction, the conceptual framework within which the distinction between this-worldly and otherworldly hypotheticals is made revolves around a democratic orientation of political theory as a civic activity. It follows that drawing the line between thisworldly and otherworldly thought experiments cannot be done in the abstract—it must be undertaken within the context where thought experiments are constructed. We can only establish what is relevant (i.e., possible for us, here and now) by looking at the real-world cases that motivate the creation of thought experiments in the first place. There can thus be no other generic yardstick for probing the merits of hypotheticals, apart from their capability of enhancing the judging of real-world problems. It is because imaginary cases ought to be seen through this lens that we need to base our assessment of their virtues and vices on context-specific factors that either facilitate or impede action-guidance. Framing plays a crucial part in this process. Sontag and Butler have demonstrated that the frames employed to represent violence are themselves the products of conscious or unconscious decisions about what can, and what cannot, be shown in a given context; what is being left out is as important as what is being revealed. Examining the frames of hypotheticals, their setup, is so essential because “the value of hypotheticals depends on the extent to which they track the critical features of the problem that a moral agent actually faces. To argue from a case that does not

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track the critical moral features of the relevant context disorients both the moral and the legal issues that the hypothetical is designed to illuminate.”83 In other words, some frames become unhinged from reality and thereby forfeit their claim to being relevant. Butler’s insistence that precariousness and frailty are distinctive features of human life discloses a criterion by which we may be able to assess the fitness of hypotheticals to our actual world. So far, I have largely refrained from grappling with thought experiments in detail to focus on the theoretical rationale behind their design. But at this stage a closer look at two examples will assist us in more sharply demarcating the boundary between this-worldly and otherworldly thought experiments. The first is Steinhoff’s discussion of selfdefensive rape, which he admits is not for the “squeamish.” The reference to rape occurs at a crucial fork in the argument when Steinhoff investigates the permissibility of torture. Recall that the right to self-defense serves as the basis for justifying torture: if we grant that it is under certain conditions permissible to kill someone (namely, when one needs to defend oneself or an innocent other), then we ought to admit, for exactly the same reason, that torturing someone can be permissible. How about raping somebody, then? Several authors have intimated that pushing the rights-based argument further so as also to include rape would eventually lead to the collapse of the argument from self-defense.84 To sustain the coherence of the rights-based defense of torture, Steinhoff is forced to claim that the justification from self-defense can be extended to a case like rape. He tries to achieve this by introducing the following thought experiment: Innocent Jenny, naked in her bedroom, is attacked by Serial Killer, who has broken in. He, too, is naked. Jenny, who is a doctor, is currently treating her vaginal infection with a potent new ointment, which has the side-effect of killing any man whose penis is exposed to it long and severely enough, something best achieved by sexual intercourse. While the killer is trying to strangle her, they are wrestling on the ground, she gets on top of him, and he gets his hands on her throat and squeezes. In her desperation, she shoves the aggressor’s penis—while the aggressor explicitly says “No!”—into her vagina and starts to move up and down

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while the man still strangles her. But suddenly the ointment works, the man goes into shock and dies. Jenny is safe.85

I suppose it is uncontroversial to deem this an extreme thought experiment. One reaction to Innocent Jenny would be to state that it is simply too eccentric to tell us anything meaningful about self-defense at all.86 The rejoinder would be that philosophers making up hypotheticals like Innocent Jenny are frivolously toying around with imaginary cases without acknowledging the severity of the moral problems. Innocent Jenny, then, might reveal a disparity between what is morally at stake in a given situation and how (some) philosophers talk about it. On this account, if someone tried to show, through intricate thought experiments, that the absolute prohibition of torture (or rape) should become an object of discussion, the proper attitude would be to halt the conversation altogether.87 Another way of countering a case like Steinhoff’s would be to insist that, while being peculiar, the thought experiment constructs a situation that is perhaps conceivable, but only barely so. The phrase “only barely so” indicates that the modality underlying Innocent Jenny should be considered problematic. We may hence grant that, in a very distant world, rape could be envisaged as a means of self-defense and that Steinhoff has been successful in imagining such a world. Yet, that statement remains vacuous until we raise a series of subsequent queries: What follows from this hypothetical? What lessons should we draw from it? Where lies its action-guiding element? How, if at all, does it help us make judgments about real-world dilemmas? The answer to these questions appears to be that, even though Innocent Jenny testifies to Steinhoff’s vivid mind-set as regards sexual violence, it does not succeed in changing established ideas about the wrongness of rape or torture, for that matter. Just because an elaborate counterexample is conceivable does not mean that a general norm needs to be revised.88 It can be doubted whether many readers of Innocent Jenny would upon reflection come to the conclusion that their preconceived intuitions about rape were wrong beforehand—that they should now deem it likely that in situations of self-defense, such as Innocent Jenny, raping somebody would be morally permitted.

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To put this point more sharply, as an imaginary case Innocent Jenny is unhinged from reality precisely because it features an aspect of rape that is absent in all actual cases of rape, namely, self-defense (and killer ointment, obviously). Hence, while it presents us with a scenario that is imaginable, its practical value for judging real-world cases is negligible. Common sense tells us that in all incidents of real-world rape the characteristic feature of self-defense is absent, which is why Innocent Jenny is not possible for us, here and now. This has ramifications for the debate around torture. If the justification of torture depends on an argumentative analogy between various types of defending oneself (or innocent others) against aggression, then Innocent Jenny simply does not succeed in establishing a chain of equivalence. Having grappled with an unambiguously extreme hypothetical, let us now turn to a prima facie less outlandish one. It is plausible to presume that the ticking-bomb scenario is much closer to the world as we know it than Innocent Jenny. Dramaturgists like Dershowitz and Gross underscore this idea, and it seems true that the assumptions embedded in it are modally closer to reality than the ones made by Steinhoff. It is also beyond doubt that the ticking-bomb scenario possesses imaginative grip, as various TV shows and movies have shown. Should we conclude that the ticking-bomb scenario is benign? Does it track a state of affairs that could be real, as Dershowitz and Gross want us to believe? One way of resisting this conclusion would be to expose the flawed suppositions on which the ticking-bomb scenario rests. Along these lines, Kim Lane Scheppele demonstrates that the hypothetical misconstrues four crucial features of reality that one ought to account for—even in an imaginary world: First, the hypothetical assumes that you (as the moral agent to whom the hypothetical is directed) and the terrorist are alone in the world. . . . There is no institutional context; neither state nor society appears in this picture. But of course in any real-world context, the choice would be made in an institutional setting by those charged with the responsibility to fight terrorism. Second, the hypothetical assumes an extraordinary degree of clarity about the situation in which you . . . find yourself when the question of whether to torture arises. . . . Such certainty may be hypothetically possible, but it will likely never exist. Third, the

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hypothetical assumes that the person to be tortured is the one (perhaps even the only one) who knows where the ticking bomb is. . . . Instead, the more likely question will be whether the person to be tortured really knows anything useful at all. Finally, the hypothetical assumes that if the captured person gives you the information after being tortured, the information will in fact be true and useful in defusing the bomb. Yet torture produces results that are highly unreliable.89

Should this interpretation of the hypothetical’s assumptions be accurate, as various authors seem to have confirmed,90 we might conclude that the ticking-bomb scenario shares more with Innocent Jenny than initially suspected. In other words, although it appears to be modally closer to reality, it turns out to be as otherworldly as Steinhoff’s hypothetical. On this interpretation, the imaginary case is so far detached from what could reasonably be expected to happen in the real world that its merit in guiding action becomes dubious. The real challenge, then, for those devising imaginary cases is not whether they can conjure up a situation that is within the realm of the possible; with the right kind of training in analytical philosophy, they will probably manage to do so.91 Rather, for political theorists committed to the dialogical and democratic activity outlined in the introduction, the crux is to what extent the thought experiment helps us navigate the complex moral universe we currently inhabit.92

3 . 6 . D I AG N O S I N G FA I LU R E S A N D O U T L I N I N G S U CC E S S CO N D ITI O N S

I have claimed that this-worldly hypotheticals are thought experiments that express what is possible for us, here and now; otherworldly hypotheticals, by contrast, are thought experiments that express what is possible simpliciter. This division leads to another question: Are all this-worldly hypotheticals benign, and, conversely, are all otherworldly thought experiments pernicious? The distinction between this-worldly and otherworldly does not fully map onto the distinction between benign and pernicious thought

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experiments. To explain why, we must again reflect on action-guidance. As explained earlier, the capacity of thought experiments to enable judgments is an indicator of their merit. If a hypothetical fails to contribute to our judging of real-world cases due to its irrelevance, it should be considered pernicious. But, crucially, there are two sorts of failure in this regard. An imaginary case might fail to offer action-guidance because it does not succeed in engaging the imagination at all. This is what happens when thought experiments do not manage to develop “imaginative grip” from the outset. A hypothetical might be so bizarre that the sheer distance between the possible and the actual world undercuts the readers’ ability to draw any kind of lesson from it. Some extreme hypotheticals resemble science fiction more than anything else, and could therefore be considered entirely benign.93 They might not proffer any assistance in judging realworld dilemmas, but neither do they exert any detrimental impact on our ability to judge. A second sort of failure is more serious for it indicates a corruption of the ability to judge. Innocent Jenny falls into this category. A hypothetical like Steinhoff’s presents us with a case of “rape” that can have a distorting effect on the practical wisdom of those who have learnt to recognize that raping somebody simply cannot be an act of self-defense. While it is conceivable to envisage “rape” along Steinhoff’s lines, the problem with the thought experiment is not so much that it is purely speculative and possesses no value whatsoever when it comes to informing judgments about quandaries in the real world; rather, one could object that it evokes a possible world in which we are invited to demolish the taboo-like character of rape and, by implication, torture. So, in this case we are dealing with a thought experiment that potentially has “imaginative grip,” but its effects on the audience should be deemed deleterious. Innocent Jenny engages the imagination of the readers, but it does so in a problematic fashion. If neither an extreme hypothetical such as Innocent Jenny nor an apparently less outlandish one like the ticking-bomb scenario manages to sustain a link with the world as we know it, how about this-worldly thought experiments, then? Can there be productive hypotheticals about torture that are relevant to the audience and speak to our world, here and now? This chapter has not opposed the use of thought experiments per se, but

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rather targeted more specifically those hypotheticals that fail to offer action-guidance. It follows that some imaginary cases, provided they develop imaginative grip, sustain a symbolic link with the real world, and enable the judging of difficult situations, must be considered benign. However, to my knowledge such a thought experiment cannot be found in the existing literature. Instead of now attempting to construct a thisworldly hypothetical, I shall outline the success conditions that any such hypothetical would have to satisfy to qualify as productive. My suggestion is that, if one were to transform otherworldly thought experiments about torture into this-worldly ones, one ought to be primarily guided by Butler’s admonition to bring “the human in its frailty and precariousness into view.” As we have observed, Butler pleads for the creation of frames that give prominence to the dignity of victims, no matter who they are or what they have done. Only such novel frames, which often are reactions to hegemonic depictions of muted and invisible suffering, will enable the viewers to express outrage at torture practices and recognize the value of all lives. This argument is especially poignant when dealing with the clarificationist defense of imaginary cases. Recall Kamm’s and McMahan’s argument about the advantageous epistemic setup of hypotheticals, compared with historical or contemporary cases—they strip the real world of superfluous, morally overdetermined information and thus facilitate normative reasoning. The error that many clarificationists commit, however, is that they do not include in their moral universe an acknowledgment of the suffering of those on whom interrogational or self-defensive torture would be exercised. This idea is pivotal because it once again underlines the intrinsic connectedness of imaginary cases with the world as we know it. Butler teaches us that frailty and precariousness are features that all human beings share; they can be either accentuated through responsible frames or obfuscated through manipulative ones. At first sight, this argument seems vulnerable to the objection that clarificationists draw on thought experiments about torture to highlight how much human suffering can potentially be prevented by torturing a culpable suspect, be it in self-defense or in defense of innocent others. Hence, a critic could accuse my emphasis on the suffering of those on whom interrogational or self-defensive torture is imposed of misunderstanding the counterfactual nature of the imaginary case.

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However, the point to be taken from Butler’s discussion is not that the suffering of the tortured must somehow trump the suffering of potential victims; ranking one form of human frailty over another would simply replace a hegemonic hierarchy of grief with an alternative one. Yet, Butler admonishes us that certain hegemonic frames condemn the suffering of some victims to the sidelines, by completely silencing their susceptibility to pain. This is precisely what happens in the vast majority of thought experiments about torture. The very design of these imaginary cases—from the ubiquitous ticking-bomb scenario to Innocent Jenny— makes it impossible to perceive even a trace of the precariousness that characterizes human life. Obviously, conjuring up hypotheticals that heighten awareness of these aspects of humanity is not an easy exercise. To remain relevant, productive thought experiments about torture would have to attempt to strike a precarious balance between abstracting from the real world so as to put into clearer focus the complex issue under scrutiny and maintaining a symbolic link with the world as we know it. The main anchor of this link should be the recognition of human frailty and precariousness, without which the modal distance between real and imagined world becomes too extensive. Yet, as this section has tried to argue, if we wish to defuse the wholesale skepticism raised by Henry Shue—that artificial cases in general are deleterious to normative reasoning—then we have no choice but to reflect on thought experiments that are possible for us, here and now.

3 .7. W H Y R E A F FI R M I N G T H E D I S T I N C T I O N B E T W E E N T H EO RY A N D P R AC T I C E I S I N S U F FI C I E N T

Two objections may be raised against the argument presented in this chapter. First, clarificationists could counter my proposal by affirming the gulf between theory and practice. There are at least two flaws with this line of argument. To begin with, given our current knowledge about the pervasiveness of torture practices around the world, maintaining the distinction between moral permissibility and legal authorization, as McMahan, for example, does, will simply not be enough. If one is fully aware of the

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widespread use of torture and if one has learnt to appreciate that torture is abhorrent and condemnable (which in itself must be recognized as significant historical progress), why would one be tempted to make up a modally remote case in which torture was suddenly, under extraordinary circumstances, permissible? What should the audience do with intuitions tested in a situation that shares close to nothing with the real world, such as Innocent Jenny? Sharply separating theory from practice hence sets the debate on the wrong track from the beginning. Moreover, even if we subscribed to an implausibly strict distinction between moral knowledge and practical action, the problems identified earlier prevent the meaningful exercise of judgment in cases where the modality underpinning the thought experiment becomes otherworldly. The loss of imaginative grip, the neglect of a concern with human frailty and precariousness, and the foreclosing of alternative frames of representation incapacitate our ability to judge complex issues of political violence. This is especially clear in a case like Innocent Jenny, where the inference of permissible rape depends on a posture of self-defense that is a theoretical possibility, but not a practical one. One might, second, object to my argument that thought experiments are not only “intuition pumps”; they also serve as wake-up calls for reconsidering age-old problems that have become somewhat calcified. The conjurers of “otherworldly” hypotheticals might thus respond to my criticism that thought experiments are intended to kick-start the debate anew, to make us think harder about the problem of torture. Along Millian lines, they might suggest that the prohibition of torture has become an unexamined dogma that needs constant probing, as much as any other societal norm. Sometimes extreme hypotheticals are indeed defended on the grounds that they estrange readers from the current situation so as to make them perceive more clearly what the values are that inform their practices.94 My argument for restraining otherworldly hypotheticals might thus be associated with a conservative spirit, desiring to legislate certain boundaries of the imagination that ought to remain utterly open. While such reimaginings are crucial for societies to continuously explore their core commitments, it matters what it is that the readers are being estranged from. If the estrangement reaches a level so radical that the very basis of core commitments becomes shaky, we run the risk of rendering the moral world we inhabit unstable.95

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The tension this chapter sought to explore is simple to state in theory, but hard to resolve in practice: whereas forcing us to see norms, such as the ban on torture, in a new light is one of the exceptional virtues of such hypotheticals, the drive toward cases that are more and more remote from the world as we know it is one of their worst vices. To reiterate my core argument, the idea that every “artificial case makes bad ethics” seems misguided. This realization still leaves substantial room for debate around which kinds of imaginary case we wish to promote in political theory. However, I have also suggested that this room is not limitless. Naturally, it remains contestable whether a concrete thought experiment is framed in such a way as to enable judgments of complex cases or not. Yet, an answer to the question whether, for example, Rawls’s “original position” is a productive hypothetical can only be given by examining the concrete context within which the imaginary case is introduced. The framework undergirding this chapter does not allow for an a priori assessment of all imaginary cases, but it permits us to organize our reflections when we assess the merits of thought experiments in political theory. This is why it is so vital to uphold the distinction between the two kinds of modality outlined in this chapter: possible for us, here and now, and possible simpliciter. Without it, the imagination is free to flow, but we would be deprived of a means to deliberate on when and why thought experiments go wrong, and, conversely, when and why they help us navigate the moral universe we currently inhabit.

4 GENEALOGY AS CRITIQUE Problematizing Definitions of Terrorism

I

n this chapter, I will once again interrogate how the faculty to imagine things differently might advance the discussion around violence. My focus will now lie on the historical imagination and on the ways in which thinking about the past might inform, expand, and transform our understanding of the present. More specifically, I shall ask whether a genealogical approach to conceptualizations of terrorism may help us in productively overcoming the chasm between moralist and realist perspectives. Let us begin by reflecting on how this chapter relates to the wider concerns behind this book. The concept of terrorism shares with genocide and torture a feature whose appreciation has been identified as vital: through the politics of naming and through “looping effects,” its uses are implicated in struggles over its precise meaning and its application to real-world cases. One could even argue that nowhere is the politics of naming more striking than in the case of terrorism, where the derogatory and polemical uses of the term often clearly derive from political agendas.1 To call an opponent’s actions terrorist is to denounce practices that should have no place within the arena of legitimate contestation. This raises worries about the standing of academic discourse. If, as the saying goes, “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter,” where does this leave political theory as a discipline that strives to be both critical and constructive in its engagement with the real world? Are we

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compelled to conclude that all attempts to call someone a terrorist are manipulative? Or can we arrive at a definition of terrorism that is not simply a vehicle for surreptitious interests or a sociological artifact of power? As we have remarked in the introduction, theorists typically pursue one of the following strategies when answering these questions: either they assume a moralist position and strive for a definition of terrorism that is fully insulated from contagion with public controversies, or they promote a hermeneutics of suspicion, seeking to reveal the traces of power within existing uses of terrorism. We can thus again observe a spectrum of positions unfolding between the two poles of moralism and “unreconstructed” realism. Here is what this spectrum looks like in more detail. One of the common responses to the politics of naming behind the concept of terrorism has been to develop a specifically “moral definition”2 that attempts to develop an account of terrorism that is untainted by the polemical uses of the word. This approach decontextualizes terrorism, stripping it—or claiming to, at least—of its complex historical and cultural specificities. Terrorism is thereby turned into the kind of object that Nietzsche deemed appropriate for definitions: one that has no past whatsoever. On the other end of the spectrum we can identify the burgeoning field of critical terrorism studies, which seeks to excavate the traces of power within existing uses of the word terrorism.3 The assumptions behind this field of inquiry differ from the moralist camp. The adjective critical here signals a scholarly attitude whose main goal is to denounce the ways in which the label terrorist serves strategic purposes in public discourse.4 While some proponents of critical terrorism studies do acknowledge the normative implications of their stance, discussions about how we may distinguish terrorism from legitimate forms of violence are largely absent from their research agenda.5 Between the two camps, there appears little hope of productive dialogue. Indeed, it rarely happens that an adherent of the moralist camp even bothers to cite, let alone seriously engages with, a contribution from critical terrorism studies.6 The same is, of course, true for the other side. Realists are, generally, reluctant to admit that the normative appraisal of terrorism is worthwhile.

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My argument in this chapter is that moralists are correct in insisting on the importance of having a definition of terrorism; but they are mistaken in their suppositions how we may arrive at such a definition. Realists, on the other side, are right to foreground the ways in which the naming of violence is embedded in historical and cultural contexts; but they are wrong to discard the possibility of distinguishing between more or less appropriate definitions of terrorism. As in previous chapters, my aspiration is to sidestep the intellectually unsatisfactory stalemate between moralists and realists by claiming that it is possible to marry important insights from both camps, without collapsing them entirely. Occupying this middle ground requires one to acknowledge the political character of the terms of debate (their intertwining with the politics of naming), without resorting to evaluative agnosticism. This is the crux of the sober realism I am, once again, encouraging in this chapter. To begin with a caveat about the scope of this chapter: I do not aim to offer a genealogy of “terrorism” tout court. Rather, I will concentrate on one particular aspect of definitions of terrorism, namely, the deliberate targeting of noncombatants.7 We do require a definition of terrorism for practical purposes. The ability to judge, to separate productive from unproductive uses of a concept, lies at the heart of any responsible engagement with violence. I thus suggest that, on pragmatic and ameliorative grounds, we may be able to define the term terrorism by reference to the targets of terrorism: those who are noncombatants. But such a conceptualization of terrorism, which is shared by many contributors to the debate, can be sustained so long as it occurs against the background of a genealogy of innocence. By “genealogy” I mean, broadly, a denaturalizing inquiry into the manifold roots of a practice or idea. As a mode of historical inquiry, genealogy can initially be characterized by focusing on two aspects. First, genealogy, in its aspiration to reveal the contingent emergence of a belief or value, is not antiquarian—the reason why we turn to history is grounded in an interest not in the past per se, but in issues that pose a challenge to our thinking and to our practices, here and now. Neither, however, is genealogy a form of presentism—the past is not reconstructed through the lens of contemporary concerns, but rather in its own right. This is why

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a genealogical perspective often uncovers hidden sources—what Nietzsche considers the “grey”8 color of genealogy and what Foucault dubs the search for “discreet and seemingly insignificant truths”9—that have so far received too little scholarly attention. Second, genealogy has a critical impact in its orientation toward our contemporary thinking. Yet, this does not necessarily involve subverting or repudiating the beliefs or values under scrutiny. Notwithstanding interpretations of genealogy as subversion and repudiation, genealogy can also be conceived in a different manner: as an effective way of problematizing ostensibly self-evident norms. Such an interrogation helps us better understand a practice by revealing the historical conditions of its possibility.

4 .1 . D E F I N I N G T E R R O R I S M : T WO S T R AT EG I E S AND A COUNTERPROPOSAL

This section reconstructs the debate within political theory about how to define terrorism. To approach this debate, we need to start by acquiring a clearer sense of the legal dimension of defining terrorism. This framing in terms of what the law has to tell us serves exploratory purposes: it allows us to take stock of the status quo and to more clearly perceive from where the controversy in political theory departs. Notwithstanding efforts since the 1920s to develop an internationally binding definition of terrorism, the disputes around the meaning of the term have not abated.10 While it has been suggested that a quasi-definition of terrorism could be deduced from various domestic legislations and regional as well as international treaties, it is obvious that the lack of a binding account has left states with plenty of leeway to selectively apply the label terrorism in order to bolster security agendas.11 Although some commentators are optimistic about the prospects of an emerging consensus in customary international law, there is still no agreement around a full list of characteristics that would distinguish terrorist from other violent acts.12 The main stumbling block for customary international law’s capacity to define terrorism with at least some degree of certainty is the status of new types of political actors, such as freedom fighters engaged

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in national liberation movements.13 It has become increasingly evident that existing legal frameworks are not capable of accommodating these actors within their systems of reference. One reason why there has been a renewed push for a definition in international law can be found in the determination to cut terrorist groups off from their material support, notably by targeting their financial tributaries.14 For this purpose, it has become urgent to more clearly delineate who could be held accountable as a direct sponsor to terrorist groups. However, even in this circumscribed arena, no final decision on the term’s meaning has been reached. In the humanities and social sciences definitions of terrorism keep on growing too. By various counts, it is assumed that more than one hundred definitions exist and compete with one another.15 One way of reacting to this overabundance of definitional accounts would be to abandon the quest for a definition altogether. Walter Laqueur—perhaps the most eminent historian studying terrorism today—comes close to such a posture of resignation, when he states that a comprehensive definition is doomed to failure given the diachronic disunity of the term. While Laqueur and others examining the history of terrorism draw on a rather fuzzy working concept, they acknowledge that the changing nature of terrorism makes a comprehensive definition, enumerating both necessary and sufficient conditions, unachievable.16 The lack of a consensus in international law and the ongoing debate in the humanities and social sciences provide the background for the discussion in political theory. Moving from the historical and socialscientific debates to the political-theoretical ones, we can observe the narrowing of definitional strategies.17 Historians and social scientists will have to be relatively flexible in their use of conceptual frameworks when analyzing a wide range of evidence; otherwise their explanations of terrorism risk becoming schematic. Political theorists, especially those partaking in what I shall call the definitions first camp, are not overly worried about dogmatism of this kind. Their main concern is to get the definition “right.” The most ardent debates in contemporary political theory revolve around the question of what terrorism is—whether and how we may distinguish it from cognate types of political violence. This question is closely connected to terrorism’s morality—whether terrorist acts are

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impermissible under all conditions, or whether there are situations in which such acts (however defined) could be justified or excused on moral grounds. Although no agreement has been reached, we can identify several ideal-types of definitions within political theory. Adopting a macroperspective, the most prominent features highlighted in definitions of terrorism are • • • •

the political or ideological motivation behind terrorism; the spreading of fear within the wider public through terrorist acts; the prominence of nonstate actors as primary agents behind terrorism; the intentional targeting of noncombatants by terrorists.18

More technically, we can distinguish four types of definition: teleological, tactical, agent-focused, and object-focused.19 Teleological definitions focus on the ends themselves (political, ideological, religious, or otherwise) that terrorism hopes to bring about; tactical definitions concentrate on the specific means or technologies enlisted by terrorists to achieve their ends (however they may be conceived); agent-focused definitions highlight the specific character of the agents perpetrating terrorism, be they nonstate, substate, or state actors; finally, object-focused definitions foreground the targets of terrorism, from the immediate one of killing noncombatants to the more distant one of menacing society at large. The great variety of definitions has its roots in the fact that we can easily combine different aspects of these ideal-types in order to capture what is specific about terrorism. Yet, even a quick glance at the debate of the past thirty years reveals that authors remain deeply divided over the question whether one of these features, or a combination thereof, vitally characterizes terrorism. One issue that almost all definitions face is their lack of consistency when confronted with counterexamples. To illustrate, consider agent-focused accounts, which typically stress that nonstate actors are primarily engaged in terrorism. The problem with this approach is that it screens out many horrific acts committed by states that very much look like terrorism, but that would not count as such under the proposed definition. The history of totalitarianism and imperialism in the twentieth century is full of horrific occasions where states themselves have been deeply implicated in seemingly terrorist acts, both against their

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own populations and against other countries. Hence, it is prima facie dubious to associate terrorism exclusively, or even primarily, with nonstate actors. Instead of weighing the strengths and weaknesses of various definitional strategies, I will now take a step back and raise a more fundamental question: What is the purpose of a definition of terrorism? At first sight, the answer seems as straightforward as the question trivial: precisely because the term is so heavily contested and so frequently used to denounce political adversaries, we must rely on a definition that is isolated from concrete struggles. The urge to sharply distinguish the notion of terrorism from other types of political violence can hence be seen as a reaction to the widespread manipulation of the word in the public sphere. Political theorists have found various ways to illuminate the process of naming terrorism itself: (1) by stipulating a canonical definition, which would permit the unequivocal separation of terrorist acts from other violent acts; (2) by deflating the importance of defining terrorism relative to other practical and theoretical tasks, such as understanding and responding to the social phenomenon of terrorism; and (3) by suggesting that the very task of defining terrorism ought to be revised and that we should instead focus on the historical and rhetorical factors that shape the meanings of terrorism.

4.1.1. THE DEFINITIONS FIRST POSITION

Given that the word terrorism is affected by the politics of naming, a first position involves the search for a canonical definition. We may assemble theorists striving for such a concept under the moniker definitions first. For example, Tony Coady suggests that “there are two central philosophical questions about terrorism: What is it? And what, if anything, is wrong with it?”20 On this account, the definitional quest is instrumental to understanding and ultimately responding to the evil of terrorism. Tamar Meisels propounds a similar idea when she points to the absolute necessity of delivering a canonical definition. Since the word terrorism is so widely used in public discourse, we require terminological clarity in order to hold terrorist acts apart from other types of violence: “If we are to fruitfully pursue the further moral issues regarding the changing character

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of modern war, we must first settle on a definition of terrorism. . . . If terminology is to contribute to ethical judgment, the definition itself ought to highlight the characteristic normative aspect of the category in question.”21 This quote is emblematic of the definitions first camp, where ethical and political stances are construed as requiring a canonical definition of the object under scrutiny. In the case of terrorism, this means that we need to know what it is before we can commit ourselves to reflecting on responses to it. Evidently, we can observe significant similarities between this case and the debates surveyed in chapter 2 and 3. As with genocide and torture, one widespread response to the politics of naming is the attempt to strive for a conceptual core that withstands the manipulative appropriations in the public sphere. The identification of such a conceptual core is the expressed purpose of a canonical definition of terrorism. Alex Bellamy suggests that the quest for a definition is so pivotal because the term’s meaning would become vacuous if we failed to sharply distinguish between correct and incorrect uses of the label terrorist. Such a view has obvious implications for how to deal with everyday usages of the word. The main function of a canonical definition is to assess how the notion of terrorism is employed in public discourse: The main problem with assessing what is wrong with terrorism is that, while the label is frequently used in public and academic debates to describe a wide variety of violent acts, there is very little agreement about what terrorism actually is. Unless we have a clear understanding of what terrorism is and what sets it apart from other forms of political violence, we cannot know whether terrorism is always wrong and whether it is more or less wrong than other types of violence.22

The rationale behind a canonical definition, then, is simultaneously an epistemological and a practical one: without a clear-cut account of terrorism we would not be able to separate terrorist acts from other types of violence, and that in turn would hamper our capacity to adequately respond to terrorism. This view implies that the philosophical work behind attempts to define terrorism is of utmost importance. Absent the clear guidance of analytical rigor, we would lack the basic tools to make appropriate judgments when faced with various situations in which violence is used.

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The definitions first camp acknowledges that any definition of terrorism remains value-laden, prone to polemical appropriation and invested with emotive power. Terrorism is a “derogatory term,”23 which very few political actors would choose as a self-description. How to account for the prima facie wrongness of terrorist acts is a question that divides the definitions first camp. David Rodin maintains that the only way forward would be through a “moral” definition, which incorporates “features of acknowledged core instances of terrorism which merit and explain the moral reaction which most of us have toward them.”24 What sets this kind of a definition apart is that it seeks to be completely free from the rhetorical struggles over meaning that take place in the wider public. In focusing on “core instances” alone, Rodin hopes to develop a definition that allows us to sharply and unambiguously delimit appropriate uses from manipulative uses of the label terrorist. The idea of a “moral” definition reflects the desire to reserve a definition for those social facts that “have no history,” to recall Nietzsche’s aphorism discussed in the introduction. Among those who embrace the quest for a canonical definition there is significant disagreement as to whether their account leads to an absolute prohibition of terrorism. This should not surprise, for, as Coady notes, the process of defining terrorism can be logically held apart from the question of its justification. On the one hand, we find authors who think that, given the characteristic feature of targeting noncombatants, terrorism must be considered categorically impermissible. Thus, object-based definitions of terrorism usually go hand in hand with the total proscription of terrorism. On this view, whenever a moral justification of terrorism is proposed, it offers nothing but an ideologically motivated excuse for atrocities.25 On the other hand, there are those who seek to separate the question of terrorism’s prima facie wrongness from its justification in exceptional moments.26 Tamar Meisels accepts that terrorism is almost always unjustified, especially because of its distinctive feature of intentionally killing noncombatants. This, however, does not imply that there are no situations at all in which terrorism might be permissible. As Igor Primoratz remarks, if the negative appraisal of terrorism is decoupled from the conceptual definition, we end up with a neutral account that leaves “its justification under certain circumstances”27 open.

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Notwithstanding these controversies around the moral status of terrorism, we can discern an emerging consensus among normative political theorists regarding the strengths of object-focused definitions. Almost all adherents to the definitions first camp stress that substantively terrorism can be characterized by the intentional targeting of noncombatants.28 A specific upshot of this type of definition is that they permit a distinction between morally acceptable acts of war and terrorism: if we accept that innocent lives should and can in fact be spared in warfare, then we must grant that not all wars are terrorist in nature. This move brings the debate around terrorism in closer and often explicit contact with ius in bello provisions in Just War theory, according to which noncombatants must be protected. Therefore, any act—no matter whether committed by state or nonstate actors—that disregards this principle of noncombatant immunity would qualify as terrorist. Even though object-focused definitions command widespread support, they are not without problems. To point to just one issue that arises once we focus on noncombatants as the targets of terrorist acts: political assassinations of state leaders and officials, so widely employed during the “propaganda of the deed” campaigns of nineteenth-century revolutionaries, would then not qualify as terrorist at all. This contradicts the perspective adopted by virtually all historians: when they study terrorism by scrutinizing disparate phenomena over a long period of time, political assassinations are nearly always included under the term of terrorism.29 As we saw earlier, apart from concentrating on noncombatants, there are other ways of defining terrorism, for example, by concentrating on the “use or threat of violence or force with the primary purpose of generating a psychological impact beyond the immediate victims for a political motive.”30 Yet, no matter how these features are captured, the definitions first approach is necessarily based on the assumption that it is imperative to extract the true meaning of terrorism from the confusing polyphony in public debate. This is the chief idea behind this moralizing response to the politics of naming.

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4 .1 . 2 . R E DE S C R I B I N G I NNO CE NCE FRO M A MO R AL I ST STANDPO INT

One reason why this definitional strategy has proven so successful is that it appeals to the deeply ingrained norm that noncombatants ought to be spared from violence. This idea is today enshrined both in international law and in the moral reflection on the permissible use of force more widely. To put the basic principle in a nutshell, in a Just War, soldiers and only soldiers can be the legitimate targets of attack. While an exception exists for situations in which noncombatants are nonintentionally killed,31 discriminating between those who are directly involved in wartime activities and those who are not is one of the most important pillars of Just War theory.32 Some analytical philosophers, however, with Jeff McMahan at their helm, have recently started to question the conventional equation of innocence in war with the status of noncombatants. The statements of these so-called revisionist Just War theorists have caused a deep-reaching shift in the discussion around the ethics of war—away from a more traditional framework, in which a country’s population can be relatively neatly split into combatants and noncombatants, toward a more individualistic one, in which rights provide the cornerstones of the normative edifice.33 McMahan’s widely debated argument is driven by the motivation to transform one of the main pillars of traditional Just War theory—the socalled moral equality of soldiers, which underwrites the principle of discriminating between combatants and noncombatants. The traditional idea that soldiers are “morally equal” suggests that, in any given conflict, combatants on both sides have a right to use lethal force against one another. This means that there is, from the viewpoint of traditional Just War theory, nothing objectionable about killing an enemy combatant, so long as the act of killing occurs within what one could call the “moral realm” of war. This view implies that, within that realm, those who are not embroiled in warfare—noncombatants—must be shielded from intentional attacks; they are considered “innocent” by virtue of being not harmful, or by virtue of not posing any threat. On this view, “noncombatant” is equivalent to “innocent.”34

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So much for the conventional story, which remains predicated on a profound discontinuity between ordinary ethics, where killing is impermissible (with the exception of cases of self-defense and perhaps otherdefense under specific circumstances), and the ethics of war. Revisionists suggest that this picture, along with the implied criterion for identifying who may legitimately be killed, is radically flawed. McMahan and others argue that the moral equality of soldiers cannot be upheld in situations where one party is engaged in an unjust war. For the purpose of brevity, an unjust war can here be defined as lacking a just cause. McMahan thus submits that, once we examine the claim to justice of each party to the conflict, our assessment of the ethics of warfare must necessarily change. While traditional Just War identifies “being harmful” or “posing a threat” as the criteria for legitimate targets in war, revisionists shift attention to individuals’ moral responsibility for war. Those who can be meaningfully described as being responsible for an unjust war are under entirely different obligations from those who are not. Crucially, though, the distribution of responsibility does not map onto the traditional distinction between combatants and noncombatants. McMahan summarizes his view as follows: “Those who fight solely to defend themselves and other innocent people from a wrongful threat of attack, and who threaten no one but the wrongful aggressors, do not make themselves morally liable to defensive attack. By engaging in morally justified self- and otherdefense, they do nothing to forfeit their right not to be attacked or killed.”35 So, on this perspective, it makes a significant difference on which side one is fighting: liability to be attacked can only be ascribed to aggressors. If you have a just cause for fighting—for example, in self-defense—then you are not a legitimate target of attack. The emphasis on moral responsibility also upturns the principle of noncombatant immunity: rather than characterizing all noncombatants as innocent, revisionists reserve the term for those who cannot be blamed for an unjustified threat.36 McMahan maintains that this responsibility-based account of innocence aligns the ethics of war with ordinary ethics. Why is this account relevant for our discussion around terrorism? By redescribing innocence in terms of responsibility, McMahan and those following in his footsteps attempt to moralize the way we reflect on the legitimate use of force. This has, at first sight, the advantage of resolving some of the conundrums of the traditional account: after all, the

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distinction between combatants and noncombatants is not always as easy to draw as one might expect: How should we class, for example, those who produce, facilitate, or research military technology?37 What about workers operating in factories that manufacture machines for dual use (civilian and military), such as engines for motor vehicles?38 The grey zone between those who can unambiguously be identified as civilians and those who are undoubtedly soldiers is, without a doubt, vast and difficult to explore. McMahan’s turn to responsibility (and blameworthiness) as a more suitable framework to identify the innocent is, in part, motivated by a worry about the conceptual fuzziness of traditional accounts. However, far from resolving the tensions within the concept of innocence, revisionists actually exacerbate them when they divorce innocence from the status of noncombatant. This is so because the proposal runs into what has been called the responsibility dilemma. Seth Lazar summarizes the dilemma in the following manner: If, to protect noncombatants, we set the liability bar high, then many unjust combatants will also be impermissible targets; if we forestall the contingent pacifist objection by setting the liability bar low, then many noncombatants may be intentionally killed. McMahan tries to walk a tightrope between contingent pacifism and the wholesale rejection of noncombatant immunity. I think he must overbalance, and choose which way to fall. I call this the responsibility dilemma for McMahan’s theory.39

Given that “innocence” is vital for object-focused definitions of terrorism, the shift away from the moral equality of soldiers toward a liability model has significant ramifications for those definitions. If the precise level of “responsibility” cannot be adequately established, as Lazar has conclusively shown, then the abstract criterion of responsibility is simply too vague to allow for the kind of conceptual clarity that McMahan and others hope to achieve. Revisionist Just War theorists attempt to depoliticize the notion of innocence by defining it in moral terms. The goal of that exercise is to identify more clearly who can claim the status of innocence in war. Yet, setting the “liability bar” is ultimately a practical task that requires contextually specific judgments tailored to specific situations. This kind of casuistic engagement is, however, precisely what McMahan wants to avoid.

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One of the lessons to draw from the recent rise in revisionist contributions to Just War theory seems to be that the flight from history and rhetoric into a domain of moral inquiry largely devoid of judgments about concrete cases must end in theoretical ruminations that have little bearing on real politics.40 When authors such as McMahan do enter the public debate and take a stance vis-à-vis controversial issues, their statements usually conform to the mainstream position.41 Once we extend this discussion to the debate around terrorism, the futility of the moralization strategy becomes obvious: since the term “terrorism” remains inevitably pervaded by the dynamics of the politics of naming, striving for a conceptual plane beyond history and rhetoric is a chimera. Similar to the “clarificationist” strand of hypothesizing in chapter 3, McMahan and his followers therefore fail to situate their reflections within the sphere of practical reasoning that is distinctive of political theory in an ameliorative spirit.

4.1.3. THE DEFLATIONARY POSITION

This perspective can be contrasted with a second strategy, which deflates the importance of defining terrorism. Jeremy Waldron and George Fletcher are the most vocal proponents of this approach. Waldron’s argument is based on the observation that (1) the search for a canonical definition is bound to fail, and that (2) the struggle against terrorism is ultimately more important than the definitional issues that have bedazzled the philosophical debate: It may be thought that we should not waste time worrying about definitional issues (someone might say, “Who cares how terrorism is defined? We know it when we see it, and we saw it on September 11th”). Surely what matters is what we do about terrorism, not how we define it. I agree that it would be wrong to hold out much hope that philosophical inquiry might yield of drawing a canonical definition of the term, one that would be generally accepted.42

Waldron admits that definitional issues can, to a certain degree, be addressed, but he rejects the suggestion that they should occupy a central

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place in the philosophical debate. He thus opposes the definitions first approach proposed by Meisels, Coady, and Bellamy. The reason for this skepticism is, as we have seen, that the word terrorism remains open to polemical appropriation—it possesses both a “descriptive” and an “emotive” side. The “vagaries of a particularly inflamed form of political discourse” 43 are such that the quest for a definition inevitable fails. Waldron also intimates that the primary task of any theoretical engagement with terrorism must be to enhance our understanding of the complex phenomenon; the search for a canonical definition stands in the way of such understanding precisely because it abstracts from the complexity of realworld cases. This is, essentially, an argument about the scarcity of intellectual resources, which appear to be badly spent if we focus too much energy on intricate philosophical distinctions around terrorism. George Fletcher takes a stance not too dissimilar from Waldron’s when he declares the concept of terrorism “undefinable.” He starts with the observation that a legal definition of terrorism cannot simply advance through a fiat—the law’s engagement with the social phenomenon of terrorism must necessarily reflect how people think about the reality on the ground. Obviously, when people search for a definition of terrorism, they do not want a legislature someplace to issue a fiat that will henceforth constitute the official definition of terrorism. That would be, in the lexicon of philosophers, a “stipulative definition.” . . . International organizations and national governments can issue official definitions of terrorism, but so far as they are out of harmony with our intuitions, they are not of much use. What we are looking for, then, is not a stipulation about the boundaries of terrorism but rather an account of terrorism as the concept is actually used. What do we already agree upon? . . . Finding this account is not the task of legislators but of scholars willing to reflect upon the world as we know it.44

Beginning with observations on the “world as we know it,” Fletcher analyzes eight elements of terrorism that he considers central: “the factor of violence, the required intention, the nature of the victims, the connection of the offender to the state, the justice and motive of their cause, the level of organization, the element of theatre and the absence of guilt.” 45

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The reason why these elements do not cohere into a full-fledged definition of terrorism is that for each characteristic of terrorism it is easy to find counterexamples of acts that we would commonly consider terrorist, but that do not satisfy all the criteria listed earlier. Therefore, Fletcher maintains we should refrain from striving for a canonical definition. Rather than insist on the necessity for a definition, we ought to envisage the function of the concept in a different light: “The way to think about terrorism, then, is to become aware of all the relevant factors but not to expect that they will all be fulfilled in any particular case. The specific cases of terrorism are related the way the members of a family are related. . . . A definition in ‘if and only if’ terms (necessary and sufficient conditions) will invariably produce intuitive counterexamples.” 46 Waldron and Fletcher are thus exemplary proponents of a deflationary strategy regarding the definition of terrorism. While they acknowledge the importance of describing the social phenomenon of terrorism as accurately as possible, they question the merits of a canonical definition. On a basic level, their argument is about the most efficient use of limited intellectual resources—Waldron and Fletcher consider it more important to invest energy into understanding and combating terrorism, rather than focusing in vain on the quest for an account that enumerates both necessary and sufficient conditions of what terrorism actually is. On another level, though, their argument is epistemological as well: the complex reality of terrorist acts and actors is simply too varied to be captured through a definition. Fletcher’s reference to the Wittgensteinian image of “family resemblances” is an illuminating one: given that terrorism is such a multifaceted phenomenon, attempts at decontesting the meaning through a stipulative definition will necessarily obscure something. This observation leads adherents of this pragmatic strategy to conceive of political theory’s ambition in more limited terms—as contributing to the understanding of terrorism on the one hand, but also as outlining the moral distinctiveness of terrorism.47 In rejecting the definitions first camp, Waldron and Fletcher steer clear of a moralistic interpretation of political theory, but they simultaneously become vulnerable to a serious objection. The deflationary account presumes a unitary response to witnessing violence: we know it when we see it. But this view is premised on a problematic assumption about the interpretive frameworks we enlist to make sense of phenomena like terrorism. While we might have a frank “gut reaction” toward cases of

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violence that fall within the core range of instances of terrorism, our judgments will require guidance when we encounter cases where the charge of terrorism might be more contested and where the politics of naming thus becomes more contested. To illustrate this, consider, for example, recent calls in the United States for reparations for the unspeakable harm done to African Americans.48 One among several arguments put forth to add support to these pleas is the historical fact that even after slavery as an institution had been legally abolished, African-Americans were subjected to the most horrendous campaigns of violent persecution. Reconstruction, in other words, was also an era of burgeoning domestic terrorism.49 Now, to redeem this claim we require a provisional conceptual frame of what rendered the actions of the Ku Klux Klan terroristic in the first place. We need such a frame precisely because the term terrorism can serve emancipatory purposes when it is invoked to denounce acts of state or nonstate violence that are either invisible or rationalized under the cover of necessity and legitimacy. Hence, if we accept the idea that the term terrorism can be used critically, the main issue to ponder becomes what kind of definition we would require, given the role that the concept is supposed to play in public as well as scholarly discourse.

4 .1 . 4 . T H E S E L F - R E F L E C T I V E POS IT IO N

This is where the third strategy emerges, shifting our attention from the goal of defining terrorism toward what I shall call a self-reflective position. Two authors in particular have taken steps in this direction, focusing on history and rhetoric as inroads for reinterpreting the function of definitions: Verena Erlenbusch and Christopher Finlay. First, in a review and critique of the existing literature on terrorism, Verena Erlenbusch argues that contemporary studies of terrorism suffer from methodological shortcomings that have detrimental effects on our understanding of the phenomenon. Her main diagnosis can be found in the following paragraph: These problems result from attempts of terrorism scholars to identify the essence of terrorism in a set of constitutive elements or conditions. Whether they are regarded as naturally given or discursively produced,

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the search for these elements and conditions invariably results in an understanding of terrorism that is ahistorical, reductive, and ideologically biased. . . . As such, the claim that terrorism is definable ignores and actually obscures the contestations over the term, the resistances against dominant interpretations, the power struggles underlying these frictions, and the various effects that can be achieved by deploying a rhetoric of terrorism in different social, historical, and political contexts.50

According to Erlenbusch, the very assumption that we might be capable of capturing terrorism through a canonical definition is erroneous. The problem with attempts at defining terrorism in this way is that they solidify a category of violence that by default remains subject to change. This criticism clearly resonates with Waldron’s and Fletcher’s concerns about the variability of terrorism in the real world. Instead of concentrating on the abstract meaning of the concept of terrorism, as many political theorists do, Erlenbusch suggests we should scrutinize the various functions that the term fulfills in different contexts. It is at this point that proponents of the self-reflective approach part ways with the deflationists encountered in the prior section. Erlenbusch argues that we need to undertake a case-based analysis of various articulations of the notion of terrorism in order to examine regularities and patterns that shed light on the wider frameworks of historical, social, cultural, and political interests, concepts, and rationalities within which terms like “terrorism” become meaningful. More concretely, whether an act of violence is considered to be just, legitimate, or beneficial for the common good or, instead, as an act of terrorism against the security and well-being of a given community, depends on more general conceptions of justice, legitimacy, and what is considered necessary or permitted for the welfare of society.51

Her strategy, then, is to situate terrorism in the complex historical matrix in which its meaning is constructed. This kind of linguistic contextualism abandons the quest for a canonical definition and replaces it with an interest in the variable circumstances in which conceptions of terrorism are articulated. In so doing, Erlenbusch goes beyond the pragmatic

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strategy espoused by Waldron and Fletcher because she embeds existing definitions within wider vocabularies of justice and legitimacy. As a consequence, a much more fine-grained picture emerges of the conditions under which specific definitions of terrorism are put forth. Let us turn to an example of the self-reflective position and consider the relationship between terrorism and the state in so-called agentfocused definitions. This relationship changes over time. Whether the state can be seen as an active proponent of terrorism, or exclusively as its target, depends to a large degree on the period under scrutiny: terrorism during the French Revolution signifies something entirely different from terrorism in nineteenth-century Russia. This attention to material and ideological variations undermines attempts to arrive at a definition of terrorism that is independent of context. Instead of abstracting from context altogether, as the definitions first proponents suggest, Erlenbusch makes the case for inductively developing an account of terrorism that remains sensitive to the very historical conditions from which it emerges.52 One potential worry with Erlenbusch’s approach to terrorism might be that it results in some form of relativism. Is the term terrorism merely an aftereffect of power structures, which naturally change over time and according to place? And if power structures so heavily shape the meaning of terrorism, is there a way to identify general features of terrorist activities that evade hegemonic attempts for semantic control? Erlenbusch certainly thinks so, but her proposal only highlights the thin “line between reducing terrorism to mere discourse and ascribing to it universal status,”53 without fully exploring its significance. Still, this approach opens up an important perspective that casts terrorism in a new light. While rejecting the pretensions of “ahistorical, reductive, and ideologically biased” definitions of terrorism, Erlenbusch seems to concur with Fletcher in submitting that an account of terrorism based on certain family resemblances can be developed. The idea of carefully working through history to construct those family resemblances distinguishes Erlenbusch’s approach from the one discussed in the prior section. A second author who falls within the self-reflective camp is Christopher Finlay. Instead of turning to history, Finlay suggests that we ought to employ the tools of rhetoric to examine various definitional strategies.54 His goal is to demonstrate that all uses of the concept of terrorism—no

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matter whether they occur in the public sphere or in academe—are subject to the strictures of rhetoric. Drawing on J.  L. Austin’s speech-act theory,55 Finlay argues that the word terrorist ought to be analyzed in view of its performative effects. A rhetorical reading of the term terrorism concentrates not so much on its meaning, in the sense of stipulating necessary and sufficient conditions for ascertaining the occurrence of terrorism, but on its manifold uses in concrete contexts—what it is that we do when we utter the word terrorism. In this endorsement of linguistic contextualism, Finlay’s theoretical framework dovetails with Erlenbusch’s. In a direct rebuttal of the definitions first approach, Finlay thus suggests that “instead of seeking a definition free from rhetoric, that is, reinforcing a divide between conceptual and rhetorical deployments, we would seek a means of distinguishing between different kinds of rhetorical use and perhaps even between good and bad rhetorical deployments.”56 Note here that Finlay does not slide into a relativistic view that all uses of the word terrorism are equal from an evaluative standpoint. How, then, may we separate appropriate (“good”) from inappropriate (“bad”) uses of the word terrorist? Finlay highlights the role that the rhetorical trope of redescription plays in public as well as in academic discussions. By “redescription” Finlay means the process through which competent language users attempt to assess and alter the applicability of a generic term with normative-emotive content. Accordingly, participants in the debate around terrorism typically try to do one of three distinct things: (1) they try to curtail the application of the term by arguing that agent A or act X does not exhibit the characteristic features of that which is properly called terrorism; (2) they try to revise the definitional criteria of the term terrorism through which we normatively judge agent A or act X; or (3) they seek to extend the application of the term by arguing that agent A or act X, although previously unrecognized as such, exhibits characteristic features of terrorism. All these rhetorical maneuvers have the purpose of redescribing terrorism. Let us now rehearse the strengths and weaknesses of this third strategy. Both Erlenbusch and Finlay adopt a metaposition, which allows us to scrutinize both the definitions first approach and the deflationist views of Waldron and Fletcher. While their insights are highly useful for exploring the shortcomings of these approaches, they lack substance in terms of fleshing out how we may arrive at a definition that does not collapse

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into a mere reflection of power relations. Erlenbusch and Finlay reject the logic of critical terrorism studies, whereby every existing definition is subjected to a hermeneutics of suspicion. Yet, their frameworks say perhaps too little about the content of defensible conceptualizations of terrorism. In other words, the turn toward history and rhetoric possesses great potential, but it is less clear how it is connected to the constructive task of generating judgments that allow us to conceptualize terrorism in an ameliorative spirit. In concluding this section, I want to again highlight the deeply entrenched fault lines in the debate. We can employ the moralist-realist dyad to heuristically organize these responses into two camps: moralists fall within the definitions first camp because they make two interrelated arguments that are of both epistemological and practical relevance: (1) They are convinced that it is possible and desirable to construct a canonical definition of terrorism that is insulated from the struggles over meaning in the wider public. (2) Furthermore, moralists argue that such a definition—however substantiated by reference to a specific set of features—is absolutely essential for guiding how we ought to identify and respond to terrorism. A canonical definition provides the basis for the practical struggle against the evil that is terrorism. Realists in this debate contest both suppositions, by pointing to the complexity of real-world cases and to the variability of contextual circumstances. Their starting point is an observation about the disparate nature of terrorist acts. Our conceptual apparatus is ill equipped to capture these phenomena under one definition. Crucially, though, realists want to insist that the incapacity to arrive at a definition is no hindrance to practical responses to terrorism. In fact, the authors I have classed as deflationists—Waldron and Fletcher—would even argue that the philosophical energy spent by the definitions first camp is misdirected: understanding terrorism is not premised on having a canonical definition. Moralists are at complete loggerheads with the realist agenda of paying close attention to actual cases. But what I have dubbed the selfreflective position permits us to move beyond the impasse separating moralism and realism. In order to progress toward a political theory of naming violence that eschews both realism and moralism, we thus need to build on Erlenbusch’s and Finlay’s ideas. Their method of historically

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and rhetorically reconstructing various accounts of terrorism adds another layer of subtlety to the debate around the virtues and vices of definitions. In the following, I explore the potential of a genealogical approach to complement Erlenbusch’s and Finlay’s accounts. This implies taking a core value of object-focused definitions of terrorism—“innocence”—and investigating its historical emergence in detail. The advantage of this method is that it fully acknowledges the importance of having a conceptual framework within which to situate the word terrorism; it thus rejects some of the arguments proposed by deflationists who want to play down the significance of a clear concept altogether. Yet, in contrast to the moralist drive toward pure speculation, my perspective supports the idea that our current conceptualizations are judgments that can only gain plausibility if their history is fully acknowledged.

4 . 2 . TOWA R D A G E N E A LO GY O F I N N O C E N C E

In order to comprehend why a genealogical approach matters to philosophical debates about terrorism, we require a background story about the place of genealogy within political theory today. Given that genealogy has, over the past forty years, become one of the most discussed methods in the field, I shall merely highlight a few key stages in its development, without appealing in any way to completeness. The onus of the following sections is on demonstrating that a genealogical approach to “innocence” problematizes its status, without rejecting it outright. By engaging the imagination in this way, we are impelled to think differently about one of the core values on which definitions of terrorism rest, becoming acutely aware of the their problematic and potentially dangerous aspects.

4 . 2.1 . G E N E A LO GY, CO NT I NGE N CY, AND CRIT IQ U E

Genealogy’s aim is to uncover the manifold conditions of emergence of ideas and practices. Theorists employing genealogy typically attempt to

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reveal the constructed character of ideas and practices that are viewed as naturally given. As an approach in political theory, genealogy is used by a great variety of authors exploring a range of phenomena, from concrete political institutions, such as ideas of the modern state,57 to epistemological debates around truthfulness,58 to the discipline of political theory itself.59 For our purpose, it suffices to state that, as a mode of inquiry, genealogy was first developed by Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche envisaged genealogy as a means to historically probe the hidden origins of ideas and practices. Most famously, he applied this method to uncover the roots of morality itself, by showing that ostensibly ahistorical values, such as good, bad, and evil, have in fact emerged from specific power differentials between the weak (slaves) and the strong (masters). Nietzsche argued that these power differentials were ultimately responsible for the constant transformation of ideas and practices.60 Crucially, Nietzsche wanted to suggest that the meaning of the object under scrutiny—in this case, morality—is subject to permanent change. This implies that our current normative understanding of a belief or value is necessarily discontinuous with the numerous origins from which it can be shown to have sprung. One way of approaching genealogy would be to contrast it with attempts to trace the pedigree of a norm. As Raymond Geuss has argued, tracing a pedigree can be characterized by five features: 1. In the interests of a positive valorization of some item 2. the pedigree, starting from a singular origin, 3. which is an actual source of that value, 4. traces an unbroken line of succession from the origin to that item 5. by a series of steps that preserve whatever value is in question.61

Genealogy calls into question every feature of pedigree tracing. By excavating the complex conditions of morality’s emergence, Nietzsche attacked conventional understandings of morality, which put much more emphasis on the unchangeability of religious and ethical doctrines. Genealogy, on this account, is a critical enterprise, but only in an indirect way. Historical inquiry in itself does not undermine specific values; it merely dispels the myth that good, bad, and evil have no history at all—that they are naturally given.

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Yet, we may also read Nietzsche as leaning toward a subversive interpretation of genealogy.62 In explaining the historical development of Christian values, Nietzsche hopes to loosen the firm grip these values have on believers. On the Genealogy of Morality claims that the creation of morality itself can only be understood if we appreciate its impact on certain types of human flourishing. Since Nietzsche’s objective is to demonstrate how morality suppresses the flourishing of “higher men,” he reveals the “pudenda origo” (shameful, lowly origin) of high-minded ethics.63 The second catalyst for the development of genealogy in the twentieth century has been the work of Michel Foucault. Foucault was throughout his life heavily influenced by Nietzsche’s thinking.64 He employed various approaches to write extremely original histories of madness, the human sciences, and punishment. Whereas Foucault initially tended to refer to the method of “archaeology” in his writings, he shifted to a genealogical lens from the early 1970s onward.65 This is perhaps most evident in Discipline and Punish, where Foucault analyzes the emergence of the juridico-scientific complex of “disciplinary power.” In this book, Foucault traces the contingent processes by which certain ideas, practices, and institutions that we today take for granted—such as the proposition that torturing culprits is largely taboo, while jailing them is perfectly acceptable—have come into existence. Foucault’s explanation of the ubiquity of disciplinary power provides a useful illustration of his genealogical method. Instead of assuming that various sites of disciplinary power—from the prison, to the army and the school—have originated in, and then spread from, a master plan to control vast populations, Discipline and Punish argues that disparate mechanisms led to the constitution of a society governed by discipline. The juridical apparatus underpinning incarceration cannot be traced back to a single moment of emergence, but rather has its variegated origins in messy practices of power. Two more issues need to be explored before we return to the substantive discussion of terrorism.66 The first concerns the relationship between genealogy and critique, hinted at already in the context of Nietzsche’s exploration of the origins of good, bad, and evil. As Raymond Geuss surmises, the genealogical method is critical in that it problematizes “apparently self-evident assumptions of a given form of life and the (supposedly)

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natural or inevitable and unchangeable character of given identities.” 67 Problematizing a belief or proposition, however, is not necessarily the same as repudiating it. Hence, a genealogical approach will not always yield the result that an idea or practice needs to be completely rejected once its genesis has been disclosed. Rejection is one possible outcome of any given genealogical project, but it is not the only one. Second, let us home in on the issues of contingency and contestability. Mark Bevir emphasizes that genealogy entails a form of radical historicism that subverts “appeals to principles that lend necessity and unity to history.” 68 This means that, in scrutinizing the emergence of an idea or practice, genealogists refrain from assuming a teleology inherent in its development. Genealogy as radical historicism is therefore opposed to the idea that we could account for the history of an institution as the progressive development toward an ultimate end.69 Struggle and diversion are given much more attention in genealogy than unanimity and directedness. In foregrounding their social constructedness, genealogies attempt to denaturalize ideas and practices. They maintain that the emergence of a specific belief or value could have played out differently. As Foucault demonstrated in the context of disciplinary power, the rise of societal arrangements organized around broadly similar practices of discipline cannot be attributed to a singular decision to order society in the image of the prison. Rather, the genealogical approach uncovers various trends in the establishment of disciplinary power that might at points have common origins, but often remain contested over long periods of time. Here, again, we can see that a genealogy is radically different from the tracing of a pedigree.

4 .2. 2. “R E AL H I STO RY ” AND T H E IMAG INAT IO N

While we have so far examined why genealogy has critical purchase, we still need to explore the relationship between genealogy and the imagination. Essentially, we can distinguish between two readings of how genealogy and the imagination stand to each other: one that assimilates genealogy to “real history”; and one that allows for genealogy to link up with fictional accounts that resemble the hypothetical scenarios discussed in chapter 3. Let us quickly look into each of these interpretations.70

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On the one hand, it might be said that genealogical approaches are, due to their attention to the conditions of emergence of specific ideas and practices, committed to the pursuit of real history. This commitment is visible in Foucault’s projects, which often deal with hidden historical resources. Foucault accentuates this aspect of genealogy when he describes Nietzsche’s methodology as “grey, meticulous and patiently documentarian”; to engage in genealogy is premised on “relentless erudition.”71 Antiquarian and presentist histories, by contrast, are misguided. Where genealogy departs from rival accounts of the past is in its consideration of often ignored details and submerged origins that can only be unearthed if commonly held assumptions are being revised.72 The upshot of this employment of genealogy is a problematization of the idea or practice under scrutiny: such a problematization, in Foucault’s words, attempts to write a “history of the present.” This interpretation of the genealogical method remains normatively abstemious. That is to say, in contrast to, for example, Nietzsche’s employment of genealogy, Foucault does not necessarily aim at subverting the ideas and practices he sets out to explore. The purpose of his approach is, rather, to uncover the contingent character of our commitments. That this implies a form of critique, as outlined in the last section, is fully acknowledged by Foucault. He explains this vision of critique in the following manner: Criticism is a matter of flushing out that thought and trying to change it: to show that things are not as self-evident as one believed, to see that what is accepted as self-evident will no longer be accepted as such. Practicing criticism is a matter of making facile gestures difficult. In these circumstances, criticism (and radical criticism) is absolutely indispensable for any transformation. A transformation that remains within the same mode of thought, a transformation that is only a way of adjusting the same thought more closely to the reality of things can merely be a superficial transformation.73

On the other hand, genealogy can also be construed in opposition to “real history.” Bernard Williams explored this idea in his study of truthfulness, deviating sharply from the previous interpretation. Williams does not engage in the kind of empirical investigations that are the

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hallmark of Foucault’s work. On the contrary, when scrutinizing the ways in which the imperative of truthfulness has been established, he begins with an “imaginary genealogy.”74 The main feature of this inquiry is that it does not look into how the norm of truthfulness has actually emerged in time, but rather into how it could have come about. The device for delivering such an imaginary genealogy is the State of Nature. Williams draws on this hypothetical scenario for the same reasons we encountered in favor of thought experiments in chapter 3: as a means to tease out the implications of specific ideas. In the case of truthfulness, Williams develops a fictional account of the value of truth in any human society. This imaginary genealogy is then supplemented, in a second step, by a historical narrative whose purpose is to flesh out the actual content of that value. Another respect in which Williams’s approach is different from both Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s is in the way he envisages valuation. The genealogy of truth and truthfulness strives for vindication, rather than subversion (Nietzsche) or problematization (Foucault). Even though Williams has been criticized for misinterpreting the specific qualities of genealogy,75 it is helpful to contrast Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s projects with his suggestion that genealogy can effectively assist us in positively justifying a belief or proposition. It would go beyond the chapter’s ambition to adjudicate between these competing readings of genealogy. Rather, gesturing toward the wider spectrum of positions shared by those who make use of genealogy indicates once again that a variety of options are available to Nietzsche’s heirs.

4 . 3 . I N N O C E N C E S TA I N E D : F E M I N I S T A P P R OAC H E S TO N O N CO M B ATA N TS

How can we mobilize the potential of genealogy to shed light on the notion of terrorism? This section proposes that a genealogical approach to the idea of noncombatant immunity allows one to see object-focused definitions of terrorism in a new and illuminating light. Consequently, the suggestion is that genealogy as critique has significant ramifications

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for how we conceptualize political violence in a way that is distinct from the moralizing approach of revisionist Just War theorists. Over the past twenty years, feminist scholars have begun to interrogate the centrality of innocence in discourses on the ethics of conflict.76 These scholars have started developing genealogical approaches to the status of noncombatant immunity in view of denaturalizing the value attached to innocence. What is more, feminists have also begun to scrutinize the real-world effects of appeals to innocence—what it does, rather than what it signifies or how it may be justified. These contributions can be seen as partaking in a wider-ranging attempt to question and transform the normative study of war from a feminist viewpoint.77 In this, their efforts resonate with Erlenbusch’s and Finlay’s observations. I now wish to investigate how two feminists reinterpret the principle of noncombatant immunity through a genealogical intervention. My focus will be on Helen Kinsella and Maja Zehfuss, but their general outlook on normative theory is shared by a wide range of authors. It must also be added here that sex and gender are not exclusive, or even privileged, lenses through which the notion of innocence can be problematized. Kinsella herself dedicates an entire chapter to the Algerian Civil War, and another one to the civil wars in Guatemala and El Salvador. In both these contexts, she examines how racialized discourses of barbarism and civilization have shaped the concrete concept of innocence. Investigating the ways in which race has structured the distinction between combatants and noncombatants would, undoubtedly, open up another illuminating perspective on the immunity principle.78 Kinsella’s situating of the distinction between combatants and noncombatants within a gendered matrix of international politics and law is a useful starting point, because it explicitly draws on the method of genealogy.79 She sees the benefit of genealogy in help[ing] us to understand how fixed oppositions (here civilian versus combatant) mask the degree to which their meanings are, in fact, a result of an established rather than inherent contrast. Moreover, a genealogy expressly engages the hierarchical interdependence of the opposed terms, whereby the combatant is invested with primacy and thus is  responsive to the operation of power. . . . A genealogy illustrates how that which is taken to be universally necessary and necessarily

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universal (here, the civilian) has come to be understood and institutionalized as self-evidently so.80

The chief claim is that, far from being a self-evident principle that requires no further elaboration, it is “discourses of gender that produce the distinction of combatant and civilian upon which the laws of war depend. The explicit regulation of the difference of combatant and civilian is enabled by, and occurs through, the regulation of sex and sex difference.”81 In the wider public, we are accustomed to the statement that women, children, and the elderly need to be classed as noncombatants in conflicts. It is often simply assumed that adult men fighting are liable to be killed by virtue of being combatants. Yet, Kinsella’s claim is that gender effectively sustains the distinction between combatants and noncombatants: gendered divisions can be shown to have historically contributed to the creation of the category of innocence. It is this turn to history, and its overlooked implications for contemporary practices and ideas of warfare, that marks out Kinsella’s approach as genealogical. Instead of simply unveiling the effects of gender on contemporary configurations of warfare, Kinsella attempts to unearth the covert origins of the value of innocence. The main author she engages with is the Dutch diplomat and jurist Hugo Grotius, who has been canonized as the founding father of both modern Just War theory and international law. Kinsella summarizes her endeavor in the following way: To reread the work of Grotius in light of the questions posed by the indeterminacy and uncertainty of the distinction [between combatants and noncombatants] may, in the end, not completely displace its central institutional status. But, even if this is not a result, this rereading will transform its significance. It will, I suspect, require us to rethink the meaning of the conventional history of the difference between “combatant” and “civilian,” and the distinctions it allows.82

The assertion that an investigation into this gendered history might in the end not result in a wholesale rejection of the distinction between combatants and noncombatants resonates with the problematizing kind of critique promoted by genealogists. But how does Kinsella interrogate the notion of innocence? Through an interpretation of Grotius’s Law of War

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and Peace, she maintains that innocence has been understood by linking it to women’s and children’s inability to rationally lead their lives. Grotius’s insistence that noncombatants must be spared from violence is founded on an ontology of sex differences that ascribes certain cognitive and emotive capacities to women that render them innocent. It is because women are by their irrational nature incapable of exercising autonomy that they can only occupy the status of noncombatant.83 Thus, by examining one of the canonical authors of Just War theory and international law, Kinsella manages to complicate the conventional understanding of innocence: instead of conceiving it as a protective umbrella shielding the most vulnerable parts of the population, she demonstrates that specific ideas about sex differences produce and uphold the distinction between combatants and noncombatants. A rejoinder to this genealogical approach would be to point out that Grotius’s world is very different from ours: even though the Dutch jurist has contributed to inaugurating an influential tradition of thought, this does not imply that inheritors of that tradition remain bound by such a demeaning view of women as lacking autonomy. Essentially, this objection stipulates that theorists such as Kinsella commit a “genetic fallacy” when they propose that a belief’s or norm’s genesis matters for its validity. More will be said about this objection later on, so suffice it here to observe that Kinsella goes beyond merely investigating Grotius’s own writings as evidence of past prejudice. In connecting her hermeneutics of historical texts from the early modern period with a reading of current provisions in international law governing noncombatant immunity, Kinsella attempts to circumvent the charge of committing the genetic fallacy. She maintains, for example, that the Geneva Conventions of 1949, which cover what we call humanitarian law today, rely on a conceptual framework that once again relegates women to a sphere of inaction.84 Whereas Grotius conceived of women as irrational by nature and hence exempt from legitimate warfare and political action, the Geneva Conventions stress women’s “productive capability and sexual vulnerability”85 as the main reason why they presumptively enjoy the status of innocence. Kinsella hence submits that, while these accounts of how sex matters differ in important respects, they converge on the effective exclusion of women. What has changed over time are the reasons why women cannot be combatants; the practical result remains broadly the same.

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Perhaps the most significant conclusion Kinsella draws from this genealogy is that, since both early modern (Grotius) and contemporary (Geneva Conventions) configurations of noncombatant immunity derive from an ontology that portrays women as deficient and lacking in various ways, international humanitarian law remains contaminated by “subhumanity.” The past thus reaches into the present and has an impact on how we separate combatants from noncombatants. This implies that even today, in times when we have supposedly overcome the gendered inequities of the past, the distinction between combatant and civilian cannot be taken for granted: “They are not just regulative categories of the laws of war, but are also performative. That is to say, the combatant and the civilian gain in substance through persistent and constant, imperfect and provisional, iteration. . . . The ambivalence of the principle, its open texture and its deliberate ambiguity: Who is a civilian? Who is a combatant? . . . How do we know? Who is to judge and on what grounds?”86 Therefore, the genealogical approach’s main thrust is to foreground the problematic aspects of a universally accepted principle, by highlighting its unexplored, and shameful and lowly, origins. Maja Zehfuss, our second interlocutor in this section, expands on this analysis and applies it with even more vigor to actual conflicts today. Her main proposition is that the “principle of non-combatant immunity ultimately emerges as part of the problem rather than the solution: it enables the very practice it seems designed to restrain. More bluntly, it makes it possible to justify war in the first place.”87 For Zehfuss, any appeal to the status of innocent lives is disingenuous, for it obscures a fact that has become central in recent wars: the distinction between combatants and noncombatants not only serves to demarcate legitimate uses of violence, but also assists in justifying actual wars. If Just Wars can be characterized, among other criteria, by sparing the innocent, then this might lead to a dangerous sense of entitlement on the part of those who claim for themselves to use violence in a discriminate way. An upshot of the principle of discrimination is the psychological effect of licensing warfare: It enables us to think of war as a legitimate practice—a practice that is unpleasant, to be sure, but justifiable nevertheless if certain conditions are observed. War is all right: we do not (mean to) kill civilians after all. In the practice of contemporary western war, expressions of support for

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the principle have played an increasing role and the illusion that our technology enables us to protect civilians in warfare has underlined this commitment.88

In a dialectical twist, Zehfuss puts forth the suggestion that the distinction between combatants and noncombatants has facilitated the proliferation, rather than the reduction, of violence. She also proposes that the discrimination principle stultifies ordinary citizens, who might otherwise feel outrage at the misdeeds of their governments. Ensuring that innocent civilians will be exempt from intentional targeting will go a far way in securing popular assent to military action. What about the overall value of the idea of “innocence”—should we discard it altogether or revise it such that it becomes less prone to manipulation? Zehfuss does not offer a definitive answer when she underlines the mutual vulnerability of all human beings and maintains that harm can be caused by anyone. She merely asserts that “innocence” per se remains an elusive category for restraining violence; what would be needed instead of the plea for respecting innocent people is a general awareness of how human beings can cause harm to one another. This point about the precariousness of human life closely resembles, and indeed remains indebted to, Butler’s discussion of frailty outlined earlier. From what we have observed so far, it seems evident that Zehfuss is less interested in the historical emergence of the norm of noncombatant immunity than in its current effects. But it is productive to read Kinsella and Zehfuss together, as each delivering one element of the feminist critique of the distinction between combatants and civilians. While Kinsella turns to the history of ideas to reconstruct the ideological contexts from which the figure of the civilian has arisen, she leaves open for debate—or for what she calls “persistent and constant, imperfect and provisional, iteration”—how we may interpret the norm of noncombatant immunity today, in light of our current predicaments about the use of force. Zehfuss, on the other side, approaches the norm with a view to exploring its actual, rather than professed, function in contemporary politics. This look at the real world is an eminently critical enterprise that can be extended to other practices of warfare. For example, technologically advanced precision bombing, which is often naïvely praised as more ethical in that it only targets those who are liable to be killed in war, can itself

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become a vehicle for legitimizing war. Western countries, through their possession of such precision bombs, are deemed superior when compared to their enemies. Just as with the norm of noncombatant immunity, the issue for Zehfuss is not so much whether the idea of protecting innocent lives is good in itself, but rather whether its real-world impact is on balance positive or negative. She thus asks who benefits and who suffers from the invocation of the discrimination principle in concrete situations.89 Hence, even though Zehfuss refrains from historical investigations, the thrust of her critique can be described as a genealogy of sorts: by focusing on the material and symbolic benefits that actors derive from an ostensibly self-evident value, she engages in an exegetic exercise that resembles Nietzsche’s take on the oppressive effects of morality for human flourishing. In this sense, Zehfuss’s project bears resemblance to a counterhistory, whose main goal is the revelation of a norm’s “concrete reality,” rather than its “abstract purity.”90 Counterhistories aim to disclose the dangerous aspects of an ideological formation by steering attention away from an analysis of the ethical framework undergirding that formation, toward an inquiry into its material influence on the world we inhabit. More often than not, their objective is the subversion of the belief or value under scrutiny: the objective of writing a counterhistory of liberalism, for example, is not to improve on its pathologies, but to denounce how the ethical framework of liberalism, with its apparent celebration of freedom and equality, not only could coexist with, but was effectively premised on, and remains tainted by, the institutionalized epitome of unfreedom and inequality: slavery.91 Zehfuss’s critique of noncombatant immunity operates through a similar argumentative logic. But note here that counterhistories are not completely identical with genealogies. Genealogies share with counterhistories an acute interest in the pudenda origo of high-minded ideals: raising “embarrassing questions” and reclaiming “embarrassing truths”92 about a value or belief are shared ambitions of both genealogists and counterhistorians. Yet, genealogy is less strongly invested in the rebuttal of the object under scrutiny. This is why it is possible for a genealogist like Williams to drive his project in the direction of a positive vindication of truthfulness, or why Foucault’s problematizing approach can be seen as

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normatively abstemious.93 Counterhistories, on the other side, are not compatible with either positive vindication or normative abstemiousness. They are inherently subversive. Genealogical approaches allow us to activate the imagination in ways that yield unexpected results: they make us see things differently by revealing the constructed nature of seemingly unproblematic norms. Once the link between the norm of innocence and the relegation of women to a sphere of inaction has been revealed, we will perceive the controversy around noncombatant immunity from a new angle. Estranging us from self-evident norms has the effect of probing the commitments we might hold in particularly high esteem; the idea that, prima facie, noncombatants ought to be spared violence in conflicts articulates one such commitment. Consider, though, that the kind of estrangement achieved by Kinsella and Zehfuss is radically different from McMahan’s project. Their reconstruction runs counter to the moralist redescription of innocence. While revisionist Just War theorists see a theoretical problem in the confusing distinction between combatants and noncombatants, genealogists perceive such a flight from history as a cause for concern. They start with the practical problem of discriminating between innocent and noninnocent people and raise hard questions about the suitability of “innocence” in light of its problematic history and present.

4 . 4 . W H Y T H E G E N E T I C FA L L AC Y O B J EC T I O N M I S S E S I T S TA R G E T

Before concluding this chapter, I still need to tackle a serious doubt about the very idea of genealogy as critique. I have already hinted at one criticism of genealogy as a method: that it commits the “genetic fallacy.” This charge has been leveled against the feminists discussed earlier: Kinsella has been criticized for unduly overextending her argument. The claim that gender is constitutive of innocence should be held apart from the more convincing suggestion that it merely plays a significant role in it.94 Since all genealogies, no matter which norm they interrogate, can be confronted with this objection, it is imperative to systematically reflect on

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how one may respond to it. The objection states that revealing the complex and contingent ways in which a belief or value has come about tells us little, or perhaps even nothing, about their normative status.95 In the language of the philosophy of science, the “context of discovery” must be neatly separated from the “context of justification.” Using the mildly technical terms of argumentation theory, the fallacy is caused by a violation of the criterion of relevance: the fact that a belief or value has emerged in a specific context is irrelevant for the appraisal of its normative status.96 We thus commit a category mistake when we summon history to probe a belief or value. The objection has been raised ever since genealogy was developed by Friedrich Nietzsche.97 Foucault, too, has been accused of falling into the trap of ascribing relevance to historical findings.98 I shall assume here that the objection possesses, at first sight, intuitive appeal and that it aims at the heart of what proponents of genealogy hope to achieve. After all, if genealogy is indeed deprived of its critical impact—if its relation to the present is rooted in nothing but the curious capturing of the past’s distant echo—then we are dealing with a historical investigation that smacks of antiquarianism. This is evidently not the type of investigation that either Kinsella or Zehfuss would endorse. How can defenders of genealogy address this doubt? Several authors have suggested that the genetic fallacy objection is misleading. Let us look at three strategies to defend genealogy. Raymond Geuss, first, suggests that the objection is misguided insofar as it wrongly claims that the purpose of genealogy is to undermine the belief or value under scrutiny: “They [historical arguments] are not in the first instance intended to support or refute a thesis; rather, they aim to change the structure of argument by directing attention to a new set of relevant questions that need to be asked. They are contributions not to finding out whether this or that argument is invalid or poorly supported, but to trying to change the questions people ask about concepts and arguments.”99 As we have already seen, on Geuss’s account, the contribution of genealogy consists in transforming the conceptual apparatus with which political theory tackles certain issues. Thus, its purpose is not to refute the normative status of a belief or value, but rather to thoroughly contest its appeal to universalism. To be sure, if genealogy’s aim were to directly rebut a belief or value, then it would indeed fall victim to the genetic fallacy objection.

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A second way of defending genealogy has been explored by Colin Koopman. Koopman’s vision of genealogy is inspired by Foucault’s notion of “problematization.” This notion remains, in an important sense, normatively abstemious: akin to Geuss, Koopman submits that the goal of genealogy is neither to buttress nor to refute a specific thesis. However, he goes beyond the suggestion that genealogy helps us ask new questions: The charge that genealogies commit the genetic fallacy applies to strong claims that genealogy normatively bears on justification to such a degree that genealogy by itself can determine justifiability. A weaker claim for the mere relevance of genealogical histories to questions of normative assessment does not seem to involve fallacious genetic reasoning. . . . The genetic fallacy need not be taken as asserting that descriptive claims about the history and development of certain beliefs are always irrelevant to normative conclusion in every context. . . . One can, in other words, regard genetic reasoning as fallacious and still accept that genetic reasonings, including genealogy, are broadly relevant in less determinative senses to our projects of normative evaluation.100

On this perspective, it matters significantly how ambitious we intend genealogy’s implications to be: while stronger commitments to vindication, such as William’s genealogy of truthfulness, might ultimately fall prey to the genetic fallacy objection, normatively less determined types of genealogy, such as Foucault’s idea of “problematization,” successfully avoid the charge. Finally, Amy Allen suggests yet another way to grapple with the genetic fallacy objection.101 She proposes that the problematizing of a value or belief can be genetically grounded and yet avoid an argumentative fallacy. Through a carefully crafted response to Nancy Fraser’s critique of Foucault, Allen develops the idea that the basic claim underlying the objection is wrong. Using as a case study the faculty of autonomy, Allen notes: There is no fallacy involved in considering the causal history by means of which individuals come to be autonomous. If Foucault’s genealogies show us that an individual only comes to be autonomous as a result of a process of subjection to disciplinary power relations, then this is relevant

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to our assessments of autonomy. When we talk about assessments of autonomy, however, it is important to recall . . . that Foucault’s point is not that autonomy is bad. Rather, his point is that what looks like autonomy may not really be autonomy, especially to the extent that it does not acknowledge or reflect upon its own connection to power relations. If this is right, then Foucault’s use of a genetic argument is not fallacious.102

Genealogy reveals the complex ways in which power relations have shaped and disfigured our understanding of specific values, such as autonomy or innocence. To the extent that these values thus can be shown to possess a history, awareness of that history will be central to their normative appraisal. Consequently, the suggestion that normativity needs to be sharply separated from historical inquiry is a mistake, based on either ignorance or willful denial of the past. Allen’s defense of genealogy accepts that so long as the causal history written by the genealogist is persuasive enough to demonstrate the lowly origins of the belief or value under scrutiny, the project itself is not vulnerable to the genetic fallacy objection. In a sense, then, Allen discards the fundamental assumption underlying the genetic fallacy objection that the context of discovery ought to be separated from the context of justification. It is precisely because the history of a practice matters for how we evaluate it that genealogy is a worthwhile endeavor. Geuss, Koopman, and Allen give us convincing reasons for delimiting the scope of genealogy as a critical enterprise. Most importantly, they show that the genetic fallacy objection is premised on a simplistic understanding of what genealogy aims to achieve. Disclosing that a specific value originated in a number of contingent moments shaped by power relations surely implies some form of criticizing that value. If we more accurately understand the complex ways in which a practice or idea has been formed, we are in a better position to see both their strengths and their weaknesses. Yet, what the genetic fallacy objection fails to grasp is the extent to which criticism might differ from subversion. In other words: the genetic fallacy objection assumes that all genealogies are also counterhistories; this is a mistake.

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4 . 5 . G E N E A LO GY B E T W E E N S U BV E R S I O N A N D V I N D I C AT I O N

We can now more clearly perceive why we ought to be careful about which lessons to draw from Kinsella’s and Zehfuss’s investigations. Let us, then, ask how a genealogically reconstructed notion of innocence can be enlisted for the debate around definitions of terrorism. To begin with, an obvious observation: once the noncombatant principle becomes problematized, object-focused definitions of terrorism forfeit their aura of selfevidence. This in itself is an important insight. Kinsella and Zehfuss point to both the contingent emergence and the unintendedly or purposefully deleterious effects of the norm of noncombatant immunity for practices and ideas of warfare. Genealogy, then, offers a propaedeutic for us to imagine things otherwise and “to think differently, instead of legitimating what is already known.”103 The disclosure of new possibilities of evaluation and orientation involves a critical intervention on our own thought practices. How far does this critique extend? The feminist challenges to the status of noncombatants make room for two kinds of reaction: on the one hand, we may think of a radical critique emanating from Kinsella’s and Zehfuss’s observations, whereby the norm itself is ultimately abandoned and eventually replaced with an alternative one that eschews the gendered inequities built into noncombatant immunity. We can detect signs that this might be the desired outcome in Zehfuss’s text. Her turn to Butler’s account of human frailty and precariousness indicates that Zehfuss is generally doubtful about the value of noncombatant immunity. But, given that genealogy can be interpreted in various directions, we need not necessarily endorse this proposition. If one of genealogy’s purposes involves questioning ostensibly self-evident norms through histories of their emergence, then we might be well advised to refrain from drawing overly ambitious conclusions as to the subversive or vindicatory implications of genealogy. While it is imperative to acknowledge the gendered history of the emergence of innocence, we need not inflate this genealogical observation into a full-fledged rejection of the distinction between combatants and noncombatants. In other words, it is perfectly possible to appreciate the merits of Kinsella’s historical arguments without embracing Zehfuss’s claim connecting

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the norm of innocence to the actual proliferation of violence. In this vein, we may recover another, less radical strand of critique that is perhaps more in tune with Koopman’s and Geuss’s remarks on the aim of genealogy: a problematization of certain key norms on which our ethical frameworks are based. Problematizing, as we saw earlier, is not the same as repudiating. On the contrary, a genealogical inquiry may well prepare the ground for a more inclusive—that is, more informed and circumspect— understanding of the ways in which certain beliefs and values have come about. This insight, in turn, might be utilized for rethinking current practices surrounding the protection of noncombatants in war. Once we apply this interpretation of genealogy to the controversy about terrorism, we need to grapple more subtly with the notion of innocence in definitions of terrorism. The simplistic reference, frequently found in the definitions first camp, to the identifying criterion of innocence needs to be supplemented with an acknowledgment of its gendered history. Only then will we be able to better grasp the complexity of the value underpinning the definition of terrorism. The question still remains whether a positively constructive position can be developed out of the genealogy of noncombatant status. This issue resonates with the discussion in chapter 2, where I referred to various kinds of captivity in which one can find oneself. In examining genocide blindness, it emerged there that different types of captivity—ideological or otherwise—call for different kinds of emancipatory responses. In the case of what it means to be innocent, we are confronted with a similar constellation: we might be blinded by conventional conceptions of noncombatants, which remain insensitive to the gendered inequities built into the conventional notion of innocent life. The historical reconstruction undertaken by Kinsella can then be seen as an effort to liberate us from ill-conceived ideas about both the development and the effects of innocence in warfare. Viewed from this perspective, genealogy can add support to those who believe that the historical imagination has the potential of transforming our understanding of definitions of terrorism. Revealing the history behind the construction of the noncombatant heightens awareness of the ways in which claims about values are interwoven with, and sustained by, power relations. Genealogies open up the debate about conventional accounts of the past; they historicize ostensibly ahistorical beliefs and values. The way

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that the imagination is engaged in this process differs from both storytelling and imaginary cases: a genealogical approach takes a well-known idea or practice and sheds new, and often surprising, light on its emergence. Locating genealogy in the normative space between subversion and vindication implies that we also acknowledge what is specific about the way in which the imagination is engaged through history: a genealogical approach tells us when and why existing categories are appropriate, and when and why they lack explanatory power and have to be supplemented  by new categories. What are those new categories? This chapter has argued that a genealogy cannot provide an answer to that question. In searching for an answer, it would be more opportune to turn to artistic representations. In other words, if we are looking for alternative descriptions of political violence, genealogies, such as the ones proposed by the feminists discussed in this chapter, do not afford us with the appropriate tools for conceptual innovation.

5 THE CONCEPTUAL TAPESTRY OF POLITICAL VIOLENCE

T

he final chapter weaves together the various threads I have been spinning up to this point. My goal here is to come up with a conceptual tapestry, rather than a grand theory, of the functions that the imagination performs in the examination of political violence. Each of the book’s chapters has dealt with a different type of violence, refracted through a different imaginative lens. In the introduction, I have maintained that the imagination can further an ameliorative approach to the concepts we use to account for the dynamic reality of violence. Our ways of naming violence need to remain responsive to changes in how violence is enacted in the real world. In this process, imagining violence can play a critical role: by allowing us to see the world from a new angle, the faculty of the imagination allows us to sharpen the theoretical instruments we employ to capture violence. In chapters 2 to 4, we have then observed how varied the uses of the imagination can be, depending on the method we are applying. I now want to conclude by interrogating the ways in which storytelling, thought experiments, and genealogy relate to one another, as well as to the wider ambitions of political theory identified at the book’s start.

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5 .1 . L I N K I N G S TO RY T E L L I N G , T H O U G H T E X P E R I M E N TS , A N D G E N E A LO GY

One question to ask about this book is whether a genuine connection between storytelling, thought experiments, and genealogy exists. Or is the link between the imagination’s artistic, hypothetical, and historical dimensions perhaps much looser than I have suggested? The chief claim in this section is that each register of the imagination can play a specific, circumscribed role for political theory as an ameliorative project. Illuminating that role is of utmost importance if we are to remain alive to the politics of naming. In conjunction with one another, however, storytelling, thought experiments, and genealogical history can broaden the normative and critical horizon of political theory’s engagement with violence. A promising way to trace the limits of the imagination would be to home in on temporality and modality within storytelling, thought experiments, and genealogy. Accordingly, my argument is that (1) storytelling can lead to a widening of existing conceptualizations, while (2) thought experiments facilitate the defamiliarization of conventional patterns of meaning and (3) genealogy unsettles appeals to seemingly unproblematic norms. In line with the notion that for the imagination to be simultaneously disruptive and instructive, certain constraining conditions would have to be met, I propose that (1) storytelling is constrained by its rejection of propagandizing, (2) thought experiments are constrained by what is possible for us, here and now, and (3) genealogy is constrained by the recovery of historical facts that have been sidelined in dominant chronicles of the past. Let us elaborate on each of these suggestions. Recall how I maintained in chapter 2 that cinematic storytelling can become productive in tackling genocide blindness. “Blindness” here denotes an interpretive incapacity, rooted in a failure to perceive an aspect of something, to subsume a type of violence (“mass rape” or “climate change”) under a generic term (“genocide”). Denial seems to be qualitatively different from blindness, for its aim is, broadly, the subversion of truth claims. I have then pointed to one potential cure to blindness of this sort: storytelling. The reason for this is that narratives, from feature films like Grbavica to documentaries

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like Climate Refugees, allow us to perceive and interpret forms of violence, such as rape or climate change, in a different light. More specifically, they enable the viewers to creatively extend a generic term (“genocide”) such that it covers instances of violence that were originally not subsumable under it. Rape and climate change are, of course, not new phenomena, but their recognition as instantiations of genocide can be channeled through narratives that trigger aspect change. Even though these stories often convey events from the past, the imagination is therefore employed in a future-oriented fashion. That is to say, when we are faced with artistic representations of violence, we do so in order to adapt and transform already existing conceptual categories. Art can thus help in breaking up the rigidity of conceptual categories so that we can reassemble them in view of new types of violence. Successful aspect change is the explicit goal of this process: once we have seen rape or climate change through a different prism, we may come to recognize that genocide is an appropriate label to describe these forms of violence. Storytelling can therefore play an eminently pedagogical role, inviting the viewers to see the world anew. Narratives aim to revise the moral and political knowledge we already possess. But aspect change as a means to combat genocide blindness only works if we possess relatively clear-cut categories to begin with. This is why I distinguished in chapter 2 between absolute and relative genocide blindness: while the former applies to those who fail to judge any act of violence as fulfilling the criteria of genocide, the later merely pertains to those who cannot extend the concept to cases that have hitherto remained excluded. Films like Grbavica or Climate Refugees will have little impact on those afflicted by genocide blindness of the absolute variety, but they may, under propitious circumstances, woo those who would instinctively refrain from adapting or transforming the established concept of genocide. Sometimes there are, of course, good reasons for suppressing the urge to revise legally enshrined norms: if we end up seeing every form of violence as genocide, the term becomes meaningless and loses its critical edge. Yet, the dynamic nature of violent acts and the feedback loops between conceptualizations of violence and the deeds of perpetrators make it imperative to constantly reflect on our practices of naming. Hypotheticals are not bound up with temporality in the same way. As we have remarked in chapter 3, their portrayal of what is possible and

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what can be imagined is predicated on estrangement. This implies that imaginary scenarios, such as those pertaining to torture, are purposefully unshackled from existing conceptual categories. When we conjure up hypothetical scenarios, we do not do so in order to extend the reach of generic terms. Rather, the hypothetical’s purpose is to liberate us from ossified conventions, to make us understand how we may better justify deeply held convictions. Viewed from one angle, reality imposes no constraints whatsoever on those who invoke imaginary scenarios: insofar as we grant that thought experiments ought to make the status quo appear unfamiliar, a certain degree of strangeness is certainly appropriate for disrupting our conventional understanding of the real. But our sense of reality still imposes some restrictions on what ought to be contemplated in imaginary scenarios. The reason for this specific constraint, fleshed out by Butler’s plea to remain vigilant to human frailty and precariousness, is that meritorious thought experiments are intimately linked to action-guidance: their ultimate goal must be to clarify morally and politically complex situations that concern us, here and now. They must not, in other words, become fully disconnected from the world as we know it. Finally, genealogy engages the imagination by looking back in history, urging us to reconsider traditional accounts of the past. The upshot of this investigation, as observed in chapter 4, is the reconstruction of the complexity and contingency of ostensibly natural concepts. Such a denaturalizing tendency is related to defamiliarization: scanning the past, genealogy’s ambition is to conclusively demonstrate that things could have played out differently. As we witnessed in our discussion of the gendered configuration of “innocence,” even the most apparently innocuous terms belie complex histories, which undermine naïve appeals to them. In this case, the imagination is employed so as to unsettle deep commitments to foundational principles. Focusing on temporality is once again crucial: as a backward-looking investigation of a norm’s concealed history, genealogy focuses on a past that still has a significant impact on the present. As I averred in chapter 4, the historical register of the imagination is rather ill suited for constructive proposals to adapt or transform already established concepts. While we are able to define terrorism by referring to the notion of “innocence,” the genealogical inquiry into the term’s gendered history will necessarily

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problematize any uncritical espousal of object-focused conceptualizations of terrorism. The unsettling effect of genealogy thus resembles the defamiliarization initiated by this-worldly thought experiments. Yet, rather than conjuring up a modally distant world, genealogists explore the histories from which currently operative norms have emerged and established themselves. Where we go from that observation is an open question that looking at the past alone cannot answer; but any answer will involve the imagination, in one way or another. Temporality and modality thus fulfill different functions in each of the case studies discussed in this book. One relevant factor that binds the imagination’s three registers together is that a sense of reality, of the world as we know it, serves as an enabling condition of how we make present what is absent. When the imagination is fruitfully engaged, it remains constrained by real-world considerations that ultimately shape whether storytelling, thought experiments, and genealogy manage to serve both disruptive and instructive purposes. Without the right kind of constraints, engaging the imagination can have nefarious consequences. Moralists frequently misunderstand the nature of these constraints when they submit that political theory is supposed to construct idealizing accounts of violence. A much more promising way of envisaging political theory would be in terms of an intellectual enterprise that is concerned with amelioration and action-guidance beyond moralistic prescriptions: a sober realism, in other words. The difference between persuasion and propaganda exemplifies this: when stories seek to turn an audience into collaborators of violence, the benefits of learning from aspect change are completely erased. Propagandizing narratives, such as Jud Süß or Der ewige Jude, exert violence themselves. In depicting the other as inherently evil, they do not only denigrate and humiliate their targets; they also show no respect whatsoever for the deliberative freedom and hermeneutic diversity of those who are being addressed. The way Jews are portrayed in these stories serves only one purpose: the incitement of resentment and fury. This is why films like Grbavica or Climate Refugees must remain open for debate so that the narratives themselves can become catalysts for wider societal discussions about violence. Aspect-seeing, in short, cannot be enforced. The indeterminacy in the stories’ uptake is unavoidable, lest we revert back to the moralist posture of issuing absolute, apodictic, and definite judgments about violence.

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In the case of hypotheticals, different brakes on the imagination need to be applied. Defamiliarizing through imaginary scenarios essentially entails striking a precarious balance between the overly customary and the radically alien. As Innocent Jenny illustrates, the feeling of productive estrangement can morph into an experience of profound alienation that undermines our capacity to exercise judgment. In this case, the disruptive force of the imagination has pernicious effects. Akin to drawing out the difference between persuasion and propaganda, finding the right balance between defamiliarization and alienation is a challenging task that can easily go awry. Since thought experiments move us away from the real world, there is always a danger that they relinquish all anchoring in the here and now. Concentrating on the distinction between possible simpliciter and possible for us, here and now, allows us to identify those hypotheticals that move too far away from the real world and thereby cause alienation. Genealogy’s scope is limited in yet another way. Since genealogists hope to reconstruct the contingent emergence of norms, their success will depend on the plausibility of the historical findings. Relatedly, it is vital to stress that normative overextension poses a permanent threat to genealogy as a critical project. As chapter 4 maintained, neither vindication nor subversion is a necessary consequence of genealogical inquiry. Awareness of the gendered configuration of “innocence” forces us, however, to relinquish simplistic assumptions about the self-evident power of the norm; such a problematizing of “innocence” does not entail a full-fledged rebuttal.

5 . 2 . H OW T H E I M AG I N AT I O N M AT T E R S FO R P O L I T I C A L T H EO RY I N A R E A L I S T V E I N

Let us proceed with the issue of realism. Recall how I claimed in the book’s introduction that, if we concentrate on the imagination’s artistic, hypothetical, and historical registers, we will be able to circumvent both moralism and (unreconstructed) realism, the two most common rejoinders to the politics of naming. If the imagination remains unchecked, its effects can become problematic, precisely because its connection with

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reality is severed. We are now in a position to flesh out this claim with regard to the wider debate around how to do political theory. The caveats we must heed when faced with storytelling, thought experiments, and genealogy reveal why a realist outlook on political theory is entirely compatible with embracing the imagination. At various junctures in the previous chapters we detected the impasse between moralist and (unreconstructed) realist positions. My argument has consistently been that imagining things otherwise may help us to engage with various forms of violence in such a way that this impasse could be overcome. The examples of disclosive narratives, this-worldly hypotheticals, and problematizing genealogies demonstrate how imagining things differently can inform our understanding and evaluation of the common world. What is the consequence of this observation for political theory? Aspect change, defamiliarization, and denaturalization are useful strategies for weakening the potentially debilitating grip that conventions have on us. Does this imply we abandon the commitment to a sober realism, which underpins the ideal of political theory this book endeavors to promote? To answer this question, we need to scrutinize ways to reconcile various uses of the imagination with realism. A good place to start on this quest is Raymond Geuss’s recent writings on utopianism, the traditional bête noire of realism. Geuss, whom we have encountered in the book’s introduction as one of the most vociferous detractors of moralism, maintains that the standard critique of utopian thinking is based on the reflection that utopias devise perfect states of social order and permanent peace, but fail to specify how one would have to proceed to reach those end points of history.1 Utopian thinking of this kind is for Geuss “form-based”2 in that it unfailingly concentrates on developing a formal vision of a telos in the future; this vision is then turned into a contrasting foil through which the miserable state of affairs, here and now, can be rendered visible. Geuss juxtaposes this conventional view with another way of reflecting on utopia that is much more concerned with a contextual analysis of the social world as we know it. Epitomized by the work of the German anarchist Gustav Landauer,3 this “content-based” version envisages “the task of utopian speculation as not to construct the image of a possible perfect world but as a focused study of those human desires and needs that continue to torment us but are incapable of being satisfied under

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present social circumstances.” 4 On this account, what matters is not so much the end state toward which utopian thinking remains oriented; the concrete reasons why the utopian project cannot be realized under current conditions are much more central to the very idea of utopia. These thoughts on utopia are directly relevant for our topic because they show how the imagination can be utilized for amelioration’s sake. To adopt an ameliorative perspective is to examine the concepts we employ to describe and assess social reality and contextually inquire how we may improve them such that they successfully achieve the goals they are supposed to serve. We therefore always commence with practices in the here and now, probing where deficiencies in our conceptual apparatus lie and asking how they may be remedied. Amelioration sustained by imaginative judgments occupies a particular standpoint; it does not pretend to offer a “view from nowhere.” Instead of fully detaching the imagination from the here and now, storytelling, thought experiments, and genealogy thus remain moored in a sense of the real. Their purpose is not to conjure up a world totally dissimilar from the one we currently inhabit, but rather to allow us to perceive and interpret the present in a new and illuminating light. It is important, then, to emphasize once again that what counts as real and thus as the initial point of departure for any use of the imagination is itself contentious. There are judgments involved as to what anchor in reality ought to guide us when engaging the imagination. But how could this be otherwise? If the status quo forms the yardstick against which we measure the ways in which the imagination ought to be engaged, then we evidently require appropriate frameworks for firming up our grasp of reality. All the authors I invoked in support of my view of the imagination delineate such frameworks: whether it is María Pía Lara’s idea of “leaning from catastrophe,” or Judith Butler’s notion that human life is inherently “precarious and frail,” or Helen Kinsella’s insistence that investigating the early modern sources of the notion of innocence will “transform its significance,” all these positions share a deep concern with contemporary political problems; they thus make explicit what they consider to be a central dimension of reality. This is why political theory must necessarily pay attention to the real world, and yet remain receptive to the creative potential of the

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imagination to transform the conceptual tools with which we make sense of violence. In this sense, the ameliorative approach endorsed in this book resembles the “content-based” type of utopia identified by Geuss—its goal is to address shortcomings in our current conceptual apparatus that prevent the cultivation of ethical sensitivity and institutional preparedness.

5 . 3 . T H E PAYO F F: M A K I N G S E N S E OF POLITICAL VIOLENCE

What is the payoff of this enterprise? This book has systematically dealt with a number of cases that tell us something about how political theory typically approaches violence. My reflections have not culminated in a grand theory, but rather in a multifaceted picture of what the imagination can achieve for political theory. This picture, however, allows us to draw some general conclusions that can lay the ground for novel research agendas. The first conclusion concerns the horizon of political theory’s normative and critical ambitions. I have framed the book’s objectives in terms of an ameliorative attempt to grapple with the dynamic nature of violence. What the preceding chapters have shown is that such a project can be advanced by scrutinizing various ways of imagining things differently. Haslanger grounds her plea for amelioration in a commitment to continuously revise and reform existing conceptualizations. In so doing, she subjects the words we use for describing and evaluating reality to a pragmatic test: insofar as these concepts help us achieve certain goals, such as fighting sexism, they will be deemed suitable for the purpose of remedying injustices; if they fail to contribute to the struggle against sexism, these concepts need to be reconsidered or abandoned (in extremis). This pragmatic test helps to ground political theory. This outline is enlightening for the debates I have rehearsed in this book. However, it has also become evident that the imagination performs a more pronounced role in servicing the ameliorative project than Haslanger might have assumed. In order to understand and respond to violence, storytelling, thought experiments, and genealogy perform important functions, allowing us to examine a variety of phenomena

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from a different angle: genocide, torture, and terrorism are not “fixed” objects, devoid of history and cultural context, but processes that are constantly in flux. Tracking these transformations, with regard to actors, means, and victims of violence, is a complex endeavor that can be facilitated by engaging the imagination. This does not imply, of course, that we should completely prioritize the imagination over other forms of inquiry into the social reality of violence. The battle against genocide denial calls for painstaking historical and sociological scholarship; uncovering the true extent of torture practices during the War on Terror, and indeed during any protracted conflict, hinges on thorough monitoring activities of what has actually happened in detention camps; finally, understanding terrorism is premised on various theoretical and practical operations that strive to enhance our grasp of the material and ideational mechanisms facilitating this complex phenomenon. Yet, all these engagements with the social reality of violence do not exhaust the means of coming to terms with the ever-changing character of genocide, torture, and terrorism. Therefore, my argument in favor of engaging the imagination should be understood as complementing the existing repertoire of social-scientific and historical approaches. This book hence contains a proposal to take more seriously what social scientists and historians frequently treat as extraneous noise in the background of hard data: how we imagine violence can make a difference in the real world. This means, second, that focusing on the imagination has ramifications for how we ought to study violence in a holistic manner. I am referring here not so much to the panoply of social-scientific and historical approaches that would be necessary to strengthen our grasp of the dynamic nature of violence, but rather to the ethical dimension of our research agendas. This dimension comes to the fore once we recall how the imagination operates when it is employed in a disruptive as well as instructive manner. Our investigation of storytelling, thought experiments, and genealogy has revealed that the effects of these imaginative registers cannot be easily predicted: whether a specific narrative, hypothetical, or genealogical account succeeds in what it set out to accomplish—trigger aspect change, unsettle normative commitments, problematize ostensibly natural categories—depends on the capacity of the political theorist to move her audience.

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Since this audience is not reducible to the members of the academic community, the uptake of any effort at stirring the imagination remains inherently uncertain. As I have argued in the introduction, reflective judgments strive to elicit agreement without pretending to be able to enforce it. This becomes evident in all the cases discussed in the book: although Grbavica, for example, has had a demonstrable impact on the debate about the wars in Ex-Yugoslavia, there can be no unassailable guarantee that narratives will always move their readers or viewers in such a way that their perceptive and interpretive frames actually change. The role of theory, then, is to identify and promote potential strategies for improving patterns of perception and interpretation that make productive use of the imagination. This affirmation of political theory’s more modest aspirations is not to be bemoaned. Indeed, as Amy Allen has convincingly argued, circumspection vis-à-vis one’s own convictions and openness to the positions of others are the only safeguards against epistemic arrogance.5 Given that I endorse a dialogical and democratic conception of political theory, we should not be worried that narratives, hypotheticals, and genealogical accounts merely extend invitations to see things differently, rather than construct stringent syllogisms that would permit only one logical outcome. Engaging the imagination involves considerable risk: precisely because judgment proceeds “without banister,” to again refer to Arendt’s dictum, the accomplishment or failure of narratives, hypotheticals, and genealogical accounts will depend on the ultimately uncertain effects they have on the wider public sphere. This means that we cannot easily reach a verdict on whether a specific attempt at imagining things differently offers a more or less promising vehicle for amelioration. Returning to our discussion of imaginary torture scenarios, we have remarked that what kinds of hypotheticals will offer action-guidance remains a question that cannot be conclusively answered in abstracto. Rather, we require a detailed assessment of the conditions under which a new hypothetical is introduced, or an old one modified. Only such an assessment allows us to identify whether the thought experiment is based on an imaginary scenario that is possible for us, here and now. Looking at the conditions in which a hypothetical is raised also permits us to critically interrogate the wider effects that they can have.

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The original context in which the ticking-bomb scenario was developed exemplifies this thought: it emerged during the Algerian war of decolonization, quite some time before Michael Walzer used it as an illustration of the “dirty hands” problem.6 Darius Rejali identifies Jean Lartéguy’s novel The Centurions (1960) as the first literary treatment of the imaginary case.7 Interestingly, the book, which fictionalizes various examples of actual torture during the war in Algeria, was a huge bestseller in France, largely because it portrayed the horrific use of violence by French soldiers as a strategically necessary instrument to subdue what the colonial power considered Algerian terrorists. Clearly, in this situation, the novel performed a function that was closely associated with the war effort itself.8 Yet, we can also think of alternative moments in which a thought experiment played an entirely different, perhaps more auspicious role. As I maintained in chapter 3, thought experiments that heed various caveats, such as making human frailty and precariousness visible, can potentially serve ameliorative goals. Third, a note on the limitations of this research. This book has not attempted to exhaustively discuss all the ways in which the imagination can be engaged. Although I do of course believe that storytelling, thought experiments, and genealogy are especially important registers of the imagination, we can easily ponder other modes that are worth exploring. We may deliberate on at least three such alternatives: nonrepresentational art, utopian fiction, and virtual histories. All three point toward a future research program that could supplement the findings of this book. Nonrepresentational art forms, such as poetry, music, or abstract painting, differ from the films I analyzed in chapter 2 due to their lack of narrative content. Does this imply that they would be entirely unsuitable for the purpose of engaging the imagination? Perhaps not.9 Although much of my argument hinges on the force of storytelling to induce aspect change, I do not maintain that nonrepresentational art is without its merits for grappling with violence. Paul Celan’s poetry might offer a powerful illustration of this point. Although his oeuvre, which can perhaps be read as an attempt at disclosing the impossibility of linguistically mastering the ineffable horror of the Holocaust, is known for its obstinate elusiveness, we can interpret the poetry’s inscrutability as a form of dissent.10

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Utopian fiction, which purposefully breaks the bond with reality as we know it, violates one of the premises that I have identified in chapter 3 as  conducive to productive thought experiments: this-worldliness can be characterized as a rootedness in the here and now. Evidently, utopias undo this rootedness in favor of a radical alterity. Are they therefore incompatible with the challenges this book has sought to explore? Once again, I do not think we need to categorically reject the possibility that otherworldly scenarios have anything productive to teach us. Note here, though, that I am speaking of fiction, rather than philosophical thought experiments. One of the great benefits of artistic treatments of otherworldliness is that they enrich the imaginary scenario with so much subtle detail that new perspectives might suddenly gain plausibility. Philosophical thought experiments are usually so compressed by deliberate design that all the fine nuances that would be necessary for responsibly judging complex situations in the real world are chiseled away. As an example for a more propitious model, consider Ursula Le Guin’s novel The Dispossessed (1974). Le Guin’s utopian depiction of an anarchist community is so fine-grained that we acquire a distinct feeling for the complications and perturbations that would surely bedevil any society without government. These concluding pages are not the place to delve into a detailed interpretation of this novel, but suffice it to observe that it can be read as a “content-based” utopia in Geuss’s sense.11 Although utopian fiction engages in “world reduction,”12 as Fredric Jameson notes, its peculiar method can be enlisted as a critique of the status quo.13 Finally, virtual histories meditate on what would have happened if a certain pivotal event in the past had not taken place.14 They are thus distinct from genealogies in that they forsake the ambition of writing “real history.” Even so, they can still kick-start the imagination in productive ways. In parallel to genealogies, virtual histories make us look again, and with renewed interest, at the past. Yet, here the idea is to highlight the pivotal role that chance and luck play in politics. As one of the most important defenders of this unorthodox view of history explains: “I do not use counterfactuals to make the case for alternative worlds, but use the construction of those worlds to probe the causes and contingency of the world we know.”15 Once again, we observe the reality constraint emerging, this time as a reminder about the boundaries of virtual history.

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In sum, although I should not propose to have done more than merely gesture at these potential research topics, it appears to be fruitful to also consider these alternative modes of engaging the imagination. I wish to end this book with a plea addressed at fellow political theorists, summarizing the core message this book has tried to deliver. It is high time to salvage the almost unbearably clichéd slogan “think different” from the global corporations that have appropriated it over the past twenty years. In order to better understand, evaluate, and orientate ourselves in the world as we know it, we would be well advised to recuperate that slogan for political theory, albeit with a slight modification: Daring to imagine things otherwise will enable us to respond to a dynamic social reality—so long as we keep in mind that the great challenges we have to confront, among which I would consider the horrors of genocide, torture, and terrorism, have their deep roots in the here and now.

NOTES

1. POLITICAL THEORY BETWEEN MORALISM AND REALISM 1.

2.

3.

A prefatory remark on my use of the first-person plural: we, us, our, as in “the world as we know it.” I am aware of the dangers that such significations harbor, especially with regard to homogenizing ways of speaking and writing that ignore differences within the collective alluded to. When employing these phrases, I refer to them in a relatively unsophisticated manner, to gesture toward a collective identity that is perhaps not yet fully formed, but that is the ultimate audience of this book: all those who grapple with the forms of violence this book analyzes. Needless to say, from time to time I also make use of the first-person plural in an authorial mode. There are, naturally, other types of violence that would have been suitable candidates for the kind of inquiry proposed in this book, not least symbolic and discursive types. Why, then, focus on genocide, torture, and terrorism? Genocide, torture, and terrorism have lately become topics of widespread debate, both in the public sphere and in academia. They have been especially vehemently discussed in political theory. Given the overlapping of academic debates and wider societal conversations, this makes them ideal cases to be studied. For an author, who has focused her attention on the same grouping of atrocities, see Claudia Card, Confronting Evils: Terrorism, Torture, Genocide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). An important caveat on my terminology regarding “realism”: since I mainly deal with political theorists, my use of “realism” derives from the literature within this discipline. For an illuminating discussion of how the terminology in political theory and international relations intersects in various complex ways, see Matt Sleat, Liberal Realism: A Realist Theory of Liberal Politics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013).

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4.

5.

6.

7. 8.

9. 10. 11.

12. 13.

14.

Mahmood Mamdani, Saviours and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror (Cape Town, South Africa: HSRC, 2009). Mamdani was not the first to use the phrase politics of naming. But his discussion of the Darfur conflict is exemplary in its detailed analysis of the political decisions that influence naming specific conflicts in one way or another. An earlier issue of the Third World Quarterly (26, no. 1) from 2005 contains several papers that scrutinize the politics of naming terrorists from a comparative perspective. Catherine Gegout, “The International Criminal Court: Limits, Potential and Conditions for the Promotion of Justice and Peace,” Third World Quarterly 34, no. 5 (2013): 800–18, https://doi.org /10.1080/01436597.2013.800737. See Richard Jackson, “Knowledge, Power and Politics in the Study of Political Terrorism,” in Critical Terrorism Studies: A New Research Agenda, ed. Richard Jackson, Marie Smyth, and Jeroen Gunning, Routledge Critical Terrorism Studies (New York: Routledge, 2009), 78. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, expanded ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 30–31. I take that phrase—sober realism—from Antonio Y. Vázquez-Arroyo, Political Responsibility: Responding to Predicaments of Power, New Directions in Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 252–56. On the debate within ethics, rather than political theory, see the essays in C. A. J. Coady, ed., What’s Wrong with Moralism? (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006). Bernard Williams, “Realism and Moralism in Political Theory,” in In the Beginning Was the Deed (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 2. It is necessary to add a note on terminology here. A case can be made to separate abstraction from idealization as modes of ethical and political inquiry. The argument, put forth by Onora O’Neill, is roughly that we can pursue the former without succumbing to the latter. While I can see why one would want to hold these two modes of ethical and political inquiry apart, I prefer a different framing, in which moralism is opposed to realism. On the debate between O’Neill and her detractors, see Onora O’Neill, Towards Justice and Virtue: A Constructive Account of Practical Reasoning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Onora O’Neill, “Abstraction, Idealization and Ideology in Ethics,” Royal Institute of Philosophy Lecture Series 22 (September 1987): 55–69, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0957042X00003667; Lisa  H. Schwartzman, “Abstraction, Idealization, and Oppression,” Metaphilosophy 37, no.  5 (2006): 565–88; Charles  W. Mills, “ ‘Ideal Theory’ as Ideology,” Hypatia 20, no.  3 (2005): 165–83, https://doi.org/10.1111/j .1527–2001.2005.tb00493.x. See, for example, G. A. Cohen, Rescuing Justice and Equality (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008). On the nexus between moralism and liberalism, see John Horton, “Realism, Liberal Moralism and a Political Theory of Modus Vivendi,” European Journal of Political Theory 9, no. 4 (October 1, 2010): 431–48, https://doi.org /10.1177/1474885110374004. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 53 (essay 2, section 13).

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15.

16.

17.

18. 19. 20.

21.

22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28.

29.

Hannah Arendt, “On Violence,” in Crises of the Republic; Lying in Politics, Civil Disobedience on Violence, Thoughts on Politics, and Revolution (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), 103–98. For an excellent reconstruction of Arendt’s account of violence, see Elizabeth Frazer and Kimberly Hutchings, “On Politics and Violence: Arendt Contra Fanon,” Contemporary Political Theory 7, no. 1 (2008): 90–108, https://doi.org /10.1057/palgrave.cpt.9300328. For arguments along similar lines, see Elizabeth Frazer and Kimberly Hutchings, “Argument and Rhetoric in the Justification of Political Violence,” European Journal of Political Theory 6, no.  2 (2007): 180–99, https://doi.org /10.1177/1474885107074349; Robert Paul Wolff, “On Violence,” Journal of Philosophy 66, no. 19 (1969): 601–16. For a useful discussion of these two strands of definition, see C. A. J. Coady, “The Idea of Violence,” Journal of Applied Philosophy 3, no. 1 (1986): 3–19, https://doi.org /10.1111/j .1468–5930.1986.tb00045.x. Johan Galtung, “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research,” Journal of Peace Research 6, no. 3 (1969): 167–91. See Vittorio Bufacchi, “Two Concepts of Violence,” Political Studies Review 3, no. 2 (2005): 193–204, https://doi.org /10.1111/j.1478–9299.2005.00023.x. Decontesting can follow many different routes, from simply stipulating what a term ought to signify to the conceptual analysis of its integral parts. For an account of decontestation as a political technique, see Michael Freeden, “What Should the ‘Political’ in Political Theory Explore?,” Journal of Political Philosophy 13, no. 2 (2005): 113– 34, https://doi.org /10.1111/j.1467–9760.2005.00216.x. Elizabeth Frazer, “What’s Real in Political Philosophy?,” Contemporary Political Theory 9, no. 4 (2010): 490–507, https://doi.org /10.1057/cpt.2010.2; Raymond Geuss, Outside Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Raymond Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). See Enzo Rossi, “Can Realism Move Beyond a Methodenstreit?,” Political Theory 44, no. 3 (June 1, 2016): 410–20, https://doi.org /10.1177/0090591715621507. For a related critique, see Lorna Finlayson, “With Radicals Like These, Who Needs Conservatives? Doom, Gloom, and Realism in Political Theory,” European Journal of Political Theory 16, no. 3 (2017): 264–82, https://doi.org /10.1177/1474885114568815. These thoughts are adapted from Raymond Geuss’s account of the tasks of realist political theory. See Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics, 37–55. Geuss, 39. See Michael Freeden, “Interpretative Realism and Prescriptive Realism,” Journal of Political Ideologies 17, no. 1 (2012): 1–11, https://doi.org /10.1080/13569317.2012.651883. For a useful overview of realism’s stance toward normativity, see Enzo Rossi and Matt Sleat, “Realism in Normative Political Theory,” Philosophy Compass 9, no. 10 (2014): 689–701, https://doi.org /10.1111/phc3.12148. For a book that approaches contemporary debates around violence in a similar fashion, see Michael Neu, Just Liberal Violence: Sweatshops, Torture, War, Off the Fence: Morality, Politics and Society (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017).

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30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43.

44.

45.

46.

47.

Anil Gupta, “Definitions,” ed. Edward N. Zalta, in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2015, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2015/entries/definitions/. Zygmunt Ziembiʤski, Practical Logic, trans. Leon Ter-Oganjan (Dordrecht: Springer, 1976), 54. Nuel Belnap, “On Rigorous Definitions,” Philosophical Studies 72, nos. 2–3 (December 1993): 117, https://doi.org /10.1007/BF00989671. Ian Hacking, “Historical Ontology,” in Historical Ontology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 2. Ian Hacking, “Making Up People,” in Historical Ontology, 100. Ian Hacking, “Five Parables,” in Historical Ontology, 48. Ian Hacking, “The Looping Effects of Human Kinds,” in Causal Cognition: A Multidisciplinary Debate, ed. Dan Sperber, David Premack, and Ann J. Premack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 369–70. Henry C. Theriault, “Genocidal Mutation and the Challenge of Definition,” Metaphilosophy 41, no. 4 (2010): 481–524, https://doi.org /10.1111/j.1467–9973.2010.01658.x. Raymond Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School, Modern European Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 55. Duncan Bell, “Writing the World: Disciplinary History and Beyond,” International Affairs 85, no. 1 (2009): 3–22, https://doi.org /10.1111/j.1468–2346.2009.00777.x. Mark Osiel, Making Sense of Mass Atrocity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), xvi. Osiel, xvii. For a paradigmatic collection of papers applying this approach to genocide research, see Charles H. Anderton and Jurgen Brauer, eds., Economic Aspects of Genocides, Other Mass Atrocities, and Their Prevention (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). See Judith Butler, “Violence, Mourning, Politics,” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 4, no. 1 (January  3, 2003): 9–37, https://doi.org/10.1080/15240650409349213; Judith Butler, “Survivability, Vulnerability, Affect,” in Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009), 33– 62; Judith Butler, “Precarious Life, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Cohabitation,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 26, no. 2 (2012): 134–51. Ethical and political responsiveness can, of course, be explored in many different ways. Jade Schiff, for example, singles out thoughtlessness, bad faith, and misrecognition as standing in the way of responsiveness. See Jade Schiff, Burdens of Political Responsibility: Narrative and the Cultivation of Responsiveness (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Danielle Petherbridge, “What’s Critical About Vulnerability? Rethinking Interdependence, Recognition, and Power,” Hypatia 31, no. 3 (August 1, 2016): 593, https://doi.org /10.1111/hypa.12250. For a powerful critique, see Christopher Cramer, “Homo Economicus Goes to War: Methodological Individualism, Rational Choice and the Political Economy of War,” World Development 30, no. 11 (November 1, 2002): 1845– 64, https://doi.org /10 .1016/S0305–750X(02)00120–1. Sally Haslanger, Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 367.

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48. 49. 50.

51.

52.

53. 54.

55.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63.

Sally Haslanger, “Gender and Race: (What) Are They? (What) Do We Want Them to Be?,” Noûs 34, no. 1 (2000): 33. Haslanger, Resisting Reality, 229. For a charitable and challenging critique of Haslanger’s project, which focuses on trans women and underscores amelioration’s malleability, see Katharine Jenkins, “Amelioration and Inclusion: Gender Identity and the Concept of Woman,” Ethics 126, no. 2 (December 30, 2015): 394–421, https://doi.org /10.1086/683535. As a general point, we can remark that Haslanger’s proposal bears some resemblance to the philosophical tradition of pragmatism. See Colin Koopman, Pragmatism as Transition: Historicity and Hope in James, Dewey, and Rorty (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). For a representative selection of some milestones in the debate, see bell hooks, Feminist Theory from Margin to Center (Boston: South End, 1984); Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). Claudia Card, “Genocide and Social Death,” Hypatia 18, no. 1 (Winter 2003): 63–79. For a comprehensive survey of the role of judgment in Western intellectual history, see Leslie Paul Thiele, The Heart of Judgment: Practical Wisdom, Neuroscience, and Narrative (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 17–69. It is important to note that for Kant both determinant judgment and reflective judgment pertain to the aesthetic and teleological realm, but not to the domain of morality. Morality is governed by rules and principles that are given a priori. Practical reason, which for Kant includes morality, is based on the rational directedness of the individual will. Neither determinant judgment nor reflective judgment plays a role in this process: the Categorical Imperative prescribes what ought to be done without any reference to actual experience. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 149–50. Kant, 104. Thiele, The Heart of Judgment, 33. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 122. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, one-volume ed. (San Diego: Harcourt, 1981). Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, rev. and enlarged ed. (New York: Viking, 1965). For some of the most illuminating interpretations of Arendt’s theory of judgment, see Ronald Beiner, “Interpretive Essay: Hannah Arendt on Judgment,” in Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, by Hannah Arendt, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 89–156; Seyla Benhabib, “Judgment and the Moral Foundations of Politics in Arendt’s Thought,” Political Theory 16, no. 1 (February 1988): 29–51, https://doi.org /10.2307/191646; Max Deutscher, Judgment After Arendt (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 125– 62; Maurizio Passerin d’Entrèves, The Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt (London: Routledge, 1994), 101–38. Hannah Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Considerations: A Lecture,” Social Research 38, no. 3 (1971): 418.

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64. 65.

66. 67. 68.

69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

75.

76.

77.

78. 79.

80.

Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 43. Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Culture: Its Social and Its Political Significance,” in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin, 2006), 221–22. Hannah Arendt, “The Modern Concept of History,” Review of Politics 20, no. 4 (October 1958): 579. See Raymond Geuss, Reality and Its Dreams (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016), 28. For the best reconstruction of how determinant and reflective judgment work together, see Peter J. Steinberger, The Concept of Political Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 91–95. Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 71. Arendt, 43. Arendt, 43. Arendt, 55. Mary Warnock, Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 140. Mihaela Mihai, “Theorizing Change: Between Reflective Judgment and the Inertia of Political Habitus,” European Journal of Political Theory 15, no. 1 (2016): 22–42, https:// doi.org /10.1177/1474885114537634. On Arendt’s appropriation of the idea of a sensus communis, see Annelies Degryse, “Sensus Communis as a Foundation for Men as Political Beings: Arendt’s Reading of Kant’s Critique of Judgment,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 37, no. 3 (March 1, 2011): 345–58, https://doi.org /10.1177/0191453710389452. A clarification on my terminology: in this book, I use estrangement and defamiliarization (and the connected verbs) synonymously, contrasting them with the term alienation, which I employ to signal a problematic type of estrangement and defamiliarization. On the importance of estrangement and defamiliarization in literary theory, see J. A. Cuddon, “Defamiliarization,” in A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, ed. Matthew Birchwood et  al. (Malden: Wiley, 2013); Carlo Ginzburg, “Making Things Strange: The Prehistory of a Literary Device,” Representations 56 (1996): 8–28, https://doi.org /10.2307/2928705; Fredric Jameson, Brecht and Method (London: Verso, 2000); Galin Tihanov, “The Politics of Estrangement: The Case of the Early Shklovsky,” Poetics Today 26, no. 4 (December 21, 2005): 665– 96, https://doi .org /10.1215 /03335372–26–4-665. Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (New York: Verso, 2005), 231–32. Amy Kind and Peter Kung, “Introduction,” in Knowledge Through Imagination, ed. Amy Kind and Peter Kung (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 1. I should add here that Kind and Kung do not use the same terminology as I do, preferring to call imagination’s disruptive side its “transcendent” aspect. See Amy Kind, “Imagining Under Constraints,” in Kind and Kung, Knowledge Through Imagination, 151–52.

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81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86.

87. 88. 89. 90.

91. 92. 93. 94.

95. 96. 97. 98.

Raymond Geuss, “Preface,” in Politics and the Imagination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), ix. Chiara Bottici, Imaginal Politics: Images Beyond Imagination and the Imaginary (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 54–71. Bottici, 58. Linda M. G. Zerilli, “ ‘We Feel Our Freedom’: Imagination and Judgment in the Thought of Hannah Arendt,” Political Theory 33, no. 2 (2005): 163, https://doi.org/10.2307/30038411. Linda M. G. Zerilli, Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 61–65. To complicate matters, however, Williams uses the term audience in a more technical sense for those who will likely actually read a text. See Bernard Williams, In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument, ed. Geoffrey Hawthorn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 56–60. James Tully, Public Philosophy in a New Key, vol. 1, Democracy and Civic Freedom, Ideas in Context 93 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 8. Ian Shapiro, The Flight from Reality in the Human Sciences (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 173. Tully, Public Philosophy in a New Key, 1:15–16. This thought also figures prominently in Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s account of “rearguard theories” of social transformation. The idea here is that emancipation is best served not by progressive intellectuals who lead the way for oppressed people, but rather by theoretical interventions that ally themselves with local struggles, fought by social movements on the ground. See Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide (Milton Park: Routledge, 2014). See also Andrew Dobson, Listening for Democracy: Recognition, Representation, Reconciliation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Anthony Simon Laden, “The Key to/of Public Philosophy,” Political Theory 39, no. 1 (2011): 115, https://doi.org /10.1177/0090591710386559. Iris Marion Young, Intersecting Voices: Dilemmas of Gender, Political Philosophy, and Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 5. Michel Foucault, “Intellectuals and Power: A Conversation Between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 206. Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory,” in Critical Theory: Selected Essays (New York: Continuum, 1982), 188–243. Horkheimer, 200. Horkheimer, 246. Critical Theory, too, has been shifting away from a vanguard model of social inquiry, more reminiscent of the early Frankfurt School with its penchant for cultural elitism, toward a more dialogical framework. See James Bohman, “Critical Theory as Practical Knowledge: Participants, Observers, and Critics,” in The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of the Social Sciences, ed. Stephen P. Turner and Paul Andrew Roth, Blackwell Philosophy Guides 11 (Malden: Blackwell, 2003), 91–109.

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99. 100. 101.

102. 103.

104. 105.

Amy Allen, The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 210. Cohen, Rescuing Justice and Equality, 268. Sheldon S. Wolin, “Political Theory: From Vocation to Invocation,” in Vocations of Political Theory, ed. Jason A. Frank and John Tambornino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 15. See Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). David Miller, “A Tale of Two Cities; or, Political Philosophy as Lamentation,” in Justice for Earthlings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 230–31. I should add here, though, that I do not concur with Miller’s positive account of “realistic” political theory. In his latest book on migration, Miller’s views are decidedly conservative and lacking in a critical understanding of the status quo. But that fact does not make his objection to moralist lamentation wrong. See David Miller, Strangers in Our Midst: The Political Philosophy of Immigration (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016). For a critique of Miller’s interpretation of realism, see Sarah Fine, “Migration, Political Philosophy, and the Real World,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy (September  26, 2016): 1–7, https://doi.org /10 .1080/13698230.2016.1231793. Tully, Public Philosophy in a New Key, 1:16. Tully, 1:17.

2. TELLING STORIES 1. 2. 3.

4. 5.

Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic, 2002). Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 63. Lemkin was not the first to associate mass violence with the extinction of whole peoples. The French propagandist and writer Gracchus Babeuf introduced the notion of “populicide” as early as 1794 to characterize the extermination campaigns during the French Revolution in the Vendée. But in its systematicity, Lemkin’s approach is still qualitatively different from earlier attempts to theorize what some today call the worst of all crimes. See Ronan Chalmin, “La République populicide: Relire Du Système de dépopulation de G. Babeuf,” Dix-Huitième Siècle 43, no. 1 (2011): 447–68, https://doi.org /10.3917/dhs.043.0447. Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress, 2nd ed. (Clark: Lawbook Exchange, 2008). The Armenian genocide is generally credited for having had the strongest impact on Lemkin’s reflections on mass violence. For some exemplary publications, see Taner Akçam, From Empire to Republic: Turkish Nationalism and the Armenian Genocide (London: Zed, 2004); Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism,

2. TELLING STO RIES 1 79

6.

7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

20.

21. 22.

Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Some scholars prefer to use the Hebrew word Shoah instead of Holocaust. See Jon Petrie, “The Secular Word Holocaust: Scholarly Myths, History, and 20th Century Meanings,” Journal of Genocide Research 2, no. 1 (2000): 31–63, https://doi.org/10.1080/146235200112409. Dan Stone, “Raphael Lemkin on the Holocaust,” Journal of Genocide Research 7, no. 4 (December  1, 2005): 539–50, https://doi.org /10.1080/14623520500349985; Michael  A. Mcdonnell and A. Dirk Moses, “Raphael Lemkin as Historian of Genocide in the Americas,” Journal of Genocide Research 7, no. 4 (December 1, 2005): 501–29, https:// doi.org /10.1080/14623520500349951. Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, 79. Martin Shaw, What Is Genocide? (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), 19. A. Dirk Moses, “Raphael Lemkin, Culture, and the Concept of Genocide,” in The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, ed. Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 23. Raphael Lemkin, “Genocide: A Modern Crime,” Free World: A Non-Partisan Magazine Devoted to the United Nations and Democracy, 1945. David Luban, “Calling Genocide by Its Rightful Name: Lemkin’s Word, Darfur, and the UN Report,” Chicago Journal of International Law 7, no. 1 (2006): 310. Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, 79. Lemkin, 86–89. John Cooper, Raphael Lemkin and the Struggle for the Genocide Convention (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Moses, “Raphael Lemkin, Culture, and the Concept of Genocide”; Dominik J. Schaller and Jürgen Zimmerer, eds., The Origins of Genocide: Raphael Lemkin as a Historian of Mass Violence (London: Routledge, 2009). Donald Bloxham, Genocide on Trial: War Crimes Trials and the Formation of Holocaust History and Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 4–5. Michael R. Marrus, “The Holocaust at Nuremberg,” Yad Vashem Studies 26 (1998): 2. Lawrence Douglas, The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 2. William Schabas, “Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity: Clarifying the Relationship,” in The Genocide Convention the Legacy of 60 Years, ed. Harmen van der Wilt et al. (Leiden: Nijhoff, 2012), 5. The proceedings of the Nuremberg trials can be consulted at “Nuremberg Trial Proceedings Vol. 1: Indictment— Count Three,” Text, The Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy, 2008, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/count3.asp. John B. Quigley, The Genocide Convention: An International Law Analysis (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 6. Alexa Stiller, “Semantics of Extermination: The Use of the New Term of Genocide in the Nuremberg Trials and the Genesis of Master Narrative,” in Reassessing the Nuremberg Military Tribunals: Transitional Justice, Trial Narratives, and Historiography, ed. Kim Christian Priemel and Alexa Stiller (New York: Berghahn, 2012), 110.

18 0 2. TE LLING STO R I ES

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24.

25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37.

38. 39. 40.

41. 42.

For a comprehensive history of the legal notion of genocide, see William Schabas, Genocide in International Law: The Crime of Crimes, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 17–58. On the development of the UDHR, see Johannes Morsink, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Origins, Drafting, and Intent, Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). Schabas, Genocide in International Law, 60. Quigley, The Genocide Convention, 8. Hirad Abtahi and Philippa Webb, The Genocide Convention: The Travaux Préparatoires (Leiden: Nijhoff, 2008), 115. For a comprehensive and detailed analysis of why “political groups” were ultimately excluded from the Convention, see Schabas, Genocide in International Law, 153– 65. For a revisionist reading of the Convention’s exclusion of political groups, see David  L. Nersessian, Genocide and Political Groups (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Schabas, Genocide in International Law, 61. Abtahi and Webb, The Genocide Convention, 230. For a historically informed argument that Stalin’s terror regime should in fact be called “genocidal,” see Norman M. Naimark, Stalin’s Genocides, Human Rights and Crimes Against Humanity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). Schabas, Genocide in International Law, 176. Caroline Fournet, “The Actus Reus of Genocide,” in Elements of Genocide, ed. Paul Behrens and Ralph J. Henham (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), 58. William Schabas, An Introduction to the International Criminal Court, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 37. Kai Ambos, “What Does ‘Intent to Destroy’ in Genocide Mean?,” International Review of the Red Cross 91, no. 876 (2009): 833–58, https://doi.org /10.1017/S1816383110000056; Otto Triffterer, “Genocide, Its Particular Intent to Destroy in Whole or in Part the Group as Such,” Leiden Journal of International Law 14, no. 2 (June 2001): 399–408, https://doi.org /10.1017/S0922156501000206. Schabas, Genocide in International Law, 266. Nancy A. Combs, Fact-Finding Without Facts: The Uncertain Evidentiary Foundations of International Criminal Convictions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 6. Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, 79. Power, A Problem from Hell, 65. David Alonzo-Maizlish, “In Whole or in Part: Group Rights, the Intent Element of Genocide, and the Quantitative Criterion,” New York University Law Review 77 (2002): 1375. Schabas, Genocide in International Law, 277–86. For a deflationary position regarding the practical effect of the word genocide, see Luke Glanville, “Is ‘Genocide’ Still a Powerful Word?,” Journal of Genocide Research 11, no. 4 (2009): 467–86, https://doi.org /10.1080/14623520903309529.

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43. 44.

45. 46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

54. 55. 56.

57. 58. 59. 60.

Anon., “Srebrenica Deaths ‘Not Genocide,’ ” BBC, June 1, 2012, www.bbc.co.uk /news /world-europe-18301196. For representative publications on Turkey’s history of denial, see Richard G. Hovannisian, ed., Remembrance and Denial: The Case of the Armenian Genocide (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998); René Lemarchand, Forgotten Genocides: Oblivion, Denial, and Memory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). Donald W. Beachler, The Genocide Debate: Politicians, Academics, and Victims (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Adrian Gallagher, “Words Matter: Genocide and the Definitional Debate,” Centre for the Study of Genocide and Mass Violence at the University of Sheffield (UK), February 27, 2009, www.genocidecentre.dept.shef.ac.uk /documents/Paper%20-%20Adrian%20Gal lagher.pdf; Christopher Powell, “What Do Genocides Kill? A Relational Conception of Genocide,” Journal of Genocide Research 9, no. 4 (2007): 527–47, https://doi.org/10.1080 /14623520701643285; Scott Straus, “Contested Meanings and Conflicting Imperatives: A Conceptual Analysis of Genocide,” Journal of Genocide Research 3, no. 3 (2001): 349–75, https://doi.org/10.1080/14623520120097189. W. B. Gallie, “Essentially Contested Concepts,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 56 (1956): 167–98, https://doi.org /10.2307/4544562. John G. Gunnell, Political Theory and Social Science: Cutting Against the Grain (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 132. Luban, “Calling Genocide by Its Rightful Name,” 308. David Scheffer, “Genocide and Atrocity Crimes,” Genocide Studies and Prevention 1, no. 3 (December 1, 2006): 229–50, https://doi.org /10.3138/E832–0314–6712–60H3. Madelaine K. Albright and William S. Cohen, Preventing Genocide: A Blueprint for U.S. Policymakers (Washington: Genocide Prevention Task Force, 2008), xxi. Albright and Cohen, xxii. See Henry C. Theriault, “The Albright- Cohen Report: From Realpolitik Fantasy to Realist Ethics,” Genocide Studies and Prevention 4, no. 2 (2009): 201–10, https://doi .org /10.1353/gsp.0.0012; William  A. Schabas, “ ‘Definitional Traps’ and Misleading Titles,” Genocide Studies and Prevention 4, no.  2 (2009): 177–83, https://doi.org /10 .1353/gsp.0.0019. Michael Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 55–60. Michael Freeden, Ideology: A Very Short Introduction, Very Short Introductions 95 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 54–60. Freeden, “What Should the ‘Political’ in Political Theory Explore?,” Journal of Political Philosophy 13, no. 2 (2005): 113–34, at 121, https://doi.org /10.1111 /j.1467–9760.2005 .00216.x. Paul Boghossian, “The Concept of Genocide,” Journal of Genocide Research 12, no. 1 (2010): 69–80, https://doi.org /10.1080/14623528.2010.515402. Boghossian, 79. Card, “Genocide and Social Death.” Card, 73.

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65. 66.

67.

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Don Herzog, Without Foundations: Justification in Political Theory (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); Arthur Ripstein, “Foundationalism in Political Theory,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 16, no. 2 (Spring 1987): 115–37. Judith N. Shklar, Legalism: Law, Morals, and Political Trials (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986). Eric A. Posner, The Perils of Global Legalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), xii. Evidently, not all lawyers or legal theorists endorse legalism as I sketch it. For a notable exception, see Martti Koskenniemi, “The Politics of International Law,” European Journal of International Law 1 (1990): 4; Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law, 1870–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Samuel Totten and Paul R. Bartrop, “Genocide, Denial Of,” in Dictionary of Genocide (Westport: Greenwood, 2008). See Teun A. van Dijk, “Discourse and the Denial of Racism,” Discourse and Society 3, no.  1 (1992): 87–118, https://doi.org /10.1177/0957926592003001005; Philomena Essed, “Everyday Racism,” in A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, ed. David Theo Goldberg and John Solomos (Malden: Blackwell, 2002), 202–16. Charles  W. Mills, “White Ignorance,” in Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, ed. Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 13–38. Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 127, italics in the original. Israel W. Charny, “A Classification of Denials of the Holocaust and Other Genocides,” Journal of Genocide Research 5, no. 1 (2003): 11–34, https://doi.org/10.1080/14623520305645. John Hagan and Wenona Rymond-Richmond, eds., Darfur and the Crime of Genocide, Cambridge Studies in Law and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Nsongurua J. Udombana, “When Neutrality Is a Sin: The Darfur Crisis and the Crisis of Humanitarian Intervention in Sudan,” Human Rights Quarterly 27, no.  4 (2005): 1149–99. Alex J. Bellamy, “Responsibility to Protect or Trojan Horse? The Crisis in Darfur and Humanitarian Intervention After Iraq,” Ethics and International Affairs 19, no. 2 (2005): 31–54, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747–7093.2005.tb00499.x; Alex De Waal, “Darfur and the Failure of the Responsibility to Protect,” International Affairs 83, no. 6 (2007): 1039–54, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468–2346.2007.00672.x; Paul D. Williams and Alex J. Bellamy, “The Responsibility To Protect and the Crisis in Darfur,” Security Dialogue 36, no.  1 (March 1, 2005): 27–47, https://doi.org/10.1177/0967010605051922. See Danilo Zolo, Invoking Humanity: War, Law and Global Order (London: Continuum, 2002); Danilo Zolo, Victors’ Justice: From Nuremberg to Baghdad (London: Verso, 2009); Chantal Mouffe, “Schmitt’s Vision of a Multipolar World Order,” South Atlantic Quarterly 104, no. 2 (April 1, 2005): 245–51, https://doi .org /10.1215/00382876–104–2-245. For a critique of the underlying reasoning, see Mathias Thaler, Moralische Politik

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oder politische Moral? Eine Analyse aktueller Debatten zur internationalen Gerechtigkeit, Campus Forschung 933 (Frankfurt: Campus, 2008). Theriault, “Genocidal Mutation and the Challenge of Definition,” Metaphilosophy 41, no. 4 (2010): 481–524, at 495. https://doi.org /10.1111/j.1467–9973.2010.01658.x. Alex J. Bellamy, “Getting Away with Mass Murder,” Journal of Genocide Research 14, no. 1 (2012): 29–53, https://doi.org /10.1080/14623528.2012.649894. Chile Eboe-Osuji, “Rape as Genocide: Some Questions Arising,” Journal of Genocide Research 9, no. 2 (2007): 251–73, https://doi.org/10.1080/14623520701368669; Sarah Clark Miller, “Moral Injury and Relational Harm: Analyzing Rape in Darfur,” Journal of Social Philosophy 40, no.  4 (2009): 504–23, https://doi.org /10.1111/j.1467–9833.2009 .01468.x; Robin May Schott, “War Rape, Natality and Genocide,” Journal of Genocide Research 13, nos. 1–2 (2011): 5–21, https://doi.org /10.1080/14623528.2011.559111. See Jürgen Zimmerer, ed., Climate Change and Genocide: Environmental Violence in the 21st Century (London: Routledge, 2015); Martin Crook and Damien Short, “Marx, Lemkin and the Genocide–Ecocide Nexus,” International Journal of Human Rights 18, no. 3 (2014): 298–319, https://doi.org /10.1080/13642987.2014.914703. For a very strong (and disputed) equation of “holocaust denial” and “climate change denial,” see Micha Tomkiewicz, Climate Change: The Fork at the End of Now (New York: Momentum, 2011). For a more refined appraisal of environmental factors of violence, see Thomas F. Homer-Dixon, Environment, Scarcity, and Violence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). For the case of Tuvalu, see Jon Barnett, “Security and Climate Change,” Global Environmental Change 13, no. 1 (April 2003): 7–17, https://doi .org /10.1016/S0959–3780(02)00080–8. On the centrality of seeing and blindness in our cultural imaginary, see Nicholas Mirzoeff, “Blindness and Art,” in The Disability Studies Reader, ed. Lennard  J. Davis, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2006), 379–90. David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse, Corporealities (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 47–64. For a reconstruction of Wittgenstein’s engagement with perception, see Justin Good, Wittgenstein and the Theory of Perception (London: Continuum, 2006). On the relationship between seeing-as and metaphors, see Marcus B. Hester, “Metaphor and Aspect Seeing,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 25, no. 2 (December 1, 1966): 205–12, https://doi.org /10.2307/429393. The idea that Wittgenstein may teach political theorists something crucial is not new. See Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice: On the Significance of Ludwig Wittgenstein for Social and Political Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972); Chantal Mouffe, “Wittgenstein, Political Theory and Democracy,” in The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso, 2000), 60–79; Robin Holt, Wittgenstein, Politics and Human Rights (London: Routledge, 1997); Nigel Pleasants, Wittgenstein and the Idea of a Critical Social Theory: A Critique of Giddens, Habermas, and Bhaskar (London: Routledge, 1999); Linda M. G. Zerilli, “Doing Without Knowing: Feminism’s Politics

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86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93.

94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103.

of the Ordinary,” Political Theory 26, no. 4 (August 1998): 435–58, https://doi.org/10.2307 /192199; Christopher C. Robinson, Wittgenstein and Political Theory: The View from Somewhere (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009). On Wittgenstein as a critic of social facts, see John G. Gunnell, “Leaving Everything as It Is: Political Inquiry After Wittgenstein,” Contemporary Political Theory 12, no. 2 (2013): 80–101, https://doi.org /10.1057/cpt.2012.17. William Day and Víctor J. Krebs, eds., Seeing Wittgenstein Anew (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Hans-Johann Glock, “Aspect-Perception,” in A Wittgenstein Dictionary, Blackwell Philosopher Dictionaries (Oxford: Blackwell Reference, 1996). Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, ed. P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte, rev. 4th ed. (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). Wittgenstein, 207e. Wittgenstein, 224e. Gunnell, “Leaving Everything as It Is,” 88. Avner Baz, “What’s the Point of Seeing Aspects?,” Philosophical Investigations 23, no. 2 (2000): 99, https://doi.org /10.1111/1467–9205.00116. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 207e; Hester, “Metaphor and Aspect Seeing.” Glock, “Aspect-Perception,” 39. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 225e. Many of these authors take their cues from Stanley Cavell’s influential interpretation: Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy, new ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). For a very interesting use of “aspectseeing” in the analysis of “liberty,” see Jonathan Havercroft, “On Seeing Liberty As,” in The Grammar of Politics: Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy, ed. Cressida  J. Heyes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 149–64. For a feminist appropriation of Wittgenstein’s reflections, see Cressida J. Heyes, Self-Transformations: Foucault, Ethics, and Normalized Bodies, Studies in Feminist Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 15–37. Aletta J. Norval, “Democratic Identification,” Political Theory 34, no. 2 (2006): 229–55, https://doi.org /10.1177/0090591705281714. Norval, 243. Norval, 246. Norval, 245–46. Norval, 249. David Owen, “Criticism and Captivity: On Genealogy and Critical Theory,” European Journal of Philosophy 10, no. 2 (2002): 216–30. Owen, 217. Owen, 227. Owen, 224. María Pía Lara, Narrating Evil: A Postmetaphysical Theory of Reflective Judgment (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).

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106. 107. 108. 109.

110. 111. 112.

113. 114. 115.

116.

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 175–99. For Arendt’s account of storytelling, see Seyla Benhabib, “Hannah Arendt and the Redemptive Power of Narrative,” Social Research 57, no. 1 (1990): 167– 96; Lisa Disch, “More Truth Than Fact: Storytelling as Critical Understanding in the Writings of Hannah Arendt,” Political Theory 21, no. 4 (1993): 665–94, https://doi.org /10.2307/192078; David Luban, “Explaining Dark Times: Hannah Arendt’s Theory of Theory,” Social Research 50, no. 1 (1983): 215–48; Allen Speight, “Arendt on Narrative Theory and Practice,” College Literature 38, no. 1 (2011): 115–30. MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984); Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989). Lara, Narrating Evil, 10. Lara, 27. Lara, 93–94. Jürgen Habermas, “Learning by Disaster? A Diagnostic Look Back on the Short 20th Century,” Constellations 5, no. 3 (1998): 307–20, https://doi.org /10.1111/1467–8675 .00097. Lara, Narrating Evil, 164. Donald Bloxham, The Final Solution: A Genocide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 31. A. Dirk Moses, “Conceptual Blockages and Definitional Dilemmas in the ‘Racial Century’: Genocides of Indigenous Peoples and the Holocaust,” Patterns of Prejudice 36, no. 4 (2002): 7–36, https://doi.org/10.1080/003132202128811538; David Moshman, “Conceptual Constraints on Thinking About Genocide,” Journal of Genocide Research 3, no. 3 (2001): 431–50, https://doi.org/10.1080/14623520120097224; Dan Stone, “The Historiography of Genocide: Beyond ‘Uniqueness’ and Ethnic Competition,” Rethinking History 8, no. 1 (2004): 127–42, https://doi.org/10.1080/13642520410001649769. Lara, Narrating Evil, 12, 38. Disch, “More Truth Than Fact,” 682–88. Peter Preston, “Remember Srebrenica? The West’s Intervention in Libya Is a NoBrainer,” Guardian, May  29, 2011, www.guardian.co.uk /commentisfree/2011/may/29 /srebrenica-libya-intervention-no-brainer; Brendan Simms, “Road to Libya Runs Through Srebrenica,” Independent, May  29, 2011, www.independent.co.uk /opinion /commentators /brendan -simms -road -to -libya -runs -through -srebrenica -2290326 .html. Anon., “Syria’s Srebrenica,” Wall Street Journal, May 28, 2012, http://online.wsj.com/arti cle/SB10001424052702303807404577432561861499408.html; Daniel Korski, “A Syrian Srebrenica?,” Spectator, February 4, 2012, www.thespectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/politics/2012 /january/week-beginning-30-january—2012/a-syrian-srebrenica; Tim Lister, “Syria, Sarajevo and Srebrenica: When Outrage Isn’t Enough,” CNN, May 29, 2012, http://articles .cnn .com /2012– 05–29 /middleeast /world_meast_syria - sarajevo - and - srebrenica_1 _ srebrenica-bosnian-serb-forces-sarajevo?_s=PM:MIDDLEEAST; Rick Noack, “Two Decades Before Aleppo, There Was Srebrenica.,” Washington Post, December 14, 2016,

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117.

118.

119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124.

125.

126.

www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/12/14/europes-aleppo-continues -to-haunt-the-continent/; Robert Fisk, “No, Aleppo Is Not the New Srebrenica,” Independent, August 4, 2016, www.independent.co.uk /voices/aleppo-siege-syria-assad-isis -srebrenica-kosovo-robert-fisk-west-won-t-go-to-war-a7171466.html. Another justification for my turn to cinema would be that novels have recently received a decent amount of attention from political theorists, and that it would therefore be advisable to seek out alternative resources for exploring the potential of storytelling. The work of J. M. Coetzee, for example, has seen an impressive reception, both within political theory and within analytic philosophy. On Coetzee and how philosophy and literature relate to each other, see Stephen Mulhall, The Wounded Animal: J. M. Coetzee and the Difficulty of Reality in Literature and Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). On the various uses of literature in political theory, see John Horton and Andrea Baumeister, eds., Literature and the Political Imagination (London: Routledge, 1996). Some have even announced an aesthetic turn in political theory. See Roland Bleiker, “The Aesthetic Turn in International Political Theory,” Millennium—Journal of International Studies 30, no.  3 (December  1, 2001): 509–33, https://doi .org /10.1177 /03058298010300031001. Davide Panagia, “Why Film Matters to Political Theory,” Contemporary Political Theory 12, no. 1 (2013): 2–25, https://doi.org /10.1057/cpt.2012.4. Davide Panagia, The Political Life of Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 12. Stephen  L. Esquith, “Reframing the Responsibilities of Bystanders Through Film,” Political Theory 41, no. 1 (February 1, 2013): 34, https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591712463197. On Grbavica’s domestic reception, see the summary Dino Murtic, Post-Yugoslav Cinema: Towards a Cosmopolitan Imagining (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 83–123. Martina Fischer, ed., Peacebuilding and Civil Society in Bosnia-Herzegovina: Ten Years After Dayton, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Lit, 2007), xi–xii. Iavor Rangelov and Marika Theros, “Transitional Justice in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Coherence and Complementarity of EU Institutions and Civil Society,” in Building a Future on Peace and Justice: Studies on Transnational Justice, Peace and Development, ed. Kai Ambos, Judith Large, and Marieke Wierda (Berlin: Springer, 2010), 365. On the role of the arts within transitional justice projects in general, see Peter D. Rush and Olivera Simiʉ, eds., The Arts of Transitional Justice: Culture, Activism, and Memory After Atrocity (New York: Springer, 2013). On this question, see Jasmina Husanovic, “The Politics of Gender, Witnessing, Postcoloniality and Trauma: Bosnian Feminist Trajectories,” Feminist Theory 10, no.  1 (2009): 99–119, https://doi.org /10.1177/1464700108100394; Teodora Todorova, “ ‘Giving Memory a Future’: Confronting the Legacy of Mass Rape in Post-Conflict BosniaHerzegovina,” Journal of International Women’s Studies 12, no. 2 (2011): 3–15. Karen Brounéus, “Truth-Telling as Talking Cure? Insecurity and Retraumatization in the Rwandan Gacaca Courts,” Security Dialogue 39, no. 1 (March 1, 2008): 55–76, https: //doi.org /10.1177/0967010607086823; David Mendeloff, “Truth-Seeking, Truth-Telling,

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128.

129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136.

137. 138.

139. 140.

141.

and Postconflict Peacebuilding: Curb the Enthusiasm?,” International Studies Review 6, no. 3 (2004): 355–80, https://doi.org /10.1111/j.1521–9488.2004.00421.x; David Mendeloff, “Trauma and Vengeance: Assessing the Psychological and Emotional Effects of Post-Conflict Justice,” Human Rights Quarterly 31, no. 3 (2009): 592–623, https://doi.org /10.1353/hrq.0.0100. This is not to suggest that films or theater plays are unproblematic means to advance transitional justice. For some of the inherent tensions in representing the way trials function, see Sativa January, “Tribunal Verité: Documenting Transitional Justice in Sierra Leone,” International Journal of Transitional Justice 3, no. 2 (July 1, 2009): 207–28, https://doi.org/10.1093/ijtj/ijp003. On the role of South African literature and performative arts in the aftermath of Apartheid see Shane Graham, South African Literature After the Truth Commission: Mapping Loss, 3rd ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Yvette Hutchison, South African Performance and Archives of Memory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013). For an illuminating attempt to redefine genocide to cover phenomena such as settler colonialism as well as climate change, see Damien Short, Redefining Genocide: Settler Colonialism, Social Death and Ecocide (London: Zed, 2016). Chase Hobbs-Morgan, “Climate Change, Violence, and Film,” Political Theory, early view (2015): 1–21, https://doi.org /10.1177/0090591715587359. Galtung, “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research,” Journal of Peace Research 6, no.  3 (1969): 167–91. Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011). Michael P. Nash, Climate Refugees, documentary, 2010. For a useful taxonomy of documentaries, see Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 99–138. Paul Lindsay, Before the Flood, documentary, 2004. Briar March, There Once Was an Island: Te Henua e Nnoho, documentary, 2010. For a comparative reading of all three films, see Alexa Weik von Mossner, “The Human Face of Global Warming: Varieties of Eco-Cosmopolitanism in Climate Change Documentaries,” Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses 64 (2012): 145–60. Robert Poole, Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). On this issue, see Alexa Weik von Mossner, “Troubling Spaces: Ecological Risk, Narrative Framing, and Emotional Engagement in the Age of Stupid,” Emotion, Space, and Society 6 (2013): 108–16. Andrew Baldwin, “Racialisation and the Figure of the Climate-Change Migrant,” Environment and Planning A 45, no. 6 (June 1, 2013): 1474–90, https://doi.org/10.1068/a45388. Andrew Baldwin, Chris Methmann, and Delf Rothe, “Securitizing ‘Climate Refugees’: The Futurology of Climate-Induced Migration,” Critical Studies on Security 2, no. 2 (May 4, 2014): 121–30, https://doi.org /10.1080/21624887.2014.943570. Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998); William

18 8 2. TELLING STO RIES

142. 143. 144.

145. 146.

147.

148.

Schabas, “Hate Speech in Rwanda: The Road to Genocide,” McGill Law Journal 46, no. 1 (2001): 141–71. Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006). David Welch, Propaganda and the German Cinema, 1933–1945 (London: I. B. Tauris, 2001), 252–53. Ernesto Verdeja, “Narrating Evil: A Post-Metaphysical Theory of Reflective Judgment by María Pía Lara,” Constellations 16, no. 2 (June 2009): 355–57, https://doi.org /10.1111/j .1467–8675.2009.00546_3.x. Disch, “More Truth Than Fact,” 684. The full passage reads as follows: “You said ‘groundless thinking.’ I have a metaphor which is not quite that cruel, and which I have never published but kept for myself. I call it thinking without a bannister. In German, Denken ohne Geländer. That is, as you go up and down the stairs you can always hold onto the bannister so that you don’t fall down. But we have lost this banister.” Hannah Arendt, “On Hannah Arendt,” in Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World, ed. Melvyn A. Hill (New York: St. Martin’s, 1979), 336–37. This thought bears some resemblance to Miranda Fricker’s work on epistemic injustice. Fricker argues that we need to broaden our understanding of what constitutes injustice by paying attention to both testimonial and hermeneutic dimensions of injustice. This view resonates with my account insofar as I, too, consider the process of aspect-seeing to be subject to oppressive interferences, denial being the most obvious one. See Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). This idea is inspired by Allen, The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 209–11.

3. HOW TO DO THINGS WITH HYPOTHETICALS 1.

2.

3. 4. 5. 6.

Dean Baquet, “The Executive Editor on the Word ‘Torture,’ ” New York Times, August 7, 2014, www.nytimes.com/times-insider/2014/08/07/the-executive-editor-on-the-word -torture/. For an illustrative discussion of the torture taboo, see Günter Frankenberg, “Torture and Taboo: An Essay Comparing Paradigms of Organized Cruelty,” American Journal of Comparative Law 56, no. 2 (2008): 403–22, https://doi.org /10.5131/ajcl.2007.0011. Samuel Moyn, “Torture and Taboo: On Elaine Scarry,” Nation, February 5, 2013, www .thenation.com/article/172677/torture-and-taboo-elaine-scarry. Jeremy Waldron, Torture, Terror, and Trade-Offs: Philosophy for the White House (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). Douglas McCready, “When Is Torture Right?,” Studies in Christian Ethics 20, no. 3 (2007): 383–98, https://doi.org /10.1177/0953946807082934. For the two most comprehensive collections of the torture memos, see David Cole and Philippe Sands, The Torture Memos: Rationalizing the Unthinkable (New York: New

3. HOW TO DO THINGS WITH HYPOTHETICALS189

7.

8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18. 19.

Press, 2009); Karen J. Greenberg and Joshua L. Dratel, eds., The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). See Darius  M. Rejali, Torture and Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); John  T. Parry, Understanding Torture: Law, Violence, and Political Identity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), chap. 5, “Torture in Modern Democracies.” Henry A. Giroux, The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex, The Radical Imagination Series (Boulder: Paradigm, 2007), chap. 1; Joseph Margulies and Hope Metcalf, “Terrorizing Academia,” Journal of Legal Education 60, no. 3 (2011): 433–71. In international law, the torture prohibition enjoys the status of jus cogens. See Erika de Wet, “The Prohibition of Torture as an International Norm of Jus Cogens and Its Implications for National and Customary Law,” European Journal of International Law 15, no. 1 (2004): 97–121, https://doi.org /10.1093/ejil/15.1.97. Christopher J. Einolf, “The Fall and Rise of Torture: A Comparative and Historical Analysis,” Sociological Theory 25, no. 2 (2007): 107, https://doi.org /10.1111/j.1467–9558 .2007.00300.x. See John H. Langbein, Torture and the Law of Proof: Europe and England in the Ancien Régime (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977). Cesare Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishments, and Other Writings, ed. Aaron Thomas, trans. Aaron Thomas and Jeremy Parzen (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009). See Marcello T. Maestro, Voltaire and Beccaria as Reformers of Criminal Law (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942). Michel Foucault makes a similar point when he reconstructs the gradual replacement of judicial torture. See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage, 1995), pt. 1, “Torture.” Jastine Barrett, “The Prohibition of Torture Under International Law. Part 1: The Institutional Organisation,” International Journal of Human Rights 5, no. 1 (March 1, 2001): 2, https://doi.org /10.1080/714003706. Matthew Lippman, “The Development and Drafting of the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment,” Boston College International and Comparative Law Review 17 (1994): 290–91. See Raphaëlle Branche, “Torture and Other Violations of the Law by the French Army During the Algerian War,” in Genocide, War Crimes, and the West: History and Complicity, ed. Adam Jones (London: Zed, 2004), 134–45. For the first denunciation of French torture practices, published originally in 1958, see Henri Alleg, The Question, Bison Books (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006). Andrew Mumford, “Minimum Force Meets Brutality: Detention, Interrogation and Torture in British Counter-Insurgency Campaigns,” Journal of Military Ethics 11, no. 1 (March 1, 2012): 10–25, https://doi.org /10.1080/15027570.2012.674240. Barrett, “The Prohibition of Torture Under International Law. Part 1,” 3. The Convention can be found at the following website: “Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment,” www.un.org /documents/ga/res/39/a39r046.htm.

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20.

21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30.

31.

32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37.

Jiewuh Song, “Pirates and Torturers: Universal Jurisdiction as Enforcement GapFilling,” Journal of Political Philosophy, September 1, 2014, https://doi.org /10.1111/jopp .12044. Antonio Cassese, “A New Approach to Human Rights: The European Convention for the Prevention of Torture,” American Journal of International Law 83, no. 1 (January 1, 1989): 129, https://doi.org /10.2307/2202800. Rejali, Torture and Democracy, 8. The italics are in the original. Alan M. Dershowitz, Why Terrorism Works: Understanding the Threat, Responding to the Challenge (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 132–63. Alan M. Dershowitz, “Torture Without Visibility and Accountability Is Worse Than with It,” University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law 6 (2003): 326. Andrew A. Moher, “The Lesser of Two Evils: An Argument for Judicially Sanctioned Torture in a Post-9/11 World,” Thomas Jefferson Law Review 26 (2004): 469–89. See, for example, Michael L. Gross, Moral Dilemmas of Modern War: Torture, Assassination, and Blackmail in an Age of Asymmetric Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 127. Jean Bethke Elshtain, “Reflection on the Problem of ‘Dirty Hands,’ ” in Torture: A Collection, ed. Sanford Levinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 79. Slavoj Çiäek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real! Five Essays on 11 September and Related Dates (London: Verso, 2002), 107–10. Jessica Wolfendale, “The Myth of ‘Torture Lite,’ ” Ethics and International Affairs 23, no. 1 (2009): 47–61, https://doi.org /10.1111/j.1747–7093.2009.00189.x. Kathleen Clark, “Ethical Issues Raised by the OLC Torture Memorandum Symposium: Lawyers’ Roles and the War on Terror,” Journal of National Security Law and Policy 1 (2005): 455–72; David Luban and Henry Shue, “Mental Torture: A Critique of Erasures in U.S. Law,” Georgetown Law Journal 100 (2011): 823–64. Rebecca Gordon, “Donald Trump Has a Passionate Desire to Bring Back Torture,” Nation, April 6, 2017, www.thenation.com/article/donald-trump-has-a-passionate-desire -to-bring-back-torture/; Adam Serwer, “Can Trump Bring Back Torture?,” Atlantic, January 26, 2017, www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/01/trump-torture/514463/. See Judith Jarvis Thomson, “A Defense of Abortion,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 1, no. 1 (1971): 47–66. The most prominent example is the so-called trolley problem: Philippa Foot, “The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of Double Effect,” Oxford Review 5 (1967): 5–15. Robert Nozick’s “experience machine” is a good example for this kind of imaginary case. See Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic, 1974), 42–45. Adrian Walsh, “A Moderate Defence of the Use of Thought Experiments in Applied Ethics,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 14, no. 4 (2011): 471–72, https://doi.org /10 .1007/s10677–010–9254–7. Tamar Gendler, Thought Experiment: On the Powers and Limits of Imaginary Cases (New York: Routledge, 2000), 34. On the similarity between thought experiments and literature, see Noël Carroll, “The Wheel of Virtue: Art, Literature, and Moral Knowledge,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 60, no. 1 (2002): 3–26.

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38.

39. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44.

45.

46.

47. 48. 49. 50.

51. 52.

The most comprehensive survey of thought experiments, which has kick-started this methodological debate, is Roy A. Sorensen, Thought Experiments (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). Sorensen, 3. Henry Shue, “Torture,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 7, no. 2 (1978): 141. See Jakob Elster, “How Outlandish Can Imaginary Cases Be?,” Journal of Applied Philosophy 28, no. 3 (2011): 241–58, https://doi.org /10.1111/j.1468–5930.2011.00531.x. See Michelle Farrell, “The Ticking Bomb Scenario: Origins, Usages and the Contemporary Discourse,” in The Prohibition of Torture in Exceptional Circumstances (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 82–146. Michael Walzer, “Emergency Ethics,” in Arguing About War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 40. Vittorio Bufacchi and Jean Maria Arrigo, “Torture, Terrorism, and the State: A Refutation of the Ticking-Bomb Argument,” Journal of Applied Philosophy 23, no. 3 (2006): 358, https://doi.org /10.1111/j.1468–5930.2006.00355.x. As regards the real-world impact of these TV shows on viewers, it has recently been shown that a “Hollywood effect” indeed exists: social scientists have confirmed that “dramatic depictions of torture as being effective increased both stated level of support for torture and behavioral commitment to this belief.” See Erin M. Kearns and Joseph K. Young, “If Torture Is Wrong, What About 24? Torture and the Hollywood Effect,” SSRN Scholarly Paper (Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, August 19, 2014), http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2483131. I do not mean to suggest here that Dershowitz and other “dramaturgists” capture the reality of torture practices accurately. On the contrary, I agree with critics such as Bob Brecher, who have shown that Dershowitz pays astonishing little attention to how torture works in fact. The label dramaturgist foregrounds their justification of the tickingbomb scenario as an embellishment of what they (wrongly) consider to be reality. See Robert Brecher, Torture and the Ticking Bomb, Blackwell Public Philosophy (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 14–39. Dershowitz, Why Terrorism Works, 140. Oren Gross, “The Prohibition on Torture and the Limits of the Law,” in Torture: A Collection, ed. Sanford Levinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 234. Fritz Allhoff, “A Defense of Torture: Separation of Cases, Ticking Time-Bombs, and Moral Justification,” International Journal of Applied Philosophy 19, no. 2 (2005): 247. For our purpose, see, especially, Frances M. Kamm, Intricate Ethics: Rights, Responsibilities, and Permissible Harm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Uwe Steinhoff, On the Ethics of Torture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013); Jeff McMahan, “Torture in Principle and in Practice,” Public Affairs Quarterly 22, no. 2 (April 1, 2008): 91–108. Kamm, Intricate Ethics, 427. Jeffrey Brand-Ballard, review of F. M. Kamm, Intricate Ethics: Rights, Responsibilities, and Permissible Harm, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, May 17, 2007, https: //ndpr.nd .edu /news/25299 -intricate - ethics -rights -responsibilities -and-permissible -harm /.

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53. 54.

55. 56.

57.

58. 59. 60.

61.

62. 63. 64. 65.

66. 67.

68.

69. 70. 71.

See, for example, Frances  M. Kamm, “Terrorism and Several Moral Distinctions,” Legal Theory 12, no. 1 (2006): 42, 52, 55, https://doi.org /10.1017/S135232520606023X. Uwe Steinhoff, “Defusing the Ticking Social Bomb Argument: The Right to SelfDefensive Torture,” Global Dialogue 12, no. 1 (2010), www.worlddialogue.org /content .php?id=457. Steinhoff, On the Ethics of Torture, 149. Jeff McMahan, The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life, Oxford Ethics Series (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Jeff McMahan, Killing in War, Uehiro Series in Practical Ethics (Oxford: Clarendon, 2009). Jeff McMahan, “Torture and Method in Moral Philosophy,” in Torture and the Rule of Law, ed. Scott Anderson and Martha Nussbaum (Chicago: Chicago University Press, forthcoming), 6–8. McMahan, 11. McMahan, 3. Most prominently, Michael Walzer can be credited for creatively combining the interpretation of historical cases with normative reasoning around warfare. See Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations, 4th ed. (New York: Basic, 2006). J. Jeremy Wisnewski, “Book Review: Ethics for Enemies: Terror, Torture, and War, Written by F. M. Kamm,” Journal of Moral Philosophy 11, no. 5 (2014): 658–59, https:// doi.org /10.1163/17455243–01105002. McMahan, “Torture and Method in Moral Philosophy,” 3. Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991), 282, 397. See Joshua Michael Knobe and Shaun Nichols, eds., Experimental Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). There is, to my knowledge, only one paper in experimental philosophy that touches on the torture prohibition: Florian Cova and Hichem Naar, “Side-Effect Effect Without Side Effects: The Pervasive Impact of Moral Considerations on Judgments of Intentionality,” Philosophical Psychology 25, no. 6 (2011): 837–54, https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089 .2011.622363. See, especially, Max Deutsch, The Myth of the Intuitive: Experimental Philosophy and Philosophical Method (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015). Lisa H. Schwartzman, “Intuition, Thought Experiments, and Philosophical Method: Feminism and Experimental Philosophy,” Journal of Social Philosophy 43, no. 3 (2012): 307–16, https://doi.org /10.1111/j.1467–9833.2012.01566.x. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003); Susan Sontag, “Regarding the Torture Of Others,” New York Times, May 23, 2004, www.nytimes.com/2004/05/23/magazine/regarding-the-torture-of-others.html. These texts are based on Sontag’s earlier work on photography: Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977). Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 46. Sontag, 80. Sontag, 98.

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72. 73. 74. 75. 76.

77. 78. 79.

80. 81. 82.

83. 84.

85. 86.

87. 88. 89. 90.

Sontag, 89. Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009), 64. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), 32. Butler, 34. Maja Zehfuss, “Hierarchies of Grief and the Possibility of War: Remembering UK Fatalities in Iraq,” Millennium—Journal of International Studies 38, no. 2 (2009): 419– 40, https://doi.org /10.1177/0305829809347540. Judith Butler, “Torture and the Ethics of Photography,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 25, no. 6 (2007): 953, https://doi.org /10.1068/d2506jb. Butler, Frames of War, 77. For example, although she remained outside the frame, the woman who took the photos in the Abu Ghraib prison, Specialist Sabrina Harman, clearly played a role in the depicted reality—a fact for which she was later sentenced to prison time and discharged from the United States Army for dishonorable conduct. Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris, “Exposure: The Woman Behind the Camera at Abu Ghraib,” New Yorker, March 24, 2008, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/03/24/exposure-5. Walsh, “A Moderate Defence of the Use of Thought Experiments in Applied Ethics,” 469. See Timothy Chappell, Knowing What To Do: Imagination, Virtue, and Platonism in Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 43. Kant makes a similar distinction, separating logical from real possibility. His antirationalist argument is as follows: determining that an idea contains no contradiction is insufficient for establishing its “real possibility.” See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood, Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 343 (A 244/B 302). Kim Lane Scheppele, “Hypothetical Torture in the War on Terrorism,” Journal of National Security Law and Policy 1 (2005): 293. See David Luban, Torture, Power, and Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 104; Jeremy Waldron, “What Are Moral Absolutes Like?,” SSRN Scholarly Paper (Rochester: Social Science Research Network, August 8, 2011), 18–19, http://papers.ssrn .com/abstract=1906850. Steinhoff, On the Ethics of Torture, 149. Walsh (“A Moderate Defence of the Use of Thought Experiments in Applied Ethics,” 476–77) summarizes this objection effectively. I also take the following reference to Anscombe’s work from him. See G. E. M. Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” Philosophy 33, no. 124 (1958): 17. See Chappell, Knowing What To Do, 35. Scheppele, “Hypothetical Torture in the War on Terrorism,” 294. See, in particular, Brecher, Torture and the Ticking Bomb; Bufacchi and Arrigo, “Torture, Terrorism, and the State”; Henry Shue, “Torture in Dreamland: Disposing of the Ticking Bomb,” Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law 37, nos. 2–3 (2006):

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91.

92.

93.

94. 95.

231–39; J. Jeremy Wisnewski, “It’s About Time: Defusing the Ticking Bomb Argument,” International Journal of Applied Philosophy 22, no. 1 (2008): 103–16, https://doi.org /10 .5840/ijap20082218. For the most comprehensive reconstruction of how analytical philosophers make use of hypotheticals, see Marguerite La Caze, The Analytic Imaginary (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002). On this point see the excellent critique in Gregory Fried, review of On the Ethics of Torture, by Uwe Steinhoff, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2014, http://ndpr.nd.edu /news/48412-on-the-ethics-of-torture/. See, for instance, Thomson’s paper on abortion, where she defends abortion after consensual sex by referring to hypothetical “people seeds,” which drift through the air and, although you try to keep them out, still enter into your house through a badly protected window shield. See Thomson, “A Defense of Abortion,” 59. Walsh, “A Moderate Defence of the Use of Thought Experiments in Applied Ethics,” 472–73. Svetlana Boym offers a similar argument when she distinguishes between “estrangement from the world” and “estrangement for the world.” See Svetlana Boym, “Estrangement as a Lifestyle: Shklovsky and Brodsky,” Poetics Today 17, no. 4 (1996): 511–30, https: //doi.org /10.2307/1773211; Svetlana Boym, “Poetics and Politics of Estrangement: Victor Shklovsky and Hannah Arendt,” Poetics Today 26, no. 4 (2005): 581–611, https://doi .org /10.1215/03335372–26–4-581.

4. GENEALOGY AS CRITIQUE 1.

2. 3.

4.

5.

On this issue, see Michael V. Bhatia, “Fighting Words: Naming Terrorists, Bandits, Rebels and Other Violent Actors,” Third World Quarterly 26, no. 1 (February 1, 2005): 5–22, https://doi.org /10.1080/0143659042000322874. David Rodin, “Terrorism Without Intention,” Ethics 114, no. 4 (2004): 753, https://doi .org /10.1086/383442. For a good introductory collection of essays, see Richard Jackson, Marie Smyth, and Jeroen Gunning, eds., Critical Terrorism Studies: A New Research Agenda, Routledge Critical Terrorism Studies (New York: Routledge, 2009). Jeroen Gunning, “A Case for Critical Terrorism Studies?,” Government and Opposition 42, no. 3 (June 1, 2007): 363–93, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1477–7053.2007.00228.x; Richard Jackson, “The Core Commitments of Critical Terrorism Studies,” European Political Science 6, no. 3 (2007): 244–51, https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.eps.2210141; Michael Stohl, “Old Myths, New Fantasies, and the Enduring Realities of Terrorism,” Critical Studies on Terrorism 1, no. 1 (2008): 5–16, https://doi.org/10.1080/17539150701846443. It is telling that in one of the most-cited manifestos of critical terrorism studies, Richard Jackson summarizes its disciplinary ethos in the following manner: “The core commitment of CTS is to a broad conception of emancipation, which is understood as

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6.

7.

8.

9. 10. 11.

12. 13.

14.

15.

16.

the realization of greater human freedom and human potential and improvements in individual and social actualisation and well-being.” Jackson, “The Core Commitments of Critical Terrorism Studies,” 249. The problem here is not so much the obviously laudable orientation toward “greater human freedom and human potential,” but rather the lack of specificity when it comes to probing the ability of the concept of “terrorism” to further the goal of emancipation. Seth Lazar’s recent book on the status of noncombatants, for example, does not contain a single reference to Helen Kinsella’s work on the same issue. This strikes me as both astonishing and depressingly expectable. See Seth Lazar, Sparing Civilians (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). Having said that, Verena Erlenbusch has recently published a book, which delivers on this ambitious project of writing a genealogy of terrorism. See Verena Erlenbusch, Genealogies of Terrorism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). Since our two books have developed in parallel to and in conversation with each other, I did not have the time to respond to Erlenbusch’s claims in more detail. For a similar endeavor, see Ondrej Ditrych, Tracing the Discourses of Terrorism: Identity, Genealogy and State (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe, rev. student ed., Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 8. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 77. Ben Saul, “Attempts to Define Terrorism in International Law,” Netherlands International Law Review 52, no. 1 (May 2005): 57–83, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0165070X05000574. Rumyana Grozdanova, “ ‘Terrorism’—Too Elusive a Term for an International Legal Definition?,” Netherlands International Law Review 61, no. 3 (December 2014): 305–34, https://doi.org /10.1017/S0165070X14001351. Gilbert Guillaume, “Terrorism and International Law,” International and Comparative Law Quarterly 53, no. 3 (July 2004): 537–48, https://doi.org /10.1093/iclq/53.3.537. Antonio Cassese, “The Multifaceted Criminal Notion of Terrorism in International Law,” Journal of International Criminal Justice 4, no. 5 (2006): 933–58, https://doi.org /10.1093/jicj/mql074. Jean-Marc Sorel, “Some Questions About the Definition of Terrorism and the Fight Against Its Financing,” European Journal of International Law 14, no. 2 (April 1, 2003): 365–78, https://doi.org /10.1093/ejil/14.2.365. See C. A. J. Coady, “Defining Terrorism,” in Terrorism: The Philosophical Issues, ed. Igor Primoratz (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 3–14; Tamar Meisels, “Defining Terrorism—a Typology,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 12, no. 3 (2009): 331–51, https://doi.org /10.1080/13698230903127853. See Walter Laqueur, The New Terrorism: Fanaticism and the Arms of Mass Destruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Walter Laqueur, A History of Terrorism (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2001).

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17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

34.

On this point, see Igor Primoratz, “Terrorism,” ed. Edward  N. Zalta, in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2015, http://plato.stanford .edu /archives/spr2015/entries errorism /. Alex J. Bellamy, Fighting Terror: Ethical Dilemmas (London: Zed, 2008), 31. This taxonomy has been first developed in Rodin, “Terrorism Without Intention,” 753–55. Coady, “Defining Terrorism,” 3. Meisels, “Defining Terrorism—a Typology,” 333–34. Bellamy, Fighting Terror, 28. Meisels, “Defining Terrorism—a Typology,” 347. Rodin, “Terrorism Without Intention,” 753. See Michael Walzer, “Terrorism: A Critique of Excuses,” in Arguing About War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 51–66. Meisels, “Defining Terrorism—a Typology,” 348. Igor Primoratz, “What Is Terrorism?,” in Primoratz, Terrorism, 24. Bellamy, Fighting Terror; Meisels, “Defining Terrorism—a Typology.” On this point, see, especially, Randall David Law, Terrorism: A History (Cambridge: Polity, 2009); Franklin L. Ford, Political Murder: From Tyrannicide to Terrorism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985). Anthony Richards, Conceptualizing Terrorism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 18. See also Virginia Held, How Terrorism Is Wrong: Morality and Political Violence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Robert Goodin, What’s Wrong with Terrorism? (Cambridge: Polity, 2006). In Just War theory, this exception is fleshed out through the so-called doctrine of double effect, whereby the killing of noncombatants can be justified so long as the violence is intentionally targeted at legitimate objects—soldiers. In colloquial language, the victims of such actions are often described as “collateral damage.” See Judith Lichtenberg, “War, Innocence, and the Doctrine of Double Effect,” Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition 74, no. 3 (June 1994): 347–68; Warren S. Quinn, “Actions, Intentions, and Consequences: The Doctrine of Double Effect,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 18, no. 4 (1989): 334–51, https://doi.org/10.2307/2265475. For helpful overviews, see Nicholas Rengger, Just War and International Order: The Uncivil Condition in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Cian O’Driscoll, The Renegotiation of the Just War Tradition and the Right to War in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Among the most important authors contributing to revisionist Just War theory (apart from McMahan) today are Cécile Fabre, Cosmopolitan War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Cécile Fabre and Seth Lazar, eds., The Morality of Defensive War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Helen Frowe and Gerald R. Lang, eds., How We Fight: Ethics in War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). See Robert K. Fullinwider, “War and Innocence,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 5, no. 1 (Autumn 1975): 90–97; Thomas Nagel, “War and Massacre,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 1, no. 2 (1972): 123–44, https://doi.org /10.2307/2264967.

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35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49. 50.

51. 52.

53.

McMahan, Killing in War, Uehiro Series in Practical Ethics (Oxford: Clarendon, 2009), 14. Lionel K. McPherson, “Innocence and Responsibility in War,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 34, no. 4 (2004): 485–506. Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations, 4th ed. (New York: Basic, 2006), 145–47. On the moral questions surrounding dual use and weapons research, see John Forge, Designed to Kill: The Case Against Weapons Research (New York: Springer, 2013). Seth Lazar, “The Responsibility Dilemma for Killing in War: A Review Essay,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 38, no. 2 (March 1, 2010): 189, https://doi.org /10.1111/j.1088–4963 .2010.01182.x. See Mathias Thaler, “On Time in Just War Theory: From Chronos to Kairos,” Polity 46, no. 4 (2014): 520–46, https://doi.org /10.1057/pol.2014.20. With regard to Syria, for example, McMahan compared the situation to a “modern-day Holocaust,” urging the international community to destroy ISIS once and for all. See Jeff McMahan, “Syria Is a Modern-Day Holocaust. We Must Act,” Washington Post, www .washingtonpost.com /news/in-theory/wp/2015/11 /30/syria-is-a-modern-day-holocaust -we-must-act/. Jeremy Waldron, “Terrorism and the Uses of Terror,” Journal of Ethics 8, no. 1 (2004): 6, https://doi.org /10.2307/25115779. Waldron, 34. George P. Fletcher, “The Indefinable Concept of Terrorism,” Journal of International Criminal Justice 4, no. 5 (November 1, 2006): 901, https://doi.org /10.1093/jicj/mql060. Fletcher, 910. Fletcher, 911. See Samuel Scheffler, “Is Terrorism Morally Distinctive?,” Journal of Political Philosophy 14, no. 1 (2006): 1, https://doi.org /10.1111/j.1467–9760.2006.00242.x. On this debate, see Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations,” Atlantic, June 2014, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/; John Torpey, “Paying for the Past?: The Movement for Reparations for African-Americans,” Journal of Human Rights 3, no. 2 (2004): 171–87; Lawrie Balfour, “Unreconstructed Democracy: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Case for Reparations,” American Political Science Review 97, no. 1 (2003): 33–44, https://doi.org/10.1017.S0003055403000509. Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877, updated ed. (New York: HarperPerennial, 2014). Verena Erlenbusch, “How (Not) to Study Terrorism,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 17, no. 4 (2014): 479, https://doi.org /10.1080/13698230 .2013.767040. Erlenbusch, 480. See Verena Erlenbusch, “Terrorism and Revolutionary Violence: The Emergence of Terrorism in the French Revolution,” Critical Studies on Terrorism 8, no. 2 (May 4, 2015): 193–210, https://doi.org /10.1080/17539153.2015.1049842. Erlenbusch, “How (Not) to Study Terrorism,” 481.

19 84. GE NE ALO GY AS CR I TI QUE

54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64.

65.

66.

67. 68. 69.

70.

Christopher J. Finlay, “How to Do Things with the Word ‘Terrorist,’ ” Review of International Studies 35, no. 4 (October 2009): 751–74, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210509990167. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962). Finlay, “How to Do Things with the Word ‘Terrorist,’ ” 754. Quentin Skinner, “A Genealogy of the Modern State,” Proceedings of the British Academy 162 (2009): 325–70. Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). John G. Gunnell, The Descent of Political Theory: The Genealogy of an American Vocation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). See Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, 51. Raymond Geuss, “Nietzsche and Genealogy,” European Journal of Philosophy 2, no. 3 (1994): 275, https://doi.org /10.1111/j.1468–0378.1994.tb00015.x. Edward Craig, “Genealogies and the State of Nature,” in Bernard Williams, ed. Alan Thomas, Contemporary Philosophy in Focus (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 181–200. On this point, see Brian Leiter, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Nietzsche on Morality, Routledge Philosophy Guidebooks (London: Routledge, 2002), 165–73. Hans Sluga, “Foucault’s Encounter with Heidegger and Nietzsche,” in The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, ed. Gary Gutting, 2nd ed., Cambridge Companions to Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 210–39. For a more subtle classification of Foucault’s work, see Colin Koopman, “Foucault’s Historiographical Expansion: Adding Genealogy to Archaeology,” Journal of the Philosophy of History 2, no.  3 (September  1, 2008): 338– 62, https://doi .org /10.1163 /187226308X335994; Thomas Flynn, “Foucault’s Mapping of History,” in The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, ed. Gary Gutting, 2nd ed., Cambridge Companions to Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 29–48. See Melissa Lane, “Constraint, Freedom, and Exemplar: History and Theory Without Teleology,” in Political Philosophy Versus History?: Contextualism and Real Politics in Contemporary Political Thought, ed. Jonathan Floyd and Marc Stears (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 128–50; Melissa Lane, “Doing Our Own Thinking for Ourselves: On Quentin Skinner’s Genealogical Turn,” Journal of the History of Ideas 73, no. 1 (2012): 71–82, https://doi.org /10.1353/jhi.2012.0002. Raymond Geuss, “Genealogy as Critique,” European Journal of Philosophy 10, no. 2 (2002): 211, https://doi.org /10.1111/1468–0378.00157. Mark Bevir, “What Is Genealogy?,” Journal of the Philosophy of History 2, no. 3 (September 1, 2008): 266, https://doi.org /10.1163/187226308X335958. For the locus classicus of this account of history as inevitably directed toward a final goal, see Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (New York: Norton, 1965). In constructing this division in terms of an opposition between Foucault and Williams, I follow the lead in Colin Koopman, “Two Uses of Genealogy: Michel Foucault

4. GE NE ALO GY AS CRITIQ UE1 99

71.

72.

73.

74. 75. 76.

77.

78.

79.

and Bernard Williams,” in Foucault’s Legacy, ed. Carlos Prado (London: Continuum, 2009), 90–108. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 76–77. Nietzsche’s approach, too, has been described simply as history done right. See Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche, Life as Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 122. See Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège De France, 1975–76, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey, 1st ed. (New York: Picador, 2003), 8. Michel Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977–1984, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York: Routledge, 1988), 155. For another important text, in which Foucault delineates his practice of critique, see Michel Foucault, “What Is Critique?,” in The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. Lysa Hochroth and Catherine Porter, 2nd ed. (Los Angeles: Semiotext[e], 2007), 41–81. Williams, Truth and Truthfulness, 32. Richard Rorty, review of Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy, London Review of Books, October 31, 2002. See, representatively, Judith Gail Gardam, Non- Combatant Immunity as a Norm of International Humanitarian Law (Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 1993); Charli Carpenter, “Innocent Women and Children”: Gender, Norms and the Protection of Civilians, Gender in a Global/Local World (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). This debate has its origins in the work of Jean Elshtain, who was among the first to bring feminist thinking into a conversation with Just War theory. Later on, as we have seen in the previous chapter, Elshtain would become a torture apologist. See Jean Bethke Elshtain, Women and War (New York: Basic, 1987); Jean Bethke Elshtain, “Women and War: Ten Years On,” Review of International Studies 24, no. 4 (1998): 447–60; Lucinda J. Peach, “An Alternative to Pacifism? Feminism and Just-War Theory,” Hypatia 9, no. 2 (May  1, 1994): 152–72, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527–2001.1994.tb00438.x; Laura Sjoberg, “Why Just War Needs Feminism Now More Than Ever,” International Politics 45, no. 1 (2008): 1–18, https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.ip.8800216; Kimberly Hutchings, “Towards a Feminist International Ethics,” Review of International Studies 26, no.  5 (December 2000): 111–130, https://doi.org /10.1017/S026021050000111X. This clarification omits, however, one further complication: race and gender often overlap, sometimes in obvious and sometimes in surreptitious ways, such that it can be very difficult to analytically unravel them as distinct categories of oppression. This is undoubtedly true, as many accounts of colonial violence, for example, have illustrated. See María Lugones, “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System,” Hypatia 22, no. 1 (February 1, 2007): 186–219, https://doi.org /10.1111/j.1527–2001 .2007.tb01156.x; Evelyn Nakano Glenn, “Settler Colonialism as Structure: A Framework for Comparative Studies of U.S. Race and Gender Formation,” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 1, no. 1 (January 1, 2015): 52–72, https://doi.org /10.1177/2332649214560440. See, especially, Helen M. Kinsella, “Discourses of Difference: Civilians, Combatants, and Compliance with the Laws of War,” Review of International Studies 31 (2005):

20 0 4. GENE ALO GY AS CR I TI QUE

80. 81. 82. 83. 84.

85. 86. 87.

88. 89.

90. 91.

92. 93.

94.

163–85; Helen M. Kinsella, “Gendering Grotius: Sex and Sex Difference in the Laws of War,” Political Theory 34, no. 2 (2006): 161–91. Helen M. Kinsella, The Image Before the Weapon: A Critical History of the Distinction Between Combatant and Civilian (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), 6–7. Kinsella, “Gendering Grotius,” 163. Kinsella, 167. Kinsella, 177. The most important sources in international humanitarian law on the protected status of women can be found in: Art. 77, “Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and Relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (Protocol I), of 8 June 1977,” 1977. Kinsella, “Gendering Grotius,” 184. Kinsella, The Image Before the Weapon, 196. Maja Zehfuss, “Killing Civilians: Thinking the Practice of War,” British Journal of Politics and International Relations 14, no. 3 (2012): 424, https://doi.org /10.1111/j.1467–856X .2011.00491.x. Zehfuss, 435. See Maja Zehfuss, “Targeting: Precision and the Production of Ethics,” European Journal of International Relations 17, no. 3 (September 1, 2011): 543–66, https://doi.org /10 .1177/1354066110373559. See also Yves Winter, “The Asymmetric War Discourse and Its Moral Economies: A Critique,” International Theory 3, no. 3 (November 2011): 488–514, https://doi.org /10.1017/S1752971911000145. Domenico Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-History, trans. Gregory Elliott, first Verso paperback ed. (London: Verso, 2014), vii–viii. For historical research on the liberalism-slavery nexus, see, for example, Greg Grandin, The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World, 1st ed. (New York: Metropolitan, 2014); David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (New York: Knopf, 2014); Robin L. Einhorn, American Taxation, American Slavery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Lawrence Goldstone, Dark Bargain: Slavery, Profits, and the Struggle for the Constitution (New York: Walker, 2005). Losurdo, Liberalism, 1, 7. However, a potential complication of this picture presents itself once we realize that Foucault, too, uses the term counterhistory to describe his approach. He does so in his lectures at the Collège de France, where he investigates what he calls “race struggle.” See Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 65–85. I do not think that Foucault uses the term in the same sense as Losurdo. Instead, my reading of these pages is that Foucault uses it either in the nontechnical sense of “alternative historical account” or indeed as synonymous with genealogy. Charli Carpenter, review of The Image Before the Weapon: A Critical History of the Distinction Between Combatant and Civilian, by Helen Kinsella, Ethics and International Affairs 27, no. 1 (2013): 107–10, https://doi.org /10.1017/S0892679412000809.

5. THE CONCEPTUAL TAPESTRY OF POLITICAL VIOLENCE201

95.

96. 97.

98.

99. 100. 101.

102. 103.

For the philosophical debate around the genetic fallacy, which owes a lot to the philosophy of science, see T. Z. Lavine, “Reflections on the Genetic Fallacy,” Social Research 29, no. 3 (1962): 321–36; Norwood Russell Hanson, “The Genetic Fallacy Revisited,” American Philosophical Quarterly 4, no. 2 (1967): 101–13. T. Edward Damer, Attacking Faulty Reasoning: A Practical Guide to Fallacy-Free Arguments, 6th ed. (Belmont: Wadsworth/Cengage Learning, 2009), 93. On the genetic fallacy objection as applied to Nietzsche, see Paul S. Loeb, “Is There a Genetic Fallacy in Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals?,” International Studies in Philosophy 27, no. 3 (1995): 125–41, https://doi.org /10.5840/intstudphil199527389. Among the most influential objections to Foucault’s genealogies has been Habermas’s suggestion that they remain “crypto-normative,” that is, that Foucualt does not make explicit the normative claims on which his problematizations rest. See Jürgen Habermas, “Some Questions Concerning the Theory of Power: Foucault Again,” in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 266–93. The idea that Foucault’s genealogies are marred by a performative contradiction—they implicitly profess their commitment to autonomy while vehemently objecting to all kinds of oppression—has also been forcefully made by another critical theorist: Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). On the wider debate between Habermas and Foucault, and its implications for political theory, see Samantha Ashenden and David Owen, eds., Foucault Contra Habermas: Recasting the Dialogue Between Genealogy and Critical Theory (London: SAGE, 1999); Amy Allen, The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory, New Directions in Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 69. Colin Koopman, Genealogy as Critique: Foucault and the Problems of Modernity, American Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 64–65. Amy Allen, “The Entanglement of Power and Validity: Foucault and Critical Theory,” in Foucault and Philosophy, ed. Timothy O’Leary and Christopher Falzon (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 78–98. Allen, 92. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley, vol. 2, The Use of Pleasure (New York: Vintage, 1988), 9.

5. THE CONCEPTUAL TAPESTRY OF POLITICAL VIOLENCE 1.

For some of Geuss’s earlier thoughts on utopianism, see Raymond Geuss, “Realismus, Wunschdenken, Utopie,” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 58, no. 3 (2010): 419–29, https://doi.org /10.1524/dzph.2010.0033; Raymond Geuss, “The Metaphysical Need and

2 02  5. T H E CO NCEP TUAL TAP ESTRY O F POLI TI CA L VI OLEN CE

2. 3. 4.

5.

6. 7. 8.

9.

10.

11.

the Utopian Impulse,” in Actions, Reasons and Reason, ed. Marco Iorio and Ralf Stoecker (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 141–60. Raymond Geuss, “Realism and the Relativity of Judgement,” International Relations 29, no. 1 (March 1, 2015): 18, https://doi.org /10.1177/0047117815569517. Gustav Landauer, “Revolution,” in Revolution, and Other Writings: A Political Reader, ed. and trans. Gabriel Kuhn (Oakland: Merlin, 2010), 110–85. Geuss, “Realism and the Relativity of Judgement,” 17. This distinction between two kinds of utopian thinking can be found in various other authors too. Miguel Abensour, for example, speaks of “eternal utopia” as a conservative trope that necessarily involves an authoritarian invocation of perfect order. He contrasts this dangerous view with the concept of a “persistent utopia,” which he equates with the “wish for the advent of a radical alterity here and now.” Miguel Abensour, “Persistent Utopia,” Constellations 15, no. 3 (September 1, 2008): 407, https://doi.org /10.1111/j.1467–8675.2008.00501.x. For a systematic overview of various strands of contemporary utopian thinking, see Russell Jacoby, Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); Ruth Levitas, Utopia as Method: The Imaginary Reconstruction of Society (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). As remarked in the introduction, Allen’s point primarily concerns conversations between cultural Others. However, I think the plea for the “epistemic virtue of humility” can be extended to cover all forms of debates to which political theorists hope to contribute. See Allen, The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 75–76. Michael Walzer, “Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 2, no. 2 (1973): 167. Rejali, Torture and Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 545. On the further impact of colonial counterinsurgencies in more recent conflicts, see Moritz Feichtinger and Stephan Malinowski, “Transformative Invasions: Western Post-9/11 Counterinsurgency and the Lessons of Colonialism,” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 3, no. 1 (February 12, 2012): 35–63, https://doi.org /10.1353/hum.2012.0000. On the ability of music to serve pacifist goals, see Dieter Senghaas, “Sounds of Peace: On Peace Fantasies and Peace Offerings in Classical Music,” in Resounding International Relations, ed. M. I. Franklin (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 199–221, https://doi .org/10.1007/978–1-137–05617–7_10; Roland Bleiker, “Why, Then, Is It So Bright? Towards an Aesthetics of Peace at a Time of War,” Review of International Studies 29, no. 3 (July 2003): 387–400, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210503003875. Once again, Roland Bleiker proffers an illuminating argument to this effect: Roland Bleiker, “ ‘Give It the Shade’: Paul Celan and the Politics of Apolitical Poetry,” Political Studies 47, no. 4 (September 1, 1999): 661–76, https://doi.org /10.1111/1467–9248.00223. On Le Guin’s oeuvre and its relevance for political theory, see Tony Burns, Political Theory, Science Fiction, and Utopian Literature: Ursula  K. Le Guin and the Dispossessed (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2008); Laurence Davis and Peter Stillman, eds., The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2005).

5. T H E CO NC EP TUAL TAP ESTRY O F P O LITI CA L VI OLEN CE203

12.

13.

14.

15.

Fredric Jameson, “World-Reduction in Le Guin: The Emergence of Utopian Narrative,” Science Fiction Studies 2, no.  3 (1975): 221–30; Fredric Jameson, “Of Islands and Trenches: Neutralization and the Production of Utopian Discourse,” Diacritics 7, no. 2 (Summer 1977): 2–21. For a more extensive interpretation of science fiction along these lines, see Mathias Thaler, “Hope Abjuring Hope: On the Place of Utopia in Realist Political Theory,” Political Theory, November 22, 2017, https://doi.org /10.1177/0090591717740324. See Niall Ferguson, ed., Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (New York: Basic, 1999); Robert Cowley, ed., What If?: The World’s Foremost Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been: Essays (New York: Putnam, 1999); Robert Cowley, ed., What If? 2: Eminent Historians Imagine What Might Have Been (New York: Berkley, 2002). Richard Ned Lebow, Forbidden Fruit: Counterfactuals and International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 6.

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INDEX

Abensour, Miguel, 202n4 Abu Ghraib prison, 103 Agent-focused definitions, of terrorism, 122, 135 Albright-Cohen Report, 58, 64 Algerian National Liberation Front, 89 Alienation, 162, 176n76 Allen, Amy, 40, 152, 167 Allhoff, Fritz, 97 Ameliorative approach, 10; content-based utopia and, 165; to genocide, 23–24; lamentation influencing, 41; social reality and, 164 Ameliorative interventions, 35–36 Ameliorative project: critically examined purpose in, 22–23; political theory as, 37–39; political violence and, 20–21 Anticipatory denial, 17, 64, 67, 71, 91 Arendt, Hannah, 7, 24–25, 188n146; enlarged empathy from, 29–30; imagination and, 30–31; judgment theory of, 26–28; The Life of the Mind by, 26 Aristotle, 24 Artificial cases, 94, 114, 116 Aspect blindness, 68, 70–72

Aspect change, 32; genocide blindness combated by, 159; from Norval, 73; political violence and, 34; storytelling triggering, 34–35, 82 Aspectival captivity, 69–72 Aspect-seeing, 43, 67–68, 161, 184n93, 188n147 Assassinations, political, 126 Atrocities, 14, 54, 58, 60, 72, 74–75 Atrocity crimes, 58 Austin, J. L., 136 Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (Lemkin), 47, 50 Babeuf, Gracchus, 178n3 Baldwin, Andrew, 80 Before the Flood (documentary), 79 Bevir, Mark, 141 Blindness, 158; aspect, 68, 70–72; genocide, 43, 65–66, 71, 81–82, 159 Blue Marble (photograph), 79 Boghossian, Paul, 59–61 Bottici, Chiara, 33–34 Bush administration, 14, 87, 92 Butler, Judith, 101–2, 107–8, 164; frailty and precariousness from, 113–14; framing

23 0 IND EX

Butler, Judith (cont.) comments of, 104; grievable life questioned by, 103; victim dignity plea of, 113; vulnerability and, 19 Card, Claudia, 23–24; genocide account of, 29; genocide definition by, 60; social death concept of, 60 Cassese, Antonio, 90 Celan, Paul, 168 Centurions, The (Lartéguy), 168 Charny, Israel, 63 Clarificationists, 105–6, 113; theory and practice gulf and, 114–15; thought experiments defenders of, 97–98 Climate change: as genocide, 77–81; migration induced by, 80–81; natural disasters and, 79; race and, 80–81; violence and, 7–8 Climate Refugees (documentary), 43, 78, 82–83, 159 Coady, Tony, 123 Coetzee, J. M., 186n117 Cohen, G. A., 40 Combatants, noncombatants and, 148 Concept of the Political, The (Schmitt), 4–5 Content-based utopia, 165 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (the Convention), 52–54 Counterhistories, 149–50, 200n93 Crimes against humanity, 50–51, 57–58 Critically examined purpose, underpinning amelioration, 22–23 Critical terrorism studies, 10, 118, 137, 194n5 Critical theory, 39, 177n98 Critique of the Power of Judgment (Kant), 25, 27–28 Darfur debate, 57, 63, 172n4 Decontestation, 8, 42, 58–60, 62–64, 132, 173n20 Defamiliarization, 35, 95, 158, 160–63, 176n76

Definitions, 60; agent-focused, with regard to terrorism, 122, 135; canonical, 123–24, 132, 134–35; descriptive, 14, 90; explicative, 14–16; moral, 118, 125; object-based, 125–26, 138; in social world, 17–18; stipulative, 13–15, 131 Deleuze, Gilles, 38 Democratic identification, 68–69 Democratic political education, 75 Denial, genocide, 56, 62–63, 83, 158, 188n147 Dershowitz, Alan, 91, 96, 110, 191n46 Descriptive definition, of torture, 14, 90 Determinant judgment, 6, 24–25, 27–29, 175n55, 176n68 Disch, Lisa, 83 Disciplinary power, 140–41 Discipline and Punish (Foucault), 140 Discrimination, principle of, 147–48 Dispossessed, The (Le Guin), 169 Documentary, 43, 78–79, 82–83, 159 Double mental element, in the definition of genocide, 54–55 Dramaturgists, defenders of thought experiments, 96–97, 110, 191n46 Dynamic nominalism, 19–20 Earth Rise (photograph), 79 ECHR. See European Convention on Human Rights ECPT. See European Convention for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment Eichmann, Adolf, 26 Elshtain, Jean Bethke, 91–92, 199n77 Emancipatory drive of theory, 40 Empathy, enlarged, 29–30 Enhanced interrogation techniques, 85–86 Equalizing cases, method of, 98 Erlenbusch, Verena, 44, 133–35 Esquith, Stephen, 75 Estrangement, 31, 95, 115, 150, 160, 162, 176n76 Eternal utopia, 202n4

IND E X 231

European Convention for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (ECPT), 90 European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), 90 Ewige Jude, Der (film), 82, 161 Explicative definitions, 14–16 False consciousness, 69–70 Feedback, looping, 16, 20–21 Field of representability, 103–4 Films: Der ewige Jude, 82, 161; Grbavica, 43, 75–77, 82–83, 158–59; Jud Süß, 82, 161; political theory approach of, 75; storytelling from, 81 Finlay, Christopher, 44, 133, 135–37 Fletcher, George, 130–32 Foucault, Michel, 38; counterhistory term used by, 200n93; disciplinary power from, 140–41; Discipline and Punish by, 140; genealogy of, 152–53, 201n98; problematization from, 201n98; relentless erudition and, 142 Foundationalism, 60, 63 Framing, 32, 101–4, 107–8, 120, 172n11 Fraser, Nancy, 152 Freeden, Michael, 10, 59 Freedom-centered imagination, 34 Fricker, Miranda, 188n147 Friedrich, Ernst, 102 Gallie, W. B., 57 Galtung, Johan, 7, 77 Gender, 21; innocence and, 146, 160; noncombatants and, 145 Genealogy: aspects of, 119–20; of Foucault, 152–53, 201n98; genetic fallacy and, 152–53; Geuss and purpose of, 151; Geuss surmising method for, 140; imaginary, 143; imagination activated in, 150; imaginations relationship with, 141–43, 160– 61; of innocence, 138; interrelated tasks of, 70; Kinsella’s view

on, 144–45, 147; Nietzsche developing, 139; political violence conceptualized in, 143–44; power relations in, 153; as radical historicism, 141; strategies defending, 151; terrorism and, 35, 44; thought experiments and storytelling linked to, 158– 62 General intent, in the definition of genocide, 54 Genetic fallacy, 146, 150–53, 201n95, 201n97 Geneva Conventions, 146 Genocidal rape, 64, 71, 76–77 Genocide: ameliorative approach to, 23–24; anticipatory denial and, 17; atrocity crimes replacing, 58; Card’s definition of, 60; Card’s engagement with, 29; climate change as, 77–81; collective atrocity of, 14; the Convention defining, 52–54; crimes against humanity and, 50–51, 57–58; debates on, 56–57, 63, 171n2; decontestation of, 58–59; denial of, 62–63, 65; disguising acts of, 56; general intent in, 54; global conflicts of, 4; ideological captivity and, 71; International Criminal Court for, 16–17, 45; international law and, 61; legal codification of, 49–50; Lemkin on, 47–49, 51–52; mass killings and, 48–49; metaphysical indeterminacies in, 64; origins of, 47; politicizing term of, 45–46; social death from, 60; social realities of, 2; term too expansive, 59–60; universal abhorrence to, 45; in whole or in part, 55 Genocide blindness, 43, 65–66, 71; aspect change combating, 159; storytelling as a remedy against, 81–82 Geuss, Raymond, 9, 139; genealogical method surmised by, 140; genealogy’s purpose from, 151; imagination’s power stated by, 33–34; utopianism as envisaged by, 163–64 Grbavica (film), 43, 75–77, 82–83, 158–59 Grief, hierarchy of, 103–4, 114

23 2IND EX

Gross, Oren, 96, 110 Grotius, Hugo, 145–46 Hacking, Ian, 15–16, 19 Harlan, Veit, 82 Harman, Sabrina, 193n79 Haslanger, Sally, 20–23, 36, 165 Hegemonic actors: political violence and, 5–6; terrorism and interests of, 10 Hierarchy of grief, 103–4, 114 Hippler, Fritz, 82 Hollywood effect, 191n45 Holocaust, 47, 50, 73 Horkheimer, Max, 39–40 Human life, frailty and precariousness of, 32, 105, 113, 164 Human rights, 87; ECHR and, 90; in international law, 89; UDHR and, 51, 89; violations of, 90–91, 101 Hypotheticals, 43; alienation through, 162; conditions of, 167; failure of, 94–95; Kamm’s method aimed at, 98; otherworldly, 107, 111–12, 115, 169; political theorist using, 95; on politics, 93; reality and features of, 110–11; reasoning through, 92–93; this-worldly, 107, 111–13; ticking-bomb scenario as, 96–97, 110–11; on torture, 97, 100, 112–13, 160 Ideological captivity, 69–71, 155 Imaginal politics, 34 Imaginary cases: challenge in devising, 111; intuitions tested in, 106; moral factors in, 98–99; moral problems in, 109–10; reality connection with, 113, 160; of torture, 95–96 Imaginary genealogy, 143 Imaginary grip, 94–95 Imagination, 29; Arendt and, 30–31; constraining, 31–32; engagement of, 32, 95; freedom-centered, 34; genealogical methods activating, 150; genealogy’s relationship with, 141–43, 160–61; Geuss

and power of, 33–34; judgment’s connection to, 20, 25, 30, 39; reality constraints on, 41; social world and, 30–31; storytelling influencing, 39; violence studied using, 32–33, 166 Imaginative grip, 106, 110, 112 IMT. See International Military Tribunal Innocence, 44; gender and, 146, 160; genealogy of, 138; in Just War theory, 147; Kinsella and warfare, 155–56, 164; Kinsella comments on value of, 145; moral terms defining, 129; noncombatant immunity and, 144; noncombatants and, 155; terrorism definition and, 155 Innocent Jenny (fictitious), 108–12, 162 International Criminal Court, 16–17, 45, 53 International law, 52; genocide and, 61; human rights regime in, 89; offenses against, 57; terrorism defined in, 120–21 International Military Tribunal (IMT), 50 Interpretive realism, 10 Interrogation techniques, 85–86 Intuition pumps, 101 Intuitions, 93, 98, 99–100, 106 Irish Republican Army, 89 Ius in bello provisions, 126 Jackson, Richard, 194n5 Jameson, Fredric, 31 Judgment: Arendt’s theory of, 26–28; beautiful objects, 27–28; faculty of, 9; gut reaction, 132–33; imagination’s connection to, 20, 25, 30, 39; Kant and noncognitive, 26, 175n55; political theory and, 24; of political violence, 115; reflective, 25, 28–29; thought experiments enabling, 94–95 Judicial torture, 88–89 Jud Süß (film), 82, 161 Just War theory, 35, 44, 99, 127–30, 144–45; innocence in, 147; ius in bello provisions in, 126; McMahan’s contribution to, 99; noncombatants in, 196n31

IND EX 233

Kamm, Frances, 98, 100, 106, 113 Kant, Immanuel, 24; antirationalist from, 193n82; Critique of the Power of Judgment by, 25, 27–28; judgment as noncognitive from, 26, 175n55; moral reasoning from, 26–27 Kind, Amy, 31 Kinsella, Helen: genealogy view of, 144–45, 147; innocence in warfare from, 155–56, 164; innocence’s value comments of, 145 Koopman, Colin, 152 Kosovo, 64 Krieg dem Kriege! (Friedrich), 102 Ku Klux Klan, 133 Kung, Peter, 31 Landauer, Gustav, 163 Langbein, John, 88 Laqueur, Walter, 121 Lara, María Pía, 43, 72–74, 164 Lartéguy, Jean, 168 Law of War and Peace (Grotius), 145–46 Legal codification: of genocide, 49–50; of torture, 87–88, 90 Legalism, 23, 61, 63 Le Guin, Ursula, 169 Lemkin, Raphael, 14, 17; Axis Rule in Occupied Europe by, 47, 50; as deep pluralist, 49; on genocide, 47–49, 51–52; imperial power politics and, 49; mass violence and, 178n3; political groups opposed by, 52 Life of the Mind, The (Arendt), 26 Looping effects, 16, 18–21, 28–29, 32, 91, 117 Luban, David, 57 Mamdani, Mahmood, 3–5, 46, 63, 172n4 Massacre, Srebrenica, 74 Mass killings, 48–49, 54 McMahan, Jeff, 98–100, 106, 113–14, 127 Meisels, Tamar, 123, 125–26 Migration, climate induced, 80–81 Miller, David, 41, 178n103

Mills, Charles W., 62–63 Modality, in thought experiments, 161 Moralism: equality in, 128; evaluations in, 9, 97; factors in, 98–99; filters in, 73; imaginary cases and problems in, 109–10; one true answer in, 42; political theory and, 40; terms in, 129; unreconstructed realism and, 13, 118–19; use of force and, 128–29 Moralist response, 2–3, 6; realism and, 11–12; on violence, 8 Nash, Michael, 43, 78 Nazi Germany, 49–51 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 118, 120; genealogy developed by, 139; On the Genealogy of Morality by, 7, 140 Nixon, Rob, 77 Nominalism, 15, 19 Noncombatants: combatants distinction with, 148; feminist challenges to, 154; gender and, 145; immunity, 144, 147, 149–50; innocence and, 155; in Just War theory, 196n31; responsibility dilemma and, 129 Nonrepresentational art, 168 Norval, Aletta, 70; aspect change from, 73; democratic identification and, 68–69; Wittgenstein interpretation of, 69 Nuremberg trials, 50 Object-based definition of terrorism, 125–26, 138 O’Neill, Onora, 172n11 On the Genealogy of Morality (Nietzsche), 7, 140 Osiel, Mark, 18, 33 Other-worldly hypotheticals, 107, 111–12, 115, 169 Owen, David, 69–70 Panagia, Davide, 75 Persistent utopia, 202n4

23 4IND E X

Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein), 67 Photographs, 79, 102 Phronesis, 24 Plato, 93 Poetry, 168 Political theory: as ameliorative project, 37–39; artificial cases in, 94; audience of, 36, 42; audience’s relationship with, 37; democratic enterprise of, 18; films approach to, 75; grammars used in, 69; hypotheticals used in, 95; inequalities in, 22; judgment and, 24; moralism and, 40; practical reasoning approach to, 38; principled social criticism and, 37; realisms outlook on, 163; realist outlook in, 8–9, 178n103; terrorism debate in, 121–22; thought experiments in, 92–95; Tully’s approach to, 38; unreconstructed realism in, 6; Williams view on, 36–37 Political violence: ameliorative projects and, 20–21; aspect change and, 34; conceptualizations of, 3; genealogy conceptualization of, 143–44; hegemonic actors and, 5–6; judgment of, 115; Mamdani on, 5; terrorism and, 117, 123 Politics: of naming, 3–5, 8, 11, 13, 29, 41–42, 46, 61–62, 117–19, 130, 158, 162, 172n4 Poole, Robert, 79 Populicide, 178n3 Powers, Samantha, 55 Practical reasoning, 38 Precarious Life and Frames of War (Butler), 102 Precision bombs, 148–49 Primacy of practice, 42 Principled social criticism, 37 Problematization, 142, 152, 155, 201n98 Propaganda, 81–82, 161 Race, 80–81 Racism, 62–63, 144 Radical historicism, 141

Rape: genocidal, 64, 71, 76–77; selfdefensive, 108–10, 112 Rawls, John, 14, 93, 116 Realism, 162; interpretive, 10; moralist response and, 11–12; political theory outlook through, 163; sober, 6, 11, 119; unreconstructed, 3, 6, 13, 118–19 Realist-moralist dyad, 137 Reality: concrete, 149; constraints, 41; hypothetical features of, 110–11; imaginary cases connection with, 113, 160; social, 164; two-way interaction and, 16; utopian fiction breaking with, 169 Rearguard theories, 177n90 Reasoning: through hypotheticals, 92–93; moral, 26–27; normative, 113; practical, 38 Redescription, 29, 46, 53, 136 Reflective judgment, 24–26, 28–29, 82, 167, 175n55, 176n68 Rejali, Darius, 91, 168 Relativism, 27, 82, 135 Republic (Plato), 93 Responsibility dilemma, 129 Rhetorical tools, 135–37 Rights-based defense of torture, 98–99 Rodin, David, 125 Rwandan genocide, 54, 81 Santos, Boaventura de Sousa, 177n90 Schabas, William, 52, 55 Scheffer, David, 58 Scheppele, Kim Lane, 110 Schmitt, Carl, 4–5, 63 Semantic shock, 73, 74 Sexual violence, 17, 23, 108–10 Shue, Henry, 94, 114 Slow violence, 77 Sober realism, 6, 11, 119 Social death, 23, 60 Social world: critical theorizing within, 39; definitions in, 17–18; imagination dealing with, 30–31; violence in, 18–19, 84 Sontag, Susan, 43, 101–2, 107

INDEX235

Srebrenica massacre, 56, 74 Steinhoff, Uwe, 98–100, 106, 108–9, 112 Stipulative definitions, 13–15, 131 Storytelling: aspect change triggered by, 34–35, 82; Disch’s comments on, 83; films providing, 81; genocide blindness remedy of, 81–82; imagination influenced by, 39; Lara’s theory of, 43, 72–74; manipulative, 83–84; Panagia’s critique of, 75; public debate stimulated by, 76; thought experiments and genealogy linked to, 158–62 Structural violence, 7, 77 Suffering, 90, 102–3, 113–14 Temporality, 158–61 Terrorism: agent-focused definitions of, 135; canonical definition of, 123–24, 134–35; debates on, 171n2; definitional issues of, 130–31; definition types concerning, 122; explicative definition of, 15–16; family resemblances in, 135; Fletcher and Waldron and combating, 132; genealogy and, 35, 44; gut reaction judgments of, 132–33; hegemonic interests in, 10; innocence in defining, 155; international law defining, 120–21; Jackson on, 194n5; Meisels and unjustified, 125–26; methodological shortcomings studying, 133–34; moral definition of, 118, 125; naming of, 123; object-based definition of, 125–26, 138; polemical appropriation of, 131; political assassinations as, 126; political theory debate on, 121–22; political violence and, 117, 123; power structures and, 135; rhetorical maneuvers on, 136–37; self-reflective position on, 133–38; social reality of, 2 Theory of Justice, A (Rawls), 93 There Once Was an Island (documentary), 79 Theriault, Henry, 64, 71

This-worldly hypotheticals, 107, 111–13 Thought experiments: clarificationist defenders of, 97–98; defining, 93; imaginative grip of, 106, 112; judgments enabled in, 94–95; other-worldly hypotheticals in, 115; in political theory, 92–95; storytelling and genealogy linked to, 158–62; this-worldly and otherworldly, 107, 111–12; on torture, 43; utilitarianism of extremity and, 96 Ticking-bomb scenario, 96–97, 105, 110–12, 168, 191n46 Torture: abolition of judicial, 88–89; clarificationist camp on, 97–98; clean, 87; in criminal justice system, 88; debates on, 171n2; Dershowitz and practices of, 191n46; descriptive definition of, 14, 90; enhanced interrogation techniques and, 85–86; Hollywood effect on, 191n45; hypotheticals on, 97, 100, 112–13, 160; imaginary cases of, 95–96; juridical and judicial, 88–89; legal codification of, 87–88, 90; lite, 91–92; prohibition of, 87; public monitoring of, 91; regulation of, 92; relevant hypotheticals on, 112–13; rights-based defense of, 98–99; social reality of, 2; taboo, 86–87; thought experiments on, 43; warrants, 91, 96 “Traditional and Critical Theory” (Horkheimer), 39 Trial of the Major War Criminals, 50 Trials, Nuremberg, 50 Trump, Donald J., 14 Tully, James, 37; political theory approach of, 38; primacy of practice from, 42 UDHR. See Universal Declaration of Human Rights UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (UNCAT), 89

23 6 IND EX

Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), 51, 89 Unreconstructed realism, 3; moralism and, 13, 118–19; in political theory, 6 Utilitarianism of extremity, 96 Utopia, 165, 202n4 Utopian fiction, 169 Utopianism, 163–64 Violence: African Americans subjected to, 133; bystanders to, 75; circumstances changing, 7; climate change and, 7–8; conceptualizing, 7; dehumanizing policies and, 105; field of representability and, 103–4; frames of, 102; imagination studying, 32–33, 166; imperial power politics with, 49; judging, 13; mass, 178n3; moralist response on, 8; naming of, 3–4; politics of naming of, 5; semantic shock and, 73; sexual, 17, 23, 108–10; slow, 77; social meanings of, 84; in social world, 18–19, 84; structural, 7, 77; types of, 171n2 Virtual histories, 169 Vulnerability, 19, 20, 148

Waldron, Jeremy, 130–32 Walzer, Michael, 96, 168, 192n60 Warfare: discrimination and, 147–48; Kinsella on innocence in, 155–56, 164 War on Terror, 10, 103 Wartime photography, 102 White ignorance, 62 White supremacy, 62 Williams, Bernard, 6, 142; imaginary genealogy inquiry of, 143; political theory view of, 36–37 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 32, 66; aspect blindness and, 68, 72; aspect-seeing from, 43, 67–68; Norval interpreting, 69; Philosophical Investigations by, 67 Yoo, John, 92, 99 Young, Iris Marion, 38 Çbaniʉ, Jasmila, 43, 75–77 Zehfuss, Maja, 144; counterhistories and, 149–50; noncombatant-combatant distinction of, 148; noncombatant immunity and, 147, 149–50 Zerilli, Linda, 34–35

Narrating Evil: A Postmetaphysical Theory of Reflective Judgment, María Pía Lara The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory, Amy Allen Democracy and the Political Unconscious, Noëlle McAfee The Force of the Example: Explorations in the Paradigm of Judgment, Alessandro Ferrara Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence, Adriana Cavarero Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World, Nancy Fraser Pathologies of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory, Axel Honneth States Without Nations: Citizenship for Mortals, Jacqueline Stevens The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Négritude, Vitalism, and Modernity, Donna V. Jones Democracy in What State?, Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Daniel Bensaïd, Wendy Brown, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière, Kristin Ross, Slavoj Çiäek Politics of Culture and the Spirit of Critique: Dialogues, edited by Gabriel Rockhill and Alfredo Gomez-Muller Mute Speech: Literature, Critical Theory, and Politics, Jacques Rancière The Right to Justification: Elements of Constructivist Theory of Justice, Rainer Forst The Scandal of Reason: A Critical Theory of Political Judgment, Albena Azmanova The Wrath of Capital: Neoliberalism and Climate Change Politics, Adrian Parr Media of Reason: A Theory of Rationality, Matthias Vogel Social Acceleration: The Transformation of Time in Modernity, Hartmut Rosa The Disclosure of Politics: Struggles Over the Semantics of Secularization, María Pía Lara Radical Cosmopolitics: The Ethics and Politics of Democratic Universalism, James Ingram Freedom’s Right: The Social Foundations of Democratic Life, Axel Honneth Imaginal Politics: Images Beyond Imagination and the Imaginary, Chiara Bottici Alienation, Rahel Jaeggi The Power of Tolerance: A Debate, Wendy Brown and Rainer Forst, edited by Luca Di Blasi and Christoph F. E. Holzhey Radical History and the Politics of Art, Gabriel Rockhill The Highway of Despair: Critical Theory After Hegel, Robyn Marasco A Political Economy of the Senses: Neoliberalism, Reification, Critique, Anita Chari The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory, Amy Allen Recognition or Disagreement: A Critical Encounter on the Politics of Freedom, Equality, and Identity, Axel Honneth and Jacques Rancière, edited by Katia Genel and Jean-Philippe Deranty

What Is a People?, Alain Badiou, Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler, Georges Didi-Huberman, Sadri Khiari, and Jacques Rancière Death and Mastery: Psychoanalytic Drive Theory and the Subject of Late Capitalism, Benjamin Y. Fong Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory, Enzo Traverso Foucault/Derrida Fifty Years Later: The Futures of Genealogy, Deconstruction, and Politics, edited by Olivia Custer, Penelope Deutscher, and Samir Haddad The Habermas Handbook, edited by Hauke Brunkhorst, Regina Kreide, and Cristina Lafont Birth of a New Earth: The Radical Politics of Environmentalism, Adrian Parr The Practice of Political Theory: Rorty and Continental Thought, Clayton Chin Queer Terror: Life, Death, and Desire in the Settler Colony, C. Heike Schotten Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left, Ernst Bloch