The Collective Dynamics of Racial Dehumanization and Genocidal Victimization in Darfur

John Hagan Wenona Rymond-Richmond Northwestern University University of Massachusetts and American Bar Foundation

Sociologists empirically and theoretically neglect genocide. In this article, our critical collective framing perspective begins by focusing on state origins of race-based ideology in the mobilization and dehumanization leading to genocide. We elaborate this transformative dynamic by identifying racially driven macro-micro-macro-level processes that are theoretically underdeveloped and contested in many settings. We investigate generic processes by exploiting an unprecedented survey of refugees from the ongoing genocide in Darfur. Our focus is on the Sudanese government’s crisis framing of a dehumanizing collective process. Sudanese forces joined with Janjaweed militia to attack black African settlements. They aggregated and concentrated racial epithets in a collective process of dehumanization and organized terror, which amplified the severity of genocidal victimization, the lethal and lasting scar of the genocidal state. Our findings question primordial and counter-insurgency explanations, while supporting aspects of the instrumental, population–resource, constructionist, and cognitive Delivered by Ingenta to : perspectives that form the foundationUNIVERSITY of our critical OF WASHINGTONcollective framing perspective. It has been more than 50 years since SutherlandTue, 28famously Apr 2009 added 05:04:14 white-collar crime to public sociology, radically reordering discourse about crime. It is time to do the same with Raphael Lemkin’s concept of genocide.

e are Sudanese living in our home- THE SOCIOLOGY OF GENOCIDE “Wland. We have no problem with the Genocide is now widely discussed by journal- Sudanese government. They became our first ists and lawyers, but it still is neglected, mar- enemy, they do not protect us. They want to kill ginalized, and undertheorized by sociologists. Horowitz (1980:3) speculates that sociologists all the black people. Why? I can ask myself, and feel “a studied embarrassment about these also ask you.” issues, a feeling that intellectual issues posed in — Darfurian Refugee in Chad Camp such a manner are melodramatic and unfit for scientific discourse.” Fein (1990:7 and 2007:1) similarly insists that “the primary deterrent is our own inhibitions and lack of boldness.” Direct correspondence to John Hagan, MacArthur Further methodological difficulties are posed by Professor, Northwestern University, 1810 Chicago the unpredictability of genocides, the devasta- Avenue, Evanston, IL 60208 (j-hagan@northwestern. tion of whole groups and places, and govern- edu). We thank Alberto Palloni, Gabriele Plickert, ments’ participation and cover-ups. Stefanie Frease, Nina Bang-Jensen, Patricia Parker, Gabrielle Ferrales, Ronit Dinovitzer, Don Nonetheless, accounts of genocide assume Tomaskovic-Dewey, Eric Poehler, Katie Harr, and the fundamental sociological processes. These ASR editors and reviewers. This work was support- descriptions often emphasize dehumanization ed by NSF grant LSS 0550299 and the American Bar framed in terms of race, ethnicity, religion, or Foundation. nationhood. This process is usually depicted as

AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW, 2008, VOL. 73 (December:875–902) 876—–AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW collectively driven—led by groups and leading and “this is the last day for blacks”) resulting in to group destruction. Yet few quantitative analy- violent victimization, which we analyze using ses evaluating these social aspects of genocide survey interviews about attacks on black African exist. This article investigates genocide in the villages. We show that the role of race is promi- context of Sudan, not because this time or place nently denied in this genocide, as it often is is unique, but because during the ongoing historically. Darfur genocide, for the first time in history, the The role of the state in activating racial dehu- U.S. government collected detailed data on manization leading to genocide is essential to racial dehumanization and intergroup violence. our critical collective framing theory.3 Through This allows us to address the fundamental ques- racial framing, the Sudanese government mobi- tion: How is racial genocide accomplished?1 lized local Arab Janjaweed militia toward much Brubaker and Laitin (1998:427) argue that death and destruction. Our critical collective “the most fundamental questions—for example, framing theory argues that this racial targeting how the adjective ‘ethnic’ modifies the noun was the socially constructed and critically con- ‘violence’—remain unclear and largely unex- tingent mechanism that mediated the influence amined” and that the answers require analysis of population–resource competition on genoci- of “the forms and dynamics of ethnicization.”2 dal victimization. We build on Katz’s (1988) We make a similar argument about racialization account of the role of cursing in the “righteous and dehumanization. The Sudanese state insti- slaughters” of intimates and acquaintances. We gated a collective framing process that dehu- hypothesize that racial epithets played a paral- manized its victims (black Africans in Darfur) lel role in transforming individual motivation and resulted in genocide. Although the details and intent into collectively organized dehu- are case specific, we cite parallel processes and manization and violence. More specifically, we illustrations from other genocides. hypothesize that the aggregation and concen- In Darfur, the dehumanization involved racial tration of racial epithets during attacks created epithets (e.g., “you are slaves, kill theDelivered slaves” by Ingenta to : UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTONa collective effect that intensified the severity Tue, 28 Apr 2009of 05:04:14genocidal violence. Collective dehumaniza- tion processes place groups outside the norma- 1 The question of why Sudan indiscriminately tive universe of moral protection, leaving them attacks black Africans is in one sense simple: because vulnerable to targeted genocidal victimization. Sudan can, and cheaply. Black African rebels are a These racialized and collectivized dehuman- threat. De Waal (2007) calls indiscriminate attacks ization processes establish the contingent con- “counter-insurgency on the cheap.” China and Russia ditions for genocide (Fein 1990). sell Sudan the limited weaponry required to devas- First, we use historical material to establish tate the relatively defenseless black Africans, while the ideological link in Darfur between the fending off the UN for trade advantages. So the larg- Sudanese state and the targeting of three black er question is: How does Sudan do genocide so effi- African groups: the Zaghawa, Fur, and Masalit. ciently? That is, how does Sudan accomplish We then analyze the historically unprecedent- genocide? In this sense, the answer to the question of how becomes the explanation of why. 2 Most scholarly discussions of genocide focus on this concept as a noun. For example, Gurr and 3 The expanding research literature on genocide Harff (1994) advocate expanding genocide to include focuses on problems of definition (e.g., Chirot and political conflicts. Others advocate including non- Edwards 2003; Fein 1990), the identification of lethal acts that threaten group members (Lemkin antecedents (e.g., Gurr and Harff 1994; Horowitz 1946), emphasizing the role of the state (Horowitz 2001), disputes about scale (e.g., Hagan and Palloni 1980), highlighting one-sided killing by the state 2006; Heuveline 2001), the creation of typologies (Chalk and Jonassohn 1990), excluding ethnocide (e.g., Chalk and Jonassohn 1990; Chirot and (Chalk and Jonassohn 1990), and specifying geno- McCauley 2006; Lemkin 1946), and the develop- cide as political mass murder (Chirot and Edwards ment of explanatory approaches considered below. 2003). These definitions are insightful for probing the Our distinctive focus is on the dehumanizing racial boundaries of genocide, but our interest here is in motivations and intentions that explain how a gov- understanding how dehumanizing processes of col- ernment mobilizes and collaborates in the ideologi- lective racial and ethnic framing drive genocidal vic- cal dehumanization and criminal victimization of a timization. racial group. COLLECTIVE DYNAMICS OF GENOCIDAL VICTIMIZATION IN DARFUR—–877 ed U.S. State Department’s Atrocities The various tribes that have been the objects of Documentation Survey (ADS) data on racial attacks and killings (chiefly the Fur, Masalit and dehumanization and violence collected during Zaghawa tribes) do not appear to make up ethnic groups distinct from the ethnic group to which the Darfur genocide. We use these data to doc- persons or militias that attack them belong. They ument the combined role of Sudanese and speak the same language (Arabic) and embrace the Janjaweed forces in the incitement of racial epi- same religion (Muslim). In addition, also due to the thets to collectively dehumanize and victimize measure of intermarriage, they can hardly be dis- black African groups. Finally, we use narratives tinguished in their outward physical appearance from the ADS interviews to document the organ- from the members of tribes that allegedly attacked ized leadership and integration of Janjaweed them. (UN 2005:129) with Sudanese forces in perpetrating genocide. Although this UN Commission conceded We present this crucial interstitial link last to that victims of violence in Darfur might sub- underscore the importance of social efficacy jectively identify themselves as racially distinct, and agency in genocide. it did not find evidence that the attackers intend- ed to destroy victim groups protected on this basis in international law. The Commission RACIAL DEHUMANIZATION urged the UN to refer the Darfur case to the AND DENIAL International Criminal Court (ICC) for investi- Dehumanization is a mechanism that imposes gation as a crime against humanity, rather than degrading attributes on both individuals and genocide. The Commission did not further entire groups for purposes of massive group investigate the role of race as a socially con- destruction, the defining feature of genocide.4 structed and contingent element in the Darfur 5 This process strips black Darfurians of their genocide. individuality and membership in Sudanese soci- This denial of race responded to two nonsci- ety, justifying attacks and denying moralDelivered or nor- by Ingentaentific toconcerns: : (1) applying “African” and mative protection (Alvarez 1997:146;UNIVERSITY see also OF WASHINGTON“Arab” racial categories might have deleteri- Tue, 28 Apr 2009ous 05:04:14 repercussions, “setting in motion the com- Browning 1992; Fein 1979; Hilberg 1985; plete dismemberment of Darfurian society” (de Kelman and Hamilton 1989). Racial and ethnic Waal 2007:3), and (2) acknowledging race epithets conveying contempt and denying might lead to an unsuccessful genocide prose- humanity to targeted group members are effec- cution (Power 2004). A simpler crime-against- tive instruments of dehumanization that make humanity prosecution requires proof of it easier for ordinary people to permit and par- widespread and systematic violence against ticipate in genocide (Dower 1986). civilians, rather than evidence of intent to Given what we know sociologically about destroy racial or other protected groups. the pervasiveness of racial/ethnic antagonism in In 2007, the ICC followed the UN genocide historically, it is surprising to Commission’s recommendation, charging a encounter frequent denials of the role of race in Sudanese deputy minister, Ahmad Harun, and Darfur. The United Nations International a Janjaweed militia leader, Ali Kushayb, with Commission of Inquiry (2005) concluded that crimes against humanity. The legal brief, which victims of violence in Darfur were not objec- exceeded 100 pages (Office of the Prosecutor tively distinct from their attackers and thus were 2007), contained several references to race but not recognizable as protected ethnic or racial sidestepped claims of racially targeted Darfur groups under the Genocide Conventions: atrocities (these claims were made, for example, by the U.S. State Department, the Save Darfur

4 Article II of the Genocide Convention defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, 5 In support of the race-based genocide claim, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or Chirot and McCauley (2006:89) insist that “some of religious group,” including in addition to killing, the worst ethnic genocides of the twentieth century “deliberately inflicting on the groups conditions of involved targeting groups that were difficult to dif- life calculated to bring about its physical destruction ferentiate on physical or cultural grounds from the in whole or in part.” perpetrators.” 878—–AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW coalition, the scholar-activist Eric Reeves, and an essential element in the explanation of the the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof). severity of the Darfur genocide is the dehu- In 2008, the ICC charged Sudanese President manizing impact of the collectivized motivation Al-Bashir with genocide, but the short 10-page and intent expressed in the racial epithets shout- supporting document focused broadly on eth- ed by the Janjaweed militia and Sudanese mil- nicity rather than specifically on race (Office of itary while attacking black African groups. Our the Prosecutor 2008). goal is to better understand how the racializa- The ICC’s hesitancy followed from the con- tion of this collective dehumanization process cern about legally demonstrating an intent influences the contexts and severity of genocide. beyond a reasonable doubt by the president of Using a Darfur refugee survey, we empirically Sudan to target racially protected groups. illuminate top-down macro-level and bottom-up Sutherland (1940, 1945, 1949) confronted sim- micro-level mechanisms underlying severe ilar challenges in introducing the concept of forms of genocidal victimization. The top-down white-collar crime. He insisted on a proba- collective framing in Darfur involved a gov- bilistic approach for social science purposes, ernment-led Arab supremacist ideology that which corresponds more closely to civil than to devalued black Africans. This ideology started criminal law standards. As we do for genocide, a process that demeaned and ultimately exclud- Sutherland emphasized the collective aspect of ed black African groups from a protected uni- white-collar crime and the need to understand verse of moral humanitarian obligation, leaving how business groups developed “differential them vulnerable to victimization. The bottom- definitions” that collectively framed their inten- up collective framing was activated by the tions and behaviors as acceptable to both law aggregation and concentration of racial epithets enforcers and themselves. that degraded and fundamentally dehumanized Political entrepreneurs use ideology to col- black African groups, leading to frenzied attacks lectively frame and mobilize groups.Delivered In partic- by Ingentaby combined to : Sudanese government forces and ular, explaining mass atrocitiesUNIVERSITY in Darfur OF WASHINGTONJanjaweed militias on targeted black African requires recognition of the socially constructedTue, 28 Apr 2009villages. 05:04:14 Our critical collective framing per- and dehumanizing process of collective racial spective identifies this succession of “macro- framing. We demonstrate that an Arabization micro-macro” mechanisms that drove state-led ideology, the social construction of racial cate- genocide in Darfur. gories, and an organized process of racial dehu- manization using racial epithets were catalysts A CRITICAL COLLECTIVE FRAMING of a shift from a “normal” to a “crisis” frame MODEL OF GENOCIDE (Oberschall 2000) for genocidal attacks. The UN Commission did not consider that racial divi- Our critical collective framing approach posits sions, both real and imagined, are often social- the Sudanese genocidal state as an endogenous ly constructed in the period leading to a system that emerged as the transformed macro- genocidal conflict. level result of collective action. This approach Racial epithets are important for both legal both diverges and converges with six past and sociological analysis because they capture explanatory approaches. attackers’ motivation and intent. The frequent- First, our attention to racial symbols and ly cited Akayesu decision in Rwanda (UN 1998) identification diverges from a state insecurity and the Jelisi decision in Bosnia (UN 1999) approach that focuses on justifiable reactions to both emphasize the importance of spoken lan- insurgent threats (e.g., Posen 1993). We demon- guage as evidence of genocide. The words and strate that threats of rebel or insurgent groups phrases used by perpetrators to dehumanize were wrongly perceived and exaggerated in victims play similar roles in genocide and hate Darfur. Our approach similarly diverges from a crimes (Green, McFalls, and Smith 2001; second primordial explanation that emphasizes Horowitz 2001; Jenness and Broad 1997). In hatreds so long-standing that they are considered both, dehumanizing language diminishes moral exogenous (e.g., Kaplan 1993). While we and practical constraints on participants and acknowledge past hostilities, we emphasize that bystanders, and this is an intrinsically important their influences are contingent on time and collective action process. We hypothesize that place. COLLECTIVE DYNAMICS OF GENOCIDAL VICTIMIZATION IN DARFUR—–879

A third contextual consideration is the com- Matsueda’s (2007) concepts of collective and petition for life-sustaining resources in the pop- social efficacy. Sampson (2006:55) reintroduces ulation–resource perspective (Diamond 2005; Coleman’s theory of social action in a discus- Tubiana 2007). This perspective sees settlement sion of the “transformation problem”: the prob- density not simply as concentrations of people lem of how systems—in our case, genocidal but also as the presence of desirable property: state systems—emerge from the interdependent possessions, livestock, and the settled land itself. and purposive actions of individuals. Coleman Opportunities and incentives are greatest, and (1986:1321) writes that this transformation “is resources most strained, in densely settled areas. the process through which individual prefer- The influence of population and resources is ences become collective choices; the process also contingent and mediated by racial dehu- through which dissatisfaction becomes revolu- manization. tion; through which simultaneous fear in mem- Among the most important contingencies we bers of a crowd turns into mass panic.” consider are choices highlighted in a fourth Coleman’s emphasis is on the dynamics of col- instrumental perspective featuring state-based lective transformation. ethnopolitical entrepreneurs who advance their Following Matsueda (2007), we focus on the interests by cultivating public fear and disrespect social efficacy of local government and militia of subordinate groups (see Hardin 1995; leaders as ethnic entrepreneurs of racial dehu- Valentino 2004). These feelings are often stim- manization and collective transformation lead- ulated with invidious socially constructed racial ing to organized genocidal victimization of attributions. Our approach further overlaps with specific groups. Coleman’s work underscores a fifth constructionist approach that empha- the need to understand the social and collective sizes racial symbols and identity manipulation efficacy of what he calls “Type 3” relations that by elites (e.g., Kaufman 2001). Finally, we draw transform micro-level social action into macro- from a sixth cognitive framing approachDelivered that by Ingentalevel systems. to : We assess the collective motiva- identifies the shifts that appearUNIVERSITY during emerg- OF WASHINGTONtions and intentions involved in the Type 3 ing conflicts as ranging from “normalTue,” to 28 “ cri-Apr 2009relations 05:04:14 together with quantitative data from the sis” scripts or frames (Oberschall 2000). Atrocities Documentation Survey (ADS) intro- Our synthesis is a critical collective framing duced below. First, though, we discuss Link 1 perspective (displayed in Figure 1), built on the as the foundation for Coleman’s Type 3 linked scaffold of Coleman’s (1986) social action the- relations and our critical collective framing ory and drawing on Sampson’s (2006) and approach. We discuss the crucial Link 2 role of

Figure 1. Transformation Model of Genocide: Macro-Micro-Macro Mechanisms 880—–AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW local leaders last, within our findings section, John and Jean Comaroff (1997:406) similar- to emphasize the importance of social efficacy ly note that in South Africa, an elite-driven cri- in our model. sis atmosphere of group conflict provoked distancing and separation between blacks and LINK 1: STATE-LED whites, and that at such crisis moments “cleav- ETHNOPOLITICAL ages, real and imaginary, reassert themselves.” ENTREPRENEURSHIP USING Brubaker (1996) calls this a process of “unmix- ing,”7 which aptly describes Rwanda. Although IDEOLOGICAL CRISIS FRAMES the Hutu and Tutsi often intermarry and are fre- An Arab-Islamic supremacist ideology gained quently indistinguishable, the Rwandan gov- a strong foothold in Darfur’s politics in the mid- ernment led a propaganda campaign with a 1980s. Link 1 in Figure 1 depicts this entrepre- crisis frame and forced the use of identity cards neurial and state-supported, macro-level role (Prunier 1997). This advanced the process of of ideology. We conceptualize this ideology racially marking the Tutsi for genocide. within the framework of political process the- In Darfur, national ethnopolitical entrepre- ory (McAdam 1982; McAdam, McCarthy, and neurs provoked deadly racial distinctions Zald 1996) and as the foundation for a genoci- through an ideological shift from normal to cri- dal political opportunity structure in Darfur. sis frames (Deng 1995). The 1970s saw more The leadership of the Sudanese government normal periods of relative optimism about a used a transformational crisis framing (Benford Sudanese identity joining Arab and African and Snow 2000; Oberschall 2000) to reconfig- groups (Doornbos 1988). At the time, it was ure the political demography of Darfur (Jok common to assert that “Dar Fur was an African 2007). More specifically, Arab-Islamic kingdom that embraced Arabs as equals” (Flint supremacist ideology served as an instrument of and de Waal 2005:3). Burton (1991:514), how- domination that demeaned black African groups. ever, finds a history of slavery that “left deeply Delivered by Ingenta to : Although Darfur is almost entirelyUNIVERSITY Muslim, the OF WASHINGTONengrained animosities.” Appiah (2007:17) iden- state-led ideology distinguished betweenTue, 28 Arabs Apr 2009tifies 05:04:14 the salience of the slavery trope, noting and black Africans and took the side of Arabs that “because people almost always think of in land disputes. slaves as belonging to a kind—a race, a tribe, a Comparative analyses reveal the broader class, a family—that is suited to enslavement, global importance of changing ethnopolitical the slave status tends to survive the abandon- ideologies and state-level entrepreneurship in ment of the formal institutions of slavery.” framing Link 1 of genocidal processes. For Slavery reemerged as a background theme, sig- example, Sekulic, Massey, and Hodson naling a racial redefinition that was moving (2006:797) indicate that ethnic intolerance was from demeaning to degrading. not initially salient in the 1990s conflict in the The 1980s “Arabization” policy of “Arab- former Yugoslavia, but only became so after Islamic imperialism” aroused the latent hostil- the war began. This shift was orchestrated by the ities of a crisis frame with its evolving Milosevic government’s elite manipulation of supremacist ideology and its assault on tradi- public images and events. Incorporating con- tional African cultures (El-Battahani 2006). structionist themes, Oberschall (2000) indicates This assault included the rejection of the inde- that cognitively framed “normal” attitudes in pendent status of women, tribal dancing, alco- post-Tito Yugoslavia gave way as they were hol consumption, bartering practices, and overwhelmed by an elite Milosevic-instigated traditional modes of dress. These were replaced “crisis framing.”6 with the teaching and speaking of Arabic, restrictions on women, rejection of alcohol, a cash economy, and Arab traditions of dress, 6 Oberschall (2000:989) defines a cognitive frame including the jellabiya for men and the taub as “a mental structure which situates and connects events, people and groups into a meaningful narra- tive in which the social world that one inhabits makes sense and can be communicated and shared with 7 This contrasts with the reframed “normaliza- others” (drawing on Snow et al. 1986; see also tion” and mixing of U.S. Jewish (Brodkin 1998) and Benford and Snow 2000). Irish (Ignatiev 1995) identities as “white.” COLLECTIVE DYNAMICS OF GENOCIDAL VICTIMIZATION IN DARFUR—–881 for women (Flint and de Waal 2005:14–15). black African agricultural groups in Darfur. The The process was demeaning to the traditions of government also took advantage of rising racial black African groups. tensions between Darfur’s settled African agri- There were at least two added macro-level culturalists and landless nomadic Arab pas- and highly politicized sources and phases to toralists who were growing increasingly this Arabized crisis framing in Darfur. One desperate for access to water and pastures for source involved the Libyan strongman their livestock in an ecosystem of advancing Muammar Qaddafi who brought guns into desertification (Harir 1992; Suliman 2000).8 Darfur during the famine of 1985. He hoped to create an “Arab belt” and to support an “Arab LINKS 3A AND 3B: AGGREGATION Gathering” across sub-Saharan Africa. A second AND CONCENTRATION OF source involved the 1986 campaign to elect COLLECTIVE DEHUMANIZATION Sadiq al-Mahadi as Prime Minister of Sudan to create an “Arab and Islamic Union” (Harir The ultimately crucial steps in the dehumaniz- 1994). The Union explicitly sought to subordi- ing collective framing process are Links 3a and nate black Africans to Arab Muslim rule. 3b in Figure 1. Hinton (2002:36) suggests the As part of this subordination process, Arab term “genocidal priming” to refer to the trans- intellectuals wrote Sudanese Prime Minister al- formative dynamics represented by these links. Mahadi a widely publicized letter in 1987 cel- We further incorporate Hinton’s point that ebrating the “Arab race” for the “creation of “when the priming is ‘hot’ and genocide takes civilization in the region” (cited in Flint and place, there is almost always some sort of ‘geno- deWaal 2005:52) and demanding greater gov- cidal activation’that ignites the charge” (p. 37). ernment control and representation (Rabbah Our thesis is that this kind of racial spark or igni- 1988). From this period on, Arabs replaced tion is observed in the aggregation and con- Africans in Darfur’s civil service (InternationalDelivered by Ingentacentration to : of the collectively framed racial Crisis Group 2004). UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTONepithets shouted during attacks in Darfur. It is The 1993 military coup that installedTue, 28 cur- Apr 2009this 05:04:14 aggregation and concentration of racial rent President al-Bashir backed these policies dehumanization that ignites the collective effect with belligerence and brutality. Earlier demean- of genocidal activation. ing policies were now imposed with a more Our framing perspective also draws from open and degrading use of force. The crisis work on ethnic conflict and domestic violence. frame intensified in response to the Justice and Brubaker and Laitin (1998:427) call for such Equality Movement’s (JEM) publication in 2000 cross-level and subfield linkage when they sug- of The Black Book, which documented Arab gest that “we may have as much to learn about dominance in Sudan’s government. When the the sources and dynamics of ethnic violence allied Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) subse- from the literature on criminology (Katz 1988) quently launched several attacks against gov- as from the literature on ethnicity or ethnic con- ernment forces in Darfur in early 2003 (Flint and flict.” This reference invokes Katz’s (1988) de Waal 2005), the Sudanese state responded account of the role of cursing in “righteous with a heightened crisis sense of insecurity slaughters” of intimates and acquaintances: about the threat of racial insurgency. Consider cursing. Most of the studies of impas- El-Battahani (2006:38) describes how “the sioned violence reveal a great deal of attendant rulers in Khartoum have mastered a technique cursing. Although impassioned attacks sometimes of divide and rule, of disrupting and co-opting ethnic, regional elites.” More broadly, he con- cludes that “of all ideological weapons used in 8 African warfare, .|.|. ethnicity .|.|. has proved It is important to distinguish the nomadic Arab groups of North Darfur, the Abbala, from the Arab by far the superior” (p. 35). The Sudanese gov- groups in South Darfur, the Baggara. Four of the ernment used Arab militias for nearly 20 years larger Baggara Arab tribes have land rights and have in the south, sometimes even supplementing not engaged in the recent Darfur conflict (Abdul-Jalil them with black African recruits from Darfur. 2006). Many Abbala Arabs explain their role in the In 2003, the latter recruitment ended, and Bashir current conflict in terms of this 250-year-old search shifted the militias to attacks on the settled for land. 882—–AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW

occur without verbal forewarning, it seems natu- of this process is reflected further in Link 3b, ral to move into assaults with shouts of “bitch,” “you which depicts the collective frenzy that con- fucking asshole,” “rat bastard,” “punk mother- nects hostile racial motivation and intent to fucker,” “nickel-and-dime drunk.” .|.|. Why? .|.|. They curse, not in the superficial sense, .|.|. but .|.|. genocidal violence. This lethal victimization is to effect degrading transformations.|.|.|. the lasting scar of the genocidal state. Symbolically transforming the offending party The collective frenzy represented in Link 3b into an ontologically lower status.|.|.|. Curses draw is the culmination of racial dehumanization. on the communal language and its primordial sen- Forces shouting racial epithets undertook sibility about the relationship between the sacred and the profane.|.|.|. Cursing sets up violence to be ground attacks on African villages. These epi- a sacrifice to honor the attacker as a priest repre- thets in Darfur involve tropes of slavery and sub- senting the collective moral being. (Katz humanity: 1988:36–37) “They called her Nuba [a derogatory term for The challenge is to generalize from this trans- black Africans] dog, son of dogs, and we came to formational role of curses in the specific ontol- kill you and your kids.” ogy of interpersonal crimes to collective “You donkey, you slave; we must get rid of you.” racialized domains of genocidal violence. “You blacks are not human. We can do anything This is where group identity again becomes we want to you. You cannot live here.” salient. It is the “us” versus “them” intensifi- “We kill our cows when they have black calves— cation of group conflict that raises “righteous we will kill you too.” slaughters” to mass atrocities. Katz (1988) “All the people in the village are slaves; you make argues that disabling the moral inhibition against this area dirty; we are here to clean the area.” murdering a “loved one” is accomplished by “You blacks are like monkeys. You are not human.” person-specific cursing—mass murder raises “Black prostitute, whore; you are dirty—black.” the stakes from individual denouncement to “We will kill any slaves we find and cut off their Delivered by Ingentaheads. to” : group dehumanization. This higher-orderUNIVERSITY trans- OF WASHINGTON formation in Darfur involved a collectivizedTue, 28 Apr 2009These 05:04:14 words and phrases shouted by the per- process of racial dehumanization. petrators are explicit evidence of dehumanizing “Such extreme dehumanization becomes pos- motivations and intentions during attacks on sible,” Kelman and Hamilton (1989:19) observe, black African villagers. “when the target group can be readily identified The racial component of the epithets is the as .|.|. a distinct racial, religious, ethnic, or polit- ical group regarded as inferior or sinister.” They motivational element. The intentional element explain that this is how killing can feed upon includes the targeted references to killing, rap- itself and become genocidal, with perpetrators ing, assaulting, looting, and destroying group “coming to believe that the victims are subhu- life. We shorten this reference to “collective man and deserve to be rooted out” (p. 20). Fein racial intent” in the following tables and figures. (1979, 2007) and Gamson (1995) explicitly link The further critical dimension, of course, is that this racial dehumanization to genocide. Gamson when targeted by state-based ethnic entrepre- (1995:3) writes that “the cultural contest is over neurs, such expressions of violent racism who is the ‘we,’ to whom specific moral obli- acquire an aggregated and concentrated force gations apply, and who is the ‘they,’ to whom that rises above each individual expression and they do not.” This framing contest maps out leads to collective genocidal victimization. what Fein (1979) envisions as the “universe of Prunier (2005:165) concludes that “since Darfur obligation.” had been in a state of protracted racial civil war We argue that the racial epithets heard dur- since the mid-1980s, the tools were readily ing attacks in Darfur are transformed into col- lective motive and intent as they are aggregated available; they merely needed to be upgraded. and concentrated in selected settlements and It was done and the rest is now history.” We begin to take on a frenzied dimension in Link demonstrate below how the aggregation and 3a. Coleman argues that this kind of transfor- concentration of racial epithets significantly mative (i.e., Type 3) process is weakly developed increased the severity of genocidal victimization in other sociological theories. The importance in Darfur. COLLECTIVE DYNAMICS OF GENOCIDAL VICTIMIZATION IN DARFUR—–883

THE ATROCITIES DOCUMENTATION We used the ADS field atlas to locate respon- SURVEY dents in the 22 originating settlements (see Map 1) that had 15 or more respondents each; this Explanations of genocide are mostly presented included 932 of the 1,136 respondents. We cal- in comparative historical case studies (e.g., ibrated the circles on Map 1 in quartiles of per- Midlarsky 2005) rather than quantitative analy- sons who reported hearing racial epithets. The ses (but see Gurr and Harff 1994). Our goals are sample was designed to proportionately repre- both integrative and quantitative. The critical sent the population of refugees from adjoining integrative aspect of our approach involves areas of Darfur. An evaluation for the State empirically connecting state-led ethnic entre- Department indicated that the sample “captured preneurship with cognitive framing and geno- the entire scope of the Darfuri refugees in cidal violence. Chad.”10 In June of 2004, a U.S. official let Sudan The ADS data uniquely and extensively know that their activities in Darfur were under measured victimization during attacks. We satellite observation (AAAS 2004), although know of only one other systematic study of “the images are not hard evidence until .|.|. cor- pre-camp violence in Darfur (Depoortere et. al roborated by testimony of witnesses on the 2004), and none that include sexual violence. ground.” That summer, aides convinced Since the beginning of the conflict about 18 Secretary of State Colin Powell to substantiate months earlier, refugees were asked when, how, charges of genocide with survey evidence. The and why they had left Darfur and if, when, and State Department authorized the Atrocities how they, their family, or fellow villagers were Documentation Survey (ADS) interviews of harmed. The survey mixed the closed-ended 1,136 Darfur refugees in Chad.9 A brief sum- format of health surveys with the semistruc- mary of the survey with several tables and maps tured format of legal witness statements (Respini-Irwin 2005). We cross-checked and (U.S. Department of State 2004) formedDelivered the by Ingenta to : background for Powell’s SeptemberUNIVERSITY 2004 testi- OF WASHINGTONsupplemented the ADS data by reading and mony to the Senate Foreign Tue,Relations 28 Apr 2009coding 05:04:14 the extensive narratives recorded in the Committee about the genocide in Darfur. interviews (see also Hagan, Rymond- The ADS is based on a multistage cluster Richmond, and Parker 2005). sample of 1,136 Darfur refugees in 20 camps The data include the age, gender, and group and settlements in eastern Chad (see Howard memberships of the displaced individuals, the 2006). The UN organized its camps by lettered separate and combined government and grids, with each sector led by a sheikh. The Janjaweed militia attacking groups, the forms of ADS team identified all sectors in the camps and attacks, their particular reported targets, the sampled them proportionately by size and eth- density of settlement clusters, measures of rebel nicity. They then sampled “households” and activity (supplemented with a media study adults within them randomly for interviews. measure), and reports of hearing the racial epi- Because camps and settlements were organized thets described above. around sheiks, their social geography reflected We next describe the dependent measure of the settlement clusters (hereafter “settlements”) severity of victimization. Descriptive details from which refugees fled. With the State for the independent variables are presented in Department’s geospatial technology, cartogra- Table 1 and the Appendix. Our measurement of severity of victimization phers, and translators, interviewers were able to uses a section of each survey that recorded up locate 90 percent of the originating settlements. to 20 victimization incidents. Respondents reported attacks on themselves, their families, and their settlements involving bombings, 9 Funding for the State Department survey flowed through the American Bar Foundation. The first author received permission and support to work with these data through his association with the American 10 This description of the ADS sample is based on Bar Foundation. We altered identifying characteris- interviews with the field supervisor and lead survey tics and used pseudonyms to protect ADS respon- methodologist for this study, as well as the detailed dents’ anonymity. account provided by the latter (Howard 2006). 884—–AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW

Delivered by Ingenta to : UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON Tue, 28 Apr 2009 05:04:14

Map 1. Settlement Map of Racial Epithets: Atrocities Documentation Survey, Darfur Refugees in Chad, Summer 2004 killing, rape, abduction, assault, property The victimization severity score is based on destruction, and theft leading to displacement. the common law seriousness (see Hindelang Every respondent reported for both themselves 1978) of the incidents reported. We aggregated and their settlements. the incidents experienced or witnessed by each COLLECTIVE DYNAMICS OF GENOCIDAL VICTIMIZATION IN DARFUR—–885

Table 1. Individual and Settlement Cluster more specific results based on numbers of Statistics: Atrocities Documentation reported killings and rapes,12 however, the Survey, Darfur Refugees in Chad, measurement properties are more attractive for Summer 2004 the severity scale than for the numerical count Mean SD scales. This is probably because of the limited opportunities for respondents to actually count Individual Level —Respondents’Attributes or even estimate these numbers. Chirot and ——Age 37.100 14.634 McCauley (2006) note that it is self-defeating ——Gender (Male = 1) .400 .491 to try to define mass murder in a precise numer- ——Zaghawa .527 .500 ical way. It is also impossible to gauge the exact ——Fur .055 .288 amount and value of property theft and destruc- ——Masalit .275 .447 tion. Meanwhile, the severity scale is nearly ——Jebal .045 .208 normal in its distribution, while the frequency —Attacking Groups counts are predictably skewed with many zeros. ——Janjaweed .100 .300 ——Sudanese .188 .391 The victimization severity scores range from 20 13 ——Sudanese and Janjaweed .672 .470 to 56, with an average score of just over 34. —Rebel Activity As noted below, the severity scale performs ——Rebels in Town .017 .130 well in terms of reliability. ——Missing Rebel Data .562 .496 —Particular Targets ——Women .070 .260 HIERARCHICAL LINEAR MODELS OF —Racial Intent GENOCIDE VICTIMIZATION IN ——Individual Racial Intent .343 .475 DARFUR —Attacks ——Bombing .829 .727 We use hierarchical linear models (HLM) ——First Peak .266 .442 (Raudenbush and Bryk 2002) to estimate vari- ——Second Peak .499Delivered .500 by Ingentaation in to outcomes : within and between settle- UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTONments, with adjustments for nonindependence —Victimization Severity 34.232Tue, 28 6.317 Apr 2009 05:04:14 resulting from clustering within settlements. Settlement Cluster Level For example, our final within-settlement model —Settlement Density .182 .151 of severity of victimization regresses individual- —Collective Racial Intent .312 .144 level reports of victimization severity by the —Bombing .861 .369 932 respondents on their individual reports of —Rebel News Accounts .318 .497 hearing racial epithets and other independent Note: N = 932 individuals (Level 1) and 22 settlement variables. Our between-settlement model clusters (Level 2). regresses the average victimization severity respondent in the settlement and assigned the en, shot, and stabbed. The woman witnessed dead in following values: five = reported killings, four the village, and her village was pillaged and = sexual violence or abductions, three = assaults, destroyed. She was displaced to Chad. two = property destruction or theft, and one = 12 Respondents reported an average of 1.72 rapes displacement.11 Below, we briefly summarize and 5.18 killings resulting from attacks on their set- tlements. 13 We explored sources of retrospective measure- ment error. It is plausible that less serious and less 11 To illustrate the coding, consider a Masalit frequent events occurring earlier in the time frame woman who scored 52. Sudanese troops and would be less fully recalled. However, the correlations Janjaweed militia attacked her village. Her report between the time since respondents fled Darfur and included 20 incidents from that day involving her, her the reported seriousness of victimization and fre- family, and her village. During the attack, she was quency of killings are respectively .017 and –.018 (p beaten, abducted, and raped; her father was beaten > .10). It is also plausible that older respondents and abducted; other village women were abducted, would have heard racial epithets less frequently, but with some held and others not, but they were beaten the correlation between age and epithets is .005 (p > and raped before being released. Another group of .10). The ADS interviews focused on recall of objec- women were raped. Additional villagers were beat- tive information (Hagan and Palloni 1986, 2006). 886—–AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW

scores for the 22 settlements—after the indi- ␤0j = ␪00 + ␪01 (collective racial intent) + vidual-level variables are taken into account— .... + U0j on the proportion of respondents who report ␪ having heard racial epithets and other variables where 00 is the overall average standardized ␪ in each of the settlements. victimization severity score, and 01 is the From the resulting joint analysis, we learn not regression coefficient of the effect of racial epi- only about individual-level sources of variation thets, measured as a settlement-level mean score, on total victimization. Additional settle- in victimization in Darfur, but also about the ment-level covariates are incorporated as further influence of differences in the aggregation and controls, and we include significant cross-level concentration of racial epithets between settle- interactions. Because the individual-level covari- ments on victimization, with the individual- ates at Level 1 are centered about the sample level variables controlled. It is in this sense that means, ␤0j is the standardized mean total vic- we regard the aggregation and concentration of timization in a settlement after covariates have racial epithets in this analysis as a collective been controlled. U0j is the settlement-level error measure (Link 3b, Figure 1) of the influence of term, assumed to be normally distributed with 14 racial motivation and intent on victimization. a variance of ␶. The within-settlement model of victimiza- A preliminary concern is the reliability of tion severity as our ultimate outcome is the fol- the outcome measure of severity of victimiza- lowing: tion that results from partitioning of the variance within and between settlements. The settlement ␤ ⌺ ␤ ε Victimization Severityij = 0j + ⌺ qXqij + ij measure of differences in this outcome yields a q=1 .733 degree of reliability. The intraclass corre- ␤ where 0j is the intercept and Xqij is the value lation is .23 and statistically significant, indi- of covariate q associated with respondent i in cating that about one-fourth of the victimization ␤ settlement-level j. q denotes the partialDelivered effects by Ingentaseverity to scale : ’s variance is between settlements, on victimization severity of a respondentUNIVERSITY’s age OF WASHINGTONcomparable to that found in analogous multi- and gender; rebels in the town; missingTue, 28 rebel Apr 2009level 05:04:14 studies of organizations or schools. data; attacking Janjaweed, Sudanese, or com- bined Sudanese and Janjaweed forces; victim- MULTILEVEL STRUCTURAL MODELS ized Zaghawa, Fur, Masalit, or Jebal groups; OF GENOCIDE VICTIMIZATION bombing; targeting of women; attacks during the first or second displacement peaks; and hearing We first consider several models of the medi- racial epithets. The error term εij is the unique ating concept of racial motivation and intent at contribution of each individual, which is the center of our critical collective frame analy- assumed to be independently and normally dis- sis. The dehumanizing racial epithets represent tributed with constant variance ␴2. the constructionist framing of the conflict in The between-settlement equation is the fol- Darfur into “us” and “them” motivational terms. lowing: Chirot and McCauley (2006:73) write that “hate seems to us best understood as an extreme form of negative identification.” This extreme nega- tive identification is racially dehumanizing. 14 We adapted a dictionary definition of aggrega- Because our measure of racial motivation and tion as “a combined whole” and a military definition intent is a binary report of whether a respondent of concentration as the massing of forces in a par- heard shouted racial epithets during the attack ticular area in preparation for planned operations. Our that preceded flight to the refugee camp, we point in linking these terms is to focus on both the estimate the models with the logistic regres- joining of the epithets and their targeted assembly in sion equations presented in Table 2. particular places in preparation for attacks. This is a classically sociological collective process resulting in The first of these equations shows that these settlement-wide violent consequences greater than epithets are heard significantly more often when could be expected from solely individual shouts of Sudanese and Janjaweed forces are combined in racial epithets. The collective consequences include an attack. This suggests the Sudanese forces’ the heightened vulnerability and fanatical fury that primary instrumental role and is consistent with lead to genocidal violence. Chirot and McCauley’s (2006:8) proposition COLLECTIVE DYNAMICS OF GENOCIDAL VICTIMIZATION IN DARFUR—–887

Table 2. Individual and Settlement Cluster Level Logistic Regression Models of Racial Intent: Atrocities Documentation Survey, Darfur Refugees in Chad, Summer 2004

Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 b(se) Odds b(se) Odds b(se) Odds Individual Level —Respondent ——Age –.005 .994 –.005 .995 –.005 .995 (.005) (.005) (.005) ——Gender .660** 1.934 .666*** 1.947 .685*** 1.983 (.178) (.169) (.170) ——Zaghawa .528 1.696 .565 1.759 (.296) (.344) ——Fur .890* 2.434 –.834 2.302 (.430) (.420) ——Masalit .733** 2.081 .692** 1.996 (.281) (.285) ——Jebal .819** 2.268 .899** 2.445 (.325) (.356) —Attacking Groups ——Janjaweed .194 1.214 .186 1.205 .302 1.353 (.331) (.338) (.328) ——Sudanese –.316 .729 –.397 .672 –.348 .706 (.340) (.324) (.302) ——Sudanese and Janjaweed Delivered.517** by Ingenta 1.677 to : .410* 1.508 .467* 1.595 UNIVERSITY(.197) OF WASHINGTON(.209) (.229) —Rebel Activity Tue, 28 Apr 2009 05:04:14 ——Rebels in Settlement –.977* .376 –.946* .388 –.941 .390 (.457) (.493) (.502) ——Missing Rebel Data –.352 .703 –.289 .749 –.275 .760 (.225) (.251) (.250) —Particular Targets ——Women .296 1.322 .243 1.275 .239 1.269 (.347) (.369) (.376) —Attacks ——First Peak –.628*** .534 –.649*** .523 (.186) (.186) ——Second Peak .243 1.275 .232 1.261 (.232) (.234)

Settlement Cluster Level —Settlement Density .603 1.828 (.796) —Rebel News .138 1.142 (.335) Cross-Level Interaction —Sudanese and Janjaweed ϫ Rebel News .190 1.209 (.301) —Sudanese and Janjaweed ϫ Settlement Density 2.063** 7.873 (.845) Intercept –.725 –.725* –.736 Note: N = 932 individuals (Level 1) and 22 settlement clusters (Level 2). * p < .05; ** p < .01; *** p < .001 888—–AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW that “large scale genocides need the organiza- effect of settlement density with the combined tional power of government,” as anticipated by involvement of Sudanese and Janjaweed forces Link 1 and the role of the state in Figure 1. on the hearing of racial epithets. This concen- The first equation also shows that rebels are tration of racial motivation and intent in dense- less likely to be in the villages where racial epi- ly populated areas is consistent with the thets are heard. This negative finding strongly population perspective on group competition suggests direct racial targeting of civilians rather for life-sustaining resources indicated at the than of suspected rebels, which would be expect- origin of the model in Figure 1. Figure 2 clari- ed in a more legally justifiable self-defense, fies the meaning of this cross-level interaction, counter-insurgency strategy.15 One survivor showing average estimates of combined interviewed in the ADS survey noted the dif- Sudanese and Janjaweed attacks on racial epi- ference between the current conflict and past thets at the higher and lower quartile levels of conflicts: “Ten years ago there was fighting settlement density. between Zaghawa and Arab. But this is a tar- Recall that we measured both of the inter- geting of civilians, this is different. They want acting variables in Figure 2 in terms of variation to commit genocide.” from their sample means. The results indicate The second model in Table 2 introduces the that increased population density makes racial African groups expected to be targets of the epithets more likely when Sudanese and racial epithets in Link 2 of Figure 1 and during Janjaweed forces attack together. When the the two peak periods of attacks. Three of the four Sudanese or Janjaweed forces attack separate- African groupings—the Fur, Masalit, and ly, increased population density diminishes the Jebal—are significantly more likely to have likelihood of hearing racial epithets. The effect heard racial epithets, while only the Zaghawa are of the combination of forces in the higher quar- not. This may be because racial epithets are tiles of population density approximately dou- more likely to be heard in ground attacks, and Delivered by Ingentables the to hearing : of racial epithets from about 20 a separate analysis indicates thatUNIVERSITY the Zaghawa OF WASHINGTONpercent to over 40 percent. As anticipated by were subjected to bombing more oftenTue, than 28 Aprthe 2009Links 05:04:14 1 and 2 in Figure 1, this is compelling evi- other groups. Meanwhile, controlling for the dence of the instrumental role of the Sudanese African group memberships in the second state in intensifying the expression of a social- model reduces the effect of the combined ly constructed racial motivation and intent by Sudanese and Janjaweed attacks by about 20 joining with the Janjaweed in attacks on dense- percent, offering further evidence that these ly settled areas of Darfur. joined forces instrumentally directed their Table 3 explores the socially constructed attacks with a socially constructed racial focus influence of racial motivation and intent—meas- on these particular African groups. Finally, a sig- ured at the individual and settlement levels by nificant negative effect from the first peak of racial epithets—in increasing the severity of attacks suggests that racialization of the attacks genocidal victimization. The OLS regression increased during the conflict, which is consis- equations estimated in Table 3 take into account tent with the emergence of a crisis frame in statistically the influence of individual-level Darfur. correlates previously included in Table 2, as The third model estimated in Table 2 adds well as bombing, on the victimization severity. both settlement-level and cross-level interac- Model 1 again supports predictions following tions to the analysis. There are no significant from Link 1 in Figure 1. This model shows the main effects for either settlement density or instrumentally combined salience of Sudanese rebel news (i.e., indicated by media reports). The and Janjaweed forces, this time in predicting vic- bottom panel of Table 2, however, indicates that timization severity. To a lesser degree, Sudanese there is a significant cross-level interaction forces acting alone also significantly increase this victimization, while Janjaweed forces act- ing alone do not. These results document the 15 Table 2 also indicates that men are more likely leading role of the Sudanese state in the geno- than women to hear the epithets (B = .660, p < .001). cidal violence. Meanwhile, rebels’ presence in This is probably because women are less likely to a settlement does not significantly increase vic- know Arabic. timization severity. This null finding under- COLLECTIVE DYNAMICS OF GENOCIDAL VICTIMIZATION IN DARFUR—–889

Figure 2. Cross-Level Interaction of Separate and Combined Forces with Settlement Density (mean centered) on Individual Racial Intent mines the self-defense, counter-insurgencyDelivered jus- by Ingentaremoved, to : sexual organs cut off, and skin tification for the attacks, and UNIVERSITYit is consistent OF WASHINGTONremoved (see also Human Rights Watch 2005). with comments from respondents likeTue, the 28 fol-Apr 2009 Women05:04:14 are also a specifically targeted group. lowing: “My village was not defended and how Respondents report that the Janjaweed and could we defend? There was no equality in Sudanese military troops specifically targeted power. There were no rebels nearby.” women by raping and abducting them. Like the The dummy variable representing the first racial epithets, the words and phrases spoken by two weeks of the survey when rebel questions the perpetrators during attacks provide insight were not asked (i.e., the missing rebel data vari- into their motivation and intent. One respondent able) indicates that less severe victimization reports hearing the perpetrators say, “We will was reported during this period. This implies take your women and make them ours. We will that asking these questions in the early weeks change the race.” Another respondent was raped, would not have resulted in the rebel variable branded, and told, “You are now Arab wives.” being significant. Finally, Model 1 shows that In these examples, the intention is to change the severity of adult victimization decreases with race of the offspring. age, as is true more generally in crime research The effect of combined Sudanese and (see Hirschi and Gottfredson 1983). Janjaweed forces is reduced by about 15 percent Model 2 introduces the specific African in the second equation, while the Sudanese groups as socially constructed targets, as well force effect is essentially unchanged. This again as the targeting of women, bombing, the peak suggests the instrumental role of the Sudanese attack measures, and the measure of individual- in targeting and unleashing victimization when level racial motivation and intent. Again, as they attacked in conjunction with the Janjaweed, predicted by Link 2 in Figure 1, the Fur, Masalit, as anticipated in Link 1 of Figure 1. The two and Jebal are at significantly higher risk for peak attack variables are significant. Finally, more severe victimization, while the Zaghawa the individual-level racial epithet measure of are not. In the open-ended survey narratives, the racial motivation and intent has a strong and Fur respondents report extreme dehumanizing highly significant effect on victimization sever- experiences of torture: people were cut, brains ity, as predicted in Link 3a of Figure 1. 890—–AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW

Table 3. Individual and Settlement Cluster Models of Victimization Severity: Atrocities Documentation Survey, Darfur Refugees in Chad, Summer 2004

Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4 Model 5 Model 6 b(se) b(se) b(se) b(se) b(se) b(se) Individual Level —Respondent ——Age –.005** –.004* –.004* –.004* –.004* –.004* (.002) (.002) (.002) (.002) (.002) (.002) ——Gender –.057 –.138** –.140** –.132* –.130* –.136** (.056) (.055) (.056) (.058) (.059) (.058) ——Zaghawa –.023 –.023 (.105) (.104) ——Fur .321** .257 (.125) (.153) ——Masalit .265** .012 (.099) (.167) ——Jebal .224*** .256*** .174*** .261*** .214*** (.050) (.060) (.031) (.047) (.056) —Attacking Groups ——Janjaweed .157 .162 .144 .145 .143 .137 (.178) (.183) (.184) (.194) (.189) (.191) ——Sudanese .375** .386** .372** .375** .365** .374** (.156) (.150) (.151) (.151) (.151) (.152) ——Sudanese and Janjaweed .509*** .432*** .422*** .428*** .416*** .425*** (.110) (.116) (.117) (.121) (.123) (.125) —Rebel Activity ——Rebels in Settlement .138 .228 .229 .215 .204 .210 (.239) (.209) (.211) (.212) (.217) (.218) ——Missing Rebel Data Delivered–.330** by–.306*** Ingenta to–.295*** : –.314*** –.290** –.286** UNIVERSITY(.111) OF (.085) WASHINGTON (.085) (.094) (.089) (.088) —Particular Targets Tue, 28 Apr 2009 05:04:14 ——Women .448*** .442*** .467*** .462*** .457*** (.086) (.087) (.093) (.095) (.094) —Attacks ——First Peak .223** .216** .210** .189** .199** (.078) (.079) (.078) (.075) (.078) ——Second Peak .190* .189* .189* .211** .220** (.093) (.091) (.091) (.090) (.090) ——Bombing .061 .067 .054 .051 .058 (.045) (.045) (.043) (.037) (.041) —Racial Intent ——Individual Racial Intent .387*** .387*** .394*** .365*** .367*** (.067) (.087) (.085) (.083) (.084)

Settlement Cluster Level —Settlement Density .686* .449 .243 (.316) (.299) (.405) —Bombing –.137 (.288) —Rebel News –.032 (.115) —Collective Racial Intent 1.225* 1.107* 1.066* (.565) (.553) (.518)

Cross-Level Interaction —Bombing ϫ Collective Racial Intent .781** .747* (.306) (.341) —Bombing ϫ Settlement Density .131 .133 (.156) (.166) Intercept –.023 –.011 –.077 –.013 –.012 –.014 Note: N = 932 individuals (Level 1) and 22 settlement areas (Level 2). * p < .05; ** p < .01; *** p < .001 COLLECTIVE DYNAMICS OF GENOCIDAL VICTIMIZATION IN DARFUR—–891

Model 3 in Table 3 adds the mean settle- instrumental joining of the Sudanese with the ment-level racial epithet measure of collective Janjaweed in the attacks drives the racial epithet racial motivation and intent, which, as predict- measure of racial motivation and intent, this ed in Link 3b, is statistically significant. The cross-level interaction further points to the addition of only this variable in Model 3 has the instrumental role of the Sudanese state. Model further effect of reducing the size and elimi- 6 demonstrates that including both individual- nating the significance of the African Fur and and settlement-level measures of rebel activity Masalit group measures. Consistent with the in the villages does not account for these effects. focus of our critical collective framing per- The cross-level interaction of Sudanese spective, this means that settlement-level dif- bombing with collective racial motivation and ferences in collective racial motivation and intent (measured with settlement-level differ- intent account for the greater severity of vic- ences in racial epithets) is particularly striking timization of the Fur and Masalit groups in evidence of the instrumental use of state power Darfur. Further analysis at the settlement level to divide and victimize the socially construct- can add clarity to this finding. To maintain the ed identification of subordinate target groups. robustness of the significance tests, we removed The impact of this cross-level interaction is fur- the African group measures that are statistical- ther clarified with the graphical capacity of ly insignificant with the inclusion of the racial HLM in Figure 3. motivation and intent variable in the model. As in Figure 2, we measure both of the inter- Models 4 and 5 in Table 3 bring settlement acting variables in Figure 3 in terms of variation density into the victimization analysis. When from their sample means. At the lower quartiles settlement density is introduced alone at the of collective racial motivation and intent, the settlement level, it is statistically significant. effect of increased bombing is associated with This indicates that severity of victimization decreasing levels of victimization severity. In the increases in densely settled areas of DarfurDelivered—the by Ingentahigher to quartiles : of collective racial intent, areas the population perspectiveUNIVERSITY argues have OF WASHINGTONincreased bombing elevates the severity of vic- the greatest opportunities and incentivesTue, 28 Aprfor 2009timization. 05:04:14 We previously argued that the attacks and where resources are potentially the Sudanese government instrumentally directed most strained. Recall too, however, that the the Janjaweed forces and channeled their social- sequence in Figure 1 indicates that collective ly constructed racial hostility toward African racial motivation and intent is a crucial and groups as a means of more effectively gaining socially constructed mediating mechanism control over the Darfur region, partly out of through which settlement density would exer- insecurity and fear that this region was escap- cise its exogenous influence. ing government control (see Flint and de Waal Our data uniquely reflect the respective 2005). Figure 3 supplements Table 3 in show- exogenous and endogenous roles of population ing how in densely settled areas, the concen- density and racial motivation and intent. When tration of bombing and collective racial hostility the main effect of collective racial motivation against specific African groups, such as the Fur and intent is added alone or in cross-level com- and Masalit, produces an elevated severity of bination with bombing, the effect of settlement genocidal victimization.16 The fact that the gov- density is reduced by about one-third or more ernment directed the bombing and enlisted the and becomes nonsignificant. The mediating effect of collective racial motivation and intent in removing the significance of the effect of settlement density on severity of victimization 16 Although reported frequencies of killings and is striking evidence of the salience of race as the rapes are less reliable than the severity scale, the mediating—Link 3b—mechanism in this results of using these measures are interesting. The cross-level interaction effect of collective racial moti- conflict. vation and intent and bombing is stronger and more The cross-level interaction effect of collective significant when numbers of killings is substituted racial intent with bombing on victimization for the severity scale as the outcome. However, this severity adds another dimension to these results. cross-level interaction is weaker and nonsignificant Because the bombing is entirely under Sudanese for numbers of rapes (both killings and rapes are state control, and because we saw earlier that the estimated from 1 to 10 or more). For rape, the main 892—–AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW

Figure 3. Cross-Level Interaction of Collective Racial Intent with Bombing on Victimization Severity Delivered by Ingenta to : UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON Tue, 28 Apr 2009 05:04:14 Janjaweed in racially animated attacks that militia organized) opportunity structures can intensified the severity of victimization indicates activate and advance collective action, organized that the Sudanese state intentionally took a com- criminality, and even genocidal victimization. mand role in the collective enactment and per- In genocides, state entrepreneurs often recruit petration of genocide, as hypothesized with the local agents who possess the social efficacy combination of links identified in Figure 1. (Matsueda 2007) needed to transform individ- ual initiative into collective action. Authorities’ LINK 2: LOCALLY-ORGANIZED activation of ethnic attacks from “above” requires locally led “resonance from below” ETHNOPOLITICAL ENTREPRENEURS (Mamdani 2007). OF RACIAL DEHUMANIZATION By further incorporating Matsueda’s (2007) We turn finally to the interstitial role of local collective action approach, we address the clas- leadership in our model, which we illustrate sic question of how authorities enlist civilians with further narratives from the ADS inter- in locally organized and targeted mass atrocities. views. As Mertonian strain theorists (e.g., Official and unofficial community leaders in Cloward and Ohlin 1960; Messner and Darfur, such as Musa Hilal, effectively organ- Rosenfeld 1993) emphasize, and as anticipated ized Arab civilians into “war according to the in our discussion of political process theory, crisis script.” In this kind of “us” and “them” the integration of legitimate (e.g., government script, “once the young man ‘took out a gun’he authorized) with illegitimate (e.g., gang and became encapsulated in a quasi military unit subject to peer solidarity and ethnic loyalty” (Oberschall 2000:997–98; see also Scheper- effect of collective racial motivation and intent Hughes and Bourgois 2004). remains salient. Note that while bombs obviously In Darfur, authorities integrated local out- can kill, only persons can rape. law Janjaweed militia with the reservist Public COLLECTIVE DYNAMICS OF GENOCIDAL VICTIMIZATION IN DARFUR—–893

Defense Forces of the Armed Forces and the Hilal, with Harun’s support, rallied attacks on Police (Office of the Prosecutor 2007:40). black African villages with a collective vocab- Locally-organized indoctrination included ulary of dehumanizing motivation and intent instruction in “us” and “them” distinctions that that was racially framed.17 More specifically, an escalated from demeaning and degrading to eyewitness from the ADS survey reported see- dehumanizing characterizations. These includ- ing Hilal speak to a mixed crowd of Arabs and ed attributions of subordinate, slave, and sub- black Africans in June 2003 in a market town human statuses. Racial epithets constituted the near a militia training camp. Hilal arrived in a hooks for the dehumanization leading to geno- four-wheel drive car with tinted windows and cide. The incentive was clear, for as Dower a mounted machine gun. An interviewer sum- (1986:89) brutally explains and our analysis marized the eyewitness account: starkly confirms, “it is .|.|. easier to kill ani- mals than fellow humans.” Musa Hilal said he was sent by the Government of Narrative descriptions of attacks recorded in Sudan, and he told the people that we are going to kill all the blacks in this area, and that if you kill the ADS interviews and information from the people, nobody will be prosecuted. Also if you legal brief of the Office of the Prosecutor (2007) burn [i.e., homes], nobody will prosecute or “ques- specifically demonstrate how the racial framing tion” you. Animals you find are yours.|.|.|. He said of the political opportunity structure in the he will clear the land. Darfur genocide was locally mobilized. The first of two major government offensives began Hilal was accompanied by a man who appeared in mid-2003 when the locally infamous Arab to be a government official and who explained leader Musa Hilal was released from prison to Hilal’s recent arrest and return to North Darfur: organize militias. Hilal and other militia lead- He wasn’t from the area. He said Musa Hilal had ers—including Hamid Dawai, Ali Kushayb, and been arrested, “but we brought him back for your Abdullah Shineibat—were frequentlyDelivered identi- by Ingentasafety. to” He: instructed the people to “understand” fied by eyewitnesses in the ADSUNIVERSITY interviews. OF WASHINGTONwhat Musa Hilal said, “to obey his orders,” and to Until recently, Arab nomadic groupsTue, traversed 28 Apr 2009 use05:04:14 him as a “reference.” a changing landscape of diminished life This eyewitness provided accounts of subse- chances. Almost overnight, socially efficacious quent attacks and burnings. (Matsueda 2007) local sheiks such as Hilal, Another ADS respondent was certain of Dawai, Kushayb, and Shineibat were newly Hilal’s identity, recognizing him from prior empowered by the Sudanese state as leaders of interactions. This respondent recalled standing Janjaweed militias. They became personal in the middle of the market when Hilal arrived embodiments of the kind of mobility that can with armed men. Hilal announced that “the follow from the integration of legitimate and government gave me the order and I came here. illegitimate opportunity structures in a genoci- dal setting. The government gave me cars and uniforms. The These militia leaders organized attacks in government gave me the order to start killing the which racial epithets were the collectively people here—all the blacks from here to Karnoi framed vocabulary of motive and intent. Map and Tine and up” (see Maps 1 and 2). Hilal 2 shows the approximate areas of their opera- indicated that he was told to “kill all the blacks tions. These are also the areas with high reports in the area” and that his forces should “give the of racial epithets and attacks, as we saw in Map Arab people freedom” by “clear[ing] the land.” 1 and the quantitative analyses. Two additional ADS respondents described The ICC Office of the Prosecutor (2007) Hilal’s training camp. The first respondent locat- identified Ahmad Harun, then a Deputy ed the camp near Misteriha, and the second Minister in charge of the “Darfur Security described, in racially explicit terms, the threat Desk,” as the official responsible for mobiliz- ing local Janjaweed militia leaders like Hilal. Harun had previously mobilized tribes in the 17 Several sources (see Flint and de Waal 2005:106; 1990s in the Kordofan area to the east of Darfur. Steidle and Wallace 2007:188) also cite documentary Beginning in 2003, he mobilized Janjaweed evidence of state instigation and authorization of militias in Darfur. these racialized attacks led by Hilal. 894—–AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW

Delivered by Ingenta to : UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON Tue, 28 Apr 2009 05:04:14

Map 2. Janjaweed Militia Leaders’ Areas of Operation posed by the camp. The interviewer summa- weapons.|.|.|. During the training, the Arabs rized her story: shopped at the market in the black villages and they said they were going to kill all the blacks.|.|.|. On She lived in a nearby village .|.|. where Musa Hilal the 26th day of the training, someone spoke over trained his men. They trained there for 25 days with the microphone. He said that you have trained for COLLECTIVE DYNAMICS OF GENOCIDAL VICTIMIZATION IN DARFUR—–895

25 days and now you should kill the people in the Janjaweed forces on black African groups in nine villages nearby.|.|.|. While she was fleeing, she Darfur. These racial expressions played an ele- was chased and caught by men.|.|.|. The women vated role in areas densely settled by African were raped. groups, and individual and collective expres- The interviewer reported that the respondent sions of racial motivation and intent increased was obviously traumatized. the severity of genocidal victimization. These The Office of the Prosecutor’s (2007) pres- findings, and further evidence that Sudanese entation of evidence for charges against Harun bombing associated with the shouting of racial and Kushayb documents a July 2003 speech epithets increased the severity of genocide vic- Harun gave in Darfur with Hilal, in which he timization, support the claim that the Sudanese implies protection for attacks on racially-tar- state’s Arab supremacist ideology was an impor- geted African villagers: tant source of the dehumanization process that led to genocide in Darfur. On that day, Harun’s speech was preceded by that of the notorious militia/Janjaweed leader Musa We found no evidence that the presence of Hilal. Hilal’s speech was characterized by the wit- rebel groups is associated with severity of vic- nesses who heard it as “very racist.” .|.|. Hilal’s timization, whereas there is significant evidence remarks were followed by Harun’s announcement that the victimization of African groups by the that the President had handed him the Darfur Sudanese state is militarily unjustifiable as Security Desk and that he had the power and counter-insurgency against rebel attacks. Such authority to kill and forgive .|.|. in Darfur. Harun findings question primordial and counter-insur- himself indicated that he spent more than four gency explanations while supporting aspects months in Darfur. (P. 53) of the instrumental, population–resource, con- Harun was present at a meeting near Nyla structionist, and cognitive perspectives that form when a militia/Janjaweed leader boasted that the foundation of a critical collective framing the Arab tribes “can wipe out the areasDelivered of the by Ingentaaccount to of : genocidal victimization. Fur, Zaghawa and Masalit in UNIVERSITYa matter of one OF WASHINGTONThere is especially strong evidence that racial month.” Harun was heavily involvedTue, in the 28 dis- Apr 2009motivation 05:04:14 and intent, expressed with racial tribution of weapons and money and the devel- epithets during attacks, formed a consequential opment of training camps. He reportedly had an crisis frame in Darfur. This dehumanization “unlimited and unaudited” budget, and he process placed black African groups in Darfur repeatedly said in speeches that he held the outside a bounded universe of moral obligation power “to kill or forgive whoever” in Darfur and left them vulnerable to targeted genocidal (Office of the Prosecutor 2007:53–70). victimization. Treatment of groups as dehu- Harun encouraged attacks on civilian popu- manized and contemptible makes them vulner- lations he associated with rebels, and he said able to displacement and destruction. We found they were ready “to kill three quarters of Darfur compelling evidence that collective processes of in order to allow one quarter to live.” His defense racial motivation and intent influenced the sever- of the indiscriminate policy was that the “rebels ity of victimization across settlements, above infiltrate the villages” and thus the villages “are and beyond this influence at the individual level, like water to fish.” Harun encouraged taking and that this collective frame mediated the con- from “all the Fur and what they had,” which he centration of attacks on densely settled areas and characterized as “booty,” and further identified particular African groups. This evidence docu- the Fur, Zaghawa, and Masalit as the primary ments the kinds of organized social processes targets of attack (Office of the Prosecutor increasingly emphasized in international crim- 2007:53–60). inal law and is relevant to a social scientific determination that genocide did occur in Darfur. Specifically, our findings are consistent with COLLECTIVE DEHUMANIZATION IN a sociological theory of what international law CRIMINALLY ORGANIZED ACTION recognizes as “criminal organization,” “common In sum, dehumanizing expressions of racial purpose,” and “joint criminal enterprise.” motivation and intent in the form of racial epi- International criminal prosecutions are saturat- thets most commonly occurred during joint ed with assumptions about collective action attacks of the Sudanese government with Arab (Meierhenrich 2006). A notable example is the 896—–AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW prosecution of Slobodan Milosevic (recently reported phrases, and the violence and vic- aborted due to his death) for his involvement in timization were specifically recorded in the a “joint criminal enterprise” to commit genocide style used by police investigators taking state- in the former Yugoslavia (Hagan 2003). ments for use in court. Osiel (2005:1768), a prominent legal schol- As a follow-up effort to obtain further cor- ar, emphasizes the need to better understand roboration for our findings, the first author con- the “kind of influence .|.|. participants in such ducted interviews with the Darfur Investigation criminality actually exercise over one another, Team at the new International Criminal Court through what organizational devices and inter- in The Hague during three weeks in October actional dynamics.” Our analysis of the emer- 2006 (more than 100 hours of fieldwork). gence of collective racial motivation and intent During a particularly instructive interview, the provides direct evidence of the “interactional African Head of the Investigation Team received dynamics” involved in Darfur. The further soci- a cell-phone call from an investigator the first ological backdrop to this state-organized crim- author had interviewed the previous day in The inal enterprise is the integration of legitimate Hague and who now was interviewing a government military and illegitimate paramili- Janjaweed defector in London. Within weeks, tary opportunity structures. These structures the BBC released a parallel interview with an were built around Arab Janjaweed militias in anonymous Janjaweed defector. Either the two Darfur by leadership figures partially identi- interviews were with the same defector or they fied in Map 2. corroborated one another’s accounts. The inter- In the interest of maintaining its control over view described much that is statistically docu- Darfur, the Sudanese government integrated mented in our data analysis, for example, that the Janjaweed into its military strategy. The key Janjaweed fighters were instructed with racial to this integration was that the enlisted and epithets and orders such as “kill the blacks,” that the Janjaweed did not fight without Sudanese newly empowered Arab Janjaweed forcesDelivered were by Ingenta to : members of landless nomadic UNIVERSITYgroups increas- OF WASHINGTONorders, that Sudanese bombing characteristi- ingly in need of arable land. This isTue, the 28popu- Apr 2009cally 05:04:14 preceded Janjaweed ground attacks, that lation–resource-based ecological context of a abductions and rapes were common, and that collective action and opportunity structure that civilians, more than rebels, were the intended 18 uses an “us” and “them” crisis framing of col- targets of the attacks. This interview also lective racial motivation and intent to direct the includes an important assertion of repeated vis- unfolding of genocidal victimization. Our find- its to the training camps by a Sudanese Minister ings indicate that racism was used in Darfur as of the Interior. an instrument for the collective framing of Such evidence about the conflict in Darfur organized terror that amplified the severity of might make its prosecution as racial genocide genocidal victimization. In Coleman’s terms, seem certain. Between 200,000 and 400,000, this socially organized and instigated terror was maybe more, have died (Hagan and Palloni a transformative “Type 3” process with the fea- 2006; Hagan et al. 2005), and 2 to 3 million peo- tures of a killing frenzy, or fanatical fury, which ple have been forcibly displaced. Yet neither linked targeted racial motivation and intent to the European Union, which is the main funding genocidal violence. source for the new International Criminal Court There are, of course, limitations to the data (ICC), nor the UN Commission of Inquiry in analyzed in this article. The data come from Darfur (2005), which recommended referral of surviving refugees whose former settlements the Darfur case to the ICC, nor the first brief were close enough to the Chad border to allow filed by the ICC Office of the Prosecutor (2007) their escape. There is notable evidence, called this conflict genocide. They instead char- though, that these data are representative (see acterized Darfur as a lesser crime against the Appendix). Attacks were reported retro- humanity. A second brief filed by the ICC spectively, and it would be preferable to have separate sources for the measures of racial epithets and victimization. Nonetheless, legal- 18 The interview can be heard at ly-trained interviewers made special efforts to http://news.bbc.co.uk/nolavconsole/ukfs_news/ and document the racial epithets in precisely read at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6060856.stm. COLLECTIVE DYNAMICS OF GENOCIDAL VICTIMIZATION IN DARFUR—–897

Prosecutor in 2008 charged Sudanese President co-director of the Center on Law and Globalization Al-Bashir with genocide, although with an eth- at the American Bar Foundation. His most recent nic rather than racial focus. books are Justice in the Balkans: Prosecuting War It is possible that racism is not only a signif- Crimes at The Hague Tribunal (University of Chicago icant force in genocidal victimization, but is Press 2003) and Northern Passage: American Vietnam War Resisters in Canada (Harvard also present in the language and naming of con- University Press 2001), which received the 2004 flicts. Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois (2004:21) Albert J. Reiss Award from the Crime, Law, and emphasize that “collective denial” and “mis- Deviance Section of the American Sociological recognition” are prerequisites for genocide. Association. He is the coauthor, with Alberto Palloni, Misrecognition is Bourdieu’s term for collective of “Death in Darfur” in Science, September 2006, denials so deeply embedded in our socially and, with Wenona Rymond-Richmond, of Darfur and induced unconsciousness that they become a the Crime of Genocide (Cambridge University 2009). matter or habit, what Bourdieu called habitus Wenona Rymond-Richmond is an Assistant (Bourdieu 1977). We noted distinctive paral- Professor at the University of Massachusetts- lels between genocidal victimization in Europe Amherst. In addition to the coauthored book with and Africa. Yet, perhaps with regret born of his Hagan on Darfur, her areas of interest include urban own misrecognition as the UN Secretary- sociology, criminology, race/ethnicity, inequality, General during the genocide in Rwanda, qualitative methods, and law. For her dissertation, she Boutros Boutros-Ghali (2004) cogently conducted qualitative research in a public housing observed that “a genocide in Africa has not development undergoing transformation to better received the same attention that genocide in understand how geographic space matters for indi- viduals in violent neighborhoods. Her recent articles Europe or genocide in Turkey or genocide in include “Transforming Communities: Formal and other parts of the world. There is still this kind Informal Mechanisms of Social Control” in The of basic discrimination against the African peo- Many Colors of Crime and “The Criminology of ple and the African problems.” We suggest that Genocide: The Death and Rape of Darfur,” coau- the rejection of the role played by raceDelivered in Darfur, by Ingentathored withto : John Hagan, in Criminology, 2005. again led by the UN in itsUNIVERSITY influential OF WASHINGTON Tue, 28 Apr 2009 05:04:14 Commission of Inquiry on Darfur, is a form of METHODOLOGICAL APPENDIX misrecognition and denial by an institutionally embedded and culturally powerful voice using SAMPLE SELECTION ISSUES “techniques of neutralization” (Alvarez 1997; Although death is a source of selectivity in our Sykes and Matza 1957). data, it is mitigated by individuals’reports about Like Raphael Lemkin, who coined the word their villages and the HLM modeling of the genocide, Edwin Sutherland argued that it is collective violence and its effects. Furthermore, important to identify white-collar crime as a because the victims are almost exclusively black crime, for purposes of both public discourse Africans victimized at the hands of Arabs, and and scientific study. Sutherland understood the because this victimization increases in associ- importance of applying probabilistic rather than ation with state involvement and racial epithets, criminal law reasoning to white-collar crime the potential mortality bias is almost certainly and of incorporating a collective conceptual- either negligible or conservative with regard to ization for its explanation. Genocide demands the relationship of victimization to state involve- the same understanding. Legal reasoning has obscured the recognition of genocidal victim- ment and racial epithets. ization and allowed an underestimation of the We compared the population pyramids we role of the state in its collective racial framing. constructed from this refugee sample with sam- As noted at the outset, Fein (1990:7) believes ples from displacement camps inside Darfur sociologists are inhibited by a lack of boldness (Hagan and Rymond-Richmond 2007: Figures on this topic. More than 50 years after 5 and 6). These pyramids are similar in terms Sutherland added white-collar crime to the of age and gender composition. For example, in agenda of public sociology, it is time to do the both Chad and Darfur there is a disproportion- same with Lemkin’s concept of genocide. ate absence of fighting-age men who are dis- proportionately reported killed. There are thus John Hagan is John D. MacArthur Professor of no indications that the Chadian refugees differ Sociology and Law at Northwestern University and in significant ways from internally displaced 898—–AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW

Darfuris in the bordering areas of Sudan and in a respondent’s town or surrounding villages. Chad. Less than 2 percent of the sample reported a It is commonly said that the border between rebel presence, with these reports concentrated Chad and Darfur is literally “little more than a disproportionately in several northern settle- line in the sand.” Movement back and forth ments. Half of the sample were not asked this across this border is very common, which is why question and thus were coded zero. We includ- the State Department/USAID was interested in ed a variable reflecting these missing data. A investing nearly a million dollars in this survey media study identified seven of the settlements in Chad. It is also noteworthy that this sample as experiencing rebel activity, and this was includes both camps and resettlements, rather included as a cluster-level measure (Petersen and than camps alone. Finally, note that many of the Tullin 2006). The settlement-level correlation respondents in this survey are not victims in the between the respondent reports and the media sense of direct violent victimization. This is not survey classification is .4. We incorporate both “merely” a survey of victims, although all measures in our analyses. respondents are displaced. For that matter, There were two peak periods of displace- almost the entire black African population of ment in Darfur after February 2003 (Office of Darfur has been displaced, regardless of which the Prosecutor 2007: Annex 3). We include two side of the uncertain border they are on now. variables that indicate the first (June through This makes the displaced on either side of the August 2003) and second (December 2003 border an appropriate population to sample. through March 2004) peak months of the con- A much greater consideration than sample flict. The second peak is thought to include the selection bias is being able to ask sensitive ques- high point in Sudanese–Janjaweed attacks in tions, which the Sudanese government does not Darfur. want asked, about rape and pre-camp violence The survey provides considerable detail in in the internal displacement camps. DeliveredThis is the by Ingentarecording to :the shouting of racial epithets, our more important and unique valueUNIVERSITY added by the OF WASHINGTONmeasure of racial motivation and intent, during ADS data from the Chadian side ofTue, the border. 28 Apr 2009the 05:04:14 attacks. We recorded the content of the epi- thets as a detailed string variable, and we assigned each individual a binary code indicat- INDEPENDENT VARIABLE MEASURES ing the hearing of racial epithets. About one- Males make up 40 percent of the sample and third of the respondents reported racial epithets have an average age of 37 years. Females prob- during the attacks. These epithets were explic- ably predominate because they are more likely it and offer concrete, first-person evidence of to be raped yet survive. Nearly 10 percent of dehumanizing racial motivation and intent. respondents reported that women were specif- We analyze racial epithets at both the indi- ically targeted in the attacks. Just over half of vidual and mean settlement levels to indicate the African individuals self-identified as individual and collective racial motivation and Zaghawa group members, just over a quarter are intent predicted in Links 3a and 3b of Figure 1. Masalit, and Fur and Jebal represent about five The individual scores are binary “yes” or “no” percent each. reports of hearing racial epithets. The settle- We read and coded each survey narrative to ment scores are means of these reports, reflect- determine whether the attacking group was ing variation in the aggregation and made up of Janjaweed, Sudanese, or combined concentration of these dehumanizing racial epi- Sudanese and Janjaweed forces. About two- thets at the settlement level. thirds of the attacks were joint Sudanese and In addition to news of rebel activity in an Janjaweed operations, while nearly one-fifth area and the mean level of racial epithets, we involved only Sudanese and about one-tenth include the density of settlements as a third involved only the Janjaweed. The remaining cluster-level measure. The Darfur Investigation attacks form the omitted comparison group. Team at the ICC provided this measure to the Making the Janjaweed the omitted category first author. We use UN reports of the number produced similar substantive results. of settlements in an area as the numerator, with During the second two weeks of the survey, square kilometers of the area as the denomina- an item was added asking if there were rebels tor. We multiplied this measure of settlement COLLECTIVE DYNAMICS OF GENOCIDAL VICTIMIZATION IN DARFUR—–899 density per square kilometer by 10 to make its Boutros-Ghali, Boutros. 2004. Frontline interview. metric consistent with other measures in the Posted online April 1, 2004 (http://www.pbs.org/ analysis. wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/ghosts/themes/ The population–resource perspective does lessons.html). not regard settlement density as simply a con- Brodkin, Karen. 1998. How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America. trol variable, but rather as a meaningful meas- New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. ure of criminal opportunity and incentive Browning, Christopher. 1992. The Path to Genocide. (Cohen and Felson 1979; Osgood et al. 1996) Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. that reflects the presence of desirable property, Brubaker, Rogers. 1996. Nationalism Reframed: such as possessions, livestock, and the settled Nationhood and the National Question in the New land itself. Settlement of a land area effective- Europe. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University ly constitutes ownership in Darfur, and in a Press. time of desertification, access to settled land is Brubaker, Rogers and David Laitin. 1998. “Ethnic often a crucial resource for sustaining life. We and Nationalist Violence.” Annual Review of therefore expect that victimization will increase Sociology 24:423–52. Burton, John. 1991. “Development and Cultural in densely settled areas, where opportunities Genocide in the Sudan.” Journal of Modern and incentives are greatest and resources are African Studies 29:511–20. potentially the most strained. This hypothesis is Chalk, Frank and Kurt Jonassohn. 1990. The History consistent with the Malthusian view of popu- and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case lation growth that Diamond (2005) applies to the Studies. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Rwandan genocide. Chirot, Daniel and Jennifer Edwards. 2003. “Making Because bombing as a method of attack is Sense of the Senseless: Understanding Genocide.” both a means and a form of victimization, we Context 2(2):12–19. chose to treat bombing as an independent vari- Chirot, Daniel and Clark McCauley. 2006. Why Not able. Only the Sudanese state possesses planes Kill Them All? The Logic and Prevention of Mass Political Murder. Princeton, NJ: Princeton and bombs, and bombing is thereforeDelivered a unique by Ingenta to : University Press. measure of the state’s instrumentalUNIVERSITY role in geno- OF WASHINGTON Tue, 28 Apr 2009Cloward, 05:04:14 Richard and Lloyd Ohlin. 1960. cide. 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