THE [BIO]POLITICS OF GENOCIDE: AN AGAMBENIAN APPROACH

Bethany Rachel Elisabeth Page BArts (Hons)(Newcastle)

A thesis submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of the Doctor of Philosophy

July 2018 Newcastle Business School, Faculty of Business and Law The University of Newcastle, Australia

This research was supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarship I hereby certify that the work embodied in the thesis is my own work, conducted under normal supervision. This thesis contains no material which has been accepted, or is being examined, for the award of any other degree or diploma in any university or other tertiary institution and, to the best of my knowledge and belief, contains no material previously published or written by another person, except where due reference has been made in the text. I give consent to the final version of my thesis being made available worldwide when deposited in the University’s Digital Repository, subject to the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968.

ii

DEDICATED TO:

Brenda Faulkner (1923-2017)

-We did it nanna!!-

iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This PhD journey has definitely not been an easy one and this thesis would not have been in the slightest bit possible without the love, help and support from a myriad of people in my life. I would therefore like to express my utmost thanks to a number of friends and family who have encouraged me over the past four years, you do not know just how grateful I am for the support.

Firstly, I would like to thank my primary supervisor Professor Jim Jose. Jim, you had a very tough task to undertake and came on board as my primary at a very difficult and indeed crucial time within my thesis. Your guidance over the last 1 ½ - 2 years has been incredible and so very appreciated. I hope you realise, that without your support I don’t think I could have pulled this thesis together as well as I have. You really have been a tremendous help, guide and support to me over the last couple of years, and I have appreciated everything you’ve done to help me on this journey.

To my incredible man Stephen, you have absolutely no idea how much you have helped me throughout the years. You have encouraged me to strive for this PhD, and to keep pushing no matter how hard I was struggling. I know your eyes glazed over at times and you got tired of trying to explain what I was studying to your friends. But you put up with my daily “hey what do you think of this?”, and “does this sound ok to you?”, for which I will be ever grateful. Thank you for being such an encouragement and place of stability in my life, I love you very much.

To my mum Sue and my dad John. What can I say. You have been an amazing support to me over the years. Mum, you always told me I was capable of doing anything that I set my mind to and I know you have believed in me from the moment I said I was going to undertake this PhD. You are the most incredible mum – your kindness, caring and words of encouragement have helped me in some of the toughest times throughout this whole process. Dad, you are my quiet strength, I have constantly channelled your main word of wisdom “concentrate”, and I know that you’re proud of me no matter what. Thank you for your upbeat, positive attitude and constant ‘dad’ jokes keeping me entertained – I will never stop asking you if you’re a taxi driver!

iv To my amazing, incredible, witty and brilliant grandmother. Whilst unfortunately we lost you last year, I know you are smiling down on me as I complete this final work! You were always there for me, listening to my assignments in my undergrad, arguing with me on my honours thesis and providing discussion and insight on topics within my PhD. I always remember when I gave you my honours thesis as a gift, I called you to wish you Merry Christmas and the first thing you said to me was “Bethany, I’ve read half of your thesis already and I don’t agree with a lot of your arguments”. We may have butted heads, but without you I would never have made it this far. You encouraged me to think and dream big and you were always up for a chat on the hard topics. I will miss you a lot nanna, but this thesis is dedicated to you and your ever- present passion for learning.

Additionally, I would like to thank my friends that have helped me through and put up with me on this crazy PhD roller coaster. Hawzhin Azeez, whilst you only were there for the first year, you gave me the best grounding and guided me through my foundation stages, you also supported me for my confirmation and for that I am so thankful for. Jess O’Neill, your midnight chats, dinners and talks over processes, theories and thoughts as we both pursued our doctorates, were so needed! To my crazy girls, Kylie Schenk and Cilla Weeks, thank you for the many times you listened to parts of my thesis, or ideas I had, even though it may not have made sense to you, supporting me through it all with numerous cups of coffee and glasses of wine, providing a bed when I stayed too late, listening to what I had to stay and generally just being a shoulder to lean on really meant the world, so thank you! I also want to thank all my other family and friends, whilst not mentioning each and every one of you, please know that you have helped me in one way or another to push through and get this done. Whether it be a coffee, a supportive phone call, or anything in between you have all helped so very much.

Whilst I was only two when the Bosnian War broke out, and a little older when Rwanda occurred, I still have small memories of the news showing UN peacekeepers trying to aid in two very difficult and exceptionally violent situations. Growing up in a privileged school the word genocide always invoked a discussion of the Holocaust and even touching on the genocide that occurred in Australia during colonisation. Very rarely, however, did we talk about genocide in Africa, nor did we look at the issues that occurred in the Balkans. However, to me, these two countries have always held a unique fascination, being both unique in terms of location and of course culture and language etc. Yet how could two nations, thousands of

v miles apart, both turn from seemingly productive nations to organisers and executors of genocide?

As such, words cannot express to the people of Rwanda, and Bosnia-Herzegovina, how your incredible stories and amazing countries have forever left an impression on me. One I will never forget…

Bethany Page.

vi ABSTRACT

Genocide is a complex, multi-faceted phenomenon. Scholars disagree as to what should be properly encompassed by the term, but even when it is agreed that genocide has in fact occurred the explanations for its occurrence are contested. The primary argument of this thesis is that the current prevailing theories of genocide, whilst undeniably relevant, do not provide an overarching, fully encompassing analysis of genocide. Much of this current scholarship takes the Holocaust as both the historical phenomenon and paradigm for defining and explaining genocide. However, this thesis aims to develop an alternative approach by focusing on two recent examples of genocide from the late twentieth century: Rwanda in 1994 and the Bosnian War from 1992-1995. The currently dominant international interpretation of these two genocides is that they are to be understood in terms of ‘primordial conflict’ and ‘ancient ethnic hatreds’ where one or both are posited as being in large part to blame for these conflicts. While this thesis pays due heed to this interpretation it moves away from it to develop an analysis that explores genocide from a biopolitical perspective.

To do this, the thesis argues for an explanatory approach based on the biopolitical works of Italian political philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, in particular Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998), as well as his texts Remnants of Auschwitz (2002) and State of Exception (2005). The thesis critically examines Agamben’s biopolitical approach, paying particular attention to his concepts of ‘bare life’, ‘homo sacer’, the ‘state of exception’ and the ‘camp’. It develops a biopolitical framework for understanding and evaluating the genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina. While the thesis draws on these two events of the late twentieth century to illustrate its arguments, the focus is not solely a study of genocide as such, as it is not concerned with solving the ‘problem’ of genocide. Nor is its concern to argue that Agamben’s theories enable a determination of the ‘correct causes’ of modern genocide. Rather, the analysis developed in this thesis is concerned to argue that an Agambenian approach has the explanatory power to help us understand genocide as a phenomenon of biopolitical power relations. In so doing the thesis aims to provide a more inclusive analysis and understanding of genocide.

vii This study provides a number of contributions to both biopolitical theory and genocide scholarship. Whilst aiming to develop a more holistic analysis of genocide it demonstrates a link between ‘ethnic cleansing’ and biopolitics, something that is not focussed on by Agamben. This thesis demonstrates the value of Agamben’s biopolitical theory for developing an approach, an Agambenian framework, that can enhance our understanding of the twin phenomena of ‘ethnic cleansing’ and genocide. By focussing on the more ‘recent’ genocides of Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina, this thesis demonstrates that an Agambenian approach can in fact advance our capacity to make sense of the phenomenon of genocide and the complexities surrounding it.

viii TABLE OF CONTENTS

The (bio)Politics of Genocide: An Agambenian Approach i

Copyright Declaration ii

Dedication iii

Acknowledgements iv

Abstract vii

Table of Contents ix

List of Abbreviations x

List of Figures xi

Chapter One: Introduction 1

Part One: Theory

Chapter Two: 5 Pillars of Influence 29

Chapter Three: Giorgio Agamben and the Importance of the Homo Sacer Project 63

Chapter Four: Contesting the Theory 98

Part Two: Cases

Chapter Five: Rwanda – April 6th – July 1994 123

Chapter Six: The Bosnian War – 1992-1995 153

Chapter Seven: Conclusion 180

Appendix 190

Bibliography 195

ix LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

CDR – Coalition for the Defence of the Republic

DPKO – UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations

DRC – Democratic Republic of Congo

ICJ – International Court of Justice

ICTR – International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda

ICTY – International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia

IR – International Relations

JNA – Jugoslovenska Narodna Armija (Yugoslav People’s Army)

MRND – Mouvement Révolutionaire Nationale pour le Développement (National Revolutionary Movement for Development)

NATO – North Atlantic Treaty Organisation

RPF – Rwandan Patriotic Front

RTLM – Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Colines

SFRY – The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia

SPE – Stanford Prison Experiment

UN – United Nations

UNAMIR – UN Assistance Mission in Rwanda

UNCG – United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide

UNPROFOR – United Nations Protection Forces

x LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 5.1 Political Map of Rwanda 124

Figure 5.2 Onset of Genocidal Violence 132

Figure 6.1 Map of Bosnia-Herzegovina 154

Figure 6.2 Map of the Former Yugoslavia 158

xi CHAPTER ONE – INTRODUCTION

“The word is new – the concept is ancient”.

–Leo Kuper 1981: 9-

Genocide is not a modern invention, nor did it begin with the Second World War and the Final Solution carried out by the Nazi Regime. Whilst the atrocities that occurred in the 1930s and 1940s have contributed significantly to this field of study, this was not its beginning point. Rather, it has been mirrored in the long-term history of societal conquest, warfare, ‘holocaust- style’ events and more recently, so-called ‘ethnic cleansing’ (Kinloch 2004: 15). During the twentieth century alone, we have witnessed the intentional destruction, in whole, or in part, of groups such as: the Armenians, the Jews, Cambodians, Hutus, Tutsis, Bosniaks, as well as other indigenous peoples from around the globe. Genocide is then, what Goldhagen (2009) terms “worse than war”, and what Power (2002) claims to be truly “a problem from hell”. Clearly, then, this large-scaled devastation poses a critical challenge to scholars: Why does one group of human beings set out to eradicate the other? What are the origins and processes involved in these mass eradications? And how should we as scholars, political scientists, humanitarians etc., respond to these acts of violence? (Hinton 2002: 1). The problem of genocide is not a new issue that we as political scientists are only now grappling with in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. However, what has become increasingly critical is the need to move beyond a mere discussion of the ‘horrors’ and reviews of the ‘aftermath’ of genocide (Horowitz 2000: 76). We need to shift our focus to consider a wide range of questions, to ‘decentre’ and fundamentally rethink our taken-for-granted assumptions and biases on this topic and to seek new ways to approach this field of study. Within this thesis, two case studies will be analysed: Rwanda (1994) and Bosnia-Herzegovina (1992-1995). The dominant international interpretation of these two genocides is that they were predicated on the basis of ‘primordial conflict’ and ‘ancient ethnic hatreds’ where both sides are attributed with the constant conflict surrounding them. Whilst this thesis pays due heed to this interpretation, as well as the already established theories of genocide, it moves away from it to develop an analysis that explores genocide from a biopolitical perspective. This thesis,

- 1 - focussing on two examples not previously evaluated by Agamben, argues that a critical examination of Giorgio Agamben’s concept of biopolitics and its analysis of the phenomenon of genocide provides a contemporary and cogent means to challenge these taken for granted assumptions.

Many scholars have contributed to the debate on war and genocide and have noted the obvious link between the two. They have also placed an added emphasis on understanding ideas such as ‘rape warfare’ and ‘ethnic cleansing’ and the importance these have in cases of mass murder. The link between biopolitics and genocide has been widely debated in the fields of international relations and political science. Recent attempts by Agamben to understand the relationship between politics and the human body have resulted in a revised notion of the concept of ‘biopolitics’ and have, in turn, been exceptionally influential in both the humanities and social sciences (Finlayson 2010: 97). Modern scholarship drawing on Michel Foucault’s theories of biopolitics and biopower has created significant interest within the context of political theory in recent years and are concerned with themes such as eugenics, race, security issues and the quintessential concept – power. In the History of Sexuality Vol. 1: The Will to Power, Foucault (1990) refers to the processes by which the biological life (zõe) has become included within the functions of modern State power (bios) – this is the transition from politics to ‘biopolitics’. Biopolitics in this sense administers life, rather than threatening to take it away (Taylor 2010: 46; Forti 2006: 9). For Foucault, the history of biopolitics is essentially the history of bodies: that is, how they are connected and interact with each other and the world at large. It is the history of epistemology, political reason and ethics – upon the manifestation, protection and perpetuation of life. Biological and biopolitical life is therefore immensely productive. The emergence of biopolitics as a discourse has given us an “array of rationalities, motivations and ethics” to explore, not only within political science, but also within medicine and the social sciences (Agamben 2002: 146; Blencowe 2012: 1; Coleman and Grove 2009: 504). The hypothesis of biopower and biopolitics, which Foucault formulated at a turning point in his research, brings to light a specific mode of exercising power: beginning with the eighteenth century, life is the privileged reward of power. It is the life of individual bodies, specific objects of an anatomic-politics that he is concerned with, in this respect, Foucault is engaged in a continuation of his analysis of disciplinary power and its differentiation to that

- 2 - of biopolitics.1 For Foucault, beginning with the second half of the eighteenth century, the states of political strategies become the life of the human species, thereby “marking a ‘society’s threshold of biopolitical modernity’” (Foucault 1990: 143). What is at issue here are the biological processes affecting populations and which subsequently demand control by a regulating power – this is what Foucault specifically designates as ‘biopolitics’.

In contrast to Foucault’s analysis, the importance of Agamben’s theoretical approach proceeds from a fundamental continuity of biopolitical mechanisms whose foundations he situates within the logics of sovereignty. Agamben is somewhat critical of Foucault’s analysis on biopolitics and moves away from Foucault’s original thesis to develop his theory of biopolitics through the key concepts of homo sacer, ‘bare life’ and the state of exception (Koopman 2015: 574). For Agamben, power became more than just a standard and typical political concept, because when seen as an analytical category through the examples of the concentration and extermination camps of the Holocaust, power was that which was situated and exercised at the level of life itself. These themes, it can then be argued, have been exhibited time and time again throughout the twentieth and indeed twenty-first centuries.

As is the case with any theorist that we as political scientists focus on, we must ask the question ‘why’ – why study Agamben’s work and why utilise his theories? From a brief glance at his analysis it may appear that the main themes, on which Agamben focusses, deflect attention away from of the ‘more’ important and urgent questions society is faced with in the twenty- first century. Not only does he diverge from Foucault’s original thesis, but he develops ideas of biopolitics through concepts such as archaic Roman law (homo sacer), as well as concepts adopted from other theorists such as ‘bare life’ (Walter Benjamin), and the state of exception (Carl Schmitt). However, his overarching conception of politics is central to his philosophy. The history of biopolitics, as Agamben sees it, describes the context wherein various nation-states develop ‘the camps’, orchestrate biopolitical eugenics and commit ‘ethnic cleansing’ and genocides (Blencowe 2012: 2). Instead of taking his lead from the eighteenth century as Foucault had done previously, the intensification of the biopolitical problematic, for Agamben, is seen after the end of both the Nazi and Stalinist dictatorships of World War Two. He argues that since then biopolitics has “passed beyond a new threshold – in modern democracies it is

1 See appendix (a): The Two Levels of Biopower.

- 3 - possible to state in public what the Nazi biopolitics did not dare say” (Agamben 1998: 165). Detention camps (such as those of Nazi Germany or even Guantanamo Bay) that reduce ‘inmates’ to a condition of ‘bare life’ are, increasingly, not only sites where bodies are merely managed as ‘life’ and are then seen as a threat to that population (Downey 2009: 117). “Life is now set apart from the operation of law and treated as manageable by technical expertise in institutions ranging from refugee camps and immigration detention centres to schools, universities, and hospitals, which are all now focussed on achieving targets generated from population statistics and quantitative research” (Colebrook and Maxwell 2016: 15-16). Colebrook and Maxwell (2016: 16) further suggest that under the guise of healthcare and wellbeing initiatives, workplaces are monitoring biometric data to a much larger extent. The shift of focus in today’s society, that is, to a government that operates on populations by means of knowledge, statistics, and surveillance, has become well-known as ‘biopolitics’. Like Foucault, Agamben’s concern is with how power is organised within these domains (Agamben 1998; Agamben 2008: 201).

In discussing genocide in particular, Agamben, has developed concepts that are often questioned by his critics (see: Ojakangas 2005a; Gerhardt 2011; Lemke 2005; LaCapra 2004; Fitzpatrick 2005 and Pan 2009).2 These are issues he considered to be “‘banned’ from political reflection: life and death, health and sickness, the body and medicine” (Lemke 2011: 64). Whilst Agamben focusses primarily on the outcomes of the Nazi perpetrated Holocaust, his theory is also applicable to a more wide-ranging analysis of genocide as will be demonstrated through the two case studies used within this thesis. Not only are Rwanda and Bosnia- Herzegovina examples of where biopolitics has clearly played out on an intranational level, they also illustrate where modernity clearly facilitates a shift from mere ‘ethnic and ancient hatreds’ to a biopolitical stripping causing these people to live in a constant state of exception and become homo sacer. In both instances the perpetrators did not hide behind any justifications about what they were doing. In such a context the state henceforth takes the liberty of carving up the social body: “it planes off the rough edges, and removes contagious and impure elements. In short, it shapes the social body in its own way, to its own design. It

2 This list is not exhaustive of the critics to Agamben’s work. Further in-depth evaluation of these sources will be given in Chapter Four, where this thesis seeks to provide a critique of the critics of Agamben. This thesis provides a chapter on the critics of Agamben in order to justify the usefulness and applicability of an Agambenian approach. It is necessary to provide the other side to this argument in order to view this approach holistically.

- 4 - can perform the work of a gardener, or rather a political surgeon” (Sémelin 2007: 338). Their actions were ‘justified’ through simultaneous inclusion and exclusion, biological markers were exhibited through the demarcation of the ‘other’. Whilst examples of biopolitics can be seen in times of war and conflict, where the ‘other’ may be killed with impunity, Agamben makes the claim that ‘bare life’ is now potentially the lot of every human being, something that illustrates the “darker side of modernity” (Mann 2005). For many political theorists, the events of World War Two still serve as an example, one that we must never again repeat. Agamben too shares this view but takes this further. For him, World War Two serves as an example of a different sort – one that marks out more than just an horrendous exception to the civilised norm. Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina are two key examples of where this exception to the norm has taken place within a modern setting.

For the majority of historians, lawyers and political scientists, it is World War Two and the events of the Holocaust that are used as the gauge by which we measure genocide and genocidal actions. This has led to a particular way of understanding instances of genocide, namely that the totalitarian governments come to be identified as the major culprits for causing such actions (see Arendt 1979; Jones 2016; Valentino 2004; Kuper 1981 and Bartrop 2015).3 Totalitarian states, or so the argument goes, are most likely to be the architects and perpetrators of genocide, a phenomenon that is then aligned with the leaders of those states. This approach is then extended to cover and explain other instances of mass killing by reference to the leaders at the time. The case studies evaluated within this thesis have also previously been analysed through this lens, those within the Hutu militia groups (Interahamwe and Impuzamugambi), and the planners of the Bosnian War - Slobodan Milošević (Serbia), Radovan Karadžić (Bosnia) and Ratko Mladic (Bosnia), being acknowledged as the primary architects of genocide within their respective nations.4 It can be convenient and also judicially helpful to look at specific people as being the principal architects of these genocidal activities.

3 The Frankfurt School, has also written extensively on the Nazi phenomenon of World War Two. Key works from authors such as Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s (1997) Dialectic of Enlightenment and Franz Neumann’s (2009) Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism 1933-1944, to name a few, have had a profound impact on the social, political and cultural thought of the twentieth century. Additionally, Walter Benjamin, who wrote works such as Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (1969) and Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings (1978) was also a member of the Frankfurt School and became a significant influence in Agamben’s revisions on biopolitics. 4 Whilst Ratko Mladic would later become known as the “Butcher of Bosnia” for the war crimes that he committed during the Bosnian War, Radovan Karadžić is often referred to as the “Architect of the Bosnian Genocide” (Donia 2014).

- 5 - Groups of people, religious assemblies or political parties, even an entire race of people, for example, are then not blamed for being ‘genocidal in nature’. Agamben, as will be made evident, challenges this particular position. He raises questions that are relevant for looking not just at the Holocaust, but also how modern genocides, such as Rwanda and Bosnia- Herzegovina, were possible in a post-totalitarianism world.

Genocide studies scholarship has been marked by “an endless quest for a consensual definition”, a debate that will arguably not be resolved (Owens et al. 2013: 71). Important areas of definitional debate, according to Owens et al. (2013) include the advantages as well as shortcomings of the United Nation’s legal definition (in particular its failure to acknowledge political groups – see for instance Fein 1993a; Harff & Gurr 1988); the distinction between genocide and various forms of mass murder including ‘ethnic cleansing’ (Mann 2005; Blum et al. 2007; Mulaj 2003) as well as the relationship between genocidal behaviour and violence against civilians during intra- and international war (Shaw 2003; Valentino 2004; Humphrey 2002) (Luft 2015: 900-901). One of the major problems in studying genocide is one of finding a unified and succinct definition, as well as being able to clearly identify which groups should be included in this definition (see: Kuper 1981; Chalk and Jonassohn 1990; Bartrop and Totten 2009 and Herman and Peterson 2010). The term ‘genocide’ itself was not coined until 1944, when a Polish-Jewish jurist, Raphael Lemkin, linked the Greek word genos- meaning tribe or nation, with the Latin suffix -cide meaning murder. Lemkin introduced the term with reference to two key events – the Nazi regime’s treatment of the Jews and the Ottoman regime’s treatment of the Armenians. As a term, ‘genocide’ gained traction, primarily, as a legal concept aimed at providing a label that would help us understand and condemn what happened under the Third Reich. It also provided traction for prosecutors seeking justice through the international legal system (Schneiderhan 2013: 284; Boghossian 2010: 70).

Following Lemkin’s lead, Article 2 of the United Nations’ Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (UNCG) defines genocide as: of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group as such:

- 6 - a) Killing members of the group; b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within a group; and e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Lemkin’s United Nations’ definition remains widely accepted, even canonical, despite growing concerns over its limitations (see for example: Tatz and Higgins 2016: 27-32; Kuper 1981; Chalk and Jonassohn 1990; Bartrop and Totten 2009 and Herman and Peterson 2010). One limitation of this definition is its perceived exclusion of political groups (and therefore tends to exclude ‘cultural genocide’). Another is that it does not provide a good point of departure for political scientists, due in large part to the legality behind the definition (Sémelin 2002: 434-435; Kuper, cited in Freeman 1991: 187; Schneiderhan 2013: 284 and Harff and Gurr 1988).5 Perhaps of more importance, is a different level of criticism. Scholars have generally followed the UN in excluding ‘cultural genocide’, thereby downplaying or missing what Lemkin deemed important and tried to capture in his pioneering definition, namely the fact that he regarded genocide as a multifaceted phenomenon – distinguishing between ‘physical’ genocide (destruction of individuals), ‘biological’ genocide (prevention of births) and ‘cultural’ genocide (brutal destruction of the specific characteristics of a group) (Cooper 2008: 90). Lemkin, personally, conceived of genocide in a fundamentally cultural manner, because the ultimate purpose of genocide, under his definition of the term, “is to destroy a cultural unit” (Butcher 2013: 254). In his 1944 book Axis Rule, Lemkin suggests that genocide:

Does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killing of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be disintegration of the political and social institutions of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of

5 See also Schabas (2009: 6-18 and 2010: 123) who refers to genocide as being first and foremost a legal concept and Fein (1990: 24), a sociologist, who utilised the Convention in determining her definition for genocide.

- 7 - the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups (Lemkin [1944]1973: 79).

This has left Lemkin’s definition (and by extension that of the UN) in what Freeman (1991: 187) calls ‘theoretical limbo’, a problem that many theorists in the field of genocide studies shy away from.6 Levene and Schneiderhan suggest that the UNCG and scholars alike appear to define genocide as something with a pre-existing ‘teleology’, such that the actors seen as responsible for genocide can be represented as being governed by a fixed and given blueprint of what they are ultimately going to do. Although there may be at times a certain ‘prescript’ as to how these ‘génocidaires’ may act, translating it into action is dependent on events which are often far from being expected (Levene 2005a: 35-36; Schneiderhan 2013: 281).

In a similar fashion, when discussing the events of the 1990s, as this thesis will do over the coming chapters, whether it be the genocide that occurred in Rwanda or the actions taken in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the terms ‘genocide’ and ‘ethnic cleansing’ also warrant further elaboration. The term ‘genocide’, as has been discussed above, has been applied both broadly and narrowly towards various examples, and comes with a certain amount of baggage when discussing both Rwanda and the Bosnian War. Whilst theorists (see for example: Blum et al. 2007; MacKinnon 1994b; Shaw 2015 and Allen 1996) argue that the concept of ‘ethnic cleansing’ is simply a euphemism for genocide and genocidal activity, ‘ethnic cleansing’ as a term within the political and judicial spheres still remains highly contested.7 Schabas (2010), claims that ‘ethnic cleansing’ can never be seen as coming close to genocide as the intent seen in both of these are completely different, and Humphrey (2002) proposes that the act of ‘ethnic cleansing’ brings into existence something that perhaps does not yet exist – that being the “hegemony of a particular ethnic nationalism, or the aspirations of an oppressed one” (Humphrey 2002: 75). However, what these arguments ignore and fail to take in to account is that by separating these two terms, this completely discounts the very obvious fact that genocidal massacres often have both intents in mind (Blum et al. 2007: 206). Additionally, by

6 What Freeman means here is that Lemkin’s original conception of genocide was rejected by the United Nations, and as such has remained a topic of contention and confusion, and one that has unfortunately, for the most part, been neglected in discussions surrounding genocide and genocide prevention (Freeman 1991: 186-187 & 193). 7 Shaw (2013: 42) further supports these theorists: “Just as political leaders had been reluctant to use the ‘g- word’, so IR scholars were (and often remain) too willing to use practitioner euphemisms like ‘humanitarian crisis’ and ‘ethnic cleansing’ for situations which involved genocide”.

- 8 - discussing ‘ethnic cleansing’ and genocide separately whilst simultaneously trying to position these terms within a ‘legal’ framework or from an international interventionist point of view, this is merely a discursive practice. Both definitions dominate the arguments that the international community, lawyers, sociologists, historians and political scientists all have that obscures what is ostensibly a larger symptom of modernity as an organising process.

The topic of genocide is, therefore, a complex, multifaceted phenomenon that defies any simplistic, reductionist account. Where it has been critically examined, genocide has been explained as the product of social control and deviance (Campbell 2009); seen as democracy’s dark side (Hinton 2002; Mann 2005); created as a product of modernity (Bauman 1991 & 2003); and situated within a contextual history (Mamdani 2009).8 Within the genocide studies literature, and as exemplified by Adam Jones, there are five main social science ‘approaches’ to analysing genocide as a phenomenon: Historical, Sociological/Anthropological, Psychological, the Political Science and International Relations (IR) Approach and the study of genocide through Gender (Moses 2004; Jones 2016; Dytell 2016: 21). Holocaust studies, and more recently genocide studies in general, was traditionally the province of historians and theologians. However, there has been a shift over the past three to four decades where the field has developed into an increasingly interdisciplinary enterprise (Bloxham and Moses 2010: 3). Whilst, the five approaches noted above are undeniably helpful in gaining an understanding into one specific side of the genocidal process, as will be shown below, each approach is limited. This is because they not only fail to reach a unified agreement on what constitutes genocide, they also fail to analyse the issues surrounding genocide as they arise, rather relating their analysis to specific genocides ‘after the fact’. Additionally, Martin Shaw (2007: 8) comments that “mainstream social sciences are coming very slowly to the subject [of genocide]”. In nearly all current approaches to genocide, the actor, whether it be a person, a group of people or the state as perpetrator, are depicted as setting a goal (the ultimate aim), figuring out the best way to get there (the means) and then carrying it out (the act).

In the evolution of genocide studies, it would be foolish to not acknowledge the significant contributions and many useful insights each discipline has had on the topic. Scholars have put forward varying hesitations about grounding our understanding of genocide as a phenomenon

8 Of course this is not an exhaustive list of scholars who have critically examined genocide. Rather, these scholars are useful in showing the types of analyses used when approaching the concept of genocide.

- 9 - outside the current approaches to genocide. However, solutions to, and even alternatives for these current approaches are still few and far between in the existing literature (Schneiderhan 2013: 284). Rosenberg further articulates this point stating that, in the current literature, ranging from history to the political, there is a significant lack of an overarching methodology or theoretical convergence about how to approach and subsequently analyse the subject of genocide (Rosenberg 2012: 21). The failure of these approaches in explaining trajectories or to produce a coherent, convincing and reasonably ‘generalisable’ theory of certain mechanisms is a case in point for the need to develop an alternative overarching approach to the issues. For example, Fein (1993a: 30) observes that there is a high degree of overlap among the core cases that various scholars consider genocide. However, we do not see consensus as little agreement exists where a workable and appropriate definition is concerned. In what follows, each of these five approaches is evaluated in turn as to their relevance in relation to the existing literature.

Historical Approach

The historical approach, as exemplified in the work of A. Dirk Moses (2004 & 2008), employs a form of analysis that claims genocide must involve a very specific set of features, including: intent, method, and something well beyond the ‘pragmatism’ of individuals (Butcher 2013: 254). This means that for many historians (such as: Moses 2004 & 2008; Gellately and Kiernan 2003; Kiernan 2007; Levene 2005a & 2005b and Bauer 1987 & 2001) genocide is about a ‘particular kind’ of organised violence involving the state, and therefore cannot be equated with ‘frontier violence’ or indeed in some cases even mass murder. Historians insist that these ‘genocidal horrors’ have occurred throughout history and in all parts of the world. The key words that Moses employs within his historical evaluation are terms such as ‘empire’, ‘genocide’ and ‘history’. For Moses, these key words imply a specific interpretation of world history and the historical progression of certain nation states (Moses 2008: 3-4). As such, the historiography of nations means that a historical approach to genocide for historians is the best way to understand this phenomenon. This is because it remains faithful to the complexities and contingencies of the past, and subsequently what we can infer and understand from these cultural exchanges. This historical inquiry means that the object of such an inquiry is the “sum-total of economic, social and political relations between people in a colonial situation, the various bids for power and the resistances to them, the processes of

- 10 - escalation brought on by real, contrived or perceived security crises and the successes of the colonial state” (Moses 2008: 7). A historical process is not only moulded by specific political and economic conditions which will differ between regions, countries and continents but also by strata of cultural and social distinctiveness developed over time and space (Levene 2005a: 8).

Whilst historians may acknowledge, and note at times, that there is something inherently modern about genocide and twentieth century mass murders, the twentieth century did not invent the mass extermination of peoples (Gellately and Kiernan 2003: 9 & 21). Instead, historians rely on and trace other issues to help explain or account for issues of genocide arising. These issues include: religion, race, territorial cultivation amongst a variety of issues indicating the potential for genocide (Gellately and Kiernan 2003: 29, 31 & 33). Genocide for historians is then to be explained as the outcome of complex historical processes, rather than ascribable to the concept of modernity or to the intentions and the motivations of so-called ‘wicked men’ for example (see psychological analysis below) (Moses 2008: 7). Mamdani’s work on Africa (2001 and 2009 respectively) is a case in point. In recent writings on both Rwanda and Darfur his analysis is explicit about how he defines and perceives the theory of genocide: “It is killing with intent to eliminate an entire group – a race for example – that is genocide” (Mamdani 2009: 3). This approach to an analysis of genocide is arguably consistent with a ‘historical’ evaluation of post-colonial Africa.

Whilst historians such as Moses are not unsympathetic to the plight of the victims of genocide, it is important to remember that for Agamben in particular, modernity itself, as a structural force and hegemonic social phenomenon was the driving force that created the conditions for genocide, regardless of who is involved and the relationship they share. History, therefore, cannot be utilised as a tool for analysing genocidal patterns that may arise nor can it delve into issues dealing with mass murder. As such Agamben argues that merely looking at genocide in terms of World War Two historiography and certain legal definitions are in fact severely insufficient and far from convincing as an argument when we explore in more detail genocidal events as they actually occur (Mojzes 2011: 2-3). In drawing on some of the key genocides Moses discusses in his books and articles, genocides in nations such as Australia and America are good examples of how nations implemented rational strategies for ‘cleansing’ the territories in order to secure space and resources for capitalist development.

- 11 - As the ‘new world’ was built on the bloody ruins of indigenous societies, we do see genocide and modernity are indeed compatible (Barkan 2003; Hitchcock and Koperski 2008: 594-597 & 599-600). Within an historical approach, therefore, there is limited room within this theoretical framework for other possibilities or explanations of genocide, which severely limits the scope of genocidal analysis as a whole (Schneiderhan 2013: 284). For Agamben, consequently, history and a historical approach to the study of genocide are mostly immaterial and irrelevant to his view of genocide and the modern nation-state.

Sociological and Anthropological Approach

The sociological and anthropological approach studies various kinds of societies and they deal with genocide and genocidal actions primarily in terms of how ethnicities are constructed and then mobilised to eventually eliminate and murder people designated as the ‘other’ (Jones 2016: 423; Walliman and Dobkowski 2000: xii; Dadrian 1975: 201; Chalk and Jonassohn 1990 and Kiernan 2007). Debates concentrate on the identity of the target group, the scope of acts deemed genocide, the identity of the perpetrator, the distinction among types of genocide and whether or how to distinguish their intent (Fein 2009: 44). Genocide, for these theorists, consists of many different actions by many different agents located in different positions within the social structure (Campbell 2009). Sociologists claim that the concept of sociology can make significant contributions to genocide studies and their specific ‘unique’ perspective raises important questions about the issues of definition, one of the central concerns of genocide studies (Hinton 2012: 9). The central genocidal relation is that of perpetrator domination and victim dehumanisation. Although the perpetrator is an empowered subject voluntarily exercising power on a relatively powerless victim, this approach explains genocidal actions only if they conceive of the perpetrators as themselves being subject to powerful forces (Clegg 1989). A sociological approach conceptualises genocide not as a historically singular event, but rather as a more general type of social phenomenon that has occurred within various historical contexts and against various groups throughout human civilisation (Owens et al. 2013: 71). For example, Chalk and Jonassohn (cited in Gellately in Kiernan 2003: 9) suggest that genocide, like war, massacre, mass rape, ‘ethnic cleansing’ and other similar atrocities, is anything but new and is hardly an invention of the twentieth century.

- 12 - While the social sciences have long been concerned with social issues such as poverty, “much less attention has been given to the nature of social conflicts and attempts to de-escalate them” (Walliman and Dobkowski 2000: xvii). In fact, Dexter wrote that “sociologists very rarely, if ever, devote systematic attention to the problem of genocide” (Dexter 1958: 177). It is argued by Walliman and Dobkowski (2000: xi), Hinton (2002: 1) and Chalk (1989: 150-151) that it has only been since the mid-1980s sociological and anthropological focus and analysis has turned toward political violence in complex state societies. Anthropologists and sociologists, such as Kuper and Horowitz, have spent a lot of time analysing and evaluating issues surrounding genocide and ideology. The lack of any coherent anthropological/sociological approach to the study of genocide, for instance, led Horowitz (1977) to investigate and discover the common elements in the national culture of totalitarian states that have resorted to genocide (Chalk and Jonassohn 1990: 14). For example, from an anthropological perspective, the reifications of concepts such as race and ethnicity are problematic because, like the concept of class, caste, or political orientation, physical and mental disability, the terms reference so-called ‘imagined communities’ (Brubaker et al. 2004: 31).9 Genocides within this approach are distinguished by a process of ‘othering’ in which the boundaries of an imagined community are: “reshaped in such a manner that a previously ‘included’ group is ideologically recast as being outside the community, as a threatening and dangerous ‘other’ – whether racial, political, ethnic, religious, economic or so on – that need to and must be annihilated” (Hinton 2002: 6). Shaw’s (2010) sociological approach contends that genocide is not merely the physical destruction of a group, but also included the destruction of group identity and represents a form of ‘degenerate warfare’ where targeted civilians are treated as enemy combatants (Shaw cited in Verdeja 2012b: 309). However, despite varying degrees of analyses on violence, and the connection between this, a nation and ultimately genocide, Hagan and Rymond-Richmond (2008: 875) state that the analysis and understanding of genocide as a social phenomenon remains “neglected, marginalised and under theorised by sociologists”.

9 The term ‘imagined communities’ was originally coined by historian and political scientist Benedict Anderson in the 1983 book of the same name. Anderson suggests that the nation is a socially constructed community imagined by the people who believe themselves part of that said community or group (Anderson [1983]2006: 6).

- 13 - Despite these limitations in analysis, and being somewhat similar to an Agambenian approach at times, sociologists often discuss the sociology of modernity, i.e. is there something specific about the concept of modernity that has become definitional to genocide? With the advent of modernity, genocidal violence began to be motivated by a new series of factors. Politically, modernity involved the rise of secular forms of government, symbolised by the French Revolution and culminating in the modern nation state (Hinton 2002: 7). Modernity here, quickly demonstrated that it has a ‘dark side’ – for instance: mass destruction, extreme cruelty, and ultimately one could argue the capacity for genocide. Following on from Bauman’s ([1989]2003) seminal text Modernity and the Holocaust, this approach has characterised the relationship between modernity and genocide as one in which modernity is a necessary, but not always a sufficient condition, rather than a straightforward causal relationship (Freeman 1991; Jones 2016).10 Here Agamben (2005) would agree to some level, but he argues that this analytical approach cannot account for the state of exception (a key concept discussed at length below in Chapter Three) in its entirety which can be created randomly. For Agamben, this is the true ‘hallmark of modernity’ (Agamben 2005: 2-3).

Psychological Approach

“Understanding perpetrator and perpetration is the essential element to understand genocide. Other ‘lessons’ are ancillary” (Roth 2010: 198). The psychological view of genocide focuses on probing the minds of those who commit it, as well as those who seek to prevent and limit it. Scholars using this approach focus on identity formation and three separate classes of groups – perpetrators, bystanders and rescuers (Jones 2016: 383; Baum 2008: 7). Research on the so-called perpetrators of genocide dates to post-World War II debates on the motives and behaviour of those within the Nazi regime (Owens et al. 2013: 76). From a psychological point of view, genocide ‘experts’ write about the causes of genocide from a top- down approach – that is through the view of utopia or authoritarian regimes (such as the regimes of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia) (Straus 2012: 556). For psychologists, a psychological approach, however, looks at what motivates génocidaires, usually focussing on four essential elements: narcissism, greed, fear and humiliation (Jones 2016: 384). Taken from

10 Zygmunt Bauman is a key theorist in this field and an influence on biopolitics and subsequently Agamben. As such, it is important to note his contribution in this field, however, his research will take on a greater role further on in the thesis.

- 14 - Jones’ (2016: 528-541) text on genocide, these four elements are key to a psychological analysis of genocidal motives: narcissism can be broken down in to three separate sections – collective, malignant or pathological and narcissism of minor differences; greed, it is argued is never satiated by the génocidaires and the only force that can match it is the element of fear; fear is the element which génocidaires act out due to two separate forms of anxiety – mortal terror and existential dread; finally humiliation, which, according to Jones is “recognised as a primary motivating force in human behaviour, particularly violent behaviour” (Jones 2016: 539). Baum (2008: 6) suggests that a psychological evaluation of genocide is the best approach as it is one that comes from the bottom, up. By this he suggests that looking at genocide from the perspective of how genocide and genocidal practices relate to the average person, how they think and act, when the rules change or indeed how they react in the absence of rules.

Many psychologists look to both the Milgram and Stanford Prison Experiments (SPE) to evaluate the extent to which subjects continue to inflict harm on supposed victims, as well as how structures, roles or situations trump “dispositional factors as determinant of behaviour” (Roth 2010: 206). The Milgram Experiment, along with the SPE, have been instrumental in understanding the psychology behind ‘why’ people commit such heinous crimes such as the Holocaust. The Milgram experiment, conducted by Stanley Milgram, in the wake of the events of the Holocaust and World War Two, was aimed at answering the question of how seemingly normal people could become complicit in mass murder (Hollander 2016: 57). This experiment was based around obedience to authority figures with a ‘learner’ and a ‘teacher’. The teacher, for every incorrect answer given, was ordered to administer an ever-increasing electric shock. Milgram found that it was “surprising… how far ordinary individuals will go in complying with the experiment’s instructions… Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process” (Milgram 1997: 5-6). The SPE, in a similar fashion, was designed by Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo in 1971 as an attempt to demonstrate how the “power of a situation” can transform those who are generally perceived as “good citizens” into authoritarians and sadists (Lurigio 2009: 71S). A makeshift prison was created to emulate a realistic setup for examining the behaviour of people within a simulated prisoner and guard interaction. Despite the experiment only lasting a few days Zimbardo suggests that “ordinary people, even good ones, can be induced, seduced and initiated into behaving in evil ways” (Zimbardo 2007: 443).

- 15 - What has been understood from both of these examples, by psychologists, is that the experiments conducted suggest it requires little incentive to recruit people for unsavoury purposes. Psychological approaches consider why people do what they do; for example, the passivity of bystanders, those who commit genocide and those who change from bystander to génocidaire. Lifton (1986) exemplifies this through his analysis of Nazi doctors during the Holocaust. Bystanders may experience an evolution toward violence within a group and, as they change, these bystanders can become perpetrators. Within this approach, the work done with the Milgram and SPE’s can be utilised to study the general behaviours of people and to help explain ‘why’ these shifts occur (Roth 2010: 207).

Psychologists within the genocide studies field believe that essentialising the enemy is a crucial part of the process and there are many ways in which this can be done, however they may not necessarily be sufficient for genocide to occur (Chirot and McCauley 2006: 90). Staub has included what he deems necessary ‘personality preconditions’ as a major driver behind the possible emergence of negative motives within genocidal behaviour. He argues that genocide is the result of a combination of influences which include: conditions in a society, the characteristics of its culture, their psychological effects and the social processes they give rise to, the political system, the evolution of increasing violence and its psychological and social bases and the passivity or complicity of internal and external bystanders (Staub 2012: 823-824). Staub’s approach appears useful in identifying certain character traits evident within genocidal behaviour. However, his almost ‘catch-all’ list of features do not help us to understand the phenomenon of genocide holistically as it mostly focusses on the events of perpetrators etc. after the genocide has in fact occurred. Whilst psychology may allow us a greater insight into the mind of the killer, or those who stand by and allow these genocides to occur, they do not address the actual societal problems present within the nation, nor do they begin to provide analysis on the evolution toward group violence. Agambenian biopolitics and psychology here then, are incompatible, in that, rather than understanding the mind of the génocidaire, biopolitics aims to understand the inner workings of genocide as a phenomenon itself.

- 16 - Political Science and International Relations (IR) Approach

The political science and international relations (IR) approach is quite a broad and detailed one. It encompasses the primary focus for political science scholars – power, and the dissemination thereof, as well as the focus for international relations theorists, primarily the attention IR theory places on war and peace, the role of the regime, and the value of norms on the international scene (Jones 2016: 602). Thanks in large part to theorists such as Valentino, Mann, Kiernan and Midlarsky, political scientists and IR theorists have been instrumental in broadening the concept of genocide. In a more general vein, genocide is almost always a political phenomenon – as Valentino (2004: 17) argues “pre-existing social cleavages are neither sufficient nor universally necessary conditions for killing”. Genocide may be seen as political, in that the origins and dynamics of the said ‘phenomenon’ generally entail struggles for power, the containment of threat and control over the distribution of goods and property. The occurrence of genocide is also usually closely tied to the state either directly when national governments act as the chief instigator and perpetrator of violence (for instance Nazi Germany, Cambodia, Bosnia-Herzegovina), or indirectly when national governments enable private actors or local officials to commit mass violence (as occurred in Rwanda or Darfur).

International Relations theory, on the other hand, is a broad field encompassing everything from wars, regime changes and state building to political economy and trade (Weber 2013: 23; Grieco et al. 2015: 2). It also analyses the use of power and its distribution amongst nation- states (Jones 2016: 2). Carr’s ([1939]1961) influential text, The Twenty Years Crisis, became one of the seminal texts for IR theory in the wake of the breakdown of the League of Nations. ‘International’ analysis of genocide is usually recognised in almost all genocide research, but the main role of international relations is visible in the responses to genocide once it has occurred rather than in the production of it (Shaw 2013: 42). In this respect, international relations theorists are interested in non-state actors as well as the actions taken by the international community in light of genocidal activities (Griffiths et al. 2014: 128).

At the same time, however, the actual fit between the political science and international relations approach and genocide studies is hardly seamless (Straus 2010: 163-164). Despite the recent advances within the political sciences and international relations approaches, and

- 17 - their subsequent focus on the link between power and genocide, the current political science literature, at times, has lacked the ability to analyse the changes in violence over time and why perhaps we see political violence escalating, continuing as is, or declining (Verdeja 2012b: 308 & 312). Shaw (2013) argues that despite the fact that in recent years this ‘approach’ has produced a more focussed analysis on political conflict, civil war and armed conflict, this analysis “tends not to distinguish genocidal violence clearly as an aspect of conflict” rather it seems to focus on “the comparative treatment of discrete national cases rather than the understanding of international and regional patterns” (Shaw 2013: 195). He further suggests that the political science discipline as a whole “often suffers from an excessively abstract quantitative approach” (Shaw 2013: 153). Additionally, the main theoretical schools within international relations, such as realism, constructivism and idealism, are not proven theories in a scientific sense, rather they comprise different ways of perceiving international relations, norms and models which help to understand a way to observe and view the world (Wilkinson 2007: 18). Because many theorists focus on the particular ‘outcome’ of genocide, or how we perceive a theory affecting issues of genocide ‘internationally’, insufficient attention is then given to how genocide is connected to other forms of political violence and whether the proposed causal mechanisms and processes actually explain genocide or potentially other forms of violence as well (Verdeja 2012b: 309; Vaughn-Williams 2009: 729). This along with the emergence of a comparative analysis of genocide within the field, has afforded the political IR approach of analysis a rather restricted place in the field of genocide studies. As such, the focus of research on cases of genocide within this approach, carries with it some significant methodological problems. By studying only those cases that have resulted in genocide, rather than looking at issues that are present ‘now’, how can we explore whether the factors and processes discussed within those examples help to explain genocide?

Agamben would posit that none of the points mentioned above really capture the importance of the historical context of genocide, nor does the political science and IR approach have a broad enough social lens to incorporate each problem that they are faced with in turn. The notion of the ‘modern’ and modernity delivers, for Agamben, the genocidal process through the concept of biological markers. Whilst political science focusses on power and IR theorists look at the roles of regimes etc., it is the power over ‘bare life’ rather than the emphasis placed on that power which is Agamben’s focus. Whilst being written prior to Agamben’s Homo Sacer

- 18 - project Wahlke’s (1986) article makes the interesting observation that “biopolitical research, may effect a major transformation in political scientists’ views”. Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero (2008: 265) suggest that whilst today biopolitics is a commonly known theory within the social sciences and humanities, the powerful and useful analysis offered by the biopolitics of ‘power over life’ is still often neglected within this approach. Vaughn-Williams (2009: 729 & 749) also suggests that in order to face certain challenges within this theoretical approach, promise can be found within Agamben’s analysis of power in terms of the production of ‘bare life’ and that this focus is again often an untapped resource within a political science (and in turn) IR approach.

Gender Approach

The final method within Jones’ five main approaches to genocide studies is the examination of genocide through the paradigm of gender studies – one of the most contested within all of the social sciences, as this has to do with gender studies being a relatively new avenue of research and still a peripheral study within the field of genocide as a whole (von Joeden-Forgey 2010: 61). Gender studies usually pays close attention to classification and categorisations based on gender, and the resulting harm through rape and sexual assault. The notion of gender is not synonymous with women and/or femininity, despite its close association with feminist-influenced scholarship and policy making. Unfortunately, some scholars have contended that gender automatically implies oppression of women by men, which has resulted, at times, in a certain tone-deafness to the way in which men and masculinities are then portrayed, quite often in cases of genocide (Jones 2016: 464). Within genocide studies, as a discipline, a focus on the impact of war on women has largely been excluded from the majority of case studies, due in large part to the narrow focus on the mass-murder component. Gender studies, however, looks further at the structural aspects that might lead to genocide such as famines and economic embargoes, and which have been found to have an equal or greater impact on women and girls as compared with the impact on men and boys. Randall (2015: 2) suggests, that historically, the leaders and perpetrators of genocide have promoted deliberatively gendered genocidal strategies and processes, which have then produced gender-specific traumas.

- 19 - The study of gender as a variable in ethnic conflict and genocide has been dominated by feminist approaches emphasising women’s human rights. Additionally, we have seen terms emerge relating to ‘gynocide’ and ‘femicide’ which have been used to refer to the wrongful killing of solely girls and women (Warren 1985 cited in Jones 2000: 186). Fein (1999) recognised that traditionally genocides have left the men dead, but the women were raped and subsequently incorporated within the victorious group. However, in more recent times, the ancient pattern has begun to shift, with women and girls in a designated group being slain along with the men, or being raped for instrumental reasons “as a tactic serving strategic war aims” (as was the case in both Bosnia-Herzegovina and Rwanda) (Fein 1999: 49).

Until relatively recently, genocide scholars made few distinctions among victims in terms of either sex or gender. This was very much predicated on the assumption that genocides such as the Holocaust for instance affected both men and women in a similar fashion, with Nazi ‘brutality’ overriding any other characteristics such as sex, age or gender (von Joeden-Forgey 2010: 64-65). Jones (2000; 2006; 2016) along with other scholars (see for example: Warren 1985; Stein 2002) have sought to apply gender to a different context: the selective massacre of adult civilian males. ‘Gendercide’ here is a gender-inclusive framing, designed to ensure there is the understanding that killing both male and females is equally wrong (Jones 2000: 186). Gender analysis also demonstrates, in addition, the micro-managed gender strategies employed, such as within Srebrenica where the specific slaughter of 8,000 men and boys was termed both a gendercide and genocide (von Joeden-Forgey 2010: 68). Additionally, within the Balkan genocide, women were exposed to direct abuse and atrocities throughout the Bosnian War (Allen 1996; MacKinnon 1993). The genocide in Rwanda has also been considered especially gendered, and, as a result of the scale and savagery of the Rwandan rapes the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) convicted génocidaires for acts of genocide including sexual violence (see for example: The Prosecutor v Akayesu (1998); Balthazar 2006- 2007: 45,47-48; MacKinnon 2004: 326 & 328). Whilst an important extension of gender studies and indeed within the feminist approach to the topic of genocide, this term ‘gendercide’ and the literature surrounding it still contains inconsistencies and substantive limitations (Carpenter 2002: 77). Agamben would argue that gender as a social construct is only a small part within the mechanics of biopolitics and is not important as a designator. Gender operates as a sub-category for Agamben because the concept of homo sacer requires

- 20 - no gender, as homo sacer is merely the apparatus to achieve the destruction of the subject (Agamben 2009). However, whether Agamben’s view here can be accepted without some modification is an issue that an Agambenian theoretical framework will have to address. This is an important question to consider and one that is taken up later in the thesis.

If we are to consider these five approaches as a whole, a core problem which we see arise within the genocide literature is the relation of the Holocaust to other genocides. This link, seen in each approach, is a cause for concern and has raised a distinctive set of problems. Whilst this thesis by no means wishes to trivialise the horrors that occurred during the 1930s and 1940s, this argument causes a fundamental divide between scholars. This conflict has arisen mainly from the apparent disagreement between those such as Lemkin, the UN and some genocide scholars who work with the assumption that genocide is a generic concept, and the view of many Holocaust writers that the Holocaust is unique and non-comparable (Freeman 1991: 187). The ‘generic’ view, is articulated by Dytell (2016) who suggests, that rather than the Holocaust being seen as a unique and individual genocide, the concept of genocide rather is based on the fact that genocides share underlying commonalities and preconditions. Additionally, she claims that no single factor can account for genocide (Dytell 2016: 21). This is further evidenced in the UN Convention where a variety of factors are acknowledged as contributing to the case for genocide. On the other hand, scholars have argued for the so-called uniqueness of the Holocaust and have resisted its comparison with other genocide (see: Bauer 1987: 209; Fackenheim 1985; Margalit and Motzkin 1996; Rosenberg 2000; and Gaita 2005 amongst others). Still other scholars have either compared the Holocaust with at least one other genocide (frequently comparing it to the genocide of the Armenians), or alternatively made general comparative studies of genocide which have included the Holocaust within these (see for example: Dadrian 2009; Katz 2009; Freeman 1991: 186). Additionally, some researchers have even used episodes of genocide and mass murder as a backdrop for more general theoretical explorations into mass murder and political violence (Owens et al. 2013: 70). The issue with this analysis is that if we look at the Holocaust as a singular, or ‘unique’ event it has the effect of undermining any attempt to look at separate genocides as individual issues which we can then analyse. This ‘Holocaust paradigm’ has a related consequence to the study of genocide in that it overemphasises the role of the Holocaust and may hinder further analysis of each individual case (Bloxham and Moses 2010:

- 21 - 4; Hinton 2012: 11).11 Shaw (2003: 223) further illustrates this point by claiming that appropriation of the Holocaust by theorists has exacerbated the difficulties for theorists in understanding new genocides and subsequently why they occur. As a result of the growing amount of literature, as well as the lack of a clear methodology, there has emerged a significant murkiness in the field and an inability to move on from old debates (for example, the issues over definitions, and which approach may be the best to take) which in turn create an impasse within the field’s development and severely inhibits its potential (Rosenberg 2012: 21).

As a growing field of research and potential alternative to the argument of ‘genocide uniqueness’, the comparative study of genocide is more robust than ever; despite this, major problems and obstacles still remain. Begun in the late 1970s and early 1980s with core texts by Charny, Fein, Horowitz and Kuper, comparative genocide studies remained marginal in terms of its connection to mainstream social sciences and history until the early-mid 1990s (Finkel and Straus 2012: 56; Hinton 2012: 12; Rosenberg 2012: 16). Kuper (1981: 40), often revered as a leader if not the leader in genocide studies, doubted the practicality of developing “a general theory of genocide”, on the basis that there are a “great variety of historical and social contexts” in which genocide may occur. Additionally, with reference to the Holocaust and the Russian Gulags, Fein states these are two commonly misappropriated models and warns that “comparisons based on… a single archetype which assume there is one mechanically recurring script are bound to be misleading” (Fein 1990: 56). As this field began to gain traction and clarity through the late 1980s and early 1990s, scholars began to focus not on arguments centred around genocides being caused by extreme and irrational deviance, various psychopathologies or even pent-up aggression, but rather by the exact opposite. Scholars asserted that participants in genocide were ‘ordinary men’ pulled into participation in violence through institutionalised norms and everyday forms of interactions (Browning 1998 cited in Luft 2015: 899; Browning and Sieglbaum 2009: 263). The ‘banality of evil’ conveyed the power of bureaucratic norms to enable otherwise ordinary individuals to engage in horrific acts through the systematic following of orders (Arendt 1979; see also Hilberg

11 Historian Peter Novick has suggested that the so-called ‘Holocaust paradigm’ may do more harm than good and serve as a hindrance for IR theorists and policy makers in intervening due to the nature of certain nations’ events failing to resemble those of the Holocaust – for instance the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s (Novick cited in Bloxham and Moses 2010: 4).

- 22 - 1985). Bauman (2003) has also argued within the realms of a sociological approach that the distancing of power of modern bureaucratic structures enabled the average person to participate in extreme violence without feeling personally responsible. Seen in this light, the participation is a product of formal institutional incentives, official authorisation of killing and the banal routinisation of action within hierarchical institutions (Luft 2015: 899; Owens et al. 2013: 76). The recent literature on genocide shows signs of taking what might be called a ‘processal turn’ where the concept of genocide increasingly is understood through a series of steps, rather than one large singular event (Owens et al. 2013: 80; Finkel and Straus 2012). Chalk has argued that much of the current work on genocide has rested on the very tenuous premises that through study we can improve prediction of ‘future’ genocides and that through prediction and education we can mobilise support for humanitarian interventions to deter and prevent ‘new Holocausts’ (Chalk 1989: 150).

Whilst in the late 1990s and early 2000s the field of genocide studies saw a crystallisation around this comparative analysis within genocide studies, research stagnated in the social sciences. However, this is not to say that historians and social scientists were doing unimportant work, and this thesis does not wish to detract from any work these theorists have contributed within the realm of genocide studies. For example, enormously influential studies on genocide in history during this time came to dominate the research (see for example: Kiernan 2007; Levine 2005a; Sémelin 2003 & 2007 and Weitz 2003) additionally, as previously mentioned political science had also made significant strides in research during this time (see: Midlarsky 2005; Valentino 2004). Still, the literature available remains far from providing a strong understanding of how and why genocides occur, with the main research agenda aimed at finding what various contrasting cases of genocide and mass killing have in common. As such, contemporary analyses have focussed and have seemed to stagnate on or around, some mix of the major 20th century cases – the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, Cambodia, the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda (Straus 2012: 555). The more recent literature on genocide (see: Mann 2005; Midlarsky 2005; Sémelin 2007 and Valentino 2004) shows signs of moving away from utilising the Holocaust as a yardstick to gauge different genocides or intrastate warfare. However, whilst there are some theorising these ‘potential’ deviations from original genocide literature, the theory guiding this change is insufficiently specified being implicit rather than explicit (Straus 2012: 555). As such, genocide theory does not and cannot realise

- 23 - its full potential – rather, the study of genocide is stuck within a cyclical wheel unable to branch out and progress forward.

Issues in definition and identification of political violence abound and the concepts of ‘genocide’ and ‘ethnic cleansing’ are not as clear-cut as they may initially appear in the literature (see for example: Tatz and Higgins 2016: 27-32; Herman and Peterson 2010; Jones 2016). Whilst definitional inconsistencies are important to note, it must be highlighted again here, that this thesis is less concerned with debating what constitutes genocide and how this then correlates to examples such as the Holocaust. Rather, it is more concerned with how a biopolitical approach to the issue enables us to understand modernity more clearly and how this approach might then help us account for the phenomenon of genocide. Even though Agamben views the Holocaust as an example to be utilised, for him however, it serves a different purpose. Events such as the Holocaust are examples of a terrible exception to the normal. For Agamben, simply looking at genocide through the lens of World War Two historiography and legal debates on definitions is insufficient and far from convincing as an argument (Mojzes 2011: 2-3). In analysing genocide and ‘ethnic cleansing’ through the examples of Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina, it was ultimately the incapacity of the modern sovereign states to tolerate significant minorities within their borders that led either to forced assimilation pogroms or to operations of ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ultimately genocide. The fanaticism, or as some authors argue (Valentino 2004; Straus 2012), a blind devotion to what the perpetrators believe and feel is a ‘greater cause’ (this is regulation and normalisation) runs throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century examples of mass murder. It is evident, therefore, that the development of an all-powerful state needs to be viewed in the longer historical perspective. The works of Agamben allows us to do this. Whilst Foucault, as mentioned, outlines some ideas on this for us as well, in particular the birth of ‘biopower’ embedded in the state that disciplines and controls, as well as identifying perceived dangerous groups and banishing them, the examples provided within the twentieth century (for instance: Cambodia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Rwanda, in addition to the Holocaust), confirm that there is much more going on than simply the establishment of social control over seemingly ‘docile bodies’. The state is no longer merely content in ‘disciplining and punishment’ (Sémelin 2007: 338).

- 24 - Although Agamben’s work does not address the colonial context, or the ways in which sovereignty differentiates populations according to race, ethnicity and gender, or look into the mind of the génocidaire, the figure of the homo sacer and its relationship to ‘bare life’ is important in describing the correlation between the coloniser and colonised, the oppressor and the oppressed. It also allows us also to understand the positions of the subjects that currently inhabit the camps and zones of the undecided during the genocide as well as their subsequent relationship to the sovereign (Grinberg 2012: 217). The world is now in a period in which the original understanding of sovereignty to make die and to let live has returned via modern biopolitics. The decision of the sovereign – at the limit of the decision of life itself – has re-emerged as a foundation to political form. However, in the modern nation state, this time the sovereign is not a king, or a despot, but the contemporary state apparatus (Agamben 2009). It is this claim to power, harnessing the ability to select who may live and who will die, which is clearly explained through Agamben’s concepts of homo sacer, ‘bare life’ and the state of exception, and which has been analysed in depth throughout the two case study chapters below. What results from this, according to Agamben, is the post-democratic society, which knows no value but life itself, a society vulnerable to the persistent re-emergence of the decision over the worth of ‘bare life’ as the core political principle and the very fixed boundary between life and death (McNamee 2007: 498). The Hutu regime harnessed this state apparatus and swiftly created an ‘us’, as the strong and capable, and ‘them’ as the weak and unworthy opposition – the clear delineation between the make live and let die dichotomy. Additionally, rather than so-called ‘ancient hatreds’, or an ‘ethnic cleansing’/genocide dichotomy, the wars of Yugoslav succession (Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo in 1999 and Slovenia) reflect a myriad of factors. Most notable among these is the rupture in the normal operation of juridical order and a clear display of sovereign power within modernity. It is here that Agamben’s biopolitical theory aids in helping to understand the nature of the genocides which occurred in Rwanda in 1994 and Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1992-1995 (Mennecke 2009: 512-514). Agamben makes it clear that it is not enough simply to expand the rights of those who hitherto have been without rights and therefore without protection. His concepts and methods of analysis, whilst of course open to interpretation and critiqued by a variety of theorists, offer important insights into political and cultural exceptions, the importance of modernity, as well as the exclusion of the ‘other’ in times of war – issues that are not focussed on consistently, or are overlooked completely, by each of the five approaches discussed in turn above.

- 25 - If we were to take Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina as two separate nations, one located in Africa and a former European colony, and the other in the Balkans and formerly part of an unaligned communist nation, one would be excused into thinking that there is absolutely nothing tying these two nations together. However, scholarly interest in genocide has grown exponentially over the past three decades, due largely to the genocides during the first half of the 1990s: the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 and the genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina only a year later. In recent years, the violence perpetrated in Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina has compelled social scientists (political scientists especially) to refocus their lenses on the analysis of civilian mobilisation for genocide. However, as Hoare (2014: 516) points out these genocides, that of Bosnia-Herzegovina in particular, have inspired limited analysis and research from scholars outside Bosnia-Herzegovina. Genocide literature in this sense, despite the 20th anniversaries of these genocides occurring in 2014 and 2015 respectively, has been exceptionally cyclical in nature, simply providing analysis on the already established arguments and discussion of genocide and failing to further try to account for the phenomenon of genocide as a whole. Whilst Bauman (2003: 12) has specifically described the Holocaust as a “rare, yet significant and reliable test of hidden possibilities of modern society”, much of those discourses are exceptionally philosophical and theoretical and remain limited (Levene 2005a: 10).

Whilst it is hard to deny that genocide scholars have contributed to a deeper understanding of mass violence in past decades, severe methodological and ideological implications hamper further development. As noted previously, historians, sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, psychologists etc. all prefer different approaches to the study of genocide, which are all, in their own ways, exceptionally hard to reconcile (Schaller 2011: 254; see also Fein 1993a; Owens et al 2013; Verdeja 2012b and Rosenberg 2012). Additionally, as Levene argues, people have not been able to fully overcome the effects of the Holocaust (Levene 2005a: 39). As such, although genocide is a complex phenomenon, it cannot be reduced to a simple uniform pattern despite the fact many genocides can be characterised by common processes. This in turn makes the ‘biopolitical’ context in question increasingly relevant for our knowledge and understanding in an ever-growing variety of fields. This thesis has subsequently been broken down in to two sections. Part One deals with the theoretical foundations and criticisms of Agamben’s work, with Part Two analysing Agamben’s theory

- 26 - through the examples of Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina. In developing and applying an Agambenian critique to both the situations within Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina, this thesis will develop an alternative understanding of genocide as a phenomenon. It will do this by engaging with two cases that have not been focussed on by Agamben previously. Whilst the two examples to be used in this thesis provide a summary analysis of what occurred within these two countries in the mid-1990s, it needs to be reiterated that this thesis is not concerned with solving the ‘problem’ of genocide. Rather, through the use of these two examples, the thesis will seek to use an Agambenian biopolitical approach and harness its explanatory power for understanding genocide and mass murder as a phenomenon.12

12 This thesis has taken the help of both English and German books as well as a variety of journal articles to finish. Throughout there are German phrases and quotes which have been translated from the original language into English. These have all been translated using my own knowledge of the language and have then been double- checked to ensure the accuracy of each separate translation.

- 27 -

PART ONE: Theory

- 28 - CHAPTER TWO: 5 PILLARS OF INFLUENCE ARENDT- FOUCAULT-BENJAMIN-SCHMITT- BAUMAN

In recent years Giorgio Agamben has become one of the most important and most discussed figures in the world of social science, especially within politics and international affairs. His key ideas and their relevance for this thesis, are explored in Chapter Three. In this chapter the aim is to discuss the views of five key theorists who have all influenced Agamben’s work in one way or another, either directly or indirectly. These five theorists are Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Walter Benjamin, Carl Schmitt and Zygmunt Bauman. The first four, Arendt, Foucault, Schmitt and Benjamin, afforded Agamben with key ideas that provided much of the theoretical basis for his Homo Sacer project (Owens 2009: 40; Finlayson 2010: 101-103).13 Perhaps the most important influence on his Homo Sacer project was Foucault’s concept of biopower and biopolitics. Foucault redeveloped these terms to describe a form of power that emerged in the shift from the late Middle Ages to modernity. The idea of biopolitics, for Foucault then, refers to the various technologies through which not just the behaviour of individuals is regulated, but through which life itself, in all its dimensions, is subjected to the exercise of power (Milchman and Rosenberg 2005: 336). In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998: 3), Agamben argues that it was Foucault and indeed Arendt, who were really the first contemporary thinkers to understand and grapple with the radical changes that have occurred within the ‘political’ in modern times. In what follows, each of these thinker’s contributions to Agamben’s overall perspective will be considered in turn. It needs to be understood, however, that what follows is not intended to be a comprehensive analysis of their considerable writings. Rather, the aim here is to identify key aspects of their thought that Agamben drew upon in the development of his own approach. This will also involve discussing the ways in which Agamben’s use of their ideas nevertheless differed from how these thinkers used them in their own work.

13 This series of books, whilst briefly mentioned here will be discussed at length in the following chapter.

- 29 - To give a brief snapshot of what is to follow, it is fair to say that Arendt was an important forerunner to those concerned with the emergence of ‘biopolitics’. Arendt’s influence stems mainly from her analysis and diagnosis of modern politics and society in The Human Condition (1958) and her thoughts on the changes to the political in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism ([1951]1979), which subsequently deals with the limitations of human rights in relation to the nation state. Arendt looks at the ‘statelessness’ of those peoples without citizenship or rights. Agamben grapples with these issues in a lot more detail in his book The State of Exception (2005), where Arendt’s ideas on ‘statelessness’ are seen as a precursor to the notion of the state of exception. Benjamin and Schmitt’s insights into the state of exception and the concept of sovereignty were heavily utilised by Agamben throughout his writings. Benjamin identified in Critique of Violence ([1940]1978) the problem that Agamben elucidates in Homo Sacer, namely the conceptual distinction between two forms of life as a means for understanding and appreciating what lies between the lives of those who are fortunate enough to be included within the political community, and those who are placed at its margins or outside of this altogether. In building on Benjamin, Agamben focusses on the idea of ‘bare life’ as essential to the notion of sovereignty. Carl Schmitt’s seminal work Political Theology ([1922]2010) opens with his most famous statement “sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception” (Schmitt 2010: 5). Agamben draws on this to illustrate the way in which the collapse of the rule of law, together with the state of exception, has become increasingly evident where the use of exceptional measures, practised against marginalised groups has become a norm and has subsequently spilt over into the rest of the society. Finally, there is the work of Bauman, whose ideas on modernity, whilst not directly impacting on Agamben’s theories in Homo Sacer, are important for understanding how modernity and postmodernity play a role in current society as well as within the phenomenon of genocide.14 Bauman’s interest in the postmodern and global culture has come increasingly to the fore in recent years and his analysis of issues within modernity rests upon his recent writings, Modernity and the Holocaust ([1989]2003), and Modernity and Ambivalence (1991). Additionally, Agamben’s analysis of the ‘modern’ would shape how he viewed not only biopolitics as a whole, but the idea of the ‘camp’ which he views as the biopolitical paradigm

14 Interestingly, it would be Agamben’s work that Bauman utilises in his more recent works on postmodernity and consumer society.

- 30 - of the West (Agamben 1998: 181). The value of exploring the relationship of Bauman’s ideas to those of Agamben is to compare their respective approaches to modernity. Whilst other theorists may have been drawn upon or indeed mirror Agamben’s work to some extent, these five theorists discussed below are most relevant for developing an understanding of Homo Sacer and Agambenian biopolitics.

I

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) is widely recognised as one of the most original and influential political thinkers of the twentieth century. Arendt wrote on an extremely wide variety of issues and a number of diverse topics. She is well known for her study in The Human Condition (1958) of the place of political action in human life and her subsequent diagnosis of modern politics and society. She is also well known for coining the term ‘the banality of evil’ to describe the Nazi war criminal, in what some say is her most controversial book, Eichmann in Jerusalem ([1963]1964). In The Origins of Totalitarianism she developed her ground-breaking ideas on totalitarianism and the state; the meaning of the modern revolutionary tradition; the nature of political freedom and authority; and the faculties which make up ‘the life of the mind’ (Villa 2006: 1). De la Durantaye, in his introduction to Agamben’s philosophical beginnings, draws the reader’s attention to the very early connection between Arendt and Agamben. It was early in the 1970s that Agamben wrote to Arendt expressing both his admiration and gratitude for what he deemed to be a “decisive experience” (de la Durantaye 2009: 41).

Arendt’s approach to political theory was inspired by certain facts and events rather than an intellectual ‘story of ideas’. For Arendt, ideas and theories only mattered if they were directly illuminated in politics (Grumley 2015: 229). Her thoughts, and beliefs, which came across so strongly in her writings, at times significantly overlapped with those of Schmitt and Benjamin, as well as Foucault, three other key theorists of influence in Agamben’s work. Arendt was, according to Owens (2009), a theorist of “new political beginnings and founding of new political spaces. New beginnings were always possible, she argued, given the facts of natality, the ontological root of political action, because humans “are not born in order to die but in order to begin”” (Owens 2009: 38). However, it was her belief that although political action can have a definite beginning, it can never have a predictable end. According to Arendt, history is the product of events brought into being by the actions of men and women; here “accident

- 31 - and infinite improbability occur” all the time (Arendt 1958: 246; Vatter 2006: 137; Arendt cited in Owens 2009: 38).

In one of her earliest works, The Human Condition, Arendt identifies several modern trends that have contributed to the destruction of our sense of a distinctly ‘public’ world. She was extremely critical of any use of Christian principles as the basis for political action, such as compassion, love or charity. She was also highly critical of efforts to make issues of ‘the self’ and concern for the ‘life processes’ of individuals, the central concern of politics (LaFay 2014: 123; Owens 2012: 557). Arendt believed that the results would be disastrous. She claimed that “the linkage of politics and life results in an inner contradiction that cancels and destroys what is specifically political about politics” (Arendt 2005: 145). This element of Arendt’s thought overlaps with the realist tradition of Machiavelli (Owens 2009: 37). Arendt assumed that there was a priority and autonomy to politics. She did not believe that the public and the private spheres were totally unrelated, rather she argues that there are distinct principles and motives for political action. In a consumer society, for example, life is not human because it is constantly subject to the life processes, consuming and being consumed (Terada 2011: 107). Unlike other theorists, such as Schmitt (1996), who also believed in the distinctiveness of the political, the ultimate expression of Arendt’s idea of politics is not violent conflict, a struggle to the death between enemies, rather it is the ability to “appear before plural equals and to debate and act to build a common world” (Owens 2007: 25-26; Slomp 2009: 2-3). Arendt understood political action to be identical with the freedom to act with plural others to bring something new in to the world (LaFay 2014: 138). This plurality, she argued, is “specifically the condition… of the political world as such” (Arendt 1958: 7). What Arendt (1958: 220) calls something similar to the ‘modern triumph of homo faber’ thus gives birth to the modern view that ‘everything is possible’, that there are “no limitations to humanity’s capacity to mimic and exploit natural processes and thus no limits to the reshaping of reality which we might accomplish” (Villa 2001: 129). Within this account, Arendt turns the focus from the danger of totalitarian dynamism to consider other ‘world destroying’ forces that the modern age has unleashed. It is within this ‘modern age’ where the formation of unprecedented alienation, isolation and loneliness is created (Arendt 1958: 173; Villa 1999: 185, 187 & 190). It is this idea of controlling populations or ‘specimens’, destruction, lifelessness etc. that connects Arendt’s Human Condition to Agamben’s research and the ‘rise of biopolitics’.

- 32 - Whilst these ideas on politics and humanity’s capacity for exploitation have contributed to further study on Arendt by Agamben, it is without doubt that her book on The Origins of Totalitarianism has been by far the most instrumental of all her works for Agamben’s Homo Sacer project. Interestingly, however, for a thinker who has been accused of Eurocentrism, the issues that Arendt addresses in the Origins of Totalitarianism are as relevant to the ‘globalised’ world today as they were to the events within the twentieth century (King 2007: 255). The Origins of Totalitarianism established Arendt’s reputation as a political thinker and should be regarded as the key to her work. It is through this book we see reflections on a variety of catastrophic experiences, both personal and second hand, as she sought to understand these issues within her own theoretical arguments (Canovan 2006: 25). Arendt argued that the Second World War, and especially the Holocaust, revealed a clear rupture in the Western tradition of political thought. Imperialism, world wars and the rise of totalitarianism had, according to Arendt, left Western morale and political traditions in tatters (Owens 2009: 34). In Arendt’s account, the decisive condition for totalitarian politics is the appearance of the animal laborans, a human being who works in order to live and lives in order to work – it is synonymous with the labouring classes (Levin 1979: 522). Since labour is, for Arendt as it was for Karl Marx, the condition through which the human being relates to its biological survival, the reduction of all cultural and political forms of human life (bios) to the natural life maintained by labour (zõe) could have no other outcome than the thorough ‘labor- isation’ of politics characteristic of totalitarian regimes.15 The culmination of this was when these animal laborans and indeed biological life itself, occupied the centre of the political scene of modernity (DeCaroli 2013: 222 & 228; Levin 1979: 525). For Arendt, this was described as the creation of a ‘superior race’ of men, on the one hand, and the production of a ‘worthless’ life-form that could be completely controlled, manipulated and eventually exterminated, on the other (Arendt 1979: 126; Vatter 2007: 3).

In Chapter Nine of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt grapples with the concept of statelessness, the condition of literal and political homelessness – which are closely linked, and which overlap with what Arendt terms ‘superfluousness’ (Arendt 1979: 267-302). The central function of the camp system, and a crucial part of what she meant by radical evil,

15 As will be made clearer in what follows, unlike Arendt, Agamben makes a clear distinction between zõe, that being the biological life and bios, which is political life.

- 33 - entailed making whole groups of people superfluous, thus in turn, making them prime candidates for genocide – people thus deemed as ‘vermin’ or ‘cockroaches’ or as Hitler termed the Jews during the Third Reich ‘untermensch’, or subhuman (Arendt 1979: 437; Aharony 2010: 205).16 For Agamben, her approach was exceptionally useful and he focusses on this idea in some depth. From her analysis of superfluity one can trace Agamben’s development of the idea of ‘bare life’ as “life unworthy of life” (King 2007: 256). Arendt did not trust organised humanity; she explicitly says, “it is quite conceivable and within the realm of practical possibilities, that one fine day a highly organised and mechanised humanity will conclude quite democratically – namely by majority decision – that for humanity as a whole it would be better to liquidate certain parts thereof” (Arendt 1979: 298). However, Agamben does not stop with this, he drastically radicalises her famous analysis of the death camps by asserting that the ‘camp’ is not only the central institution of mid-century totalitarian societies, but also of contemporary societies. This claim is intentionally provocative and Agamben immediately raises the stakes by arguing that the differences which separate the liberal democratic regimes of the post-war period from their totalitarian precursors signify “only a stay of execution” (Grumley 2015: 231).

Arendt recognises the appearance of rape, concentration and extermination camps in places such as Bosnia-Herzegovina as the realisation of her prophecy from The Origins of Totalitarianism – the camp is, in Arendt’s theory, a rare and unique place of evil, while in Agamben’s argument it is not rare and unique, it is a rule (Kurelić 2009: 154). Arendt observed that what comes to light in the camps is the principle that supports the totalitarian domination and that common sense stubbornly refuses to admit to, namely, the principle according to which anything is possible. It is only because the camps constitute a space of exception that everything is truly possible within them (Arendt 2005: 39). At the end of Origins Arendt warned that totalitarian solutions may very well survive the fall of totalitarian regimes. For Arendt, the camp was an appearance of a radical evil, which revealed the essence of totalitarianism. It was the most important institution of a totalitarian regime (Barichello 2015: 45). Nazism and Stalinism share the ability to exterminate millions of innocent human beings

16 Chapter Ten of her book The Origins of Totalitarianism details Arendt’s distinctive response to, and view of, the status of a refugee and the notion of genocide. Here she looks at the concept as a ‘war of annihilation’ (Arendt 1979; 2005).

- 34 - for non-utilitarian reasons. What they share is not a set of institutions or the mode of production of the camp, but the place in which humanity itself is put into question, the place in which a new form of evil comes into existence (Aharony 2010: 194). With the collapse of totalitarian regimes and the closure of the camps, humanity was able to dispense with radical evil but failed to stamp out totalitarian solutions that could see it return (Kurelić 2009: 141- 142). For Agamben, the ‘camp’ is the paradigm of our age not because of its similarities to horrific historical episodes of the past, but because it points to the unacknowledged dark realities of the present and anticipated future (de la Durantaye 2009: 241). Agamben shares Arendt’s view that the camps are no accident, but rather the outcome of a ‘political logic’. However, he rejects her explanation that they should be understood as a product of the totalitarian project alone. Rather, he views them as necessary products of the Western theological-political tradition and its logic of sovereign decision. He does not search for the elements which crystallised in a regime capable of running a rape or concentration camp, but recognises the common origin of modern political violence, the common origin of all camps (Kurelić 2009: 142). For Agamben, “the ancient prerogative of the sovereign to kill and to let live now assumes a specific biopolitical shape with the fracture between the nation and excluded ‘bare life’ and the inverse formula ‘to make live and to let die’” (Agamben 1998: 82- 83).

Both Agamben and Arendt agree that, under existing conditions, the nation state determines who will benefit from the implementation of human rights and that the status of merely being human is not enough to ensure human rights protection (Lechte and Newman 2012: 524). Arendt had argued, that human rights had always been linked to the rights of citizens of nation states. When the system of nation states went into crisis, and entire peoples became stateless masses, the individuals also found themselves in a condition of rightlessness, thereby casting into question the idea that human beings “in virtue of their nature” are endowed with inalienable human rights (Arendt 1979). Agamben takes this analysis of rights by Arendt to mean that at the height of the French nation and with the signing of the Declaration de Droits de l’Homme of 1789 (or Declaration of the Rights of the Man and of the Citizen), rights are created in a biopolitical fashion because they directly tie the idea of being human to a person’s ‘bare life’ to the kind of “nakedness of being human” which we are at birth (Arendt 1979: 296).

- 35 - According to Vatter (2007) Agamben’s deconstruction of the French declaration works “only on the assumption that it is no longer possible to distinguish a republic from a nation state, and on the further assumption that the reference of a freedom ‘from birth’, contained in the discourse on human rights, refers to the birth of the nation and the birth of individuals into a nation, and not to another sense of birth” (Vatter 2007: 32). These assumptions, he further suggests, have been rejected by Arendt, because she believed the crisis of the modern republic was due in large part to the “principle of the nation taking over the republican idea of the state” (Vatter 2007: 32). Arendt believed that the very notion of political freedom should be understood as a “right to have rights (and that means to live in a framework where one is judged by one’s actions and opinions) and a right to belong to some kind of organised community… Only with a completely organised humanity could the loss of home and political status become identical with expulsion from humanity altogether” (Arendt 1979: 296-297).

In Arendt’s work the distinction between the rights of man and the rights of a citizen, what originally began with the French Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, remained ambiguous. Arendt recognised that one cannot assume the nation state as being any more reliable as a guarantor of human rights than any other entity, such as the United Nations for example. The problem is such: a human being who supposedly has human rights as a human being finds out that these human rights are protected only within nation states (if that), and if you find yourself as a refugee, that being stateless, you are subsequently thrown out of humanity altogether. A camp, no matter what camp, is a place for the unwanted (Kurelić 2009: 147). Both Agamben and Arendt, albeit for different reasons, reject the definition that “human rights are the rights one has simply because one is a human being” (Lechte and Newman 2012: 530). Arendt reinforced that the abstract nakedness of “being nothing but human” was indeed humanity’s greatest danger. In such situations, genocide always seems about to happen, or actually does occur (Aharony 2010: 200; King 2007: 256; Bauman 2002: 284).

Agamben’s thesis takes this issue one step further. In his view, modern biopolitics is already situated within the Declaration of the Rights of Man, in as much as these rights constitute the very inscription of naked or ‘bare life’ into the juridical-political order. According to Agamben in the 1789 Declaration, natural life is both the foundation source and the carrier of the rights of man, since a man’s ‘bare life’ – or more precisely the very fact of being born in a certain

- 36 - territory – is the element that effects the transition from the ancient régimes’s principle of divine sovereignty to modern sovereignty concentrated at the nation state. While Agamben draws a lot of his analysis from Arendt’s discussion on the ‘decline of nation-state; end of rights of man’17 his analysis of human rights is that people are judged only through one’s “national, ethnic, sexual or racial identity” (Vatter 2007: 32-33). This is why Agamben insists that we separate the concept of the refugee from the rights of man. The current practice of these rights does not in any way protect refugees but rather renders them politically impotent (Agamben 1998: 128 & 134; Duarte 2007: 202; Gündogdu 2015: 51 and Lechte and Newman 2012: 531).

Arendt’s principal reflections on totalitarianism remain exceptionally relevant for today. Rephrased in biopolitical terms, the core of Arendt’s diagnosis of the present is “that wherever politics has the most to do with maintenance and increase of the vital metabolism of affluent states, it is on the verge of being degraded further still – to the status of homo sacer, bare and unprotected life that can be delivered to oblivion and death” (Duarte 2007: 202-203). It is for these reasons, amongst others, that “Arendt’s approach to politics and to thinking remains an indispensable source” for those looking for “not what to think but how to think about world politics” (Owens 2009: 40). What both Arendt and Agamben agree on is that our understanding of politics as the administrative promotion of abundance and the happiness of the human population is in fact correlated with economic and political exclusion, radicalised prejudice, violence and genocide against the ‘bare life’ of homo sacer. Arendt notes “the alternative is no longer between good and evil, but between murder and murder” (Arendt 1979: 452; Duarte 2007: 202). Perhaps Arendt’s most distinctive legacy to biopolitics consists in the pattern of rebellion against society and the fearful relapse into humanity that can be found re-interpreted in Agamben’s work (Terada 2011: 96). Agamben creates a fusion between Arendt’s criticism of totalitarianism and Foucault’s criticisms of biopolitics and argues that concentration camps are the ultimate playground of the biopolitical. Arendt is important to Agamben for two main reasons: It is with her help Agamben aims to explain the collapse of the European political order, the birth of camps as a result of that collapse and indeed each failed nation where genocide has occurred. However, unlike Arendt he wants to show that both phenomena are in fact the result of biopolitics. This is how the two key

17 Please see Part Two: Chapter Nine within The Origins of Totalitarianism.

- 37 - concepts of Agamben’s theory come into play – the refugee and the camp (Kurelić 2009: 146). Agamben agrees with a lot of what Arendt has to offer. He wants to show that the internment camp represents a place in which human life is reduced to ‘bare life’. That is something that never occurred in the writings of Arendt; or indeed Foucault to whose influence it is time to investigate.

II

If genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers, this is not because of a recent return of the ancient right to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race and the large-scale phenomena of population – Michel Foucault ([1976]1990: 136-137)

The work of Michel Foucault (1926-1984) has been influential in almost every area of the humanities and social sciences. Very few thinkers have been taken up in so many diverse fields of study and practice, from literature and philosophy to psychiatry and healthcare. However, it is within the social sciences and the discipline of politics and international relations especially, that we find a diverse range of interpretations of his work (Neal 2009: 161; Lemm and Vatter 2017: 40). Foucault’s focus is on modern forms of power in their plural forms, locations and practices as well as the way these organise and help to shape human populations. There are a wide variety of ideas that Agamben draws from Foucault’s work and we cannot discuss Agamben without first acknowledging the impact Foucault has had on his research. Indeed, Foucault is one of Agamben’s key influences: “I see my work as closer to no one than to Foucault” (Agamben cited in de la Durantaye 2009: 314). Discipline and power/knowledge is an undercurrent discourse throughout all of Agamben’s work and something adopted from Foucault’s analyses presented in his lectures given at the Collège de France. Additionally, the notion of sovereignty and the ‘archive’ are also ideas that Agamben considers in terms of Foucault’s work. Although the study of institutions is central to much of Foucault’s work, the implications are more general than the institutions themselves. Whilst Agamben in various ways applies Foucault’s work to his own, it is the concepts of biopower and biopolitics that are of most relevance for Agamben.

Beginning with the History of Sexuality Vol. 1: The Will to Knowledge (1990), Foucault extends his study of ‘disciplinary power’, with its focus on the normalisation of the productive

- 38 - individual, to something he terms ‘biopolitics and biopower’, a form of power with a focus on human life at the level of populations (Neal 2009: 164). However, in developing the critical analysis of Foucault’s historico-theological analysis on the biopolitical and sovereignty, Agamben makes a number of contextual shifts away from Foucault (Mills 2008a: 60). Where Foucault describes and analyses biopolitics in terms of a productivity of life and experience seen in terms of positive power, Agamben sees this as a negative. For Foucault, biopolitics is born when natural life begins to be incorporated into the politics of the state. However, for Agamben the notion of biopolitics was the entry of zõe into bios which constituted a fundamental shift in the relation between politics and life, where the simple fact of life is no longer excluded from political calculations and mechanisms but resides at the heart of modern politics (Vaughn-Williams 2009: 22; Agamben 1998: 139-140; Forti 2006: 10-11). Foucault’s discussion on biopolitics and biopower is expanded in The Birth of Biopolitics (2008) and his extension on the study of disciplinary power is also further detailed in his books Society Must Be Defended (2003) and Security, Territory, Population (2007).

In his lectures at the Collège de France, Foucault undertook a series of daring ‘problematisations’ the concerns of which were two-fold: he focussed on the trajectory of what he terms ‘biopower’ as the basis of power relations in modern societies, and the role of parrhesia or ‘speaking truth frankly’ (Venn and Terranova 2009: 1; Milchman and Rosenberg 2005: 335-336). Society Must Be Defended centred around the notion of power/knowledge and biopower, as well as addressing the technologies of ‘governments’, that being the various ways in which the behaviour of individuals or populations can be shaped and regulated. In order to do this, he contrasted a philosophical-juridical discourse to a historico-political discourse for the analysis of power relations. The aim of biopower, as Foucault articulated it, was the production of the human being as a ‘docile body’, a mode of subjectification that would enhance productivity whilst simultaneously maximising control (Milchman and Rosenberg 2005: 337; Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero 2008: 279; Koopman 2015: 579). The aim of Foucault’s analysis of the place of death within biopolitics is that biopolitical technologies are capable of making the perpetration of death, physical or political, be experienced as a maximisation of life, an augmentation of capacity and experience. The originality of Foucault’s analysis of death within a biopolitical power is to demonstrate that there is no contradiction between maximising life and perpetrating death (Blencowe 2012: 97). Lemke (2005: 3) states

- 39 - that for Foucault life is at the centre of the political order and therefore biopolitics is the threshold of the politics of modernity. In Agamben’s ‘modern’, however, biopolitics is the original act of sovereignty and in addition to this the idea of the ‘camp’ has become the paradigm of modernity. He argues that ‘bare life’ and sovereignty cannot be separated and the “inclusion of bare life in the political realm constitutes the original – if concealed – nucleus of sovereign power” (Agamben 1998: 6). The decision that founds the state and the decision that declares life itself to be mere life are indistinguishable. Agamben (1998: 114) suggests an enduring link between the sovereign and the ‘bare life’ of homo sacer that is not religious, but rather biopolitical (Pan 2009: 52). This is something that Foucault did not envision and could not conceive of (Vaughn-Williams 2009: 22).

What Foucault insists upon within Society Must Be Defended is that if we want to analyse modern power relations, we need to separate ourselves from the theory of sovereignty (Kalyvas 2005a: 224; Milchman and Rosenberg 2005). His analysis of regimes of biopolitics, and their disciplinary networks, leads him to confront the question of how it is possible for individuals or collectives to resist this form of domination? He insists that we must dispense with the theory of sovereignty. For Foucault (2003: 39-40), if “we are to struggle against disciplines or rather against disciplinary power… we should not be turning to the old right of the sovereign: we should be looking for a new right that is both anti-disciplinary and emancipated from the theory of sovereignty”. However, Agamben refuses to do this because he sees ‘bare life’ and the sovereign decisions as two sides of the same phenomenon (Pan 2009: 52). In his view, the notion of sovereignty is inherent to both the theory of biopolitics and indeed modernity. Sovereignty is no longer limited to merely the traditional view of a sovereign, but rather it can be and has been extended to others in positions of immeasurable authority. In essence, Agamben restores the notion of sovereignty, law and the functioning state to the centre of analysis (Rabinow and Rose 2006: 202).

In Foucault’s view, genocide represented a manifestation of modern ‘biopolitics’, reflecting the fact that ‘life and its mechanisms’ have been brought “into the realm of explicit calculations and made knowledge/power an agent of transformation of human life” (Foucault 1990: 143). As such, the result of the state’s management of life forces was a new management of death: “One might say the ancient right to take life or let live was replaced by a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death” (Foucault 1990: 138). Foucault writes

- 40 - that “if genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers, this is not because of a recent return to the ancient right to kill, it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race and the large-scale phenomenon of population” (Foucault cited in Taylor 2010: 50). Foucault describes and analyses biopolitics in terms of a productivity of life and experience, this is seen in terms of positive power. Despite looking at positive power the perpetration of death and the “murderous functions of the state” are central to his concerns (Blencowe 2012: 96; Vaughn-Williams 2009: 25). Both Foucault and Agamben would agree that whilst death is still an outcome of many modern practices of power, biopolitics considers this statistically at the level of populations. Once this happens, choices are made, which often result in letting die rather than directly causing someone to die (Neal 2009: 164).

However, if genocide is a manifestation of the general ‘power over life’, by which the state takes upon itself the task of regulating and maintaining its subject’s minds and bodies, as Foucault makes particular mention, then it is still imperative that this issue is linked back to the notion of genocide, modernity and the modernisation process. Foucault’s explanation that genocide is the ‘other side’ of the modern state’s “function of administering life”, whilst useful for Agamben, it is still insufficient in its analysis. According to Shaw (2015: 173) Foucault’s ideas on genocide appear relatively unexamined and somewhat over reliant on particular pseudoscientific ideas. It may have been evident that some totalitarian rulers did appear at times to be mobilising power to destroy completely entire populations, but there are clear instances where his arguments lacked a thorough overview in the application to genocide. Foucault’s linkages were suggestive, however they did not in their albeit brief overview explain the rise of genocide, or why they begin in the first place (Shaw 2010: 152). Agamben’s diagnosis of modernity and genocide, however, whilst drawing considerably on Foucault’s analysis of biopolitics moves far beyond it. For Agamben, the Foucauldian paradigm, which signifies the reorientation of politics away from questions of law to those of life, death, work and the strength of the state in general is, “substantially correct”, but not entirely correct (Agamben 2000: 7). Here Agamben builds on and ‘corrects’ Foucault. For Agamben, it is the early decades of the twentieth century with the emergence of totalitarianism and the mass appearance of the refugee that exemplifies the darkest potential of the present. For him ‘bare life’ is not a prior substance, life conceived independently of all its traditional human attributes, but a remainder after life has been violently stripped of all form (de la Durantaye

- 41 - 2009: 203; Vaughn-Williams 2009: 734). Whilst “external wars are bloodier than ever, and regimes visit ‘holocausts’ upon their own populations”, Foucault did not consider these wars to be waged in the name of the sovereign, but “in the name of the existence of everyone, entire populations are mobilised for the purpose of the wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity” (Foucault 1990: 137). Foucault wished to analyse biopower separately from that of ‘traditional’ sovereign power because not only is it a more encompassing framework, but it also addressed directly the productivity of life (Forti 2006: 10). Power, Foucault argues, is not situated and exercised at the level of life. Despite the ‘disqualification of death’ within the modern era and instead the promotion of life, Foucault argues that there will be more genocides under biopolitics and biopower, than sovereign power. This is because biopolitics wants to manage the health of populations. When combined with any of the elements that make up any given genocide, “this management becomes cast as a concern for the racial purity of a people” (Rabinow and Rose 2006: 196; Taylor 2010: 50).

The most extreme exemplar of a modern biopolitics that places the human being’s existence as a living being in question, is the use of racial and ethnic distinctions by Nazi and Fascist regimes, with the implication of inferior and superior species of human beings (Lemm and Vatter 2017: 43; Forti 2006: 13-14).18 Society Must Be Defended culminates in Foucault’s account of a tendency immanent of biopolitics, a tendency to what he has elsewhere designated as ‘thanatopolitics’ something also hinted at by Agamben, and what he terms ‘state racism’. The question for Foucault, raised in his final lecture series, is how can mass murder and extermination become instantiated in a regime of biopower? It is here that racism, which indeed has a long history, intervenes, and now becomes inscribed in the basic mechanisms of the modern state (Foucault 2003: 254; Milchman and Rosenberg 2005: 341- 342). Race, for Foucault, is linked to the ‘dividing practices’ through which a population can be placated and controlled within a biopolitical regime. The Foucauldian notion of race is exceptionally interesting and permits us to see the numerous ways in which such dividing practices are embedded in the modern world regardless of the “racialisation of politics” that may arise (Rose 2001: 2; Milchman and Rosenberg 2005: 342; Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero 2008: 271-272). Whilst the concept of racism is nothing new, and indeed Foucault embeds this within a modern biopolitical regime, Agamben does not settle with simply acknowledging the

18 This is similar to Arendt’s discussion on totalitarian nation states.

- 42 - issues of race – the idea of biological markers, as will be made evident in Chapters Five and Six below, are important for understanding Agamben’s theory on race and come into play when a biopolitical state is faced with the need to deny life (Blencowe 2012: 99). However, both Agamben and Foucault suggest that, racism is interwoven not only into the theory of biopolitics itself, but within the fabric of the Holocaust. Agamben also believes, however, the element of race and biological markers are found within all aspects of modern society today (Agamben 1998).

Foucault’s continuous wavering between a positive productive reading and a negative tragic reading of the relationship between politics and life is why theorists, such as Agamben, have posited that his assessment of the biopolitical structure is incomplete and exposes an internal contradiction (Esposito 2011: 210). The limits of Foucault’s thinking around biopolitics lies in an ambiguity that derives from the fact that Foucault thought of two core polarities of biopolitics – bios and politics – as originally separate and only afterwards reassembled them together in such a fashion that the one always attempts to subdue and absorb the other. This troublesome ambivalence continues to characterise the biopolitical debate in the post- Foucauldian era: “life either appears to be seized and trapped by a power destined to reduce it to a mere biological stratum, to ‘bare life’ or politics to be subsumed and dissolved into the productive rhythm of a constantly expanding life” (Esposito 2011: 210 & 211). With these distinctions in mind, Foucault’s conception of biopolitics signals the entry not of ‘life’ in its generality into politics, but rather the integration of what is captured by the more specific designation of zõe or natural life. What is at stake in modern politics to Agamben is the simple living body of the individual and the species. For Agamben, in contradistinction to the view developed by Foucault, natural life has always been included in politics – even if only through its exclusion (Mills 2008a: 70).

III

The centre of gravity in Agamben’s genealogical analysis is the works of Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt. Two of their early texts, Benjamin’s Critique of Violence ([1940]1978) and Schmitt’s Political Theology ([1922]2010) mark a new sensibility in the understanding of sovereignty. Both texts, in their own ways, suggest that sovereignty, though secularised, bears

- 43 - witness to a reappearance of theologico-political figures of thought (de Wilde 2006b: 188-189; Lesch 2014: 219).

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) was a peripheral member of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, a philosophically focussed movement for critical thought that attempted to save the important momentum of Enlightenment thought (de Wilde 2006b: 189). In the eyes of the Frankfurt School, the First World War had discredited the Enlightenment’s dominant cultural and philosophical expression in Germany, namely idealism. “Drawing upon Hegel’s justification of conflict as a valuable source of cultural rejuvenation, idealism had succeeded in supplying even a patently senseless war with a reasonable appearance” (de Wilde 2006b 189). The Frankfurt School, as it became known, was set up explicitly as a Marxist research Institute. The alternative to this ‘crisis of idealism’ was found within the Frankfurt School. Benjamin considered his main philosophical task to be reconciling Marxism’s critical materialism with the tradition of Jewish religious thought (de Wilde 2006b 189). This resulted in his political theology which, compared to Schmitt, is probably opposite in every sense of the word. Schmitt, on the other hand, is the twentieth-century’s standard for the alternative approach to political theory and belonged to the Conservative Revolution, an intellectual movement situated in Germany on the extreme right of the political spectrum (Slomp 2009: 3). A characteristic feature of this movement was its revolutionary attitude in seeking to reshape society according to the ideals of Gemeinschaft (community) and Kultur (culture) (de Wilde 2006b: 190). It served to mobilise modern means in the service of a nationalist project. By continually trying to undermine the fragile democracy of the Weimar Republic, the conservative revolutionaries in fact paved the way for National Socialism and ultimately the Third Reich (McConkey 2013: 416).

‘Political theology’, for Benjamin, refers not to what we usually see as ‘politics’ or ‘political’, but rather to das Politische (the political). This is evidenced through the fact that for both Benjamin and Schmitt (as noted below) have argued that “the political no longer takes place in the classical political institutions, such as parliament and political parties, but has become omnipresent: in modern societies the political is present and active in the media, the economy, technology and so on so forth” (de Wilde 2006b: 190). “Political theology seems to indicate that the reappearance of theological resurgence is not only in fundamental beliefs,

- 44 - ideologies and myths, but also silently in theories such as sovereignty, decision and the ‘force of law’” (Marder 2010: 2; de Wilde 2006b: 189-190).

Benjamin’s view/approach to law begins with the idea that meaningful change is possible and that the current conditions of law and political order contain elements of domination that can be eliminated through human action. The key to such a project of emancipation is the disruption of the existing order in ways that open unexpected new possibilities in the future (Pan 2009: 43). Whilst Agamben is perhaps best known for his logic of sovereignty drawn from Schmitt, as we will see, Agamben would be nowhere without his critique of sovereignty that he develops through his reading of Benjamin’s messianism. For Agamben, Schmitt’s analysis of sovereignty claims that the state of exception is a juridical condition, in that the law survives its suspension in the form of the ‘force of law’. Drawing on Benjamin, Agamben argues that sovereignty is a fiction that covers over the original in-operativity of the law and the illegitimacy of authority (McLoughlin 2016: 509; Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero 2008: 276). Benjamin’s essay Critique of Violence (1978) is a foundational text for Giorgio Agamben’s study of sovereign power because it lays bare the link between violence and law that is so important for Agamben’s project (De Boever 2008: 82). In the Critique, Benjamin examines the relationship between law and violence in the light of theology. Agamben suggests that Carl Schmitt conceived his theory of the sovereign and sovereignty in Political Theology as a response to Benjamin’s account of divine violence. Schmitt arrives at a conclusion that is entirely opposed to that of Benjamin, however, similar to Benjamin’s concept of revolutionary violence Schmitt’s sovereign violence suspends the law, but only to neutralise attempts to radically challenge state power (Son 2013: 629; Salzani 2016: 117; Watkin 2015: 143). The dialogical relationship between Schmitt and Benjamin is central to the question Agamben later poses about whether the meaning of law can survive its own deposition without being applied in a juridical or political context (Kruger 2005: 339). By exposing the legal order’s dependence on the violence of ‘law making’ decisions, Benjamin attempts to articulate a certain kind of responsibility. Benjamin begins by suggesting that “the existing critiques of violence, that being the violence to be criticised and the violence inherent in critique itself, have become entangled and conceptually confused” (Watkin 2015: 143). This critique understands violence to “be merely a means to affect the norms of either positive or natural law” and will be unable to “get a hold of state violence, for that critique will focus on the illegitimacy or illegality of a

- 45 - juridical practice instead of grasping violence ‘as a principle’” (de Wilde 2006b: 194). That critique, de Wilde (2006b: 195) further suggests, tends to mobilise violence as itself a means, that is, a ‘means of more pressure’, and thus risks becoming implicated in the very violence it seeks to criticise. Benjamin suggests that the critique of violence can only be effective if it succeeds in overcoming this conceptual confusion: “the violence to be critiqued and the violence inherent in critique itself is merely a means. It is not a means, but a ‘manifestation’” (de Wilde 2006b: 195). The aim of Benjamin’s essay is to propose a third figure that would break the circularity of this conflict (De Boever 2008: 82).

Benjamin identifies two different types of violence: rechtsetzende Gewalt ‘law making violence’ as distinguished from rechtserhaltende Gewalt ‘law preserving violence’. Law making violence seems to reside in the ‘force of law’, guaranteeing the law’s applicability. These forms are often grouped together under the heading ‘mythic violence’ in opposition to ‘pure’ or ‘divine’ violence (Watkin 2015: 141). The law is violence, Benjamin states, to overcompensate for its lack of real origins. This causes a problem in that the means and the ends do not have a causal but rather a cyclical relationship (Martel 2015: 189). The juridico-political order betrays its dependence on law making violence in at least four cases that Benjamin identifies and are articulated in de Wilde (2006b) (Menke 2015: 22). These ‘legal institutions’ – military law, the death penalty, the police and the parliament are meant to illuminate the various aspects of law making violence: military law serves to prove the originality, the death penalty the excessiveness, the police the omnipresence and the parliament the furtiveness of law making violence (Son 2013: 623; de Wilde 2006b: 196; Zartaloudis 2015: 173).

Military Law: Benjamin seeks to demonstrate that sovereign state violence is not merely a ‘predatory’ violence outside of and opposed to the legal order, but a force capable of founding and modifying relations of law. At first glance it appears that the sovereign’s unlimited authority to wage war is opposed to the existing relations of law and even a threat to the continuity of the legal order as such. However, Benjamin suggested that this is not the case because of what he called the “necessary sanctioning of every victory”. This meant that military violence, seemingly the opposite of the legal order, is in retrospect recognised as being legitimate and in accordance with the law (Benjamin 1978: 285-286). In this moment of sanctioning, a law-making violence comes to light that is original and independent of any formerly existing relations of law. Military violence, as a result of being legalised after the

- 46 - event, can cause a permanent modification to the established legal order (de Wilde 2006b: 196).

The Death Penalty: “At the core of the legal order seems to reside a kind of lawlessness, a violence that escapes every attempt at legal regulation” (de Wilde 2006b: 196). When faced with this so-called ‘lawlessness’, Benjamin suggests that the death penalty reveals something so completely “rotten in the law” – any laws prove to be powerless in the wake of the death penalty (Benjamin 1978: 286). “Originating in a lawless violence, the legal order is always already exposed to the possibility of decline”, that being “its internal corruption” (de Wilde 2006b: 196).

The Police: As an institution, Benjamin argues that the police embody a ‘spectral mixture’ of both law making and law preserving violence. The police, as an institution, was for Benjamin of specific interest, for whilst the police were there to maintain the law, there was also the ever-present possibility “of extending or restricting the application of the rule in exceptional circumstances” (de Wilde 2006b: 196; Menke 2015: 21). Police are not merely an administrative function of law enforcement. Because of this fusion of law making and law preserving violence, Benjamin suggested that both forms of violence “lose their mutual limitations” (de Wilde 2006b: 197). Law making violence is therefore able to breach all areas of the juridical. In modern democratic societies, Benjamin believed the police even bear witness to the “greatest conceivable degeneration of violence” (Benjamin 1978: 287).

Parliament: These institutions cultivate a politics of compromise that has supposedly banned all forms of violence (de Wilde 2006b: 197). The problem here for Benjamin is that he believed that there was widespread violence within law making institutions as well as within the political system, nothing was immune from this violence (Martel 2015: 190). According to Benjamin, the illusion that parliament embodies perfectly peaceful and open discussions is in and of itself very problematic (Benjamin 1978: 288; Menke 2015: 32). “The fact that a politics of compromise has to accept any position as negotiable… undermines the parliament’s legitimacy. Parliament(s) falls into decline as soon as it loses awareness of the presence of violence. In modern democracies parliaments offer a ‘woeful spectacle’ because they have lost consciousness of the law making violence originally represented in them” (de Wilde 2006b: 197). “They have fallen prey to indecision” (Benjamin 1978: 288).

- 47 - The relevance of these ideas for Homo Sacer is obvious. In the same way that these two forms of violence (law making and law preserving) are immanent to law, so too are the norm and the state of exception. The idea that law can be counter posed to either violence or the state of exception is redundant.

These analyses, as discussed above, lead into the other aspect of Benjamin’s critique and that is the state of exception. Like Schmitt, Benjamin identifies the state of emergency as immanent to law (Salzani 2015: 116). But he goes further by saying that the state of exception has itself become the norm. Benjamin attempts to rethink our ideas of time and to contest the idea that the future represents a smooth continuation of present and past. By attempting to disrupt an assumption of progress, he suggests that the future could hold something other than an extension of the same form of social and political life (Closs Stephens 2009: 79). Benjamin (1969: 257) argues “the tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight”. This suggests a thesis that the concept of fate manifests itself ‘mythically’ as violence over ‘bare life’ and that such violence of fate is ‘identical to law making violence’. Benjamin’s state of emergency was not peaceful, rather it entailed a violence, perhaps even as Son (2013) puts it, a “barbaric struggle”, which aimed to match the barbarism of fascism (Son 2013: 623). Benjamin’s essay aimed to question the traditional belief that law employs violence only as a means to attain moral ends, such as the establishment of justice (Morgan 2007). For Benjamin this assumption is questionable on two levels. According to Vatter (2007: 16; 2008: 45) this is because firstly, violence seems to primarily have a law making capacity and secondly, the way in which violence generates law is by punishing those who are considered to be ‘guilty’, but only through their virtue of being alive. The violence that “law purportedly employs as a means to establish its own legal ends, in reality, is a manifestation of something else, namely, power over life” (Vatter 2007: 16). The power over life, is what renders ‘bare life’ as guilty before any crime has been committed (Vatter 2014: 99). The use of law as a justification to then wield violence on the living and in that way determine life as guilty is in Benjamin’s definition of biopower: “mythic violence is bloody power over bare life for its own sake” (Benjamin 1969: 250). For Benjamin law is as much about placing life in a state of exception, where it becomes the pure or sacred object of mythical violence and biopolitical power, as it is a means of law.

- 48 - Agamben draws on Benjamin’s Critique to help identify the concept of law and politics in terms of mechanisms of violence and the body. Agamben agrees with Benjamin’s analysis of the legal institutions, especially the police, where he looks further at the overarching issues of sovereign violence and the restriction of rights (Agamben 2000: 104). ‘Bare life’ is something that Agamben develops from Benjamin’s expression “das bloße Leben” or the naked or ‘bare life’ (Vatter 2008: 45-46; de la Durantaye 2009: 203; Finlayson 2010: 104). In building on Benjamin, Agamben focusses on the idea of ‘bare life’ as essential to the notion of sovereignty and questions the specific relationship between the two (Pan 2009: 51; Cisney 2008: 169). ‘Bare life’ is the fundamental concept that supports Agamben’s argument (Patton 2007: 205) and is the driving force of Agamben’s theoretical analysis on the topic (Agamben 2000: 5-6). Additionally, as has already been noted, Agamben’s concept of the ‘logic of exception’ stretches between two points: Benjamin’s theory of mythical violence over ‘bare life’ and Schmitt’s theory of the sovereignty of law and its subsequent exception (Vatter 2007: 16).

IV

“Sovereign is he who decides on the exception” (Schmitt 2010: 5). And thus begins the iconic work by Carl Schmitt (1888-1985), arguably one of the twentieth century’s most controversial scholars. Despite its controversial foundations, his text on sovereignty has proved to be quite influential and is used extensively throughout contemporary political philosophy. For Agamben, Schmitt’s theory provided him with a consistent attempt to understand the link between politics and the ‘subject’, as well as a clear example of an attempt to justify the placing of the sovereign authority above the law of the land (Pan 2009: 42). The ‘state of exception’, or in the German Ausnahmenzustand, is not merely a key legal term, but an aid for regulating the very limits of the law (Agamben 2005: 10). The ‘state of exception’ is the political point at which the juridical stops and a sovereign accountability begins. It is where “the dam of individual liberties breaks, and society is flooded with the sovereign power of the state” (de la Durantaye 2009: 338).

Unlike theorisations of sovereignty in international relations that align this to control over populations and territory and external recognition thereof, Schmitt refused to attribute a fixed ‘theory’ to the notion of sovereignty (Odysseos and Petito 2009: 307; Schmitt 2010: xv). Schmitt’s concept of sovereignty is grounded solely in his concept of ‘the political’ (Suganami

- 49 - 2007: 515). “The sovereign must decide both that a situation is exception and what to do about the exception in order to be able to create or recover a juridical order when the existing one is threatened by ‘chaos’” (Schmitt 2010) – this is what Agamben then calls a “pleromatic [full] state of law” (Agamben 2005: 48). The concept of sovereignty was not fluid in its creation, rather it developed along a winding route through the thought of medieval and enlightenment scholars. However, whilst Machiavelli began to create an understanding of what we see sovereignty to be today, it was through Bodin that we see Machiavelli’s ideas further cemented. Where once sovereignty was viewed as “subject to the principles of natural law”, the sovereign, through Bodin’s writings began to be viewed as above the law (Dunning 1896: 94-95; McConkey 2013: 417-418). However, the question that needs to be asked here is how do we justify a sovereign to provide and enforce specific laws if the sovereign is seen as an equal to those he is creating the laws for? Schmitt suggests that “the essence of sovereign power precludes it from being subject to law all the time, even in exceptional times” (Schmitt 2010: xvii). McConkey (2013: 417) further suggests that if the sovereign was in fact equal then “any of his subjects would be thought equally competent and entitled to give and enforce the law. Only because the sovereign is above the law can he then be seen as sovereign – if the law has to be changed, it cannot be changed from within because doing so would be illegal, thus breaking the law”.

In post-World War One Germany the question of the legitimacy of a new political order resurfaced again after two centuries, with the Weimar Republic. Schmitt’s Political Theology argued that the state of emergency has a general significance that transcends any instance of crisis. In this text, Schmitt argued that the liberal defenders of the Weimar Republic had completely forgotten the theological dimensions of sovereignty and this was at their peril. Schmitt’s critical indictments of liberal democracy and his defence of the sovereign’s right to declare a state of exception played a significant role in smoothing the transition from the Weimar Republic to the Third Reich (Anderson 2011: 9). He argued that the legal order is constituted from two distinct juristic elements: norm and decision. Yet it is the latter that actually always determines the legal order (Agamben 2000: 7). As a foundational decision, sovereign authority is the essence of the state: it produces law without being itself situated within that law. The state of exception, Schmitt argues within Political Theology, can be proclaimed when the existence of the legal order as such is threatened, for example, in the

- 50 - case of a “global civil war” or “terrorist activities” (Agamben 2005: 3; de Wilde 2006b: 192). This power, afforded to the sovereign, temporarily suspends the normal legal order, so that the impending threat can be dealt with swiftly and without any legal opposition (Whyte 2008: 70). “The exception does not only confirm the rule; the rule as such lives off the exception alone” (Schmitt 2010: 19-21). In the state of exception the normal legal order ‘recedes’, making way for an “authority that is unlimited in principal” (Schmitt 2010). According to de Wilde (2006b: 192-193):

“within Schmitt’s state of exception, the sovereign has ‘carte blanche’ to take any and all measures necessary to quash the threat posed to the legal order and to restore a normal situation in which the law can again be applied. The sovereign is even authorised to suspend constitutional rights and freedoms, if necessary, to safeguard the constitution as such. Thus, the state of exception should neither be confused with the legally regulated ‘state of emergency’ or with ‘martial law’. The state of exception, on the contrary, falls well beyond the scope of positive law. There are no legal limits whatsoever to the sovereign’s emergency powers”.

Schmitt’s awareness of the risks related to a suspension of the rule of law, is just one reason his analysis is seen as controversial. Many theorists have acknowledged that emergency powers, designed to keep the legal system intact, if abused, can swiftly erode it (see for example: McConkey 2013; de Wilde 2006a: 511 & 2011; Shapiro 2008; and Luisetti 2011: 55). The sovereign could take the emergency powers bestowed on them merely as a pretext to create a situation where the normal rule of law can be ignored without any penalty or punishment.19 Whilst there are indeed times where the state of exception may be utilised briefly and the normal rule of law replaced when the threat has been dealt with, according to de Wilde (2006b: 193) “the rule of law and the legal order will inevitably crumble in the face of a sovereign who does not support its most fundamental principles”. Crisis, according to Schmitt, threatens to destroy already adhered to norms “it confirms not only the rule but also its existence, which derives only from the exception” – the state of exception is thus in danger of becoming the rule (Schmitt 2010: xvi).

19 This was seen in the case of the Weimar Republic.

- 51 - Within a state of exception, Schmitt argued, we reach a paradox where the sovereign decision both threatens to tear down, and yet simultaneously establishes the legal order (McConkey 2013: 426; Luisetti 2011). In a state of exception, the sovereign violently coerces their subjects to adopt fundamental norms, so that the normal legal order can have force and effect (de Wilde 2006b: 193). The question with Schmitt seems to be then, how the state of exception and the sovereign decision should responsibly be seen in the light of political theology? Schmitt attempts to place emphasis on the responsibility of the sovereign, stressing the possibility of radical violence in the case of failure (de Wilde 2006b: 195). Schmitt’s concept of sovereignty is regularly portrayed as the factual force of a supreme power, usually incarnated in the figure of the president, above and outside the restraints of the legal order, who rules through decrees. Sovereignty becomes equivalent to emergency rule and it is this interpretation of sovereignty which has informed the works of Agamben in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life as well as in his book The State of Exception (Kalyvas 2008: 92).

Schmitt also observed that in today’s world there are conflicts, friend/enemy groupings, and it is this discussion that is one of Schmitt’s most difficult to understand. The problem is that, as a result of the dominance of liberal, cosmopolitan or economic-technical thinking, these conflicts tend to become invisible and are no longer understood as specifically political conflicts or decisions. Schmitt’s political philosophy has to be understood as an intervention in a plural world whose plurality is threatened (Lievens 2013: 123). Schmitt had hoped that these friend/enemy dynamics would only exist at an international level and at this level all politics would be labelled as international politics (Slomp 2009: 6-7; Suganami 2007: 516). For Schmitt, within his theology he “especially strived for a clear distinction between who can and who cannot constitute themselves as a political subject, for a clearly identifiable distribution of politicisation and de-politicisations within the social whole” (Lievens 2013: 127). Schmitt did this in order to “avoid other types of friend/enemy groups that disrupt the political demarcation lines constituting the existing distribution of politicisation and de-politicisation” (Lievens 2013: 127). Unfortunately, for Schmitt, his definition of the political as a distinction between friend and enemy, has often been misquoted or criticised for engaging in the negative aspects of the friend/enemy relationship (Mehring 2017: 306; McCormick 2007: 315). For Schmitt, however, the key to any concept of the political “is not enmity per se by the distinction of friend and enemy” (Schmitt 2010: 65; emphasis added).

- 52 - Following Schmitt, Agamben asserts the priority of the sovereign over that of positive rule or the social pact. However, this original political tie is also a ban or an untying which both produces the idea of ‘bare life’ and also excludes it (Agamben 1998: 90; Grumley 2015: 242). The state of exception, for Agamben, represents a ‘catastrophic development’ (Agamben 2005: 56). This he argues is when the state of exception ceases to be what Schmitt called a ‘temporal’ phase and instead becomes the ‘rule’ (de la Durantaye 2009: 337; Mbembe 2003: 12). Additionally, Agamben warns that, as was the case of the Weimar Republic, within any state of exception the legal order is always exposed to the risk of “being abolished by an irresponsible sovereign” (Agamben 2005: 15 & 48; de Wilde 2006a: 511-512). Western politics also created, within the early decades of the twentieth century a “mobile grey zone of exclusion and indistinction”. This can be seen to culminate, through the works of Schmitt and then Agamben, with the concentration camps of the Third Reich and the reduction of these inmates to ‘bare life’ (Grumley 2015: 242). Therefore, Agamben views sovereign decisions as the very centre of contemporary modern politics and of the tradition that is responsible for the “manufacture of ‘bare life’ and all the other distinctions within the biopolitical universe” (Grumley 2015: 242). This is also why Agamben sees a biopolitical core as the paradigm of the modern and at the very centre of Western political culture – because within the democratic era, the biopolitical task was to “control populations and enhance productivity” (Agamben 2002: 84; Grumley 2015: 242-243). Rather than looking at the rule of law being able to describe the ‘normal’ practices of sovereignty, Agamben takes Schmitt’s arguments further and claims that contemporary forms of global sovereignty operate in what can now be acknowledged as a ‘permanent state of exception’ (Shapiro 2008: 23; McCormick 2007: 337- 337).

In combining elements from both Benjamin and Schmitt, Agamben begins with the distinction that the central binary relationship of the political is not that between friend and enemy, as Schmitt (2010) would have us believe, but rather the distinction between ‘bare life’ and the legal existence of a person. However, whilst indicating the importance of Schmitt, Agamben’s ultimate sympathy with Benjamin becomes clearer throughout The State of Exception. Ultimately, Agamben’s position is that whilst Schmitt harnesses the power of the exception back to the juridical order, Benjamin releases that power into a new politics and beyond the state (Mills 2008a: 66).

- 53 - Within the legal ‘state of exception’, when law appears to be without prior constitutional legitimation… Agamben suggests that is when we see into the heart of law. It is not the case that there is law that then needs to be executed or that occasionally deploys force in order to act; there is law because of an event of force that divides the body of law from the domain over which it governs (Colebrook and Maxwell 2016: 48).

V

The ‘camp’ is what emerges from Agamben’s examination of both Schmitt and Benjamin’s work. ‘Bare life’ is exposed during the state of exception, and ‘the camp’ is what is created from the state of exception no longer being temporal, but rather becoming the norm. These concepts of the ‘camp’ and ‘bare life’ and their subsequent connection to modernity are explored through a number of texts by Zygmunt Bauman (1925-2017).

Bauman’s sustained exploration of the nature of modernity and post modernity has been described as one of the great intellectual journeys of our time (Smith 1999: x). Bauman’s strategy was to repeat his claims in varying ways, using different symbols – globalisation, community, identity and so on so forth – to connect the present to the traditions of critical sociology (Beilharz 2010: 46; Elliot 2014: 275). As noted previously, and something that stands Bauman apart in this chapter, is his sociological background. This means he views “human actions as elements of wider figurations” (Smith 1999: 6). It is something that separates the majority of Bauman’s work from the other theorists mentioned above and again another reason why Agamben mirrors Bauman’s aspect of modernity, to an extent. It is because, as has already been discussed, sociology cannot fully account for the aspects of biopolitics, however, Bauman’s approach does look at and has focussed on the issue of modernity and post modernity, concepts of great importance for Agamben himself. Not since Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, with its highly criticised ‘banality of evil’ thesis, has a book about the Holocaust had such controversial and profound things to say. In common with Arendt’s portrayal of Eichmann, Bauman’s analysis in Modernity and the Holocaust ([1989]2003) raised worrying questions about the Holocaust’s ‘normality’, pointing out the uncomfortable truth that genocide and modernity were actually “far from uneasy bedfellows” (Marshman 2008: 75). What is of substantive concern to Bauman, and something that he shared in common

- 54 - with a number of thinkers such as Foucault, Arendt, and indeed Agamben to an extent, is their preoccupation with the way in which “the institution of the autonomous realm of solid modernity hastily turned its impetus away from Enlightenment liberation to new and more efficient means of societal control” (Blackshaw 2005: 41).

Bauman’s formative text Modernity and the Holocaust (2003) laid the foundation of the character of the modern age as a culture that is represented as ‘normal’ rather than a ‘one off’ (Junge 2006: 58). Bauman showed the importance of understanding the Holocaust and how this is an essential task of any theory of modernity. Bauman’s sociological approach recognised that we have shifted away from a more structured society in which identity was largely ascribed by social class (we also see gender and ethnicity included here) to a society in which individuality dominates more than anything else, and where identity always remains a work in progress and is largely achieved through consumption – a sociology in which life is lived surrounded by possibilities that have not yet been released (Blackshaw 2005: 49). Agamben’s work never directly discusses Bauman’s theory of analysis from Modernity and the Holocaust and postdates it by six years, however the coincidence of concerns across these two texts is exceptionally interesting, and in fact Bauman, adopts some of the theories of Agamben in his later work, especially surrounding the question of displaced persons and surplus populations (Beilharz 2006: 330). Regardless of whether Agamben draws specifically on Bauman, in one way or another Bauman’s processes and thoughts, especially with regards to the Holocaust, modernity and the concept of waste, find significant echoes within Agamben’s work.

Two narratives are central to Bauman’s early and later works respectively: one concerns progress towards a socialist utopia, and the other the transition from modernity to post modernity. Both begin with a breakdown of a ‘traditional’ social order, have heroes or pioneers and end by challenging the reader to take some action and make certain choices (Smith 1996: 6). What follows focusses on Bauman’s narrative about the transition from modernity to post modernity. With the publication of Modernity and the Holocaust, Bauman encouraged readers to think about the event. He acknowledged the fact that the whole of human history has been marred by conflicts, violence and massacres, even hinting at prior genocides occurring. This fact, Bauman argued, let many view the Holocaust as merely the latest in a long line of examples of inhumanity and bloodshed.

- 55 - The modern era has been founded on genocide, and proceeded through more genocide. Somehow, the shame of yesterday’s massacres proved a poor safeguard against the slaughters of today (Bauman 1995).

According to such a view, the Holocaust surely represented the failure to deliver us from sporadic episodes of hatred and mass killing. However, Bauman’s thesis entirely repudiated any given assumptions. The Holocaust, Bauman subsequently reasoned, was in fact the most likely consequence of the modern drive for ‘purity’ and ‘order’. Bauman asserted that the Holocaust resulted from a unique fusion of the different key elements of modernity. “In an era where social ‘engineers’ viewed human society as a ‘garden culture’ to be tamed and purged of ‘weeds’, it only really needed the utilisation of technological advances to bring about the almost total extermination of those spoiling the idealised plan of the modern garden/society” (Marshman 2008: 78-79; Minca 2015: 77). There was a mundane normality to the Holocaust, the hard facts that demonstrated the everyday ‘business’ of Auschwitz and many other camps like it, was in fact not so different from other forms of everyday business:

[Auschwitz] was also a mundane extension of the modern factory system. Rather than producing goods, the raw material was human beings and the end- product was death, so many units per day marked carefully on the manager’s production chart… Engineers designed the crematoria; managers designed the system of bureaucracy that worked with the zest and efficiency more backward nations would envy. Even the overall plan itself was a reflection on modern scientific spirit gone awry (Feingold cited in Bauman 2003: 8).

Bauman is persuaded by the findings within the Milgram Experiment, that a great number of normal, everyday people anywhere can inflict pain on others under conditions of authority and relative anonymity. For Bauman, “the Holocaust was an outcome of a unique encounter between factors by themselves quite ordinary and common” and which were a “rare, yet significant and reliable, test of the hidden possibilities of modern society” (Bauman 2003: xiii & 12). He contended “that every ‘ingredient’ of the Holocaust – all those many things that rendered it possible – was normal… in the sense of being fulfilling in keeping with everything that we know about our civilisation, its guiding spirit, its priorities, its immanent vision of the world” (Bauman 2003: 8). In Modernity and the Holocaust, Bauman demonstrated that there

- 56 - is a type of tyranny associated with the ‘dark’ side of modern culture that is inextricably linked to the modern obsession of order, particularly when cultural ambivalence becomes a problem and its elimination is turned into a mission. Bauman understands the Holocaust, and perhaps genocide as a larger scope of analysis, as a ‘solidly’ modern ‘project’. This notion of killing on a large scale, for Bauman, was a substance which could only ever be fully realised within modernity and post-modern practices (Blackshaw 2005: 43-44). Bauman argues that “when the modernist dream is embraced by an absolute power able to monopolise modern vehicles of rational action, and when that power attains freedom from effective social control, genocide follows” (Bauman 2003: 93-94). Or, as Beilharz has asserted, with reference to Bauman, “whereas tradition give you the pogrom, it is really only modernity that produces genocide, for it generates the means alongside the ends” (Beilharz 2000: 131).

Bauman specified this modern focus in terms of mentality, technology and organisation, building on Hilberg’s (1978) conclusion that the machinery of destruction “was structurally no different from organised German society as a whole”. However, the problem remains, which is arguably a limitation of Bauman’s work, that the activities stemming from the actions of the Einsatzgruppen (or death squads), proved to be a more enduring model than extermination camps for future génocidaires. For example, in Rwanda, notoriously, machine guns and machetes proved just as murderous as the gas chambers in the extermination camps. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbian nationalists destroyed Bosniak (Bosnian Muslims) and Croat society whilst slaughtering only a minority, through intimidation, expulsion, torture, rape, and killing in improvised work, rape and concentration camps. So, it is evident that within contemporary destructions of indigenous peoples, the methods and organisation have been much more basic than that of the Final Solution’s (Shaw 2010: 153). Scheper-Hughes (2002: 366) makes the point that Bauman’s thesis “in linking genocide to a specific level of state formation, technological efficiency, rationality and subjectivity is belied by other examples”.

Whilst modernity plays a role in Agamben’s thesis, he takes this analysis one step further and provides a more in-depth approach to the analysis of modernity. Agamben claims that modernity is inescapably linked to genocide as a social phenomenon. The core of Agamben’s problem with modernity is that modern life is organised in the same way as the concentration camps in the Holocaust. Agamben claims that the “threshold of modernity will be crossed” when the state of exception becomes the rule and “bare life becomes the centre of all political

- 57 - strategies” (Lemke 2011: 56). This new threshold no longer concentrates merely on identifiable individuals or specific populations, but rather as Agamben (1998: 111) argues that “in our age all citizens can be said in a specific, but very real sense, to appear virtually as homines sacri”.

Despite the enormous impact of Modernity and the Holocaust, arguably Bauman’s chief body of work has been primarily concerned with issues relating to social categorisations or classifications and exclusion with the contemporary outcast being the poor and stateless (or with reference to Arendt, the refugee). His work on these sections within the social sciences demonstrates that future exclusion and extermination may no longer only follow racial lines like those seen within the Holocaust (Peters 2014). It is these viewpoints that, in addition to his work on modernity and post modernity, overlap at times with both Arendt and indeed Agamben’s work on modernity and othering. Bauman argues that concerns about racial ‘cleanliness’, something so integral to the era of solid modernity, have been replaced by concerns about the individuals’ ability to participate fully in a consumer society. Put simply, consumer society, outlined in his text Liquid Modernity (2006), is where the “poor are stigmatised to the point where they are serving no useful function whatsoever” (Marshman 2008: 88). However, what does this have to do with genocide exactly? Bauman has argued that simply because ‘the age of camps’ has drawn to a close, does not necessarily make them a thing of the past. For Bauman (2003), the twentieth century was “the age of the camp”, however, the argument for it not ending, but rather transforming with the dawn of the twenty-first century are now taken up by Agamben (Minca 2015: 76). The boundary between politically relevant existence and ‘bare life’ has today moved inevitably “inside every human life… Bare life is no longer confined to a particular place or definite category. It now dwells in the biological body of every living being” (Agamben 1998: 139-140).

Informed by Hannah Arendt’s work in humanity and totalitarianism, Bauman argues that the demise of totalitarianism did not automatically equal the demise of ‘totalitarian solutions’ to political, social and economic problems (Bauman 1997: 38). Within this concept stems the idea of ‘waste’. This concept of ‘waste’, for both Bauman and Arendt, is defined by the very term that is being used. So, for instance, if we call something waste, it in turn becomes that waste and it is this argument that is one of the most important that Agamben draws from Bauman’s texts (Bauman 2004). The production of ‘human waste’, wasted lives, or what, as

- 58 - we have seen Arendt terms the ‘superfluous’ populations such as refugees and other social and political outcasts, is to Bauman an inevitable outcome of modernisation and the modernising process. It is this argument that is one of the most important for Agamben (1998), Homo Sacer is for him the most important category of human waste, something that can be sacrificed, disposed of and killed without impunity. According to Bauman (2004 & 2006), waste is the oozing sore of liquid modernity and it is set among those whose existence we would prefer not to think about – the outcasts. Human waste, under the conditions of Bauman’s fluid modern age, is an example of this. ‘Waste’ at any time can be dispense with, disposed of, or simply locked up and forgotten (Blackshaw 2005: 78; Junge 2006: 120).

However, in relation to liquid modernity, here Bauman compliments Arendt in terms of consumer society, but what about liquid modern genocides? Do not the conflicts in Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina disprove the idea that mass killing persists because modernity affords us a greater distance on which to observe? At face value, the hands on, bloody nature of the genocide in Rwanda makes it seem a world away even from the Holocaust in the immediacy of its brutality. Levene (2005a) however, suggests that “even the largely rudimentary weaponry of the Rwandan case hides the degree to which the accomplishment of genocide was dependant on an organised, rigorously efficient, modern administration operating within a state communications infrastructure which included sound roads, working telephone and fax links, as well as state or quasi-state radio stations” (Levene 2005a: 105). In this instance then, the dominant groups in society continue to marginalise and reject comparative minorities, even if they are no longer along only strict ‘racial’ lines. In the case of genocide, we simply see this power, of the strong over the weak, magnified exponentially. “Here the object of extermination is defined unilaterally, no symmetry is applied or suggested in any form. By any stretch of the imagination, the other side is not the enemy, but a victim marked for annihilation because the logic of the order that the stronger side wishes to establish has no room for its presence” (Bauman 1991: 47). Thus, Bauman cautions us that the categorisation of the ‘other’ removing the other from the realm of one’s moral consideration, amounts to complicity in a process that can culminate in physical destruction (Marshman 2008: 92-93).

When the average person thinks about the Holocaust, and other obvious examples of genocide, they would normally like to think that “these lie far beyond us, beyond our humanity and society, beyond out interpersonal relationships, beyond our capacity and beyond our

- 59 - thought” (Blackshaw 2005). The Holocaust has long been characterised in the public imagination by its extremity, its sense of ‘otherness’. If we are to go on living in the shadow of genocide, we should believe the its every detail stands in sharp opposition to our civilised, humane and ultimately modern world. For these reasons, Bauman’s approach posed a challenge to the way in which we think about the Holocaust and genocide in general (Marshman 2008: 75). The study of modernity is what might be seen as an obsessive project, one marked by the desire and want for constant change. Whatever is seen as outdated or old must then be replaced by the new – which is always and in itself a sign of progress. Agamben, since the beginning of his analysis within the Homo Sacer project, has long grappled with these ideas of modernity and genocide, which is why these concepts, outlined by Bauman are of significant interest to him. Whilst sociology cannot fully account for the phenomenon of genocide as a whole, the works by Bauman on modernity, post modernity and the issues dealing with human ‘waste’ have all overlapped in one way or another with Agamben’s works.

VI

While each of these theorists – Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Walter Benjamin, Carl Schmitt and Zygmunt Bauman – has separately developed unique, confrontational and even contentious ideas concerning modernity and political practices, they have all been drawn upon by Agamben as part of his conceptualisation of modernity and his redefinition of biopolitics within his Homo Sacer project. Finlayson (2010: 104) suggests a very apt summary of Agamben’s Homo Sacer thesis in that it is a kind of “intellectual club sandwich”. Arendt and Foucault are the two pieces of bread that make up the basis of Agamben’s arguments, with Agamben adding to this the select ‘filling’ with Benjamin, Schmitt and Bauman. Arendt provided Agamben with the background for the developing ideas of biopolitics, the statelessness of peoples without citizenship or rights (that being the issues surrounding the refugee), and the superfluity of human beings, as well as setting the scene for an understanding of the idea of a state of exception on which Agamben could build and start to mould his ideas. Benjamin and Schmitt provided the bridge between Arendt’s conceptual framework and Agamben’s own approach through their ideas on violence, the state of exception and the role of the sovereign within a nation state. Agamben used these two theorists in particular to help aid him in uncovering how the rule of law, through its intimate relationship to the state of exception, eased the way for the arrival of fascism in the 1930s,

- 60 - rather than acting as a defence against it. This analysis, as will be made evident, is exceptionally useful in an Agambenian application of biopolitics and its connection to modern ideas on mass murder and genocide. Whilst Agamben is indebted to these three theorists, it would be hard to look at Agamben’s analysis of the modern and post-modern condition without the aid of Bauman’s work on modernity and postmodernity respectively, as well as his application of Arendt in the discussion of human ‘waste’, and it is the concept of ‘biopolitics’ originally identified by Foucault, which can be seen as the final piece to Agamben’s theoretical puzzle.

Agambenian literature, biopolitical analysis and Agamben himself have, in recent years, become very influential within the social sciences. To be sure, and it would be irresponsible to state otherwise, a variety of theorists and scholars, not simply the ones mentioned above, have been drawn upon by Agamben in his conceptualisation of Homo Sacer, ‘bare life’ and the state of exception and many indeed mirror his own works to a certain extent. However, these five theorists, have been of most significance for Agamben. The analysis and concepts taken from each one of these theorists has not been simply adopted, but rather Agamben has furthered and developed each in turn to inform his own analysis of the biopolitical, modernity and of course genocide.

As will be shown, in the chapters that follow, the importance of Agamben’s theoretical approach proceeds from the fundamental continuity of biopolitical mechanisms whose foundations he situates within the logics of sovereignty. By creatively combining and further developing Schmitt’s definition of the sovereign decision, Benjamin’s concept of ‘bare life’, Foucault’s notion of biopower, Arendt’s analyses of totalitarianism and the status of the ‘rightless and stateless’, and Bauman’s ideas relating to modernity, Agamben explores in great depth the ‘grey zone’ where the classical distinctions between zõe and bios, first originated, only to be subsequently blurred, broken and ultimately destroyed. As Agamben discusses, people such as the refugee and the homeless, or those placed in the concentration camp, whose reduction to an existence of ‘bare life’ is set, by their legal categorisation, the distinction between law and the exception has almost no meaning, for these ‘bare lives’ no longer mean anything, they are ‘superfluous’ or ‘waste’. They are homo sacer. These theorists, as has been mentioned, play a large role in Agamben’s framework of biopolitics and his subsequent application of that concept to understanding genocide. It is one that echoes loudly

- 61 - through his analysis and can clearly be identified as we take a far more in-depth look at his biopolitical theory as a whole in the next chapter.

- 62 - CHAPTER THREE: GIORGIO AGAMBEN AND THE IMPORTANCE OF THE HOMO SACER PROJECT

Agamben’s Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998) presented the core ideas that he brought together to describe and explain the politics of ‘bare life’ that emerges in supposed states of emergency. In his work, the concept of biopower and biopolitics functions as a thesis, rather than a hypothesis, and is a thesis concerning the very structure of power, the origin of which is directly related to life (Elliot 2014: 472; Peters 2014: 327). Agamben (1998) begins his Homo Sacer Project with the distinction that the central binary relationship of politics is not that between friend and enemy, as was discussed above with Schmitt (2010), but rather it is the distinction between a persons naked life and their legal existence. Borrowing from the ancient Greek, Agamben terms these zõe and bios, and which he then aligns with the oikos and polis respectively (Agamben 1998: 1; DeCaroli 2013: 222).20 Agamben’s view of the modern era does not, therefore, signify a break with historical tradition, but rather it is a radicalisation of that which has always been there; the simultaneous exclusion (Lemke 2005: 6; Lemke 2011). Agamben (1998: 6 & 71) outlines this hidden foundation of sovereign power through a figure he derives from archaic Roman Law: homo sacer. This refers to a person whom one could kill with impunity since s/he was banned from the politico-legal community and reduced to a status of mere, physical existence (Agamben 1998: 8; de la Durantaye 2009: 309; Rabinow and Rose 2006: 200 and Vaughn-Williams 2009: 734-735). Herein lies what Agamben views as the other side of the logic of sovereignty.

The logic of sovereignty, for Agamben, is a logic of capturing life, a logic of isolating ‘bare life’ as the exception. This life is exposed not only to the sovereign’s violence and power over death but also, more generally, to a decision that qualifies it and determines its value. Sovereign power establishes itself and perpetuates itself by producing a ‘biopolitical body’ on which it is exercised. Agamben’s thesis is formulated not only in the work Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998), but also in the succeeding texts, Remnants of Auschwitz (2002), The State

20 According to Vaughn-Williams (2009: 733) for Agamben the distinction between zõe and bios is symptomatic of the fact that the Greek’s had no single work for ‘life’ (which he acknowledges through reference to Aristotle’s writings). Agamben uses these two terms to show the differences between them: zõe (the biological fact of life common to all) and bios (the political life).

- 63 - of Exception (2005), as well as in some contemporary articles collected under the title Means Without End: Notes on Politics (2000). Agamben’s focus, the question of biopower and biopolitics and the primary issue of concern for this thesis, is attached to another problematic which is clearly seen throughout all his writings: that is the constant ever evolving definition and redefinition of the human. Agamben’s conception of ‘bare life’ or ‘naked life’ (in the Italian nuda vita) is one of the most useful concepts for theorists aiming to apply his work to an analysis of the modern political environment. For instance, not only can his analysis be used to understand phenomena as diverse as the international legal status of refugees, the issues regarding suicide bombers and the social status of the poverty stricken and homeless, we can also utilise his approach in order to understand better the phenomena of modern mass murder and ultimately genocide (Mills 2008a: 69). Indeed, both the difficulty as well as the value of Agamben’s approach lie in what Colebrook and Maxwell (2016: 1) refer to as his ‘politicisation of ontology’ – that is, sovereignty is a political structure but is expressive of a deeper rupture of negativity. Agamben directs our attention to the political forms within modern society that we understand from our abstract experiences of language, being, time and what it means to be ultimately human. He points to where the overarching and non- negotiable focus of the present must be towards modernity’s most extreme point of despair which is, in turn, the outcome of a history of thought and being going as far back as Aristotle and ancient Greece (Colebrook and Maxwell 2016: 2; Norris 2003: 14; Finlayson 2010: 97 & 99).

Within the intersection between the norm and the exception, the zone of indistinction, Agamben finds the original manifestation and the true dwelling of sovereignty and power (Kalyvas 2005b: 108; Edkins 2000: 6). Here he looks at what happens when all the rules that govern human conduct are seemingly stripped away.21 The usual rule of law, which may on the surface seem to limit the power of the sovereign, can be ultimately suspended by the sovereign. It is at this very point, when there is no longer a constituted law “through which power is exercised and mediated” – that power operates directly and takes hold of bodies who can become what Agamben refers to as ‘bare life’ (Colebrook and Maxwell 2016: 11;

21 This analysis has been enormously important in rethinking the events of the Holocaust (as seen in Homo Sacer III: Remnants of Auschwitz). Additionally, Agamben utilises the word ‘Shoah’ and rejects the term Holocaust, arguing that categorising this event implies a holiness of sacrifice rather than murder on a colossal scale (Hegarty 2010: 15).

- 64 - Hegarty 2010: 15). The overarching claim within Agamben’s work is how we think about the relationship between politics and life – what might appear to be the most brutal events of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, whether it be the Nazi death and concentration camps or issues pertaining to Guantanamo Bay or even the selling of human organs, these cannot be really understood without an analysis of the way in which our political values have been generated from issues in the past, we have yet to fully understand or grasp (Diken and Lausten 2006: 447; Ziarek 2008: 92; Finlayson 2010: 98-99). It is Agamben’s premise that a biopolitical paradigm has been responsible for some of the worst atrocities of the twentieth century, including the Holocaust. He also suggests that biopolitical theory can shed light on why states utilise practices such as detainment and torture and ultimately sites such as ‘the camp’.

While Agamben (1998: 117) refers back to the Holocaust and its concentration and death camps as being the “biopolitical paradigm of the modern”, the camp does not so much represent for Agamben a specific historical space such as the actual, physical camps of Nazi Germany. Rather he sees the idea of the camp as symbolising and fixing the border between ‘bare life’ and political existence (Lemke 2005: 6). Specifically, he is of the view that “the camp is the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule” (Agamben 1998: 168-169). Agamben constantly reflects on the paradoxical status of the camp as a space of exception: the camp is a piece of territory that is placed outside the normal juridical order, for all that however it is not simply an external space.

According to the etymological meaning of the term exception (ex-capere), what is being excluded in the camp is captured outside, that is it is included by virtue of its every exclusion. Thus, what is being captured under the rule of law is first of all the very state of exception. In order words, if sovereign power is founded on the ability to decide the state of exception, the camp is the structure in which the state of exception is permanently realised (Agamben 2000: 38. Emphasis in the original).

The abandonment of the homo sacer to sovereign violence finds its institutionalised form in the camp, which Agamben famously termed “the nomos of the modern” (Agamben 1998: 166; Bourke 2013: 443). Genocide and genocidal practices have become the nomos of the modern, the custom where those targeted have no rights and where life is reduced to mere survival.

- 65 - Agamben is not claiming that we should maintain ideas, ideologies or even beliefs from the past and that we simply need to reread these critically. On the contrary, the issues Agamben draws upon express a clear, ongoing problem or aporia that is continually articulated because of a deeper political problem – that of being human (Colebrook and Maxwell 2016: 25). If politics was an ‘additional capacity’ with Aristotle, now politics is of our essence, and life has become its object (Norris 2000: 39; Mazower 2008: 34).

Agamben is therefore committed to a critique of contemporary biopolitics (or the reduction of human political being to formless ‘life’) and to a diagnosis of biopolitics that grounds the present in fundamental concepts of Western philosophy and theology (Colebrook and Maxwell 2016: 2). If Agamben’s analysis of biopolitics is correct, if the essence of the camp consists in the materialisation of the state of exception and in the consequent creation of a space for ‘bare life’ as such, it is then important to come to terms with the possibility of “facing a camp virtually every time that such a structure is created regardless of the nature of the crimes committed, and regardless of the denomination and specific topography it might have” (Agamben 2000: 41-42; Downey 2009: 110).22 For Agamben the term biopolitics is characterised by a complete indeterminateness, which forms a peculiar problem with precise regard to the uncategorised nature of the life that lies as its object ‘bare life’. When Agamben suggests in Homo Sacer that he is following Foucault’s insights and ‘correcting’ or ‘completing’ them, he is similarly not interested in the artificial imagery of power as such, but only to the extent that it acts to displace this power from its supposed proper place within modern society (Zartaloudis 2010: 164-165; Snoek 2010; Vaughn-Williams 2009). The logic of power is a logic of exclusion and inclusion which designates the thresholds which continually redefine life, its value, and as a result, the concept of being human (Genel 2006: 58).

Agamben’s work can be subsequently read as a critique of society and as a diagnosis of cultural crisis. The key and primary focus within the Homo Sacer project, is the link between law and life, between the legal existence of a person and ‘bare life’, the integration of life into the political. The ‘radical’ implication within his concept of the biopolitical, according to Agamben, is that the only way to become ‘part’ of a political society is through the simultaneous

22 This will be made clear in Chapters Five and Six of the thesis – where the violence that occurred within Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina respectively is examined via this biopolitical framework.

- 66 - exclusion of human beings who are denied full legal status (Lemke 2011: 54; de la Durantaye 2009; Zartaloudis 2010).

Zartaloudis (2010: 145-146) further suggests that:

Agamben’s preoccupation with the genealogy of Western power views the idea of power as a perpetual seizure of control and authority that presupposes, through a juridico-political act, a realm of ‘bare life’ that is characterised by an absence of rights. This act, however, does not mark a life that is impossible to observe or qualify, but the origin of an ever-denied historically existent social category... His aim is to show the historical origin of the separation of ‘bare life’ and to insist on the now permanent layer of dehumanisation that threatens to cover the globe. Only if the mechanism that perpetuates such a dehumanisation is deconstructed and stopped will a different concept and praxis of political life be made possible (Zartaloudis 2010: 145-146).

On (bio)Power, (bio)Politics and the (bio)Political Body

The term ‘biopolitics’, by the beginning of the twenty-first century, has become a concept that carries with it many different and competing meanings. For Foucault, biopolitics was another name for technology of power, a biopower, which needs to be distinguished from the mechanisms of discipline that emerged at the end of the eighteenth century (Liesen and Walsh 2012: 2; de Larrinaga and Doucet 2008: 519; Forti 2006). This new configuration of power aimed to take “control of life and the biological processes of man as species and of ensuring that they are not disciplined but regularised” (Foucault 2003: 246-247). The biopolitical apparatus here included “forecasts, statistical estimates, and overall measures”, or might also be looked at as, “security mechanisms that have to be installed around the random element inherent in a population of living beings so as to optimise a state of life” (Foucault 2003: 246). As such, Foucault’s analysis of biopolitics, in particular the power of sovereignty, is juxtaposed with Agamben leading to the important discussion between them. Biopower and biopolitics thus is that which guarantees the continuous living of the human species (Esposito 2016: 359). In Remnants of Auschwitz (2002) and The Open (2004), Agamben defines biopolitics as a negative, anchoring it to the sovereign state of exception that separates zõe from political

- 67 - forms of life bios, which in turn marks the distinction between the political and non-political, the human and the animal (Esposito 2008: x; Colebrook 2008: 108; Schinkel 2010: 161).

However, the historic claim that biopolitics emerged during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries provides the point of departure from Agamben’s own critical thesis on biopolitics, which he describes as an attempt to correct or at the very least complete Foucault’s original analysis (Agamben 1998: 9; Mills 2008a: 59; Snoek 2010: 44; Finlayson 2010: 101).23 Agamben’s Homo Sacer project is a series of books that try to completely rethink the European political tradition by using a set of concepts, the refugee, the state of exception and the concentration camp, to show how the differences between the public and the private, law and power, the human being and the citizen and even between the judiciary and the executive are all put in question within the state in which we live. Dillon (2010: 66) claims that “rather than being characteristic of the modern era, biopolitics and sovereignty articulate in a much more fundamental way”. Sovereign biopolitics, Agamben claims, has accompanied the ancients and the moderns alike uninterrupted for centuries and has remained unaffected by critical events, such as the birth of the ancient Greek democratic city, the emergence of commercial capitalism, the modern discovery of human rights, the invention of constitutionalism, the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century and the entry of labouring masses into politics (Kalyvas 2005b: 110; Oksala 2012: 92; de Larrinaga and Doucet 2008: 521 and Kurelić 2009: 145). Agamben thus claims that the “production of a biopolitical body is the original act of sovereign power” and “… biopolitics is at least as old as the sovereign exception itself” (Agamben 1998: 6).

Agamben’s concept of biopolitics is certainly indebted to Foucault. The impression that modernity produces a certain form of biopolitical body is unavoidable when reading Agamben’s work and it is implied within Foucault’s writings (Campbell 2006: 12). But! Agamben’s principle insight for thinking biopolitically, and of primary use when applied to genocide, concerns precisely the distinction between zõe and bios and the process by which he links the sovereign exception to the production of the biopolitical body and the creation of ‘bare life’ itself (Kishik 2012: 73; Patton 2007: 204). Agamben returns to Aristotle, in order to

23 Please note that his reservations on this point have to do with his belief in, and allegiance, to Schmitt’s work (Grumley 2015: 240).

- 68 - provide a thorough reworking of Foucault’s diagnoses. Noting the etymology of the word ‘life’, Agamben highlights that the ancient Greeks had two key and distinct words for it:

The Greeks had no single term to express what we mean by the word ‘life’. They use two terms that, although traceable to a common etymological root, are semantically and morphologically distinct: zõe, which expressed the simple fact of living common to all living beings (animals, men or gods) and bios which indicated the form or way of life proper to an individual or group (Agamben 1998: 1).

Simply put, the advent of biopolitics culminates with the entry of zõe and bios, or in Agamben’s already famous saying, the entry of both terms into a “zone of irreducible indistinction” (Agamben 1998: 9). Prozorov (2014) posits that Agamben, whilst agreeing with Foucault that this indistinction describes the loosely defined ‘modern’ period, Agamben questions, firstly, the reduction of biopolitics, as Foucault sees it, to a historically novel phenomenon and secondly its unrelated connection to sovereign power. “Foucault’s theory of biopolitics unfolded in the context of his attempt to abandon the ‘juridico-discursive’ model of power as negative, repressive and centred on the figure of the sovereign, with law as its main instrument” (Prozorov 2014: 95). Agamben’s thesis and approach, however, differs to that of Foucault in that Agamben suggests that we firstly need to establish the “intersection between the juridico-institutional and the biopolitical models of power” and finds such an intersection in the figure of ‘bare life’ (Agamben 1998: 6). This intersection is a decision on the distinction between political life and the political opposite, ‘bare life’ – superfluousness or waste is, thus, envisaged as “both what is placed outside the polis and what is singled out as the reservoir of proper political praxis” (Zartaloudis 2010: 145; Chare 2006).

Agamben’s starting point within Homo Sacer for his discussion on biopolitics is the apparent contradiction of sovereignty, wherein he sees the sovereign as simultaneously inside and outside the normal juridical order. Agamben here attempts to demonstrate the prevalence of zõe to produce the biopolitical body. The reasoning is found in what Agamben, following in Schmitt’s footsteps, calls the ‘sovereign exception’, that is, the process by which sovereign power is premised on the exclusion of those who are simply alive when seen from the perspective of the polis (Esposito 2008: xxii; Campbell 2010: 13). Starting from the biopolitical

- 69 - structure of sovereignty, a history of biopower and biopolitics takes shape, the aim of which is to expose both contemporary politics and its continuity with the problems of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The crucial moment of this analysis is not, as it is for Foucault, “the intensification of the diverse processes that ‘make live’, but the moment in which ‘bare life’ essentially ‘frees itself’” (Genel 2006: 53; Schinkel 2010). Here Agamben addresses the idea of an ‘inclusive exclusion’ of natural life (zõe) from political life (bios), “almost as if politics were the place in which life had to transform itself into good in which what had to be politicised is always already ‘bare life’” (Agamben 1998: 7).

What characterises modern politics is not so much the inclusion of zõe in the polis – which is, in itself, absolutely ancient – nor simply the fact that life as such becomes a principle object of the projections and calculation of State power. Instead the decisive fact is that, together with the process by which exception everywhere becomes the rule, the realm of bare life – which is originally situated at the margins of the political order – gradually begins to coincide with the political realm, an exclusion and inclusion, outside and inside, bios and zõe, right and fact, enter into a zone of irreducible indistinction (Agamben 1998: 9).

In the seventeenth century, the science of politics and the care for the life and health of its subjects combined. This amalgamation became essential for the functioning of the modern state, which is the nation state. The continental nation state system collapsed during and after World War One, and the second half of the twentieth century ushered in a challenge to the traditional emphasis placed on formal institutions which subsequently triggered a new phase in the relationship between the sovereign state and biopolitics (Mazower 2008: 24). After World War One, the state of exception became the rule and the camp was added to the original trinity (state-nation-territory) of the nation state. The camp, as we will see in Chapters Five and Six, ‘takes care’ of the stateless and rightless, whether they come from the outside, such as refugees, or from the inside, like the Jews, the Tutsi and Bosnian Muslims.24 One of the most controversial if not the most challenging aspects of Agamben’s theory is the notion

24 Kurelić (2009: 147) further explains that Arendt, through her theory of totalitarianism, notes the internment camp became a normal solution for the problem of refugees and other displaced persons prior to the outbreak of World War Two.

- 70 - that biopolitics in fact secures the continuity between liberal democratic and totalitarian nation states. The very fact that the state was biopolitical before World War One makes it potentially totalitarian, and deadly. The step from the standard Foucauldian ‘make live and let die’ biopolitics to the Nazi thanatopolitics of the concentration camp “was made when the state intervened directly with the lives of their citizens” (Kurelić 2009: 147). Whether we are discussing the Nazi concentration camps or, as this thesis discusses below, the camps located within Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina, because biopolitics, and in particular the camp, are “the hidden paradigm of modernity”, this allows Agamben to shed light on the nature of modern politics in general (Mazower 2008: 28; Ficcadori 2015: 151).25

Throughout Agamben’s readings it is clear that a number of factors combine to position politics as the site for exclusion. Politics, Agamben argues, “appears as the truly fundamental structure [struttura] of Western metaphysics… There is politics because man is the living being who, in language, separates and opposes himself to his own bare life [nuda vita] and, at the same time, maintains himself in relation to that bare life in an inclusive exclusion” (Agamben 1998: 8. Emphasis added). It is the simple fact that this division occurs, that the state of exception becomes the rule and the hidden foundation of sovereignty is then revealed. In so doing it reveals the relevance of political modernity. According to Genel (2006), this division is made possible through the ‘politicisation of life’, or as Arendt (1958: 36-38) suggests, the ‘life-isation of politics’, “which consists in the increasing inscription of life within the political order, which in turn makes its exposure to power increasingly radical. The specifity of modern democracy differentiated from the democracy of antiquity, is the fact that it approaches its opposite, totalitarianism, thus making it biopolitical” (Genel 2006: 53).

The State of Exception (2005) clarifies and extends the ‘onto-political’ characterisation of biopolitics, sovereignty, law and juridical violence that Agamben initially discusses within Homo Sacer (Mills 2008b: 16-17; McLoughlin 2010). In Homo Sacer, Agamben describes the modern condition of law as “being in force without significance”, a condition “that is

25 Thanatopolitics (as well as necropolitics) are both known as the ‘politics of death’, however the two terms should not be confused. Agamben suggests that biopolitics should be read as what he terms thanatopolitics, where biopolitics plays out in an extreme form as a determination on the unworthiness or valuelessness of a particular life (Coleman and Grove 2009: 497; Nasir 2016: 75). Necropolitics, as illuminated by Mbembe (2003: 14) suggests that the enactment of sovereignty where the destruction of populations occurs, is the core function of power rather than autonomy.

- 71 - effectively equivalent to abandonment, where in the subject of law is wholly given over to the violence of law and simultaneously bereft of its protection” (Agamben 1998 & 2002; Mills 2008b: 17). This situation emerges due to the state of exception, that founds the original logic of sovereignty, becoming the rule – the law is then suspended however, remains in place. The State of Exception, further elaborates on this exclusion with the claim that there is an “essential continuity” between the state of exception and sovereignty posited by Schmitt in Political Theology (2010) (Mills 2008b: 17; Kruger 2005: 338-339). For Agamben, the general employment by law of the state of exception, is the condition by which the law both simultaneously appropriates and abandons life. Within this the unfounded decision of the sovereign is the ‘threshold’, since it is the decision that the original non-coincidence between life and law is breached and life is truly brought into the sphere of law, thus becoming biopolitical (Mills 2008a: 66-67; Edkins 2000: 7; Norris 2000: 42-43).

On Homo Sacer and its Traditional Figure

According to Agamben, “the first foundation of political life is a life that may be killed which is politicised through its very capacity to be killed” (Agamben 1998: 89). This formation, one that stands previous theorists’ ideas (such as Schmitt and Foucault) on their head, underpins Agamben's most controversial thesis in Homo Sacer, namely that nowadays liberalism and totalitarianism, left and right, private and public, have all merged into a ‘zone of indistinction’ connecting ‘bare life’ to human rights. Agamben posits that modern individual rights are a ‘sacred man’ and so completely unprotected against the mythical violence of the state that Benjamin discusses (Vatter 2007: 29). He uses the figure of homo sacer, a character in Roman criminal law that is placed in a unique situation and truly epitomises the subject caught up in the ban. Homo sacer is a ‘sacred man’ who has been “judged on account of a crime” and may not be sacrificed, yet may be killed without someone committing the act of homicide (Agamben 1998: 71). Homo sacer is thus excluded from both human law (as being that which can be killed with impunity) and divine law (as being that which cannot be given over to the gods). Homo sacer has become nothing – but, for all that they remain the residue of humanity – they are the one that can be killed. They are alive, but as good as dead, they are doomed to death, they are a living corpse. Homo sacer is a living representation of ‘bare life’ and it is the sovereign who decides when someone becomes homo sacer (Kurelić 2009: 147; Hegarty 2010: 21; Prozorov 2014: 107; Downey 2009: 109; Edkins 2000: 6 and Colebrook 2008: 109).

- 72 - At first glance, and when coupled with an analysis on modern genocide, it would appear that the archaic figure of homo sacer has as little contemporary relevance in Western democracy as the figure of the sovereign existing on the outer limits of the law. However, within the Agambenian literature, modern democracy did not desert either the logic of sovereignty or ‘bare life’ as its object, but rather “shattered it and disseminated it into every individual body, making it what is at stake in political conflict” (Agamben 1998: 124). Every step in the democratic dissemination of sovereignty throughout the social was “accompanied by the subjection of individual bodies as ‘bare life’” (Prozorov 2014: 108). There are two figures in the life of the polis, the sovereign and homo sacer. These two figures may well coexist in the same person. They may well be both the bearer of inalienable human rights and the object of government interventions that put their very existence at stake. The sovereign subject of rights becomes the “abject bearer of ‘bare life’ whenever the recognition of these rights by the state is suspended in the state of exception”, which as will be shown, remains a possibility within any political system, democratic or not (Prozorov 2014; Vogt 2005: 78-79). The most obvious case in point is that of the refugee or the stateless, who, having lost or relinquished the citizenship of their state without gaining the citizenship of another, find themselves abandoned by the law and exposed to the purely arbitrary sovereign violence. Agamben, as mentioned previously, follows Arendt in interpreting the plight of refugees as the proof of the emptiness of the very idea of human rights. Refugees are perfect comparisons of the ‘rights of man’, since they are by definition deprived of all rights other than human rights, which are conceived of as inalienable. Yet rather than benefit from the rights for which they are eligible, they are abandoned to the power that does not recognise them as subjects of rights, and for this reason, they become ‘actually human’, the unclassified, the space between homo sacer and ‘bare life’ (Arendt 1979: 267-302; Agamben 1998: 126-132; Agamben 2000: 16 and Dietz 2012: 286-287).26

If the present requires us to look back at ancient Roman law and homo sacer, this is because ancient Roman law is already indebted to what Agamben frequently refers to as a fracture in Western thought – “a complete rupture, or impossible divide between being and acting:

26 Both Agamben and Arendt have drawn on Aristotle’s discussion in Politics (1998) relating to the citizen and the alien, albeit in different forms and varying degrees. Agamben (1998) suggests that the stateless, or those who are abandoned by the law, represent a “disquieting element” in the order of the polis.

- 73 - between a complete and absolute life opposed to a life subjected to control and governance; between a politically formed life (bios) and a life that is prior to self-actualisation (zõe); and between a recognised and legally protected citizenry and an abandoned or ‘bare life’ of homo sacer” (Colebrook and Maxwell 2016: 16-17). The figure of homo sacer is thus arguably not an archaic remnant from the dark ages of totalitarianism, but rather is only now coming fully into its own with the democratic dissemination of sovereignty. “Just as democracy can easily collapse into totalitarianism, so too can the sovereign freedoms and rights of the sovereign subject be converted into the subjection to and control by sovereign power” (Prozorov 2014: 108-109). Whilst Foucault’s approach to sovereign power dealt with ‘making die’ and his analysis of modern biopolitics consists of ‘making live’, Agamben’s sovereign biopolitics must be understood, rather, as ‘making survive’: “biopower’s supreme ambition is to produce, in a human body, the absolute separation of the living being and the speaking being, zõe and bios, the inhuman and the human” (Agamben 2002: 156). According to Prozorov (2014: 111), “the production of this separation evidently cannot be grasped in terms of any instrumental rationality or functional logic. It is not a matter of biopolitics producing a positive form of life correlative with the principles of a certain political ideology, such as a liberal, socialist or fascist subject”. The homo sacer is the exact political figure that personifies what is for Agamben ‘the original political relation’. Homo sacer is the life that is excluded from the political (bios) in which sovereignty institutes, and which is the product of the relation through which bios is “premised not upon another form of life but rather on zõe (because zõe is not by definition form), and its principal characteristic of being merely alive and hence killable” (Esposito 2008: xxii).

As such, the characteristics of homo sacer can be therefore reformulated and summarised as follows:

1) Exclusion from the polis; 2) Exception to the law (both divine and human); and 3) Exposure to violence (death), as a life that is exposed to death as the originary political element.

Agamben points out the symmetry between the body of the sovereign and of homo sacer. Both occupy a space beyond the law. The inviolable status of the sovereign is retained in

- 74 - modern constitutions in the form that the head of state cannot be subject to an ordinary trial (Humphrey 2002: 140). According to Agamben (1998: 13), “as long as the form of the State is constituted as the fundamental horizon of all communal life and the political, religious, juridical and economic doctrines that sustained this form were still strong, this ‘most extreme sphere’ could not truly come to light”. The problem of sovereignty was reduced to the question of who within the political order was invested with certain powers, and the very threshold of the political order itself was never called into question (Zartaloudis 2010: 163). “Today, now that the great State structures have entered into a process of dissolution and the emergency has, as Walter Benjamin foresaw, become the rule, the time is ripe to place the problem of the originary structure and limits of the form of the State in a new perspective” (Agamben 1998: 12). Agamben notes that sovereign authority and the power to kill should not be confused with the more general power to kill, but instead should be understood outside domestic jurisdiction: as an excessive power that “attaches itself to every free male citizen from birth and that seems to define the very model of political power in general” (Agamben 1998: 88; Zartaloudis 2010: 150).27 Homo sacer is a grim picture of human life, politicised by virtue of its abandonment to a no-man’s land between nomos and physis (Coleman and Grove 2009: 496).

On Sovereignty, Sacred Life and ‘Bare Life’

Agamben has devoted himself to an extension of biopolitics to all aspects of political life and his approach to sovereignty presents a rupture with the ‘traditional approach’. This redefinition of sovereignty as biopolitics therefore implies a significant modification to Foucault’s original hypothesis. However, as has been mentioned previously, Agamben, whilst drawing on Foucault seeks to extend and ‘correct’ his original thesis.

Agamben has suggested then, that for a long time the problem of sovereignty has been trying to identify “who within the political order was invested with certain powers” (Genel 2006: 50). Accordingly, Agamben notes that “the very threshold of the political order itself was never called into question” (Agamben 1998: 12). What Agamben calls into question, therefore, is the

27 There has been detailed criticism by a variety of authors concerning Agamben’s theory and his lack of gender neutrality. Whilst the quotes within this chapter have been cited directly from his translated texts, an overview of these critics and the ‘gender’ issue has been provided in detail in the following chapter as this is, and has been noted within the Introduction, an important issue to grapple with for clarity within this thesis.

- 75 - formulation of the limits and the originary structure of the state sphere. His thesis is that “sovereignty functions according to the logic of the exception, the privileged object of which is life, and constructs itself by producing a biopolitical body, which is to say by including bare life through its exclusion” (Genel 2006: 50). By looking at the question of biopolitics and biopower and its relation to that of sovereignty, Agamben attempts to completely redefine the concept of sovereignty altogether. “It does not therefore, concern itself with traditional questions which, starting from legal subjects, would pose the question of its legitimacy or its constitution. Sovereignty does not emerge from a contract or a general will nor is it derived from interests” (Genel 2006: 50-51). One of the main claims within the project of Homo Sacer is that the untheorised conception of the sacred still infects politics and must be dealt with in order to reconfigure this politics (Colebrook and Maxwell 2016: 7).

One way of thinking about sovereignty is not so much as a specific political form – where there is a single top-down and centred power – but as a modality of thinking about what is and that which is merely or barely existent until it takes on a form (Colebrook and Maxwell 2016: 2). Of course, Agamben’s original analysis of, and approach to, the concept of sovereignty, does not conceal the immense debt owed to other authors who have wrestled with the notion of sovereignty. However, whilst acknowledging these theorists’ contributions in turn, as has been discussed at length within the previous chapter, Agamben moves beyond their positions. Drawing on the historical ramifications of Schmitt’s work on sovereign power, Agamben redefines this issue of sovereignty. Agamben recognises that biopolitics is as “old as the notion of sovereignty itself”, but the insight that he adds is that, within modernity something new has happened to sovereignty and continues to occur, namely the coming to light of its negativity due to the expiry or devaluation of all positive projects under the condition of nothingness (Agamben 1998: 6; Downey 2009: 112; Prozorov 2014: 98). For Agamben, sovereign power relies “on the ability to decide on whether certain forms of life are worthy of living” (Vaughn-Williams 2009: 735). Sovereignty is not concerned with the legal subjects but, in a hidden manner, with ‘bare life’ which it separates itself from. In Means Without End (2000), Agamben declared that the “concepts of sovereignty and constituent power which are at the core of our political traditions have to be abandoned or, at least to be thought all over again… and those who continue to use these concepts uncritically literally do not know what they are talking about” (Agamben 2000: 110 & 112. Emphasis added). It can therefore be

- 76 - argued that homo sacer is Agamben’s answer to the challenge of rethinking critically the concept of sovereignty. Agamben’s analysis, however, is not only an effort to re-examine the nature of sovereignty, it is also an attempt to assess its theoretical implications and to study its significant impact on modern politics. Which, if we are to analyse, in-depth, the varying cases of genocide, is an extremely important function within any evaluation of biopolitics and of course its connection to genocide itself. “Agamben is not, therefore, simply advocating a return to sovereignty in the sense of aspiring to revive previously established discourses of sovereign power. The unique slant that Agamben takes is to look at the past of sovereignty in order to comprehend its present nature” (Kalyvas 2005b: 108). “Contrary to our modern habit of representing the political realm in terms of citizens’ rights, free will, and social contracts, from the point of sovereignty only bare life is authentically political” (Agamben 1998: 106. Emphasis added).

The foundation of sovereign power, Agamben argues, consists of a double indistinction (Kalyvas 2005b: 108). On the one hand, sovereignty exceeds the terrain of the juridical (as per Schmitt) to embrace the extra-legal moment of discretion. Its true function, and here Agamben moves beyond Arendt’s (1979: 269-302; 460-79) and Benjamin’s (1969: 253-64) critical dialogue with Schmitt, is a state of exception that has become the rule. Sovereignty, it is then argued, finds itself in a permanent state of emergency where norm and fact coexist, where the natural state coincides with the political state – zõe and bios. Additionally, Kalyvas (2005b: 108-109) suggests that the sovereign decision is always about what Agamben calls ‘sacred life’, that is, a life that might be killed though not sacrificed because it is neither purely political nor solely biological. Sacred life is neither fully included, nor completely excluded, it is neither situated inside or outside of the political. Rather it is ‘suspended’, trapped in the zone of indistinction between the oikos and the polis, public and private, the natural and the social. It is by this very suspension that it is connected to sovereign power and reduces it to the violence of its own decisions (Edkins 2000: 4-5; Wall 2005: 39; Downey 2009: 112-113).

Agamben argued that, in the context of the nation state: “…the so-called sacred and inalienable rights of man show themselves to lack every protection and reality at the moment in which they can no longer take the form of the rights belonging to the citizens of the state” (Agamben 1998: 126). Sacred life is a hybrid political and biological life: zõe is politicised but not included in the political community, or rather included through its exclusion. Hence the

- 77 - real subject of sovereign power is neither the civic life of the citizen nor its opposite, namely, the pre-political, natural life (Kalyvas 2005b: 109). Downey (2009: 109, 119; 123-124) summarises this analysis exceptionally well:

“Human rights are the rights of the citizen, not homo sacer – the latter being our modern-day refugee, the political prisoner, the disappeared, the so-called ‘ghost detainee’ and the unlawful combatant, the victim of torture and the dispossessed… [Within] a ‘state of exception’, sovereign power, which has effective usurped legislative (legal) power, will decide upon the distinction (or, more likely, non-distinction), between the two; decide, that is to observe, between the fact of life or death”.

The function of sovereignty is charged with the selection of ‘bare life’, which bans some part of human life from both legal and political society, opening it to the pure violence of the sovereign. But since sovereignty reveals itself to be the essence of law, Agamben is left to his fundamental thesis “according to which all civil and political life, which permits the protection and flourishing of human life, is built upon the possibility of sacrificing some part of itself” (Vatter 2007: 7). The concept of sacred life allows Agamben to draw a correlation between biopolitics as “a power that exerts a positive influence of life that endeavours to administer, optimise and multiply it” (Foucault 1990: 137) and view it as “a formidable power of death” (Foucault 1990: 137), a “thanatopolitics” (Agamben 1998: 122-123), which may be witnessed as the basis of every legal system (Vatter 2007: 8). Agamben (1998: 66) argues, that we need to consider the origins and ambivalence of the sacred: “The principle of the sacredness of life has become so familiar to us that we seem to forget that classical Greece, to which we owe most of our ethico-political concepts, not only informed this principle but did not even possess a term to express the complex semantic sphere that we indicate with the single term ‘life’”.

The absolute character of sovereign power receives its strength on the basis of the hidden tie to a life that can be killed, but not sacrificed. Homo sacer can be killed, but not sacrificed and he or she can be killed as mere ‘bare life’, as human ‘waste’, or ‘superfluousness’. This confirms the complex fact that ‘bare life’ characterised also the mythological foundation both of homo sacer and of the absolute power of the sovereign (Zartaloudis 2010: 153). At one end of the Agambenian scale lies the figure of homo sacer “a person [who] is simply outside human

- 78 - jurisdiction without being brought into the reality of divine law” (Agamben 1998: 82-83). This person can be killed because their personhood is effectively removed by being placed outside the law – we can see how this plays out in the killings perpetrated in the Nazi concentration and death camps, as well as the rape and concentration camps of Bosnia-Herzegovina. But it is the inclusion of the word ‘sacred’ that alerts us that it is not only at its most explicit that this form of power occurs. It is at least as likely that one’s biology is subject to control through the notion of sacred life (Hegarty 2010: 21).

Modern totalitarianism can be defined as the establishment, by means of the state of exception, of a legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system. Since then, the voluntary creation of a permanent state of emergency (though perhaps not declared in the technical sense) has become one of the essential practices of contemporary states, including so-called democratic ones (Agamben 2005: 2).

What is of interest for this thesis and is evident throughout Agamben’s analysis is that it brings into view the exercise of a biopolitics at the heart of the mechanisms of sovereignty, in particular, as the refugee demonstrates, as it relates to the concept and notion of sovereignty. The sovereign has the right to keep life, and to take it away.

Agamben’s analysis can be characterised as an inquiry into the originary fiction of sovereignty. Seen from that perspective the Foucauldian influence is clear. Agamben’s analysis concerns the manner in which power presents itself within the legal code and the way in which it “prescribes that we conceive of it bringing to light the complex procedures, behind their reductive assimilation, of thresholds and divisions” (Genel 2006: 57). Statelessness, may only be one indicator, albeit an important one, of the increasing mobility of people in the world today, a mobility, however, that has the potential to transform the idea of national sovereignty and may put the “original fiction of modern sovereignty in crisis” (Lechte and Newman 2012: 534; Agamben 1998: 131). Sovereignty is exercised through the sovereign decision in the paradoxical act of the exception. Constructed through a relation of the ban, it establishes and maintains itself through a gesture which is reproduced by each citizen in relation to his or her own life, by which each individual “becomes the subject and object of

- 79 - the political order” (Patton 2007: 204). In Agamben’s conception of the term, biopolitics is nothing other than the deployment of the structure of sovereignty in the form of the crisis. And this is where he parts company from Foucault. For Agamben, “sovereignty becomes a paradigm for understanding the ways in which power is constituted and exercised, rather than as per Foucault, a means of locating the discontinuities and historical transformations of the exercise of power” (Genel 2006: 58).

The originary relation between politics and life, that being its paradoxical structure, is the secret correlation between sovereignty and ‘bare life’. One of Agamben’s most important contributions to contemporary political philosophy is his concept of ‘bare life’. This concept allows us to not only revise the Foucauldian theory of biopower and biopolitics, but also to rethink the political contradictions of modernity (Ziarek 2008: 90; Vogt 2005: 78). ‘Bare life’, through its exclusion, is the hidden foundation of politics. It is what political, properly human life, is not, and politics must therefore repeatedly enact its exclusion (Oksala 2010: 29). ‘Bare life’ is always compared to what it is not: political life (Norris 2000: 41). Agamben begins his analysis of the problematic notion of ‘bare life’ in Homo Sacer with a note on the old Aristotelian distinction between zõe and bios, that is, between the “simple fact of living common to all living beings” and the “for or way of living proper to an individual group” (Agamben 1998: 1; Swiffen 2012: 352-353).

Zõe as simple, natural life was, at this time, set in contrast to the qualified life of the polis. Zõe is understood to be general, simple and natural, while bios is conceived as particular, qualified and artificial. The distinction between zõe and bios, natural life and qualified life, is problematic from as early on as in antiquity. Agamben explains this issue in Means Without End:

Political power as we know it… always founds itself – in the last instance – on the separation of a sphere of naked life from the context of the forms of life… Thus, life originally appears in law only as the counterpart as a power that threatens death… Thus, in the Hobbesian foundation of sovereignty, life in the state of nature is defined only by its being unconditionally exposed to a death threat and political life – that is, the life that unfolds under the protection of the Leviathan – is nothing but this very same life always exposed to a threat

- 80 - that now rests exclusively in the hands of the sovereign… The state of exception, which is what the sovereign each and every time decides, takes place precisely when naked life – which normally appears re-joined to the multifarious forms of social life – is explicitly put into question and revoked as the ultimate foundation of political power. The ultimate subject that need to be at once turned into the exception and included in the city is always naked life (Agamben 2000: 4-6).

In building on the theory of Benjamin, Agamben specifies a distinction between ‘bare life’ and ‘sacred life’. He traces this concept of ‘bare life’ (as the new political subject) as something already contained within the writ of habeas corpus and “highlights the new centrality of the ‘body’ within the politico-juridical model” (Peters 2014: 330). The basic separation of ‘bare life’ – the form of existence which is reduced to mere biological functions – from political existence is, for Agamben, the key dynamic that has shaped Western political history since antiquity (Agamben 1998. See also Lemke 2011: 6; DeCaroli 2013: 228; Lazzarato 2002: 100- 101 and Cisney 2008). He argues that ‘bare life’ and sovereignty cannot be separated and the “inclusion of bare life in the political realm constitutes the original – if [not] concealed – nucleus of sovereign power” (Agamben 1998: 6). That is, Agamben argues that not only is the idea of ‘bare life’ essential to the notion of sovereignty, ‘bare life’ and the sovereign decision are two sides of the same coin (Pan 2009: 51-52). The decision that founds the state and the decision that declares life itself to be what we call ‘mere life’ are entirely indistinguishable; the link between the sovereign and ‘bare life’ of homo sacer is enduring and is neither religious nor legal, but rather biopolitical (Agamben 1998: 114. See also Diken and Laustsen 2006: 449; Pan 2009: 52).

Agamben de-emphasises the Foucauldian analysis of the emergence of biopower in the nineteenth century as this represents a far less radical separation with the sovereignty of a disciplinary society. Instead Agamben focusses on the idea that biopolitics will intensify to such a point that “in the twentieth century it will be transformed into thanatopolitics for both totalitarian and democratic states” (Campbell 2006: 13; Patton 2007: 204; Bargu 2016). The reduction of the living is no longer simply the ‘status of the living dead’, but something more sinister: the dishonouring, disciplining and punishment of the living as sites of pure violence.

- 81 - Granted, there are a number of differences that still remain between the classic and modern models of biopolitics and theorists of the biopolitical continually diverge and clash on certain aspects of these two models – however of key concern and relevance here is how Agamben strives to show his reader exactly just how the modern political space if directly linked to the “birth of the camps” (Agamben 1998: 174; Campbell 2006: 13; Esposito 2008: xxii). Additionally, contra to Foucault, Agamben claims that the ‘threshold of modernity’ will be crossed when the state of exception becomes the rule and “bare life becomes the centre of all political strategies” (Lemke 2011: 56). In evaluating the idea of genocide, and genocidal practices, Agamben does not argue that these examples lie on the margins of what might occur, that this phenomenon represents a ‘logical’ exception, rather he searches and evaluates the ‘regularity’ or normality of this exception and questions to what extent ‘bare life’ is an essential component of contemporary political rationality considering that life and its preservation and prolongation are increasingly the object of legal regulations (Agamben 2000: 37-45 cited in Lemke 2011: 57). Agamben argues that since the end of the Nazi dictatorship biopolitics “has passed beyond a new threshold” (Agamben 1998: 165). This new threshold no longer concentrates merely on identifiable individuals or specific populations, but rather “in our age all citizens can be said in a specific, but extremely real sense, to appear virtually as homines sacri” (Agamben 1998: 111). In the face of a biopolitics that technologises, administers and depoliticises, and thereby renders the political and power relations irrelevant, we have all become homines sacri or ‘bare life’ (Edkins and Pin-Fat 2005: 11). For Agamben, modernity, the phenomenon of the stateless and the refugee, as well as the ever-growing trend of basic human rights deprivation are all evidence that the boundary has been created between politically relevant existence and ‘bare life’ (Cisney 2008: 173; McCormick 2007: 337). This, Agamben argues, has today moved inevitably “inside every human life… Bare life is no longer confined to a particular place or definite category. It now dwells in the biological body of every living being” (Agamben 1998: 139-140).

‘Bare life’, for Agamben, is the necessary exclusion, the state of exception, which affects the inside of the polis and sovereign power. ‘Bare life’, as an original political element is the necessary object of sovereign power and without ‘bare life’ sovereign power would cease to exist (Blencowe: 115-116).

- 82 - The most proper characteristic of the exception is that what is excluded in it is not, on account of being excluded, absolutely without relation to the rule. On the contrary, what is excluded in the exception maintains itself in relation to the rule in the form of the rule’s suspension. The rule applies to the exception in no longer applying, in withdrawing from it. The state of exception is thus not the chaos that precedes order but rather the situation that results from its suspension (Agamben 1998: 17-18).

Sovereignty needs to be understood as containing the capacity to extend the possibility of what is generally excluded – killing – to what is normally excluded – “modern man” looked upon as animals, “whose existence is being called into question (Agamben 1998: 10). Both those who can be killed without impunity and the sovereign are outside the law just as they are at its very core. The sovereign, whether it be the form of a monarch or the ruler of a nation state, is outside and beyond the law as they are the states guarantor. “At the same time, they are the concentration of law. Agamben pinpoints this situation as the ‘exception’ from which the ‘state of exception’ can emerge – that is the complete suspension of law” (Genel 2006: 56). This suspension of law, is the moment a type of law is founded, which is neither legitimate nor illegitimate, simply violent. The violence of nature is held back to be restructured as the exception that guarantees all else (Hegarty 2010: 21). “In the state of exception become the rule, the life of homo sacer, which was the correlate of sovereign power, turns into an existence over which power no longer seems to have any hold’’ (Agamben 1998: 153)

Agamben’s focus in not centred around how the sovereign is able to put an end to the state of war. In his analysis, unlike that of Foucault, he does not believe that the very notion of sovereign power signifies the end of war. Rather he views the notion of sovereignty as evidence of how both the biological life and the state of exception, endure within the normal juridical space (Genel 2006: 52-53). The state of exception for Agamben is therefore not the chaos that precedes order, but rather it is the condition that results from the law’s suspension (Edkins 2000: 4-5). It can be considered a principle immanent to sovereignty which structures the political state without ever appearing within it. “The law presupposes the non-juridical (for example, mere violence in the form of the state of nature) as that with which it maintains itself in a potential relation in the state of exception” (Agamben 1998: 20-21). Genel (2006) believes that evaluating the state of exception and sovereignty in this way “reveals the

- 83 - reversal of the traditional notion of sovereignty”. Characterised in such a manner, the “structure of sovereignty orients the history of biopower”, biopolitics and the state of exception, “which is the history of the deployment and the emerging crisis of this structure” (Genel 2006: 53). The increasing use of governmental emergency powers indicates the return of sovereign power. “Sovereignty is now associated with the creation of lawless zones (within and without the frontiers of nation state), in which it is no longer possible to separate what is ‘fact’ from what is ‘right’ and where any human life that gets trapped within it is liable to be killed or be left to die, or be barely kept alive without incurring any sort of crime” (Vatter 2007: 2).

On Modernity, the State of Exception and the Camp

Given what has already been argued above, it is clear that for Agamben a ‘state of emergency’ is the norm for constitutional political power in Western democracies. Put more starkly, Agamben suggests that “the bare life to which human beings were reduced neither demands nor conforms to anything… it is absolutely immanent” (Agamben 2002: 69). In his view there is a wider change of governance across the world in which the rule of law is routinely displaced by the ‘state of exception’ (Elliot 2014: 372). The state of exception has reached its full development in Western contemporary society, it has become the paradigm of governance for today (Bourke 2014: 443; Vaughn-Williams 2009: 745). As modernity becomes increasingly biopolitical, ‘man’ is no longer the being who decides his humanity; his humanity or bios, as already actualised, determines who may or may not engage in that decision (Colebrook 2008: 11). Modern biopolitics is perhaps exemplified by “the politics of the great totalitarian states of the twentieth century” (Agamben 1998: 119). These are states to which he suggests Foucault failed to give due consideration, however, his diagnosis relies heavily on Foucault’s analysis of biopolitics (Mazower 2008: 26).

Agamben views the entry of ‘bare life’, the entry of zõe into the domain of the political (polis) as the decisive event of modernity “and signals a radical transformation of the political- philosophical categories of classical thought” (Agamben 1998: 4). At the same time, if this passage from subject to citizen, from classical sovereignty to the modern nation state, marks the emergence of recognisably modern government, Agamben argues that in an important sense, Western politics has been a biopolitics “from the very beginning” (Agamben 1998: 181;

- 84 - Patton 2007: 204). For Agamben, it is not the emergence of biopolitics in the nineteenth century as Foucault saw it, but the early decades of the twentieth century with totalitarianism and the mass appearance of the refugee that exemplifies the darkest potential of the present era (Grumley 2015: 240). For him, ‘bare life’ is what remains after life has been violently stripped down. “Naked or bare life is not a prior substance, but instead what remains after the withdrawal of all forms” (Geulen 2005: 82 cited in de la Durantaye 2009: 203). What modernity is now faced with is ‘bare death’, becoming the vehicle of disciplining other bodies and thus rendering them targets of further violence (Bargu 2016).

Agamben argues in Homo Sacer that the key to understanding modern political phenomena lies in their biopolitical character: for example he believes it is seen not only through the concentration camps of World War Two, the Nazi’s genocidal ‘final solution’ and programs designed to eliminate incurably ill and genetically unfit members of the non-Jewish populations, but also within the way democratic states have used prisoners and other ‘marginalised’ peoples for medical experimentation, along with the increasingly political character of biomedical interventions into the human organism and genome (see for instance: Waldby & Mitchell 2006; Taylor 2005; Rajan 2006). These, and other events, can only be understood against the backdrop of the ‘biopolitical vocation’ of the modern nation state, in which the apparatus to hide the functioning of its raw, unadulterated biopolitical power is its main function (Salter 2008: 369). Both the totalitarianism that flourished during the twentieth century and its liberal democratic counterpart remain trapped within a political horizon circumscribed by the convergence of biological and political life (Kurelić 2009). Modern political governments of whatever persuasion are both founded upon, and preoccupied with, the ‘bare life’ of their citizens. In this condition, “once their fundamental referent becomes bare life, traditional political distinctions (such as those between Right and Left, liberalism and totalitarianism, private and public) lose their clarity and intelligibility and enter into a zone of indistinction” (Agamben 1998: 122; Patton 2007: 203). “The citizen dies; the man only remains, and, with respect to a political body, the death of the citizen should have the same consequences with the death of the man” (Beccaria cited in DeCaroli 2013: 233).

According to Esposito (2008: xxii-xxiii), this style of analysis has led to “a kind of flattening of the specificity of a modern biopolitics in favour of a metaphysical reading of the originary and infinite state of exception that has, since its inception, eroded the political foundation of social

- 85 - life”. For Agamben, the political bios will always remove itself in favour of the pure biological life (Campbell 2006: 13). Agamben clarifies this by saying:

The state of exception, which was essentially a temporary suspension of the juridico-political order, now becomes a new and stable arrangement inhabited by the ‘bare life’ that more and more can no longer be inscribed in that order. The growing separation of birth (‘bare life’) and the nation state is the new fact of politics within modern society, and what we call the camp exemplifies this disconnection. It is this disconnection – that is, the state of exception, in which law is suspended – that creates a permanent instability (the camp as a perpetual space of exception). The political system no longer orders forms of life and juridical rules in a determinate space, but instead contains at its very centre a dislocating ‘localisation’ that exceeds it and into which every form of life and every rule can be virtually taken. The camp as a dislocating localisation is the hidden matrix of politics in which we are still living, and it is the structure of the camp that we must learn to recognise in all its metamorphoses into the zones d’attentes of our airports and certain outskirts of our cities (Agamben 1998: 174-175; Agamben 2017: 144).

Taking up Schmitt’s (2010: 5) arguably ‘decisionist’ thesis that the “sovereign is he who decides on the exception”, Agamben argues that what is at stake in the state of exception is the very possibility of juridical rule and the meaning of state authority. “There is no rule that is applicable to chaos” (Agamben 1998: 19). In his interpretation of Schmitt, Agamben takes up the notion of the sovereign as a limited concept to argue that the defining characteristic of the sovereign is that the sovereign determines when the law is applicable and what it applies to. In doing so, it must also create a space, a grey area, in which the two may address each other (Cisney 2008: 169). The sovereign in itself must create the conditions necessary for law to operate since the law presupposes normal order for its operation (Mills 2008: 61-62).In Agamben’s words “what is at issue in the sovereign exception is not so much the control or neutralisation of an excess as the creation and definition of the very space in which the juridico-political order can have validity” (Agamben 1998: 19). The sovereign thus operates as the threshold of order and exception, determining the impression and range of law. This means that the state of exception is not simply the chaos that precedes order. For Agamben,

- 86 - it operates both as a condition of law’s operation and as an effect of the sovereign decision, such that the exception is not simply outside the realm of law, but it is in fact created through the law’s suspension (Mills 2008: 62; Patton 2007).

Given this very worrying description of Homo Sacer, sovereignty and ‘bare life’, it comes as no surprise that Agamben’s view of sovereign power finally ends up positioning the concentration camps as the definitive institutional location of the exercise of the state of exception and the administration of ‘bare life’. There is a seemingly clear affinity between the sovereign and the camp. They both operate “in the indeterminate space of a stable exception, in a permanent state of emergency, where ‘bare life’ becomes the direct concern of sovereign politics and where the classical distinction between political and biological life is wholly effaced”. In the concentration camp “sovereign politics fulfils its radical potential, becoming, according to Agamben, the paradigmatic form” – ‘the hidden matrix’ as it were, of political modernity (Agamben cited in Kalyvas 2005b: 109). One of Agamben’s key concepts within his biopolitical theory is that of ‘apparatus’, one of the concepts he borrowed from Foucault (Agamben 2009). Agamben examines the biopolitical ‘apparatus’ not only as a historical, juridical and political phenomenon, but as something much more (de la Durantaye 2009: 338). The ‘state of exception’ is at the pinnacle and something in which he calls an ‘original structure’ (Agamben 2005: 3). The state of exception refers, for Agamben, to a contradiction within modernity: the state of exception occurs at the point where the state provides for its own suspension (de la Durantaye 2009: 338). The violence of states of exception is problematic for Agamben and as such the most original feature of terror formation and its connection to biopolitics is the creation of these ‘states of exception’ as they produce various societies outside of any generally accepted legal norms (Sylvester 2006: 67). We can see here the influence of Schmitt’s work on Agamben’s attempt to understand the link between politics and the ‘subject’, and in particular the justification for the placing of the sovereign authority above the law of the land (Pan 2009: 42). For Agamben, the ‘state of exception’, or in the German Ausnahmenzustand, is not merely a key legal term, but an aid for regulating the very limits of the law (Agamben 2005: 10). The ‘state of exception’ is the political point at which the juridical stops and sovereign unaccountability begins. It is where the “dam of individual liberties break and society is flooded with the sovereign power of the state” (de la Durantaye 2009: 338).

- 87 - Agamben’s analysis of the role of the concentration camp, the ‘state of exception’ par excellence, is explored through the politics of National Socialism (Ek 2006). The state of exception “allows for the foundation and definition of the normal legal order” by providing an outside to the law from within the law, therefore enabling the law to simply ‘be’ (Agamben 2002: 48). It is a constitutive outside held inside, an inclusive exclusion. In its modern manifestation, the state of exception is best defined as a juridical pause; it is the law placed in suspension (Chare 2006: 44). Agamben points to Hitler’s 1933 Decree for the Protection of People and the State as an example of such a pause (Agamben 1998: 168; Agamben 2002: 49; and Agamben 2005: 2). The decree suspended many of the laws to protect civil liberties enshrined in the Weimar Constitution. In this sense, Agamben (2005: 2) posits that these ‘pauses’ are evident even today in modern totalitarian nation states. Demonstrated throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and established through the state of exception, these exceptions allow the sovereign the ability to physically eliminate entire categories of peoples, political adversaries, religious groups etc. who cannot or will not be integrated into the new political system.

The points of deepest despair in Agamben’s work – such as the modern condition where we are reduced to ‘bare life’ and subjected to the immediate force of the state – is where he suggests there will be no law opposed to life, and life will be experienced within a singularity, without requiring the sanctification of rights and personhood (Colebrook and Maxwell 2016: 8). Whereas Foucault sees power in the twentieth century as no longer requiring the category of person and instead managing biological life, Agamben sees the category of person as still pertinent and defined precisely in opposition to ‘bare life’ (Edkins 2007: 75). All modern life trends toward biopolitics and the reduction to ‘bare life – whether through mass killings, rights and ‘saving people, or medical technology – “all life becomes sacred and all politics becomes the exception” (Agamben 1998: 148). The implication is that, increasingly, humans become totally subject to rules and regulations, subject to exclusion, and less and less as subjects within the realm of law. It is not that law is done away with, rather it becomes the empty form it came from: “law identifying itself as law, identifying people as ‘bare life’, as the material for law” (Hegarty 2010: 22).

Agamben suggests, in relation to the state of exception, that Foucault has failed in his analysis, as he never dwelt on what Agamben identifies as the “exemplary places of modern biopolitics:

- 88 - that being the concentration/extermination camp” (Agamben 1998: 119). The state of exception extends Foucault’s original biopolitical theory as the production of a biopolitical body to incorporate the implications that follow from recognising that the creation of states of exception are the original activity of sovereign power (Vaughn-Williams 2009: 22). Specifically,

What characterises modern politics is not so much the inclusion of ‘bare life’ or zõe in the polis, nor simply the fact that life as such becomes a principal object of the projections and calculations of State power, but rather the state of exception in which bios and zõe are no longer separable – nor are right and fact, but instead enter into a zone of ‘irreducible indistinction’ (de la Durantaye 2009: 316).

The exception has become the rule and that “today it is not the city but rather the camp that is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West” (Agamben 1998: 181). The dormant seed of the camp – “that is, a geographical and social space opened up by a clear demarcation, a differentiation between what is inside and outside, between civilisation and barbarism – was always already present in ancient Greek politics and archaic Roman law, although in modern times it became more securely lodged within the city’s interior” (Diken and Laustsen 2006: 443). What was blurred is now fused.

So, what then follows must be a logical question: What exactly is the camp for Agamben and why does he describe the concentration camp as the “hidden paradigm of the political space of modernity” (Agamben 1998: 123)? Agamben’s notion of the camp does not so much represent a concrete historical place or a defined spatial unity, as will be shown through the case of Rwanda and the genocide in Srebrenica, but rather symbolises and fixes the border between ‘bare life’ and political existence (Lemke 2011: 56). Towards the end of Homo Sacer Agamben further explains the problem of the politicisation of life by looking at the extreme case of the Nazi ‘extermination camp’ as an example of a wider problem that extends to modernity’s democratic politics. Agamben refers to the totalitarian submission of life into an incessant political movement through an intertwining of medicine and sovereignty as a biopolitical problem that is yet to be understood (Zartaloudis 2010: 169). The camps were not borne out of ordinary law, and even less were they the product of a transformation and a

- 89 - development of prison law; rather they were born out of the state of exception and martial law. This is even more evident in the case of the Nazi Lager (encampment), whose origin and juridical regime is well documented (Agamben 2000: 37).

One cannot overestimate the importance of the constitutive nexus between the state of exception and the concentration camp for understanding the nature of the camp. What is new here is that the institution is dissolved by the state of exception on which it was founded and is allowed to continue to be in force under normal circumstances. In it, the state of exception, which was essentially a temporal suspension of the state of law, acquires a permanent spatial arrangement that, as such, remains constantly outside of the normal state of law” (Agamben 2000: 37 & 39).

When Himmler decided in March 1933, to create a concentration camp for political prisoners at Dachau, this camp was immediately entrusted to the SS and thanks to the rule of Schutzhaft (literally meaning protective custody), it was placed outside the jurisdiction of criminal law as well as prison law, with which it neither then, nor later, ever had anything to do with (Agamben 2000: 37).

The death camps, in particular, have been looked at extremely closely by Agamben and others and have been interpreted variously as the central metaphor for sovereign and destructive violence, as well as the ultimate sign of the absolute power in the negative (Mbembe 2003: 12). The camp is the ultimate example of Nazi politics which was, in the words of Goebbels, „Politik ist die Kunst, das unmöglich Scheinende möglich zu Machen“ (Agamben 2002: 77).28 The inmates were interned outside the law, they were deprived of political status and therefore deprived of legal protection. There was no longer any law to intervene in the interactions between guards and inmates. So whilst Agamben, for the most part, looks at the Holocaust in order to inform and help support his theory, the idea of the camp is not solely symptomatic of the Holocaust alone. It can be seen within any state of exception where the legal body that supplements the living body in the everyday and that mediates all encounters with it can then cease to exist (Chare 2006: 44). The inmate, prisoner, refugee and captive are then “reduced completely to naked life” (Agamben 2000: 41). As Arendt (1979: 444) suggested

28 “Politics is the art of making possible what seems impossible” (Agamben 2002: 77).

- 90 - that “there can be no parallels to the life in the concentration camps. Its horror can be never fully embraced by the imagination for the very reason that it stands outside of life and death”.

In the extermination camps the attempt to separate life from survival produces the ‘untestifiable’, that to which no-one has ever borne witness, which is the jargon of the camp. “A life reduced to survival is the point where the power of the atrocity of the camp and its secret coincide” (Zartaloudis 2010: 174). The camp is the paradigm itself of political space at the point in which politics becomes biopolitics and the homo sacer becomes indistinguishable from the citizen. Agamben draws an almost straight line between the ancient figure of homo sacer and the inhabitants of the concentration camp, as well as contemporary forms of zones of indistinction marked by the very same logic of inclusion through exclusion (Vogt 2005: 79; Cisney 2008: 173). The correct question regarding the horrors committed in the camps, therefore, is not the question that asks hypocritically how it could have been possible to commit such atrocious horrors against other human beings; “it would be more honest, and above all more useful, to investigate carefully how human beings could have been so completely deprived of their rights and prerogatives to the point that committing any act toward them would no longer appear as a crime” (Agamben 2002: 40). Whilst Agamben (1998: 117) refers to the Holocaust and camps as the “biopolitical paradigm of the modern”, the camp does not so much represent for Agamben a specific historical place and time such as the actual, tangible camps of Nazi Germany. Rather he sees the idea of the camp as symbolising and fixing the border between ‘bare life’ and political existence (Agamben 2005: 26; Lemke 2005: 6). Specifically, he is of the view that “the camp is the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule” (Agamben 1998: 168-169). He thus proposes a significantly new definition of ‘the camp’, as one of “existence without hope” (Sylvester 2005: 67).

The camps in this sense are not only Nazi concentration and/or extermination camps or even modern detention centres and refugee camps etc., but rather it is any space in which ‘bare life’ is systematically produced: “the camp is the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule” (Agamben 1998: 168-169). Agamben sees here, within the camps, the ‘hidden matrix’ of the political domain, and his aim is to expose the underlying logic in order to better conceive the present political pattern. In proposing a significantly new definition of the ‘camp’ Agamben moves in the opposite direction to how the idea of the

- 91 - ‘camp’ is traditionally understood. Traditionally, the camp, represented by the epitome and manifestation of the difference between friend and enemy, is turned, by Agamben, into the “materialisation of the state of exception” (Agamben 1998: 174), and it is here where we see law and factum, rule and exception indistinguishably commingling (Lemke 2011: 56). The state of exception can be seen as the complete redefinition and transformation of human nature through the destruction of freedom, birth, and above all spontaneity. The ‘experiment’ reflected in modern experiences links the nothing of biopolitics and genocide together (Kurelić 2009: 151). Mann (2005: 2) provides further analysis of Agamben’s view by stating that the “murderous cleansing is modern, because it is the dark side of democracy”. The biopolitical logic of modernity, is the over-arching potentiality of being everywhere and at all times, reducing human beings to ‘bare life’. It exhibits a logic that also permeates modern democracy in its attempt to find a form to accommodate ‘bare life’. The inhabitant of the camp is not the other to modern society, but instead it is its dark symbol (Vogt 2005: 75-80). Agamben argues against a common claim that democratic nations do not carry out ‘ethnic cleansings’ and genocide, only dictatorships do. Even within the most democratic and developed societies there are compartmentalised groups subjected to violence with impunity, mass murder on a large scale, ‘ethnic cleansing’ and genocide. This boundary between who is protected and who is not protected outlines the symmetry of power, sovereignty and citizenship (Mann 2009: 64). The camp, it can therefore be argued, is conceivable as the matrix of modern political space, but it is irreducible to a historical reality. It is aligned with the state of exception, but one that would have become the rule: it is a permanent state of exception, one that has been protracted indefinitely.

Agamben formulates a specific approach to interrogating the dominant understanding of the camp.

Rather than deducing the definition of the camp from the events that took place there, I will ask instead: What is a camp? What is its political-juridical structure? How could such events have taken place there? This will lead us to look at the camp not as a historical fact and an anomaly that, though admittedly still with us, belongs nonetheless to the past, but rather in some sense as the hidden matrix and nomos of the political space in which we still live (Agamben 2000: 37).

- 92 - The camp entails a direct relation between power and life. It is a new and stable spatial order inhabited by a ‘bare life’ which, increasingly, fails to appear within the system: in this way, life is made the object of a radical capture by the sovereign. The camp, it then becomes clear, is much more than simply a historical reality. It is rather, an operator or even a machine, that refers to diverse situations that all have in common the indistinction between norm and life (Genel 2006: 56). The camp prefigures the grounds for a number of contemporary thresholds: “contemporary instances of this threshold abound, from refugees and people in concentration camps, to ‘neo-morts’ and figures in ‘overcomas’ whom we are tempted to turn into organ farms” (Norris 2005: 10).29 They are the situations in which the norm invests itself in life to the point that the latter becomes confounded with the former, such as the life of the man of the camp or even the life of the ‘neo-mort’, for example. Modernity is conceptualised in terms of the matrix of the camp in order to sanction the impossibility of any point in the future of man distinguishing between his life as a living being and his existence as a political subject. Political space, normalised by the camp, is reduced to a specific mode of the exercise of power: the decision on the value of life (Fitzpatrick 2005: 66-68; Genel 2006: 56-57; Downey 2009: 114- 115).

The state of exception is the place in which biopolitics and sovereign power combine with deadly results, and the camps are the materialisation of this combination in its ultimate form (Whyte 2008: 69). This ‘exception as the rule’ is what Agamben suggests is the propensity for modern world politics to lean towards (Agamben 1998: 181). Agamben’s model of biopolitics “illuminates the structure of the indistinction between the exception and the rule in the most stark and unadulterated manner” (Prozorov 2014: 110). Agamben makes it clear that whilst this is the modern propensity, not all modern political spaces are examples of camps but rather “that the camp illuminates most starkly what all these spaces may become if the tendency towards the indistinction of the exception and the rule is fully actualised in them” (Prozorov 2014: 110). Genocide is a prime example of where ‘indistinction’ and the ‘exception as the rule’ are present. Prozorov (2014) furthers elaborates on the state of exception by stating that “any institutional space, structured according to the principle of the ban, is a variation of the model of the camp, irrespectively of whether mass atrocities are committed

29 A neo-mort, according to the Oxford Dictionary (2017), is “a person who is technically brain-dead but whose body functions are maintained artificially”.

- 93 - there or not” (Prozorov 2014: 110). Where power which operates in these spaces of exception is a “power whose operational logic is one of destruction” (Bargu 2016).

Agamben concludes his analysis on Homo Sacer with these three theses:

1) The original political relation is the ban (the state of exception as the zone of indistinction between outside and inside, exclusion and inclusion); 2) The fundamental activity of sovereign power is the production of ‘bare life’ as the originary political element and as the threshold of articulation between nature and culture, zõe and bios; and 3) Today it is not the city but rather the camp that is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West.

Clearly these propositions point to the fact that Agamben offers a different kind of politics. He had redefined and offered a reinvented conception of politics. Within his political philosophy, Agamben provides a stark differentiation between ‘pure law’ and ‘law beyond law’ that opens the possibility for a new approach to political analysis. To conceive of what lies outside the law as indistinct and non-relational is to accept a negativity that, for Agamben, marks everything from an understanding of language to the twentieth and twenty-first century death camps. The purpose of Agamben’s analysis is to open a space for a new understanding of the relationship between law and political action that responds to the traditionally contemporary crises of tradition, that is that is the radical transformation of the law to where the state of exception becomes the rule (McLoughlin 2016: 509, 519 & 527). Agamben’s project, as mapped out in Homo Sacer, offers a conceptual framework to understand and interpret what we might term a “brave new world” (Vatter 2007: 1).

In Agamben’s political writings, there is a critical reading of modern politics and what it has become by failing to remain faithful to itself, that is, to remain solely political. “Agamben’s return to sovereignty contains a warning about the decline of politics and the philosophical- ethical foundations that may have occasioned it. He invokes a conceptual return to sovereignty only to depart normatively from it” (Kalyvas 2005b: 113). Homo Sacer hints at a future ‘sovereign-less’ politics, a politics still-to-come and in the process turns Schmitt, Benjamin and even Foucault on their heads. More interestingly, by allowing a clearer vision of the modern horrors associated with sovereign power, Agamben aspires “to bring the political

- 94 - out of its concealment and, at the same time, return though to its practical calling” (Agamben 1998: 5). Vatter (2007: 1) suggests that “with the advent of what some have called a ‘liberal’ eugenics based on the most recent breakthroughs in genetic manipulation experimentations”; the selling of organs from the healthy but poor global South to the sick in the wealthy global North; “the return of concentration camps and secret torture areas (rendition) for ‘enemy combatants’ in the centre and at the borders of the most advanced liberal democratic countries” (i.e. Bosnia-Herzegovina and Guantanamo Bay, amongst others), advanced, modern “cities like London and New York turned into gigantic surveillance compounds, and the loss of so-called ‘traditional values’” – these and other similar phenomena have combined together certain values from liberal democratic societies with aspects of totalitarian ones. Agamben’s reconstruction of the interrelationships between sovereign rule and the biopolitical state of exception results in a rather unnerving outcome. That is the notion of the ‘concentration camp’ as it emerges as the “hidden matrix of the politics in which we still live” (Agamben 1998: 166). In effect, the sovereign has the capacity to establish the state of exception and to torture and kill those stripped of the rights of bios and reduced to the status of ‘bare life’ (Rabinow and Rose 2006: 202; Schotel 2012: 67).

What is at stake in Agamben’s Homo Sacer project and its conception of politics is the appropriation of the barrier that divides and articulates identity and difference, law and life, fact and norm, human and animal zõe and bios. Agamben clearly recognises a variety of possibilities but adds to them a crucial addition: “This – but not only this – is possible” (Agamben 2002: 126; emphasis in original; McLoughlin 2010). It is precisely the supplementary addition of ‘but not only this’ that permits Agamben to retain his optimism (Prozorov 2014: 187). The themes and arguments that Agamben first discusses in his Homo Sacer project have not only become “the basic vocabulary of students of philosophy and politics”, they also “presume to explain why the sacredness of life has become the fundamental value for the most diverse and opposed political movements. They also account for a related phenomenon, namely the global trend towards the normalisation of states of legal exception” (Vatter 2007: 2). Agamben’s assertions that the exception has truly become the rule and that the camp “is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West” are the central claims within his Homo Sacer project (Agamben 1998: 181).

- 95 - Whilst modern politics is increasingly played out on the level of biological life, in its attempt to discover the true intersection between bios and zõe, it nevertheless continually produces ‘bare life’ as the complete epitome of its failure, thereby preventing the overcoming of the sovereign exception and the violence that conditions ‘bare life’. This situation leads to an aporia specific to modern democracy: “it wants to put the freedom and happiness of men into play in the very place – ‘bare life’ – that marked their subjection” (Agamben 1998: 10). This aporia persists because modern politics has been unable to ‘heal the fracture’ between bios and zõe and until an adequate response to this is provided, politics will continue to play out within the terrain of mass murder, genocide and ultimately death (Mills 2008: 71; Mazower 2008: 26). “Those who enter the camp, move about in a zone of indistinction between the outside and the inside, the exception and the rule, the licit and the illicit, in which every juridical protection has in fact disappeared on them” (Agamben 200: 41); furthermore, as Agamben illustrates in the Holocaust, if they were Jews, they had already been deprived of citizenship rights to when the ‘final solution’ occurred they were completely denationalised.

In as much as its inhabitants have been stripped of every political status and reduced completely to naked life, the camp is also the most absolute biopolitical space that has ever been realised – a space in which power confronts nothing other than pure biological life without any mediation (Agamben 2000: 41. Emphasis in original).

Agamben’s themes, outlined in his Homo Sacer project, must be understood as sitting at the very centre of discussions dealing with rights, citizenship, sovereignty, power and ultimately genocide as a phenomenon. These issues, in which the very survival of a person is questioned, create a pattern where violence is faced not only by refugees, minorities or the inhabitants of impoverished nations, but also by those that are persecuted within their own nation state (Genel 2006: 60; Ziarek 2008: 91). Agambenian biopolitical theory is therefore a useful tool to help explain, analyse and understand the varying genocides that have occurred within the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It provides an alternative way of viewing the power relations of the sovereign and the citizen.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, power is now, more so than ever before, the power over biological life. By offering a hypothesis as to how the

- 96 - same life is valued as sacred and that can also become the object of sovereign domination, Agamben’s Homo Sacer project has turned the idea of biopolitics into the main theoretical, socio-political paradigm of the coming decades (Vatter 2007: 2).

- 97 - CHAPTER FOUR: CONTESTING THE THEORY

“The concept of biopolitics has recently become fashionable: it is often, and enthusiastically, invoked in every kind of context. We should avoid this automatic and unreflective use of the term. Let us ask ourselves, then, how and why life breaks through the centre of the public scene, how and why the State regulates and governs it”.

-Virno 2004: 81-

Whilst Agamben draws heavily on Michel Foucault’s approach to biopower and biopolitics, nonetheless as has been shown, his theories go beyond the position developed by Foucault. In recent years there has been an abundance of literature discussing Agamben’s (bio)political philosophy and theory. For example, numerous edited collections, such as Svirsky and Bignall (2012); Calarco and DeCaroli (2007); Clemens, Herron and Murray (2008) and Norris (2005) offer a range of interpretations of Agamben’s biopolitical theory and its subsequent application within society. There have also been several monographs published with a critical evaluation of his ideas and their applications (see for example: de la Durantaye 2009; Downey 2009; Gerhardt 2011; Prozorov 2014 & 2016; Minca 2006; Sylvester 2006; Colebrook and Maxwell 2016; Zartaloudis 2010; Koopman 2015 and Mills 2008). Numerous scholars have aimed to evaluate and compare his analysis of biopolitics with that of Foucault, as well as pose issues of their own concerning Agamben’s biopolitical framework in general, including critiques of homo sacer, ‘bare life’, the state of exception, and his analysis on the camp. Key criticisms have been that Agamben has moved too far from Foucault’s original thesis, that he omits an analysis on gender and race and that he is heavy handed with his disregard of ‘history’ as a possible avenue of discussion (see for example: Blencowe 2010 & 2012; Rabinow and Rose 2003 & 2006; Dillon 2005; Lemke 2005, 2010 & 2011, Ojakangas 2005a & 2005b; Pan 2009 and Dickinson 2011). Whilst these critical perspectives all present interesting and insightful arguments, they do not necessarily undermine Agamben’s work on biopolitics as an independent theory. As will be shown, once these (and other) criticisms of his work have been

- 98 - accounted for, Agamben’s biopolitical approach remains useful for understanding the contemporary phenomenon of genocide.

Agamben, in his Homo Sacer project, identifies the Holocaust as the ultimate exemplar of biopolitics, as well as illuminating the concept of biopolitics and biopower as the hidden meaning of all forms of power from antiquity to present (Agamben 1998). He also explains that modern political power is founded upon, and preoccupied with, the ‘bare life’ of its citizens (Patton 2007: 203). The ultimate grasp of the Sovereign or the State over the lives of populations and races is exemplified for Agamben in what he labels the paradigms of the ‘camp’ (Blencowe 2010: 116). Sovereign states may be the exception, but are nonetheless immanent of modernity itself (Agamben 2002: 11). This is why, therefore, the camp is the very concept of politics and becomes in and of itself biopolitical (Agamben 1998: 171; Rabinow and Rose 2006: 200). It might then be argued, that there is little wonder Agamben’s analysis on biopolitics has given rise to numerous critiques of so-called ‘misunderstandings’ on the concept of biopolitics, as well as criticisms of unfounded claims and speculations, farfetched and wild statements, as well as unregulated decisions in his application with theorists going as far as claiming that Agamben has completely bastardised both Foucault and Schmitt’s analyses (see for instance: Laclau 2007: 22; LaCapra 2007: 133; Norris 2003: 13; Connolly 2007 and Neal 2010: 83).30 Furthermore, it is prudent, especially within this chapter, to mention a significant gap in Agamben’s work: the absence of engagement with ideas about possible resistance to, or transcendence of, the various manifestations of sovereignty and sovereign power (Deuber-Mankowsky 2002: 97; 111-112).31 Additionally, Agamben’s spatial theory of power, sovereignty and displacement also “invokes a scrutiny of traditional political geographical theories dealing with inclusion and exclusion, belonging and insularity, as well as established imaginations about thematically specific political places such as humanitarian and refugee camps, asylums and detention centres” (Elden 2006: 482; Sylvester 2006).

Critics have also evaluated Agamben’s political thought from alternative normative standpoints and have critiqued his responses to them. In terms of his analysis, it is possible to

30 It should be noted here that the lists of theorists provided throughout this chapter are by no means exhaustive, their purpose is to provide an indicative overview of the range and scope of critiques of Agamben’s work. 31 This issue is additionally taken up later in the chapter, and it is an ongoing issue throughout the critiques of Agamben.

- 99 - group these criticisms into two, clear and distinct categories, with a third category overlapping both. On the one hand, Agamben’s political theory has been criticised from the perspective of constituted power, which includes the institutions of the state, the juridical process, law and public sphere and communicative acts, just to name a few. These critics (see for example: Connolly 2007; Fitzpatrick 2006; Mills 2008; Deuber-Mankowsky 2002: 98-99 and Rasch 2008) claim that Agamben is not sufficiently appreciative of the functioning capacity and ability of these institutions to deal with the problems of sovereign power and biopolitics that he highlights within his collective works. On the other hand, Agamben has also been criticised and critiqued from the perspective of constituent or ‘fundamental’ power (for example Hardt and Negri’s Empire (2000) and Multitude (2004), as well as Badiou’s Metapolitics (2005)) for not being sufficiently appreciative of the capacity of the political subject to depose as well as dismantle the structure of sovereign biopolitics and replace them with an alternative form of sovereignty, order, state and law (see for example McLoughlin 2011: 490-491; Laclau 2007; Chiesa and Ruda 2011; and Toscano 2011).

A third category of criticism, and one that straddles both of the critiques mentioned above, is that Agamben’s theories lack any real relevance in today’s society or to those who are dealing with “real history”, or “engaged in actual political practice” (Bly 2016; Zartaloudis 2010: ix). Agamben’s diagnosis of Western thought as negative has been criticised by Braidotti for being overly mournful and melancholic: “Agamben perpetuates the philosophical habit of taking mortality and finitude as the trans-historical horizon for discussions of ‘life’” (Braidotti cited in Colebrook and Maxwell 2016: 203). Ek (2006) has also pointed out that Agamben has been criticised for his random and quite eclectic collection of empirical evidence which in turn renders the examples he puts forwards as “indistinguishable” (Ek 2006: 368 & 379). Although these types of criticism have something to offer, and an alternative to consider, Agamben has responded to them by pointing out that he has focused on a number of paradigmatic areas in his work, such as the homo sacer, the Muslim and Muselmann, the state of exception and the concentration camp. He suggests that a certain amount of confusion has arisen among his critics because he does not treat these cases as ‘positive’ historical phenomena, but rather as paradigms, “the function of which was to build or to render intelligible an entire, more vast historical-problematic context” (Agamben cited in Bussolini 2010: 132). However, as is evident from Agamben’s work on the logic of exception, and thus on the idea of a state of exception,

- 100 - or emergency, as well as his focus on the camp, there has been a considerable amount of juridical and historical studies on these respective topics. Most of the literature questions and seriously challenges Agamben’s (and in turn Schmitt’s) assumptions that the exception is logically prior to the rule, with regard to the conditions of the possibility of legal validity (Marchart 2003; Borislavov 2005). Where Agamben has stated, and to some theorists arguably paradoxically, that the rule confirms the exception, his critics hold to the more mainstream belief that the exception confirms the rule (Lemke 2011; Blencowe 2012; Norris 2005). Additionally, many theorists believe Agamben’s focus on the camp and its relationship to modernity, as well as his narrow perspective focussing primarily on the Muselmann in his last book on the Homo Sacer project – Remnants of Auschwitz – all pose far too many theoretical problems for it to be a coherent and well-laid out theory (Lemke 2005: 3; Bernstein 2004: 7; Chare 2006: 42).

The entirety of Agamben’s work, and the responses that it has subsequently provoked, are marked by ambivalence at times, whilst at the same time operating with such a wide historical sweep that questions of sexuality, race, and class, as well as historical difference are completely obscured, all the while seemingly being directly engaged with the most pressing issues of twenty-first century power. One of the most critical arguments levelled against Agamben is that he is not sensitive at all to the dimension of sexuality and gender, despite his central observation that the body is “always already a biopolitical body and ‘bare life’” (Agamben 1998: 187) and is subject to the biopolitics of the sovereign ban, without differentiation. That is, Agamben treats the body as abstracted from the lived experiences of race, class, gender and sexuality, and hence the body for Agamben becomes potentially homines sacri (Mitchell 2006: 97). At the same time ignoring sexual and racial differences, Agamben also fails to acknowledge at all the notion of a revolutionary position and the well- known concept of resistance (Colebrook and Maxwell 2016: 8 & 204).32

The Foucauldian Break?

As has previously been mentioned, but is a necessary reiteration here, Agamben’s point of departure for his biopolitical position is Foucault’s original concepts of both biopolitics and

32 These critics include, but are not limited to, the following: Deutscher (2008); Ziarek (2008); Smith (2010) and Weheliye (2008), as well as those previously mentioned before.

- 101 - biopower as presented in the last chapter of The History of Sexuality (1990); as well as his collection of Collège de France lectures (see: Society Must be Defended (2003), Security, Territory, Population (2007), and The Birth of Biopolitics (2008)). Foucault’s examination of biological life and the problem of the government has received renewed attention in recent years in large part due to Agamben’s scholarship of the biopolitical properties of sovereign power. If Foucault meant in his analysis that biopolitics was to be applied loosely as a means of decentring mainstream sovereign explanations of power, biopolitics then, is for both Foucault and Agamben alike in one key aspect – “that of sovereignty’s spatially reconfigured ‘return’ to the centre of contemporary theorising on power” (Coleman and Grove 2009: 490; Nikolopoulou 2000: 128-129). Hence, Agamben, at one level, makes a remarkably similar use of Foucault’s notion of biopolitics (as discussed in the previous chapter). However, Coleman and Grove (2009; 494) contend, as do other theorists (for example: Ojakangas 2005a & 2005b; Pan 2008; Blencowe 2010 and Koopman 2015) that Agamben’s discussion of so-called ‘bare life’ and its relationship to the sovereign and modernity results in quite a different interpretation of biopolitics. Lemke (2005: 3) states that for Foucault, life is at the centre of political order and therefore biopolitics is the threshold of the politics of modernity.

In Agamben’s model, however, biopolitics is the original act of sovereignty and as such, the camp has become the paradigm of modernity (Agamben 1998 & 2002). Whilst Agamben presents us with a radical devaluation of life in the camp, what counts as biopolitics in this theory is then significantly altered. Rather than the collection of statistics and the management of populations through aggregate operations concerned with reproduction, sickness, fertility, sexuality, old age, infirmity, injury etc., and the ways these techniques interact with state racism, what is comparatively shown within Agamben’s work, then, is a lethal model of biopolitics which approaches an “aesthetics of disaster centred around a fascination of the cadaver” (Mesnard 2004: 156). Additionally, Coleman and Grove (2009: 490) suggest that despite his deployment of biopolitics to explain war, appropriation, revolution, identity etc., and notwithstanding the ways in which they both signal Foucault as a thinker and being core to his respective lenses placed on to the world, what the reader essentially gets from Agamben is an extremely distinct analysis of Foucault and ultimately biopolitics. In Remnants of Auschwitz (2002), Agamben argues that Foucault proceeds via a series of oppositions and shared differentiations in time, with the result that the sovereign-juridical,

- 102 - disciplinary and biopolitical arts of government are presented as “essentially heterogeneous” and “conceptually distinct” (Agamben 2002: 83). For Agamben, this problem, which is, in effect, about the discontinuity of successive regimes of power, is in full force in Foucault’s discussion of the difference between a sovereign power focussed on territory and a biopolitical power centred on the health of populations. Although Foucault may have invoked discontinuity as a correction to overarching histories of sovereign power, it was never intended as a “monotonous and unthinkable void between events”, but rather it was intended as a way to talk about social formation and transformation (Foucault cited in Coleman and Grove 2009: 5). As such, it can be argued, that Agamben’s critique is predicated on a far too literal application of Foucault’s notion of discontinuity and provides a distinct break in the analysis of biopolitics.

Looking at Agamben’s theory and analysis of power, it has been suggested that this is similar to Arendt’s conception, arguably more so than Foucault’s, who describes power as a collective capacity “that emerges between people when they act together, and disappears when the group disperses” (Owens 2009: 36). Where Agamben states that life enters politics (and this then becomes biopolitics), Arendt has a similar argument, that it is not the politicisation of life but rather, the ‘life-isation’ of politics (Arendt 1958: 36-38). “Power exists as mere potential until galvanised by people acting together to achieve a common goal or debate their common affairs. Whereas power is an end in itself, violence is an instrument, only a means to an end” (Owens 2009: 36). In applying this reasoning, then, Agamben’s argument is non-Foucauldian, in that life and death matters are not being placed in the hands of the individual. Blencowe also posits that the idea of ‘individuality’ in Agamben’s theory occupies a completely different place in the assessment of modern politics from that of Foucault’s (Blencowe 2010: 114). Blencowe also adopts a similar line of criticism to that of theorists like Lemke and Schotten, in that she regards Agamben’s views as more aligned with those of Arendt than of Foucault, despite Agamben’s self-proclaimed affinity with Foucault (Blencowe 2010 & 2012: 107; Lemke 2011: 54 and Schotten 2015: 156-157 & 177).

Instead of ‘correcting’ Foucault, as Agamben has previously claimed, it is argued that Agamben has demonstrated within his Homo Sacer project that these issues and divisions remain. Unlike Agamben, Foucault thought of the notion of power as a ratio of force and power, a concept that came from below, and involved the subjection and subjugation of knowledge and power.

- 103 - So stellt Agamben einerseits den Anspruch auf, eine Kritik der Gewalt zu leisten, und beschwört andererseits den Begriff einer Gewalt, welche, Souveränitätsmacht, Biopolitik und den perpetuierten Ausnahmezustand verbindend, Widerstand, wenn überhaupt dann nur in einem Sprung aus der Geschichte zu denken erlaubt. Dabei verliert er, ob der Fokussierung auf eine dermaßen vereinheitlichte Macht, die Frage nach jener Geschichte aus dem Blick, die ihm sein kritisches Anliegen überhaupt erst zu formulieren ermöglicht (Deuber-Mankowsky 2002: 110).33

In so doing Agamben has subsequently thrust Foucauldian thought into what Sylvester has described as “dark spaces” (Sylvester 2006: 67). Agamben’s apparent ‘furthering’ and ‘correction’ of Foucault, has resulted in Agamben’s thesis on biopolitics and analysis thereof to include a discussion on the concept of thanatopolitics, or the politics of death, rather than looking at biopolitics as the politics of life (Coleman and Grove 2009: 497).

The View of Sovereignty

Theorists such as Deuber-Mankowsky (2002) and Sylvester (2006) argue that modernity is not only disaster as Agamben claims, it is much more than that. Although Agamben shares some of the commonalities and premises of the Foucauldian critique, he arguably diverges from Foucault in two clear and distinct ways. Firstly, Agamben reintroduces a form of sovereign violence, that appears almost out-dated in an age of government. His work also differs from the Foucauldian critique in its call for abandoning human rights altogether in order to sever the link between life and sovereign power (Gündoğdu 2012: 10). The re-definition of sovereignty as biopower and biopolitics implies a modification to Foucault’s original hypothesis, which leads to a considerable displacement and, ultimately, to a design which is fundamentally incompatible with Foucault’s original work (Genel 2006). Agamben’s approach

33 Thus, it places “Agamben, on the one hand, claiming to be a critic of violence, and on the other as creating the very notion of violence, which, combining sovereignty, biopolitics and the perpetuation of the state of emergency, allows resistance, if any, to be thought of in one leap from history. In doing so, he loses sight of whether the focus on such a unified, standardised power, allows him to question history from the view, which made it possible to formulate his critical concern in the first place” (Deuber-Mankowsky 2002: 110. My own translation).

- 104 - to sovereignty is therefore presented as a rupture with the original approach given by Foucault.

The issue with the discussion on sovereignty has been for a long time the identification of “who within the political order was invested with certain powers” (Genel 2006: 50). Accordingly, Agamben notes that the “very threshold of the political other, itself, was never called into question” (Agamben 1998: 12). What is called in to question, therefore, is the formulation of the limits and originary structure of the state sphere (Genel 2006: 50 & 57). Connolly has criticised Agamben for imposing this so-called ‘logic’, as the concept of sovereignty is therefore constituted of “ironclad paradoxes” (Connolly 2007: 30). Indeed, Connolly claims that “Agamben displayes the hubris of academic intellectualism when he encloses political culture within a tightly defined logic” (Connolly 2007: 29). This is a very critical and overly polemic view of Agamaben’s biopolitical theory. Leaving that to one side, the nub of Connolly’s scholarly view is that Agamben generalises the sovereign exception in such a way so that it no longer appears as the exception, but rather as the norm. This means that the capture of ‘bare life’ within the exception is a general condition of existence, such that the rule and the exception, the inclusion and exclusion, and right under violence are no longer clearly distinguishable. Agamben, therefore claims from this that under a regime of biopolitics all subjects are potentially homines sacri (Connolly 2007: 30; Mitchell 2006: 97; Vaughn-Williams 2009: 740). That is, all subjects are at least potentially, if not actually, abandoned by the law and exposed to violence as a constitutive condition of political existence.

Agamben wholly rejects recourse to appeals to rights as a limitation on the violence of sovereign power. In his view “every attempt to found political liberties in the rights of the citizen is… in vain” (Agamben 1998: 181). As empirical evidence of this politico-philosophical claim, he cites the figure of homo sacer, genocidal violence, the apparently ‘ever-expanding’ phenomenon of the camp – which includes not only the concentration camp, but the death camps, asylum and detention camps, as well as humanitarian camps; all of which he argues reveal the ‘nomos of the modern’ – „Diese Kultur nennt er Moderne, deren Paradigma, bzw. Matrix ortet er im „Lager“. Das Lager, so lautet die Quintessenze seiner These, bilde den

- 105 - Nomos der Moderne“ (Deuber-Mankowsky 2002: 96).34 Whilst Agamben may see sovereignty in the negative and as something that produces the state of exception, Ojakangas suggests that Foucault’s view of the nation state, which has been described as a demonic combination of sovereign power and biopower, is correct and in this instance Agamben’s conception, poses a “deadly contradiction” (Ojakangas 2005b: 52). Mills also proposes that Agamben’s view of modernity and sovereign power ends up with a “redefinition of life and death in the categories of the ‘over comatose’ or brain dead, and the neo-morts (Mills 2004: 47; see also Norris 2005: 10). Ojakangas agrees that sovereign power may be lethal, as Agamben perhaps suggests, however it is Foucault’s concept of biopower and biopolitics which offers the best guide for political theorists – it may allow for certain freedoms etc., but it is the Foucauldian concept of sovereign power that ultimately allows citizens to be free, thus acting as a complete contradiction to Agamben’s premise (Ojakangas 2005b: 52-53). He strongly contests Agamben’s argument that there is an intimate intersection between biopower, biopolitics and sovereign power. He calls into question Agamben’s conclusions on biopolitics, which include: the notion of ‘bare life’ and its relationship to sovereignty and subsequently how Agamben’s approach is incompatible with the modern biopolitical notion of life (Ojakangas 2005a: 5-6).

At the end of his critical analysis of rights declarations, Agamben concludes that modern democracy has not only failed in healing the biopolitical fracture but has also repeated it in an unprecedented fashion by valorising life. Modern rights declarations have turned “the care of a nation’s biological body” into an essentially political task as they have attributed the principle of sovereignty to life (Agamben 1998: 142). However, whilst Agamben attempts to argue “for a critical inquiry that looks into the paradoxically violent effects of the human rights discourse and its relationship with sovereignty and sovereign power, the concluding claim that he makes “a politics beyond human rights” is arguably questionable and is at odds with his own attempts to understand history in terms of contingencies and potentialities” (Agamben 2000: 15-26; Gündoğdu 2012: 10). Agamben’s work, therefore, frequently offers a very pessimistic prognosis for humanity. The so-called ‘picture’ we are ultimately presented with

34 “The culture, which he calls Modern, and whose paradigm, or ‘matrix’ he locates respectively in ‘the camp’. The camp, this is the gist of his thesis, forms the nomos of modernity” (Deuber-Mankowsky 2002: 96. My own translation).

- 106 - is one of negativity and despair, of an overbearing sovereign power from which there is no discernible means of escape.

Criticisms of Homo Sacer, ‘Bare Life’ and the State of Exception – Issues with History, Gender, Race and the Law.

It might be then argued, from a critical standpoint, that indeed Agamben’s insistence on viewing the human experience as a totality has prevented him from falling into the scepticism of the post-modernist era. However, as Behrman argues, Agamben has not, and does not contribute to an understanding of what a life without law or sovereign power might look like (Behrman 2013). His first attempt at this analysis in his 1993 book The Coming Community is hampered throughout by an almost “impenetrable ability to understand his phrasing and ideology”, making his theory almost incoherent (Behrman 2013). However, the recent additions to his Homo Sacer project, offer a far more interesting, though, just as heavily contested, approach to this question. In so far as this analysis has made it possible to understand how he sees the sovereign state extending its regulative powers into every sphere of life, it has been particularly useful in providing an understanding of how sovereignty and sovereign power have also become explicit in the production of ‘bare life’ (Gündoğdu 2012: 9). Indeed, one of the most important contributions of Agamben’s work to contemporary political philosophy is his concept of ‘bare life’, which allows us to revise not only the Foucauldian theory of biopower and biopolitics, but also rethink the political contradictions of modernity.

However, despite its importance, critics of Agamben posit that there are significant issues plaguing his conception of ‘bare life’. Lemke (2005) points to juridical and state-centric problems in Agamben’s framework. He argues that Agamben is not so much interested in life as in its ‘bareness’, but rather what is left when life serves no purpose in a society any longer (Lemke 2005: 8). Agamben’s theories of both homo sacer and ‘bare life’, according to Colebrook and Maxwell (2016: 8); Ziarek (2008: 89); Blencowe (2010: 114) and Takayoshi (2011: 53), arguably do not sufficiently address the following three fundamental questions:

(1) The problem of resistance; (2) The negative differentiation of homo sacer and ‘bare life’ with respect to racial and gender differences; and

- 107 - (3) The ‘de-historicisation’ of biopolitics as a whole.

Agamben’s integration of Benjamin’s work, indeed the texts that Agamben engages heavily with, are concerned with how the apparent catastrophes of the modern age can be ultimately ‘transcended’. Nonetheless, Agamben’s appropriation of Benjamin’s work, it is argued, still relies on the central tenets of Benjamin’s thesis and these ideas have never truly been redeveloped or redesigned in his Homo Sacer project (Moran and Salzani 2015: 5-6; de Wilde 2011: 366; Vatter 2008: 47, 57-58; Anderson 2011: 18-20; and Pan 2009: 61). As such, Agamben’s theories fail, in part, to focus on many of the contemporary issues which post- modernists discuss today, such as the issue of resistance (Deuber-Mankowsky 2002: 97; Colebrook and Maxwell 2016: 8). Agamben has also been set apart from most other critical thinkers of our time in this respect. Whilst Negri, Badiou, Žižek, and Hardt have all referred to concrete examples of resistance, as well as being deeply engaged with specific theories, Agamben, on the other hand talks very little of this notion of struggle, and it is almost wholly absent in his work (Coleman and Grove 2009).

Agamben’s work is often contrasted and critiqued with other theorists of biopolitics and modern capitalism, who see activism, resistance and a full actualisation of life as revolutionary. Hardt and Negri’s Empire (2000), as an example, also written from a standpoint very critical of the global reach of managerial capitalism, is “adamant that living labour needs to become the self-present and actualising force of a unified humanity” (McLoughlin 2011: 490). In Foucault’s work also, for example, struggle at all levels of society is often present and critical to the development of the new forms of power that Foucault identifies, and more over Foucault frequently recognises the underlying conflict that drives these changes. In Agamben’s work, he does not (Deuber-Mankowsky 2002: 97, 111-112). By contrast, Agamben sees not working and remaining in potential, without self-actualising, the more radical mode of resisting the ways in which ‘life’ have been reduced to nothing. This is held in higher regard, so to speak, more so than the medium through which sovereignty realises itself (Coleman and Grove 2009; Mills 2008: 74). Throughout all of his works, Agamben never acknowledges anyone, anywhere in Western history as struggling from below. Instead, he provides us with an analysis of a history of kings and the powerful as devising new forms of power, assisted by philosophers and theologians. And so, “whilst Agamben’s description of ‘bare life’ almost certainly captures the lives of those living on the fringes and margins of society, what is missing

- 108 - in his work is an understanding of how those groups have, even in the depths of utter despair, resisted and fought back against those in power, and in doing so, how they have resurrected themselves as active political subjects” (Behrman 2013).

Agamben’s approach to biopolitics – as evidenced by his claim about the body as “always already a biopolitical body and ‘bare life’” (Agamben 1998: 187) – renders all places subject to the biopolitics of the sovereign ban, without differentiation; that is to say, as noted above, without regard to lived specificities of race, class, gender and sexuality. This is a surprising omission within his work, since his analysis of the production of naked life starts with the public and private, zõe and bios (Pratt 2005). In Homo Sacer, he argues that the first move of classical Western politics was the separation of the biological and the political. The natural life, that being zõe, was excluded from the polis and confined to the oikos, or the domestic sphere. The life of the polis, for the Greeks, was bios, a form of living particular to an individual. The simple, natural life of zõe was separated from the politically qualified life that was part of the polis, and in the process the female figure became invisible (Edkins 2000: 5). At times Agamben refers to figures of the feminine (such as the ‘nymph’) and through this analysis he believes it “one of the ways of thinking beyond the ‘man’” (Colebrook and Maxwell 2016: 91). However, here, theorists find fault with his theory. For instance, Lemke argues that Agamben completely avoids the question of gender altogether in his line of inquiry and so the invisibility remains. The figure of homo sacer and its relation to the concept of ‘bare life’ are continually referenced as male. Additionally, he argues, Agamben has even failed to investigate to what extent ‘bare life’ is seen as a concept of patriarchal power (Lemke 2005: 10; Edkins 2000: 21). Although a number of thinkers have turned to theorise various topics such as race, sexuality, human rights and colonialism, linking these concepts back to biopolitics (see for example: Dickinson 2011; Sylvester 2006; Smith 2010 and Diken and Laustsen 2006), Agamben’s entire works utilise a predominately uncritical use of the term ‘man’ (Edkins 2000: 5 & 20). This is a highly contentious issue because “the question of sex and its interaction with systems of power should be considered as a crucial point of entry into the very concept of bare life and even more important, emerges as a key to the issue of its survival and revolutionary manipulation but the sacred, or potentially sacred, ‘subject’” (Asibong 2003: 171). Noting Agamben’s omission is important, according to Pratt (2005: 1056-1057), because gender dynamics and heterosexual norms are often the means by which the status of both citizenship

- 109 - and ‘bare life’ is achieved. She further articulates that despite Agamben’s clear focus on those who have been legally ‘abandoned’, through the state of exception and the concept of ‘bare life’ he fails to account for the fact that “many of those who are placed in the position of bare life are women” (Pratt 2005: 1056).

Blencowe argues that Agamben focuses his critique of biological thinking on specific ideas that ignore both ethical and historical sides to biopolitical thought (Blencowe 2010: 114). Agamben has also been criticised for being overly “passive and acquiescent” in his acceptance that revolution occurs only in the moment of extreme catastrophe (Whyte 2013). Whyte (2013: 7) also argues that because Agamben moves at such a distance from historical specificities he completely loses sight of institutionalised gendered dynamics. Colebrook and Maxwell (2016: 93) suggest he has erased the broader history of colonialism by accepting solely the figures of the Muselmann and the Muslim as being the exemplary figures of dehumanisation. Similarly, Blencowe (2010) suggests that Agamben completely ‘de-historicises’ the idea of biopolitics and that history should in fact play a pivotal role in any discussion on biopolitics. She points out that the historical specificities of notions central to biological thinking such as the ‘species’, are obliterated by Agamben’s theory (Blencowe 2010: 115). However, in Agamben’s defence, it needs to be acknowledged that from the outset he states that he is “not interested in the camp as a ‘historical fact’”, history in this analysis is therefore immaterial (Takayoshi 2011: 53). Whilst Lemke and other theorists are critical of Agamben’s approach, Lemke in particular does acknowledge that Agamben’s theories do serve to show that ‘themes’ banned from political reflection are central to any consideration of the political and that the sphere of the political constitutes itself precisely through the exclusion of ‘bare life’ (Lemke 2011: 64). However, Lemke (2005: 6; 2011: 63) is also similarly unconvinced of Agamben’s simultaneous linking of biopolitics with modernity and with arguing for the beginnings of biopolitics in antiquity, such that biopolitics becomes essentially grounded in both antiquity and the present. This he suggests, as others do, results in an ‘irreconcilable paradox’ (Lemke 2011; Connolly 2007; Gross 1999-2000). The practical implications of Agamben’s failure to address

- 110 - the above historical and gender specificities inherent in the character of the state are for many theorists exceptionally sobering (Whyte 2010: 8; Pratt 2005; Edkins 2000).35

Agamben’s work on the logic of exception, and the state of exception or emergency, to which he has devoted an entire book, has undeniably led to a vast array of critiques and studies on the topic. “Within a state of exception, the sovereign power, which has essentially usurped legislative (legal) power will decide upon the distinction (or, more likely, non-distinction) between the two” (Downey 2009: 124). Agamben’s, and indeed Schmitt’s assumption also, is that the exception is logically prior to the rule, with regards to legal validity etc. However, as is the case with the works of Benjamin and Arendt, for example, Agamben does not fully engage with Schmitt’s theories. Theorists therefore argue, that the reasons behind why it is that law must be the capture of life, for example, are never fully accounted for in the Homo Sacer project (Marchart 2003; Borislavov 2005). In particular, one key criticism derives from Schmitt’s view that the power to declare what should be an exception belongs to the sovereign. This is tantamount to making the distinction between what is seen as normal and what is an exception a matter of ‘rhetoric’. This distinction is one that is also accepted by Agamben: that every state of exception declared by the juridical order is always a ‘willed’ state of exception, not a ‘real’ one, and partakes of the ‘fictional’ (Agamben 2005). However, where Agamben parts ways with the juridical criticisms of Schmitt, is that for Agamben, the law is thought to have an objective or independent existence apart from the decision of the exception (Honig 2007). For instance, he notes that in Schmitt’s work, the law is enabled to exercise its rule in a normal way, without recourse to the logics of exception. For Agamben, this is a contradiction, for the law is seen purely as a construction, and is for him a matter of complete fiction in the sense that, considered by itself, the law lacks any objective referent (Vatter 2007: 11-12). As was noted above (see pages: 57, 70-71, 82 & 91), Agamben sees this as the rule confirming the exception. This appears to be a flattening out, or indeed an emptying out of meaning, of the idea of what is ordinarily understood by the term ‘exception’. That is, as Gross argues “for an exception to be a meaningful concept, it has to be evaluated and understood against the background of an ordinary case. The very term ‘exception’ points

35 Whyte’s (2013: 8) argument that “the fact that in the midst of an emergency the State escalates its already established class, race, ethnic and gender profiling instead of striking out in an unpredictable manner” is troublesome when evaluating Agamben’s analysis as his arguments lack any gender, ethnic or racial structure.

- 111 - to something that stands outside the normal rule or state of affairs and does not conform to an ordinary case” (Gross 1999-2000: 1833). In Agamben’s hands the idea of a state of exception appears to be emptied of its analytic content.

Criticisms of the Camp, and Taking a Narrow Perspective

As a midway point between Foucault’s distinction in The History of Sexuality, between sovereignty as the ‘power to make die and let live’ and biopolitics as the power ‘to make live and let die’, Agamben argues that biopolitics in the twentieth century concentration camps took a hybrid form of these two ‘powers’ as the means to ‘make survive’. Key here for Agamben is the way the death camps produced “in the human body, the absolute separation of the living being and the speaking being, zõe and bios” (Agamben 2002: 156). Agamben’s conclusion is that it is the camp rather than the city that is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West. This conclusion has proved difficult for contemporary scholars to accept, for example Lemke and Blencowe. In part this has been because as we have seen, Agamben’s theory of the camp aligns more with the ideas of Arendt and Bauman, far more than with Foucault’s original premise. Lemke claims that, while Agamben’s thesis on biopolitics and its relationship to modernity and the camp is perhaps more plausible than many critics will admit, his work is still plagued by a variety of diverse theoretical problems (Lemke 2005: 3). Chief among these problems is how Agamben theorises political violence and the camp. These two concepts, political violence and the camp, Ojakangas (2005a: 5-6) claims, are not hidden in the original structure of biopolitics and are not exclusive solely to the politics of the Nazi Third Reich. Whilst Agamben (2002) claims that he has expanded Foucault’s ideas and introduced the concept of the camp, in which the idea is not necessarily death, as we understand death, but rather the stripping of humans to ‘bare life’, he maintains that it is possible to isolate ‘bare life’ and so therefore it is not based solely on the ability to be simply killed as such (Gerhardt 2011: 8; Agamben 1998: 153).

Lemke also finds significant issues with Agamben’s views, as described above, and highlights that Agamben’s focus on state apparatuses and centralised forms of regulation undermines Agamben’s central arguments. Lemke argues, in a similar fashion to Ojakangas, that Agamben’s focus on Nazi race politics leads him (i.e. Agamben) to a distorted view of the present and modernity (Lemke 2011: 61). Lemke suggests that it is becoming a lot less

- 112 - frequent for it to be the state who decides who is worthy of living. Rather, he suggests, that these ideas are increasingly becoming more liberal and instead of it being a sovereign choice, these are being placed in to the hands of individuals and it is therefore becoming more of a personal preference (Lemke 2011: 61). He contests the consideration by Agamben (1998: 59) where he suggests the idea of the camp is completely fluid and something that clearly delineates ‘bare life’ and political existence (Lemke 2010: 59). Ojakangas, takes this argument one step further and challenges Agamben’s claim that the concentration camp is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West (Ojakangas 2005a: 27). Whilst Agamben posits his idea of the ‘camp’ does not represent a specific place in history such as the Nazi concentration camps of World War Two, but rather a symbolic border between ‘bare life’ and political existence, Ojakangas sees Agamben as at times far too ambivalent and also in direct contradiction to Foucault’s original thesis and ideas surrounding biopolitics as a whole (Ojakangas 2005a; Agamben 1998: 117).

Additionally, scholars (see for example: Ek 2006; Lemke 2005 & 2011; Mills 2008 and Gerhardt 2011) have noted that Agamben’s theory is fundamentally concerned with the Holocaust and the concept of ‘physically organised camps’. In Remnants of Auschwitz (2002) his last book dealing with the concept of homo sacer, for example, Agamben chooses to focus on only one aspect of the camp experience. Lemke (2005) suggests that the focus by Agamben on only one example is merely a reflection of Nazi, fascist ideology and is not symptomatic of the present modernity. It therefore encompasses too narrow a view to be part of any biopolitical framework at all (Lemke 2005: 8). By narrowing his analysis to focus solely on the figure of the Muselmann, he appears to “favour a form of witnessing produced within the event itself, privileging limited and local perspectives which are completely insufficient for analysis” (Chare 2006: 42).36 Bernstein, Hartman and LaCapra each criticise the losses of context that were necessary for Agamben to make some of his arguments in Remnants of Auschwitz (2002). They

36 „Muselmäner wurder jene KZ-Häftlinge genannt, die sich völlig entkräftet, an der Grenze zwischen Tod und Leben bewegten“. The term “Muselmann” was given to an inmate that was completely exhausted, and who moved along the border between life and death (Deuber-Mankowsky 2002: 96. My own translation). The Muselmann does not relate to something (e.g. human to inhuman) but is that very relation in and of itself (it is the gap between the human and the inhuman). These inmates were often in the advanced stages of malnutrition and lived in an extreme state of ‘vacantness’, or what we may also call the living dead (Chare 2006: 42 & 48). Additionally, Agamben articulates in Remnants of Auschwitz that these ‘remnants’ are “neither the dead nor the survivors, neither the drowned nor the saved”, but rather “what remains between them” (Agamben 2002: 163-163.

- 113 - argue that the frames of reference which he had structured and outlined in previous books completely disappear here because Agamben loses sight of the bigger picture and chooses to focus his attention almost exclusively on the figure of the Muselmann. Bernstein writes of his repugnance and revulsion at Agamben’s inability to “veer off from the space of impossible sight to the wider terrain: from the victims to the executioners, to the nature of the camps, to the ethical dispositions of those set up reducing the human to the inhuman (Bernstein 2004: 7). LaCapra is also highly critical of Agamben’s failure to inquire “into the ideology and practice of perpetrators in the creation of the historical state of affairs that brought the Muselmann into being” (LaCapra 2004: 162), whilst Hartman is more disconcerted by Agamben’s emphasis on remembering the Muselmänner at the expense of the “the thousands of survivor testimonies that actually exist” (Hartman 2002: 273).

The analysis that Agamben provides in terms of sovereignty and power within Remnants, is criticised as being far too narrow. These criticisms of Agamben’s contextual narrowness are, according to Behrman (2013), all reasonably accurate. Behrman’s (2013) premise here is that this book arguably loses the edge of the rest of Agamben’s series in cutting through the mysticism of sovereign power. Norris depicts how Agamben’s own ascribing of the paradigmatic status to the camps has something of the sovereign about it – this paradigm, he then argues, mirrors the structure of exception (Norris 2003: 6-16). This notion, in turn, presents a significant problem for scholars and a key limitation within Agamben’s later works. The figure of the camp, as described by Agamben, is therefore paradoxical:

In attempting to erase the ‘undecidability’ of Auschwitz, he is driven to a position where it is impossible to think or conceive of the plurality and specificity of modes of power. By assimilating sovereign power, the power and control of ‘those in power’, such as the SS and the power of medical science, by using the camp as a generalisable figure, and by imprecisely extracting the common structure of disparate realities and events (such as the concentration camp, the extermination camp, the internment camp, the rape camp, the airport detention centre and the refugee camp), Agamben can no longer possibly examine these events in such a localised manner (Genel 2006: 57).

- 114 - However, it is the transformation of the analysis of the camp into a figure of political space that appears to result in a reductive paradigm. Instead of shedding light on the camp and its relationship to ‘bare life’ and sovereignty Agamben strays away from a broader analysis. Rather, his analysis contributes further to the mystification of the Holocaust and the death that occurred there (Fitzpatrick 2005: 66-68; Genel 2006: 56-58; Downey 2009: 114-115 and Behrman 2013). It is for these reasons that scholars believe the way Agamben has presented his views within some of his theoretical applications casts it in a pessimistic and dystopic light. It is suggested that he has focussed far too narrowly on certain examples without paying attention to the broader topic as a whole (see for example: Blencowe 2010 & 2012; Lemke 2005 & 2011; Pan 2009 and Fitzpatrick 2005).

Agamben writes:

It is common to expect results of a work of criticism or at least arguable positions and, as they say, working hypotheses. Yet, when the term ‘criticism’ appears in the vocabulary of Western philosophy, it signifies rather an inquiry at the limits of knowledge about precisely that which can neither be posed or grasped (Agamben cited in McLoughlin 2011: 487).

Agamben’s texts are usually complex and almost always multi-layered, as a result we can read, and subsequently interpret his works in a variety of different ways. It stands to reason then, that for any discussion of the biopolitical, an interpretive dialogue will take place within any platform and regardless of whether the discipline is political, social, philosophical or even scientific. Despite the criticisms presented throughout this chapter, Agamben’s work is becoming an important source to draw upon in a multitude of contexts (for example, utilised in introductory texts and key thinker compilations for political theory; used to analyse key issues in international relations; focussed on in the medical profession in terms of voluntary euthanasia and even in the context of this thesis to serve as understanding in terms of critiques and critical appraisals) (Ek 2006: 265). Whilst Agamben’s political philosophy may be termed somewhat ‘eclectic’, it is eclectic in the words most positive sense. He picks the most useful and relevant interpretations and conclusions from other philosophical and social works to assemble them into a meaningful and cognisant whole (Vogt 2005).

- 115 - Agamben tells us that the truth has eluded his predecessors, including Arendt, Foucault, Benjamin and Schmitt, four of the main sources of inspiration in his philosophical theses, because they occupied the wrong ‘vantage point’. If Agamben is ‘indebted’ to the works of Foucault, then it stands to reason that critiques of his evolution in thought would also be available (Deuber-Mankowsky 2002: 96-97). The analysis of Agamben’s philosophy of language and community allows us to understand his move away from the almost undisputed ‘Foucauldian problematic’. The reduction of biopolitics to law, and of law to violence, in Agamben’s Homo Sacer project is the result of the combination of both Benjamin and Schmitt (Deuber-Mankowsky 2002: 97). In so far as Agamben affirms a strict homology between the oppositions of zõe and bios and consequently, the notions of voice and ‘bare life’, biopolitics is, therefore, as old as the human language. Agamben’s revised view is of biopolitics as power over life, which finds its central mechanism in the sovereignty of law, where sovereignty has been interpreted along the lines of power in determining the state of exception (Mills 2008: 66-67; Edkins 2000: 7). The critics of Agamben do not focus on the problems that Agamben poses for the actual understanding of sovereignty and its relationship to biopolitics as a whole (Chare 2006: 58-59). Specifically, for Agamben,

Concepts of sovereignty and constituent power which are at the core of our political traditions have to be abandoned or, at least to be thought all over again… and those who continue to use these concepts uncritically literally do not know what they are talking about (Agamben 2000: 110 & 112).

Agamben posits that deconstruction is a complicit component of sovereignty. Sovereignty rests upon the state of exception, the inclusive exclusion authorises it. Deconstruction reinforces sovereignty in “that it interprets being as a relation of undecidability to which a being must and yet cannot relate” (Düttman 2001: 4). Whilst Lemke (2011: 61), for example, suggests the choice to live or let die is being placed more in the hands of individuals, rather than that of the state, sovereign choice, and the relationship between biopolitics and sovereignty is more connected than ever, as will be made evident in the two case studies in Chapters Five and Six below. When evaluating genocide and its relationship to biopolitics, it is a mere convenience and judicially helpful to take the load off of the nation as a whole, and blame individuals for these crimes or the historically ancient ‘ethnic hatreds’ for modern mass murder (Sémelin 2007: 338). Agamben’s framework helps us problematise that convenience

- 116 - and returns us to the systematic considerations underpinning the conducting of genocidal activities.

In so far as the entry of life into politics is strictly analogous to the entry of the human being into language, Agamben is the furthest away from de-historicising biopolitics. If anything, he makes his analysis historical through and through, co-extensive with the history of humanity as such, as is argued convincingly by Prozorov.

Just as the entry of the human being into language makes history possible by removing the natural ‘voice of man’ the inclusive exclusion of ‘bare life’ into the polis launches politics as a historical process, in which various forms of bios are constructed on the basis of ‘bare life’ as negated zõe (Prozorov 2014: 99).

The critics of de-historicising biopolitics are therefore ultimately incorrect. What Agamben traces in his linear history, the camp, homo sacer, ‘bare life’, the state of exception etc., are most certainly historical events. This is despite a history that took place long before Western or European modernity. Agamben claims that this history can be dated back as far as forty millennia, that is, with the emergence of the human being as a speaking being (Agamben 2007: 9). Whilst Agamben has been criticised in terms of his mysticism of the camp and his inability to historicise certain events, the notion of Agamben’s ‘mystical’ origin story is not simply a one- off event occurring in history, but “rather an event that continuously sees itself replicating and occurring in each and every political act throughout history” (Prozorov 2016: 103). The obvious implication here then is that an adjustment by Agamben to his theoretical perspective, rather than an endless muddling through, opens the passageway for historical truths (Takayoshi 2011: 61).

Theorists such as Lemke (2005; 2011) and Edkins (2000: 5) argue that Agamben avoids the question of gender in his Homo Sacer project and is blind to the possibility of a ‘bare life’ as a patriarchal power. However, an application of Agamben’s biopolitical approach, as per homo sacer, requires no gender-specific differentiation because it applies equally to both men and women. It does not and cannot discriminate. Additionally, biopolitics does not seek to distinguish between genders because the figure of homo sacer is someone who has been stripped of every conceivable status and reduced to the lowest common denominator ‘bare life’ (Agamben 1998: 171; Lemke 2005: 10). Thus, as Maxwell and Colebrook put it:

- 117 - Rather than condemn Agamben for being arcane and blind to the important issues of his time, and rather than smuggle him back into heaven by extending his work to the questions of race and sexuality that his ignores, one might [instead] argue that his conception of the relation[ship] between life and politics necessarily precludes this form of question of race, sex, gender and [indeed] ecology (Maxwell and Colebrook 2016: 93; also Dickinson 2011).

Whilst Agamben’s generic use of ‘man’ is at once symptomatic of his failure to think through the ways in which human life as bare life has been figured as gendered, it also indicates the specificity of his attempt to free ethics and politics from recognition, personhood and labels (Maxwell and Colebrook 2016: 101). If we therefore follow Agamben’s theory in seeking a form of life which is wholly exhausted in ‘bare life’, a “life that being its own form, remains inseparable from it”, the result, then, must be a politics that is not based on exclusion, but rather is open to all forms of life without distinction and completely regardless of gender dynamics (Edkins 2000: 21). For Lemke (2011), the political significance of Agamben’s work lies in making clear that it is not enough to expand the realm of rights to those who have been without any, for example those who have become homo sacer in one form or another, but rather understanding “the ways and forms of new politics”, which are necessary when discussing a theory such as biopolitics (Agamben 1998: 187).

In some sense of the terms, Agamben’s work has been described as pessimistic and dystopic as previously noted. In an interview, Agamben commented that:

I’ve often been reproached for… this pessimism that I was perhaps unaware of. But I don’t see it like that. There is a phrase from Mark, cited by Debord as well, that I like a lot: “the desperate situation for society in which I live fills me with hope”. I share this vision, hope is given to the hopeless (cited in Vacarme 2004: 123)

That biopolitics is not in fact the same for all those who invoke its name is very apparent, and we can acknowledge that each theorist views the various ideas, connotations and theories surrounding biopolitics as different and shifting. The differences between [bio]political thinkers such as Agamben, Foucault and Hardt and Negri suggests that biopolitics should be approached as a site of constant definitional struggle and continuous disagreement and

- 118 - critique. Indeed, the matter of “how modern Western societies [have taken] on board the fundamental biological face that human beings are a species”, and how as a result “the basic biological features of the human species [have become] the object of a political strategy”, is far, far from settled (Foucault 2007: 1). Similarly, „Die agambensche Philosophie verspricht also eine Sicht der Welt aus der Perspektive der Extremsituation“ (Deuber-Maknowsky 2002: 97).37 In the context of biopolitics, life, genocide and death, this is nowhere more apparent that within the works of Giorgio Agamben.

There is much more to Agamben’s framework than simply a revision, ‘correction’ and ‘addition’ of Foucauldian thoughts and ideas, it builds upon and extends those ideas in a dramatic fashion (see Agamben 1998, 200 & 2005; see also de la Durantaye 2009: 207 & 421). What is significant and especially relevant for us within this thesis, is as a ‘genealogist of security’, Agamben is perhaps one of the only theorists today who is willing to ask the harder questions that surround constituting and constituted power, as well as evaluating the links between sovereignty and issue of security (Marchart 2003; Borislavov 2005).

It is therefore ultimately unproductive to read the differences between Agamben and other theorists such as Foucault, for example, as a debate in which one is expected to take a side and discount any alternative arguments. Rather, these differences should be looked at as differences in perspective, and as such we can acknowledge that different perspectives suit different research problems. New and old texts by Foucault, Agamben, Benjamin, Schmitt, Hardt and Negri as well as other theorists all serve to reinforce each other’s importance and value within the social sciences and humanities, as together they offer a deeper understanding of the present bio, as well as geo, political condition.

37 “The Agambenian philosophy promises a view of the world from the perspective of an extreme situation” (Deuber-Mankowsky 2002: 97. My own translation).

- 119 -

PART TWO: Cases

- 120 - The Holocaust and the concentration/death camps of Nazi Germany, as have previously been noted, have been looked at extremely closely by Agamben and have been interpreted variously as the central metaphor for sovereign and destructive violence and as the ultimate sign of absolute power in the negative (Mbembe 2003: 12). The camp, for Agamben, is the pivot around which spins what he calls the ‘biopolitical machine’. The camp is often described as a limbo, as an extraterritorial spatial container with a void at its core, a void in constant need of being filled with and by human material or ‘biological substance’ (Minca 2015: 76; Agamben 2002; Campbell and Sitze 2013). It is the space in between. Camp spatialities are implicitly, or even on occasion unequivocally, aimed at producing a specific socio-biopolitical body and a ‘remnant’, or in other words, the included and the excluded. It is this ‘remnant’, however, that the operations of the camp create by selectively ‘cutting’ into the population at large in order to protect and ultimately ‘cleanse’ that very same body (Agamben 2002; Gregory 2006; Minca 2006).

Agamben maintains what could be construed as almost a ‘silence’ about more modern genocides, focussing rather on, as we have seen, the Holocaust as his example of the biopolitical paradigm of the modern. Despite this, his concepts and methods of analysis offer important insights into political exception and the exclusion of the ‘other’ in times of modern conflict and war. Whilst Agamben does provide examples in his Homo Sacer project relating to ‘bare life’, the state of exception and the camp within the Holocaust – such as the detainees in the Nazi concentration/death camps and the mentally ill under the Nazi euthanasia programs – we are able to also see his theory in action displayed through the two case studies to be discussed in-depth within chapters five and six below. The Hutu-inspired genocide in Rwanda exemplifies Agamben’s Homo Sacer project through biological markers and the issue of race, as well as within the acts of sexual violence that occurred throughout 1994. Biopolitics also allows us a lens through which we can analyse the events in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The work and rape camps within the Bosnian nation offer tangible examples of where the state of exception was placed into action and the segregation of thousands of Bosnian Muslims within the supposed ‘safe haven’ city of Srebrenica and the genocide that proceeded this can all be analysed as clear examples of Agamben’s theories of ‘bare life’ and homo sacer. These two case studies truly aid us in a further understanding of genocide as a phenomenon and epitomise Agamben’s statement that after the events of World War Two, biopolitics has

- 121 - “passed beyond a new threshold” (Agamben 1998: 165). Agamben’s biopolitical approach allows us to see the issues of genocide in both Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina more clearly because he shifts the focus from fixating solely on ethnicity, race or definition (for example), to a focus on what biopolitics revolves around – power.

- 122 - CHAPTER FIVE – RWANDA APRIL 6TH – JULY 1994

“Each bloodletting hastens the next, and as the value of human life is degraded and violence becomes tolerated, the unimaginable becomes more conceivable”.

-Bill Clinton, 1998-

Rwanda. Known as the land of a thousand hills, despite its beauty, rich history and diverse culture, scholars, theorists and the international community alike associated this country not with its incredible landscape and picturesque scenery, but with one word.

Genocide.

One of the smallest countries in the world, Rwanda is a land-locked nation located in East Africa. With Uganda to its North, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to its East, Burundi to its South and Tanzania to its South and South-East, Rwanda has experienced violence on its doorstep and is no stranger to corrupt governments, economic turmoil and mass violence (see figure 5.1 on page 124). While the conflict in the Balkans was taking place, due largely to the collapse of the former Yugoslavia, the international community was confronted with another genocidal conflict of even more immediate urgency, this time on the African continent. In April 1994, a small group of ethnic Hutu extremists seized power in Rwanda and initiated a genocidal campaign targeting the ethnic Tutsi minority and indigenous Twa for extermination. The goal was to liquidate, in its entirety, the Tutsi population and any moderate Hutu who were seen to oppose the Habyarimana regime. Genocide was committed against Tutsi, Twa and even liberal-democratic or ‘moderate’ Hutu by the extremist Hutu Power regime of the ruling Mouvement Révolutionaire Nationale pour le Développement (National Revolutionary Movement for Development or MRND). It was organised and directed by a small group of people who desired to keep power consolidated in Rwanda within what they called ‘Hutu Power’. In addition to the normal chain of command through the army, police, administration

- 123 - and militias, they used magazines to depict, and the radio to broadcast, hate messages encouraging Rwandans to kill fellow Rwandans (Newbury 1995: 12). During the genocide, media outlets linked to the Hutu-backed government helped lay the groundwork for the slaughter of Tutsi by routinely vilifying them. The Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Colines (RTLM) even went so far as to identify specific targets for the Hutu militias that were tasked with carrying out most of the killing (Simon 2006: 9). The violence unleashed was remarkable for its intensity and speed. Starting April 6, the violence spread to almost every commune and village in Rwanda, and within just over 100 days would claims the lives of between 500,000 and 1 million Tutsi and several tens of thousands of Hutu men, women and children (Des Forges 1999). Their killers were those in government, soldiers, police, militia, nuns, lawyers and even other ordinary Rwandans incited by those in positions of authority and spurred on by the hatred created by mass media propaganda (McDoom 2014: 38).

FIGURE 5.1 POLITICAL MAP OF RWANDA

Kafunzo RWANDA Merama UGANDA Kagitumba National capital Prefecture capital Lake Mutanda Lake RWANDA Town, village Bunyonyi Rwempasha Airport, airstrip Lubirizi Rutshuru Kisoro International boundary Nyagatare Cyanika Kabale Provincial boundary a Ka BIRUNGA b ge m ra Butaro u Road t NAT'L PARK Muvumba i Kidaho g Track Lac Katuna a K Lac Burera Rwanyakizinga Ruhengeri Mulindi Gatunda Lac Kirambo Cyamba Busogo Gabiro Ruhondo AKAGERA DEMOCRATIC Byumba Ngarama Lac Kora NORRE NATIONAL Mikindi Mutura NORD PARK Lake REPUBLIC OF THE Kagali Kinihira Lac Hago Mujunju Goma Nemba CONGO Gisenyi Rushashi Kinyami EST Muhura L Nyundo Kabaya N Lac ow y Rutare Kivumba a Ngaru a Mbogo Murambi ba Lac Rukara GISHWATI ro ng Shyorongi Muhazi NATURAL Ngororero Lac UNITED Ile Ihema Bugarura RESERVE Kiyumba KIGALI REPUBLIC OF OUEST Kigali Rwamagana Ile Wahu Runda Gikoro TANZANIA Bulinga Kayonza Lac Lac Kicukiro Bicumbi Nasho Mabanza Kivu Gitarama Butamwa Lac Kigarama Kibuye Mugesera Lac Lake Ile Lac Mpanga Bisongou Idjwi Birambo Mugesera Kibungo Cyambwe Gishyita Bwakira SUD Rilima Rukira Rwamatamu Masango Ruhango Sake Gashora Rusumo Gatagara Bare Nemba Kirehe Kaduha K Nyanza Ngenda ag Ile er Gombo Rwesero a Karaba Lac Lac Rusatira Cyohoha Rweru Kamembe Gisakura Gikongoro Sud Karama Bukavu Cyangugu Rwumba Kitabi Cyimbogo Karengera Nyakabuye Bugumya NYUNGWE NAT'L PARK Butare

Ruramba

Gisagara u r BURUNDI Busoro a y Bugarama n 0 10 20 3040 50 km Munini a k A 0 10 20 30 mi The boundaries and names shown and the designations used Runyombyi on this map do not imply official endorsement or acceptance by the United Nations.

Map No. 3717 Rev. 11 UNITED NATIONS Department of Field Support July 2015 Geospatial Information Section (formerly Cartographic Section)

SOURCE: The United Nations URL: DATE ACCESSED: December 4th, 2016

The scale and speed of the genocide left no doubt about the intent and purpose of the machete wielding militias. People of all ages and genders were killed. Best friends, family members, and church goers turned on each other, using whatever they had available. Politicians, human rights activists, journalists and members of the clergy were not spared

- 124 - (Weitsman 2008: 572). Young girls and women were raped and used as sex slaves before being killed or left for dead. The fact that most victims died almost immediately, or very shortly thereafter, points to a motive that was not only designed to make rebuilding the Tutsi community difficult, but, as one rape victims testified the assaults and rapes experienced “were designed to humiliate us”, and as was the case with many in Rwanda, this humiliation almost always preceded death (Mullins 2009: 25).

A major feature of the killings was the manner in which they took place. The interim government exhorted every Hutu to kill Tutsi, wherever they could be found. As mass murder became transformed into a civic virtue and the rule of law was no longer evident, for weeks and months, from one village to another, hundreds of thousands of Tutsi were hacked (quite literally) to death in their homes, schools and churches. What were once seen as places of safety and refuge, became scenes of unimaginable horror. “The very social fabric of the nation of Rwanda was torn asunder” (White 2009: 472). The international community, in the wake of Somalia the year before and the continuing bloodshed in the Balkans after the fall of the USSR, completely ignored General Roméo Dallaire’s warning in the preceding months that mass extermination was imminent.38 Power in her article Bystanders to Genocide: Why the United States Let the Rwandan Tragedy to Happen, as well as in her book A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide stated that “policy during the genocide in Rwanda is not a story of wilful complicity with evil. US officials did not sit around and conspire to allow genocide to happen. But whatever their convictions about ‘never again’, many of them did sit around, and they most certainly did allow genocide to happen” (Power 2001: 86; Power 2002: 108).39 The magnitude of this violence, continuing day after day, week after week, without interference from the international community speaks volumes for the lack of international resolve in dealing with the genocide in Rwanda (Power 2002; Melvern 2000 & 2004; Bartrop 2015).

38 During the months prior to the Rwandan genocide, General Roméo Dallaire, commander of the UN Assistance Mission in Rwanda (UNAMIR), warned the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) that Hutu extremists were planning a campaign to exterminate Tutsis. In the now very famous cable to New York on January 11th, 1994, which DPKO authorised hum to share with the US, French and Belgian Embassies, General Dallaire asked for authority to search for and seize the caches of machetes and other weapons that had been shipped into Rwanda for the Interahamwe (Dallaire 1994 in Adelman and Suhrke 2000: xxi-xxii). 39 The debate around non-intervention has been discussed in great detail. In addition to Samantha Power, see also Alan Kuperman’s The Limits of Humanitarian Intervention: Genocide in Rwanda.

- 125 - The issues surrounding the Rwandan genocide are very complex. Existing theories of genocide rely heavily on the concepts of race, racism, xenophobia, ethnicity, and age-old hatreds, as well as an evaluation of the Holocaust in connection with country’s history and specific precursors to genocide. These approaches position their analyses within the particular genocidal phenomenon in question. Until recently, few scholars have sought to reveal in greater detail how the genocide of 1994 is, in fact, symptomatic of a greater issue within modernity itself. As was discussed earlier in the thesis, the ambiguity and variety of interpretations of the meaning at the heart of the term ‘genocide’ complicates genocide scholarship. “The etymology of the word genocide privileges an interpretation grounded in the idea of killing of one race by another. However, such an approach makes it difficult to take into consideration the killing of members of one ethnic group by another” (Vambe and Zegeye 2008: 776). A racially inflected understanding of the term, as applied to some African experiences including Rwanda by certain theorists (see for example: Mamdani 1996 & 2001; Pottier 2002), does not help one to explain or even account for the mass killing of people of an ethnic group by the leaders of that same ethnic group (Vambe and Zegeye 2008: 776). Additionally, whilst it might be at times useful to observe that the Jewish Holocaust and genocide in Rwanda share similar aspects, to uncritically make the Holocaust the paradigm for interpreting events in Rwanda, assumes that these two genocides can be simply equated as equal in terms of a comparative analysis.

According to Vambe and Zegeye (2008: 775-776), the study of genocide and conflicts within Africa have become fraught with scholars limiting their analysis to the phenomenon of historical exceptionalism, due in large part to the history of colonialism within Africa as a whole (see for example: Semujanga 2003; Taylor 1999; Mamdani 2001; Berkeley 2001). In light of this analysis and the limitations that this approach has subsequently brought genocide scholarship within Africa, it is necessary to utilise an approach that applies itself to each genocide in turn, and which takes in to account the variety of the experiences and the different trajectories each conflict might have taken, without losing sight of the history that has aided in shaping each nation as we know it. Such an approach is Agamben’s biopolitical analysis, which allows us to see the genocide as a larger issue within the modernising process itself. In Rwanda, it would also be hard to refute that the genocide was not racially motivated in some capacity and that the issues of race have not played a part in the history of Rwanda. However,

- 126 - biopolitics acknowledges that race will always place a role within an area where a state of exception has already been created (Dillon 2008: 196). Biological racism according to Blencowe (2012) is essential to the technologies of a biological state and comes into play whenever the sovereign is faced with the need to deny life, either directly or indirectly (Blencowe 2012: 99). Racism in Rwanda was created as an essential technology of the biopolitical toolkit and utilised in order to mobilise a campaign of humiliation, torture, mass death and genocide. The figure of homo sacer was identified as Tutsi, Hutu and Twa, anyone who opposed the Hutu-power regime. Race, or as Agamben terms it, the “care of life”, is being founded now on “properly eugenic concerns” (Agamben 1998: 146-147). What draws the themes within the Rwandan genocide together and what invites an analysis grounded in Agamben’s theoretical insights, is that there is a marking out of the point at which humanity reaches or reverts to a form of minimum contact, or a complete vulnerability, what Agamben would term the condition of animality or ‘bare life’, or what separates us from the ‘animal’ (Agamben 2004: 16). Mass violence and indeed genocide, when viewed from a biopolitical perspective allows us a greater insight into the relationship between all the participants as well as to account for the emergent nature of mass violence and genocide (Alsheh 2015: 13).

Rwanda: Events Leading up to 1994

In evaluating why genocide occurred in Rwanda in 1994, it is necessary to expand on certain issues that helped to precipitate the genocide. For the purpose of this chapter’s analysis, it is important to evaluate not only the issues that arose from the 1962 independence revolution, but also chart the progression of colonialism, to a point, within the country as well.

Prior to the arrival of the German and Belgian colonisers, the social boundaries between the Hutu and Tutsi were fluid. Historically, the distinction between the Tutsi and Hutu was not simple but reflective of a series of social considerations that included wealth, birth, status and self-identification. The boundary around each was not a permanent one, with marriage and property acquisition or loss being principal routes for movement between the two groups (McDoom 2007: 488). Language, tradition and even religion between Hutu and Tutsi were easily transferable and as Bowen (1996: 3) points out, “poor Tutsi became Hutu and economically successful Hutu became Tutsi”. Traditionally Hutu life was founded on a clan basis in which small kingdoms prevailed, but, after the arrival of the Tutsi in the fifteenth

- 127 - century, a feudal system was established and the fundamental division between the Hutu and Tutsi was based more on a form of class difference than on ethnicity, particularly as a great deal of intermarriage took place (Bartrop 2015).

With the establishment of a German colony, the importance of European racial lines solidified ethnic lines between the two tribes. The more physically European-featured Tutsi were deemed to be the natural-born local rulers (although believing the Tutsi to not be real Africans), and the Hutu (who were much more ‘African’ in appearance, i.e. short and stocky) were destined to serve them (White 2009: 473). Rwandans were taught with the values, beliefs and attitude of Europeans which subsequently resulted in the falsification and misdirection of their African consciousness and behaviour (White 2009: 474).40 As Mamdani notes, Rwanda, even though it was not a settler colony, “its path of decolonisation was as such that – since Hutu and Tutsi under colonialism became identified with the native majority and alien minority – that the Tutsi became a substitute and a target for the revenge by Hutu against the white man” (Mamdani 2001: 33). Though the actual genocide only lasted 100 days, the three months can be traced back to the German and Belgian colonial periods (1893-1962), when Hutu and Tutsi were identified as distinctly different peoples, with the Tutsi accorded a higher social and ethnic status than the majority Hutu. The principal catalyst to the cementing of a durable fixed identity as ‘Hutu’ and ‘Tutsi’ came with the introduction by the Belgian colonial administration in 1933, of identity cards bearing a categorisation in these terms (Bartrop 2015: 89; Arsenault 2013: 128). The Belgian administration adopted and adapted the prevailing patterns of Rwandan society in order to promote an economically efficient colonial state (James 2015: 179). The Belgians rationalised and standardised these systems and redirected the procedures to exploit local labour and extract taxes for their own profit (Newbury 1988). After Rwanda’s independence in 1962, the identity cards were retained as a means of positive discrimination in favour of the Hutu majority (Prunier 1997; Bartrop 2015: 90).

Ever since the idea of Hutu hegemony, which took hold during the 1950s, Hutu politicians purposely portrayed the Tutsi minority as an ‘enemy’ seeking to reintroduce their reign over

40 This was called the ‘Hamitic’ thesis, because several of the first Europeans who were descended from the biblical tribe of Ham, whose father, Noah, set a curse upon him, which according to later tradition, turned his skin black (Kinzer 2008: 25; Berkeley 2002: 69).

- 128 - Rwanda. As a key part of their ideology, the Hutu constructed the myth that the Tutsi were invaders who had overrun Rwanda in the pre-colonial era and enslaved the Hutu – they were an alien group and therefore had no legitimate status in the country (Meredith 2011: 486). Through gaining power as a result of the Hutu ‘revolution’ of 1950-1960, Hutu politicians continued to use the language of hatred and division against the Tutsi minority to justify their persecution. They also found it advantageous to stir up anti-Tutsi hostility to fortify their own position at times when dissention among Hutu clans was rife. Whilst the relationship between the Hutu and their neighbours prior to the 1950s had essentially been based on hierarchy and dominance, Hutu-Tutsi relationships were, for the most part, relatively peaceful. The Bahutu Manifesto of March 1957 paid special attention to the social problems caused by the racism of the Europeans and the Tutsi, and as well called for institutional changes in favour of the Hutus and other races living within Rwanda (Melson 2003: 330). Following the 1961 general election, which replaced the Tutsi monarchy with a presidential system under the leadership of the Hutu Emancipation Party, frequent Hutu persecutions of Tutsi took place. This was due in large part to the end of colonial rule and an ethnic radicalisation of the Hutu seeing them claim their rights as the majority for the very first time (White 2009: 475; Jessee 2017: 125; Newbury 1998: 14). This subsequently triggered outbursts of violence in 1962 and 1973. When the government failed to deal with the dire levels of poverty in the country they orchestrated a mass propaganda crusade against the Tutsi. Thousands of Tutsi children were expelled from school and thousands of Tutsi men and women lost their jobs, many went into exile across the border (Uvin 1997: 102; White 2009: 476).

During the ‘Second Republic’ (1973-1994), Rwanda was governed by the Habyarimana regime, which bowed to the demands of the Hutu extremists (Uvin 1998: 28). With the election of Juvenal Habyarimana in 1973, 14 years of corruption and fighting/bloodshed seemed to be at an end. For the Tutsi, although not being equals within the regime, life appeared to be at least bearable. Rwanda flourished for the first 17 years of Habyarimana’s rule (Newbury 1995: 14). It was seen from the outside as an African success story with its good road system and reliable distribution of electricity, water and telephone network. However, the fall in coffee prices in the mid 1980s set in motion a period of political extremism and corruption – something that would stay in place until genocide erupted in 1994 (Newbury 1995: 14; Prunier 1997: 87-88; Ahluwalia 1997). By the late 1980s, there were grave economic concerns in an overpopulated

- 129 - country with an insufficient food supply. Land tenure became a burning issue and Habyarimana encountered challenges to his dictatorship from several different directions (Marchak 2003: 206-207; Uvin 1998: 4 & 53-57).

The practice of ethnic discrimination against the Tutsi intensified, especially as the nature of the regime changed such that “the Habyarimana’s Revolution Movement for Development (MRND) was truly a totalitarian party and the administrative control was probably the tightest in the world among non-Communist countries” (Prunier 1997: 76-77). Death squads were formed within the military principally by the MRND and the Coalition for the Defence of the Republic (CDR) (Lemarchand 2009). In the early 1990s, when the ruling Hutu faced growing political opposition, they sought to maintain their hold on power by inciting Hutu against a perceived Tutsi threat, creating a climate of fear and hatred that relied on the Hutu’s culture of obedience to ensure their orders were obeyed and preparing for the onslaught well in advance by arming militias and organising death squads (Meredith 2011: 487). In the pre- genocide years, both groups (the MRND and CDR) formed militias known as the Interahamwe (anti-Tutsi militia and Kinyarwandan for “those who attack together”) and the Impuzumagambi (Kinyarwandan for “those who have the same goal”) which engaged in lethal street fighting in a hope to upset the social order. Their weapons, provided by the army, allowed them to engage in daily murder sprees in an open and extremely violent fashion (Hildyard 1999; Sharlach 1999: 387; Uvin 1998: 64-65). The Interahamwe trained in camps throughout the country, evidence that the massacres were well-planned out in advance (Omaar and de Waal 1995: 51). When the call for action finally came after President Habyarimana’s assassination on April 6, 1994, none were more bloodthirsty or ready for action than the Interahamwe (Bartrop 2015: 90; White 2009: 476). From this time on, Interahamwe killing units were left to their own devices; they were merciless in their devotion to what they believed was their duty – to purify and cleanse. What is most significant about the existence of these militias is that they showed the genocide to be far from spontaneous but, instead, a carefully planned campaign of extermination that had its executioners prepared and waiting to go into action long before the killing actually began (Des Forges 1999; Bartrop 2015: 91).

By the early 1990s extensive and somewhat transparent plans were laid to carry out a campaign of extermination of the Tutsi and their moderate Hutu political allies (Bartrop 2015: 90; Gros 1996: 460-461). The genocide that followed did not have its roots in ancient ethnic

- 130 - antagonisms. Rather, a fanatical elite engaged in a modern struggle for power and wealth used ethnic antagonisms as their principal weapon. A key element in politicising ethnic cleavages in the recent history of Rwanda has been the development and propagation of a “corporate view of ethnicity”. The generalisation of blame was dramatically evident in 1994, when hardliners in the Hutu-dominated government labelled all Tutsi as enemies of the state (Newbury 1998: 7). The final event precipitating genocide was the death of President Habyarimana on April 6, 1994. Whilst this assassination arguably marks the beginning of the genocide in Rwanda, there has been a certain level of controversy that has emerged over which parties to the conflict were indeed responsible, because the Hutu Guard refused permission for the UN Assistance Mission in Rwanda (UNAMIR) to investigate the crash site, hence it is impossible to know for sure who shot the plane down (Klinghoffer 1998: 41; Marchak 2003: 208). Parties on each side have argued varying accounts, such as Habyarimana’s inner circle committing the assassination (Des Forges 1999: 182; Omaar and de Waal 1995), as well as others speculating it was the Belgian and French peacekeepers (Prunier 1997: 213-214). Regardless of who indeed shot down the plane, Habyarimana’s assassination acted as a signal for the radical Hutu across the nation to commence their long- planned operation. Within two hours, roadblocks were erected in many parts of Kigali which stopped the traffic flow, at which point the occupants of cars, trucks and busses were required to present their identity cards to the Hutu militia. If their identity was shown to be Tutsi, immediate and summary execution by machete, clubs and less frequently by gunfire would follow. Fighting broke out almost immediately and mass murder began against the Tutsi and any who opposed the killing. “The Hutu moderates, carefully listed in advance, were the first victims, this included the prime minister and other high-ranking officials who might have intervened or sympathised with the Tutsi” (Marchak 2003: 207-208). They were disposed of in a matter of hours. The next were the Tutsi leadership and rank and file of the opposition parties. Within just one day, after decimation of the leaders, Tutsi civilians and thousands of Hutu were slaughtered. Additionally, ten of Dallaire’s peacekeepers from Belgium had been murdered whilst they were protecting the interim head of state, who was also murdered along with the peacekeepers (Bartrop 2015: 94; Marchak 2003: 208) (see figure 5.2 on page 132).

- 131 - FIGURE 5.2 ONSET OF GENOCIDAL VIOLENCE

SOURCE: McDoom, Omar Shahabudin. 2014. ‘Predicting Violence Within Genocide: A Model of Elite Comparison and Ethnic Segregation from Rwanda’, Political Geography 42(September): 34-45 at 39.

Despite this brief snapshot into the history of Rwanda the question remains…

How did such an apparently stable, prosperous country, which enjoyed an outstanding international reputation suddenly change to become the perpetrator of genocidal violence? However, before this point is analysed through a biopolitical lens, a discussion of the current dominant analyses relevant to the case of Rwanda is necessary.

Genocide and Rwanda

The case of Rwanda, in contrast to that of Bosnia-Herzegovina as we will see in the following chapter, has been seen by numerous scholars as well as the international community as a clear case of genocide consistent with the Convention’s statutes (see for example: Klinghoffer 1998: 103; Gourevitch 1998; Jones 2016; May 2010; Shaw 2013: 164-165; Melvern 2004; Moghalu 2005; Prunier 1997; Omaar and de Waal; Temoney 2016 and White 2009).41 The creation of

41 Please note that this list of sources is only a sampling of the multitude of scholars who believe that the question of genocide in Rwanda should never be in doubt.

- 132 - the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) affirms that this interpretation of the events in Rwanda as it was designed to prosecute those accused of violating Article 3 of the Geneva Convention of committing crimes against humanity and ultimately committing the crime of genocide itself (UN Security Council Resolution 955).

The question surrounding the Rwandan situation can be summed up by Mamdani’s phrase “the popularity of genocide”, or put another way, how could so many people be mobilised to kill so many others, their friends and neighbours, hand in hand, using machetes and butchering them like animals (Mamdani 2001: 8)? This question has been answered in many different ways since the genocide. The answers include everything from environmental degradation and the competition for scarce resources; the instigation and organisation by a small group of organisers who were ultimately aided by people at all levels of government and social authority; and the role of international sponsors; to the role of potential international interventionists (such as Dallaire’s UNAMIR); the ethnic and cultural considerations of the alleged culture of respect for authority within Rwanda; the growing militarisation of state and society in the country as the Habyarimana regime responded to military attacks by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF); and the effects of long-term propaganda which constantly depicted the Tutsi as sub-human (Newbury 1995: 12; Marchak 2003: 207; Klinghoffer 1998: 23-25). Variations of these answers find expression in the two dominant approaches used to frame analysis of the Rwandan genocide (Vambe and Zegeye 2008: 776).

The first major approach favours using what are unquestionably Holocaust-related theories which, in turn, incorrectly suggest that the African experience of genocide and the events of the Holocaust can be neatly tied together. Whilst it might be useful at times, to utilise the Holocaust as a yard arm to compare genocidal activities, and indeed to observe that the Jewish Holocaust and genocide in Rwanda do indeed share similar traits, especially with respect to racial ideology, to correlate the two uncritically as similar examples completely blurs the uniqueness of each of the two contexts and the historical nuances that have shaped each in turn (Jones 2016). The second approach looks at the genocide through the lens of historical exceptionalism, supplemented by a sense of ethnic determinism (Twagilimana 2003: 136; Vambe and Zegeye 2008: 77). Historical exceptionalism theories of genocide in Rwanda and Africa as a whole rely upon single-factor explanations (i.e. a variation of Goldhagen’s (1997) ‘monocausal perspective’), such as explaining the problem in terms of only class issues, or the

- 133 - role of colonialism and decolonisation, or ethnicity etc. One scholar who exemplifies this type of analysis and follows a similar pattern to Goldhagen in his analysis of the Holocaust, is Josias Semujanga (2003), who explains the Rwandan genocide and its origins historically from Belgian colonialism and following this through to the events as they occurred in 1994. However, Semujanga, along with other single-factor theorists, fail to explain why people of the same ethnicity killed each other throughout the genocide. They also fail to take into consideration the political and power issues at play, focussing rather on historico-ethnic grievances as their main driving force (Twagilimana 2003: 136; Pottier 2002).

Mamdani (2001) argues that due to the lack of a historical, as well as a geographical perspective, genocide scholars simply see the war in Rwanda beginning and ending in 1994. For example, Taylor (1999) concentrates on the killings that took place solely within 1994, giving the impression that the genocide simply occurred in a vacuum. His account treats the specific geographical boundary of Rwanda as the boundary of knowledge about this genocide. However, his analysis does not take into consideration those fleeing violent uprisings in Rwanda from the 1960s onwards, nor does it consider the issue of refugee camps in neighbouring countries. Additionally, his premise does not pay any attention to the fact that colonial rule by the Germans, Belgians and the French intensified the historical grievances between the majority Hutu and minority Tutsi (Ahluwalia 1997: 501-502).

Explanations such as Taylor’s quite often tend to invoke the concept of ethnicity as solely accounting for the mass killing that took place in Rwanda. However, the mere fact of ethnic groups living in the same geographical space is not a precondition for genocide.

The war in Rwanda has often been presented as a tribal conflict. This is highly misleading. Hutus and Tutsis existed a century ago, but the two categories were defined in very different terms in those days. They were far less mutually hostile. Colonial rule and its attendant racial ideology, followed by independent governments committed to Hutu supremacy and intermittent inter-communal violence, have dramatically altered the nature of the Hutu-Tutsi problem, and made the divide between the two far sharper and more violent. In short, political manipulation of ethnicity is the main culprit for today’s ethnic problem (Omaar and de Waal 1995: iii).

- 134 - Much of the recent discussion within politics and international affairs has been based on the misleading assumption that the world is fraught with primordial ethnic conflict and deep class- based resentment. According to this notion, ethnic groups lie in wait for one another, nourishing age-old hatreds and restrained only by powerful, often colonising, states. Remove the lid, and the cauldron of hate and bitterness boils over (Klinghoffer 1998: 6-10). Furthermore, it is suggested, that the history and geography of ethnic violence in the Great Lakes region meant that those living in Uganda, Congo and Burundi had their lands taken and redistributed – all of which contributed to deep class-based resentment between Hutu and Tutsi (Jaworski 2012: 350). This stereotype of genocide, which the Western media helped exacerbate, during the genocide, is that the irrepressible hatreds between ancient foes simply burst into violence on April 7, 1994, one day after the Hutu president was assassinated. Most of this was purely speculative and exaggerated to help support the claim of ancient-hatreds (Smith 1998: 478). Theorists who advance this idea often suggest a face-off between several large civilizational groupings. This form of cultural racism exhibits itself in Huntington’s (1993) binary of a civilised world (the West) facing an uncivilised world (the rest). They share the idea that the world’s current conflicts are fuelled by age-old ethnic loyalties and distinct cultural differences (Bowen 1996: 3 & 5). However, the simple picture of two distinct ethnic or tribal groups composing the population of Rwanda at the time of the genocide does not hold true.

The complexity of the Rwandan genocide has been noted by many scholars (see for instance: Klinghoffer 1998; Des Forges 1999; Kuperman 2001; Melson 2003; McNamee 2007; and Jessee 2017). The connections of tribal and ethnic identification to structures of power in pre- colonial, colonial and post-colonial Rwanda are complex (Newbury 1998; 1995 & 1998). The ethnically based massacres are a result of many factors that include, but are not limited to, the history of colonialism, ethnocentrism, political oppression, human rights abuses, social injustices, poverty and environmental degradation (Mayes et al. 1998; see also Des Forges 1999; Gourevitch 1998; Newbury 1995; and Uvin 1999). However, framing Rwanda’s genocide in solely ethnic terms (and its complex causes) limits our understanding of the context of what took place. Whilst Rwanda has been subjected to colonialism and certainly there have been perpetrators and indeed victims of violence on both sides, genocide in Rwanda cannot be seen as a solely ethnic argument, nor an outburst of rage, but was a deliberate choice of modern elites to foster hatred in order to stay in power. “Extermination was used in order to restore

- 135 - Hutu solidarity, whilst the state machinery and authority was used in order to carry out the slaughter” (Des Forges 1999: 1). The Rwandan genocide, therefore needs to be understood “as a complete process rather than, as in the representation of it by the Western media, as a ‘tribal’ conflict” (Ahluwalia 1997: 508)

However, the question still remains, that despite all of these ways of explaining the Rwandan genocide, none actually get any closer to answering the core question satisfactorily of how the “moral evacuation of a great mass of people could have been so complete as to facilitate murder on such a mammoth scale by such a large number of willing and able participants” (McNamee 2007: 487-488). Whilst not denying the important contributions of the approaches noted above, the answer to this question lies in applying an Agambenian (bio)political analysis to the genocide within Rwanda. It is through the lens of biopolitics and the de-humanisation of the ‘other’ within the genocide of 1994 that we can better understand this phenomenon as a whole.

Genocide and Rwanda: An Agambenian Application

As we have seen in earlier chapters (see Chapters Three and Four), Agamben insists on a logical connection between biopolitics and sovereignty. That is, biopolitics forms the very foundation on the sovereign practice of power (Agamben 1998). For Agamben (1998: 6), the production of the biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power. He also makes the point of saying that the “modern era, distinguishes itself from previous ones to the extent that ‘bare life’, formerly on the margins of political existence, now increasingly shifts to the centre of the political domain, where the political and the biopolitical intersect” (Agamben 1998: 6). During acts of mass murder and genocide, the question of life is the main question of concern for the sovereign power. Being abandoned by the sovereign, and as such being reduced to ‘bare life’, does not necessarily indicate that the abandoned sovereign subject, the homo sacer, will be tortured, raped or murdered. It simply means that the law no longer applies, the homo sacer cannot appeal to anyone for help, not to the law, the sovereign or anyone in a position of authority (Ownbey 2013: 19). However, the implication is that those who are not accorded full citizenship fall outside the normative model of humanity. They are politically, socially, and economically disenfranchised; this disenfranchisement also constitutes a type of interrogation.

- 136 - The Rwandan genocide clearly exhibits this type of disenfranchisement. Those lives classified as ‘unworthy’ of living, marked for execution exhibit ‘bare life’ where they exist between life and death and where they entered into a zone of indistinction.

Sovereignty’s aim is to continue to exercise and augment its power to exercise itself; in the present circumstance, however, it can only achieve this aim through managing populations outside the law… Finally, it seems important to recognise that one way of “managing” a population is to constitute them as less than human without entitlement to rights, as the humanly unrecognisable. This is different from producing a subject who is compliant with the law; and it is different from the production of the subject who takes the norm of humanness to be its constitutive principal. The subject who is no subject is neither alive nor dead, neither fully constituted as a subject nor fully deconstituted in death. “Managing” a population is thus not only a process through which regulatory power produces a set of subjects (Butler 2004: 98).

As many have observed (see for example: Fein 1979: 7; Fein 1993: 9; Bauman 2003; Arendt 1979; Smith 2000 and Chalk and Jonassohn 1990) genocide is an act of the State, which means that firstly control of the state machine is critical and that the absence of limits on the controllers is a precondition for its commission. In The Kingdom and the Church, Agamben claims “the foundation of politics is not sovereignty, but government, it is not the king, but the minister, it is not the law, but the police, while ‘the modern state’ is that which takes upon itself this ‘double structure of the governmental machine’” (Agamben 2011: 142). The state remains important, but it is no longer central – the power is thus placed into the hands of those with authority. Arendt alludes to this in The Human Condition where she states that “even presidents, kings and prime ministers think of their offices in terms of a job necessary for the life of society” (Arendt 1958: 5). In Rwanda, the sovereign – the modern sovereign, disseminated to those in authority – was central to the foundation of the political order and ultimately of the genocide itself. They adopted, utilised and maintained a process of differentiating between ‘subjects’ who are citizens and ‘subject races’ who were not. The modern sovereign was able to harness the power afforded them quickly and effectively and deployed it against countless men, women and children. Violence had been turned into a rational and procedural technique. As the juridical order withdrew from Rwanda, biopolitics

- 137 - stepped in to regulate the lives of the population (Basevich 2012: 70). Those who were seen as ‘impure’, that is the lives of the people who fell outside of the polis, were placed into the category of homo sacer, where they exhibited ‘bare life’, who might be killed without consequence and were, what Arendt further illustrates, ‘superfluous’, a statelessness of people without citizenship or rights (Arendt 1979: 267-302).

In the lead up to the genocide, sovereign power was given to one social group to use against another thus simultaneously creating an inclusive exclusion within the Rwandan nation itself separating ‘us’ from ‘them’. As the sovereign no longer holds the sole ability to decide over life and death, the transferral of power, given to those in positions of authority, allowed for their hate to condition quickly and made those people the primary organisers and administrators in the Rwandan genocide. In an interview with Frontline, Gourevitch explained that every Hutu must consider himself attacked by every Tutsi, rather than thinking that the state was being attacked by a rebel army. In this way, a collective responsibility for the genocide was created so that no one person could bear individual or total responsibility (Human Rights Watch 2005). Butler (2004: 54-55) suggests that there is a re-emergence of sovereignty at the local level where one sees bureaucrats having an important say on matters of life and death. As Goldhagen (1997) suggests “people must be motivated to kill others, or else they would not do so”. This is further supported by Melvern (2004) and James (2015: 194), who comment that the 1994 genocide began in the city of Kigali not with machetes, but with organised, pre-meditated systematic killings. Garbage trucks organised by local officials were used to clear bodies from the streets. This is what Melvern and James call a ‘genocide bureaucracy’. Those in any form of authority were instructed to kill, what may have originally been considered places of refuge were quickly turned into sites of terror and murder. The slaughter was perpetrated by a small fraction of the population, led by well-trained death squads, soldiers and militias, with the most zealous of the génocidaires being bureaucrats and intellectuals rather than peasants (Omaar and de Waal 1995). The genocidal and extremist voices were not only tolerated, but also morally and financially supported by people at the highest levels of the establishment, including the government (Uvin 1998: 64).

As sovereign power in Agamben’s view is no longer limited to the sovereign, in the case of the bureaucracy it extends to others in positions of immeasurable authority (Rabinow and Rose 2006: 202). In Rwanda these agents of the state were people such as members of the clergy,

- 138 - doctors, lawyers and all who had authority over aspects of human existence. This is evidenced by those convicted of crimes during the genocide all having some form of authoritative role. For example: Jean Kambanda was the former prime minister, Jean-Paul Akayesu was a former mayor and Augustin Bizimungu was the Chief of Staff of the Rwandan Army. Furthermore, religious pastors, priests and even nuns were convicted of refusing to harbour refugees, aiding in the genocide alongside Hutu medical personnel (both male and female) (Sharlach 1999: 392; Richburg 2001; Temoney 2016: 12 and African Rights 1995: 155-165, 208 & 214). Genocide subsequently occurs when the sovereign’s inalienable right to kill with impunity is incorporated into “biodisciplinary power as another means for optimisation” – that is weeding and trimming, smoothing of rough surfaces as the functional elements of cultivation (Alsheh 2015: 16; Sémelin 2007: 338). As such, as a creature possessing ‘bare life’ only, the homo sacer may become subject to death or punishment at the hands of anyone. Agamben explains that in the state of exception “human life is politicised only through an abandonment to an unconditional power of death” (Agamben 1998: 90).

The concept of biopolitics is an extremely useful tool in understanding how the state of exception occurred in Rwanda. In exploring the state of exception here we are then able to understand further how the State was subsequently able to essentially underwrite the pretext for the annihilation of individuals and indeed the Tutsi as a whole (Schotel 2012: 189).

It is not possible to understand the ‘national’ and biopolitical development and vocation of the modern state in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries if one forgets that what lies at its basis is not man as a free and conscious political subject but, above all, man’s bare life, the simple birth that as such is, in the passage from subject to citizen, invested with the principle of sovereignty (Agamben 1998: 128).

Agamben’s analysis reminds us that we need to look at the ‘exception’ within as an act of State sovereignty. The sovereign, in the Rwandan case the bureaucracy of the Hutu Power regime, enabled for a state of exception to emerge by condoning and allowing the genocide and by singling out the Tutsi as the weak and impure ‘other’. The formulation of the state of exception refers to the central paradox of such states of exception – it is the point at which the law provides for its own suspension; it is the legal suspension of the distinction between legality

- 139 - and illegality (Agamben 1998: 201). The legal system completely broke down in Rwanda, with those in power constantly inciting hatred and spurring on the genocide. In Agamben’s view the conditions that allowed for such a systematic and deadly state of exception to occur did not disappear from the political practices with the defeat of Nazi Germany; to the contrary they were always a part of the political conditions of modernity and have existed in the West for some time. Even though Schmitt’s ideas may have influenced the practices of the Nazi leadership, Agamben makes it clear that Schmitt’s ‘temporal’ theory cannot be applied in cases of genocide. Within these examples, the state of exception ceases to be merely a temporal phase, a temporal suspension of the state of law and rather becomes the ‘normal’ (Mbembe 2003: 12). The persistent inside/outside, inclusive/exclusive topology Agamben uses to address the exception aids us in understanding the notion of ‘bare life’ as the basis for the exception, where those living as ‘bare life’ are placed within this zone of indistinction, and within which the sovereign is able to exercise their authority free from any anxiety over the legitimacy of state actions. This ‘freedom’ subsequently liberates the sovereign power’s insatiable hunger for death (Rifkin 2012: 79; Alsheh 2015: 16).

What follows logically from the state of exception is, according to Agamben, the concept of the camp, a space or anti-space of modernity “that is opened when the state of exception becomes the rule” (Agamben 1998: 168; Fiaccadori 2015: 170). In unpacking this statement, the elaboration of his theory is that the camp is the space where the founding moment of sovereignty takes place; demarcating the limit between human and animal, signifying the physical holding on the threshold under the sign of death. What the Nazis managed to achieve, through this very paradoxical ‘state of exception’, which for Agamben is beyond the law which is tied in to the fabric of the law, was the stripping away of the political existence from the Jews and their localisation in an environment, the camp, where they inhabited a space between life and death. Similarly, in Rwanda, the Hutu completely stripped the political existence away from the Tutsi, their political life was absolutely gone, leaving only their bare animal existence, so they could be killed as vermin, or allowed to survive but without the power of political life. The animal self remains included as an exclusion, as an entity that must be left behind, where only ‘bare life’ survives (Agamben 1998: 8; Agamben 2002: 158). The camp, in other words, is at once a material reaction to a felt political need, and the realisation of an unfolding historical dynamic of the collapsing together of fact and law; the camp as

- 140 - nomos and telos of modernity (McNamee 2007: 498-499). In Agamben’s words, “the separation between humanitarianism and politics that we are experiencing today is the extreme phase of the separation of the rights of man from the rights of the citizen” (Agamben 1998: 133).

Agamben is not providing a sociology of the state. Rather his intention is to expose and provide a critique of, the hidden logic governing the state (of exception) in its production of spaces of exception and/or camps. In Rwanda, the idea of the camp was located not in the conditions of a death factory, but in the conditions of pastoral management. The camp in Rwanda became virtually omnipresent because its logic of power extended beyond any preconceived ‘walls’ and into the much broader enclosure of society at large (Ek 2006), a principle well- articulated by Agamben (1998: 183). Genocide, racism and rape became a universal experience, and biopolitics here replaced conceptions of the polis and city as foundations of political life. The spatiality of the camp in Rwanda transcended history, geography and any ‘ancient-hatreds’, even though the colonial roots were created by the Belgians, Germans and the French (Diken and Laustsen 2006; Ek 2006). From our understanding of Agamben’s biopolitical state of exception, those in roles of authority in Rwanda dictated life or death for almost one million people whose lives were lost in 1994. Unlike Nazi Germany, where the doctors, lawyers and judges hoped that the testing would provide scientific gain, it was in the name of the Rwandan ‘Hutu’ state. Genocide here was one way in which the non-democratic ruling elites were able to resolve sovereignty and legitimacy issues as well as conflicts and challenges to their interests. In the case of Rwanda “sovereignty [became] the instrument of power by which law [was] either used tactfully or suspended, populations [were] monitored, detained, inspected, interrogated, rendered uniform in their actions, fully ritualised and exposed to control and regulation in their daily lives” (Butler 2004: 97).

Biological Markers and the Issue of Race

One of the major problems of the twenty-first century is the problem of the colour line (Du Bois [1903] cited in White 2009: 471). A primary issue in focussing almost exclusively on racial and ethnic hatreds is that this leads scholars to overlook questions of power (Newbury 1998: 19). Ethnicity is often a convenient means of distinguishing between populations within the same state territory, or subject to the same empire or colonial state. This helps to feed the

- 141 - idea that some racial or ethnic groups are superior to others, which leads to a system of privilege based on race, namely racism.

Racism defies logic, is not constrained by boundaries and finds differences unacceptable and intolerable and the causes of racism are many ranging from irrational fear and ignorance to capitalism. The development of contemporary racism has been traced to Europe and the colonial practices of its various nations that enabled its spread to other counties like a disease of pandemic proportions. Rwanda was most definitely no exception to the effects of racism. Whilst Rwanda was no longer part of an imperial empire it was still reeling from the impact of colonialism in the form of a ruling elite drawn from a particular ethnic group, and a subordinate class that was ruled and drawn from all the rest. While the division between rulers and the ruled is commonplace, in Rwanda rulers and the ruled reflected two differentiated ethnic groups, each occupying its niche in relation to the other.

Modernity and the modern nation-state delivers the genocidal process through the idea of biological markers and it is the power over ‘bare life’ that is Agamben’s focus (Agamben 1998: 201). It was during the Nazi regime in Germany, that state racism became first and foremost ‘biological racism’ establishing an exact link between the power to kill, or sovereign power and biopower. During the Nazi regime, race became the pivot around which the state came to exert its biopower both in a sovereign and biopolitical fashion (Fiaccadori 2015: 166). Whilst most scholars of genocide look to the Nazi period as the epitome of racism and racial biology/eugenics etc., racism and biology can be further understood in the broader theme of modernity, and there is something to be said about understanding how the concept of race and its relationship with biopolitics subsequently impacts on the modern nation state and the Rwandan genocide as a whole. In Rwanda in 1994 biology, race and ethnicity were all important criteria for determining victims, i.e. those who must die (Marchak 2003: 37-38).

One of the ways in which ethnicity became a divisive social construction was through the use of identity cards. Under Belgian colonial rule and administration, ethnic identities were fixed based on the theory of scientific racism and its claims about the significance of skull size, nose measurements, and similar physical characteristics (Kuper and Kuper 1996: 1230-1231; Weitz 2015: 39 & 41).42 Belgian authorities also arbitrarily replaced Hutu chiefs with Tutsi rulers. In

42 See appendix (b): Nose Measurements.

- 142 - addition, new sources of power and privilege emerged under the colonial ruler, accruing exclusively to white rulers and those designated Tutsi (Hildyard 1999). Thus, the prevailing notion of being Tutsi was synonymous with privileges of wealth and power. Expressed in more succinct terms, “modernisation under colonialism brought about the fixing of separate tribal identities, as both sides, colonial and native, thus called upon the subjectivity of customary continuity” (James 2015: 179). The identity card system was introduced as a means of facilitating the promotion of Tutsi as an administrative class, at the expense of the Hutu, who were treated as the labouring, common class. These identity cards were kept and utilised by the génocidaires as a way to identify their victims, a measure ironically made necessary by the fact that frequent intermarriage between tribes and environmental factors meant that the stereotypical distinction along racial lines was very hard to see (McNamee 2007: 488 & 506). At the local level, community members usually knew the ethnicity of their neighbours. At roadblocks on main roads, policemen, soldiers and militias used national identity cards, which indicated ethnicity to select their targets. During the genocide a man who presented an ethnic identity card that was marked ‘Tutsi’ would be killed instantly along with any women or children accompanying him (Burnet 2015: 147). Klinghoffer (1998: 45) further observed that the Tutsi were hunted in their homes throughout Kigali, identified through coded notations placed on residences during the city census earlier that year. Churches and mission compounds in which Tutsi and moderate Hutu had sought refuge became killing grounds (Marchak 2003: 208). Perpetrators in the genocide in 1994 (and indeed the international community at large) rationalised their choice of victims based on ascribed ‘age-old’ ethnic hatred. However, this was not the cause of the genocide. Rather, the killings were a result of political strategizing and conscious choices by a sovereign authority (the political and economic bureaucratic apparatus) desiring to maintain its hold on power.

Just as colonial occupation involved “writing on the ground a new set of social and spatial relations”, a set of cultural imaginaries that “gave meaning to the enactment of differential rights to differing categories of people for different purposes within the same space; in brief, the exercise of sovereignty” (Mbembe 2003: 25-26), so too do we see the same logic at work in the contemporary distribution of bodily vulnerability in the post-colonial world (Biswas and Nair 2010: 24). Excluded bodies, for Agamben, are made possible by sovereign power that produces ‘bare life’. State racism emerges as a means to separate liveable life from life that

- 143 - can thus be killed (Tagma 2010: 178). It is the racist function of the murderous state apparatus that enables a determination of what may live and what must ultimately die (Biswas and Nair 2010: 23).

The core distinctions are no longer confined to the binary of metropole versus colonies. Whereas the two may have been separate geographically and culturally, they do not constitute a centre in which a simple distinction between ‘friend’ and ‘enemy’ may be as easily discerned. It is ‘race’ that becomes a signifier for the distinction (Shenhav 2012: 27). To be sure, race is sometimes camouflaged and justified by alternative regimes of justifications: a national struggle, a security paradigm, a distinction between a friend and a foe, and various other means of demarcation (such as class). However, these all mask racial hierarchies (Shenhav 2012: 26). Race becomes a useful means for identifying ‘us’, as the strong and capable, against ‘them’, the perceived weak and unworthy (Sémelin 2003: 197). Insecurity and fear on the part of the génocidaires justified the exceptional treatment of the population within Rwanda as a matter of biopolitical manipulation (Clough and Willse 2011: 51).

Prior to the killings, the Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Colines (RTLM) had been broadcasting anti-Tutsi propaganda, referring to Tutsis as Inyenzi or cockroaches (Arsenault 2013: 128; James 2015: 186; Sharlach 1999: 392; and Rurangwa 2009: 35).43 Although the airing of these messages on the RTLM alone did not cause the genocide, it is clear that they created a social climate that legitimised ‘tribal hatred’ that ultimately helped eliminate any social sanctions that might have prevented it (Donohue 2012: 13).44 According to Mavhunga (2011: 152) “the reduction of human to pests justifies the elimination of pests, sanctions policies of elimination and blurs the division in weapons required to police people and police nature”.45 In this case,

43 According to Stephen Kinzer, the Tutsi exiles first introduced this term in the early 1960s. Whilst no one really is aware of where the saying originated, they utilised this term “to symbolise their nocturnal habits and their conviction that no amount of effort would eliminate them. Later their enemies began to use it, arguing that it was appropriate because the rebels, like cockroaches, were filthy invaders who defiled clean places” (Kinzer 2008: 34). 44 See appendix (c): Kangura Cartoon. N.B- Kangura was a Rwandan magazine that was utilised in the run up to the Rwandan genocide to stoke the flames of ethnic hatred. This cartoon in addition to the messages spread by the RTLM illustrate the utilisation of the media to actively help spread the Hutu power campaign. 45 Here again we see parallels with the Nazi period. Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf (and in more coded ways in his speeches) made explicit reference to the Jews as parasitical on the host culture. The Jew “is and remains the typical parasite, a sponger who like a noxious bacillus keeps spreading as soon as a favourable medium invites him. And the effect of his existence is like that of spongers: wherever he appears, the host people dies out after a shorter or longer period” (Hitler [1930] 1977: 277).

- 144 - the figure of the pest, understood as a form of life for which concern is not necessary, operates to suspend concern for the life that is being eliminated. Dallaire’s Shake Hands With the Devil, for example, describes Rwanda during the genocide as “a cesspool of guts, severed limbs, [and] flesh-eating dogs” (Dallaire 2003: 323). Dallaire’s description consists of broken figures of the human body, that together, animate a severed form of the national body politic. The incomplete or less than fully human status also accompanies his animalisation of Rwandans where he describes those hiding from the Interahamwe as “live bait being toyed with by a wild animal, at constant risk of being killed and eaten” (Dallaire 2003: 382). In the same way that the Jews “were exterminated not in a mad and giant Holocaust but exactly as Hitler had announced, as ‘lice’, which is to say bare life” (Agamben 1998: 114), the Hutu regime, particularly the Interahamwe and media called the Tutsis ‘cockroaches’ inciting fear and hatred and reducing the Tutsi to a sub-human status, to ‘bare life’. The homo sacer no longer signifies anything beyond their ‘bare life’; they have no political relevance but for their mere existence outside of the law, banished from the law and abandoned by it.

Within Rwanda, the distinction between who is citizen and who is not became a crucial part of the Hutu rhetoric, and all sorts of criteria for determining citizenship, and more importantly, non-citizenship arose (Ownbey 2013: 17). Using Nazi Germany as an example, Agamben illustrates that “the answer to the question ‘Who and What is German?’ (and also, therefore, ‘Who and What is not German?’) coincides immediately with the highest political task” (Agamben 1998: 130. Emphasis added). Those who are deemed non-citizens, non-Rwandan, in this instance, could then be excluded from the law, abandoned by it and rendered politically irrelevant. Dallaire suggests that the “destruction of their [identity] cards, and of their records” by the génocidaires really did “erase them from humanity” (Dallaire 2003: 281). Agamben insists that in the state of exception there is:

a new decision concerning the threshold beyond which life ceases to be politically relevant and can as such be eliminated without punishment. Every society sets this limit; every society – even the most modern – decides who its 'sacred men' will be (Agamben 1998: 139).

- 145 - The factors that determined citizenship here were outside of the individual's control, race became a divisive tool and it is through this caesura, or by deciding what constitutes the ‘friend’ and at the same time the ‘enemy’, we see life becoming political and thus biopolitical.

Sexual Violence in Rwanda

The genocide was an intense episode of violence and conflict beginning with the civil war from 1990-1994, continuing with the exile of more than two million Rwandans in to refugee camps in the DRC and Tanzania (1994-1996) and ending with the insurgency in the north-west of Rwanda between 1997 and 2000. This decade was characterised by high rates of sexual violence and militarised sex, but what is different is that the 1994 genocide constituted an abrupt break from the social norms, especially in relation to sexual violence and sexual assault. Sexual violence during this time ranged far beyond the so-called ‘ethnic/racial’ constructs of Tutsi-victim and Hutu-perpetrator (Burnet 2015: 140 & 146). A true state of exception was not only seen through the murderous functions of the state through racism, but also in the sexual violence perpetrated throughout the Rwandan genocide. Many sources cite the estimate that 250,000 women were raped during the approximately three months of the genocide. However, these figures are likely slightly inflated with later estimates putting the number of rapes in the high tens of thousands (Des Forges 1999; Sharlach 1999; Omaar and de Waal 1995 and Amnesty International 2004). Regardless of the figure, rape and sexual violence was rife and exceptionally violent during the 1994 genocide. Many Hutu women and girls were also victims of sexual violence in 1994, which means that by simply focussing on the atrocities that were committed against Tutsi women we obscure the complexity of this genocide as a whole (Burnet 2015: 146). During 1994, génocidaires used sexual torture, mutilation and enslavement as weapons of genocide against mainly Tutsi women and girls. Mass rape was a critical part of the Rwandan genocidal strategy. A survey conducted in 1994 of the women in Rwanda found that 49 percent of them had been raped over the course of the genocide. It has also been estimated that 85-90 percent of Tutsi women and girls who survived had been sexually abused in one way or another by the Interahamwe (Weitsman 2008: 573). Whilst the mass rape of women in Rwanda took place on a much greater scale, they have received only a fraction of the attention. However, the rapes in Rwanda follow a similar pattern to the rapes that took place in the Balkans (as will be discussed in the next chapter), where nationalist militias waged ethnic conflict against women’s bodies (Sharlach 1999: 396).

- 146 - In July 1996, the ICTR established a Sexual Assault Committee to coordinate the investigation of gender-based violence because Tutsi women were often raped, tortured and mutilated prior to being murdered. The number of cases the ICTR has heard in relation to sexual violence is absolutely staggering (Human Rights Watch Africa 1996: 7-8; Human Rights Watch 2005).46 Beyond the physical brutality, sexual violence in the genocide consisted of symbolic and psychosocial violence. Rape as genocide accompanied sexual humiliation, mutilation and torture. Three things would end up occurring to the girls and women who were subject to this abuse: (1) rape was accompanied with mutilation and death; (2) rapes were committed first then the women were distributed amongst the Hutu men and ‘married’ (sexual slavery); and (3) rape was used as a reward and this often ended in death for the victim (Sharlach 1999: 395). Génocidaires raped women of all ages with objects such as machetes and knives, killing most of them in the process. Rape was just one component of wholesale humiliation (Human Rights Watch Africa 1996; Omaar and de Waal 1995). The ICTR investigations established beyond any doubt that sexual violence was an explicit strategy of the genocide in Rwanda. Its investigations yielded the first judgement of rape as a crime of genocide in an international court. Many members of the Hutu elite and others were convicted for acts of genocide including sexual violence, torture and abuse (see: Prosecutor v Akayesu).47

Perpetrators targeted the normally privileged role of Rwandan women as mothers. The Hutu would target their attacks on parts of the body that symbolised fertility and reproduction. Their rationale was that “in order to wipe out a race, those who perpetuate it must be targeted first” (Rurangwa 2009: 46 & 163). Women were held often held in separate quarters, beaten and repeatedly raped for days on end (Weitsman 2008: 574). They disembowelled pregnant women whilst still alive and cut their foetuses out of their wombs. They raped and sexually mutilated women and then told them bullets should not be ‘wasted’ on them because they would die of AIDS, presumably contracted through the rape. In fact, men who were HIV positive were purposefully utilised to rape women to transmit the disease to them (Sharlach

46 Whilst this thesis does not have the space to discuss in horrific detail the cases that the ICTR prosecuted in relation to sexual violence in Rwanda, the following are examples of well-known cases that further articulate the correlation between rape and the position of ‘bare life’ women during this time were placed in during this time. Please see: Bagosora and Nsengiyumva v Prosecutor; Prosecutor v Seromba; Prosecutor v Gatete and Prosecutor v Bizimungu et al. 47 In Prosecutor v Akayesu at 449-460, the court held that Jean-Paul Akayesu was responsible for over thirty rapes that took place under his control and backing.

- 147 - 1999: 396; Sharlach 2000; Weitsman 2008: 573). Extremists’ rhetoric targeted Tutsi beauty and desirability – militiamen were promised the opportunity for sexual intercourse with these women as a reward for their ‘hard efforts’ (Burnet 2015: 148). Rape during the genocide also became a political and economic weapon. The Rwandan state sought to eliminate the Tutsi ethnic group through the destruction or systematic stripping of their assets, such as the looting and burning of Tutsi homes and businesses. (Bartrop 2015) Soldiers, militiamen, and civilians alike were rewarded for their work with property taken from the Tutsi (Burnet 2015: 148).

If the human figure is that with which the sovereign obtains the right to kill, that which they deem animalised or stripped of their status and reduced to ‘bare life’, these forms of sovereignty actively work to produce lives of absolutely no concern to institutional apparatuses, let alone warrant protection (Arsenault 2013: 129). The idea of the camp, as understood in this thesis, did not so much exhibit itself in a spatially concrete environment within Rwanda, as it did in Bosnia-Herzegovina. However, this idea of the camp is definitely seen in the sexual violence within Rwanda. The Rwandan government utilised rape as a tool in its campaign of hatred against the Tutsi. Instead of using rape as a mechanism to propagate more Hutu children, it used rape as a mechanism to destroy life at its very core and eliminate the Tutsi population. This differentiated mass rape in Rwanda from that in Bosnia- Herzegovina, as it was not done with the purpose of impregnating the women (Mullins 2009: 16; Weitsman 2008: 577). For the victims of rape in Rwanda the camp was virtually omnipresent, it was no longer fixed between four walls, but came to incorporate society at large (Agamben 1998: 183). Agamben suggests that this is one of the reasons that ethnic rape, and its relationship to the camp as a whole is so important (Agamben 2000: 44). As Mills interprets it, the camp is topological in that “it reveals an abstract logic that is by no means limited to the geographical space of internment” (Mills 2008: 85). The concept of the camp transcends any geographical and historical ideas as the women who were raped became homo sacer and were living in a permanent state of exception. The sovereign had the capacity to establish the state of exception and to torture and kill those stripped of the rights of bios and reduced to a status of ‘bare life’ (Rabinow and Rose 2006: 202; Schotel 2012: 67). As the sexual violence escalated during the civil war from 1990-1994, its ferocity and intensity during the genocide from April 6 through July 1994, constituted an abrupt break with the social norms.

- 148 - This period of time witnessed a complete suspension of the normal functioning of society and the emergence of a state of exception. Rape and the sexual violence associated with it became weapons of genocide used to destroy the Tutsi ethnic group as well as to “terrorise the community and warn all people of the futility of resistance – those targeted as victims as well as those who might wish to protect intended targets” (cited in Burnet 2015: 146).

The RPF’s victory brought an end to the genocide. In the space of 100 days some 800,000 people had lost their lives – this equated to about three quarters of the Tutsi population. More people had been killed in less time than any other mass killing in recorded history. Tutsi who had escaped the slaughter emerged downtrodden, defeated and starving from spending months hiding in caves, swamps and forests and crept out from under sheds and inside cupboards and attics. Many had been saved by the help of moderate Hutu. The entire country had been laid to waste. Hospitals and schools had been destroyed or ransacked; government offices looted; there was no authority; the government was broke; and any food that was grown had been previously destroyed. Everywhere there were ditches filled with rotting corpses and the rivers ran red with blood. Nearly 2 million people inside their own country were refugees, uprooted from their homes, families torn apart, lives broken. According to the World Bank, the genocide crippled the nation and left Rwanda the poorest country on earth (Meredith 2011: 523).

It is an understatement to say that these tragic events occurred at a time when Rwanda’s state and society were in severe crisis. External and internal factors combined during the 5 years preceding 1994 to create an extremely volatile set of conditions. Among these were the nature of the post-colonial state in Rwanda and the changing configuration of regional, class and ethnic divisions; the growing militarisation of state and society in the country as the Habyarimana regime responded to military attacks by the RPF; and the effects of the process of political liberalisation and multipartyism brought about by the concerns of ordinary citizens. These processes occurred in a context of sharply deteriorating economic conditions internally. The Arusha Peace Accords of 1993 served to further heighten anxieties, while events in the neighbouring nation Burundi increased fears and insecurities among many within Rwanda (Newbury 1995: 12; Marchak 2003: 207; Klinghoffer 1998: 23-25). The conflict’s roots lay in a revolution which toppled the long-standing Tutsi monarchy and installed Rwanda’s first Hutu Republic that would exclude the Tutsi from political decision making for the next three

- 149 - decades (McDoom 2014: 38). “Elitism evolved into racism and a myth of historic Tutsi domination and cunning came to be broadly accepted by Tutsi and Hutu alike” (Berkely cited in Moghalu 2005: 11). However, despite this, our understanding of violence in Rwanda has been clouded by visions, not of boiling cauldrons, but of ancient tribal hatreds and warfare. As has been noted, the causes of the turmoil in Rwanda are complex, crossing culture, ethnicity, gender, religion, history, politics and economics (Smith 1998: 743-744). Far from tribal warfare erupting in the vacuum created by the collapse of the state, genocide in Rwanda resulted from the machination of state actors seeking to extend and consolidate their power. It occurred in a context of escalating political, economic and social tensions within the civilian society, at the time of massive popular withdrawal from the political process. “Civil war, devastating economic conditions, anxieties over the consequences of implementing the Arusha Accords, class polarisation, intense power struggles linked with democratisation initiatives – all of this in a country where leaders could, and most definitely did, manipulate ethnic rivalries and fears which had a strong even at times a historical resonance” (Newbury 1995: 16).

Whereas the European Hamitic myth made the Tutsi the civilising agent of the Hutu, the Hutu extremism’s variation of the Hamitic myth made the Tutsi a colonising race of ‘dangerous type’ and ‘absolute enemy of the Hutu’. Any attempt to explain how Hutu extremism developed into a machine capable of killing around one million people within a record time of three months at a pace of at least five times that of Nazi concentration camps is indeed a complex and challenging task (Twagilimana 2003: 136-137). In Rwanda in 1994, Tutsi were humiliated and killed because they were born Tutsi, in the Holocaust Jews were humiliated and killed because they were born Jewish and, in the Balkans, Bosnian Muslims were killed by Serbs because they were born Muslim. The demarcation that separates who we may class as friend and enemy is in DuBois’ words the colour line. However, in Agamben’s view, this line may also be racial as well as “a function of the management of government of the un-political element which is the population, the biological body of the humankinds and the peoples that need governing” (Agamben cited in Fiaccadori 2015: 160). The conflict in Rwanda cannot then be reduced to the imagined ethnic differences between Tutsi and Hutu. As important to an explanation of the events is recognition that, within Rwanda, the ruling parties were divided

- 150 - between factions within their own ‘ethnic’ group. Ethnicity in and of itself, then, is not sufficient explanation for the genocide (Marchak 2003: 54).

Rather, Rwanda demonstrates what is at stake for the individual when they are reduced to ‘bare life’ and made into homo sacer. It depicts the danger and the horrors that can exist in a state of exception, when law withdraws and abandons the individual. What Agamben further illustrates is how the structure of the state of exception is already at work in the dominant structure of modernity, and how the modern subject, despite whatever appearances may seem otherwise, is always already homo sacer. Here we see the ultimate causal relationship between biopolitics and the Rwandan genocide. Agamben argues that the development by which natural life appeared as the new political subject in modernity ultimately paved the way for the murderous racism, rape and torture perpetuated in the name of the sovereign authority and those with whom they act in concert with (Whyte 2012: 245).

The Rwandan case serves to highlight the example of the ‘camp’ that now goes far beyond any earlier incarnations and is now capable of transmutation into a mobile site of operations, where the camp is no longer defined by a given geography, fences or by walls, but rather by political consciousness. Moreover, this is not simply a novel political consciousness, but an extreme form which has the ability to animate the most diverse political spheres. The camp comes to be reinvented as the abandoned space, the zone in between, where anything and everything can be done, and was done, and where these actions are then legitimated (McNamee 2007: 500). The boundary between politically relevant existence and ‘bare life’ has within modernity moved “inside every human life… Bare life is no longer confined to a particular place or definite category. It now swells in the biological body of every living being” (Agamben 1998: 40; Lemke 2011: 58).

In this respect, Rwanda illustrates the very ever-present danger of an efficient and centralised state that “does not embrace the entire polis” but only the part “which members of the hegemonic elite believe it should embrace” (Gros 1996: 460), and this is a severe problem for all states. The Rwandan example illustrates that this is a precursor for genocide. The violence in Rwanda unfolded with different speeds and intensities in different parts of the nation.

Every institution, court and record today confirm that the actions taken in Rwanda were, in fact, tantamount to genocide. However, whilst Rwanda may be a clear-cut case of genocide,

- 151 - we must ask what happens when the status of a state’s actions are perhaps not as clear? Many NGOs, journalists and even scholars refer to the violence perpetrated in Rwanda, and as we will see in Bosnia-Herzegovina, as genocide; the ICTR and ICTY respectively have prosecuted numerous cases where those tried have been found guilty of crimes against humanity and genocide. Depite the ICJ and ICTY finding that the Srebrenica massacre of July 1995 did indeed amount to genocide, the verdict regarding other acts of mass violence committed in Bosnia- Herzegovina between 1992 and 1995, as now turn to analyse, has been anything but clear (Hoare 2014: 516). Nonetheless, the case of Bosnia-Herzegovina provides an interesting and very useful contrast with Rwanda insofar as both are examples of Agamben’s state of exception. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, however, we can also see Agamben’s idea of the camp in action – though in this case the camp has a physical presence that is underwritten by its biopolitical state of exception.

- 152 - CHAPTER SIX – THE BOSNIAN WAR 1992 – 1995

“The tragedy of Srebrenica will haunt our history forever”.

-Kofi Annan, 1999-

Camps do not necessarily always present themselves within an obvious physical setting as we saw in the previous chapter. In Bosnia-Herzegovina two key and distinct places were established as ‘tangible’ camps and zones of exception. In addition, there is the genocide at Srebrenica to consider. All three are examples of where biopolitics has clearly being played out on an intranational level. It also illustrates where modernity clearly facilitates a shift from mere ‘ethnic and ancient hatreds’ to a biopolitical stripping causing the people involved to live in a constant state of exception and to become homo sacer. As has been noted several times already, for Agamben the concentration camp appears every time we normalise the exception, every time we give it a permanent location:

When our age tried to grant the unlocalizable a permanent and visible localisation, the result was the concentration camp. The camp is thus the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule and gains a permanent spatial form (Agamben 1998: 37).

This point further underscores why Agamben places particular emphasis on the modern definitions of “lives worth living”, as well as on modern anthropogony, in which he describes and provides an identification of the threshold between human and animal, evident within all humans (Agamben 2004). In the case of Bosnia-Herzegovina we can see the ‘idea of the camp’ and its instantiation of the state of exception in operation in a way paralleling but yet in contrast to that of Rwanda.

Located in the Balkan peninsula, Bosnia-Herzegovina is a geographically and ethnically diverse country. It is bordered by Croatia to the North, West and South; Serbia to the East and Montenegro to the South-East. From April 6, 1992 until December 14, 1995, Bosnia-

- 153 - Herzegovina became the centre of a policy of ‘ethnic cleansing’ enacted by Serbian authorities, under the guidance of Slobodan Milošević in an attempt to create what they believed would be a more ‘ethnically’ homogenous reason. They aimed to achieve this through the context of war and “reclaiming what they believed would be the ‘Greater Serbia’” (Bartrop 2016: xxi). Concentration, detention and rape camps were set up throughout the nation, leaving more than 100,000 dead, 50,000 men and women raped, and 2.2 million Bosnians geographically displaced (Weitsman 2008: 569). Bosnia-Herzegovina became the scene of mass graves, rape, mutilation and torture (Tatum 2010: 75) (see figure 6.1 below).

FIGURE 6.1 MAP OF BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA

SOURCE: Encyclopaedia Britannica URL: DATE ACCESSED: April 11TH, 2017

The Bosnian War brought with it much discussion and many plans of action, among which was the debate on how to hold perpetrators accountable. As was the case with Rwanda and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), on the back of this crisis the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (or ICTY) was created, designed to hold criminally responsible those who committed the atrocities. A new term ‘ethnic cleansing’ was subsequently added to the Western vocabulary. It was coined in the 1990s to describe the actions emerging from the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, a war over the disintegration of one nation state, the former Yugoslavia, and the formation of others – Bosnia-Herzegovina,

- 154 - Croatia and Serbia (Mann 2005: 356; Leydesdorff 2011: 22; Tatum 2010: 75). The claim that the organised mass violence carried out by Serbian authorities and paramilitary forces within Bosnia-Herzegovina during the 1992-1995 war in fact constituted genocide has divided genocide scholars. Detailed academic studies of the mass violence inflicted in Bosnia- Herzegovina by Bećirević (2014) and Cigar (1995) have strongly supported the view that this was, indeed, a case of genocide. Helsinki Watch (now known as the Human Rights Watch) was the first non-governmental organisation to pronounce that its findings in 1992 and 1994 respectively, at the very least being prima facie, provided evidence that genocide was taking place within the region. Amongst academics, Jones (2016) applies the term ‘genocidal’ to the Serbian atrocities committed in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and even Kosovo; Shaw (2007: 48-62 & 130) argues that ethnic cleansing must be categorised as ‘genocide’, a term which he applies to the Serbian atrocities in Bosnia and Kosovo; Naimark (2001: 160) discusses the “genocidal treatment of the Muslim population in the first months of the war”; Rummel (1994: 31-32) states categorically that the Bosnian Serb massacre of Bosniaks is in fact genocide, as does Cigar (1995) whose Genocide in Bosnia: The Policy of ‘Ethnic Cleansing’ illustrates how the events in Bosnia focussed on a genocidal approach; and Weitz states that “as an eminently twentieth-century dictatorship, Serbia made ethnic cleansing and genocide a cause not only of the state but of the population as well” (Weitz 2003: 235; Mulaj 2003: 417).

Whichever term one settles on, ‘genocide’ or ‘ethnic cleansing’, the Serbian state attempted to ‘cure’ the ‘biopolitical’ fractures of the people, the cracks within a nation which were derived from ethnic, racial and/or class differences. Whilst ‘ethnic cleansing’ and the notion of an exception to the juridical norm (may be) potentially harder to determine, it is still evidenced through the production of a unified people (classified as the other). The Serbians harnessed the pure political power, which was unbothered by the law – the figure of homo sacer was thus identified as Bosniak (Kurelić 2009: 148).48 Where we could clearly identify the state of exception occurring within Rwanda in 1994 and the Srebrenican genocide of 1995, it is now also evidenced throughout the ‘ethnic cleansing’ campaign of the Bosnian War in general. When we look at ‘ethnic cleansing’ and genocide in terms of the Bosnian War, ‘ethnic cleansing’ emerges as both an atrocity and an example of ritual violence, which can be seen

48 Bosnian Muslims, during the Bosnian War were known as Bosniaks, regardless of whether they were religious or not. As such, for the remainder of this chapter will be referred to by this name.

- 155 - as a politically constitutive act, based on the power of selection and simultaneous exclusion of the ‘other’. As has been discussed elsewhere in the thesis, it is this capacity, that is the power to select who lives and ultimately who dies, which is the most fundamental expression of the claim to sovereign power.

Whilst certainly there were perpetrators and victims on all sides, to characterise the war as an inevitable conflict among equal age-old ethnic adversaries is completely inaccurate (Hoare 2011).49 Most importantly the parties to this conflict were not equal. Serb forces held all the weapons and power of the JNA (Yugoslav People’s Army) in which the Bosnian-Serb state was organised (Bartrop 2016: xxii; Hoare 2007). Slobodan Milošević was in control of a very powerful bureaucratic apparatus and an army which was considered a very strong military force. Serb forces targeted Bosnian Muslims in a coordinated and strategic way. War efforts were very well organised and extremely well planned. This is contrary to the idea of spontaneous, passionate outbursts of violence and in keeping with Bauman’s vision of a genocidal state (Bauman 2003). To many outside observers in the West, the war in Bosnia appeared to be a civil war. It was not. In a civil war, there is usually an attempt to co-opt, coerce, capture or enslave the opposition (Tatum 2010: 77). In Bosnia-Herzegovina this was not the case at all. Bosnia was a unique war.

Bosnia-Herzegovina: Events Leading up to 1992

In order to understand why war broke out in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1992, it is important to provide a brief snapshot of the history within the country. The history of the Balkans goes back hundreds of years, however as this chapter is not providing a history of Bosnia-Herzegovina, this overview is limited to establishing the geopolitical context leading up to the outbreak of war in 1992.

There have been a few iterations of Yugoslavia over the years with the countries that make up this ‘nation’ dating back to the fourteenth century (Hupchick 2002; Lampe 2000: 9). However, it was not until the end of the First World War in 1918 that the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes emerged. It was a multi-ethnic monarchical state dominated largely by Serbia. The

49 We have previously seen this same argument arise with regards to the Rwandan Genocide of 1994. Among theorists, Hoare (2011) suggests, there is a common misconception that nations, due to evidence of age-old ethnic conflicts, will almost always inevitably be at war with one another, and that this is something politics and intervention will be unable to fix.

- 156 - monarchy was renamed the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1929 and was the first time the colloquial name for the nation was officially utilised (Benson 2001: 1 & 52). At the end of the Second World War, Yugoslavia emerged as a federated communist republic under the leadership of Marshal Josip Broz Tito (known as the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia or SFRY). The Yugoslav-Soviet split occurred in 1948 where Yugoslavia broke away from the Stalin dominated Eastern bloc to become an unaligned communist nation (Lampe 2000: 241). Economically the federation did reasonably well until the early 1960s when economic growth slowed dramatically affecting the various constituent provinces differently. In Bosnia’s case by the 1960s, it was falling behind the rest of Yugoslavia economically. Bosnia’s national income was 20 percent below the national (Yugoslav) average in 1947 and dropped to 28 percent below by the end of 1969. In the 1970s, with the exception of Kosovo, Bosnia-Herzegovina had Yugoslavia’s highest infant mortality rate, illiteracy rate and the highest percentage of people whose only education consisted of the first three years of primary schooling (Kalyvas and Sambanis 2005). During this period, many Orthodox Serbs left Bosnia in favour of the more cosmopolitan cities of Zagreb in Croatia or Belgrade in Serbia. This shift slowly altered the ethnic mix of Bosnia, as Tito had feared, to a country that was predominately Muslim (Lampe 2000: 335). This was the general state of play when after nearly forty years in power, Tito died, leaving a power and political vacuum (see figure 6.2 on page 158).

Once the Soviet Bloc collapsed, Yugoslavia lost all global strategic importance, and the economic opportunities that were afforded it by Cold War neutrality, evaporated completely. The constituent regions of the former Yugoslavia emerged to become separate nation states that were recognised surprisingly quickly by other European nations. Opportunistic politicians preyed on Yugoslavia’s instability, especially in Croatia and Serbia, where they rallied support through fear-based nationalist appeals (Hayden 2008: 493). Milošević ascended to power in Serbia, and almost from the outset strived to create a practically totalitarian, Stalinist regime (Mann 2005). He blamed the ‘ethnic other’ for the nation’s crises, using historical tragedies of the world wars to imply impending contemporary threats (such as the Bosniaks), and further advocating for ‘Serbian Unity’ as the ultimate solution (Gagnon 2004; Glenny 1992). Milošević tapped into the genuine economic grievances of many of his fellow countrymen, further channelling their discontent to aid his own political ends. A “political ethno-kitsch” swept through the Serbian nation and even found its way into Serb popular-culture during the late

- 157 - 1980s as well as music, football clubs, media and other Serbian-dominated spheres. A nationalist form of patriotism emerged that emphasised the Serbian status as the victim and their shared destiny as a unified solution (Udovički 2000; Weitsman 2015: 127). This in turn fuelled the fires in Croatia, where nationalism arose and created instability and mistrust within the nation. By 1990, what Tito had created, his so-called “Brotherhood and Unity”, had crumpled under the weight of xenophobic hysteria (Bartrop 2016: xxii). The leaders of Yugoslavia were effectively “stirring a cauldron of blood that would soon boil over” (Glenny 2012: 634).

FIGURE 6.2 MAP OF THE FORMER YUGOSLAVIA

SOURCE: United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia URL: < http://www.icty.org/en/about/what-former-yugoslavia> DATE ACCESSED: July 20TH, 2014

As ethnic tensions throughout each nation escalated, Bosnia’s political situation grew progressively more tenuous. Convinced that the remaining Serb-dominated ‘rump Yugoslavia’ would be disastrous to peaceful multi-ethnic co-existence, on March 1, 1992, Bosnian Croats and Bosniaks voted for an independent Bosnia-Herzegovina.50 Strongly opposed to this separation from Serbia, Bosnian-Serbs declared an independent Bosnian-Serb Republic (under

50 The term ‘rump Yugoslavia’ refers to the two remaining republics of Yugoslavia – Serbia and Montenegro – that had not voted for independence. The ‘Federal Republic of Yugoslavia’ or ‘rump Yugoslavia’ lasted from 1992- 2003.

- 158 - the presidency of Radovan Karadžić) (Glenny 2012: 327). The war began on April 6, 1992, when Serbian snipers opened fire on a peaceful demonstration in the city of Sarajevo. At the same time, the JNA and other paramilitary forces invaded Bosnia. Karadžić promised a swift and concise victory, even stating that the war could be all over in just six days (Malcolm 2002: 234). In the same month, the international community recognised Bosnia’s right to independence, however, influenced by Milošević’s claims that this was a civil war with which Serbia had no part, the United Nations stated they had no business engaging. The Bosnian and Serb JNA’s withdrawal from Bosnia-Herzegovina, placated the Western politicians and journalists, who were quick to characterise the violence as an inevitable civil war among three equal, eternally fighting ethnic groups (Bartrop 2016: xxii; Power 2002). However, very much like the case of Nazi Germany, the influence of paramilitaries undermined the organisation of the army and the rationality of the plans, as they were often too difficult to control and practised exceptionally violent methods. It was estimated in 1993, that around 70,000 paramilitaries were operating on the front, half the size of the regular Yugoslavian army (Mann 2005: 394). The army’s initial refusal to hurt civilians and their disillusionment with Milošević’s goals for Serbia, meant that varying groups of paramilitaries throughout Bosnia-Herzegovina were utilised on a number of levels. Nationalist politicians also utilised paramilitaries in order to convince Serbian civilians in Bosnia that their Muslim neighbours “posed a threat” (Malcolm 2002: 237). Almost immediately, Serbian paramilitary groups began campaigns of ‘ethnic cleansing’: burning homes, raping, forcibly deporting civilians to concentration and death camps, and killing all non-Serbs in the East of Bosnia. The war in Bosnia-Herzegovina culminated with the genocide in Srebrenica in 1995 and ended 5 months later with the signed Dayton Agreement.

The Term ‘Ethnic Cleansing’ and Bosnia-Herzegovina

The terms ‘genocide’ and ‘ethnic cleansing’ warrant further elaboration, in relation to Bosnia- Herzegovina, as both played a controversial role in the debates within international relations discourse and international politics during the Bosnian War. The term ‘genocide’ – was used both narrowly and broadly within international relations and was something that the international community, at times refrained from using, to avoid labelling specific atrocities within Bosnia-Herzegovina as genocides. It is here that we find the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ emerging, and this term in particular became used frequently to label certain crimes (Bell-

- 159 - Fialkoff 1993: 110). Mojzes (2011: 1) claims if there were ‘bragging rights’ for a region engaging in genocide and ‘ethnic cleansing’, the Balkans would almost without a doubt gain championship status. Killing the ‘other’ is a clear act of elimination, and the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ suggests just this – purification, homogenisation, elimination and expulsion. In its basic form it is merely a question of ‘pollution’ – that is, some people are out of place, they are somewhere they do not belong, and this is then a problem (Humphrey 2002: 73). The concept of ‘ethnic cleansing’ is probably one of the most interesting terms to look at in relation to mass murder and genocide. In the Western world, large-scale forcible relocation of a specified ‘people’ was introduced in the early nineteenth century in the United States, as the official policy of the government. However, as a legal category, the term has only been proposed recently as a result of the ICTY’s formation and subsequent trials. The term was used throughout the Bosnian War, as Donia (2014) suggests, arguably to dilute some of the seriousness of the crimes committed and justify the non-use of the term genocide. This became evident where the international community quickly tried to rule out the ‘g-word’ within Bosnia-Herzegovina, not wanting a repeat of 1994 to happen again so quickly (Donia 2014: 18). This form of warfare was really epitomised during the Bosnian War and can be seen within the rape camps scattered throughout the country as well as the unrelenting Serbian aggression towards the Bosniaks as well as the Bosnian Croats.

To many theorists (see for example: MacKinnon 1994b: 186; Carmichael 2002: 1), ‘ethnic cleansing’ has been utilised as a euphemism to mask the horrors of war and employed to minimise or deny genocide by putting a ‘nicer’ term or a ‘pleasant’ face on mass atrocity (Donia 2014: 18). However, the discussion that the systematic killing and mass murder carried out by the Serbian authorities and other military forces in Bosnia-Herzegovina during the Bosnian War constituted genocide has divided genocide scholars. For example, Ther (2014) argues that the difference between ‘ethnic cleansing’ and genocide is all in the numbers and that mortality rates provide evidence of a clear difference between ‘ethnic cleansing’ and genocide. In Srebrenica, the site of the only crime against humanity in the former Yugoslavia that is regarded as genocide under international law, Bosnian Serbs killed one-third of the town’s Bosniaks, all the men of fighting age. The ‘ethnic cleansings’ in the rest of the country Ther claims, no matter how inhumanly or murderously they were enforced in some places, did not cause a comparable loss of life (Ther 2014: 243).

- 160 - The international courts have been unanimous in declaring the Srebrenica massacre of July 1995 a case of genocide, with both the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) ruling that it did indeed amount to genocide. However, the verdict regarding other acts of mass violence perpetrated in Bosnia- Herzegovina between 1992 and 1995 has been anything but precise (Hoare 2014: 516). The difficulty in approaching the notion of ‘ethnic cleansing’, is that it has not yet received clear legal definition. Currently the terminology includes a conglomeration of the categories of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and its definition may or may not include genocidal intent, genocidal massacre and ultimately genocide itself (Blum et al 2007: 204-205). In addition, the meaning of the term remains blurred and is frequently used loosely and interchangeably with ‘genocide’. The interchangeable use of ‘ethnic cleansing’ and genocide has been common not only among everyday people, but also amongst political practitioners, scholars of political and international relations, as well as journalists. For example, the UN General Assembly Resolution 47/121 of December 18, 1992, states in paragraph 9 of the Preamble that, “the abhorrent policy of ‘ethnic cleansing’… is a form of genocide…”. Genocide was also recognised in Article 4 of the Statute of the International Tribunal for the Prosecution of Persons Responsible for Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law Committed in the Territory of the Former Yugoslavia since 1991 (referred to now as the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia or ICTY) (UN Security Council Resolution 827).

This Bosnian War has repeatedly been misrepresented as something of a ‘civil war’, the aggressors being equated with that of their victims and with all sides to this conflict (Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia), being accused of ‘hatred’ toward the other. However, as will be argued below, this was not a ‘reciprocal’ war, nor was it a ‘reciprocal’ genocide. International observers, including political leaders, avoided labelling this event genocide, not only to sidestep acknowledgment of another mass murder and genocide occurring at, and around the same time as Rwanda, but also to avoid direct forms of intervention, providing rather NATO forces and the UNPROFOR to ensure order was maintained. Instead of acknowledging what had occurred within Bosnia-Herzegovina throughout the early 1990s, the ‘international community’ suggested that the war was due to ‘ancient hatreds’ and stemming from centuries of conflict and difference within the Balkan region, that were in fact, the actual issues responsible for the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the outbreak of a ‘civil war’ (Cigar 1995:

- 161 - 11). Power in her book A Problem from Hell, quotes former US President Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State Warren Christopher as saying that “The hatred between all three groups is almost unbelievable. It is almost terrifying, it is centuries old. That really is a problem from hell” (Power 2002: 298 & 303). This very much illustrates the international mentality at the time.

Genocide and ‘Ethnic Cleansing’: Agambenian Application

The logic of this so-called ‘ancient hatreds’ argument really implies that the parties to the conflict merely needed to ‘fight it out’ or let the ‘chips fall where they may’, and it is this mentality that was made evident by the ‘international community’ that intervention would not and could not stop the bloodshed that was occurring within the former Yugoslav nations (Farkas 2003: 107). However, there is a consensus that the existence of any ‘age-old’ hatred was greatly exaggerated and in the case of Bosnia, did not in fact, start the war. A large number of scholars within the political science and international relations fields have pointed out that there is a nexus between war and genocide, as genocides most often take place during wars, or that genocide may even be seen as a kind of war (see for example: Jones 2016; Kinloch and Mohan 2004; Walliman and Dobkowski 2000; Bartrop and Totten 2009; Straus 2010 & 2012; Sémelin 2002 & 2007; and MacKinnon 1993 & 1994a).51

The ‘popular’ or ‘general’ understanding of the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ invokes the horrors of tribal hatreds and primordial allegiances, with many in the West choosing to utilise this account when it came time to labelling the issues occurring in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The international view at this time not only coded the conflict as one that was ethnic in nature, but also implied a sense of moral distance between the brutality of Bosnia-Herzegovina and the ordered space of the Western nations right next door (Humphrey 2002: 69). However, when evaluating this war, regardless of terminology, ‘ethnic cleansing’ is simply another example of the resort to mass death that we have seen in the twentieth century and an exemption of the normal juridical space. Whilst the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ describes seemingly organised atrocities, in the context of nationalist struggles, and which have occurred in the context of struggles of state power as an instrument of mobilisation and

51 It should be noted here that this example of sources is not a complete list, but rather is merely a sample of the variety of sources that have charted the nexus between war and genocide.

- 162 - displacement, ‘ethnic cleansing’ is also a form of atrocity which extends biopolitics and encompasses it – the century of power on the care and/or control of the individual – by selecting who can be killed with impunity (i.e. who is considered beyond the protection of the law, that is, homo sacer). As Humphrey (2002) further illustrates, ‘ethnically coded corpses’ within the context of the nation state need to be contextualised within a project of ‘state power’ that is focussed on within the biopolitical. As is evident within the post Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, ‘ethnic cleansing’ here is included within the observation that these were genocidal wars, in the sense that they were wars of organised states against a civilian population as such, as well as war between state centres (Blum et al 2007: 205). In the case of Bosnia-Herzegovina, ‘ethnic cleansing’ acquired a genocidal element given that killing, torture and rape were all employed, at times on a large scale, in order to spread such fear and insecurity as to compel the community of victims to take flight.

The methods of achieving [ethnic cleansing] are… not limited to physical elimination. For instance, a person may be sexually assaulted in order to be humiliated or emotionally destroyed or to be proven submissive or subordinate; a person may be raped in order to cause chaos or terror and/or to make people flee the area, effectively destroying the “group”; a woman may be raped in order to forcibly impregnate her with a different ethnic gene. Different tactics but with the same objective – destroying or removing the unwanted group (Askin 1997: 262. See also Stiglmayer 1994 and Allen 1996).

Genocide and ‘ethnic cleansing’ involves the collective act of selection, divination and the elimination of the ‘other’. If we view these crimes as something not necessarily politically contextualised within the nation state, then what should be, or what needs to be explained are the ‘ethnic’ origins of the conflict, relating back to the ‘ethnic, ancient hatreds’ that have often been used to describe the outcome of this war, as argued by Brubaker and Laitin (1998). However, what Brubaker and Laitin fail to take into consideration is that these crimes, in the sense of an intranational war (in comparison to international wars), presents its victims clearly and as victims of a methodical approach to mass violence. Whilst both forms of war resort to killing to reaffirm each sides ideas and beliefs, genocide and ‘ethnic cleansing’ clearly illustrate their aims through the notion of ‘marked bodies’, ‘ethnically coded corpses’ and biological markers, that is the signalling out of the ‘other’ (Mbembe 2003: 17; Agamben 2008: 201).

- 163 - When we evaluate the ‘other’ in the context of international wars they are already delineated historically, culturally and often spatially as they are already outside the nation’s borders – however, within an intranational war the ‘other’ is dispersed within that country and it is harder to differentiate the different groups as they live amongst each other within one, fixed border (Humphrey 2002).

Within the context of the Bosnian War, the Serbs created a clear-cut margin as they aimed on creating a ‘Greater Serbia’ within the borders of Bosnia (Bartrop 2016: xxi). ‘Ethnic cleansing’ and genocide in this instance involved acts of selection and de-humanisation (along the lines of racial and biological markers), forced segregation and obvious elimination of the ‘other’ to achieve their ultimate political aim. Here the Bosniaks, Croats and even more ‘moderate’ Serbians were seen as the ‘other’ and swiftly eliminated. It was the “constitutive act of ‘citizen- making’ by resorting to the ‘corpse’ to substantiate the nation-in-the-making by juxtaposing the nation negatively to the ‘other’s’ corpse with the simplified aim of exclusivity within a nation” (Humphrey 2002: 70-71). Those targeted by the Serbian act of aggression were transformed through this violence and expelled from the community of the living, they were placed outside the normal legal juridical order and in the process, they were also de- humanised, stripped of their rights as a citizen and de-sacralised.

Apart from the physical and practical nature of genocide, this is more importantly a crime which is about asserting identity and defining ‘us’, as strong and pure, in relation to and as a binary opposition to ‘them’, classified as weak and impure (Bartov 2000; Sémelin 2003: 197). This is a crime of cleansing, which has deep symbolic and cultural connotations, and as such does not only target the physical existence of the group necessary for its continuing existence (Bauman 2003). This is why the quest for purifying the nation is often accompanied by an attack on its memory: extermination of all evidence that the group ever lived on the territory, including any testimonies of co-existence and inter-marriage (Friedlander 1993). Naimark (2001) further illustrates the connection between biopolitics and modernity. He states that “ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia… is a profoundly modern experience, related to previous instances in the twentieth century but not a product of ‘ancient hatreds’” (Naimark cited in Mojzes 2011: 3).

- 164 - The threshold between life and death is therefore not only constantly questioned, but also located at the very core of biopolitical considerations about the juridical order, and the relationship between individual rights – including that of residing in one country or location – and the collective body politic (Minca 2015: 76). Even though ‘ethnic cleansing’ was often carried out in random fashion by militaries and paramilitaries, militias and the like, there was a key political goal: to make a modern nation state through forging an exclusive and incontestable relationship between people and territory and the simultaneous exclusion of ‘the other’ (Humphrey 2002: 11). Even with legal terminology there is no clear-cut demarcation between the terms ‘ethnic cleansing’ and genocide. This is especially telling at the end of the spectrum where ‘ethnic cleansing’ becomes so violent that it develops into genocide. Humphrey (2002: 73) further articulates this point when he argues that “mass murder is the centrepiece of ‘ethnic cleansing’, that being the production of ethnically coded corpses, with the mass grave being the metaphor for human waste, a mechanism for de- individualising and de-humanising the ‘other’”. Genocide, we might then argue, is seen as the most heinous stage of ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the broader sense of the term, namely a conscious effort and often government-conducted attempt at exterminating, eradicating and, if at all possible, attempting to make a group vanish from the face of the earth (Mojzes 2001: 7). So, whilst we may see the Balkan region as a region which has experienced, over the centuries, a multitude of clashes and ancient hatreds, it is through the lens of biopolitics and the de- humanisation of the ‘other’ that we can better understand this phenomenon. The production of human waste, such as the stateless Bosniaks and Bosnian Croats, becomes one of the most important outcomes of the modernising process. It is the concept of homo sacer that for Agamben (1998) is the most important category of human waste, something or someone who can be disposed of and killed without a second thought. Human waste, at any time can be dispensed with, disposed of, or simply locked up and forgotten altogether (Blackshaw 2005: 78).

The ‘Camp’ and the Bosnian War

The empirical examples analysed below reveal how the victim identity of camp detainees was created, recreated and retained in contrast to the ‘us’ – the Serbian authorities and military forces. The camp detainees portrayal of their victim identity presents their humiliated self through dissociation from the camp and their guards. The detainees new, albeit altered,

- 165 - morality is a product of their imprisonment at the camp and the associated repetitive humiliation and power rituals (Basic 2017: 89). The production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power (Vaughn-Williams 2009: 22). The life that may be killed sets the stage for the most original and fundamental sovereign decision: that is to live or let die (Schotel 2012: 68).

What characterises modern politics is not so much the inclusion of bare life or zõe in the polis, nor simply the fact that life as such becomes a principal object of the projections and calculations of State power, but rather the state of exception in which bios and zõe are no longer separable – nor are right and fact, but instead enter into a zone of ‘irreducible indistinction’ (de la Durantaye 2009: 316).

The sovereign, in this case the Serbians, not only declared, but also illustrated clearly the state of exception within the Bosnian War through its enactment of the camp. As we have seen, the camp is the experimental laboratory where life has been and continues to be inscribed into order, into real and imagined spaces (Agamben 1998). This is precisely why those in Bosnia- Herzegovina, and as we have also seen in Rwanda, were located ‘between camps’ and were consequently subject to the biopolitical imperative that, in the camp, finds its theoretical and material origin and justification (Minca 2015: 78). It is evident that as the Serbian forces embarked on more drastic measures of trying to eliminate the Bosniaks and Croats from their vision of ‘Greater Serbia’, their actions more frequently conflicted with the law and morality, thus further enhancing the state of exception.

Detention centres such as the concentration camps utilised in the Bosnian War are what Augé calls ‘non-places’: “they do not integrate other places, meanings, traditions, and sacrificial, ritual moments but remain, due to the lack of non-symbolised and abstract spaces” (Augé cited in Diken 2010: 91). The concentration camp, in Agamben’s reading, is thus the ultimate laboratory where biopolitics turns into thanatopolitics, where people may be treated as purely members of a population (and translated into pure numbered living bodies, as in Auschwitz and other camps of a similar nature), and where race allows for the cut into the body politic that endlessly separates life into its political and biological essence (Minca 2015: 79). Within Bosnia-Herzegovina we can see that the distance from full citizenship was measured by the

- 166 - accepted level of violence against particular individuals or social categories who were treated formally or informally as if they occupied social spaces beyond the law. It is this compartmentalisation of social life that charts the threshold of life in which modern biopolitics constantly seeks to delineate (Agamben 1998). The politicisation of human life by the declaration of rights means that “the distinctions and thresholds that make it possible to isolate sacred life must be newly defined” (Agamben 1998: 131). The space created in those acts of ‘rounding up’ social categories for exclusion, expulsion, and at its very height extermination – are evidenced through the camps and ghettos of World War Two, the commonly thought safe havens of churches, hospitals, schools etc. turned massacre sites within Rwanda, the UN designated safe enclave in Srebrenica and the work and rape camps within Bosnia-Herzegovina (Humphrey 2002: 7). The ultimate bureaucratisation of this process is the selection and exclusion within the ‘camp’ as the epitome of the state of exception. The camp therefore can be seen as a ‘dislocating localisation’ which compartmentalises ‘bare life’ at the centre of political sovereignty in the face of the disjunction between birth and nationality.

Bosnian Work and Rape Camps

The work camps within Bosnia operated very similarly to the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, in fact the Serbs chose to utilise the term ‘concentration camp’ for their own use (Mann 2005). The physical camp in Bosnia-Herzegovina stood out, primarily because the perpetrator often knew his victim. The tools used for killing were not only firearms, but also knives, steel rods, electric cables and batons (Basic 2017: 75). In Rwanda, as has been discussed in Chapter Five, paramilitary and irregular militias wreaked a similar terror on the populations, but ultimately aspired to kill all Tutsi’s within the country’s borders. In contrast to this, in Bosnia-Herzegovina we see Serbian paramilitary forces being used to murder and ‘ethnically cleanse’ the nation with the aim of either eliminating or forcing Bosniaks and Croats to flee (Mann 2005: 395). Concentration camps and work camps became the norm after Ratko Mladic took over as the commander of the Bosnian-Serb forces. In May 1992, he opened prisoner of war and death camps which were scattered throughout Bosnia (Tatum 2010: 78). There were two specific types of camps: killing camps, such as Omarska, where a person would be murdered shortly after arrival, and detention centres, where the primary activity was rape

- 167 - and torture.52 Eastern Bosnia-Herzegovina was the site for many of these camps, which became the places closely associated with the first mentions of the word ‘genocide’ in connection with Bosnia in an international context.

Indeed, the existence of these various institutions reveals a sense of profound logic, rationality and organisation (Sells 1996: 18-19). Serb forces also set up many more temporary detention centres throughout the country. Some estimates have put the number of the camps as high as almost 700, although these were mostly small and were held quite often in schools and houses. Camps became the site of a myriad of atrocities including murder, torture, and the brutal rape of both women and men. In many cases prisoners were starved and forced to wallow in their own excrement (Human Rights Watch 1992: 65 & 89; 1994a & 1994b; Gutman 1993). Work camps were set up throughout Bosnia-Herzegovina to house Croats, Bosniaks and the more moderate dissenters from the ‘Greater Serbian’ ideal. In addition to the work camps established within Bosnia, a horrific new trend emerged which subsequently stripped many women, girls and men of their right of choice. The rape camps of the Bosnian War have been well documented as systematically planned Serbian instruments of genocide, designed “not merely to encourage the evacuation of all non-Serbs but to destroy parent-child and spousal bonds as well as rendering large numbers of the society’s child-bearing women contaminated and thus unmarriable” (Boose 2002: 73).

As was seen in Rwanda, in addition to mass murder and torture, rape and sexualised violence was extensive and systematic. Rape and death camps were buildings where Bosnian- Herzegovinian and Croatian women and girls were kept and systematically raped for weeks or months at a time by Serbian personnel from the Yugoslav Army, irregular Serbian soldiers, the irregular Serb militia known as Chetniks, and at times, even civilians. These so-called rape camps were one of the chief strategies used by the Serbian forces, primarily against the Muslim populations within Bosnia-Herzegovina (Boose 2002: 71). The ‘ethnic cleansing’ operations systematically wiped out whole peoples and villages, which is why the work camps were often termed ‘death camps’ as the workers would be systematically chosen for extermination, or they would be worked until they could no longer survive. In Omarska, one

52 See appendix (d) & (e): Map of the Bosnian Genocide 1992-1995, With Special Reference to Massacre, Detention and Concentration Sites; Mapping the Serbian Concentration Camps.

- 168 - of the most famous camps set up during the war, there were reportedly 7,000 people missing from a population of 25,000 in the neighbouring town. That was 1 in every 3.5 people. Gutman, who was at the time working for Newsday reported:

In one concentration camp, a former iron-mining complex at Omarska in northwest Bosnia, more than a thousand Muslims and Croat civilians were held in metal cages without sanitation, adequate food, exercise or access to the outside world (Gutman 1993: 44-45).

At the Omarska camp, a true state of exception was visible where 300 prisoners were put in 700 square-foot cages and were stacked four high (Tatum 2010: 79). In the summer of 1992, for example, in the Omarska camp alone, about 5,000 – 7,000 Bosniaks and Croats were held in appalling conditions. Hundreds died of starvation, punishment beatings and ill treatment. Hundreds more were transported to different localities and executed (Basic 2017: 76). There were two separate sections within the Omarska camp, the ‘white house’, which was used for physical abuses, rapes, torture and occasional killings, and the ‘red house’, which was utilised solely for killings (ICJ 2007: 172; Allen 1996: 64). The general atmosphere of the camps made the detainees lose any will of their own; they became apathetic and they simply waited to die.

Other rape and death camps were no less horrifying. These were anything from hotels to hospitals, even schools and were also found in animal stalls and arenas. During the Bosnian War upwards of thirty such rape camps were in use at any one time (Allen 1996: 65). In 1992, Bosnian Muslim women arriving in refugee camps in Croatia began reporting that they had been repeatedly raped by Serbian men. Though the estimates have varied, it is generally assumed that close to twenty thousand women and girls were raped during the war, with eighty percent of these rapes occurring in detention centres and concentration camps (Engle 2005: 784-785). Concentration camps or detention centres often doubled as brothels for the military. Rapes were used as formal military tactics as soldiers were ordered to rape by their commanding officers. “Women of all ages were targeted, including pregnant women and some middle-aged women; however, it was the attractive, young, wealthy and educated women who were the most frequent targets” (Amnesty International 1993). Girls and women were raped as an instrument for spreading terror and these rapes were often committed in front of family members (Leydesdorff 2011: 22). Reproducing the nation became a prominent

- 169 - theme in political rhetoric. Women’s identities and bodies in the Serbian nation were enlisted to serve the nationalist mantra; a woman ‘patriot’ was someone who could regenerate the nation through motherhood (Cockburn 1998: 161). There have been numerous cases and stories documented where women and girls were held for weeks and months as captives in ‘rape camps’ and used as sex slaves, later being either sold off or killed (Mann 2005: 357). According to a study completed in 1996, thousands of rapes took place with the sole purpose of impregnating women, (thus stripping these women of their rights and utilising them as mere ‘vessels’, no longer people, to wipe out the Bosniak race, in the service of creating a ‘greater’ Serbia) (Allen 1996: xiii, 97 & 104).

Additionally, rape was used as a form of genocide (Tatum 2010: 78). The military policy of rape ultimately leading to genocidal outcomes was practiced in Bosnia-Herzegovina by the Yugoslav Army, the Bosnian and Serb forces as well as Chetniks. According to Allen (1996), three main forms of rape as policy were practiced in Bosnia: (1) Irregular forces enter a village, take several women of different ages from their homes, rape them in public and depart. Days later regular Bosnian soldiers arrive and offer the terrified residents safe passage on the condition they never return. Most leave the village abandoned to the Serbs, thus furthering the goal of ‘ethnic cleansing’; (2) Bosnian-Herzegovinian women and men being held in Serb concentration camps are chosen at random to be raped, part of the ‘torture preceding death’ mentality; and (3) Serbian soldiers as well as irregular forces arrest Bosnian women, imprison them in a rape/death camp and rape them systematically for extended periods of time. These rapes were usually either part of torture preceding their death, or part of torture leading to forced pregnancy (Allen 1996: 63). Allen here makes a convincing point that this violates Article II of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, particularly the following sections of Article II:

a) Killing members of the group; b) Causing seriously bodily or mental harm to members of the group; c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life and calculated to bring about the physical destruction in whole or in part; d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.

- 170 - Clearly, rape was used as a tool to demean, humiliate and eliminate Muslims and Croats in Bosnia: a crime for which some have only just been recently tried (Tatum 2010: 78). Rather than being simply a by-product of war, ‘ethnic cleansing’ and rape constituted some of the war’s most significant practices (Mulaj 2003: 422). In most conflicts, or wars, the element of rape functions as a tactic aimed primarily at humiliating, degrading, intimidating, and torturing the enemy. In Bosnia, rape served as a weapon to destroy the genus of a people and a specific ethnic group. Rape in these instances, and as we have seen with Rwanda, becomes a prelude to death and ultimately dismemberment (Weitsman 2008: 563; Diken and Laustsen 2005: 112). When faced with cases such as these Bosnian rape camps, where women became literally biological war zones, it is clear that life, death and their thresholds are constantly being reinvented and spatialised in the camp (Stiglmayer 1994b). The gorgon of the camp is its fundamental thanatopolitics (Mbembe 2003).

Within the camps, and especially the rape camps, we see something entirely new emerge within the broader theme of modernity. For some of these rapists it was the final solution without it being the complete extermination of the Bosnian Muslims. Whilst it would seem unfair to compare why the Nazis, for example, did not rape Jewish women, yet the Serbs raped Bosniak women, “what is important to note is that rape is an expression of pure violence and power, and has a sadistic quality that should not be overlooked in cases of ‘ethnic cleansing’ and genocide” (Kurelić 2009: 154). The point is aptly generalised by Brownmiller (1993: 37) who states, “sexual trespass on the enemy’s women is one of the satisfactions of the conquest… for once he is handed a rifle and told to kill… [has the permission] to kick in the door, to grab, to steal, to give vent to his submerged rage against all women”. According to Kurelić (2009: 154), Agamben, in terms of ethnic rape, perceptively recognises the biopolitical character of organised and controlled rape. This is because ethnic rape controls the bodily functions of the victim by brute violence and force, thus placing the victims in a state of exception. To Agamben the camps of ethnic rape are crucially important (Agamben 2000: 44). In the Bosnian-Herzegovinian context, their goal of creating a non-Muslim baby served to eliminate the mothers’ claim to humanity, or at least their ethnic identity, as they no longer had any power over their ability to conceive, or even consent to these acts. The women placed within these rape camps were stripped of rights and left with ‘bare life’ to become homo sacer.

- 171 - MacKinnon, one of the most vocal in arguing that rape in the Balkans amounted to genocide, has taken this argument one step further and attempts to reconcile genocide and ‘ethnic cleansing’ through the example of the rape camp within the framework of biopolitics. She states that it should be acknowledged that ‘ethnic cleansing’ is merely a euphemism for genocide, as it was utilised as a policy of ethnic extermination of non-Serbs with the aim of “all Serbs in one nation” – there was a clearly announced political goal of a ‘Greater Serbia’ with territorial conquest and praise for the Serbian nation and its people. She claims that what happened in Bosnia-Herzegovina was in fact genocide, in which “ethnicity, culture and race were tools for political hegemony; the war was an apparatus of genocide and rape was an instrument of the warfare” (MacKinnon 1994b: 187).

The creation of something that is neither governed by law or natural life was produced within these camps and the detainees found themselves as ‘bare life’, the life of the in-between. These camps operated outside the normal rule of law: becoming “the place in which the most absolute conditio inhumana ever to appear on the earth is realised” (Agamben cited in Mbembe 2003: 12). Torture, beatings, illegal interrogations, as well as severe humiliation and sexual abuse of prisoners within camps such as Omarska have been prosecuted by the ICTY (Basic 2017: 76). For example, the cases of both Duško Tadić and Kvočka et al. were found by the Trial Chamber in the ICTY, beyond a reasonable doubt, to have involved the mistreatment and torture of victims in the Omarska Camp during the Bosnian War. In addition, there is the Brdanin case where the court upheld several counts of severe physical abuse, sexual violence and rape. These cases, however, are only a snapshot of the numerous ones heard by the ICTY in dealing with the crimes committed during the Bosnian War. The importance of these rulings is not simply to give clarification about what occurred within Bosnia-Herzegovina during this time, nor is it to illustrate the horrific acts that occurred within these camps. Whilst both of these points are relevant to an extent, these cases are also useful in further illustrating the importance of a biopolitical approach to understanding what occurred within Bosnia- Herzegovina.

The escalation of violence through these atrocities served only to further entrench already existing cleavages, and proposed solutions based solely on the complete annihilation, either through death or otherwise, of the ‘other’ as the ‘normalised’ enemy. The concentration camp of Omarska, and dozens more like it, did not just occur as a one off, or an exception within the

- 172 - throws of war, nor were they operating in a secured place of a certain nation. Rather, they were operating in broad daylight on the European stage. Agamben argues that the state of exception, as the state of nature, is inbuilt within the New World Order, that being modernity – “the state of war and the actions associated within this are accepted in the nomos of exception” (Agamben 2005: 70). He claims that the extermination and rape camps can be easily established within the existing international order and are left to carry out their objectives for months, or even years interrupted. As such, sovereign power is about determining what belongs inside and outside the politico-legal order (Kurelić 2009: 154-155). The example of these camps within Bosnia-Herzegovina and the actions carried out there, epitomised the zone of the undecided – this was a true state of exception where the standards of normative order were no longer adhered to. What Schmitt claimed should or would be a temporal cessation of the rule of law, became a permanent state of exception where the ‘maintenance’ of civilisation was given to a chosen few, but not to those the sovereign chose to kill. Any rational thought thoroughly broke down and the state of exception was introduced in order to get around the difficulties in applying their ever more drastic measure against the Bosniak ‘other’.

In evaluating a biopolitical approach to the formation of these camps and the establishment of a state of exception within, Agamben does not delve into the reasons as to ‘why’ places like Omarska were established in the shadow of the collapse of socialism within the former Yugoslavia, nor does he attribute these issues to the shift in post-Cold War economy and politics. He does not search for the elements which make up a regime that is capable of running violent, brutal camps, but rather recognises the common origin of modern political violence, this is the common origin of all camps. Unlike the Nazi death camps, these camps were not designed to exterminate all non-Serbs, although death was a definite possibility. Rather, they were designed to dehumanise the population. It is here where Agamben’s theoretical approach sheds light on the epitome of the state of exception. Those placed within the state of exception, within the camps of Bosnia-Herzegovina, were stripped of their humanity and were made to work until they were no longer able to, raped until they had served their purpose, or were systematically chosen for death. These people had become isolated from all political and juridical decisions and their lives became exposed to anything and everything that would come, no matter how brutal it might be. It is within this notion of

- 173 - homo sacer, something built within every single human being, and the establishment of a camp outside the normal juridical process that allowed these people to be killed outside a normal, legally prescribed procedure.

Rape and ‘ethnic cleansing’ was a new departure from the brutalities of the Holocaust and a unique (albeit generally not seen as ‘new’) atrocity. At the same time it is something symptomatic of modernity, at least when seen from an Agambenian perspective. What is essentially ‘unique’ here, and something Agambenian biopolitics can aid us in our understanding, is that “rape has never before been used this consciously, this cynically, this openly, this systematically, with this degree of technology and psychological sophistication as a means of destroying a whole people” (MacKinnon 1994a: 75). In tying this in to the present analysis, we are able to see that Bosniaks were the ‘essentialised figures’ that constituted the ‘other’ within the idea of the ‘Greater Serbia’. The aim was not to disperse a people across other territories, as the very basic understanding of ‘ethnic cleansing’ would have us believe, it was rather, in the words of Hannah Arendt “to cause a people to disappear not just from their own land, but from the land” (Arendt [1979] cited in Sémelin 2007: 340).

Srebrenica, July 1995

The Drina Valley, in which Srebrenica is situated is infamous for the slaughter of nearly 8,000 men and boys in July 1995. By the end of May 1992, Serbian forces had occupied and ethnically cleansed a large part of Eastern and Western Bosnia (Hirsch 2012: 57). At the beginning of the war, the town had been the site of an early Serb defeat at the hands of the local Bosniak militia, in which approximately 400 Serbians were killed (Burg and Shoup 1999: 133). As a result, the area had become a safe haven for approximately 40,000 non-Serbs within an ever- expanding hostile Serbian territory. Serb forces surrounded Srebrenica for the majority of the war, and whilst the city was declared a UN Safe Zone, the citizens of Srebrenica lived in a constant state of hunger and violence (Bartrop 2016: xxiii; Malcolm 2002: 255). Eventually the Serbian commanders gave the UN an ultimatum: either force the citizens to evacuate the city or prepare for a military campaign. On 6 July 1995, Bosnian Serb forces, with the help of the ‘rump Yugoslavian’ Serbian military and Serb paramilitary forces under the command of General Mladic began an aggressive campaign on Srebrenica. The women and children were deported to Kladanj, in Bosnian Government territory. In the Krstić judgment it stated that

- 174 - “almost to a man, the thousands of Bosnian Muslim prisoners captured, following the takeover of Srebrenica were executed” (Prosecutor v Krstić at 67).

Within a few days, approximately 25,000 Bosnian Muslims, most of them women, children and elderly people who were living in the area, were uprooted and, in an atmosphere of terror, loaded onto overcrowded buses by the Bosnian Serb forces and transported across the confrontation lines into Bosnian Muslim-held territory. The military-aged Bosnian Muslim men of Srebrenica, however, were consigned to a separate fate. As thousands of them attempted to flee the area, they were taken prisoner, detained in brutal conditions and then executed. More than 7,000 people were never seen again (Prosecutor v Krstić at 1).

Tens of thousands of Bosniaks fled Srebrenica whilst the Serb forces hunted down and rounded up between 7,000 and 8,000 Bosniak men and boys. They were then loaded on to trucks and buses and brought to clearing in the forests surrounding Srebrenica and systematically executed (Power 2002: 394-405). This slaughter was the darkest point of the war and was ultimately revealed to be largest massacre on European soil since World War Two. In drawing a biopolitical link to the phenomenon of genocide, we can see this clearly within the ‘safe enclave’ of Srebrenica.

The intensification of the biopolitical problematic, for Agamben, emerges after the end of both the Nazi and Stalinist dictatorship of World War Two. He argues that since then biopolitics has “passed beyond a new threshold – in modern democracies it is possible to state in public what the Nazi biopoliticians did dare not say” (Agamben 1998: 165). This was evident throughout the Bosnian War and the ‘ethnic cleansing’ and genocide that followed. The Serbians, in this instance, did not hide behind any justifications about what they were doing, they justified their actions rather through a biopolitical approach, biological markers were exhibited through the demarcation of the ‘other’. In contradistinction to what some critics of Agamben argue, Agamben is not equating democracy and dictatorships here, or devaluing civil freedoms or even social rights. Rather, he is attempting to expose the fact that the democratic rule of law is not an alternative political project to the Nazi dictatorship of the ‘30s and ‘40s. Rather, these dictatorial political regimes “radicalise the biopolitical trends, that according to

- 175 - Agamben, are already present in other political contexts and whose power today has increased rather than decreased” (Lemke 2011: 57). In evaluating the Nazi concentration camps, for instance, Agamben does not argue that these examples lie on the margins of what might occur, that this phenomenon represents a ‘logical’ exception; rather he “searches and evaluates the ‘regularity’ or normality of this exception and questions to what extent ‘bare life’ is an essential component of contemporary political rationality, considering that life and its preservation and prolongation are increasingly the object of legal regulations” (Agamben 2000: 37-45 cited in Lemke 2011: 57). Whereas Nazi biopoliticians concentrated on identifiable individuals or definite subpopulations (and this can also be said to have occurred within the Bosnian War), Agamben argues that “in our age all citizens can be said, in a specific but extremely real sense, to appear virtually as homines sacri” (Agamben 1998: 11).

The very notion of ‘Srebrenica’ is symptomatic of the ghettos created in World War Two. In Srebrenica, the conditions for genocide became manifest once power was placed in the hands of those not only within the government, but those in other positions of authority, such as the military. In this situation, it made possible the massacre of thousands within an area outside a normal juridical space despite a UN presence being evident. As previously mentioned, Agamben locates the source of law not so much in the state of exception, but rather in the creation of that state of exception. Events such as the genocide at Srebrenica further strengthen his argument and heighten the potential for the state of exception to occur. Serbian ‘ethnic cleansing’ campaigns culminated with the 1995 Srebrenica genocide and is telling not only with relation to the international community’s most critical shortcomings throughout the war, but also clearly illuminates the biopolitical approach in which Agamben centres this genocide.

In Means Without End Agamben writes:

It is from this perspective that we need to see the reappearance of camps in a form that is, in a certain sense, even more extreme in the territories of the former Yugoslavia. What is happening there is not at all, as some interested observers rushed to declare, a redefinition of the old political system according to new ethnic and territorial arrangements… Rather, we note there an irreparable rupture of the old nomos as well as a dislocation of populations and

- 176 - human lives according to entirely new lines of flight. That is why the camps… are so crucially important (Agamben 2000: 44-45).

Despite the presidents of Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina signing the Dayton Agreement on 21 November 1995, the disaster of Bosnia-Herzegovina, in the former Yugoslavia, dominated the international stage for much of the 1990s (Glenny 2012: 651). It was the first time since the Holocaust of World War Two that people claimed genocide was taking place within a military conflict in Europe. The toll of the genocide and ‘ethnic cleansing’ within the former Yugoslavia was and remains alarming. According to a compilation of international and regional estimates, by the time the genocide occurred in Srebrenica, approximately 2.2 million people were thought to have fled the region, with over 100,000 men, women and children murdered (Weitsman 2008: 569). The post-Yugoslav wars of the 1990s were genocidal wars, in the sense that they were wars of organised states against civilian populations as such, as well as wars between state centres (Shaw 2003: 190). The emphasis here on the Bosnian War as an extreme consequence of the convergence of biopolitical factors that are not, in and of themselves exceptional, remains a useful reminder that these separate and distinct factors help us to understand Serbian organised violence as violence outside the normal realm of law and placed within a permanent state of exception culminating with the Srebrenican genocide of 1995. Organised, systematic and rational violence established law, and organised, systematic and rational violence maintained that law.

There is no doubt that many reprehensible deeds were committed against civilians during the Bosnian war. The ICTY trials of the past two decades, together with a rich collection of documents, eyewitness statements, scholarly works and journalists’ accounts, erase any doubt that mass atrocities took place in a large number of municipalities in 1992-1995 and that genocide occurred in the Srebrenica area in 1995 (Donia 2014: 17). ‘Ethnic cleansing’, despite its vague legal standing is generally easier to demonstrate than genocide. As was the case within the Bosnian War, the events that played out within Bosnia-Herzegovina were more easily established before a court of international public opinion, than before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Yet, while this explanation of the differences and comparisons between ‘ethnic cleansing’ and genocide is perhaps helpful from a legal point of view, and the ICTY and UNCG help to explain these differences, it is nonetheless too rational and sterile to account fully for the enormity of what occurred in Bosnia-Herzegovina between

- 177 - 1992 and 1995 (Boose 2002: 74). However, in utilising an Agambenian approach we can see that despite the legal hang ups and the plethora of discussions for and against these terminologies that claim ‘ethnic cleansing’ is in fact different from the crime of genocide, the biopolitical approach allows us to see through these points to the core of the issue – that both of these issues detail the darker side of modernity and modern democratic practices, rather than being defined and confined by a specific legal or political argument. ‘Ethnic cleansing’, as argued by MacKinnon (1994a) and Allen (1996), amongst others, can be seen from a biopolitical approach as the removal or liquidation of all non-Serbs from the former Yugoslavia, the removal of citizenship, the exposure to brute force and their subjection to a state of genocide. The campaign of expansion by the Serbs was driven by the quest for a ‘Greater Serbia’ through ethnic extermination which included but was not limited to rape, forcible impregnation, torture and mass murder of Croatian and Bosnian Muslim men, women, and children (MacKinnon 1994a: 74; Helms 2007: 237).

Power (2002) called the Bosnian War “a problem from hell”, and international activists labelled the issues that occurred in the Balkans as “primordial ancient hatreds”. The evidence of ‘ethnic cleansing’ within Bosnia-Herzegovina shows that rather than being seen as a reversal back to the ‘primitive’ tribal hatreds, it should be seen instead as a key tactic within a ‘very modern war’. The key political goal was to make a modern nation-state through forging an exclusive relationship between a nation and the state and the simultaneous exclusion of ‘the other’. After all, the capacity to select who lives and who dies is the most fundamental expression of the claim to power (Humphrey 2002: 72). However, whilst the war crimes, ‘ethnic cleansing’ and genocide that occurred during 1992-1995 might be viewed as exceptional circumstances, and in relation to mass murder, cases that perhaps do not frequently repeat themselves, they are no less important, for an understanding of how the state of exception was subsequently created in Bosnia-Herzegovina. During the war in Bosnia- Herzegovina civilians were made direct targets – and even became willing participants – in acts of war. As was evident in the case of Rwanda, Bosnia-Herzegovina also fell victim to the loss of identity within the nation (Bauman 2003). The suspension of the rule of law in Bosnia- Herzegovina during 1992-1995 ceased to be a temporal state of exception, but rather was exhibited by the rape and death camps established all over the Bosnian nation. The ultimate grasp of power by the Sovereign or the State over the lives of the populations and races in

- 178 - Bosnia-Herzegovina is exemplified for Agamben in the paradigm of the camps (Patton 2007: 203). The figure of homo sacer was easily targeted by using biological markers, race and cultural associations to pick out those who no longer fit within the plan for a ‘Greater Serbia’ (Ownbey 2013: 20). This means in the case of modernity that the behaviour and violence is seen not so much of ‘ethnic hatreds’ and ‘barbaric acts of a primitive ethnicity’, but of an essentially modern phenomenon occurring throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

As important to an explanation of the tension between Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia- Herzegovina, the view of primordial ancient hatreds and age-old rivalries is not a sufficient ‘over-arching’ explanation for the ‘ethnic cleansing’ and indeed genocide that occurred. Agamben’s biopolitical perspective is an exceptionally useful alternative for understanding in greater detail, the correlation between the sovereign and the citizen and the power shift by those in authority to control Bosniak and Croat lives during the Bosnian War.

- 179 - CHAPTER SEVEN – CONCLUSION

Armenia (1915-1923)

The Holocaust (1939-1945)

Cambodia (1975-1978)

Rwanda (1994)

Bosnia-Herzegovina (1992-1995)

Darfur (2003-)

This thesis began, in its earliest form, as a personal interrogation of the inner workings of Agamben’s biopolitical theory and its subsequent application to violence, mass murder and the crime of genocide. However, as I worked closer and closer with the materials and after visiting places of mass atrocity, such as the concentration and death camps in Germany and Poland, as well as travelling to various locations in Rwanda in 2015, this topic, its associated research and the analysis I was providing became much more to me than a simple revision of political theory and historical events of the 1990s. As the subject matter deepened the importance of the thesis took on a new perspective, that being the consideration of the human and the important role it plays.

The central argument in this thesis is that the current prevailing theories of genocide (as outlined by Jones) do not fully account for genocide as a phenomenon. However, by looking at the topic of genocide as well as ‘ethnic cleansing’ from an Agambenian biopolitical approach, a form of analysis was developed that provided the means to challenge these already taken for granted assumptions, as well as providing an alternative understanding of the concept of genocide as a phenomenon. This thesis has discussed the currently accepted approaches to genocide, laid out key features of Agamben’s biopolitical theory and outlined the key influences and main criticisms of his work. This theory, the Agambenian approach, was then applied to cases of genocide and ‘ethnic cleansing’ in both Rwanda and Bosnia- Herzegovina. Through these cases key biopolitical concepts were explored such as homo sacer, ‘bare life’, the state of exception and the camp.

- 180 - This thesis focused on the genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina as case studies using an Agambenian biopolitical approach to demonstrate an alternative, more encompassing theory to account for the phenomenon of mass murder and ultimately genocide itself. The twentieth, and indeed twenty-first centuries, have been marked as ages of extremes. World wars, terrorism, civil war, ‘ethnic cleansing’ and of course genocide – all of these have helped shape and mould the world in which we live. In the wake of the Second World War, the destruction this war caused left millions dead and millions more attempting to reconstruct their broken lives. The Nazi Holocaust proved to be the single most catastrophic event of the twentieth century in terms of numbers, more than 800,000 starved to death in the ghettos; more than 1,300,000 were shot or gassed to death; and up to 3,000,000 died in the Nazi concentration and death camps between 1939 and 1945 (Hilberg 1980: 94). Because of the sheer scale of the Nazi perpetrated Holocaust, it is no wonder that it ranks as an unparalleled event in human history. However, whilst the Holocaust is undeniably a significant event in our history, it is not the only example of mass murder. Since the end of the Second World War, historians, political scientists, psychologists and sociologists have all attempted to provide analysis as to ‘why’ genocide and mass murder occur. This thesis has argued that despite the unique and often useful insights these theorists bring to the study of genocide, they do not adequately (by themselves) explain each issue, as it arises, when dealing with cases of genocide. Biopolitical theorists, on the other hand, have helped to provide an alternative and insightful way of analysing the issues we have faced in the past and continue to face today. Foucault (1990: 137), for instance, suggests from his biopolitical perspective that wars will be bloodier and genocide will become ever more prevalent.

As has been discussed, Agamben sees himself closer to no-one more so than Foucault as a theorist, but he pushes the theory of biopolitics further and provides an alternative to Foucault’s position. Agamben focusses his questions on the world in which we live today, with a focus on the modern. His questions and concerns raise not only issues for looking at the Holocaust, but also how modern genocides, indeed how Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina for example, were possible in a post-totalitarian world. Agamben draws much from his ‘politicisation of ontology’ – that is, he believes sovereignty is a political structure, but it is symptomatic of a deeper rupture with the traditional approach and one of negativity (Colebrook and Maxwell 2016: 1). The function of sovereignty is charged with the selection of

- 181 - ‘bare life’, which excludes some part of humanity from its political society and opens it up to pure violence. In his view there is a wider change of governance across the world in which the rule of law is routinely displaced by the ‘state of exception’ (Elliot 2014: 372). In a broader sense, today we live in an increasingly fragmented society in which “distinctions between culture and nature, biology and politics, law and transgression, mobility and immobility, reality and representation, immanence and transcendence, inside and outside… tend to disappear” (Diken and Laustsen 2006: 451). This is the site that forms like a zone of indistinction between law-making and law-preserving violence at the very place of our alleged being or nature. It is indeed human life itself that is said to contain a biopolitical break that forms on the very zone of indistinction between ‘bare life’ and qualified life. “What Agamben proposes, then, persistently, arguably, controversially and against the dominant current theory, is that a theory of the state of exception is the preliminary key to any understanding of the now, permanent zone of indistinction between ‘bare life’ and qualified life” (Zartaloudis 2010: 160). Indeed, Agamben’s concept of the camp, the prototypical zone of indistinction, appears as the hidden logic between this process that creates a new social topology. The camp emerged as the concentration camp, originally, as a space in which the life of the ‘citizen’ was reduced to ‘bare life’, stripped of all form and of value. However, “as the inside/outside distinctions disappear, the production of ‘bare life’ is today extended beyond the walls of the concentration camp. That is, today, the logic of the camp is generalised; the exception is normalised. Hence it is no longer the city but the camp that is the paradigm of social life” (Diken and Laustsen 2005: 451).

Agamben’s diagnosis of the activity of sovereign power as the production of ‘bare life’ in zones of indistinction between zõe and bios has important implications for the way we think about the politics of life and death, as well as the space in between. Agamben focusses on the emergence of concentration camps in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, historically associated with the state of exception and martial law. “In Agamben’s understanding the ‘camp’ excludes what is captured inside it and which, as another form of inclusive exclusion, blurs the conventional spatial distinction between internal and external” (Vaughn-Williams 2009: 25). Because law is suspended in the camp and exception practices become the rule, Agamben therefore argues, that the camp represents: “the most absolute biopolitical space that has ever been realised, a space in which power confronts nothing

- 182 - other than pure biological life without any mediation” (Agamben cited in Vaughn-Williams 2009: 25-26).

The ultimate grasp of power by the Sovereign or the State over the lives of populations and races is exemplified for Agamben in the paradigm of the camps. The Sovereign is within the state, and acts as a functioning part of a legal system based on the principle of sovereignty. However, as its foundation, the Sovereign is also in a unique position whereby they stand beyond that very same system and it is because of this that it can declare its own suspension (Norris 2007). But as Agamben demonstrates Sovereign states may be the exception they are nonetheless immanent of modernity itself (Agamben 2002: 11). It becomes a fourth space added to that of State, nation and land, in which inhabitants are stripped of everything except their ‘bare life’, which are places without recourse in the hands of those in power. This is why the camp is the very concept of politics and becomes in and of itself ‘biopolitical’ (Agamben 1998: 171). Agamben argues that through the development of the state of exception within biopolitics, sovereign power is no longer confined to those who are explicitly agents of the state, it rather extends to all those who have authority over spaces of human existence. Hence, Agamben argues that the power over life exercised today by the “jurist… the doctor, the scientist, the expert, the priest arises from the alliance with the sovereign into which they have entered… they then wittingly or unwittingly do the sovereign’s will” (Agamben 1998: 122). In providing power to those in positions of authority, the concept of citizenship then assumes a position of particular importance. Within modernity, the distinction between who is a citizen and who is not becomes exceptionally critical – as these figures of authority determine the criteria for granting citizenship and more importantly non-citizenship – that is they provide the demarcation between ‘us’ and ‘the other’. This point, as has been previously discussed, (see pages: 144-145 & 164) is exceptionally important in cases of genocide as the concept of statelessness creates groups of ‘surplus’ peoples, thus making them main contenders for genocide.

An analysis of the camps both tangible (as was the case with Bosnia-Herzegovina) and where the lines were invisible and omnipresent (as we see in Rwanda) are demonstrative of the way in which sovereign power is crucially implicated in these most horrifying acts of mass violence. By charting the variety of camps that have been created over the decades – Nazi concentration and death camps, the rape and concentration camps of the Bosnian War and the society at

- 183 - large in Rwanda – we can draw a parallel between each example as locations where we find people who are produced as ‘bare life’, a form of life than can be killed without impunity but not sacrificed. In a state of exception, the question really comes down to ‘who decides’ – and what this decision may entail. Within war, the question amounts to asking what kind of peace the combatants thought feasible. However, within a genocide, the ideology of those doing the killing will never contemplate their enemies. This was certainly evident for the Jews, gypsies, Slavs, Bosniaks and Tutsi, to name a few. Within a state of exception, the regime will pursue their subjection or extermination quite literally radicalising and returning to the roots of brute warfare arguing or justifying it as a life and death struggle (the very epitome of ‘the other’).

Whether we are discussing the Jews in Auschwitz, the Tutsi in Rwanda or the Bosniak peoples held within the walls of Omarska or similar camps, it is clear that each group entered their respective camps not as a result of a political or even a legal choice, but rather on the basis of what was the most private and sacred within one’s self, that is, one’s blood, their biological self. The latter does not function as a decisive political criterion, in the sense we see the camps as being the pure, inaugural site of modernity: it is the first space in which public and private events, political and biological life, become rigorously and swiftly indistinguishable. This is because, as Agamben articulates, the inhabitant of the camp has been severed from any political community and reduced to the status of ‘bare life’. Whilst they still may have been seen as a ‘private’ person, there is no single instance in which they may be able to find shelter in the realm of the private and it is precisely this indiscernibility that constitutes the specific anguish of the camp (Agamben 2000: 121). The suspension of the rule of law in both Rwanda in 1994 and Bosnia-Herzegovina during 1992-1995 ceased to be a temporary state of exception, which remained continually outside the normal state of law. Agamben broadens this argument by suggesting that during a state of exception, sovereign power is no longer limited to one person, but rather extends to all those who have authority over human existence.

As this thesis has previously suggested, the current prevailing UNCG definition of genocide suggests that genocide is a rare phenomenon and must tick a number of legal ‘boxes’ to be classified as such, whilst other modern crimes of mass murder are defined as belonging altogether to other alternative categories. In this view, genocide is only considered as such if a large number of people are murdered in an attempt to annihilate immediately and physically

- 184 - the whole group and all of its members regardless of gender, age, class or the territory in which they live. Genocide is not seen as overlapping with other categories, such as ‘ethnic cleansing’, but it is rather seen as exclusive and isolated – other ways of physically endangering the survival of a group, apart from killing are not taken into consideration. Indeed, at times, a genocide will only be considered as such, if it can live up to the reputation of the Holocaust. Both definitions, however, involve arguments that point to what is ostensibly a larger symptom of modernity as an organising process. Acknowledging this is not to trivialise the events that occurred during the Holocaust. However, this thesis has acknowledged that terminological disputes involve shifting discursive practices that by their nature remain contested. To move beyond this the thesis proposed a more inclusive definition requiring us to answer the question of what happens when the status of a state’s actions are not as clear as they potentially should be? That is, what happens when sovereign power is no longer the definitive locus of the state’s power and its subsequent actions, when the individual holders of different levels of authority operate independently of each other but in such a way that their actions cumulatively result in genocidal outcomes? The chapter on Rwanda brought out the answer to this question quite clearly, namely ‘bureaucratic genocide’ (Melvern 2004; James 2015).

Agamben’s biopolitical approach allows us to see this answer more clearly because it shifts the focus from an exclusive concern with a specific issue such as ethnicity, race, gender, class, or even simply viewing genocide from a definitional perspective, to a recognition of the central issue of biopolitics – power. As has been discussed at length in this thesis, this is a form of power that is situated and exercised at the level of life and which operates through the state of exception and ultimately the camp. The categories of biopolitics, the state of exception and the camp therefore allow us to see contemporary genocide in its darkest form, as ‘ethnic cleansing’ writ large. Many scholars have noted the link between ‘ethnic cleansing’ and genocide and the progression from one to the other. The term ‘ethnic cleansing’ suggests atrocity, purification, homogenisation, elimination, expulsion and ritual violence (sacrifice) as it also does with genocide. Each in turn reduces social mapping to a question of pollution – that some people, some ethnicities are misplaced. The centrepiece of both genocide and ‘ethnic cleansing’ is mass murder, massacre, and the production of ethnically coded corpses. The ‘mass grave’ is the marker of both genocide and ‘ethnic cleansing’. We have seen this

- 185 - exemplified in the bones, the graves and the tribunals for both Rwanda and Bosnia- Herzegovina. “The ‘mass grave’ is a metaphor for human waste, a mechanism for de- individualising and de-humanising the ‘other’. It also declares the collective and intentional purpose of reducing individuals to an abject category in order to treat them as objects. Mass death in a mass grave signifies de-humanisation by making death anonymous” (Humphrey 2002: 73).

In re-evaluating and revising the examples of both Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina, this thesis has noted the issues that underlay these political conflicts – conflicts that have nothing to do with so-called ethnic hatreds or primordial allegiances (Newbury 1998: 19). For example, the evidence of ‘ethnic cleansing’ within Bosnia-Herzegovina shows that rather than being seen as a reversal back to the ‘primitive’ tribal hatreds, it should be seen instead as a key tactic within a ‘very modern war’. The discussion of Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina in this thesis has demonstrated that both of these cases serve as examples of the promotion of life as being somehow non-political, extra-political, the void between life and death and between sovereignty and homo sacer, not to be a process which demonstrates its superior worth, but rather demonstrative of its extreme vulnerability and fragility. The very notion of life itself, within these spaces, is exposed and susceptible to anything that may come. Ancient hatreds can thus not be used as a justification for atrocities, as genocides have one profoundly modern thing in common, a version of nationalism in which ethnicity trumps class. In pre-modern, multiethnic empires, the population was stratified in so many ways that a modern mass movement that could potentially lead to genocide could never have taken place.

The fact that the issue of race is something that is always occurring within the calculus of biopolitics was also clearly illustrated within Bosnia-Herzegovina and Rwanda. The key political goal was to make a modern nation state through forging an exclusive relationship between a nation and the state and the simultaneous exclusion of ‘the other’. After all, the capacity to select who lives and who dies is the most fundamental expression of the claim to power (Humphrey 2002: 72). The power given to others in positions of authority within the state not only created administrators but primary organisers of these events as well. This is why Agamben finds the issue of the state of exception extremely problematic. The exception quickly turned violence into a technique, free from emotions and purely rational – as such, this thesis charted these occurrences. Not only did we see this in Nazi Germany through the

- 186 - euthanasia plans and concentration/extermination camps, but they are evident also within both Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina:

(1) The purposeful targeting of Bosniaks and Tutsi via racial identification programs; (2) The fact that both the Hutu in Rwanda and Serbians in Bosnia-Herzegovina firmly believed it was their right to rid their respective nations of people they deemed unworthy of living within their country. (Inyenzi (or cockroach) was used in Rwanda to create a sense of being inferior, a correlation which can be drawn to the term Untermensch utilised by the Germans in World War Two); (3) The propaganda, both media and print, presented to incite hatred and to fuel the flames of violence within both Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina; and (4) The status of detainees in the Bosnian work and rape camps and the de- humanisation of Tutsi as ‘cockroaches’ and constantly vilified through a variety of platforms, both of which were stripped of their rights and could be killed, but whose killing did not constitute punishment in any legal terms.

Whilst these could arguably all be written off as isolated, extreme cases in relation to mass murder, they are nonetheless integral for the creation of a state of exception within both Rwanda and the Bosnian state. In genocide and ‘ethnic cleansing’ these are clearly evidenced through the choice to kill by the different murderous functions of the state, all of which are central to the concerns of biopolitics and an understanding of mass killing as a phenomenon. The political significance we see in Agamben’s work and its application to both Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina is in his making it clear that it is not simply enough to expand the rights of those who previously have been without rights and therefore without protection, Agamben insists that new ways and new forms of politics are needed in light of this (Lemke 2011: 64). Therefore, even though for Agamben, Auschwitz might be the most radical materialisation of the deadly potential of European states hidden in the transformation of politics to biopolitics, his arguments are relevant for an understanding of genocide as a phenomenon (Kurelić 2009: 142).

During the genocide in Rwanda and the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina civilians were made the direct targets – and even encouraged to act as participants – in acts of violence and war.

- 187 - Through the examples, cases and even the first-hand accounts provided to us a loss of identity within the nation is evidenced (Bauman 2003). Agamben, in relation to biopolitics and genocide, has developed a variety of concepts that remain outside of the normal political theory. These are issues he considers ‘banned’ from any sort of political reflection or analysis – life and death, health and sickness, the body and medicine (Lemke 2011: 64). Whilst Agamben focusses primarily on the outcomes of Nazi Germany, the Holocaust and the events of World War Two, his theory has proved exceptionally relevant for an application to the crimes committed in both the Rwandan genocide, as well as the Bosnian War. What Agamben’s theoretical framework shows us, in relation to both genocide and ‘ethnic cleansing’, is that the notion of the state of exception was already established within the dominant structure of modernity and despite appearances, these people were already, prior to the violence homo sacer. This in turn made it easier to target specific groups, taking into consideration biological markers, race, ethnicity and cultural associations (Ownbey 2013: 20). This means in the case of modernity that the behaviour and violence is seen not so much of ‘ethnic hatreds’ and ‘barbaric acts of a primitive ethnicity’, but of an essentially modern phenomenon occurring throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Agamben’s theory here serves to show that these problems are important when evaluating genocide or potential issues of genocide. They are crucial to any consideration of the political, and that the sphere of the political constitutes itself precisely through the exclusion of ‘bare life’ (Lemke 2011: 64). This framework that Agamben gives us is most appropriate for explaining and understanding the shift to the control over the lives of the Tutsi and Bosniaks in both Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Biopolitics, therefore, is an exceptionally helpful means to assist in our understanding of how the atrocities within both Rwanda and the Bosnian War occurred. Mass murder is evident, not only within the totalitarian nations of the Second World War and the ‘outlier nations’ of the Global South, it is also prevalent today in any modern democracy, in developed and organised nations as well.

This thesis has provided the basis for developing a set of unique insights into the nature of genocide as well as providing a critical evaluation of Agamben’s concept of the biopolitical and its explanatory power for understanding genocide and mass murder as a phenomenon. In this theory, it has been argued, lies the political significance of Agamben’s work. Whilst Agamben’s theoretical approach to biopolitics has been both adapted from previous critical thinkers, and

- 188 - has been the subject of harsh criticism today, his theory nonetheless provides an alternative approach to analysing and understanding the various ‘ethnic cleansings’ and genocides which have occurred within the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As this thesis demonstrates, an Agambenian approach provides the tools necessary to explain both biopolitical theory and expose the dark side of modernity, that in turn enables the inner workings of these particular genocides to be exposed. But just as importantly, an Agambenian approach also provides the means to identify conditions that might be the harbingers of future genocides.

- 189 - APPENDIX APPENDIX (A) THE TWO LEVELS OF BIOPOWER

Type Target Aim Institutions Tactics Studies and Regulatory Population; Knowledge, The State (the practices of Power Species and power and sovereign). demographers; (Biopolitics). Race. control of the sociologists; population. economists; interventions in birth rates, longevity, public health, housing and migration. Studies and Disciplinary Individual Knowledge, Schools, armies, practices of Power Bodies. power and prisons, criminologists; (Anatomical subjugation of asylums, psychologists; Politics). bodies. hospitals and psychiatrists; workshops. educators; apprenticeships; tests; education and training.

SOURCE: Taylor, Chloë. 2010. Biopower. In: Taylor, Dianna. Ed. 2010. Michel Foucault: Key Concepts. Great Britain: Acumen at 46.

- 190 - APPENDIX (B) NOSE MEASUREMENTS

SOURCE: My own picture, taken at the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre, Rwanda. October 2015.

- 191 - APPENDIX (C) KANGURA CARTOON

SOURCE: Kinzer, Stephen. 2008. A Thousand Hills: Rwanda’s Rebirth and the Man Who Dreamed It. New Jersey: John, Wiley & Sons, Inc at 385.

- 192 - APPENDIX (D) MAP OF THE BOSNIAN GENOCIDE 1992-1995, WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO MASSACRE, DETENTION AND CONCENTRATION SITES.

SOURCE: Bartrop, Paul R. 2016. Bosnian Genocide: The Essential Reference Guide. California: ABC-CLIO, xvi.

- 193 - APPENDIX (E) MAPPING THE SERBIAN CONCENTRATION CAMPS.

SOURCE: WGBH Educational Foundation, PBS URL: DATE ACCESSED: March 13th, 2017

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