PREVENTING GENOCIDE: PRACTICAL STEPS TOWARD EARLY DETECTION AND EFFECTIVE ACTION
American Psychiatric Association
September 2011
“Out of the crooked timber of humanity,” as Kant and Isaiah Berlin
powerfully assert, “nothing entirely straight can be made.”
Is it possible to understand, confront, and even prevent genocide?
Has much been learned and done? Can we, as psychiatrists and
citizens, do anything about it? David Hamburg-for many decades one
of the world’s most thoughtful and distinguished psychiatrists and
a significant figure in international thinking about mass violence,
war, and genocide-marshals a rather staggering array of evidence and
ideas from many disciplines in his current book, which is an updated
and revised version of a 2008 book with the same title.
Dr. Hamburg, for those unfamiliar with his life, is a psychiatrist
with a public health background who has been a professor at Stanford
and at Harvard and is now a Distinguished Scholar at Weill/Cornell.
He has been President of the Institute of Medicine, the National
Academy of Science, and the American Association for the Advancement
of Science. His many awards include the U.S. Presidential Medal of
Freedom. He was president of the Carnegie Corporation for 14 years and
has served on and/or chaired countless major national and international
advisory boards. His books include Learning To Live Together, No More
Killing Fields, and Today’s Children.
History, politics, economics, diplomacy, war, psychology and
psychiatry, sociology, anthropology, and biology are all relevant to
Dr. Hamburg’s tasks in the current book, which stresses public policy
and prevention. His sources, quotations, references, and interactions
are heavy with names from academia but also names from differently
powerful worlds, such as Annan, Carter, Gorbachev, Tutu, Solana,
Vance, Mandela, Nunn, Sachs, Sen, and Urquhart as well as Armenia,
Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Cambodia, Rwanda/Burundi,
and Darfur.
Dr. Hamburg reminds us that genocide is old, not new, even if mankind’s
weapons have become on the whole more lethal, and that genocide usually
follows years of clear warning signs. After a general overview, he
devotes a full chapter to each of several notable and much-studied
illustrative 19th and 20th century examples, including what led up
to them and what was and was not done: Turkey/Armenia, Nazi Germany,
and Burundi/Rwanda/Tutsi/Hutu. He then devotes a more hopeful full
chapter to a place and recent time where genocide might well have
happened but did not: South Africa at the end of Apartheid.
Dr. Hamburg has a patient, tenacious, and hopeful interest in
prevention on a grand scale. That he is so widely informed and
reasonable may make anyone, such as the current reviewer, who is a bit
more pessimistic than Dr. Hamburg appears to be about these issues,
feel a bit wrong or even churlish. I would like to be as optimistic
as Dr. Hamburg is in this book, but my psychiatric views about
individual biopsychosocial people and the primitive and destructive
impulses of our species, including mankind’s capacity for creating,
ignoring, tolerating, and even enjoying savagery, violence, war,
and genocide, may be darker than Dr. Hamburg’s view of them. I
also read some of the political evidence in a darker light than
I think Dr. Hamburg does. That area includes perennial spoken and
unspoken, hugely conflicting demands within the realms of politics
and economics; the continuing usefulness, to far too many leaders,
of war and of scapegoating; people’s deep openness to propaganda and
demagoguery; what governments did and did not do before, during, and
after Turkey/Armenia, Nazi Germany, and Rwanda/Burundi; and the recent
efforts and successes by governments in narrowing the definition of
genocide for their perceived national convenience and in avoiding
calling genocide genocide, lest they be pressed to act.
That the book largely leaves out, as a likely potential agent for
change, the United States, with its current reductionist business
model as a substitute for government, seems to me to be notable and
probably realistic.
In his introduction, Dr. Hamburg emphasizes proactive help to
countries in trouble. He recommends the formulation and dissemination
of specific response options to deal with early warning signs. He
draws together tools and strategies to prevent mass violence. He
clarifies what international organizations can do and emphasizes the
roles of democracies. He looks at preventive uses of cooperation,
conflict resolution, and democratic socioeconomic development. He
suggests developing two large cooperating international centers
for prevention of genocide, as well as many smaller contributory
structures. He suggests tasks for the next decade (e.g., in expanding
linkage). And he urges encouraging leaders by molding a constituency
for prevention by public education. He is concerned with education,
or training, for hatred as one reason to insist on education for
social and civic strength. All these goals would seem to many of us
reasonable and admirable.
He has a section called Pillars of Prevention, with chapters on
preventive diplomacy, democracy and prevention of mass violence,
equitable socioeconomic development, education for survival, human
rights abuses and international justice, and restraints on weaponry.
He supplements that with a list of what he considers a few recent
advances in preventing mass violence, such as Kofi Annan’s work in
Kenya in 2008, and some restructuring of the United Nations.
He is an expert on relevant institutions and organizations, and this
becomes the focus of the third major section of the book, which
looks at the United Nations, the European Union, the Organization
for Security and Cooperation in Europe, NATO, and many smaller
potential contributors, several of which he has helped to build and/or
strengthen. He does several times note-without, in my judgment, fully
acknowledging the power of-obstacles and limitations and conflicting
aims in those organizations.
It is an impressive book, painted on a large canvas. One might
wish that the next edition be a bit more tightly edited to reduce
repetitiveness and perhaps to leave room for further development of
thought, or books, on some unwieldy areas only briefly touched on, such
as religion, the psychology of ideologies, nationalism and tribalism,
the sociobiology of aggression, and perhaps even the implications of
climate change. Overall, however, this book will usefully challenge
some of any reader’s basic values and assumptions.
It is a hopeful, widely informed, widely thoughtful, and quite readable
one-man multidisciplinary survey of an unpleasant and important topic
that makes many of us angry and most of us sad and uncomfortable.
Footnotes
The author reports no financial relationships with commercial
interests.
Book review accepted for publication March 2011.
http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/168/9/992