Book Review: Nicole Rafter, The Crime of All Crimes: Toward a Criminology of Genocide
| Author | Guy Lancaster |
| DOI | 10.1177/1478929916667009 |
| Published date | 01 February 2017 |
| Date | 01 February 2017 |
| Subject Matter | Book ReviewsGeneral Politics |
Book Reviews 135
in Marxism, socialism and environmentalism.
However, the books do present a few short-
comings such as a redundant writing style and
an essentialist approach of man against woman,
coloniser against colonised. The argumentation
may perhaps not be as revolutionary as it was a
few decades ago, but the ideas are undoubtedly
still very important today.
Mies’ and Shiva’s predictions in these books
have been realised in much more extreme ways
than they expected, particularly in terms of
technology and environmental destruction.
Their analysis makes sense. In fact, reading
these books, you cannot help but accept its
wisdom and logic. Mies delivers a meticulous
world system critique of the neoliberal capital-
ist white imperialist and heterosexist patriarchy.
Shiva’s criticism of the scientific paradigm
alongside her activist approach combining
women’s and ecological movements through
various grassroots initiatives and small-scale
organisational projects are at the beginning of
a bottom-up greater revolution already taking
place in the twenty-first century.
Mounia Utzeri
(Corvinus University of Budapest)
© The Author(s) 2016
Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1478929916673772
journals.sagepub.com/home/psrev
The Crime of All Crimes: Toward a
Criminology of Genocide by Nicole Rafter.
New York: NYU Press, 2016. 314pp., £23.99 (h/b),
ISBN 9781479859481
Part of Raphael Lemkin’s motivation for devel-
oping the concept of genocide was an aware-
ness that such cases of group destruction were
not illegal, being typically the actions of states
against their own people. Although genocide is
now rightly regarded as criminal, scholars have
been slow to apply criminological methods and
theories to its study. Nicole Rafter’s fascinat-
ing The Crime of All Crimes fills this void,
arguing that ‘magnitude aside, genocide is
similar in many ways to ordinary violent crime
and can be profitably studied in the ways that
ordinary violent crime is studied’ (p. 52). In
particular, genocide resembles street crime,
with its perpetrators (those doing the actual
killing) being predominantly young or middle-
aged men, the victims typically defenceless
and its occurrence often rooted in local
circumstances.
Rafter surveys eight twentieth-century gen-
ocides with an eye towards the macro, meso
and micro dynamics of such events: the Herero,
Armenia, the Nazi genocide of disabled peo-
ple, the Katyn Forest, Indonesia, Cambodia,
Guatemala and Rwanda. She finds that war and
impunity are the greatest risk factors at the
macro level, but also that, for states, ‘prior
offenses predict reoffending, just as they do
for individuals’ (p. 71), as with Turkey, which
had seen many Ottoman-era massacres of
Armenians before 1915. Genocide at the group
level depends upon ‘reframing the identities of
those who are to become victims’ (p. 81). In the
case of Indonesia, Suharto had ‘reframed a
political group – communists – so expansively
that it came to include everyday enemies, irre-
spective of political affiliation’, which fact
helps to explain the rather gangland nature of
the violence (p. 90). This book even explores
the psychology of individual perpetrators,
illustrating how atrocity is rooted not in a loss
of impulse control but rather in the pernicious
effects of ideology upon empathy.
Rafter’s criminological analysis also
reveals the changing face of genocide: in the
first half of the twentieth century, genocidal
organisations, those groups carrying out the
actual killing, ‘were usually mobilized and
directed by a strong state and remained depend-
ent upon it’, while at present they ‘may be
mobilized by independent rebel groups and
other non-state actors’ (p. 148). Genocide, in
short, is not one specific crime but many.
This revelatory book is required reading for
all those interested in genocide and political
violence. In an increasingly crowded field,
Rafter has produced a stand-out volume that
provides a valuable analytical framework for
genocide studies.
Guy Lancaster
(Encyclopedia of Arkansas History &
Culture)
© The Author(s) 2016
Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1478929916667009
journals.sagepub.com/home/psrev
To continue reading
Request your trial