By Melina Ackermann<\/p>\n\n\n\n
All too often, scholars have explained mass atrocities by looking primarily at the macropolitical circumstances. But how do those broader social dynamics translate to heightened levels of violence in formerly peaceful neighbourhoods? Mila Dragojevi\u0107 addresses this question by looking into what she terms \u2018amoral communities\u2019. During conflict, amoral communities are created on the local level through an enhanced political ethnicisation with the exclusion of moderates and the creation of material borders demarcating and creating ethnically homogenous groups. This political strategy of ethnicisation and the targeted use of small-scale violence to achieve it explains the subnational differences between varying levels of violence targeted at civilians in the same country during the same war. This is the central argument presented in Amoral Communities: Collective Crimes in Time of War<\/em> by Mila Dragojevi\u0107<\/a> (2019). In this ethnographic study, Dragovi\u0107 <\/a>examines the communal level of divisions and how top-down attempts at ethnic division gain hold on the ground. She combines archival sources and in-depth interviews (conducted in 2013-14) of individuals who experienced the Homeland War (Croatian War of Independence 1991-95) in the former Yugoslavia in their communities, such as Eastern Slavonia, and supplanted by ethnographic data into the civil wars of Guatemala (1960-1996) and Uganda (1981-86). <\/p>\n\n\n\n As such, the book\npresents valuable insights into the understudied meso level of violence\ntargeted at civilians. It further corroborates research stipulating that\nviolence targeted at civilians goes beyond achieving a purely military strategy\nbut is a sign of a process of political ethnicisation, which is part and precedes\nattempts of creating ethno-nationalist states. It also bridges the gap between\ngenocide studies and literature concerned with civil wars and insurgencies on\nthe causes and occurrence of wartime violence against civilians. Accordingly,\nthose collective crimes are not, as previously thought, the outcome of\nlong-standing grievances but rather of ethnic divisions created and exacerbated\nthrough violence. The fieldwork conducted by the author also stands out for its\nfocus on not only giving the respondents who experienced the war a voice but\nalso adding more emotion and depth to the study by focusing it on their\nembodied experiences. The research is herewith contributing to debunking\ndominant narratives and crucially shedding light on the fabric of society on\nthe communal level before violence erupts. \nThe book skilfully manages to capture the nuances of understanding the\nrespondent\u2019s appreciations of the events that happened to them and occurred in\ntheir immediate surroundings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The theoretical framework\nthe author chose to embed her research in, namely the by Dragojevi\u0107 coined concept\nof amoral communities, though, is not sufficiently explored and also\nmisguiding. The author explains it as a locus where civilians are the targets\nof attacks or excluded from the community via ethnic categorisations. Through\nthe lens of peacetime morality, the behaviour of civilians and warring parties\nmay appear to be amoral on the outset. However, the perpetrators operate in\ntheir own parameters of morality and do justify their behaviour and violence.\nHannah Arendt\u2019s Banality of Evil (1963), as well as social-psychological\nresearch (such as the 1961 Milgram and the 1971 Stanford-Prison Experiment), indicate\nthat atrocities take place in the context of a reversal of the moral and\n(legal) order. Dragojevi\u0107 acknowledges this when saying that \u201cthe very\ndefinition of crime became altered by the wartime conditions\u201d (p. 6), where the\n\u201cstate of exception\u201d allowed the targeting of civilians of the \u201cother\u201d\nethnicity as an act of \u201cpreemptive self-defense against perceived threats, not\nto one\u2019s own biological existence but rather to the existence of one\u2019s\nethnically defined state, seen as the extension of one\u2019s own life\u201d (p. 6; see\nalso p. 46). Consequently, amorality does not characterise those communities,\nbut rather a reversed morality, where violence is justified because it\npresumably creates security and stability for the livelihood of one\u2019s own\nethnicity, and where, through a process of dehumanisation, a denial of the\nhumanity of individuals of a different ethnicity gradually takes place. In\nextension, those are not amoral communities but display a shifted morality:\nmoral ideas still underpin their actions. \n\nFurther criticism concerns the arguably unnecessary addendum of the\nUgandan and Guatemalan conflict. Although examining those cases is of interest,\nthe focus is clearly on Croatian respondents and the Yugoslavian conflict. In\ncontrast, the context of the two other case studies complicates matters and\ntakes away from the strength of the analysis. The inclusion of the comparative\nstudies is rather confusing than illuminating, primarily because the book\u2019s\nchapters are organised thematically and not according to geographical regions.\nThus, the author switches from one context to another instantly, without giving\nthe reader the possibility to situate her or himself in the divergent conflict\nsetting. Overall, the book\u2019s strength does not lie in its conceptual framework\nand the angle it takes, but rather in its communal-level ethnographic approach\nto explain why incidents of violence against civilians vary among different\nconflict-ridden communities. It gives cause for hope for the prevention of\natrocities by pointing out that those variations depend on the level of\nexclusion of moderates (through in-group policing, targeted violence, threats\nand social ostracism) and the creation of borders.\n\n\n\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Melina Ackermann All too often, scholars have explained mass atrocities by looking primarily at the macropolitical circumstances. But how do those broader social dynamics translate to heightened levels of violence in formerly peaceful neighbourhoods? Mila Dragojevi\u0107 addresses this question by looking into what she terms \u2018amoral communities\u2019. During conflict, amoral communities are created on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1017,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-191","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/warcrimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/warcrimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/warcrimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/warcrimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1017"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/warcrimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=191"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/warcrimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":204,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/warcrimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191\/revisions\/204"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/warcrimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/warcrimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/warcrimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}