Suicide From Fear of Death
So here's the opening paragraphs.
When compared to the numerous investigations of political violence in political science, research on state-initiated mass murder against ethnic groups receives a conspicuous inattention. Explaining political violence among citizens during peacetime is the traditional purview of the ethnic conflict literature. For scholars of ethnic conflict, the sources and proponents of violence are either fellow citizens or political parties, competing for some combination of political security and goods, stemming from party competition and politicized cleavages within those societies. In contrast, the literature concerning ethnic violence against civilians conceives of the perpetrators as states and organized militias, rather than fellow citizens, and theorizes the violence as peculiar to wartime. With the exception of some elements within the marginalized literature on genocide and mass killing, few theorists account for political violence against civilians in peacetime.
What explains victimization rates among resident ethnic groups in Democratic Kampuchea during the rule of the Khmer Rouge? The literature on political violence has left us with few answers but many clues for this puzzle. In this paper, I read the occurrence of prevalent mass killings in Democratic Kampuchea against four important arguments: -(i) Benjamin Valentino’s and Manus Midlarsky’s strategic theories of anti-civilian mass killing, (ii) Macartan Humphrey and Jeremy Weinstein’s disorganization of militant insurgents, (iii) Stathis Kalyvas’s militant competition and rationalist signaling, and (iv) Michael Mann’s, Valentino’s and Midlarsky’s beliefs about communist ideology -to further refine our scientific understandings of mass civilian death. Along with strategic theories of mass death, I argue that while the length of time available to perpetrators to accomplish policy objectives best explains the onset of mass anti-civilian violence, the jurisdictions of regime political authority and whether the regime foresees the target group as a part of its future state best predicts the geographic scope and intensity of the violence. Using these two concepts, I sketch a framework for investigating peacetime anti-civilian violence. My intention in this paper is only to check the plausibility of a tentative rubric, not to expound a full theory of anti-civilian violence, or even anti-civilian violence in post-revolutionary contexts.
When compared to the numerous investigations of political violence in political science, research on state-initiated mass murder against ethnic groups receives a conspicuous inattention. Explaining political violence among citizens during peacetime is the traditional purview of the ethnic conflict literature. For scholars of ethnic conflict, the sources and proponents of violence are either fellow citizens or political parties, competing for some combination of political security and goods, stemming from party competition and politicized cleavages within those societies. In contrast, the literature concerning ethnic violence against civilians conceives of the perpetrators as states and organized militias, rather than fellow citizens, and theorizes the violence as peculiar to wartime. With the exception of some elements within the marginalized literature on genocide and mass killing, few theorists account for political violence against civilians in peacetime.
What explains victimization rates among resident ethnic groups in Democratic Kampuchea during the rule of the Khmer Rouge? The literature on political violence has left us with few answers but many clues for this puzzle. In this paper, I read the occurrence of prevalent mass killings in Democratic Kampuchea against four important arguments: -(i) Benjamin Valentino’s and Manus Midlarsky’s strategic theories of anti-civilian mass killing, (ii) Macartan Humphrey and Jeremy Weinstein’s disorganization of militant insurgents, (iii) Stathis Kalyvas’s militant competition and rationalist signaling, and (iv) Michael Mann’s, Valentino’s and Midlarsky’s beliefs about communist ideology -to further refine our scientific understandings of mass civilian death. Along with strategic theories of mass death, I argue that while the length of time available to perpetrators to accomplish policy objectives best explains the onset of mass anti-civilian violence, the jurisdictions of regime political authority and whether the regime foresees the target group as a part of its future state best predicts the geographic scope and intensity of the violence. Using these two concepts, I sketch a framework for investigating peacetime anti-civilian violence. My intention in this paper is only to check the plausibility of a tentative rubric, not to expound a full theory of anti-civilian violence, or even anti-civilian violence in post-revolutionary contexts.