60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

44 development dialogue december 2008 – revisiting the heart of darkness
preconditions, processes of banalisation of violence fi gure prominently.
Such processes gradually ‘draw people in’, as they are enmeshed
and possibly entrapped within the criminal framework. These include
the routinisation already alluded to, inclusion into specifi c institutional
nexuses creating a feeling of belonging and conspiracy, as
well as ‘ideological acceleration… splitting and separating the good
(us) from the bad (them)’ (Foster et al. 2005: 77). Mechanisms of ‘genocidal
priming’ (Hinton 2002: 29) encompass a range of ‘apparently
far lesser occurrences of symbolic and physical violence’ on the basis
of social exclusionism, resulting in particular exclusionary devices
that result in the constitution of ‘groups that the dominant society
has defi ned in one way or another as lesser human beings’ (Nagengast
2002: 325). Such mechanisms, acting over several decades, and
again through an entire array of phases, have been present in the prehistory
of the genocide against European Jewry in German society
and public discourse (cf. Bartov 1998), but arguably also as a longterm
impact of the genocide committed by German colonial troops
in present-day Namibia early in the 20th century (cf. Kössler 2005).
Another instance of such rather long-term priming is the process of
debasing and naturalising ‘Tutsi’ and of inculcating a feeling of impunity
by mass propaganda, which occurred on a continuous basis years
before the genocide in Rwanda 1994 actually took place (cf. Neubert
1999; Taylor 2002, 2005). Again, precisely the long time frame
of these processes underscores the contingent dimension of genocide
and, more generally, of mass violence: While the potential that may
be discerned within a given situation, such as the regime at the US/
Mexican border (cf. Nagengast 2002) may hopefully never be actualised,
for such potential to turn into gruesome reality, a particular
‘hot’ situation must accrue, ‘some sort of “genocidal activation” that
ignites the “charge” that has been primed’ (Hinton 2002: 30), or in
other words, the prerequisite ‘toxic relations’ have to be aggregated in
a specifi c and cataclysmic way (Foster et al. 2002: 67).
Order by the state: the defi nition of target groups and
processes of othering
An important ingredient in such toxic concoctions is constituted by
specifi c traits of the modern state, to order, enumerate, cultivate and
‘weed out’. Zygmunt Bauman (1991: ch. 1) has dubbed this kind of
state activity as the ‘gardening state’, highlighting precisely the social
technological pattern of identifying conducive and unhealthy
traits in persons or groups of people and consequently, nurturing the
former, and eliminating, even exterminating the latter (cf. also Schiel
1999). Such activities of the modern state obviously fall within a much