New Blog Post - Extremist Ideologies and the Roots of Mass Atrocities: Lessons for Ukraine10/25/2022
My recent article for the leading international security blog JustSecurity.org has been published, summairising some of the key research findings from my recent work on ideology and mass atrocities, and applying them to make sense of ongoing events in Ukraine.
You can read the article for free, here: www.justsecurity.org/83555/extremist-ideologies-and-the-roots-of-mass-atrocities/ I was delighted to be interviewed last week by Dr Miranda Melcher about my new book, Ideology and Mass Killing: The Radicalized Security Politics of Genocides and Deadly Atrocities, for a podcast on the New Books Network.
You can find the podcast, freely available, here: https://newbooksnetwork.com/ideology-and-mass-killing. More info on my new book can be found here: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/ideology-and-mass-killing-9780198776796?cc=au&lang=en& For more info about Dr Miranda Melcher and her research, check out her website, here: https://mirandamelcher.com/ One of my significant secondary interests concerns methodological debates in political science and political theory. In 2018, Alex Worsnip (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) and I published a paper on 'Is there a distinctively political normativity?' in the leading philosophy journal Ethics, interrogating an argument advocated by many 'political realists' that politics involved its own kinds of normative concerns that are not moral in nature.
In another major journal, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, political theorist Matt Sleat has recently advanced a critique of our Ethics paper, suggesting that we have mischaracterised realism. But this suggestion by Sleat appears to rest on a significant misunderstanding of what Alex Worsnip and I actually argue, and the position we impute to realists. We have therefore written a short reply to Sleat, seeking to clear up this misunderstanding. We'd stress that we have a lot of respect for Sleat's broader work on realism - and particularly recommend his edited volume Politics Recovered: Essays on Realist Political Thought, and his Liberal Realism: A Realist Theory of Liberal Politics. You can read our reply, here: http://www.jleadermaynard.com/uploads/5/2/9/9/52995413/clarifying_political_normativity.pdf. You can read Sleat's original critique of us here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10677-021-10239-8. You can find out more about Matt Sleat's own work on his departmental web page, here: https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/politics/people/academic-staff/matt-sleat. You can find out more about Alex Worsnip's work on his website, here: https://www.alexworsnip.com/. In response to the ongoing evidence of serious atrocity crimes committed by Russian forces in Ukraine, I have a new article out for the UK in a Changing Europe research network at King's College London considering how the international community might do more to prevent and halt such atrocities. Sanctions and efforts to publicize and condemn atrocities are crucial, I observe, but unlikely to halt atrocities on their own. The best way for the international community to fulfill its recognized responsibility to protect civilians from atrocity crimes is to step up military and humanitarian assistance to Ukraine - since only the expulsion of Russian military forces from Ukrainian territory provides a reliable way to stop atrocities on the ground.
Check out the full article here: ukandeu.ac.uk/the-struggle-to-prevent-atrocities-in-ukraine/ Following the tragic images and facts emerging from the Ukraine, I have written up a brief analysis on what we know about atrocities committed by Russian military forces in Ukraine, and whether they constitute genocide, for JustSecurity.org.
At the time of writing, we have clear evidence of serious atrocity crimes being perpetrated in Ukraine, as well as a visible escalation of genocidal rhetoric by state-backed media and officials in Russia. At the moment, we don't have clear enough evidence on the link between these two - i.e. that violence on the ground in Ukraine is being guided by specifically genocidal motives - to confidently conclude that genocide, in its legal sense, is occurring. However, more evidence is coming out all the time, and the risk of an intensification of atrocities, and potentially escalation to outright genocide, is high. You can find the full article here: www.justsecurity.org/80998/is-genocide-occurring-in-ukraine-an-expert-explainer-on-indicators-and-assessments/ I was delighted to participate in the 'Diskursive Konstruktion von Feindbildern: Populismen, Verschwörung, Verhetzung' (Discursive Constructions of Enmity: Populisms, Conspiracy, Hate) workshop at Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich on 11 February 2022, hosted by Juliane Prade-Weiss, Dominik Markl and Vladimir Petrovic.
You can watch the video of my talk: 'Rethinking Extremism in Comparative Perspective: Narrative, Enmity and Political War' above! The webpage for the broader workshop can be found here: www.discoursesofmassviolence.komparatistik.uni-muenchen.de/index.html I was really delighted to be featured prominently in Professor Thomas Homer-Dixon's latest op-ed in The Globe and Mail, 'The American polity is cracked, and might collapse. Canada must prepare.'
While the comments about me are incredibly generous, this article is a must read for Homer-Dixon's crucial analysis of the danger of growing political extremism in mainstream US politics, and his warning that Canada and Canadians are not sufficiently prepared for the danger of future authoritarian take-overs of the US state. It's a terrific read and necessarily urgent wake-up call. Check it out at the link below: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-the-american-polity-is-cracked-and-might-collapse-canada-must-prepare/ Interested in the history of ideas, rhetoric and ideology? I was delighted to take part in the British Academy conference on these themes to celebrate the work of the preeminent intellectual historian Quentin Skinner last week. The whole conference is free to watch online through the links below!
DAY 1 - https://youtube.com/watch?v=waztwgtbUp8 DAY 2 - https://youtube.com/watch?v=EWT_BNr7mcs Programme here: https://thebritishacademy.ac.uk/.../Quentin-Skinner... The great panel I shared with Professor Alan Finlayson and Dr Sophia Hatzisavvidou on 'Rhetoric and Ideological Analysis' is on the Day 2 video at 2:50:20. My own paper, on 'Ideology as Infrastructure' is at 3:23:10. Enjoy! Loads of thanks, too, to Dr Adrian Blau and Dr Joanne Paul, as well as the whole British Academy team, for organizing such a great couple of days! I was delighted, on 5 March 2021, to participate in an online and highly interdisciplinary workshop on 'Discourses of Mass Violence in Comparative Perspective,' hosted by the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich.
My talk at the workshop, 'Ideology and Mass Killing: How Groups Justify Genocides and Other Atrocities Against Civilians,' discussed the current state of the debate over ideology's role in mass violence against civilians, as well as previewing some of the key arguments in my forthcoming book, Ideology and Mass Killing, with Oxford University Press. You can watch my talk, as well as videos of most of the other workshop talks, at the link below. This was a terrific event, and I highly recommend checking out the other videos too! My thanks to Juliane Prade-Weiss, Dominik Markl and Vladimir Petrovic for inviting me, and for organising the event. https://www.komparatistik.uni-muenchen.de/personen/professoren/prade_weiss/discourses_violence/index.html I'm delighted to announce that my second foray into the debate over realism in political theory - part of my broader research interest in methodological debates in political theory and political science - has just been published in the leading philosophy journal Ethical Theory and Moral Practice.
You can get the Online First Version via the link below (Open Access - so anyone can read this), and the print version will appear in a forthcoming special issue of ETMP on Political Normativity. https://rdcu.be/ciD2T My thanks to Carlo Burelli, Illaria Cozzaglio, Chiara Destri, Eva Erman, Favara Greta, Matthew Longo, Enzo Rossi, Cord Schmelzle, Matt Sleat, Manon Westphal, Alex Worsnip and all participants of the ‘Political Normativity: Realism Meets Critics’ workshop at the University of Milan (10/10/2019) and the ‘Realism and Moralism in International Politics’ panel at the ECPR General Conference (held online 25/08/2020) for their invaluable feedback on earlier versions of this paper. I am really honoured to have been named as one of two runners-up for the Nils Petter Gleditsch Journal of Peace Research Article of the Year Award 2019, and congratulate the winners - Emily Kalah Gade, Mohammed M Hafez, and Michael Gabbay - for their terrific paper on 'fratricidal' violence between rebel movements in Syria. I saw Emily and Michael present an early version of their paper at a workshop we attended in Montreal in 2017, and have gratefully benefited from Mohammed's generous feedback on my own article, so I'm really delighted for them.
The full announcement about the prize is here: https://www.prio.org/JPR/ArticleOfTheYear/. Copies of the winning article, my article, and the other runner-up article (Juan Fernando Tellez's study of peace agreement design in Columbia) can be found on the Journal of Peace Research website, here: https://journals.sagepub.com/home/jpr. I was delighted to appear on Dr Brian Klaas's exciting new podcast series, Power Corrupts, for an episode on 'The Anatomy of Evil'. The episode focuses on genocides and other mass atrocities, and asks how leaders and ordinary rank-and-file perpetrators are able to initiate and execute these most horrific forms of political violence.
The podcast (free to access) can be found here, or on all standard podcast apps. My article on 'Ideology and Armed Conflict' has just been published in Volume 56, Issue 5 of the Journal of Peace Research. The article can be found here, and the abstract is pasted below:
A growing wave of scholarship suggests that ideology has demonstrable effects on various forms of armed conflict. But ideology remains a relative theoretical newcomer in conflict research, and scholars lack developed microfoundations for analyzing ideologies and their effects. Typically, existing research has primarily presented ideology as either an instrumental tool for conflict actors or a source of sincere political and normative commitments. But neither approach captures the diverse ways in which contemporary social science theorizes the causal connection between ideas and action, and both struggle to reconcile the apparently strong effects of ideology on conflict at the collective level with the relative rarity of ‘true believers’ at the individual level. This article addresses such problems by providing key microfoundations for conceptualizing ideologies, analyzing ideological change, and explaining ideologies’ influence over conflict behavior. I emphasize that ideology overlaps with other drivers of conflict such as strategic interests and group identities, show how ideologies can affect conflict behavior through four distinct mechanisms – commitment, adoption, conformity, and instrumentalization – and clarify the role of both conflict pressures and pre-existing ideological conditions in ideological change. These microfoundational claims integrate existing empirical findings and offer a foundation for building deeper explanations and middle-range theories of ideology’s role in armed conflict. I'm delighted to announce that The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Evil, in which I have a chapter on 'Evil, Genocide and Mass Atrocities', has just been published, edited by Stephen de Wijze (University of Manchester) and Thomas Nys (University of Amsterdam).
This is by far the most extensive existing volume on the study of evil in political theory and philosophy, so strongly recommended to all interested audiences! More information can be found here. I recently appeared on Toby Buckle's Political Philosophy Podcast for an episode on 'What is Ideology?' alongside Dr Matto Mildenberger (UC Santa Barbara).
Matto and I recently co-authored a major review article on the current state of research on ideology, which formed the starting point for our discussion with Toby. Our article, in the British Journal of Political Science, can be accessed here for those with a personal or institutional journal subscription. You can access the podcast (available to everyone!) at: https://www.politicalphilosophypodcast.com/what-is-ideology. I was delighted to be invited to give a public talk on 'Ideology and Violence in World Politics' at the University of Victoria on 25th September 2018, hosted by the Center for Global Studies.
A video of this talk is now available to view online, on the website for the Ideological Conflict Project, here: https://www.ideologicalconflict.org/resources/video/ New Publication: Correspondence Article on Barbara Walter's 'The Extremist's Advantage in Civil Wars8/12/2018
Kai Thaler and I have written a short correspondence article, which has just been published in published in International Security (vol.43, issue 1), on Barbara Walter's 'The Extremist's Advantage in Civil Wars'. Though Walter's article advances a growing literature on ideology's role in armed conflict, we suggest that her argument paints an excessively instrumental picture of ideology's role, and implausibly claims that extremist ideologies thrive because they attract moderate support.
The correspondence, alongside another letter on Walter's paper by Max Abrahms, can be found here (journal access required): https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/full/10.1162/isec_c_00324 Over the course of Hilary Term 2018, the Department of Politics and International Relations will continue last year’s successful Ideas and Political Violence (IPV) seminars, with seven planned talks held on Thursdays at 4pm, in Lecture Room 6 at New College. We have an exciting line-up of speakers and welcome interested attendees from across the university. The relationship between ideas and political violence is a key interdisciplinary interest of modern academia, and this seminar series will seek to capitalise on the expanding wave of new scholarship, bringing this into the DPIR’s research community and adding momentum to it by providing a forum for discussion between academic staff, graduate students, and visiting speakers on cutting-edge research work.
The Hilary Term seminars are listed below. Anyone interested in further information, should email one of the seminar convenors, Dr Elizabeth Frazer (elizabeth.frazer@politics.ox.ac.uk) and Dr Jonathan Leader Maynard (jonathan.leadermaynard@politics.ox.ac.uk). 1st Week (18th January) Omar McDoom (LSE), Extremism, Genocide, and Ideological Contestation 2nd Week (25th January) Julia Amos (Oxford) Structural Violence, Public Health and the Militarization of Assistance 3rd Week (1st February) Zoe Marks (Edinburgh), “Self-Reliant Struggle” or Revolution?: On the Limits of Ideology in African Civil War 4th Week (8th February) NO SEMINAR 5th Week (15th February) N.B. LR4. Jerome Drevon (Oxford), How do Salafi Jihadi Ideological Commitments Matter in Multiparty Civil Wars: Rationales, Costs, and Regulations 6th Week (22nd February) The Lord John Alderdice (House of Lords/Oxford), Conflict, Complexity and Cooperation 7th Week (1st March) Janina Dill (Oxford), The Resonance of Moral and Legal Principles in Civilians’ Attitudes towards Wartime Harm: Qualitative Evidence from Afghanistan 8th Week (8th March) Christopher Finlay (Durham), Politics and the Promise of Violence Ideas and Political Violence Seminars
Over the course of Hilary Term and Trinity Term 2017, the Department of Politics and International Relations is convening a new seminar series on Ideas and Political Violence, with six planned seminars each term held on Thursdays at 4pm, in Lecture Room 6 at New College. We hope that participants and guest speakers may then continue the discussions over drinks at the Turf Tavern. The series continues this Trinity Term, and we welcome interested attendees from across the university. Anyone interested in further information, should email one of the seminar convenors, Dr Elizabeth Frazer (elizabeth.frazer@politics.ox.ac.uk) and Dr Jonathan Leader Maynard (jonathan.leadermaynard@politics.ox.ac.uk). 3rd Week (11th May) Corinna Jentzsch (Leiden), Auxiliary Armed Forces and Innovations in Security Governance in Mozambique’s Civil War 4th Week (18th May) Siniša Malešević (UCD), Why do Combatants Fight? The Irish Republican Army and the Bosnian Serb Army Compared 5th Week (25th May) Laia Balcells (Duke), Rivalry and Revenge: The Politics of Violence during Civil War Book Panel with Kristin Bakke (UCL), Jonathan Leader Maynard (Oxford) and Andrea Ruggeri (Oxford) 6th Week (1st Jun) Alex Bellamy (University of Queensland), Syria and the Battle of Ideas 7th Week (8th Jun) Matt Walton (University of Oxford), Reconciling Narratives of Conflict and Peace in Contemporary Myanmar 8th Week (15th Jun) Nick Hewlett (Warwick), How should we approach the paradox of violence in pursuit of peace and equality?  Tomahawk missile launch off the USS Ross, 7/4/2017 Check out my commentary on recent developments in Syria, after the chemical attack in Idlib and subsequent US air strikes, in two interviews with BBC Radio Oxford.
Links here: https://www.politics.ox.ac.uk/news/jonathan-leader-maynard-comments-on-attacks-in-syria.html |