In Genocidal Conscription, Christopher Harrison probes the complex relationship between war and genocide through the lens of military conscription. Drawing on case studies from the first and second world wars, the book examines how conscription facilitates genocidal violence against minorities and critiques the hypocrisy of the modern liberal international order that simultaneously condemns and enables repressive and violent regimes. Harrison’s is a nuanced, novel and valuable lens through which to understand the war-genocide continuum, writes Eric Loefflad.
What is the relationship between war and genocide? Varied explanations of Israel’s actions in Gaza following the attacks of 07 October 2023, reveal just how contentious this relationship is – especially considering how often proponents of the respective Israeli and Palestinian sides cast “war” and “genocide” in mutually exclusive terms. For the State of Israel and its defenders, the response to 07 October 2023 is an eminently justifiable resort to war, and anyone equating wartime death and suffering with “genocide” should be dismissed for their anti-Israel bias or possible antisemitism. For the Palestinians and those in solidarity with them, to refer to the events as a “war” euphemistically mischaracterises the profound asymmetry of the violence, wherein a deprived people living under years of blockade is facing off against high-tech army of a settler state structurally motivated to erase a preexisting indigenous society. Given these seemingly irreconcilable framings, the time seems ripe to critically detail the nexus between war and genocide. After all, in times of war, mass killings are normalised in ways they would never be during peacetime. It is under these blood-saturated conditions that past prejudice towards, and/or present scapegoating of, marginalised groups can erupt into genocidal extermination.
Genocidal Conscription provides a concise depiction of complex historical, political and social realities while never losing sight of the human consequences of its topics of analysis – a feat accomplished largely through the extensive use of the testimonies from genocide survivors.
Given these meta-circumstances, Christopher Harrison’s Genocidal Conscription: Drafting Victims and Perpetrators Under the Guise of War is a valuable account of the war-genocide continuum through the lens of conscription for military service. Drawing on the iconic nineteenth-century Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz, Harrison centres the concept of “wastage”, the losses a polity at war inevitably incurs as it wears away the resources of its opponent in its effort to force concession. According to Harrison, this reality of wastage is key to issues concerning the recruitment of military labour via conscription – a defining hallmark of modern state formation – in that the potential loss and replenishing of manpower must enter the calculus of any able commander. However, between this nexus of wastage and conscription lies the genocidal potential.
As Harrison shows, through the mechanisms of conscription, members of a persecuted group – importantly the young adult males most capable of resisting state violence – are segregated from their communities. Captives of the conscripting state, these concentrated recruits, can be exterminated in various ways ranging from outright massacres (including those perpetrated by fellow conscripts) to forced labour under deadly conditions, to being sent to the front lines of battle without adequate means of self-defence. Crucially, in such contexts those seeking to deny the true intent behind these killings can depict those killed as “casualties of war” as opposed to victims of genocide. Harrison persuasively illustrates this theoretical framework through two case-studies: the Ottoman conscription of Armenians during the First World War and the Nazi-aligned Hungarian conscription of Jews during the Second World War. Thoughtful, thorough, and highly perceptive, Genocidal Conscription provides a concise depiction of complex historical, political and social realities while never losing sight of the human consequences of its topics of analysis – a feat accomplished largely through the extensive use of the testimonies from genocide survivors.
However, despite the book’s claims to general applicability, there are distinct patterns of specificity that define Genocidal Conscription’s two primary case studies. Both the Ottoman persecution of Armenians and the Hungarian persecution of Jews that manifested in, amongst other instances of systematic violence, genocidal conscription was indelibly linked to the protracted breakdown of multiethnic European/Eurasian land empires and their replacement with exclusionary nation-states. In the first case study, Harrison highlights how this shift was facilitated in great measure through that conscription policies emerging in the context of Ottoman imperial decline that “…assisted the rising ethnonational Turkish movement by discriminating against several minority groups including Armenian and Greek communities” (80).sovereignty
liberal internationalist projects have been increasingly condemned throughout the world as destructive, domineering, and potentially neo-imperial, intrusions upon local sovereignty.
Similarly, in his second case study, the context of Jewish persecution he describes is inseparable from the breakup of the Habsburg Empire, in which the historic Kingdom of Hungary (whose status in this Empire was extensively debated) lost nearly two-thirds of its territory via the Treaty of Trianon following the First World War. As John Connelly has detailed, the Hungarians who fled lost territories, faced shortages of resources and employment in the vastly reduced Hungarian state, and turned much of their resentment towards Jews. Unsurprisingly, this social reality shaped the Hungarian conscription practices that Harrison details. Taking this specificity into account, while the turn to genocidal conscription in this context of the protracted collapses of the Habsburg and Ottoman empires is itself an important finding, it does raise questions of how Harrison’s framework would need to be adapted in situations shaped by different imperial/nationalist identity dynamics – for instance in the Asian and African states who gained independence from maritime, as opposed to land-based, empires.
Furthermore, despite this book’s various novel contributions, the final chapter on present-day prospects for genocidal conscription and its possible prevention generates ample grounds for critique. Though his overview here is empirically rich, Harrison largely operates according to the much critiqued premise that liberal states are fundamentally less likely to commit genocidal violence and, therefore, having illiberal orders adopt liberal policies will reduce the likelihood of genocidal conscription. His concrete proposed solutions are calls upon states to:
“refine mandatory service to comply with safe working conditions for civilians…reform conscription for services in deadly environments as requiring written informed consent…decentralise the security norm that has traditionally led states to expend the lives of young adult males…promote interethnic cooperation across state institutions…[and] open pathways of asylum for members of communities at risk of becoming targets of deadly subordinated forms of conscription” (166).
While difficult to disagree with Harrison’s proposals as isolated matters of policy, there remains the issue of how the larger structural and ideological parameters of present-day international relations might lead these varied measures to spectacularly backfire at the level of implementation. After all, liberal internationalist projects have been increasingly condemned throughout the world as destructive, domineering, and potentially neo-imperial, intrusions upon local sovereignty. While this critique certainly has its justifications, it also provides ammunition to reactionary forces who may very well deploy the rhetoric of opposing liberal imperialism/liberal hypocrisy to legitimise agendas of aggression abroad and persecution at home that provide the base ingredients of genocidal conscription.
the same international legal and political order that outlaws war and genocide on one level, on another level deeply enables a system of political economy that creates overwhelming incentives to deploy force in myriad ways.
A case-in-point is Vladimir Putin’s Russia. As Harrison makes clear, Russia’s war on Ukraine raises many questions of possible genocidal conscription, in that while “Russia is under suspicion of deploying conscripts to commit atrocities against Ukrainian civilians…[i]t is also very likely that Russia has conscripted members of historically discriminated communities for deployment in frontline combat zones” (5). While Harrison is right to highlight this reality, a comprehensive view of these issues must also include how Putin’s very legitimation of this war (and ensuing conscription) betrays the arrogance and double-standards of the same liberal internationalism that underpins many of Harrison’s proposals for confronting the problem of genocidal conscription. This is all the more pertinent given how Putin’s antiliberal “anti-imperialism,” superficial as it may be, holds widespread appeal, especially in the Global South, and after the response of Western nations to Israel’s war on Gaza has – for many – revealed the stark limits of liberal universalist invocations of “human rights” and “humanitarianism.”
Despite this critique, the insights of Genocidal Conscription can extend far beyond the liberal precepts that Harrison concludes with and offer many important insights into critical and materialist theorists of violence and repression on a global scale. This is particularly true if we understand conscription to exemplify the base-level labour relations essential to state and social reproduction. On this reading, genocidal conscription is perhaps the highest stage of labour exploitation, highlighting how a distinctly pathological array of social relations make it possible to systematically exploit large portions of a society’s most marginalised to death in the name of creating an ideal of “purity.” Not isolatable to any singular bounded state or social space, the forces that can ultimately manifest in genocidal conscription can be understood on a broad transnational scale, forcing us to play close attention to the contradictions that define existing institutions. As Ntina Tzouvala has shown (here and here), the same international legal and political order that outlaws war and genocide on one level, on another level deeply enables a system of political economy that creates overwhelming incentives to deploy force in myriad ways. Any theorist working on this issue today will be vastly indebted to Harrison for his novel, nuanced articulation of “genocidal conscription”.
Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Image: A photo of the memorial to the victims of the Armenian genocide in Yerevan, Armenia by Shant Kha on Flickr. License: CC BY 2.0.
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