Mass Violence as Tragedy: Analyzing the Transmission of Discourses

Abstract

Mass violence—killings and other forms of violence that aim at exterminating large groups of people—is often called a tragedy. The trope can be found in testimonies of victimization, justifications of perpetration, journalistic, political, and academic language as well as in popular parlance. The article examines the divergent usages of the travelling trope of tragedy with particular emphasis on its role in forming justificatory discourse. The issue at stake is that the trope of tragedy does not remain confined to outright justifications such as juridical legitimization, moral vindication, political propaganda etc., but permeates condemnation and critique as well. The rationale of the analysis is that justifications of acts of mass violence that are negotiated in key areas of the cultural canon give a culturally specific, often identificatory, meaning to acts that are, from a critical perspective, mostly either considered senseless or comprehended in economic and sociopolitical terms. Yet it is largely owing to justificatory discourses that acts of mass violence do not remain single, exorbitant events, but have a lasting impact by shaping the linguistic and heuristic framework of their subsequent evaluation. When condemnation and critique adopt these terminologies and frameworks—such as the notion of purity underlying the term ‘ethnic cleansing’, or the ethnopolitical paradigm informing the concept of genocide—this effects an uneasy mimetic participation in transmitting justifications of mass violence. The trope of tragedy makes it possible to address the issue of mimetic participation by drawing attention to the audience as an indispensable element of the discourse.

Beyond denial: Justifications of mass violence as an agenda for memory studies

“…The adoption of the ethnopolitical logic of perpetration in the concept of genocide cannot appropriately be described as denial. It, rather, illustrates the problem of the mimetic participation of criticism in what it is criticizing (Prade-Weiss et al, 2023). Adopting a descriptive concept, such as mass violence, "systematic murder of noncombatants" (Valentino, 2004: 10), or "onesided violence" (Eck and Hultman, 2007), in lieu of genocide is one necessary step in inquiring into the linguistic dynamics by which the meaning of these acts is constructed, negotiated, and transmitted to different contexts.…”