The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,207

one-sided killing, and the world has seen nothing like it since.

FIGURE 6–8. Rate of deaths in genocides, 1956–2008

Sources: PITF estimates, 1955–2008: same as for figure 6–7. UCDP, 1989–2007: “High Fatality” estimates from http://www.pcr.uu.se/research/ucdp/datasets/ (Kreutz, 2008; Kristine & Hultman, 2007) divided by world population from U.S. Census Bureau, 2010c.

Harff was tasked not just with compiling genocides but with identifying their risk factors. She noted that virtually all of them took place in the aftermath of a state failure such as a civil war, revolution, or coup. So she assembled a control group with 93 cases of state failure that did not result in genocide, matched as closely as possible to the ones that did, and ran a logistic regression analysis to find out which aspects of the situation the year before made the difference.

Some factors that one might think were important turned out not to be. Measures of ethnic diversity didn’t matter, refuting the conventional wisdom that genocides represent the eruption of ancient hatreds that inevitably explode when ethnic groups live side by side. Nor did measures of economic development matter. Poor countries are more likely to have political crises, which are necessary conditions for genocides to take place, but among the countries that did have crises, the poorer ones were no more likely to sink into actual genocide.

Harff did discover six risk factors that distinguished the genocidal from the nongenocidal crises in three-quarters of the cases.167 One was a country’s previous history of genocide, presumably because whatever risk factors were in place the first time did not vanish overnight. The second predictor was the country’s immediate history of political instability—to be exact, the number of regime crises and ethnic or revolutionary wars it had suffered in the preceding fifteen years. Governments that feel threatened are tempted to eliminate or take revenge on groups they perceive to be subversive or contaminating, and are more likely to exploit the ongoing chaos to accomplish those goals before opposition can mobilize.168 A third was a ruling elite that came from an ethnic minority, presumably because that multiplies the leaders’ worries about the precariousness of their rule.

The other three predictors are familiar from the theory of the Liberal Peace. Harff vindicated Rummel’s insistence that democracy is a key factor in preventing genocides. From 1955 to 2008 autocracies were three and a half times more likely to commit genocides than were full or partial democracies, holding everything else constant. This represents a hat trick for democracy: democracies are less likely to wage interstate wars, to have large-scale civil wars, and to commit genocides. Partial democracies (anocracies) are more likely than autocracies to have violent political crises, as we saw in Fearon and Laitin’s analysis of civil wars, but when a crisis does occur, the partial democracies are less likely than autocracies to become genocidal.

Another trifecta was scored by openness to trade. Countries that depend more on international trade, Harff found, are less likely to commit genocides, just as they are less likely to fight wars with other countries and to be riven by civil wars. The inoculating effects of trade against genocide cannot depend, as they do in the case of interstate war, on the positive-sum benefits of trade itself, since the trade we are talking about (imports and exports) does not consist in exchanges with the vulnerable ethnic or political groups. Why, then, should trade matter? One possibility is that Country A might take a communal or moral interest in a group living within the borders of Country B. If B wants to trade with A, it must resist the temptation to exterminate that group. Another is that a desire to engage in trade requires certain peaceable attitudes, including a willingness to abide by international norms and the rule of law, and a mission to enhance the material welfare of its citizens rather than implementing a vision of purity, glory, or perfect justice.

The last predictor of genocide is an exclusionary ideology. Ruling elites that are under the spell of a vision that identifies a certain group as the obstacle to an ideal society, putting it “outside the sanctioned universe of obligation,” are far more likely to commit genocide than elites with a more pragmatic or eclectic governing philosophy. Exclusionary ideologies, in Harff’s classification, include Marxism, Islamism (in particular, a strict application of Sharia law), militaristic anticommunism, and forms of nationalism that demonize ethnic or religious rivals.

Harff sums up the pathways by which these risk factors erupt into genocide:Almost all genocides and politicides of the last