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Perspectives on Evil and Human Wickedness

Friday 19th - Wednesday 24th March 2004
CERGE-EI,
Prague, Czech Republic

Conference Programme, Abstracts & Papers

Purging the Other: An Exploration of the Pernicious Use of Landmines as Instruments of Ethnic Cleansing
Frank Faulkner & Graeme Goldsworthy
University of Derby, UK & Director of the International Demining Group, The Netherlands

The widespread use of anti personnel mines (APM) in Cambodia, as a textbook case of mine warfare, has been described as, amongst other considerations, an ‘ … instrument of terror for social and economic control over civilian populations …' This is a telling description of one of many uses to which mines can be put, and is redolent of the ethos of ethnic cleansing, which may be described as follows: ‘The practice of mass expulsion or killing of people from opposing ethnic or religious groups within a certain area.' However one may view this practice, the inference is that ethnic cleansing is the use of a demographic purgative to provide lebensraum for one's one kind.
This paper will, in the light of the above observations, explore the use of APMs to achieve these ends. It will do so by initially investigating the status of mines in international law, and in the provision of legal instruments to codify these weapons in terms of their intrinsic properties. Subsequent to this, the text will move on to discuss the nature of these weapons, assuming that they traditionally lend themselves efficaciously to the enforced movement of peoples, and will subsequently apply this analysis to the modern interpretation as described above. The final part of the work will draw these matters together and present suitable conclusions.

From Individual Discontent to Collective Armed-Struggle: Personal Accounts of the Impetus for Membership or Non-membership in Paramilitary Groups
Mark Burgess & Neil Ferguson and Ian Hollywood
Liverpool Hope University, United Kingdom

Individual acts of defiance may prove futile in challenging existing conditions unless accompanied by meaningful social change (Ratner, 2000). It is understandable then, that collective protest has become an increasingly popular global tool for registering discontent with governing bodies. There are a wide variety of potential modes of collective protest, ranging from isolated, peaceful, demonstrations to sustained participation in armed campaigns. Those who engage in the latter, armed, style of collective action often have similar beliefs and backgrounds to those who engage in the former, peaceful, style of collective action. So, what might account for those people having made very different decisions regarding their specific mode of collective action?
We conducted a series of in-depth, semi-structured, interviews with individuals who had engaged in collective action with the specific intent of challenging existing institutional structures and of altering their own conditions in Northern Ireland. Interviewees represented all sections of the ethno-political landscape and some of them had previously been enlisted in paramilitary organizations.
We describe the decision processes involved in initiating a variety of defiant activities, chart identity shifts during the transformation from individual discontent to collective action (see Reicher, 1996, 2001), and highlight the self-perceived similarities and differences between those who “cross the rubicon” (in one participant's words) to violent activity and those who maintain nonviolent participation. As such, our study adds to recent efforts to determine the events and processes that aid the mobilization of individual sympathizers into activists in a variety of collective protest domains (e.g., Klandermans, 1997).

Dichotomous Thinking and Culture of Destruction: Revisiting Youth Activism in China during the May Fourth Period
Haijing Dai
The University of Michigan, Michigan, USA

The importance of student activism in China during the May Fourth period (1915-1919) cannot be stressed too much in Chinese history, as it marked a turning point for the country and established the social norms and the logic of thinking for a Socialist China. The New Culture and the May Fourth Movements are often officially viewed as patriotic campaigns, which succeeded in promoting ideas of science and democracy. Yet, the May Fourth dream of a strong and democratic country was never fulfilled in the hegemonic politics of modern China. This study revisits the so-called success of the movements and their role as the prelude to the Communist China, and examines whether seeds of evilness were already sowed in the good wills of students in the May Fourth period.
In the popular radicalism among youth at the time, dichotomous thinking took root in the country. Students understood and interpreted the world in binaries of Confucianism and democracy, of the East and the West, and of the old and the new. They equalled the Oriental traditions to the evil, and the support for the new/the West to the hatred of the old/the East. With the binary logic, they eliminated the possibilities of eclecticism and established a unique culture of hatred and destruction for modern China. The militant attitude of students towards the evil existing systems inspired their intention to “destroy forever”, legitimated the use of violence, and paved paths to the dominance of Communism in 20's.
Students' efforts to rescue China during the May Fourth period failed to avoid the simplicity and arbitrariness of binary thinking and the culture of destruction. Their pursuit for democracy eventually evolved into the cultural and political hegemony of Communism in China. Lessons should be learnt from this transformation from good wills to evil outcomes.

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