Chapter 1 Introduction: ecological inequity, ‘exterminism’ and genocide

The genocide – ecocide nexus

As yet there are only a few papers in the canon of genocide scholarship that attempt to theorise the material ‘extra-human environment’ as, what Lemkin termed, an essential foundation of a social collective (1944). Raymond Evans (2008) is one such example. In his contribution he specifically calls for a theoretical reorientation on the pivotal importance of environmental destruction to the continued survival of a social group. Echoing this sentiment, Damien Short and I (2014, p. 319) have called for a paradigm shift and a new ‘ecological turn’ in genocide studies. Short has done much to drive this turn, spearheading a reappraisal of the changing shape of the engine that now drives and underpins what he called (2010b) ‘settler colonial expansionist land grabs’ and their attendant genocidal consequences. His work on Indigenous people in Australia and First Nation Americans in Canada are cases in point. Short (2010b, pp. 837–8) elaborates:

Driven by corporate agendas governments frequently dispossess Indigenous groups through industrial mining and farming, but also through military operations and even national park schemes – all of which routinely take no account of core Indigenous rights. But of all such activities it is industrial extractive industries which pose perhaps the biggest threat to Indigenous peoples’ survival, for it is not just the accompanying dispossession which they bring but also the ‘externalities’ of pollution and environmental degradation.

Thus, the central focus of my book will be to illuminate the nexus between the two socioecological phenomenon and join the chorus of a nascent yet growing body of literature in genocide studies dubbed the ‘environmental turn’ (Churchill, 2002; Huseman and Short, 2012; Crook and Short, 2014, 2020, 2023; Lindgren, 2017; Dunlap, 2017; Crook, Short and South, 2018). I, however, want to go beyond this body of literature and attempt a synthesis of the sociology of genocide and environmental sociology into a new theoretical apparatus. Previous literature has by and large merely sought to empirically observe and document the necessary connection between these two phenomena and assert a socio-ethical critique condemning capitalism for its ecocidal and genocidal ‘externalities’. If they move beyond an empirical and ethical critique, they invariably identify the prevailing socio-economic system, unbridled neoliberal globalised capitalism, wrongly narrowing the historical scope of capitalist production’s eco-destructive period to this late phase of neoliberal market fundamentalism and/or point to the industrial expansionist drives of capitalism in vague abstract, ahistorical terms. In his critique of ‘green theory’ and ‘ecocentrism’ as a critique of the anti-ecological nature of the capitalist system, Foster (2016b) made much the same critical observations, arguing that ‘abstract notions like growth, industrialism, or consumption take the place of investigations into the laws of motion of capitalism as an economic and social order, and how these laws of motion have led to a collision course with the Earth system’. Heeding Foster’s warning, I seek to illuminate the political-economic drivers and mechanisms couched in an ontology that recognises the co-evolution of nature–society relations and accounts for the rise of ecologically induced genocide in its various iterations as a necessary function of capitalist production. As we will see, this encompasses the pastoral economy in the early history of Australian settler capitalism, or more recently fossil fuel extraction, including its particularly virulent form ‘extreme energy’ or unconventional fossil fuel extraction, or the Kenyan context and the commodification of nature, pursued under the euphemistic guise of the conservation of nature. The new theoretical apparatus will illuminate the nexus that binds all of these ecologically destructive practises in a common sinew of mutual destruction: the ecocide-genocide nexus. The form that this co-evolution of mutual destruction takes is, of course, an expression of the crisis-prone socioecological contradictions of the global capitalist system at any given particular historical juncture.

The book will argue that a radical political economy and ecology can help explain the destructive drive of the extractive industries and the drive to commodify nature through the institutional matrix of neoliberal climate governance and, more importantly, the fundamental contradiction between the capitalist production and its extra-human environment. It is the contention of this author that the capitalist system, propelled by the necessity to accumulate capital, in the form of industrial agriculture, neoliberal climate governance, industrial extractive industries and more recently even renewable energy (Dunlap, 2017), are the sine qua non of modern genocide. In other words, it is precisely these industries that constitute the dominant delivery system for the genocidal technique par excellence: ecological destruction.

However, to understand how settler-colonial states mediate the laws of motion of the capitalist system and express its drives, I will also draw on the rich storehouse of insights from settler-colonial studies, critical race studies and critical Indigenous studies to make sense of the diverse and complex ways in which the genocidal techniques, underpinned as they are by the aforementioned logic of capital, become manifest at the various levels of the settler-colonial and (post)colonial formation. In other words, the lacuna in the genocide studies literature which this book attempts to address is the failure to illuminate and explicate the manner in which the ecocidal logic of capital intersects with the settler-colonial ‘logic of elimination’ (Wolfe, 2006a, p. 387). I will combine this with the sociology of genocide as understood through a neo-Lemkian colonial settler lens, within which the master concept of culture is retained and where genocide is understood as a structure or process, unfolding through time, over many decades if not centuries, that cripples the essential foundations of a group by breaking up or stifling the relations of solidarity that bind a group together (Card, 2003; Short 2010a, 2010b; Barta, 1987; Curthoys and Docker, 2008; Docker, 2008; Kreiken, 2004, 2008; Moses, 2002; Powell, 2007). In essence, a Lemkian ontology understands social collectives as held together by its common culture, which secures its structural integrity and ultimately its physical well-being (Schaller, 2008a; Van Kreiken, 2004). The flipside of this ontological coin is that genocide is not an assault on the individuals per se, but rather an assault on the very structures, or essential foundations, of the group itself, weakening the integrity of the group and its capacity to successfully reproduce. Therefore, genocide is not limited reductively to ‘Nazi-like extermination policies’ or mass death. As Woolford and Benvenuto (2015, p. 379) remind us, a ‘people can be placed in precarious conditions that threaten its survival as a group without gas chambers or concentration camps’. Accordingly, forms of cultural destruction can result in the liquidation of the social group, just as surely as physical destruction, both ultimately leading to ‘social death’ (Card, 2003, p. 63; Short, 2003, p. 48). By social death, Claudia Card (2003, pp. 63–79) argued that the ‘social vitality’ of the group, which is secured through inter-generational and contemporary relationships and the formation of group identity which gives meaning to life, if disrupted or thwarted, would lead to social death. Where what Moses (2002) dubbed the ‘liberal’ approach, adopting a more legalistic interpretation, equates genocide with mass killing, intentionality, state actors and holocaust uniqueness, the ‘post liberal’ approach seeks to decolonise the discipline and focuses on the points of continuity between the Holocaust and colonial and postcolonial regimes and structures, both theoretically and ontologically, and in country-specific case studies such as Canada, Australia or Israel (Dunlap, 2017, pp. 555–6). Moreover, for Lemkin, and myself, genocide is necessarily a dimension of colonial settler societies, best summed up in Lemkin’s (1944, p. 79) keen abstraction:

Genocide has two phases: one, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group: the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor. This imposition, in turn, may be made upon the oppressed population which is allowed to remain, or upon the territory alone, after removal of the population and the colonization of the area by the oppressor’s own nationals.

Of course, today, in a ‘postcolonial’ world, where modern sovereign nation states with internationally agreed borders rarely, with a few notable exceptions, invade and annex other territory, colonialism and the colonial settler/Indigenous relations reproduce themselves and endure in modified form; the colonial modality referred to as ‘internal colonialism’ being a more apt category which captures the lived experience of vulnerable Indigenous groups who continue to suffer from systematic legal, political and social oppression and discrimination at the hands of the colonial state machine (Tully, 2000). It is through this Lemkian colonial settler lens, combined with Marxist ecology, political economy, settler-colonial studies, critical race studies and critical Indigenous studies that we can illuminate the ongoing imposition of genocidal structuring dynamics in the case studies that will form the focus of my book.

A synthesis of the sociology of genocide and environmental sociology

The contribution Marxist ecology and historical materialism can make to the field of genocide studies is twofold: first, by helping us theorise ecology and the material ‘extra-human environment’ as the ninth essential foundation of a social collective and its vital importance for biological and cultural integrity of any social collective (Crook and Short, 2014; Crook, Short and South, 2018).⁴ Historical materialism as a theory of society and historical change is rooted in an understanding of the centrality of social production of wealth or use values to the rise and historical evolution of social relations. This production, a universal requirement for all societies, includes basic requirements of food, shelter and clothing, as well as cultural and aesthetic needs. Crucially, this material requirement includes ecology. As Marx asserted, ‘The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus, the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature’ [emphasis added] (Marx and Engels, 1998, p. 37). Therefore, Marx ecologically embedded all human societies, recognising the co-evolution of human and natural history.

Secondly, Marxist ecology attempts to identify the causes of ecological degradation under the capitalist system, locating it in the manner in which the capitalist class have both historically monopolised control of the means of production, including the land, and the manner in which social production is carried out, both of which degrade the extra human environment, causing a metabolic rift (Burkett, 2014; Foster, 1997a, 2000). Briefly, Marx (1976a, p. 198) described as ‘social metabolism’ the ecological processes that govern the continual exchange of materials and energy between all life and its environment and allow for the regeneration and continuation of the ecological life-sustaining web, only mediated through the social relations of any given society, thus ecologically embedding all social formations. The key mediator of the life sustaining metabolic relationship, where human societies are concerned is labour (Marx, 1976a, p. 283). Every distinct social order or mode of production produces its own corresponding metabolic order, since each mode is distinguished by the manner in which labour and the other forces of production are organised. Contrary to prevailing Western environmentalist thinking which is broadly predicated on an empirically erroneous ‘nature-culture dualism’ (Braun, 2002, p. 10), society and nature are inevitably brought together in a dialectical relationship (Harvey, 1996). In other words, the metabolic interaction is socially mediated by the historically structured social relations between producers and between producers and appropriators of the surplus product (Crook and Short, 2014, p. 300), to produce a ‘social nature’ (Braun, 2002, p. 10; Smith, 2008). As Marx (1973, p. 85) was keen to stress, ‘some determinations belong to all epochs, others only to a few’. Indeed, what Smith (2008) called the ‘production of nature’ is common to all systems of social production. The concern of this book, however, will be the capitalist system, and the role it has played in restructuring socioecologies of much of the world through the ‘colonial encounter’ of European empires from the seventeenth century onwards (Grove, 1995, 1997; Crosby, 2004) with their colonised territories and what might be called the ‘production of colonial nature’. It is in the production of colonial nature that the book will tease out those ‘few’ determinations unique to capitalist production.

These theoretical and historical insights can be fruitfully incorporated into our understanding of ecologically induced genocide. If we accept the ontological reality that all social groups are ecologically embedded, and expand Lemkin’s techniques to include ecological destruction, Marxist ecology offers a very fruitful set of tools to illuminate eco-genocidal processes in settler-colonial spaces where the capitalist system plays a central role. As I will demonstrate, these case studies will make the ecocidal properties of the capitalist system painfully apparent.

Governmentality, colonial discourses and the constitutive logic of race

Colonization invent[ed] the colonized.

—Bhambra, 2014, p. 132

Much has been written to finesse understandings of how, alongside the material practises that facilitate the logic of elimination, various discursive, ideological and biopolitical techniques have been employed to pursue the erasure of the Indigenous genos. Critical race studies have done much to illuminate the ways in which socially constructed, racialised differences and the uneven racialised landscapes they create enable the material reproduction of the economic system in colonised spaces and ultimately the accumulation of capital, on local, national and international scales. There is a rich and important literature that identifies the critical role colonialism and its corollary, racial oppression and expropriation play in the expanded reproduction of racial capitalism. Works such as C. L. R. James’s (2001) Black Jacobins and Cedric Robinson’s (2000) Black Marxism stand as testament to this. The structuring power of racial categories facilitate the expanded material reproduction of the capitalist system by cheapening the labour of ‘othered’ bodies (Pulido, 2016), and structuring racialised landscapes that enable the accumulation process, such that the associated environmental externalities differentially impact white and non-white communities and restrict access to environmental benefits (Pulido, 2016). More recent work develops and deepens the work of such seminal thinkers like Cedric Robinson in this vein, showing that racial capitalism has played a pivotal role in environmental history and the transition to the Anthropocene, or the Racial Capitalocene (Vergès, 2017), dovetailing with the ecological Marxist insights discussed above. The role of racial capitalism will become painfully apparent in both case studies.

Of critical importance to developing a heuristic understanding of the symbolic violence and biopolitics that accompanies the material reproduction of the colonial political economy and racial capitalism are processes of ‘internal territorialisation’ (Vandergeest and Peluso, 1995, p. 387). They hinged on modern state technologies or ‘spatial practices’ such as, inter alia, mapping, cadastral planning and surveying, which were crucial to state formation as well as capital accumulation. These cadastral technologies that facilitated the expansion of the colonial state and regulated the behaviours and conduct of subject populations were both enabled and enablers of the cultural erasure and (re)inscription of colonised spaces which are central to relations of genocide in both sites of settler colonisation. As Peluso and Lund (2011, p. 673) have argued, territorialisation is ‘no less than power relations written on the land’ [emphasis added].

Of course, as Indigenous scholar J. Kēhaulani Kauanui (2016) reminds us, we mustn’t conflate indigeneity with race or ethnicity. As alluded to already, the histories of othering, settler-colonial violence, subjugation, relationship to place and subject positions are not identical for all racialised groups. Influenced by what is often described as the ‘discursive turn’ within postcolonial studies and post-structuralist school, scholars working within the critical Indigenous studies and settler-colonial studies tradition have applied concepts and categories borrowed from within this tradition to better understand what was earlier referred to as the shifting structural target of the settler-colonial logic of elimination. Key to the discursive turn is the notion that knowledge and power are mutually constitutive of each other, a notion attributed to the French philosopher, historian and sociologist Michel Foucault, first formulated in his path-breaking work Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1995). Referring to the evolution of the penal system, Foucault (1995, p. 23) observed that ‘a corpus of knowledge, techniques, “scientific” discourses is formed and becomes entangled with the practise of the power to punish’. This ontological nexus between ‘the deployment of force and the establishment of truth’ (1995, p. 184) was extended to a development of an understanding of how modern governments (including colonial ones, as we will see), exercise their power. In particular, Foucault’s notion of ‘biopolitics’ and ‘governmentality’ (Foucault et al., 2014): the former referring to the notion that in the modern age, entire populations and their ‘improvement’, in arenas such as public health or economic productivity, have become the object of government, requiring new bodies of knowledge, including, inter alia, the macroeconomic, bio-scientific and statistical. The latter referred to the ‘art of government’, which he broke down into ‘rationalities’ or discourse that governments employed and various ‘technologies’ that governments deploy to ensure that the objects of government conform or ‘normalise’. This alternative model of state power to the traditional top-down, juridical, hierarchal notion, creates ‘regimes of truth’ which, via disciplinary institutions, such as hospitals, psychiatric institutions, schools and the like, allow for the more efficient social control of whole populations as they internalise those discourses or norms of behaviour (Foucault, 1998, p. 140). Edward Said, one of the founders of postcolonial studies, would apply this framework to an understanding of colonial relations of power, arguing (1994, p. 9) that the latter was not simply constituted through ‘accumulation and acquisition’ but that ‘[b]oth are supported and perhaps even impelled by impressive ideological formations that include notions that certain territories and people require and beseech domination, as well as forms of knowledge affiliated with domination’. Sadly, this insight will prove highly redolent to this book.

Even human and Indigenous rights, and by extension, progressive efforts to reconcile with and recognise Indigenous people, function as forms of governmentality that act to discipline those to which they have been extended and neutralise Indigenous political challenges to settler-colonial states (Moreton-Robinson, 1999b; Alfred, 1999). Mohawk scholar Taiaiake Alfred (1999, p. 58) argues that ‘reconciliation’ efforts and the legislation of new rights for Indigenous peoples is nothing more than the continuation of colonial relations by other means, arguing that the granting of ‘rights’ is one of the weapons in the arsenal of colonialism given the role of the colonial settler state in shaping and defining them. Glenn Coulthard’s (2014) path-breaking work Red Skin, White Masks argues much the same, describing the ‘recognition paradigm’ as the new modus operandi of colonial power (Coulthard, 2014, p. 4). Where colonial power is not primarily reproduced through violence, the structure of dispossession is secured through psycho-affective discourses that forge a ‘colonial subject’ (Coulthard, 2014, p. 4). More specifically, Alfred argues that to aspire to secure rights through the colonial state is to implicitly accept the authority of the colonial state in the first place. Even when the ‘liberal’ human rights academic and policy communities champion Indigenous rights and argue in favour of ‘collective rights’ (as opposed to rights couched in Lockean or Benthamite terms of the individual), advocated by William Kymlicka (1995) and Charles Taylor (1995), which protect persistently disadvantaged individuals as members of minority communities, they are still insidiously plagued with colonial notions. For all the eloquence and merits of the ‘collective rights’ arguments, they are predicated on the liberal settler state’s jurisdiction over Indigenous nations (Tully, 1995, p. 53).

The liberal politics of ‘recognition’ flounders when it conflates the status of immigrant minority communities who have, voluntarily and with consent, chosen to become citizens of any particular nation-state and Indigenous peoples who invariably consider themselves as not only culturally distinct, but crucially, dispossessed First Nations, who did not give their consent, nor willingly hand over their land or relinquish their self-determination (Short, 2008, p. 19). The consequent focus on ‘internal citizenship’ as a solution to Indigenous rights claims subsumes Indigenous self-determination and political autonomy to the overarching authority of settler state authority and consequently becomes a form of internal-colonialism (Tully, 2000, p. 39). It is precisely these colonial assumptions, discursive manoeuvres, forms of governmentality and psychoactive affects that we will see deployed to great effect by settler and (post)colonial administrations in Australia and Kenya respectively.

The import for the purposes of the argument of this book is that these forms of discursive violence, racialisation and biopolitics help us comprehend the manifold ways in which, through various cognate biocultural assimilation projects, social death is achieved.

The case of Kenya and Australia as sites of continuing genocide: the logic of comparison

In the case of Australia, we witness a process of continuing genocide that can be broken down into phases, beginning with the much studied and discussed ‘dispersal’ extermination campaigns of the 1800s, the biopolitical assimilation programmes that followed in their wake, such as the ‘protection’ regimes and the reserve system, the more recent ‘reconciliation’ process and the bowdlerisation of Indigenous rights as part of an assimilationist nation-building agenda (Moran, 2009; Short, 2003, 2008). Now in the current phase, we witness the continued settler-colonial land grabs which enable the rampant mining of Australia, in what Short (2016) has described as resource-based ecological genocide and more recently extreme energy known as coal seam gas (CSG) production.

In Kenya, the dynamic genocidal structure – not singular event – as Wolfe (2006) described, was set in train during the initial colonisation phase under the auspices of the Imperial British East Africa Company in 1888, which principally involved, above all else, land grabbing, followed by what I (Crook, 2013, pp. 31–5) called the second concentrated phase of genocide during the emergency period from October 1952 to December 1959, which organised the brutal suppression of the resistance to land alienation (Anderson, 2005; Elkins, 2003, 2005a). In this new third phase, in Kenya’s postcolonial period and the age of climate change and the Anthropocene, ecologically vulnerable Indigenous groups are being menaced by a multitude of ecological and cultural genocidal coercive processes of social change, among which the most salient are land grabs, market environmentalism and neoliberal conservationism. The forces that underpin these processes are the Kenyan post-independence state and its drive to develop the economic base of its economy in a sharply competitive globalised economy, restructured along neoliberal lines (Kwokwo, 2014, ch. 4). The ecological fallout from these development agendas threatens the cultural integrity of forest dwelling peoples like the Sengwer by both severing their connection with their land, the land which embodies their cultural identity and spiritual vitality, sustained through inter-generational and contemporary relationships (Card, 2003, pp. 63–79).

In essence, my book seeks to deepen the attempt to understand the structural roots of ‘genocidal societies’ as Tony Barta (1987) called them, as national entities and in their many political economic connections with broader global structures, and reveal their political economic underpinnings. This attempt to give the study of genocide sociological rigour was given a new lease of life with Barta’s (1987) path-breaking piece Relations of Genocide: Land and Lives in the Colonization of Australia, in which he coined the phrase ‘relations of genocide’, a concept which was obviously inspired by his Marxist leanings, and gave the phrase ‘genocidal society’ a much-needed shot in the arm, after Irving Horowitz used it misleadingly, as Barta (1987, pp. 239–40) argues, to describe a state apparatus seized by the Nazis for the purposes of systematic structural elimination of social groups. For Barta (1987) genocidal societies were distinct from genocidal states, because as he put it:

the whole bureaucratic apparatus might officially be directed to protect innocent people but in which a whole race is nevertheless subject to remorseless pressures of destruction inherent in the very nature of the society. It is in this sense that I would call Australia, during the whole 200 years of its existence, a genocidal society [emphasis added].

In is in this vein and this tradition that my book seeks to illuminate the inner structural connections between capitalist social formations and cultural and ecologically induced genocide in order to repudiate the notion that genocide is somehow an aberration of the social and political system, a pathological breakdown of the normal functioning of our society’s institutions of economy and government.

The central contention of this book is that the continuing genocide of, inter alia, the Sengwer in Kenya and the Gomeroi, Githabul, and Wangan and Jagalingou in Australia, is the necessary product of the expansion and imposition of the colonial occupant’s capitalist system, a system inimical to the Indigenous way of life. Herein lies the ultimate structural root of the cultural genocide of the aforementioned Indigenous groups. It also succinctly and eloquently captures what Short (2016, p. 37) has urged other genocide scholars to do above all else, which is to examine and reveal ‘the context and manner in which Indigenous cultures are “changing” in the face of continuing settler colonial expansionist projects driven by global capitalism and a “logic of elimination”’ [emphasis in original].

Kenya and Australia share a history as former colonies of the British Empire, which will provide illuminating similarities and contrasts. Above all, it is this shared heritage as former British settler colonies that will set them both on the path to genocide and see them unleash Lemkin’s two-staged process. The precise historical manner in which the logic of settler-colonial capitalism will manifest as the ‘logic of elimination’ in the respective colonial spaces and the corresponding points of similarity and difference is what interests us here. Above all, it is this shared heritage which I will demonstrate unleashed genocidal structuring dynamics in the past and laid down a legacy that continues to reproduce those dynamics in the here and now. The precise manner and trajectory of these genocidal structuring dynamics in both sites is what will be traced.

Firstly, we must consider the manner in which both settler colonies were forcibly integrated into the international division of labour and the imperial chain of global capitalist production, investment and trade. This has left a lasting legacy in how both countries are currently governed and incorporated into the global economy, which has implications for the continuing genocidal structuring dynamics in both countries. Moreover, as alluded to earlier in the case of Kenya, both countries have recently gone through similar processes of neoliberalisation, which have not only deepened (and to some extent transformed) their historic role in the international division of labour laid down during the period of the British Empire, but have played a crucial political economic role in the current phase of their respective genocidal structuring dynamics.

As well as having their fates tied by the British Empire, the manner in which they exhibit genocidal processes as a function of their political economies is also tied in another sense. The role that the Australian economy now plays as a major exporter of primary goods in the form of minerals and fossil fuels is not only, arguably, a legacy of its origins as a settler-colonial adjunct of the British Empire, but also a major contributor to ‘anthropogenic forcing’, changing the Earth’s energy balance and total atmospheric concentrations of CO2. Australia is in fact an outlier as an atmospheric polluter and carbon emitter (Morton, 2021), which of course is destabilising the biosphere’s carbon cycle characteristic of the Holocene. This, in turn, drives climate change and plays a crucial part in the general ecological crisis. Without this crisis there would be no rationale or pretext for the intellectual, ideological and political economic enterprise previously described as market environmentalism and the green economy. Without this enterprise, the avenues for green accumulation that it forced open would not have come to pass, since there would not be an ecological crisis to manage. The fact that the anti-ecological properties of the capitalist system drive the destabilisation of our climate and the Anthropocene more generally, which is now, through intergovernmental institutions and a whole array of other actors and stakeholders, being turned into an opportunity for capital accumulation through various market environmentalist schemes, ties the fates of Indigenous peoples in Australia and Kenya in yet another way.

This leads to the next fascinating point of comparison: the peculiar and tragic turn of events which brings the fates of Indigenous peoples together across the two case studies, via the shared planetary carbon cycle, has given rise to two distinct and seemingly opposing forms of the capitalist mode of production. On the one hand, in the case of Australia, as we will see, a mode of economic organisation which, shaped by the imperative to accumulate capital and produce value, extracts Earth’s resources in an ecologically destructive and unsustainable manner. On the other hand, a mode of production in Kenya, which seeks also to accumulate capital and produce value as narrowly defined by the capitalist system, but this time in order to conserve rather than destroy. The latter has been described as a conservationist mode of production (Brockington and Duffy, 2010). In essence, while one genocide machine causes ecological ruptures, another, spawned by the first, seeks to ‘fix’ them.

Finally, the cases exhibit interesting similarities and differences in the way that indigeneity is coded and instrumentalised by both settler-colonial forces and those resisting them. The legal, normative symbolic and social scientific meaning of indigeneity presents interesting differences across the two case studies both historically speaking and in the present juncture. Consequently, these differences and their political and ideological import will have material and political implications for the genocidal structuring dynamics and the resistance to them.

Methodological considerations

The truth is the whole.

—Hegel, 2006, p. 81

The methodology of this book will consciously adopt an activist perspective in the full recognition that ‘knowledge is vital to social action – as to individual ethics – [which] has long been recognized. Thinkers have been doers (contrary to stereotype). And reflection on successes, failures and unexpected consequences of social action has been a vital source of new understanding’ (Hale, 2008, p. xiii). In the past the positivist ‘objective’ forms of anthropology and social science which studied Indigenous communities often served to exclude Indigenous peoples from the production of knowledge and impose and thus perpetuate colonial forms and categories which condemned Indigenous peoples to a static and primitive form of existence and reproduced the colonial discourse that did so much to consolidate their subjugation. As Hale (2008) points out: ‘Anthropologists have lately engaged in much soul-searching over complicity in colonialism, but anthropology was also recurrently the basis for efforts to mitigate harmful colonial practices’. It is in the spirit of this latter sense that this study was undertaken. The voice of the victims of genocidal processes are accorded equal evidentiary weight, as will be explained below, given the inherently phenomenological dimension of the crime of genocide.

In essence, my methodological approach could be described as ‘mixed methods’. On the one hand I am using, following the structural or colonial genocide school, a ‘radical structural approach’ (Burrell and Morgan, 1979, pp. 33–4) which takes as axiomatic the existence of external objective structures independent of our cognition, but which also seeks to identify the contradictions and tensions within those structures to bring about radical change. It is ‘committed to radical change, emancipation, and potentiality, in an analysis which emphasises structural conflict, modes of domination, contradiction and deprivation’ (Burrell and Morgan, 1979). On the other, the collection of qualitative data, in particular interviews with Indigenous people that capture the lived experiences of structural violence and the meanings that they attribute to the various losses and social harms they experience. This is often referred to as the ‘interpretive approach’ (Burrell and Morgan, 1979, p. 30), which seeks to understand how actors make sense of their experiences and in the case of social groups, reach intersubjective or collective understandings of their situations (Putnam and Banghart, 2017, p. 2–3), which, given the recursive relationship between action and meaning construction, play a critical role in shaping future interactions.

However, I seek to move beyond what are often mutually exclusive approaches and, following the genocide scholar Christopher Powell (2010, p. 8–9), adopt a relational approach that eschews both what he called the objectivist and subjectivist strategies outlined above, and which avoids reductively erasing the significance of agency as mere epiphenomenon from history but seeks to understand it dialectically in conjunction with structure, as part of a larger rich totality; ‘The truth is the whole’ as Hegel famously observed (2006, p. 81). If therefore, we take seriously Lemkin’s understanding of genocide and his methodology – in particular, his privileging of culture as the ‘master concept’ – then we must acknowledge that group life and its destruction manifest both at the level of the objective, such as the destruction of for instance the ecosystems that physically and biologically support the integrity of group existence, which exist independent of our sense perceptions and can indeed be recorded and even quantitatively measured. They also manifest at the intersubjective or phenomenological level, in the sense that the trauma and cultural significance of such a phenomenon and its impact on the ‘social vitality’ of group life (Card, 2003, p. 63) – the contemporary and intergenerational relationships and connections people have within a genus – is inherently a lived experience, which can only be fully understood through the intersubjective meanings that the victim groups attribute to the social and cultural harms visited upon them. It therefore stands to reason that the verbal testimonies of those who have experienced ‘social death’ are crucial to understanding it. As Wise (2017a, p. 4) argues, by focusing on the experiential dimensions of genocide, we introduce a vital ‘complementary phenomenological layer of understanding’ which can enrich our comprehension of an experience which, by its very nature, eludes the grasp of most, and help us better appreciate the distinctive harms associated with genocide.

The aim of this research is therefore to document the experiences of predominantly the Sengwer and Kikuyu in the former British colony of Kenya and predominantly the Gomeroi, Githabul, and Wangan and Jagalingou nation in New South Wales (NSW) and Queensland, Australia, not because they are the only groups experiencing ecologically induced genocide, but because their experiences are indicative of the nature of relations of genocide in both countries. Where I do refer to the experiences of other groups, again, it is because they shed further light on the genocidal structuring dynamics that are the focus of this book. Through a comparative approach, the research seeks to identify and tease out the commonalities and fascinating differences in the unfolding of the genocidal structuring dynamics due to the imposition of the capitalist mode of production, or what I have elsewhere described as a mode of eco-genocidal destructive production (Crook, Short and South, 2018), in two different sites of colonisation, united by their connection to the British Empire and the global political economy it helped construct. By mode of eco-genocidal destructive production, I am referring to the manner in which the capitalist mode of production, in order to expand production and generate capital, must first destroy extant forms of material culture and forms of organising economic production. The effect is eco-genocidal. As we will see later, this two-stage process involving first destruction followed by expanded capitalist production mirrors the two stages of colonial genocide explicated by the founder of the concept of genocide, Raphael Lemkin (1944). The precise manner in which this happens is the subject of this book.

The field research included over thirty semi-structured interviews with participants across multiple sites of extraction and ‘conservation’ in predominantly Queensland and NSW in Australia and the Cherangani Hills in Kenya. The aim was to carry out interviews with those recruited via existing contacts with Indigenous and non-Indigenous activists made by myself using purposive sampling, with a view to expanding this participant group via snowball sampling. After beginning with general biographical questions, I asked broad open-ended questions about how they were impacted by various development projects, about the various forms of loss and social harms experienced on a personal and collective level due to those projects and their associated forms of (colonial) governance. I explained from the outset that the aim of my research was to draw attention to the experiences of the victim groups and to understand the nature of these harms. In almost all cases the participants would use, if not the language of genocide itself, an idiom that connoted genocide or cultural destruction. The limitations of relying on snowball sampling, such as selection or referral biases, were to some extent mitigated by the triangulation of the data with analysis of documentary evidence and other primary sources, such as statutes, court rulings, government documents, NGO data and relevant secondary literature.

In the identification of the techniques used to bring about genocide I will use Lemkin’s eight techniques (1944, pp. 82–90), to which I add the ninth, the ecological foundation. They are the following:

1.  Political: involves the cessation of self-government and destruction of political institutions followed by the imposition of administration by the colonial occupants; all local political organisations are dissolved and imposition of parties of the occupant originating from the colonising power.

2.  Social: involves the annihilation of leadership, abolition of local courts and the imposition of the legal system of the occupant.

3.  Cultural: ban on the use of native language, imposition of colonial education and the rigid control or restriction/prohibition of cultural activities, for example, art, theatre, music and so on.

4.  Economic: destruction of the foundation of economic existence.

5.  Biological: interdiction of the reproduction of the group by decreasing the birth rate or the apprehension of the children and their assimilation into the group of the occupant.

6.  Physical: mass murder and endangering of health.

7.  Religious: disruption of religious influence, destruction of religious leadership.

8.  Moral: creation of an atmosphere of moral debasement.

9.  Ecological: the destruction of, or severance from the eco-systemic habitat of the group.

Finally, it is helpful to use the internationally recognised rights of Indigenous peoples as found in United Nations Declaration of the Rights Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) (UNGA, 2017) as useful proxies for measuring the extent and unfolding of relations of genocide. Their relative retardation, violation and degradation are in inverse proportion to the unfolding of the genocidal structuring dynamics, since the denial of these rights make meaningful group existence untenable. They will be particularly useful for gauging the extent of genocidal structuring dynamics in the modern period given their dominance and prevalence in the discourse and struggle surrounding the subject of this chapter. In particular:

1.  Free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) (Article 19).

2.  Rights to self-determination (Articles 3 and 31).

3.  Rights to land (Article 26) which are pivotal to their cultural integrity and the remedial rights that allow them to protect said rights.

The denial of FPIC on development projects or the right to self-determination prima facie constitute existential threats to the cultural integrity of a social collective or group that is uniquely susceptible to the crime of genocide (Abed, 2006, pp. 308–30), namely ‘culture producing’ groups (Moses, 2010, p. 23), who consent to a life in common, whose culture is comprehensive and whose membership cannot be easily renounced (Abed, 2006, pp. 308–30). The denial of the first two are cultural genocidal coercive processes, in addition to constituting arguably political and social techniques, since the genos or social group ‘exists by virtue of its common culture’ (Lemkin quoted in Moses, 2010, p. 25), a social structure, like all social structures that must be understood diachronically (Elias, 1978, pp. 113–16), where change is integral to its flourishing. Ergo, genocide is the forcible disruption or interdiction of the process of cultural change or reproduction of the genos (Powell, 2007, p. 538). Cultural change emanating from the group itself cannot take place if and when the denial of the first two rights takes place. The denial of the right to land, or indeed its destruction through ecologically destructive practices, also menaces the collective existence of a group, particularly where Indigenous groups are concerned, who are, by definition, territorially bounded and whose cultural and spiritual vitality is tied to the land (Abed, 2006, p. 326). The denial of land rights is so fundamental to group integrity that it most probably impinges on all nine foundations of group existence listed above.

Through a comparative analysis of the two loci of genocide, I aim to illuminate and tease out the fascinating similarities and differences that comparison affords. This will underscore the utility of a political economic approach otherwise defined as neo-Lemkian above. Finally, by employing theories of global political economy, such as those drawn from radical political economy and geography traditions,⁵ the inner connections of global capitalist economic and geo-political structures with the Australian and Kenyan colonial sites will be illuminated.

Chapter outlines

This work consists of six chapters. Chapters 2 and 4 will begin with an analysis of the political economic, legal and discursive context of the genocidal and ecocidal processes of the Indigenous groups that form the focus of my study in Kenya and Australia respectively. Chapters 3 and 5 will go on to analyse and dissect the lived experience of the aforementioned Indigenous groups in the current period and try to grasp, both in their own words and through the application of the synthesised apparatus outlined above, the ecocidal and genocidal impacts of both extreme energy and the extractive industries and their associated forms of governmentality and the institutional matrix of neoliberal climate governance, being careful to illuminate the structuring dynamics of the colonial settler/Indigenous relations. Further, these chapters will trace the origins of ecologically induced genocide, in both the local structural matrix between the capitalist state and the national economy and the related categorical imperatives of capitalistic production and its structural relationship to the larger international forces of capital accumulation, trade and investment, belying what Wise (2017b, p. 34) calls the ‘domestic fallacy’, the tendency in genocide studies to privilege state-centric causes which lead to ‘inadequate International Relations analyses of the production of genocide’ (Shaw, 2012, p. 2).

The concluding chapter summarises the findings of the book; arguing that in essence, the settler-colonial–Indigenous relation, in the age of the Anthropocene and a global ecological crisis, is characterised by the genocide-ecocide nexus (Crook and Short, 2014, 2020). Furthermore, the chapter will attempt to underscore the interlinkages between Indigenous struggle and the broader struggle against the ecological crisis, which the preceding analysis has pointed to. It will expound a way, in the age of ecocidal capitalism, that can forge a generalised climate resistance, leading us beyond the rotten machinery of ceaseless economic expansion, accumulation of (exchange) value and the insatiable exploitation and raping of the planet for the aggrandisement of an ecological elite governing a planet stricken by the greatest existential threat to organised human existence in history.

Notes

1. 1. The remaking of nature leads to what O’Conner (1994, p. 165) described as ‘the second contradiction of capitalism’, as the eco-destructive mode of production undermines the conditions of the (re)production of the capitalist system itself.

2. 2. Much of it is only now being translated via the MEGA project (Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe).

3. 3. Harvey (2003b, p. 64) defined ‘spatio-temporal’ in the following manner:

Overaccumulation within a given territorial system means a condition of surpluses of labour (rising unemployment) and surpluses of capital (registered as a glut of commodities on the market that cannot be disposed of without a loss, as idle productive capacity, and/or as surpluses of money capital lacking outlets for productive and profitable investment). Such surpluses may be absorbed by: (a) temporal displacement through investment in long-term capital projects or social expenditures (such as education and research) that defer the re-entry of current excess capital values into circulation well into the future, (b) spatial displacements through opening up new markets, new production capacities and new resource, social and labour possibilities elsewhere, or (c) some combination of (a) and (b).

1. 4. Marxism has often been accused of Eurocentrism and a stagiest’ ‘evolutionary’ or unilinear theory of history, of a type with developmentalist thinking that had grave consequences for the Indigenous and colonised all over the world (Churchill and Larson, 1992; Samson and Short, 2005, p. 7–8). However, many scholars have disputed this characterisation, showing Marx evolved in his thinking and in many respects matured beyond a Eurocentric, unilinear understanding of history (Anderson, 2016a, ch. 5).

2. 5. See for instance Smith (2006, 2008); Callinicos (2009); Harvey (2001, 2003a, 2003b).