THE INTELLECTUAL ORIGINS OF THIS BOOK
My interest in geographic settings, nationalism, and repertoires of state violence was sparked by an intense, personal experience. From January 1985 to January 1988, I served as a conscript in the Israeli army, spending much of my time in an infantry unit. At the time, draftees rotated between occupation duty in southern Lebanon and the Palestinian territories. Those were relatively peaceful years, and I experienced little real combat. Still, I did witness remarkably different patterns of state coercion in each zone. Through a mixture of tacit and explicit signals, my colleagues and I learned that violent tactics appropriate to Lebanon were wrong for the West Bank or Gaza, and that methods permitted in Palestinian lands were unthinkable in Israel proper. To take one example, Israeli shoot-on-sight ambushes in the 1980s were common in Lebanon, but the same forces used quite different methods in the occupied Palestinian lands. As soldiers moved from one zone to another, in other words, they changed tactics quite dramatically. These variations were not organized solely along geographic lines, however, as we treated Jews and Arabs differently regardless of locale. As enforcers of Israeli state policy, our actions varied both by region and by nationality. These distinctions were integral to our daily routine, attracting little attention on all sides. When I began thinking more carefully about my military experiences, however, these patterns became intriguing sociological puzzles. Why would the Israeli army treat Lebanon and Palestine so differently?
My interests were strengthened in 1995, when I was sent by Human Rights Watch, a New York–based group, to study Turkey's war against Kurdish insurgents.[1] Turkish forces had burned down dozens of Kurdish villages in the country's southeastern region, using rape, torture, and other intensely violent measures. When Kurdish civilians fled the area defined as the "emergency zone," however, Turkish security forces used quite different methods of control, even though Kurdish squatter neighborhoods often harbored insurgents. What was appropriate for Turkey's southeast was entirely inappropriate in the country's west. As had been true for Israel, Turkey's coercive style varied from one geographical arena to the next. In areas where Turkish state power was less overwhelming, moreover, its methods were more blatantly destructive. While
Working in the world of international human rights documentation, I came to believe that scholars, journalists, and human rights analysis were missing an important aspect of state violence. Contrary to conventional wisdom, security forces and their semi-private allies often distinguished between institutional settings, with vital consequences for states, insurgents, civilian victims, and human rights advocates. These nuances, however, were often overlooked by scholars and state critics, many of whom lumped all coercive policies together under the rubric of "human rights abuses," ignoring geographically specific distinctions. I resolved to develop a way of distinguishing theoretically between different zones of state violence, and of explaining these zones' emergence over time. Most importantly, I wanted to explore an intriguing paradox: Why, when unwanted populations were fully dominated by contemporary ethnonationalist states, were they more likely to be policed than expelled? Why wouldn't states treat areas they controlled fully with even greater violence?
To those familiar with the awful abuses suffered by victims of these and other wars, academic theorizing may seem callous, opportunistic, even obscene. The neutral language of social science can never do justice to articulating the enormity of wartime suffering; but that effort is perhaps best left to journalists, novelists, and poets. As social scientists, our job is more modest. We provide explanatory tools to illustrate the social forces causing and shaping patterns of human misery. Whether or not this provides any tangible benefit to the world is difficult to say.