Architectures of Violence: The Command Structures of Modern Mass Atrocities, from Yugoslavia to Syria.

• Author: Ozdemir, Ahmet Yusuf

Architectures of Violence: The Command Structures of Modern Mass Atrocities, from Yugoslavia to Syria

By Kate Ferguson

London: C. Hurst & Co. Publications, 2020, 240 pages, [pounds sterling]35.00, ISBN: 9781849048118

Violent non-state actors are one of the most contentious subjects in international security studies. The majority of the work dealing with this subject mainly focus on those actors that exert violence beyond or against the state's authority. Throughout history and within the political science and international relations literature, the focus has mainly been on those irregulars: mercenaries, rebels, insurgents, and terrorists. Nevertheless, on most battlefields, there are other types of actors with different names according to their locality. In Syria, they are Shabbiha; in Darfur, Janjaweed; in Rwanda, Interahamwe. Despite their differences in expression, language, or region, they are similar in their activity: paramilitarism. In Architectures of Violence: The Command Structures of Modern Mass Atrocities, Kate Ferguson draws attention to this phenomenon. The author's primary focus is the period of "the dissolution of Yugoslavia" throughout the 1990s. Ferguson analyzes the events in Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia Herzegovina that reached a certain level defined as genocide. Pursuing an often archeological investigation within the archives of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and beyond the classical narrative on ethnicity, culture, or religion, the author makes her case clear about how these brutal scenes took place.

The author positions her work within the literature on genocide and mass atrocity studies. Doing so allows an analysis that avoids the emotional terminology common in this area of research (pp. 14-15). One of Fergusons most significant contributions is to introduce a novel term-architectures of violence-"as a means of better understanding the structures, networks, and relationships of command, control, and influence that connect states, localities, organized crime, and society with the perpetration of international crimes" (p. 7). In a sense, the book follows this line of structuring in its chapters.

Ferguson begins by setting the scene for the rest of the book by detailing what is meant by two main terms: 'architectures of violence' and 'atrocity,' and explaining their relevance to the case studies she presents. For example, the ruling elites denied their participation in 'ethnic...