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39 J. Conflict Resol. 3 (1995)

handle is hein.journals/jcfltr39 and id is 1 raw text is: Democracy, Power, Genocide, and Mass Murder R. J. RUMMEL University of Hawaii at Manoa From 1900 to 1987, state, quasi-state, and stateless groups have killed in democide (genocide, massacres, extrajudicial executions, and the like) nearly 170,000,000 people. Case studies and quantitative analysis show that ethnic, racial, and religious diversity, economic development, levels of education, and cultural differences do not account for this killing. Rather, democide is best explained by the degree to which a regime is empowered along a democratic to totalitarian dimension and, second, the extent to which it is characteristically involved in war or rebellion. Combining these results with those that show that democracies do not make war on each other, the more democratic two nations are the less foreign violence between them, and that the more democratic a regime the less internal violence, strongly suggests that democracy is a general method of nonviolence. Political regimes-governments-have probably murdered nearly 170,000,000 of their own citizens and foreigners in this century-about four times the number killed in all international and domestic wars and revolutions (Rummel 1994). Why? I will offer both a theory and empirical results on this question and then sketch the variety of tests of the theory that were conducted. But first, I will define what I mean by government murder and, in doing this, propose an appropriate concept. A concept that has provided yeoman service in denoting government murder is genocide. But this concept hardly covers the variety and extent of ruthless murder carried out by governments. To be more specific, in interna- tional conventions and the general literature, genocide has been defined in part as the intentional killing by government of people because of their race, religion, ethnicity, or other indelible group membership. Cold-blooded gov- ernment killing, however, extends beyond genocide so defined: as starving civilians to death by a blockade; assassinating supposed sympathizers of antigovernment guerrillas; purposely creating a famine; executing prisoners JOURNAL OF CONFLICT RESOLUTION, Vol. 39 No. 1, March 1995 3-26 @ 1995 Sage Publications, Inc. 3 from the SAGE Social Science Collections. All Rights Reserved.

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