Oakland: University of California Press, 2022. xiv, 284 pp. (Tables, figures, maps, B&W photos, illustrations.) US$30.00, paper. ISBN 9780520385405.
Roughly a year before Russian armed forces crossed Ukrainian borders, Ukrainian-made armoured vehicles of the Sit-Tat (the Myanmar Armed Forces) marched through the streets of Myanmar’s major cities to enforce the latest in a series of coup d’états that have informed the contemporary political history of the Southeast Asian country. Roughly a year after the February 1, 2021 coup, the same armoured vehicles were deployed in coordination with Russian-manufactured fighter bombers to quell a resistance gaining unprecedented momentum in terms of both unity and intensity across lowland and mountainous areas of Myanmar. People in dry-zone Anya areas, who traditionally had not been involved in organized armed struggle against the military-state, were now joining political and armed movements that were confronting the attempted violent territorialization of the borderlands since the end of the Second World War—a territorialization that was fashioned on the model of military land settlement strategies derived from the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF), as well as British and Japanese colonial scorched-earth military techniques.
The glaring global dimensions of a war being fought against a military-state apparatus reinventing colonial-era forms of violence—armed with vehicles produced in an invaded country and jets manufactured by its opponent—have pushed many to ask why the international community has failed to recognize and respond to the (past and present) violence perpetrated by the Sit-Tat. As contemporary atrocities unfold against the background of decades-long histories and experiences of civil society documentation efforts to trace human rights violations, war crimes, and crimes against humanity in the longest ongoing armed conflicts on the planet, why haven’t such violent practices been defined as widespread and systematic conducts in violation of international norms?
But determining facts, and even more so legal facts, necessarily entails a forensic exercise. If forensics is the art of the forum—that is to say the art of presenting facts in order to debate about them in a given forum, and thus in a given form, with all the decisions, methods, analytical practices, and argumentative strategies that are required to abide to a certain form—such a question requires an understanding that human rights violations are not found but shaped via specific processes and practices of knowledge production.
Ken MacLean’s Crimes in Archival Form, investigates the processes and practices through which different fact finders create human rights archives, as well as how such archives are geared towards human rights forensic endeavours to shape facts for different purposes and audiences in different fora. The book offers an unprecedented process-oriented analysis concerning the investigative techniques and related decisions made, the methods used to create archival data, and the advocacy strategies adopted in human rights documentation efforts. Throughout the book, the author first writes and then un-writes the stories of four archives and the fact-finding methods used to document different types of crimes against humanity. To do so, he focuses on the events of the so-called Northern Offensive, a military campaign that the Sit-Tat unfolded from 2005 to 2008 as part of its larger war efforts against the Karen National Union/Karen National Liberation Army (KNU/KNLA).
Firmly rooted in a Foucauldian conceptual approach, MacLean’s analysis takes off from a conceptual question around insurgency and counter-insurgency that interrogates the very ontological categories underpinning the human rights project. What if we were to look at a state armed force (in this case the Sit-Tat) not as such but as the real insurgent? This question not only illuminates how the entire nation/state-building project of the Sit-Tat has been informed by a war paradigm, but also how its way of waging war is a reinvention of British colonial pacification strategies and tactics that applied disproportionate violence to project a semblance of order over areas that were never under a unitary polity. Yet, such historical and political considerations are in a sense erased from and by fact-finding practices. The very format imposed by donor readerships (like diplomats and policymakers) and politico-legal international mechanisms bars such consideration from the human rights reports that fact-finding produces.
In turn, such consideration opens the way for the thick empirical material the book presents. Similarly to the first chapter, subsequent chapters provide ethnographic reconstructions concerning how verbatim techniques, enumeration practices, interview transcription, translation, and contextualization, or strategic use of citation and referencing in reports have been used to meet international legal standards and norms. Rather than a critique of how human rights reports and fact-finding practices fabricate truth, the book exposes us to the crucial consideration that international law and the human rights regime privilege one form of knowing over another. Local human rights fact-finders in turn have to simplify, decontextualize, and/or elide the historical and socio-political context in which the violence they document occurs, while emphasizing instead technical-legal dimensions deemed relevant by (and necessary to access) international norms.
Looking at the longest ongoing conflicts on earth, I believe Crimes in Archival Form also illustrates an important link between war/militarism and biopolitics that one may observe in recent conflagrations from Ukraine and Russia to Palestine and Israel. War paradigms and military techniques informed by the logic of a “people’s war” (be it inflected in terms of nation, class, race etc.) rest on an identification between the body of that people and its military as an arm/body/machine to defend it. When political apparatuses that make of the defense of one particular form of human/people life their primary object of government hijack the military arm/body/machine, the figure of the enemy stops to be considered as a rights-bearing form of life and becomes instead a sub-human element of the space to be pacified: an element that can thus be erased. In this sense, the book shows how military violence at the margins shapes life, and it does so while reconstructing documentation and archival techniques that are deployed to claim at an international scale for the dishumanity of such military violence and to reaffirm the humanity of the lives it violated.
Francesco Buscemi
University of Bologna, Bologna