Is there more to a ‘group’ than meets the eye? Reconceptualising the ‘crime of crimes’ through a process-theoretical lens

MacLean, James B. (2014) Is there more to a ‘group’ than meets the eye? Reconceptualising the ‘crime of crimes’ through a process-theoretical lens. Socio-Legal Studies Association (SLSA) Annual Conference, Aberdeen, United Kingdom. 09 - 11 Apr 2014.

Abstract

‘Groups’ have increasingly become the focus of international law; not least, of international criminal law. The intent to destroy a protected group, a central aspect of the crime of genocide as defined by the Genocide Convention marks it out and sets it apart from other, more conventional, crimes. Genocide alone requires that the specific intent to destroy a group, in whole or in part, be proved. So there is clearly something especially wrong with aiming at the destruction of a group, something that has the effect of transforming otherwise wrongful acts, such as killing, torturing, and raping, into even more heinous ones. Why? What is it about this notion of a group that makes destroying such a group so conceptually different from destroying its individual members? Is there more to a group than meets the eye?

Process metaphysics contends that reality is understood properly only when it is perceived as dynamic, and not static; that is, in terms of process all the way down. A philosophy of process represents an attempt to explicate the nature of reality as developmental that stresses the fundamental inter-relatedness of all entities, emphasizing becoming rather than sheer existence or being. Here, reality is understood as formed of experiential events, not enduring substances or ‘things’; the world, as we know it, is the result of a selective process whereby many past events are integrated in the events of the present, and in turn are taken up by future events, a sequence of integrations at every level and moment of existence.

In his presentation of process philosophy as ‘a philosophy of organism’, Alfred North Whitehead uses the term ‘societies’ to represent the ways in which entities of any kind gather together successfully to cohere and endure and constitute some kind of unity The term social refers to the means and the mode in which such endurance is gained and ‘draw[s] attention to this lowly form of society to dispel the notion that social life is a peculiarity of the higher organisms’. In this way, Whitehead demonstrates how any discussions on the social (at the human level) can only be initiated after accounting for those wider notions of society and the social that characterise all existance. For Whitehead, it is always ‘societies’, as such, that we study. In contemporary thinking, we find an increasing processual awareness of organisations, institutions and other bodies as ‘loose and active assemblages of organisings’, as ever-moving groupings of dynamic acts rather than static structures. Such an understanding, it is claimed, can help to foster a more constructive consideration of organisations than has been possible on the basis of ideas derived from the mechanistic and rationalist assumptions of Newtonian thought.

In this paper, I draw upon the conceptual categories of ‘process’ thought (Whitehead, Bergson, Deleuze, Stengers), to provide not only an exciting reconceptualization of the notion of groups but also, a fortiori a more complete understanding of what it is that makes genocide unique

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