Assassination Through History

Assassination

• Assassination is a part of social reality since the emergence of communal frameworks and has been used by leaders to defend their statuses.
• Featured in the rise and fall of empires, such as Alexander the Great's ascendance to power.
• Assassinations continue to play an important role in modern times, yet are understudied and poorly understood.

Causes of Assassinations

• Restrictions on political competition and strong polarization and fragmentation.
• Lack of consensual political ethos and homogenous populations.
• Politically deprived groups, resulting in a decline in the legitimacy of political leadership and systems.
• Domestic violence during election periods.
• Territorial fragmentation of a country, leading to a loss of control over some parts of a country to opposing groups.

Targets of Assassinations

• Heads of state
• Lower-ranking political figures
• Legislators
• Vice heads of state
• Opposition leaders, especially in authoritarian systems and during violent domestic conflicts.

Implications of Assassinations

• Intensify prospects of a state's fragmentation and undermine its democratic nature.
• Assassination of heads of state:
  • Decline in the democratic nature of a polity
  • Increase in domestic violence
  • Instability and economic prosperity
• Assassination of opposition leaders:
  • Increase overall unrest and domestic violence
• Assassination of legislators:
  • Public unrest and anti-government demonstrations
  • Decline in legitimacy of the government

Policy Implications of Assassinations

• Role of policy makers:
  • Promoting political and social conditions
  • Addressing political grievances
  • Stable and regulated succession mechanisms
  • Stable routines and protocols, and creation of institutions
  • Safety of political and opposition leaders
• Law enforcers:
  • Most assassins previously involved in criminal activities
  • Veterans may be preferred to perform an assassination

Genocide

• Defined by the United Nations' Convention as any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group:
  • Killing members of a group
  • Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of a group
  • Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part
  • Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group
  • Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group

Ethnic Cleansing

• Purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas.
• Carried out in the name of misguided nationalism, historic grievances, and a powerful driving force for revenge.

International Humanitarian Law

• Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.
• Conspiracy, public incitement, and attempt to commit genocide, as well as complicity in genocide, are equally punishable acts.

Politicide and Democide

• Politicide: An act of killing human groups because of "political opposition to the regime and dominant groups."
• Democide: An act of eliminating a group of people in general, including politicide, and can also entail other forms of serious physical or mental harm, displacement, and forced birth control.

Pramono's Classification of the Degrees of Genocide

• Ideological and pragmatic genocide
• First degree genocide: Intentional genocide with mental and material elements, also known as absolute genocide.
• Second degree genocide: Unintentional genocide, typically committed under conditions of war.
• Third degree genocide: Lacking mental and material elements, occurring as a by-product of reckless or negligent policies.

Factors Contributing to Genocide

• Ethnicity, nationality, religion
• Economic dependency, underdevelopment, destitution
• Limited physical resources
• Usurpation of political power, marginalization
• Quelling of insurgencies or threat of coup d'etat
• Earlier genocide, colonial and alien administrative systems, artificial national and subnational boundaries, and the role of colonial powers and world superpowers.

Strategies to Conceal Genocide

• Deny genocide has taken place
• Belittle the scope of the crime if genocide has taken place
• Present genocide as justified
• Banalize genocide by stigmatizing it as a dispute between ethnic or religious groups or as a usual part of war
• Justify the former victims' attempts of revenge when both sides commit the act.