Genocide Studies International
Volume 10, Issue 1, Spring 2016
http://www.utpjournals.press/toc/gsi/current

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Articles
State Strength, Non-State Actors, and the Guatemalan Genocide: Comparative Lessons
Frederick M. Shepherd
Frederick M. Shepherd is professor at Samford University, and is the author of Christianity and Human Rights: Christians and the Struggle for Global Justice (Lexington, 2009). He has been affiliated with the Holocaust Education Foundation, the US Holocaust Memorial and Museum, and was part of the Resisting the Path to Genocide Research Cluster at the University of Southern California.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/gsi.10.1.06
Abstract
This article focuses on the Guatemalan genocide—which has been labeled “acts of genocide” by the United Nations—in the context of the Guatemalan state’s weakness in mobilizing people and resources for its genocidal project. State planners were able to brutalize the indigenous population, especially during the early 1980s. But at the same time, the state showed extraordinary weakness in basic state functions such as taxing and military mobilization. The article links these failures to a more general state absence of “infrastructural capacity,” and to the strength of powerful non-state forces originating inside and outside of Guatemalan national borders. The article concludes with comparative lessons from other genocides—notably the Holocaust and Rwanda—marked by state strength in the areas of mobilizing people and resources.