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The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing
This comprehensive study of international ethnic cleansing provides in-depth coverage of its occurrences in Armenia, Nazi Germany, Cambodia, Yugoslavia, and Rwanda, as well as cases of lesser violence in early modern Europe and in contemporary India and Indonesia. After presenting a general theory of why serious conflict emerges and how it escalates into mass murder, Michael Mann offers suggestions on how to avoid such escalation in the future. Michael Mann is the author of Fascists (Cambridge, 2004) and The Sources of Social Power (Cambridge 1986).
592 pages, Paperback
First published October 11, 2004
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948 people want to read
About the author
Michael Mann
108 books98 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.
Michael Mann is a British-born professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Visiting Research Professor at Queen's University Belfast. Mann holds dual British and United States citizenships. He received his B.A. in Modern History from the University of Oxford in 1963 and his D.Phil. in Sociology from the same institution in 1971. Mann is currently visiting Professor at the University of Cambridge.
Mann has been a professor of Sociology at UCLA since 1987; he was reader in Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science from 1977 to 1987. Mann was also a member of the Advisory Editors Council of the Social Evolution & History Journal.
In 1984, Mann published The Autonomous Power of the State: its Origins, Mechanisms, and Results in the European Journal of Sociology. This work is the foundation for the study of the despotic and infrastructural power of the modern state.
Mann's most famous works include the monumental The Sources of Social Power and The Dark Side of Democracy, spanning the entire 20th century. He also published Incoherent Empire, where he attacks the United States' 'War on Terror' as a clumsy experiment of neo-imperialism.
Mann is currently working on The Sources of Social Power: Globalizations, the third volume in the series. [wikipedia]
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.
Michael Mann is a British-born professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Visiting Research Professor at Queen's University Belfast. Mann holds dual British and United States citizenships. He received his B.A. in Modern History from the University of Oxford in 1963 and his D.Phil. in Sociology from the same institution in 1971. Mann is currently visiting Professor at the University of Cambridge.
Mann has been a professor of Sociology at UCLA since 1987; he was reader in Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science from 1977 to 1987. Mann was also a member of the Advisory Editors Council of the Social Evolution & History Journal.
In 1984, Mann published The Autonomous Power of the State: its Origins, Mechanisms, and Results in the European Journal of Sociology. This work is the foundation for the study of the despotic and infrastructural power of the modern state.
Mann's most famous works include the monumental The Sources of Social Power and The Dark Side of Democracy, spanning the entire 20th century. He also published Incoherent Empire, where he attacks the United States' 'War on Terror' as a clumsy experiment of neo-imperialism.
Mann is currently working on The Sources of Social Power: Globalizations, the third volume in the series. [wikipedia]
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
July 29, 2025
[29/07/25, edited for typos and clarity]
Pretty magnificent, though hard to stomach so much death. Mann's thesis: ethnic cleansing is a historically new phenomenon, inextricable from the rise of democracy. While masscares by warbands and armies have always existed, deliberate annihilation of a culture hasn't. This is the dark corrolary to democratization itself.
From the American frontier settlers onwards (the Spanish were happy to absorb meso-American allies in their war against the Aztecs, and the vast majority of deaths were unintentional), through the Armenian genocide, to the Nazi (and collaborator) holocaust, ethnic cleansing in the Soviet Union and Cambodia, the breakup of Yugoslavia and the Rwandan genocide — the ascent of the demos as a political stakeholder reconfigured state, elite and settler interests, opening up the path to genocide as a measure of last resort, when a factionalized state, assertive settler pressures, ethnonationalist political challenges and exacting external circumstances fail to find their pre-crisis balance. It's 600 pages of the best materialist historiography — who did what, why, under which constraints, with what consequences and to whose detriment or benefit. An interaction of all these factors is necessary to explain genocide; "divide and conquer", "human nature" or racism can never explain what is essentially a elite-state-masses dynamic. At every stage, Mann checks his theory — summarized in 8 theses in the beginning — against genocidal developments, or, in the case of India and Indonesia, occasions when the danger arose but never burst into sustained, organized slaughter.
His conclusions for our time? The West has out-genocided itself, to a point where there are no more occasions for it. The Global South, on the other hand, states still consolidating and finding their electoral bases, has entered a dangerous period:
Written in 2003, that's a pretty prescient prediction.
Does Mann help make sense of the world? He goes to great length humanizing the elite perpetrators and downplaying the role of their ideology, to say nothing of the masses. He emphasizes the speed with which once friendly neighbors can start killing one another once circumstances are ripe. The nationalist impulse towards segregating peoples, was often a lesser-evil emergency solution preventing the much greater harm which accompanies genocidal separatism — ànd its repression. Belgium is cited as a happy model for consociationalism, although 20 years down the line our country is rent by separatist politics. Do all modern roads lead to nation state management?
Most importantly policywise, Mann advocates for foreign intervention. In Cambodia, genocide was stopped by an invasion; in Rwanda, it was abetted by a lack of it. Foreign pressure can put a brake on ethnonationalist pandering to a restive population, although it's exactly that foreign connection that can catalyze a minority's reputation as a fifth column, as in the case of Armenia.
The Cambodian chapter was less solid than the others, but then again, at the time of writing, it must have been the least well-documented cleansing of them all.
A better review would lay this book side by side with Ernest Gellner and McNamee's Settling For Less. Mine is just a mental anchor.
Pretty magnificent, though hard to stomach so much death. Mann's thesis: ethnic cleansing is a historically new phenomenon, inextricable from the rise of democracy. While masscares by warbands and armies have always existed, deliberate annihilation of a culture hasn't. This is the dark corrolary to democratization itself.
From the American frontier settlers onwards (the Spanish were happy to absorb meso-American allies in their war against the Aztecs, and the vast majority of deaths were unintentional), through the Armenian genocide, to the Nazi (and collaborator) holocaust, ethnic cleansing in the Soviet Union and Cambodia, the breakup of Yugoslavia and the Rwandan genocide — the ascent of the demos as a political stakeholder reconfigured state, elite and settler interests, opening up the path to genocide as a measure of last resort, when a factionalized state, assertive settler pressures, ethnonationalist political challenges and exacting external circumstances fail to find their pre-crisis balance. It's 600 pages of the best materialist historiography — who did what, why, under which constraints, with what consequences and to whose detriment or benefit. An interaction of all these factors is necessary to explain genocide; "divide and conquer", "human nature" or racism can never explain what is essentially a elite-state-masses dynamic. At every stage, Mann checks his theory — summarized in 8 theses in the beginning — against genocidal developments, or, in the case of India and Indonesia, occasions when the danger arose but never burst into sustained, organized slaughter.
His conclusions for our time? The West has out-genocided itself, to a point where there are no more occasions for it. The Global South, on the other hand, states still consolidating and finding their electoral bases, has entered a dangerous period:
The more dangerous cases today conforming most closely to my theses mostly exist around the fringes of bigger imperial countries – as was also the case in the 19th and early 20th centuries across Greater Europe. The previous chapter discussed the fringes of India and Indonesia. There are also cases around the former Soviet fringe in Chechnya, Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh, and the Fergana Valley. China’s southwestern fringe generates ethnonationalist conflict in Tibet and Xinjiang. Kurdish ethnonationalists agitate across the peripheral territories of Turkey, Iran, and Iraq. Burma’sfringe territories are tinderboxes; so are parts of the southern Philippines. Ethiopia, Somalia, and Eritrea have all contained ethnic minority secession movements aided from across the border.
Written in 2003, that's a pretty prescient prediction.
Does Mann help make sense of the world? He goes to great length humanizing the elite perpetrators and downplaying the role of their ideology, to say nothing of the masses. He emphasizes the speed with which once friendly neighbors can start killing one another once circumstances are ripe. The nationalist impulse towards segregating peoples, was often a lesser-evil emergency solution preventing the much greater harm which accompanies genocidal separatism — ànd its repression. Belgium is cited as a happy model for consociationalism, although 20 years down the line our country is rent by separatist politics. Do all modern roads lead to nation state management?
Most importantly policywise, Mann advocates for foreign intervention. In Cambodia, genocide was stopped by an invasion; in Rwanda, it was abetted by a lack of it. Foreign pressure can put a brake on ethnonationalist pandering to a restive population, although it's exactly that foreign connection that can catalyze a minority's reputation as a fifth column, as in the case of Armenia.
The Cambodian chapter was less solid than the others, but then again, at the time of writing, it must have been the least well-documented cleansing of them all.
A better review would lay this book side by side with Ernest Gellner and McNamee's Settling For Less. Mine is just a mental anchor.
February 17, 2011
Okay so I only read the (rather loong) section on the Armenian genocide, but I found it very helpful. He has a Phase A -> Phase D schematic that allows a somewhat-neophyte to the whole affair to follow the progression of events to see how they degenerated into wholesale massacre. He does not justify it or show it as "inevitable" in any way, for those who might find that problematic, he just contextualizes the event and tries to pry apart the logic of both the Armenians and the ruling CUP party, soldiers, governors in the Ottoman Empire (and it was still the Ottoman Empire) in order to get inside the mechanics of how the atrocities happened on both sides. For an emotional subject like this I think a clinical approach is useful to all sides.
Totally recommended to those interested in this particular genocide or the issue in general.
Totally recommended to those interested in this particular genocide or the issue in general.
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July 3, 2010Comes Up Short: Ethnic cleansing has been practiced by signers of the Atlantic Charter in the past and continues to be practiced by emerging democracies of today. A book addressing this issue is a welcome addition to the literature of the evolving history of human rights. Thus it is with great anticipation that I turned to the "Dark Side of Democracy". Unfortunately, the book falls awfully short of its promise. Its title is misleading and it contains a large number of misstatements of facts and factual errors and omissions.
Neither the Armenian Genocide, atrocities of the Nazis and Communists nor Rawanda have anything to do with democracy as is implied by the book's title.
Misstatements and distortions are too numerous to list, but here is a brief sampling:
On p. 301 the reader is told that "In 1946 a Hungarian court in Cluj (now Kolosvar)..."
The problems with the assertion are the following:
(1) in 1946 the town you call Cluj was known to the overwhelming part of its population as Kolozsvar. In fact, the Romanian authorities renamed Kolozsvar (note the misspelling in the book) to Cluj-Napoca in 1974.
(2) There did not exist a "Hungarian court" in Kolozsvar in 1946.
On p. 305 in the section describing Romania the statement is made "Wild deportation began of the 200,000 Transylvanian Jews, more than 20,000 gypsies..." R. Braham, the internationally recognized expert in the field, in the introduction to "Tragedy of Romanian Jewry", Columbia University Press, 1994 writes "Jews of Old Romania and Southern Transylvania fared even better. Although they were subjected to great economic hardship, ...they survived the war almost intact."
Descriptions of many events are incomplete. On p. 299 the reader is told about 3,300 civilians murdered in Voivodina by the Hungarian Army, but no mention is made of the terrorist activities preceeding these events. No mention is made of the fact that the Hungarian Army court martialed the officers responsible, the only instance where officers on the Axis side were held responsible for the killing of civilians, including Jews.
The book fails to mention that alone of the allies of Nazi Germany, Hungary despite German occupation at the time, used its troops to protect Jews from deportation. Horthy ordered the Hungarian First Armored Division to Budapest preventing the deportation of Jews, about to be carried out from the Hungarian capital, in June 1944.
It is remarkable that no mention is made of the murder of the estimated 30-40,000 Hungarian civilians by Tito's henchmen after the conclusion of the Second World War. Several books, some in English, exist on the subject.
The book fails to mention the infamous, racist Benes Decrees that was the basis of depriving the autochthonous Hungarian population, living on land that was part of Hungary for a millenium but assigned to Czechoslovakia, of property, citizenship and deporting countless to slave labor. Ethnic Germans did not fare any better. The New York Times reported that the family of former secretary of state M. Albright profited from the seizure of German owned property.
It is even stranger that the book makes scant mention of the estimated 2 million Germans who died as a result of ethnic cleansing of Germans from the East.
The sentence on p. 355 "Germans flocked peacefully home" is offensive and mockery of the facts. For example, ethnic Germans of Romania, who were not murdered or deported to the Soviet Union, were allowed to leave only after the German government paid a ransom. These people left behind all their properties, owned by their families for centuries, with scant compensation.
It is rather disturbing that the book on ethnic cleansing does not reference or mention two standards on the subject: "Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth Century Europe", edited by S.B. Vardy and T.H Tooley, C.U. Press, 2003 and the A. M. de Zayas "Terrible Revenge", St. Martin's Press, 1994.
Sixty years after these terrible events the reader has a right to be told all that is known about these events and not an excerpt of some of the facts. That this is possible is shown by J. Faragher "A Great and Noble Scheme", Norton, 2005 retelling the expulsion of French Acadians from their homeland. The "Dark Side of Democracy" falls far short of these expectations.
Neither the Armenian Genocide, atrocities of the Nazis and Communists nor Rawanda have anything to do with democracy as is implied by the book's title.
Misstatements and distortions are too numerous to list, but here is a brief sampling:
On p. 301 the reader is told that "In 1946 a Hungarian court in Cluj (now Kolosvar)..."
The problems with the assertion are the following:
(1) in 1946 the town you call Cluj was known to the overwhelming part of its population as Kolozsvar. In fact, the Romanian authorities renamed Kolozsvar (note the misspelling in the book) to Cluj-Napoca in 1974.
(2) There did not exist a "Hungarian court" in Kolozsvar in 1946.
On p. 305 in the section describing Romania the statement is made "Wild deportation began of the 200,000 Transylvanian Jews, more than 20,000 gypsies..." R. Braham, the internationally recognized expert in the field, in the introduction to "Tragedy of Romanian Jewry", Columbia University Press, 1994 writes "Jews of Old Romania and Southern Transylvania fared even better. Although they were subjected to great economic hardship, ...they survived the war almost intact."
Descriptions of many events are incomplete. On p. 299 the reader is told about 3,300 civilians murdered in Voivodina by the Hungarian Army, but no mention is made of the terrorist activities preceeding these events. No mention is made of the fact that the Hungarian Army court martialed the officers responsible, the only instance where officers on the Axis side were held responsible for the killing of civilians, including Jews.
The book fails to mention that alone of the allies of Nazi Germany, Hungary despite German occupation at the time, used its troops to protect Jews from deportation. Horthy ordered the Hungarian First Armored Division to Budapest preventing the deportation of Jews, about to be carried out from the Hungarian capital, in June 1944.
It is remarkable that no mention is made of the murder of the estimated 30-40,000 Hungarian civilians by Tito's henchmen after the conclusion of the Second World War. Several books, some in English, exist on the subject.
The book fails to mention the infamous, racist Benes Decrees that was the basis of depriving the autochthonous Hungarian population, living on land that was part of Hungary for a millenium but assigned to Czechoslovakia, of property, citizenship and deporting countless to slave labor. Ethnic Germans did not fare any better. The New York Times reported that the family of former secretary of state M. Albright profited from the seizure of German owned property.
It is even stranger that the book makes scant mention of the estimated 2 million Germans who died as a result of ethnic cleansing of Germans from the East.
The sentence on p. 355 "Germans flocked peacefully home" is offensive and mockery of the facts. For example, ethnic Germans of Romania, who were not murdered or deported to the Soviet Union, were allowed to leave only after the German government paid a ransom. These people left behind all their properties, owned by their families for centuries, with scant compensation.
It is rather disturbing that the book on ethnic cleansing does not reference or mention two standards on the subject: "Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth Century Europe", edited by S.B. Vardy and T.H Tooley, C.U. Press, 2003 and the A. M. de Zayas "Terrible Revenge", St. Martin's Press, 1994.
Sixty years after these terrible events the reader has a right to be told all that is known about these events and not an excerpt of some of the facts. That this is possible is shown by J. Faragher "A Great and Noble Scheme", Norton, 2005 retelling the expulsion of French Acadians from their homeland. The "Dark Side of Democracy" falls far short of these expectations.
February 8, 2018
I liked Mann’s approach of the Armenian genocide. Its in-line with other scholars of genocide studies, however, it’s more ‘theoretical’ than storytelling (that’s in the case of Dr. Ronald Suny’s book They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else). The phases of the Armenian extermination that led to plan D (that is genocide) is well-thought of and it makes more sense and somehow, it resonates within you (thus less confusing).
November 9, 2020
本书其实不乏洞见，尤其是最后一章。然而，结构安排似乎大可商榷。不厌其烦、独立成章的事实堆砌不但缺乏必要，而且割裂了和本就孱弱的理论框架之间的联系。其实反过来，以理论框架为线索，然后去填充可以支撑它的事实或许会合适得多。当然这样处理的话，对理论和写作都会提出更高的要求。最后不得不提的是，虽然挂名的译者只有一个，但本书的翻译明显是分包完成的。其中部分译者的常识和中文水准肯定是不够格的：能读懂，但真的读得很恼火。
August 8, 2025
The book is very informative and has a very comprehensive and well-grounded but rather disturbing theses that the author tries to prove by explaining multiple historical examples of ethnic cleansings and genocides. I don't fully agree with his theses or at least consider them insufficient in their own to explain the reprehensible phenomena of ethnic cleansings and genocides but find his work very important in understanding them, highly recommend.
April 17, 2015
I was reading for my class on Genocide and it sure taught me a lot about all the events that have happened. The categories Mann has made for who the perpetrators and who the victims were are excellently thought out. This makes a very good reading for not only classes but also if you are looking to learn about the history during your free time.
October 9, 2007
Some good anecdotes but the theory is night tight enough to bring any enduring insight to this very interesting and important problem.
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August 3, 2012Amazing book!
January 15, 2013
There is literally hundreds of better books on this topic, read one of those instead
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews