What is wrong with persecution

Abstract

The fact that persecution is seriously wrong should be obvious. Many of the worst events in human history were acts of persecution. During the reign of the Roman Empire, Christians were beaten, murdered, and forced to fight with wild animals. Until recently, Black Americans were hunted down by mobs and lynched by their compatriots.¹ They were often publicly hanged, but some were also burned alive, thrown from tall buildings, and dismembered. The centuries long persecution of Jewish people culminated in the terroristic policies of Nazi Germany and the murders of over six million Jews between 1941 and 1945. These individuals were violently targeted for their perceived membership in a particular social, religious, or political group. We know already, then, that persecution is a terrible injustice. What is not obvious, however, is why exactly this is the case. This might immediately seem like a ridiculous proposition: persecution often involves discrimination, cruelty, extreme violence, and mass murder. Surely we know that persecution is wrong precisely because it involves acts of the worst possible kind? This paper argues that the entire picture of the wrongness of persecution cannot be understood by pointing to these individual elements alone. To put it more strongly, persecution is wrong not only when (or because) it includes these other wrongs. Instead, I argue that part of the wrongness of persecution is located in the condition that it creates for the persecuted, but also for society more generally. In doing so, I follow two similar interventions from David Sussman (2004) on torture and Lea Ypi (2013) on colonialism.² Both papers begin with the intuition that such acts are serious wrongs. Their aim is to offer a new way of understanding why this is so. Like Ypi's, my title does not include a question mark. I ask you to accept that there is something wrong with persecution. My aim is to offer a new way of understanding what that something is.

As such, I will not consider whether persecution is ever justified. There are (at least) two political philosophers who maintain that persecution is compatible with legitimate governance. For St. Augustine (395AD), heretical persecution is “righteous” when the Church inflicts it upon “the impious.” This is what he calls “persecution in the spirit of love.”³ Such persecution was therefore viewed as a legitimate way of punishing those who have strayed from God (Christenson, 1968).⁴ For Hobbes, persecution is a necessary power of the Sovereign, best described as an extension of the rights of war. Hobbes distinguishes between punishment and persecution: punishment being for misdemeanors committed within the boundaries of the commonwealth and persecution being suffered by those outside it. This “right of nature to make war” extends to all individuals who refuse to be subjected under the sovereign, even citizens. Persecution, on this Hobbesian account, is a response to political rebellion aimed at protecting the Commonwealth. For Augustine and Hobbes, persecution creates unity within the body politic. I will not directly intervene in this debate, although my argument is essentially antithetical to the Augustinian and Hobbesian accounts.⁵ In other words, I will assume for the sake of argument that we agree that persecution is wrong.

I will also not offer a concrete definition of persecution, nor what we ought to do about it. First, I am not attempting to give a definitive account of what persecution “really” is. Instead, I am engaging in questions that flirt with definition to think about the concept of persecution more fully. When discussing terrorism, Jeremy Waldron (2004, 7) makes a similar move, arguing that “the point of undertaking such enquiry is not to arrive at a definition; the point is to ask hard questions, posed initially as questions about the way we use words, to focus a discussion of what we think is interesting and distinctive about this phenomenon.”⁶ Although in what follows I will draw on ordinary and legal understandings of the term “persecution,” I do not put forward my own set of necessary and sufficient conditions for what counts as persecution here. Instead, the more interesting question (in my view) is why persecution holds a special place in our moral and political world. Why does persecution illicit a particular kind of “special outrage”? Second, I am also not attempting to claim anything about what individual victims of persecution are owed in the here and now. In the political theory of refuge, an ongoing debate concerns whether only victims of persecution are entitled to international protection in the form of asylum. I will discuss this further in the final paragraphs of Section 3. However, here I should preliminarily make the case that, although I draw on literature from the political theory of refuge, I do not think discussions of meanings and wrongs of persecution necessarily have implications here. This is because the argument as to whether persecution is necessary for a claim to asylum depends on (a) what exactly the institution of asylum is for and (b) whether persecution exclusively creates the predicament that asylum is meant to remedy. As I explain in the following section, the meaning of persecution in the refugee case may be different from a more general conception of persecution. It is this more general notion of persecution with which I am concerned, for now.

The paper proceeds as follows. First, I discuss how persecution has been defined in international law. Here I argue for a reliance on what I call an “ordinary language” view of persecution. Such a view (roughly) sees persecution as a severe form of harm targeted at a person or group for a discriminatory reason. Second, I turn to the wrongs of persecution, considering three possible explanations: (i) violence, (ii) discrimination, and (iii) a denial of one's status in a political community. I do not argue here that such explanations are mistaken, merely that they are incomplete. Most importantly, the third explanation—which holds that individuals who are persecuted are stripped of their membership in the state—opens the door to a more social and political understanding of the wrong of persecution. I then defend my fuller explanation for the wrongful nature of persecution: that it re-organizes and disrupts the social order. I therefore turn to the broader function of persecution and its role in shaping social and political interaction. Focusing on the social impact of persecution, I argue, shows that persecution is not merely violence, discrimination, or a denial of membership. Instead, a core feature of persecution can be located in the effect that it has on political and social life, broadly construed. By rupturing the relationships between co-members, persecution remakes the political and social world. In this way, persecution undermines the potential for minimal cooperation and directly violates pre-existing associative duties.

We already know that persecution is a terrible wrong. Thinking about it in this new way does not really give us additional reasons to avoid persecution. We have good enough reasons to do that already. What I want to suggest is that, while the explanations that I will outline—violence, discrimination, and denial of membership—can explain a great deal of what is wrong with persecution, they remain incomplete.⁷ The aim here is to offer a richer account of why persecution is objectionable. I do claim, however, that noting this collective feature of persecution has distinctive normative implications for its rectification. The wrongs of persecution are not over when violence or discrimination ends. Resolving persecution demands an approach that recenters the political community, and persecuted peoples' place within it.

The verb “to persecute” originates from the Latin “persequi” which means “to follow, pursue, or hunt down.” It first appeared in the English language in around the 15th century, perhaps unsurprisingly given the ongoing campaigns in England against both heretics and witches. However, most debates concerning the meaning of persecution arise from developments in international law in the latter half of the twentieth century. Persecution is classified in the Nuremberg Principles (1946) as a crime against humanity, alongside murder, torture, enslavement, and forced disappearance.⁸ The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (1998) also defines persecution as a crime against humanity.⁹ The Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees (1951) places the concept of persecution at the heart of entitlement to asylum. However, even with this centrality in international law, few legal agreements have offered a formal definition. Some interpret this ambiguity as a benefit, allowing for the development and adaptation over time (Grahl-Madsen, 1992; Maiani, 2010).¹⁰

In the absence of a shared definition of persecution, individual states deviate in how they understand the concept. According to the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (1969), terms in treaties must be interpreted in good faith and in line with their “ordinary meaning.”¹¹ Many courts have therefore relied on dictionary definitions of persecution, like the one given above. British courts historically understood persecution in this way: the House of Lords  previously defined persecution as “to pursue with malignancy or injurious action, especially to oppress for holding a heretical belief”¹² (High Court v Secretary of State, 1990). Beginning with this focus on ordinary language, interpretations of the meaning of persecution have broadly coalesced around several features. First, persecution must be inflicted by a human persecutor, though it need not be inflicted by the state. De facto state authorities can commit persecution, for instance, a militia or paramilitary group. However, purely natural disasters do not count as persecution, though weaponized environmental harms or victims being refused assistance could. Second, persecution picks out individuals for harm based on some characteristic: the Refugee Convention states that persecution must be inflicted because of someone's race, religion, nationality, or membership of a particular social group. Third, persecution must be “cruel” or “serious.” Most jurisdictions therefore agree that persecution is distinct from “mere” discrimination or harassment. The case of Nagoulko v. INS (2003) from the US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals discussed whether being fired from a job because of one's religious beliefs amounts to persecution.¹³ In this case, the claimant found stable employment elsewhere within a reasonable period. The Court concluded that such harm was not sufficiently severe as to constitute persecution. An individual can thus be discriminated against without being persecuted per se. However, the sustained and systematic denial of employment such that people are prevented from securing a minimally decent livelihood can (and should) be interpreted as a form of persecution. Several jurisdictions accept such an approach. The Australian Migration Act (1958), which offers a general characterization of persecution, states that instances of serious harm might include a threat to the person's life or liberty, significant physical harassment, significant physical ill-treatment, significant economic hardship, denial of access to basic services, and the denial of capacity to earn a livelihood of any kind.¹⁴ The UK Home Office (2016, 16) also argues that discrimination can amount to persecution if it results in “sufficiently serious consequences for the person concerned.”¹⁵ Of course, the line between discrimination and persecution remains blurred and complicated; the distinction between “mere” discrimination and persecution is often politically loaded.¹⁶ Importantly, the severity of some episodic harms—for instance, a single instance of torture—are often thought to be sufficient to constitute persecution. The UK Home Office also accepts this. In the case of Mustafa Doymus v. Secretary of State for the Home Department (2000) it was decided that “persistency is a usual but not a universal criterion of persecution.”¹⁷

So, defining persecution by relying on its ordinary meaning generally results in an understanding of persecution as a severe harm (whether aggregated or episodic) targeted at a person for a particular (discriminatory) reason.

The Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties also states that—as well as an ordinary meaning approach—words must be interpreted in line with the context and purpose of the treatise in question. This focus has led to another, broader conceptualization of persecution within refugee law: the failure of state protection approach. Defenders of this model argue that the point and purpose of the Refugee Convention are to provide protection to those whose states have failed them. For instance, Anker (2017, 184) argues that the “state's legitimacy [is] based on its ability and duty to protect the basic needs and rights of its citizens.”¹⁸ This view has been cemented in James Hathaway's human rights approach, which combines the tradition of human rights law with international refugee law. On this view, asylum is a form of surrogate protection. Persecution, then, is defined as the “sustained or systemic denial of basic human rights demonstrative of a failure of state protection” (Hathaway and Foster, 2014, 185).¹⁹ In recent years, some jurisdictions have adopted the human rights approach. The European Parliament noted in a Qualification Directive (2011) that persecution is a harm “sufficiently serious by [its] nature or repetition as to constitute a severe violation of human rights.”²⁰ The UK House of Lords likewise endorsed this approach in Horvath v. Secretary of State for the Home Department in 2000.²¹

Of course, it is an open question whether defining persecution by focusing on the purpose of refugee protection is useful for thinking about persecution separately from a particular system of international law. Whether this points us in the right direction vis-à-vis persecution more generally remains to be seen.²² For a more general political theory of persecution, we would perhaps have difficulty working solely within such a framework. In aiming to give an account of persecution beyond its relevance to the refugee protection regime, I will therefore lean on an ordinary language approach, though I will come back to the importance of state protection later on. Importantly, this does not mean that I do not endorse the human rights approach within the context of refugee protection. All it means is that when thinking about persecution here, I want to be able to separate the discussion from a particular international convention and its legal history.

Some tentative conclusions can be drawn from this discussion. First, persecution is not the same as simply harm or violence. I can be severely harmed by being put in prison, but this is not obviously persecution (though in some cases it can be). Persecution is also not just a form of discrimination; it is something more severe. It is also not only committed by governments. Instead, I can be persecuted by my family, my friends, my neighbors, or society more generally. In the case of refugee protection, it is important whether the state can protect the individual from persecution. For our purposes, though, we need only focus on the persecution itself.

One might be worried, at this juncture, that acts of “persecution” are not a unified category at all. They might instead be “acts that bear various resemblances to one another” (Sussman, 2005, 11).²³ I think we can comfortably accept that these conditions and similarities are loose rather than rigid. That is, we need not give an account of what counts as persecution in every possible case. The aim here is to give a general sense of persecution and its various contours. Whether individual, horrible acts fall within this category will remain cause for debate. Importantly, these conditions fit with the kinds of events that we already accept as acts of persecution, such as those I outlined in the introduction. So, there are evidently some clear-cut cases of persecution, where others are more slippery.²⁴ My attention will now turn as to why persecution is wrong. Of course, this will demand continuing to feel around for the edges of this concept.

Before discussing my own account of why persecution is wrong, I want to briefly consider some other, more obvious, explanations. Perhaps the two clearest candidates for persecution's wrongness are violence and discrimination. First, on violence. Persecution is often extremely violent, meaning that involves a person employing “physical force directly against a living being for the purpose of harming him” (Runkle, 1976, 371).²⁵ The persecuted are often forcibly expelled, tortured, sexually assaulted, or murdered. The fact that persecution is usually so violent explains much of our immediate moral repulsion from it. However, we should bear in mind that persecution need not always involve extreme violence against the individual. As we have already seen, non-violent harms can potentially aggregate to constitute persecution, such as a denial of employment or housing. Likewise, many acts of persecution involve injury to an individual's property but not harm to their bodies. This again results in a particular condition, one which makes it very difficult for the individual to live her life.²⁶ Instead of violence alone, then, the wrongness of persecution is located in the condition of the individual who suffers it. Importantly for our sake, the wrongness of persecution is not identical to the wrongness of its violent techniques. Instead, we are already drawn to complicate the picture by adding conditions to our notion of violence in the case of persecution.

It may be the case that accidental persecution is impossible. Various definitions of persecution highlight its cruel and malignant character. The International Penal Court for the former Yugoslavia proposed in 2002 that persecution is “the manifest or flagrant denial, for reasons of discrimination, of a fundamental right consecrated by customary or conventional international law” (Cavaillé, 2010).³¹ The intention of the persecutor therefore seems important. However, persecution need not always be malignant in character. For instance, cases of persecution that were committed “for the individual's own good” will still amount to persecution. In Pitcherskaia v. INS (1997) a lesbian woman who fled Russia was found to have a well-founded fear of persecution, even though the serious harms she suffered were intended to “cure” her of homosexuality.³² The important point here, though, is that persecution is not totally random, it involves at least some element of intentionality, and it involves a targeting agent in a way that is not necessary for discrimination.

Now, it may not be immediately clear that all acts that we describe as persecution involve discrimination of this intentional kind, at least not on a typical understanding of it. As the discussion of refugee law showed, persecution is often thought to relate to a specific “nexus clause” of religion, nationality, race, political opinion, or membership of a particular social group. But not all everyday uses of the word persecution match this framework. For instance, we might speak about an abusive husband “persecuting” his wife or a man “persecuting” his neighbors, though this may not involve discrimination of the sort we have in mind. Here the way in which we use to the word persecution instead appears to track the fact that the victims are tormented. So, what about cases where we use the word persecution in this more general way?

There are two things to say here. First, in such cases, there may still be discrimination of the kind we have been concerned with so far, just not quite so obviously. Domestic violence is gendered in a way that makes it a form of discrimination (and persecution) even if the smaller scale of a husband and wife makes this lens feel improper.³³ The primary harm of domestic violence does not appear to be discrimination when we zoom in on the relationship between two individuals, but taking gender-based violence in a broader sense can show that we are still right to treat these cases as forms of discrimination against women. Second, it is not obvious that discrimination needs to latch onto the fact that an individual is a woman, a person of color, or gay, for instance. Many forms of discrimination do, of course, take this shape. But we can also understand the concept of discrimination in a slightly broader way. The husband can be said to persecute his wife because he picks out her for ill-treatment. In this sense, the wife is pursued, hunted, and singled out. For persecution to be discriminatory in its techniques, then, we can merely maintain that it is not general. Of course, this is a different way of understanding discrimination and one that would require more justification. All that I will say here is that it is at least feasible to think about persecution as discriminatory simply on the grounds that it is not totally random.

The neighbor case may be slightly more complicated, particularly if we imagine someone who simply terrorizes his neighbors, no matter who they are. We might speak of this as a form of persecution, even while the neighbor is not being discriminatory. This would imply not all cases of persecution involve discrimination. One way to respond to this is simply to claim an individual who harms everyone equally regardless of any qualities is not obviously a persecutor, though they may be just as bad. Our use of word persecution here is perhaps not literal. And so, while the bad neighbor might make other people's lives a living hell, persecution may not be the correct way to describe what is going on here. Second, we could also simply accept that not every instance of the word persecution in our ordinary language will involve discrimination: the neighbor case is a rare exception to the rule.³⁴ As I said earlier, my aim here is not to offer an airtight account of persecution, but simply to show that persecution often has effects we do not currently recognize. This is all to clarify that most forms of persecution that I am talking about here will involve discrimination in a largely straightforward way, but these outlier cases do not disrupt the more general claim.

A third possible way of explaining the wrongful nature of persecution arises from the political theory of refuge. Focusing on this discussion stands in tension with my earlier claim that we should look beyond the specificities of the refugee protection regime. However, looking to the political theory of refuge as opposed to its development in international law can offer a slightly different perspective. Political theorists who defend the special place of persecution within the refugee protection regime argue that it amounts to the denial of a person's status as a member in their political community. Therefore, persecution is essentially a form of banishment. According to Price (2009, 243), refugees “not only face a threat to their bodily integrity or liberty; they are also effectively expelled from their political communities. They are not only victims but also exiles.”³⁶ The persecuted individual's country of origin has repudiated their membership (Owen, 2020, 32).³⁷ Denial of membership—understood as the loss of effective citizenship—can be worrisome for at least two reasons (Buxton, 2021).³⁸ First, it violates an individual's prior claim to be recognized and protected within a particular community. Those who suffer persecution are usually citizens with a strong entitlement to inclusion within a specific state or group—persecution not only undermines this membership, through signaling that such an individual does not deserve the protection of their rights, it actively rejects it. Black Americans, for instance, had claims to equal treatment as human beings but also equal treatment as Americans. Their treatment denied their claims to inclusion in a political group that was systematically built on their exploitation. Therefore, as Shklar (1993, 181) puts it, “Governments… frequently abuse residents under their jurisdiction by denying them membership in the polity and other rights, not as a matter of legal punishment but because they belong to a group that is thought to be inherently unfit for inclusion.”³⁹ Second, the denial of membership violates the condition that all individuals within our system of global governance require membership somewhere. Owen argues that it is a requirement of legitimacy of the international order to ensure that all individuals enjoy “practical standing” in at least one state. When an individual is persecuted by their own Government, that requirement to have membership somewhere is undermined.⁴⁰ The membership account does a good job of shifting our focus toward the political consequences of persecution. This political element complements the “combination of violence and discrimination” alternative to understanding persecution. This is because it can single out the individual's experience of persecution as opposed to a broader account of discrimination or suffering; persecution plays a role in defining an individual's status within a community.

There are two things to note here. First, as we have already discussed, political theorists of refuge are not attempting to give an all-encompassing account of the wrongs of persecution. Their target instead is to think about persecution's relationship to asylum. Therefore, although this account may point us in the right direction, it potentially leaves something left to be said. Second, and relatedly, the denial of membership view focuses on the wrongs committed against individuals. This, again, is determined by the current structure of the refugee protection regime. An individual's entitlement to asylum depends on whether she can show that she specifically has a well-founded fear of persecution. As I will show in the following section, this focus may leave us unable to give voice to some of the pernicious social and political consequences of persecution. In other words, there remains a need for a more collective view of the wrong of persecution.

Rather than pushing against the denial of membership account, the following section aims to develop it by shifting our focus away from the political effects of persecution on the individual and turning towards persecution and political life more generally.

The previous accounts of the wrong of persecution have hinted toward a particular condition in which the persecuted individual is placed. The denial of membership view captures something important about the nature of persecution—that it undermines the persecuted person's place within the political and social world. In this section, I argue that the three previous potential explanations lack a proper account of the collective political consequences of persecution. The particularity of persecution cannot be explained by reference to these previous three elements, nor their aggregation. Instead, persecution creates, first, a particular condition for the individual, such that their social structure is turned against them but, more radically, a change in the condition of society itself. Governments and non-state actors not only violate the rights of individuals when they persecute them. They also violate the very political and social conditions that they ought to maintain. This account therefore presupposes the existence of particular moral and political obligations on the part of persecutors beyond “mere” obligations not to violate rights.

We already know that persecution is used by governments, neighborhoods, and family groups to remake the collective membership in their image. Persecution necessarily others those who are persecuted. Persecution thus not only undermines the individual's ability to claim rights within a particular sphere, but it does so in a way that reshapes and mobilizes society for this purpose. My account therefore locates at least some of the wrongness of persecution in how it affects political or social life more broadly. This is not to undermine the extreme effects that persecution has on the individuals who suffer it, and part of my account will remain focused on the experience of the persecuted. Persecution is wrong for at least all the reasons given so far: it is often violent, (wrongfully) discriminatory, and undermines the individual's claim to membership. But persecution is also wrong because it violates and undermines some pre-existing conditions from which obligations arise.

It is generally accepted that states ought to secure minimal conditions for political life, such as the protection of human rights or pursuing the promotion of justice. Ypi argues that an ideal political association depends on reciprocity, a condition that is fundamentally violated in the case of colonialism. In the context of persecution, the active pursuit of a group through violent means likewise renders such minimal conditions untenable. First, let us maintain a focus on the individual who suffers persecution. Many first-hand accounts highlight what it feels like to be persecuted. For instance, Holocaust survivors often note the intense fear that they felt, not only of Nazi officials and party members, but of everyone around them. Leah Hammerstein, a Jewish woman who worked in a German hospital on false papers describes it as an experience of “total isolation, total loneliness… You are among people, and you are like on an island all alone. There is nobody you can do to ask for help. You can nobody ask [sic.] for advice. You have to make life-threatening decisions all by yourself in a very short time, and you never knew whether your decision would be beneficial or detrimental to your existence. It was like playing Russian roulette with your life” (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1996).⁴¹ Raszka Galek Brunswick, who posed as a Polish Catholic on a German farm, said she chose that job because “I thought for my own sake, I would probably be safer to be away from everybody” (United States Holocaust Museum, 1989).⁴² Another woman who, with her sisters, gained false papers and pretended to be Christians living in Warsaw, recounted that her father told her: “No matter what happens, no matter who you meet, you cannot trust anybody” (Virginia Currents, 2020).⁴³ Pointing out that people live in fear when they are persecuted, perhaps so obvious as to be benign. But this focus adds something to our political and moral vocabulary when thinking about persecution. It shows that persecution disrupts the basic conditions of pre-existing political society. Persecution changes how people interact with one another, even when individual acts of violence have yet to occur: the threat of potential violence is always present. This can extend further beyond the persecuted group. In Alone in Berlin Hans Fallada recounts the story of Otto and Elise Hampel who begin committing acts of civil disobedience against the Nazi regime. In the fictionalized version of their story, Fallada recounts how Otto and Elise could no longer trust anyone in their apartment block. When Otto was working on the factory floor, Fallada (1947) commented: “The air was thick with betrayal. No one could trust anyone else, and in that dismal atmosphere the men seemed to grow even duller, devolving into mechanical extensions of the machines they serviced.”⁴⁴ The point I am making here is not, importantly, about individualized access to “relationship goods.”⁴⁵ People who face persecution do suffer from a lack of interpersonal benefits, such that they are no longer able to trust those around them. Here the point I want to highlight, however, is that for victims of persecution, their entire social structure is often leveraged in way that violates pre-existing cooperative obligations and expectations.

This can potentially be seen more clearly in the case of family-based persecution. To take a contemporary example, many young people are expelled from their families after they come out as non-straight or gender non-conforming (Ritholtz, 2022).⁴⁶ Such expulsion also often includes targeted harassment, hate campaigns, and ensuring that the individual does not have access to any friends or family members for support.⁴⁷ For LGBT people fleeing persecution, the family is often the first locus of harm (Buxton and Ritholtz, 2021).⁴⁸ Along with all the other wrongs committed in such an expulsion (the wrongs that we mentioned in the previous section), such families have also violated their pre-existing obligation towards this family member as a family member; they have changed who is part of the family and violated their prior associative obligations to them. Persecution is not therefore solely violence, discrimination, or lack of membership. It also involves up-ending pre-existing moral, social, and political obligations and the structures that depend on them.

Ronald Christenson argues that one of the key logics of persecution is the solidification of an in-group. Persecution, by naming and singling out an “other,” reifies and unionizes those remaining within the community. He writes: “Hitler persecuted Jews on behalf of the Volk, as Stalin persecuted kulaks in the name of the Proletariat, and as others have persecuted for The People, The Nation, The Church, The Race” (1968, 420).⁴⁹ This central logic of persecution—the creation of cleavage between groups—can help us to locate the condition of the persecuted. Scholars of political violence have noted persecution's ability to reshape communities through violent displays and public executions. As Lee Ann Fujii (2021, 2) puts it in Show Time, “when actors put violence on display, they are bringing to life ideas about how the world should be and more specifically how it should be ordered—who should have power and who should be included and on what basis people should claim belonging.”⁵⁰ Amy Louise Wood (2009, 11) makes a similar claim when discussing lynching in the United States. As events often involving large groups, lynchings allowed for the wrongful formation of an in-group and maintained a political order that maintained the domination of whites. While taking part in a lynch-mob, “the feel and push of the crowd created the sense of belonging and commonality that sustained the violence.”⁵¹ Such acts of violence therefore allowed people to reimagine the political order and their place within it.

One of the key logics of persecution, then, is the creation not only of an out group, but an in group. There are several ways in which persecution does this. First, persecution makes violence and hatred against a certain set of people appear sociologically legitimate, particularly when it is state-sanctioned: persecutory logics therefore become diffused throughout communities and individuals who had previously lived together peacefully can suddenly turn violent. During The Genocide of the Serbs in the Independent State of Croatia, neighbors who had lived alongside one another for decades suddenly became violent adversaries. One man from Kistanje recounted how his neighbors—who he had known well—had suddenly turned against him and killed his children (Carmichael, 2006, 251).⁵² Similar events occurred in the 1994 Rwandan genocide where neighbors would turn on one another in response to a campaign of extreme hatred. Fujii (2009, 3) notes that killing one's neighbors is “more than just a physical act; it is an act of social violation. It destroys not just bodies, but bonds.”⁵³ Persecution thus does not only draw on pre-existing fear and hatred, but also further solidifies such hatred. It changes the boundaries of the family, community, or state.⁵⁴

A potentially more slippery way in which persecution disrupts and remakes the social network is through changing the persecuted person's identity of condition more generally. Persecution should therefore be recognized as a mechanism for social control, but also (and relatedly) as a way to change the understandings of a particular group within the social order. In Ain't I A Woman (1981, 32), bell hooks noted this important feature of Witch Trials: “The Salem Witchcraft Trials were an extreme expression of patriarchal society's persecution of women. They were a message to all women that unless they remained within passive, subordinate roles they would be punished, even put to death.”⁵⁵ Persecution therefore did not only harm the women who were specifically targeted but harmed all women as a class. Feminist theorists have also discussed this diffuse feature of subjugation in discussions of rape. Jean Hampton (1995, 132) argues that rape “is a moral injury to all women… rape confirms that women are for men: to be used, dominated, treated as objects.”⁵⁶ These forms of violence therefore change the position and character of the entire group, rather than only the individuals who suffer it.

The wrongness of persecution is therefore partly collective rather than individual. The accounts that we discussed earlier—violence, discrimination, and membership loss—focused on the individuals who suffer persecution. However, it is not only about individuals facing severe harms and wrongs, but the restructuring of society and the relations within it. It is perhaps helpful, here, to return to the relationship between discrimination and persecution, as this may be a feature that they share. That is, discrimination includes individualized harms, but it also harms the entire group. Discrimination against women does not only harm individual women, but it also harms women as a group. It is almost certainly the case that persecution is not sui generis. In putting forward the view that persecution disrupts and undermines our social world, I do not go so far as to claim that persecution exclusively creates such a condition. For instance, Hannah Arendt (1951) argues that totalitarianism is characterized by an extreme form of political loneliness.⁵⁷ Jeremy Waldron (2004) argues that terrorism might also have a similar effect.⁵⁸ Of course, neither terrorism nor totalitarianism has a necessarily targeted character. They are often by their nature indiscriminate. So, while they might have a similar effect on society, the distinctiveness of persecution can be at least partly maintained. The aim here is thus not to claim that persecution is totally unique, but simply to offer a richer political vocabulary when thinking about persecution.

I noted in the introduction that this more collective account of persecution has implications for potential redress. The main consequence is that we can now make sense of the fact that persecution is not undone when the violence or discrimination ends. Instead, if persecution results in the remaking of the community, then the resolution of persecution must follow the same path. In situations where persecution has taken place, then, compensatory redress for loss of property of individual harms will not be sufficient.⁵⁹ A more collective approach will be required. This helps to explain why overcoming a history of persecution is so difficult. Many states still struggle with legacies of persecution and the long shadow that they leave behind them. Even for acts of persecution in the distance past, we may still require a restorative approach that seeks to reckon with the impact such a history still has on modern society. Apologies for that history are a recent potential step forward. But attempting to think about these legacies for our current state of affairs would demand a more radical project. Many accounts of reparative justice already focus on rebuilding community. The view of persecution that I have put forward merely offers another reason in favor of them.

Many questions remain about the nature and effects of persecution. This paper has attempted to add one more explanation of the wrongness of persecution to the mix: that persecution undermines the minimal conditions of political life and changes the social and political world. Such an explanation does not only locate the wrongness of persecution in the harm that it does to the individual—though this is surely an extremely important element—but also points to the social and political order more broadly. This allows us to understand persecution better in at least two ways. First, it recenters persecution's place within politics as opposed to a purely ethical account. That is, we need not rely only on moral theory to explain why persecution is bad; we can give an answer from the perspective internal to politics as well. Second, this view allows us to see the relationship between persecution and other forms of political and social control. If persecution is to be understood as undermining co-citizens ability to interact with one another, then more generalized campaigns of violence, such as those occurring under totalitarianism, might be made more legible in this way as well.

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.