Introducing Complicity

Afxentis Afxentiou, Robin Dunford and Michael Neu

This book emerged from a conference and subsequent workshop on "Complicity", and the questions about complicity with which we started remain. The two positive conclusions we can offer with confidence are these. First, complicity is a valuable and underestimated tool for the analysis and critique of social relations. Second, it would be a mistake to offer a fixed or rigid definition of complicity, let alone one that we could claim to be objectively correct. Any attempt to establish, once and for all, the nature and scope of complicity would do little more than shut down important avenues for critical analysis; and in so doing, it would detract from our ability to imagine effective resistance against the causes of avoidable harms that can be elucidated through the lens of complicity. The conceptual exploration and case studies offered in this volume are thus intended to encourage critique and imagination, rather than to offer authoritative pronunciations and abstract analytic truths. In fact, we hope to suggest that there are ways of thinking and writing about complicity which are themselves complicit, particularly if they fail to question the existing political, social and economic order.

In the next section, on 'Atomistic Complicity', we outline an account of complicity according to which law-abiding individuals can walk through life without ever being complicit: as long as they do not break what Thomas Docherty, in his contribution, calls 'the law of the land'. In the following section, on 'Broadening Complicity', we suggest that there are limits to such an account of complicity, and introduce the broader, more critically attentive approach to complicity that unites the chapters in this volume. Through the example of our complicity with wars waged by democratically elected governments, we offer a key argument recurring throughout this book: that reflecting on complicity can operate as a lens through which to understand and recognize our – the editors', authors', readers' and many others' – role in producing and upholding, and hence being complicit in, social structures that have harmful, indeed often fatal, effects. Critically reflecting on such structural complicity suggests that we are sometimes – perhaps often – forced to be complicit. Non-complicity, as Pam Laidman suggests in her chapter, is not always an option. We can be caught in "complicity dilemmas": situations in which avoiding one form of complicity results in our becoming complicit in some other way. When confronting a complicity dilemma, however, our thoughts should not simply turn to the question of what is the right thing to do given the miserable circumstances (to which there may be no plausible answer, as hard as we may try to find one); nor should we seek to excuse, justify or perhaps even (secretly) celebrate the "dirty hands" we acquire in choosing the "least bad" option. Rather, such situations should encourage us to think about ways in which we ought to resist, collectively and individually, the social structures and power relations that force us to be complicit in wrongdoing. The remaining two sections – 'Structural Complicity and the Question of Blame' and 'Resistance: Complicity Dilemmas and Anti-Complicity' – consider these issues in more depth. Throughout this chapter, we also introduce some of the ideas – "structural complicity", "complicity dilemmas" and "anti-complicity" – that stem from the collective reflections on complicity that have been at the heart of this project.

ATOMISTIC COMPLICITY

How is the law-abiding citizen said to be able to walk through life without ever being complicit? Well, simply by following the rules – both legal rules (to avoid being complicit in a crime) and moral rules (to avoid being complicit in moral wrongdoing). A complicit act contributes, in some way, to wrongdoing. It facilitates wrongdoing, covers it up, or makes it possible in the first place by creating the conditions which enable it to occur. The assumption that is often made here is that the wrongdoing in question is clearly identifiable; indeed, that the wrong doer is clearly identifiable. The accomplice knows, or ought to know (in the sense that they can reasonably be expected to know), what they are complicit in, and who they are complicit with. They know, or ought to know, that they are involved in the breaking of a legal and/or moral rule, and that this is wrong. And thus their being complicit is intentional, or at least reckless or negligent; it is in some way deliberate. The accomplice has chosen to act in a way which contributes to wrongdoing; or they have refrained from acting in a way which would have thrown a spanner in the wrongdoer's works – if, of course, they could reasonably be expected to have done so. There is a tacit assumption here: the accomplice could avoid being complicit and walk through life never failing to avoid it. If they do fail, they share responsibility, if not necessarily to the same extent as the main culprit, for the wrong done. They are thus liable to blame, criticism and perhaps punishment.

We take this atomistic account of complicity to be a dominant understanding of complicity in the liberal, democratic state. According to this understanding, complicity is an exclusively individual affair. The focus here is on agency, not structure. The question is not, "What structural factors resulted in X being complicit?" Nor is it, "What sorts of complicities arise, and what sorts of complicity might be unavoidable, when individuals operate and interact in particular social structures?" Instead, the question is: "What individual, or group of individuals, was complicit with whom in the violation of which rule?" From this standpoint, complicity's entire ontological fabric consists of individuals' involvement in breaking either the law, moral principles or both.

It is instructive here to see the example of an instance of complicity offered by the Oxford English Dictionary: 'They were accused of complicity in the attempt to overthrow the government.' The dictionary does not say: "They were accused of complicity in their government's war." Complicity is typically seen as stemming from one's being involved in the breaking of a particular law, in a deviation from the existing order, but not in the affirmation or reproduction of the existing order – be it legal, economic, social or political. This reflects a very limited perception of complicity, one that disables critics from making any use of the concept that goes beyond blaming individuals. Depending on the methodological lens through which we look at complicity, however, we will come to recognize different sorts of phenomena, ask different sorts of questions about them and assign different sorts of responsibility. This is precisely what this volume is intended to do.

However, we need to issue a warning against declaring a particular methodological approach to be the only epistemic access point for an analysis of complicity. Thinking critically about complicity will be impossible if we keep staring through the same set of lenses: a set that focuses on individuals, law, blame, and that, as Pam Laidman reminds us in her contribution, has a tendency to look back in time, rather than forward. The contributors to this volume all encourage alternative approaches. Our shared work is not to invalidate the atomistic method introduced above; it is to expose it as too narrow for the specific purpose of social critique: while it can help us attribute blame to individuals (which is often the right thing to do), it cannot enable us to expose structures of complicity in which individuals are forced to be complicit, or can hardly avoid being complicit. As a result, it cannot engage in critique that goes beyond blaming and punishing individuals – the 'bad apples' in Owen Thomas's words – for breaking the law or infringing "agreed" moral values.

What all contributors to this volume agree on is that we must dare to delve deeper when thinking about complicity, even when suspecting, or perhaps knowing, that what we will unearth beneath these structures is our very own complicity. Only then might we be able to gain a better understanding not only of complicit 'bad apples', but also of the rotten barrels which contain them; the material and social structures that reproduce complicit individuals and force them to be complicit even when they do not intend to be so – and even if they intend not to be so. We take such reflection to be an important condition of informed resistance.

BROADENING COMPLICITY

The most straightforward thing one can say about complicity is that it consists in the indirect participation of an agent or a group of agents in wrongdoing. Otherwise complicity just seems to be wrongdoing full stop, rather than a particular form of it. One can be involved in such wrongdoing through acting or failing to act. A complicit agent is not the main perpetrator of wrongdoing, but at the same time not sufficiently distant from it to be considered uninvolved. If one is complicit, one makes a contribution to wrongdoing, or one fails to prevent wrongdoing from occurring – assuming this is what one could, and should, have done.

As soon as we unravel this initial understanding of complicity, however, things become less straightforward. What counts as wrongdoing? Is it a necessary condition of being complicit that one engages in such wrongdoing knowingly? And, perhaps most importantly, is it always possible to avoid being complicit? Consider an example: the complicity of a citizenry in their democratically elected government's waging war on spurious grounds. This is not some fantastical scenario: many of the contributors to, and readers of, this volume are likely to be citizens of a liberal democratic state which regularly engages in such warfare. The 2003 Iraq War – a war in which, as Peter Finn demonstrates, governments became complicit in human rights abuses and violations of International Humanitarian Law (IHL) – is a particularly pertinent example here. If we regularly vote for parties and/or representatives who have a tendency to vote for rather than against bombing people if and when the opportunity arises, and if this opportunity arises with dramatic frequency (both historically and contemporarily in the case of countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom) then we ought to stop voting for them. It is difficult to see in this case how those who have voted a particular bunch of warmongers into office, let alone those who have a historical record of voting warmongers into office, could plausibly claim not to be complicit, unless they publically distance themselves from the bombing campaign – and commit never to vote for the warmongers again.

This is not to suggest that voters can always anticipate these things. It is probably fair to say that German Green Party voters could hardly have foreseen that one of the first moves of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) / Green Party coalition formed in 1998 would be to take part in the bombing of Serbia during the Kosovo "intervention" in 1999. But would it not then be the responsibility of such voters to withdraw their support immediately? It is not good enough simply to point out that one's voting for a party was not meant to signify one's support for a party's bellicosity (whether well-documented or recently discovered), but merely for its stance on ecology, gay marriage and animal rights. This shows that it is perfectly conceivable for a decent, law-abiding citizen – what else would a Green Party voter be? – to be complicit in wrongdoing. And German Green Party voters in 1999 knew, or should have known, that they were being complicit.

This leads us to the question of knowledge. An atomistic account of complicity would assume and require that accomplices know, or could reasonably be expected to know, that they are involved in wrongdoing. Similarly, in our example, we have assumed that voters had – or in the case of the German Green Party voters from 1998, were rapidly allowed to gain – relevant knowledge of what was going on, knowledge concerning the past and future policies and practices of the people and parties they were voting in. But what if voters are ignorant, if they simply do not know, or fail to make sense of, the relevant facts? This is a central epistemic question about complicity: the question of whether or not one's knowledge of being involved in wrongdoing, or one's being culpably ignorant about that involvement, is a necessary condition of one's being complicit. Someone's potential to become complicit in wrongdoing appears to require at least some ability to do otherwise, individually and/or collectively. A necessary precondition of that ability is knowledge. But people often lack this. They may be involved in a lot of wrongdoing and in causing a lot of harm without having the slightest clue that this is the case. And yet a state of complete ignorance is almost always a fictional condition, usually conjured when constructing an equally fictional figure, that of the completely unaware social agent. Thus one needs to be wary when confronting refutations of complicity based on grounds of ignorance.

Having said that, it is of course often difficult to ascertain whether or not people, including ourselves, know what they are doing (when they are doing what they are doing). We are often unclear about, and/or unaware of, the direct and/or indirect consequences of our actions and omissions, let alone about the extent of other people's knowledge about the consequences of their actions and omissions. What is even more difficult to know is whether or not people ought to know (or ought to have known) things they do not (or did not) know. It is frequently the case that people can reasonably be expected to know what they do not know; that they are culpably ignorant. Bob Brecher and Michael Neu claim that Michael Walzer and Alan Dershowitz exemplify this in their writings on torture. It is these authors' culpable ignorance which, according to Brecher and Neu, constitutes their complicity. Academics are, of course, in a perhaps quite special position of responsibility: they supposedly enjoy academic freedom; they devote their lives to the finding of truth; and they make a living out of their ability to think. For these reasons, they have a responsibility not to buy into the "war on terror" and not to condone the torture that has accompanied it, but instead to reflect critically upon, and to resist, the way in which this war has been constructed.

But what of those who do not enjoy any epistemically privileged position? Can someone be complicit without recognizing their own complicity? Again, we cannot settle these questions; but we can invite readers to join us in reflecting on them. Together, we can then consider the possibility that complicity might not only be a much more complex phenomenon than can be perceived through a lens that looks exclusively at individuals going against the order they inhabit, but might also have value as a heuristic tool for the purpose of social critique. The least that can be said, then, is that just as it should not be taken for granted that law-abiding citizens can walk through life without ever being complicit, so it is also doubtful whether or not the "ignorance" of those who uphold orders of war can always serve as a legitimate excuse.

So far, the example has broadened our horizon of complicity by suggesting that the law-abiding citizen can become complicit, and by problematizing the view that a lack of knowledge about one's being complicit guarantees one's non-complicity. The example has, however, remained within a framework in which reflections on complicity are used to attribute blame to particular individuals, and to think about the forms of action or inaction these individuals would need to take in order to avoid becoming complicit – in this case, not to vote for the warmongers. But what if warmongers are the only parties in town? And what if the situation is so grim that to abstain from voting would inadvertently support the most aggressive of the warmongers, who could have been prevented from coming to power only by lending support to the more moderate warmongers, despicable though they might be? Visualizing such a situation is, once again, hardly an exercise of unrestrained imagination. Consider for a moment how, in the United Kingdom at least, political rhetoric concerning and policies dealing with people other than "our own" are becoming – among all the parties that have any chance of being elected – increasingly infused with a discourse of securitization. What can the "global war on terror" be, other than a universal and persistent call to arms? How can politicians who constantly produce, or reproduce, a rhetoric of violence based on a claimed, but unjustified, need for defence against "threats" not be visualized as warmongers?