The crisis of forced disappearances in Mexico reaches thousands of regular citizens in every aspect of their lives. Beyond studying the mechanics of the phenomenon: the formation of search collectives, and state-citizenship interactions, the experience of being a witness of a mass graves search provides crucial details on the micro-dynamics of collaboration essential to understanding the attempt and/or the beginning of a personal and societal healing process.
This piece summarizes the author’s 2001 trip to Anlong Veng, Cambodia, to visit the location of Pol Pot’s cremation near the former headquarters of the Khmer Rouge guerilla movement. The paper describes the terrain that must be traversed in order to get there, and the individuals one encounters along the way. In the process, aspects of Cambodian history and culture are revealed.
Rwanda’s foreign policy is still greatly influenced by the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, commonly referred to as the Rwanda Genocide. Despite the genocidal massacres ending over thirty years ago, the Rwandan government still perceives its continued threat. Despite tangible threats to the state, such as the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) decline, the concern of the genocide’s lasting ideology and denial still concerns Rwandan policymakers responsible for the nation’s foreign policy and remembrance. This research relies on in-depth fieldwork with various Rwandan government agencies responsible for crafting state security, foreign policy, and anti-genocide policies. It examines why genocide denial is perceived as a significant threat to the nation’s post-genocide development. Rwandan elites attempt to combat historical revisions of the genocide through its diplomatic officials and events. Additionally, Rwanda utilises various tactics, such as censorship and capturing genocide deniers, to combat denial.
Preventing atrocities has garnered significant scholarly and practitioner attention. In 2014, the UN Office of Genocide Prevention issued a Framework of Analysis of Atrocity Crimes listing 14 risk factors and 143 indicators to support risk analysis and early action. Cognizant that conflicts regularly include deliberate attacks on cultural heritage, the Framework identifies fourteen indicators that pertain to culture and cultural heritage. Five years after the Framework’s release, Simon Adams decried the international community’s ineffectiveness at translating early warning into practical action with respect to cultural heritage. Instead of focusing on lack of political will or obstructionism—an obstructionism that led to a certain blindness in the international legal framework of the intimate relationship between cultural and human destruction—this article observes that definitional, temporal, and scalar ambiguities in the Framework likewise contribute to translation problems. The essay adopts a human rights framing of cultural heritage to help mitigate some of those problems, especially as it broadens the array of relevant agents to work proactively to avert and prevent tensions from erupting into violence, and sometimes reactively when situations devolve.
Preventing genocide is more achievable than ever before. In the past two decades, there has been an upsurge in research and resources dedicated to genocide and mass atrocity prevention. There is now substantial knowledge of risk factors for genocide, of current countries at risk of genocide and mass atrocities, and, most importantly, a small but passionate field of practitioners dedicated to prevention. Crucial to their effectiveness, however, is the adoption of evidence-based strategies. One important methodological approach to identifying proven strategies is through comparative analysis of historical case studies of resilience to genocide. From these case studies, in which a demonstrable risk of genocide was offset through effective resilience, researchers can identify cross-situational factors that have proven to reduce risk in the past, and therefore have a high potential to do so again. Adopting this approach, this article examines two cases of extraordinary resilience to genocide—those of Bulgaria and Denmark during the Holocaust. Through careful examination of these case studies, three factors important for promoting resilience can be identified. These include the role of leaders in contributing to prevention; the importance of early and robust condemnation of persecution in changing the trajectory of each crisis; and the importance of discursive space in which to challenge narratives of oppression. Each of these factors offers new insights for evidence-based approaches to genocide prevention.
For over a decade, shifting geopolitics, a changed global security environment, and countless failures of diplomacy have raised important questions on how to collectively grapple with a widely-perceived “crisis of multilateralism,” and reignited debate on the fitness of the UN Security Council to deliver on its mandate under these circumstances. Among other issues, ongoing polarization when not outright “gridlock” among the Permanent Members (P5) has fueled the Council’s apparent inability to respond to threats to civilian life and to countless mass atrocities around the world. Even worse, as this article argues, some P5 today possess both the willingness and unprecedented means to themselves commit atrocity crimes virtually unchallenged. Scholarship, however, has yet to systematically examine how this might be affecting prevention and response efforts, particularly though not exclusively at the UN. Against this background, this article makes a first attempt at conceptualizing what I call Great Power Perpetrators, and their challenge to the furthering of human-protection and prevention objectives. Anchoring my analysis in current geopolitics, I draw from Barnett and Duvall’s “taxonomy of power” to highlight how Great Power Perpetrators possess unique “institutional,” “compulsory,” “structural,” and “productive” forms of power that may not only defy traditional approaches to atrocity prevention and response; but, when used in combination to perpetrate abuse, also pose a “system-level” challenge to international security and cooperation. To illustrate this, I empirically analyze how the Russian Federation (which I consider to be the best contemporary illustration of the notion) wields its power with respect to other states and institutions on atrocity prevention and response issues, while also extending my analysis to other P5 as relevant. In light of said analysis, I conclude that leveraging alternative mechanisms within the prevailing multilateral system might be the best—if not currently the only—viable approach to confronting, curbing, and countering great power abuse.
Since the Genocide Convention was adopted by the General Assembly in 1948, eight cases have been brought to the ICJ by invoking Article IX of the Genocide Convention as a basis of the Court’s jurisdiction. Only two cases have reached their conclusion based on the merits of the case, with others decided during preliminary proceedings, while still others remain ongoing. There have been numerous studies of ICJ impartiality, with particular focus on judges’ voting records, using large amounts of data to discern any trends and biases. This article is the first attempt to comparatively analyze ICJ genocide cases using an interpretive lens through a close reading and detailed textual analysis of the majority opinion in five cases, along with elements of oral proceedings, declarations, and separate and dissenting opinions. By comparing the ICJ’s decisions during the provisional measures phase in Bosnia v. Serbia, Yugoslavia v. NATO members, The Gambia v. Myanmar, Ukraine v. Russia, and South Africa v. Israel, evidence suggests the ICJ delivered a biased decision against Yugoslavia due to the Court’s handling of genocidal intent, its omission of significant principles that were cited in the other four cases, and the stacking of the bench with judges from the respondent states.
Nearly sixteen (16) years since the "Agreement on Cessation of Hostilities Between the Government of the Republic of Uganda and Lord’s Resistance Army/Movement" (Juba Peace Agreement), accountability mechanisms envisaged therein have hardly provided meaningful redress, if at all, to victims of conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV). The peace negotiations took place shortly after the ICC issued arrest warrants for top commanders of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) who insisted on being tried at home. In a bid to balance the demands of peace and justice, a local accountability mechanism was agreed. The mechanism would work parallel to traditional justice mechanisms in the conflict areas, that is, parts of Northern and Eastern Uganda. The peace talks collapsed shortly before both parties signed the Juba Peace Agreement, but the government embarked on an implementation process nonetheless, which included, establishing a specialized unit in the High Court—the International Crimes Division (ICDHC), in 2008. The ICDHC was initially without rules of procedure, and some have argued, substantive law on international crimes, even though Uganda had domesticated the Geneva Conventions in 1964. The procedural and regulatory gaps, coupled with structural challenges crippled the ICDHC, which did not hear its first and only case on international crimes—Uganda vs Thomas Kwoyelo, until 2011. Despite a reported 25,000 victims of CRSV, the initial charge sheet did not include a single count on sexual related offenses, until it was amended in 2016. The trial is still ongoing. In tandem, local communities applied traditional justice to all atrocities, including, CRSV. Some empirical studies suggest that victims did not (do not) perceive the processes as effective and remedial. This article considers why formal and informal responses to CRSV have delivered little for victims in terms of justice and redress and proposes a socio-legal approach, informed by victims’ experiences and their construction of abstract legal concepts of justice, dignity and redress.
In this paper, we argue that atrocity prevention (AP) researchers face obstacles to inference and knowledge synthesis in the study of AP strategies and tools. We argue that researchers can begin to address obstacles to inference by using rigorous social-science methods and can address obstacles to knowledge synthesis through greater coordination and transparency about concepts, methods, and data. Our argument proceeds in four parts. First, drawing on a systematic review of three decades of research about AP tools, we survey key analytic obstacles to drawing conclusions about the effects of AP policy. Second, we survey four separate methods that researchers increasingly use to address some of these inferential issues in individual studies. Third, we survey the subsequent obstacles to synthesizing and aggregating conclusions from these studies, despite methodological advances. We conclude by offering recommendations about how researchers can conduct research that would be easier to synthesize across studies and some initial ideas about how analysts can use the existing body of research to inform policy decisions. In particular, we recommend that both researchers and practitioners adopt a “Bayesian approach” to interpreting evidence from the AP literature by thinking in probabilistic terms, using context-specific information about particular cases to refine estimates of the likely outcomes of AP tools based on more general evidence.
Dangerous speech, any expression that can increase the likelihood that someone will commit or condone violence against members of another group, can be a powerful early warning signal of impending mass violence. However, one cannot make a list of words that are dangerous, since the effect of the message depends not only on its content, but also on how it is communicated: by whom, to whom, and under what circumstances. What may be benign in one context may be extremely inflammatory in another. Thus, effective monitoring requires deep knowledge of the local setting and structural factors. The spread of dangerous speech online increases its potential impact, but also allows atrocity prevention practitioners access to the speech and provides a window into rapidly changing situations “on the ground.” This paper will review the literature on the connection between speech and violence and explain how dangerous speech on social media – and the responses to it – can serve as a signal of changing conflict dynamics. It will then make the case that civil society, as well as embassy staff, when trained to identify dangerous speech, can serve as a much-needed bridge, bringing local knowledge to government officials and NGOs who can marshal resources for effective interventions.
My reflections on the limits of legal responses in Rwanda stem from both academic and lived experience. I served as Rwanda’s Deputy Minister of Justice (1996–1999), Prosecutor General (1999–2003), and Deputy Chief Justice (2003–2004) during the period after the genocide. In those roles, I had access to a large volume of information drawn from policy- making roles, case files of members of my staff, as well as my own fieldwork relating to the suffering of victims of the genocide. While I obviously believe that justice for those crimes is not in vain, my work with survivors left me with an acute sense of the inadequacy of legal responses to mass atrocity
