Responding to Mass Atrocities in Africa
Responding to Mass Atrocities in Africa

Author: Raymond Kwun-Sun Lau

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-12-14

Total Pages: 222

ISBN-13: 0429619839

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This book explores the relationship between the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) and the International Criminal Court (ICC), challenging the assumption that they are always mutually reinforcing or complementary, and examining instead the many tensions which arise between the immediate imperative of saving lives, and the more long-term prospect of punishing perpetrators and preventing future conflicts through deterrence. Around the world, audiences in the mid-1990s watched the mass atrocities unfolding in Rwanda and Srebrenica in horror and disbelief. Emerging from these disasters came an international commitment to safeguard and protect vulnerable communities, as laid out in the R2P principle, and an international responsibility to punish perpetrators, with the establishment of the ICC. The book provides context-independent proposals for resolving contradictions between the two principles, suggesting that focusing on timing and sequencing in invoking international R2P and ICC actions could facilitate the easing of tensions. Drawing on examples from Uganda, Kenya, and Darfur, the book applies International Relations concepts and theories in order to deepen our understanding of international responses to mass atrocities. Ultimately the book concludes that a 'Protection First, Justice Later' sequence approach is necessary for managing the tension and facilitating more effective and consistent international responses. This book makes an important contribution to discussions and debates surrounding international responses to genocide and mass atrocities. It will be of special interest to scholars, students and policymakers in International Relations, Global Governance, African Studies, International Development, Human Rights and International Criminal Law.

The Responsibility to Protect
The Responsibility to Protect

Author: Gareth Evans

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2009-08-01

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 0815701802

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"Never again!" the world has vowed time and again since the Holocaust. Yet genocide, ethnic cleansing, and other mass atrocity crimes continue to shock our consciences—from the killing fields of Cambodia to the machetes of Rwanda to the agony of Darfur. Gareth Evans has grappled with these issues firsthand. As Australian foreign minister, he was a key broker of the United Nations peace plan for Cambodia. As president of the International Crisis Group, he now works on the prevention and resolution of scores of conflicts and crises worldwide. The primary architect of and leading authority on the Responsibility to Protect ("R2P"), he shows here how this new international norm can once and for all prevent a return to the killing fields. The Responsibility to Protect captures a simple and powerful idea. The primary responsibility for protecting its own people from mass atrocity crimes lies with the state itself. State sovereignty implies responsibility, not a license to kill. But when a state is unwilling or unable to halt or avert such crimes, the wider international community then has a collective responsibility to take whatever action is necessary. R2P emphasizes preventive action above all. That includes assistance for states struggling to contain potential crises and for effective rebuilding after a crisis or conflict to tackle its underlying causes. R2P's primary tools are persuasion and support, not military or other coercion. But sometimes it is right to fight: faced with another Rwanda, the world cannot just stand by. R2P was unanimously adopted by the UN General Assembly at the 2005 World Summit. But many misunderstandings persist about its scope and limits. And much remains to be done to solidify political support and to build institutional capacity. Evans shows, compellingly, how big a break R2P represents from the past, and how, with its acceptance in principle and effective application in practice, the promise of "Never

International Responses to Mass Atrocities in Africa
International Responses to Mass Atrocities in Africa

Author: Kurt Mills

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2015-10-16

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 081224737X

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Since the end of World War II and the founding of the United Nations, genocide, crimes against humanity and other war crimes—mass atrocities—have been explicitly illegal. When such crimes are committed, the international community has an obligation to respond: the human rights of the victims outweigh the sovereignty claims of states that engage in or allow such human rights violations. This obligation has come to be known as the responsibility to protect. Yet, parallel to this responsibility, two other related responsibilities have developed: to prosecute those responsible for the crimes, and to provide humanitarian relief to the victims—what the author calls the responsibility to palliate. Even though this rhetoric of protecting those in need is well used by the international community, its application in practice has been erratic at best. In International Responses to Mass Atrocities in Africa, Kurt Mills develops a typology of responses to mass atrocities, investigates the limitations of these responses, and calls for such responses to be implemented in a more timely and thoughtful manner. Mills considers four cases of international responses to mass atrocities—in Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, and Darfur—putting the cases into historical context and analyzing them according to the typology, showing how the responses interact. Although all are intended to address human suffering, they are very different types of actions and accomplish different things, over different timescales, on different orders of magnitude, and by very different types of actors. But the critical question is whether they accomplish their objectives in a mutually supportive way—and what the trade-offs in using one or more of these responses may be. By expanding the understanding of international responsibilities, Mills provides critical analysis of the possibilities for the international community to respond to humanitarian crises.

Media and Mass Atrocity
Media and Mass Atrocity

Author: Allan Thompson

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 2019-04-05

Total Pages: 527

ISBN-13: 1928096743

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When human beings are at their worst – as they most certainly were in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide – the world needs the institutions of journalism and the media to be at their best. Sadly, in Rwanda, the media fell short. Media and Mass Atrocity revisits the case of Rwanda, but also examines how the nexus between media and mass atrocity has been shaped by the dramatic rise of social media. It has been twenty-five years since Rwanda slid into the abyss. The killings happened in broad daylight, but many of us turned away. A quarter century later, there is still much to learn about the relationship between the media and genocide, an issue laid bare by the Rwanda tragedy. Media and Mass Atrocity revisits the debate over the role of traditional news media in Rwanda, where, confronted by the horrors taking place, international news media, for the most part, turned away, and at times muddled the story when they did pay attention. Hate-media outlets in Rwanda played a role in laying the groundwork for genocide, and then actively encouraged the extermination campaign. The news media not only failed to fully grasp and communicate the genocide, but mostly overlooked the war crimes committed during the genocide and in its aftermath by the Rwandan Patriotic Front. The global media landscape has been transformed since Rwanda. We are now saturated with social media, generated as often as not by non-journalists. Mobile phones are everywhere. And in many quarters, the traditional news media business model continues to recede. Against that backdrop, it is more important than ever to examine the nexus between media and mass atrocity. The book includes an extensive section on the echoes of Rwanda, which looks at the cases of Darfur, the Central African Republic, Myanmar, and South Sudan, while the impact of social media as a new actor is examined through chapters on social media use by the Islamic State and in Syria and in other contexts across the developing world. It also looks at the aftermath of the genocide: the shifting narrative of the genocide itself, the evolving debate over the role and impact of hate media in Rwanda, the challenge of digitizing archival records of the genocide, and the fostering of free and independent media in atrocity's wake. The volume also probes how journalists themselves confront mass atrocity and examines the preventive function of media through the use of advanced digital technology as well as radio programming in the Lake Chad Basin and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Media and Mass Atrocity questions what the lessons of Rwanda mean now, in an age of communications so dramatically influenced by social media and the relative decline of traditional news media.

The Postcolonial African Genocide Novel
The Postcolonial African Genocide Novel

Author: Chigbo Arthur Anyaduba

Publisher:

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781800857377

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In The Postcolonial African Genocide Novel, Chigbo Anyaduba examines fictional responses to mass atrocities occurring in postcolonial Africa. Through a comparative reading of novels responding to the genocides of the Igbo in Nigeria (1966-1970) and the Tutsi in Rwanda (1990-1994), the book underscores the ways that literary encounters with genocides in Africa's postcolonies have attempted to reimagine the conditions giving rise to exterminatory forms of mass violence. The book concretizes and troubles one of the apparent truisms of genocide studies, especially in the context of imaginative literature: that the reality of genocide more often than not resists meaningfulness. Particularly given the centrality of this truism to artistic responses to the Holocaust and to genocides more generally, Anyaduba tracks the astonishing range of meanings drawn by writers at a series of (temporal, spatial, historical, cultural and other) removes from the realities of genocide in Africa's postcolonies, a set of meanings that are often highly-specific and irreducible to maxims or foundational cases. The book shows that in the artistic projects to construct meanings against genocide's nihilism writers of African genocides deploy tropes that while significantly oriented to African concerns are equally shaped by the representational conventions and practices associated with the legacies of the Holocaust.

Reconstructing Atrocity Prevention
Reconstructing Atrocity Prevention

Author: Sheri P. Rosenberg

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 547

ISBN-13: 1107094968

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This proposes a new framework for atrocity prevention, featuring scholars from around the globe including three former UN special advisers.

Making and Unmaking Nations
Making and Unmaking Nations

Author: Scott Straus

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2015-03-15

Total Pages: 401

ISBN-13: 0801455677

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Winner of the Grawmeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order, 2018 Winner of the Joseph Lepgold Prize Winner of the Best Books in Conflict Studies (APSA) Winner of the Best Book in Human Rights (ISA) In Making and Unmaking Nations, Scott Straus seeks to explain why and how genocide takes place—and, perhaps more important, how it has been avoided in places where it may have seemed likely or even inevitable. To solve that puzzle, he examines postcolonial Africa, analyzing countries in which genocide occurred and where it could have but did not. Why have there not been other Rwandas? Straus finds that deep-rooted ideologies—how leaders make their nations—shape strategies of violence and are central to what leads to or away from genocide. Other critical factors include the dynamics of war, the role of restraint, and the interaction between national and local actors in the staging of campaigns of large-scale violence. Grounded in Straus's extensive fieldwork in contemporary Africa, the study of major twentieth-century cases of genocide, and the literature on genocide and political violence, Making and Unmaking Nations centers on cogent analyses of three nongenocide cases (Côte d'Ivoire, Mali, and Senegal) and two in which genocide took place (Rwanda and Sudan). Straus's empirical analysis is based in part on an original database of presidential speeches from 1960 to 2005. The book also includes a broad-gauge analysis of all major cases of large-scale violence in Africa since decolonization. Straus's insights into the causes of genocide will inform the study of political violence as well as giving policymakers and nongovernmental organizations valuable tools for the future.

Between Vengeance and Forgiveness
Between Vengeance and Forgiveness

Author: Martha Minow

Publisher: Beacon Press

Published: 2001-01-17

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 080704508X

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The rise of collective violence and genocide is the twentieth century's most terrible legacy. Martha Minow, a Harvard law professor and one of our most brilliant and humane legal minds, offers a landmark book on our attempts to heal after such large-scale tragedy. Writing with informed, searching prose of the extraordinary drama of the truth commissions in Argentina, East Germany, and most notably South Africa; war-crime prosecutions in Nuremberg and Bosnia; and reparations in America, Minow looks at the strategies and results of these riveting national experiments in justice and healing.