What are the causes of genocide and mass atrocities? How can we prevent these atrocities or, when that is no longer possible, intervene to stop them? What are the impediments to timely and robust action? In what ways do political factors shape the nature, and results, of international responses? The authors of Responding to Genocide explore these questions, examining the many challenges involved in forging effective international policies to combat genocidal violence.
Developments in the understanding and treatment of genocide through the twentieth century have involved a combination of politics, public opinion, social trends, and economic development, and led to the substantive law of genocide and the assumption of international jurisdiction. This book analyzes incidences of genocide and mass atrocities, focusing on the political factors involved in modern counter-genocide efforts. Drawing on incidences of genocide and mass atrocity such as the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, and the Armenian genocide, Mark Kielsgard adopts a conceptual model that reveals the political factors which impact the international law of genocide, such as barriers and catalysts to transitional justice and the politics of genocide denial. As a work which provides a focused picture of those influences and their significance to genocide studies, this book will be of great use and interest to students and researchers in international criminal law, conflict studies, and conflict resolution.
Why do we allow our governments to get away with "bystanding" to genocide? Focusing on the relationships between citizens, political elites, and U.S. institutions in the most powerful nation in the world, Reluctant Interveners offers a sobering account of the interplays between values and interests, words and deeds, which transformed the pledge of "never again" to a recurring reality of ever again.
From former UN Ambassador and author of the New York Times bestseller The Education of an Idealist Samantha Power, the Pulitzer Prize-winning book on America's repeated failure to stop genocides around the world In her prizewinning examination of the last century of American history, Samantha Power asks the haunting question: Why do American leaders who vow "never again" repeatedly fail to stop genocide? Power, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and the former US Ambassador to the United Nations, draws upon exclusive interviews with Washington's top policymakers, thousands of declassified documents, and her own reporting from modern killing fields to provide the answer. "A Problem from Hell" shows how decent Americans inside and outside government refused to get involved despite chilling warnings, and tells the stories of the courageous Americans who risked their careers and lives in an effort to get the United States to act. A modern classic and "an angry, brilliant, fiercely useful, absolutely essential book" (New Republic), "A Problem from Hell" has forever reshaped debates about American foreign policy. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize Winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award Winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award Winner of the Raphael Lemkin Award
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.
This book punctures once and for all common excuses for Western inaction in the face of incontrovertible evidence of the most egregious crimes against humanity to occur in Europe since World War II.
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.
