The second generation of Aspers that now runs Canada's largest news media company is much like the first. Israel "Izzy" Asper's three children often appear in today's headlines. David is bidding to buy the Winnipeg Blue Bombers football team. Gail heads fundraising efforts for the new Canadian Museum of Human Rights. Leonard sits in his father's place as head of CanWest Global Communications. Like its founder, they also use their media empire to influence public opinion. Asper Nation explains why Canadians should be concerned about where the country's first family of news media is coming from, politically. Izzy Asper was an oddity as a Liberal politician in the 1970s. Fiscally, he was to the right of most Conservatives. As a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist, he called for a flat tax and "workfare." As a best-selling author, he helped thwart a plan to shift Canada's tax burden from the middle class onto corporations. But when Asper took his policies to Manitobans as Liberal leader in 1973, he was soundly defeated. Asper got into the television business instead and built Canada's third network. Asper made CanWest the country's most profitable broadcaster by feasting on regulations that encouraged the importation of cheap American programming. He took his formula to the world in the 1990s, buying television networks in New Zealand, Australia, and Ireland. Then in 2000, Asper pioneered media "convergence," buying Canada's largest newspaper chain from Conrad Black. Southam dailies were soon ordered to run "national" editorials written at CanWest Global headquarters in Winnipeg. This corporate news control brought protest from journalists and two government inquiries. Neither resulted in long-sought limits on media ownership, however. Marc Edge offers a compelling account of the political perils involved in allowing the Asper family to dominate Canadian media.
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.
The first comprehensive account of China policy during the Kennedy years, this study profiles John F. Kennedy as a man whose inner struggles and disparate characteristics made for an unpredictable foreign policy. While he was often a hostage to the Cold War, to constrictive perceptions of the domestic climate, and to the image of a predatory China, Kennedy recognized Washington's finite capacity to shape events on the China Mainland. With the possible exception of a preventive strike against China's nuclear installations, he was also reluctant to run the risk of a military confrontation with Beijing. On the eve of his assassination, Kennedy may have even contemplated a China policy departure during his second term. A calm appraisal of China's capabilities and intentions constituted the distinguishing feature of revisionist thinking during the Kennedy years. The disjointed revisionist effort settled, in late 1963, on a pedagogic course, which still implied a search for American primacy. The revisionist approach did ultimately facilitate the transformation of bilateral relations in the early 1970s. From a shorter-range perspective, however, the Kennedy era only added fuel to the fire of Sino-American confrontation. The Limited Test Ban Treaty accentuated the sense of encirclement and vulnerability in Beijing's psyche, and clouds gathered ominously over Vietnam. Kennedy does bear some responsibility for the bilateral impasse, as he personified a decisionmaker so obsessed with the objective of deterrence as to overlook the security dilemma: nonetheless, Mao's preference for a radical course, independent of Kennedy's conduct, contributed as well. Neither side was yet ready for a breakthrough.
Introduction -- The decision to prosecute core crimes : contexts and contents -- The decisions to prosecute : possible motivations -- The decisions to prosecute : who should be brought to justice? -- The crime of genocide in Ethiopian Law -- The crime of genocide in Ethiopian trials : elements of the crime -- War crimes in Ethiopia : law and practice -- Punishment and sentencing of core crimes in Ethiopia -- Conclusion.
This title is Scheffer's account of the international gamble to prosecute those responsible for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, and to redress some of the bloodiest human rights atrocities in our time.
Fact-Finding Without Facts explores international criminal fact-finding - empirically, conceptually, and normatively. After reviewing thousands of pages of transcripts from various international criminal tribunals, the author reveals that international criminal trials are beset by numerous and severe fact-finding impediments that substantially impair the tribunals' ability to determine who did what to whom. These fact-finding impediments have heretofore received virtually no publicity, let alone scholarly treatment, and they are deeply troubling not only because they raise grave concerns about the accuracy of the judgments currently being issued but because they can be expected to similarly impair the next generation of international trials that will be held at the International Criminal Court. After setting forth her empirical findings, the author considers their conceptual and normative implications. The author concludes that international criminal tribunals purport a fact-finding competence that they do not possess and, as a consequence, base their judgments on a less precise, more amorphous method of fact-finding than they publicly acknowledge.
In one of the most detailed and powerfully argued books published on American intervention in Vietnam, Fredrik Logevall examines the last great unanswered question on the war: Could the tragedy have been averted? His answer: a resounding yes. Challenging the prevailing myth that the outbreak of large-scale fighting in 1965 was essentially unavoidable, Choosing War argues that the Vietnam War was unnecessary, not merely in hindsight but in the context of its time. Why, then, did major war break out? Logevall shows it was partly because of the timidity of the key opponents of U.S. involvement, and partly because of the staunch opposition of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to early negotiations. His superlative account shows that U.S. officials chose war over disengagement despite deep doubts about the war's prospects and about Vietnam's importance to U.S. security and over the opposition of important voices in the Congress, in the press, and in the world community. They did so because of concerns about credibility—not so much America's or the Democratic party's credibility, but their own personal credibility. Based on six years of painstaking research, this book is the first to place American policymaking on Vietnam in 1963-65 in its wider international context using multiarchival sources, many of them recently declassified. Here we see for the first time how the war played in the key world capitals—not merely in Washington, Saigon, and Hanoi, but also in Paris and London, in Tokyo and Ottawa, in Moscow and Beijing. Choosing War is a powerful and devastating account of fear, favor, and hypocrisy at the highest echelons of American government, a book that will change forever our understanding of the tragedy that was the Vietnam War.