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Books > Social sciences > Warfare & defence > Other warfare & defence issues > War crimes > Genocide
Crimes in Archival Form explores the many ways in which human
rights "facts" are produced rather than found. Using Myanmar as his
case study, Ken MacLean examines the fact-finding practices of a
human rights group, two cross-border humanitarian agencies, an
international law clinic, and a global NGO-led campaign.
Foregrounding fact-finding, in critical yet constructive ways,
prompts long overdue conversations about the possibilities and
limits of human rights documentation as a mode of truth-seeking.
Such conversations are particularly urgent in an era when the
perpetrators of large-scale human rights violations exploit
misinformation, weaponize disinformation, and employ outright
falsehoods, including deepfakes, to undermine the credibility of
those who document abuses and demand accountability in the court of
public opinion and in courts of law. MacLean compels practitioners
and scholars alike to be more transparent about how human rights
"fact" production works, why it is important, and when its use
should prompt concern.
Myanmar's security forces have conducted clearance operations in
the Rakhine State since August 2017, driving a mass exodus of
ethnic Rohingyas to neighboring Bangladesh. In The Rohingya Crisis:
Analyses, Responses, and Peacebuilding Avenues, Kawser Ahmed and
Helal Mohiuddin address core questions about the conflict and its
global and regional significance. Ahmed and Mohiuddin identify the
defining characteristics of Rohingya identity, analyze the
conflict, depict the geo-economic and geo-political factors
contributing to the conflict, and outline peacebuilding avenues
available for conflict transformation at the macro-, meso-, and
micro-level. This book is recommended for students and scholars of
anthropology, sociology, peace and conflict studies, political
science, and Asian studies.
The Western world's responses to genocide have been slow, unwieldly
and sometimes unfit for purpose. So argues David Patrick in this
essential new contribution to the aid and intervention debate.
While the UK and US have historically been committed to the ideals
of human rights, freedom and equality, their actual material
reactions are more usually dictated by geopolitical 'noise',
pre-conceived ideas of worth and the media attention-spans of
individual elected leaders. Utilizing a wide-ranging quantitative
analysis of media reporting across the globe, Patrick argues that
an over-reliance on the Holocaust as the framing device we use to
try and come to terms with such horrors can lead to slow responses,
misinterpretation and category errors - in both Rwanda and Bosnia,
much energy was expended trying to ascertain whether these regions
qualified for 'genocide' status. The Reporting of Genocide
demonstrates how such tragedies are reduced to stereotypes in the
media - framed in terms of innocent victims and brutal oppressors -
which can over-simplify the situation on the ground. This in turn
can lead to mixed and inadequate responses from governments.
Reporting on Genocide also seeks to address how responses to
genocides across the globe can be improved, and will be essential
reading for policy-makers and for scholars of genocide and the
media.
Unstable Ground looks at the human impact of climate change and its
potential to provoke some of the most troubling crimes against
humanity-ethnic conflict, war, and genocide. Alex Alvarez provides
an essential overview of what science has shown to be true about
climate change and examines how our warming world will challenge
and stress societies and heighten the risk of mass violence.
Drawing on a number of recent and historic examples, including
Darfur, Syria, and the current migration crisis, this book
illustrates the thorny intersections of climate change and
violence. The author doesn't claim causation but makes a compelling
case that changing environmental circumstances can be a critical
factor in facilitating violent conflict. As research suggests
climate change will continue and accelerate, understanding how it
might contribute to violence is essential in understanding how to
prevent it.
Uyghurs are descendents of Turkic peoples, currently facing
genocide committed against them in their homeland, East Turkistan.
This land has been colonized by the Chinese Communist Party in
1949, creating a police state and renamed Xinjiang Uyghur
Autonomous Region (XUAR). This book explains how Uyghur rights have
been diminishing under the authoritarian rule of the Chinese
Communist Party (CCP), which has recently escalated into the
cultural genocide of Uyghurs. Since Xi Jinping became president of
the People's Republic of China in 2012, he has clearly defined his
political agenda towards Uyghurs of implementing the Four Breaks
intended to "break their lineage, break their roots, break their
connections, and break their origins." The situation has now
rapidly deteriorated. Millions of Uyghur families have been
separated with an estimated 1 million Uyghurs being
indiscriminately placed in concentration camps, under the guise of
"re-education". Xi has justified this as a fight against the Three
Evils (terrorism, separatism and religious extremism). Uyghurs are
subject to forced thought reform, torture, rape, organ harvesting,
slave labor, and ultimately death in the shrouded secrecy of the
camps. For Uyghurs in exile, they face an endless uncertainty, cut
off from their families back home, and are harassed by Chinese
security agents with threats against their family back home if they
speak out against these atrocities. The world has to date largely
remained silent over this genocide due to economic ties with China.
In reflecting upon this situation the question remains: Who amongst
you has the courage to speak up and act against this totalitarian
regime of the Chinese Communist Party, committing one of the worst
genocides and human rights atrocities of the 21st Century?
On April 25th 1915, during the First World War, the famous Anzacs
landed ashore at Gallipoli. At the exact same moment, leading
figures of Armenian life in the Ottoman Empire were being arrested
in vast numbers. That dark day marks the simultaneous birth of a
national story - and the beginning of a genocide. When We Dead
Awaken - the first narrative history of the Armenian Genocide in
decades - draws these two landmark historical events together.
James Robins explores the accounts of Anzac Prisoners of War who
witnessed the genocide, the experiences of soldiers who risked
their lives to defend refugees, and Australia and New Zealand's
participation in the enormous post-war Armenian relief movement. By
exploring the vital political implications of this unexplored
history, When We Dead Awaken questions the national folklore of
Australia, New Zealand, and Turkey - and the mythology of Anzac Day
itself.
The current refugee crisis is unparalleled in history in its size
and severity. According to the UNHCR, there are roughly 67 million
refugees worldwide, the vast majority of whom are refugees as the
result of wars and other military actions. This social and
political crisis cries out for normative explanation and analysis.
Morally and politically, how should we understand the fact that 1
in every 122 humans is a refugee? How should we respond to it, and
why? Jennifer Kling argues that war refugees have suffered, and
continue to suffer, a series of harms, wrongs, and oppressions, and
so are owed recompense, restitution, and aid-as a matter of
justice-by sociopolitical institutions around the world. She makes
the case that war refugees should be viewed and treated differently
than migrants, due to their particular circumstances, but that
their circumstances do not wholly alleviate their own moral
responsibilities. We must stop treating refugees as objects to be
moved around on the global stage, Kling contends, and instead see
them as people, with their own subjective experiences of the world,
who might surprise us with their words and works. While targeted
toward students and scholars of philosophy, War Refugees: Risk,
Justice, and Moral Responsibility will also be of interest to those
working in political science, international relations, and foreign
policy analysis, and, more broadly, to anyone who is interested in
thinking critically about the ongoing refugee crisis.
This book provides a juridical, sociopolitical history of the
evolution of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Over one million citizens
were massacred in less than 100 days via a highly organized,
efficiently executed genocide throughout the tiny country of
Rwanda. While genocide is not a unique phenomenon in modern times,
a genocide like Rwanda's is unique. Unlike most genocides, wherein
a government plans and executes mass murder of a targeted portion
of its population, asking merely that the majority population look
the other way, or at most, provide no harbor to the targeted
population (ex: Germany), the Rwandan government relied heavily on
the civilian population to not only politically support, but
actively engage in the acts of genocide committed over the 100 days
throughout the spring of 1994. This book seeks to understand why
and how the Rwandan genocide occurred. It analyzes the colonial
roots of modern Rwandan government and the development of the
political "state of exception" created in Rwanda that ultimately
allowed the sovereign to dehumanize the minority Tutsi population
and execute the most efficient genocide in modern history.
Despite considerable progress in research and practice in the
constructive transformation of intractable conflicts beginning in
the 1970s, many terribly destructive conflicts have recently
erupted. New circumstances have emerged that have resulted in
regressions. The contributions in this book examine many of the new
challenges and obstacles to the transformation of intractable
conflicts. It also offers an array of new and promising
opportunities for constructive transformations. The book brings
together analyses of U.S.-based conflicts with those from many
regions of the world. International, intra-state, and local
conflicts are explored, along with those that have been violent and
non-violent. The diversity in disciplines among the authors
provides a wide range of theoretical approaches to explaining how a
variety of intractable conflicts can be transformed. Case studies
of local, national, and transnational conflicts serve to illustrate
this new landscape. These analyses are complemented by conceptual
discussions relating to new conflict systems, actors, dynamics and
strategies. Policy implications of findings are also presented.
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