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Books > Social sciences > Warfare & defence > Other warfare & defence issues > War crimes > Genocide
During a one-hundred-day period in 1994, Hutus murdered between
half a million and a million Tutsi in Rwanda. The numbers are
staggering; the methods of killing were unspeakable. Utilizing
personal interviews with trauma survivors living in Rwandan cities,
towns, and dusty villages, We Cannot Forget relates what happened
during this period and what their lives were like both prior to and
following the genocide.
Through powerful stories that are at once memorable, disturbing,
and informative, readers gain a critical sense of the tensions and
violence that preceded the genocide, how it erupted and was carried
out, and what these people faced in the first sixteen years
following the genocide.
'Mowed them down wholesale!' With these words, a judge summed up
the last great punitive massacre of Aboriginal people in Australia.
Coniston, Central Australia, 1928: the murder of an itinerant
prospector at this isolated station by local Warlpiri triggered a
series of police-led expeditions that ranged over vast areas for
two months, as the hunting parties shot down victims by the dozen.
The official death toll, declared by the whitewash federal inquiry
as being all in self-defence, was 31. The real number was certainly
multiples of that. Coniston has never before been fully researched
and recorded; with this book that absence in Australia's history is
now filled. As the last great mass killing in our country's
genocidal past but an event largely unremembered, it reminds us
that, without truth, there can be no reconciliation.
As communities struggle to make sense of mass atrocities,
expectations have increasingly been placed on international
criminal courts to render authoritative historical accounts of
episodes of mass violence. Taking these expectations as its point
of departure, this book seeks to understand international criminal
courts through the prism of their historical function. The book
critically examines how such courts confront the past by
constructing historical narratives concerning both the culpability
of the accused on trial and the broader mass atrocity contexts in
which they are alleged to have participated. The book argues that
international criminal courts are host to struggles for historical
justice, discursive contests between different actors vying for
judicial acknowledgement of their interpretations of the past. By
examining these struggles within different institutional settings,
the book uncovers the legitimating qualities of international
criminal judgments. In particular, it illuminates what tends to be
foregrounded and included within, as well as marginalised and
excluded from, the narratives of international criminal courts in
practice. What emerges from this account is a sense of the
significance of thinking about the emancipatory limits and
possibilities of international criminal courts in terms of the
historical narratives that are constructed and contested within and
beyond the courtroom.
The genocide in Myanmar has drawn global attention as Nobel Peace
Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi appears to be presiding over human
rights violations, forced migrations and extra-judicial killings on
an enormous scale. This unique study draws on thousands of hours of
interviews and testimony from the Rohingya themselves to assess and
outline the full scale of the disaster. Casting new light on
Rohingya identity, history and culture, this will be an essential
contribution to the study of the Rohingya people and to the study
of the early stages of genocide. This book adds convincingly to the
body of evidence that the government of Myanmar has enabled a
genocide in Rakhine State and the surrounding areas.
Reassessing the Cambodian genocide through the lens of global
capitalist development. James Tyner reinterprets the place of
agriculture under the Khmer Rouge, positioning it in new ways
relative to Marxism, capitalism, and genocide. The Cambodian
revolutionaries' agricultural management is widely viewed by
critics as irrational and dangerous, and it is invoked as part of
wider efforts to discredit leftist movements. Researching the
specific functioning of Cambodia's transition from farms to
agriculture within the context of the global economy, Tyner comes
to a different conclusion. He finds that analysis of "actually
existing political economy"-as opposed to the Marxist
identification the Khmer Rouge claimed-points to overlap between
Cambodian practice and agrarian capitalism.Tyner argues that
dissolution of the traditional Khmer family farm under the aegis of
state capitalism is central to any understanding of the mass
violence unleashed by the Khmer Rouge. Seen less as a radical
outlier than as part of a global shift in farming and food
politics, the Cambodian tragedy imparts new lessons to our
understanding of the political economy of genocide.
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