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Books > Social sciences > Warfare & defence > Other warfare & defence issues > War crimes
Over the past 25 years, Rwanda has undergone remarkable shifts and
transitions: culturally, economically, and educationally the
country has gone from strength to strength. While much scholarship
has understandably been retrospective, seeking to understand,
document and commemorate the Genocide against the Tutsi, this
volume gathers diverse perspectives on the changing social and
cultural fabric of Rwanda since 1994. Rwanda Since 1994 considers
the context of these changes, particularly in relation to the
ongoing importance of remembering and in wider developments in the
Great Lakes and East Africa regions. Equally it explores what
stories of change are emerging from Rwanda: creative writing and
testimonies, as well as national, regional, and international
political narratives. The contributors interrogate which frameworks
and narratives might be most useful for understanding different
kinds of change, what new directions are emerging, and how Rwanda's
trajectory is shaped by other global factors. The international set
of contributors includes creative writers, practitioners,
activists, and scholars from African studies, history,
anthropology, education, international relations, modern languages,
law and politics. As well as delving into the shifting dynamics of
religion and gender in Rwanda today, the book brings to light the
experiences of lesser-discussed groups of people such as the Twa
and the children of perpetrators.
'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.
Between 1929 and 1942, Hungary's motion picture industry
experienced meteoric growth. It leapt into Europe's top echelon,
trailing only Nazi Germany and Italy in feature output. Yet by
1944, Hungary's cinema was in shambles, internal and external
forces having destroyed its unification experiments and productive
capacity. This original cultural and political history examines the
birth, unexpected ascendance, and wartime collapse of Hungary's
early sound cinema by placing it within a complex international
nexus. Detailing the interplay of Hungarian cultural and political
elites, Jewish film professionals and financiers, Nazi officials,
and global film moguls, David Frey demonstrates how the
transnational process of forging an industry designed to define a
national culture proved particularly contentious and surprisingly
contradictory in the heyday of racial nationalism and antisemitism.
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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