Currently viewing the tag: "atrocities"
The views of victims, perpetrators and bystanders about genocide and how the term itself translates culturally and linguistically in different regions may provide another more place-based understanding of such crimes. Of course, this is unlikely to change whether or how policymakers use ethically loaded terms, but it might help scholars and others interested in helping resolve such conflicts to better interpret the nature of such crimes and the expectations of affected communities.
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If you want to follow the debate sparked by recent writings from the WPF research collaborators on How Mass Atrocities End, Alex de Waal, Jens Meierhenrich and Bridget Conley-Zilkic, in the Fletcher Forum and New York Times/International Herald Tribune, look no further. “If it is not a norm, does it not threaten to serve as mere amplification of ethical rhetoric that obscures the real policy debates that are, in any case, conducted elsewhere with different vocabularies?”
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The negotiation of land distribution and horizontal inequalities, direct causes of the conflict, meaningful transitional justice mechanisms, including prosecution of perpetrators, and indigenous territorial autonomy, was at best sidelined, at worst bluntly sacrificed, in order to lower resistance of the parties to the accords to sit at the negotiation table and sign the peace. Moreover, the process was undergirded by the framework of universal individual rights over and above social, economic and cultural rights, rights that would have gone some way towards addressing certain structural causes of violent conflict.
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In summary, most of the time, everything in Sudanese political life, including the lives of ordinary people, is subordinate to tactical political calculus. When that political calculus changes, which may happen for diverse reasons, the rationale for inflicting atrocity also changes. It may lessen or disappear, and may then reappear, probably in a different form.
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High levels of gang violence in Guatemala or Honduras, vigilante justice in postwar and fragile states such as Liberia or Timor- Leste, post-election violence in Côte d’Ivoire or Kenya, and high levels of urban crime in cities such as Kingston or Rio de Janeiro underline how the lines between armed conflict and criminal violence are increasingly blurred. In Iraq since 2003, for example, the targeting of non-combatants by insurgents, militias, and sectarian groups may seem chaotic or random, yet a closer inspection of underlying patterns of violence suggests that seemingly arbitrary or criminal violence may also serve political purposes in line with the goals of armed groups.
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Despite the expense and effort that went into organizing the first post-transition elections in the DRC in 2006, Kinshasa increasingly relies on strong-handedness because its authority rests on weak national and local institutions—a crisis of governance and legitimacy that neither the 2006 elections, nor the flawed and contested 2011 elections have solved.
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