Posts by: Bridget Conley
Ethiopia’s struggle with increasing popular demands for political and civil rights, and governmental transparency may have reached an important turning point. On January 3, 2018, the country’s Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn made a surprising announcement: the government would release political prisoners and close the notorious Maekelawi detention center. The prison, he also announced, would be turned into a ‘modern museum.’ Ethiopia’s political transition in 1991 resulted in several new memorials and museums; could the same happen now?
Continue Reading →It is closing day for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, which officially concludes its existence on December 31, 2017. As summarized by Owen Bowcott in the Guardian, the volume of work completed by the tribunal is impressive: over 24 years, 10,800 days of hearings, with 4,650 witnesses, producing 2.5 million pages of transcripts, […]
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We are very pleased to announce that Alex de Waal’s article “The end of famine? Prospects for the elimination of mass starvation by political action” published in the journal Political Geography has been selected from thousands of recently published articles to be awarded the Elsevier Atlas. Each month a single Atlas article is selected from […]
Continue Reading →The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia today announced the judgment in the case of the Bosnian Serb’s top military leader during the 1992 – 1995 conflict, Gen. Ratko Mladic. He was found guilty of all charges except one: the count of genocide for the overall conduct of the war, especially in municipalities […]
Continue Reading →One of the more complex meditations on memory and forgetting after war, comes not from social science, international law or erudite essay, but from this year’s winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize for literature, Kazuo Ishiguro, in his 2015 novel, The Buried Giant (2015). Set in an era following King Arthur’s demise, the characters inhabit a land beset by the fog of forgetting. The novel posits several ways to imagine the purpose of memory from the perspective of how its absence afflicts the story’s core characters.
Continue Reading →A nuclear strike almost certainly qualifies as an act of genocide. Does a threat of nuclear attack constitute incitement to genocide?
This question is not new, but newly invigorated by today’s crises. In 2005, then-Iranian President Ahmadinejad generated great fervor stated, in a contested translation, that Iran would “wipe Israel off the map.” In some […]
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