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In the long history of warfare and cultural and ethnic violence, the twentieth century was exceptional for producing institutions charged with seeking accountability or redress for violent offenses and human rights abuses across the globe, often forcing nations to confront the consequences of past atrocities. The Holocaust ended with trials at Nuremberg, apartheid in South Africa concluded with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and the Gacaca courts continue to strive for closure in the wake of the Rwandan genocide. Despite this global trend towards accountability, American collective memory appears distinct in that it tends to glorify the nation s past, celebrating triumphs while eliding darker episodes in its history. In American Memories, sociologists Joachim Savelsberg and Ryan King rigorously examine how the United States remembers its own and others atrocities and how institutional responses to such crimes, including trials and tribunals, may help shape memories and perhaps impede future violence. American Memories uses historical and media accounts, court records, and survey research to examine a number of atrocities from the nation s past, including the massacres of civilians by U.S. military in My Lai, Vietnam, and Haditha, Iraq. The book shows that when states initiate responses to such violence via criminal trials, tribunals, or reconciliation hearings they lay important groundwork for how such atrocities are viewed in the future. Trials can serve to delegitimize violence even by a nation s military by creating a public record of grave offenses. But the law is filtered by and must also compete with other institutions, such as the media and historical texts, in shaping American memory. Savelsberg and King show, for example, how the My Lai slayings of women, children, and elderly men by U.S. soldiers have been largely eliminated from or misrepresented in American textbooks, and the army s reputation survived the episode untarnished. The American media nevertheless evoked the killings at My Lai in response to the murder of twenty-four civilian Iraqis in Haditha, during the war in Iraq. Since only one conviction was obtained for the My Lai massacre, and convictions for the killings in Haditha seem increasingly unlikely, Savelsberg and King argue that Haditha in the near past is now bound inextricably to My Lai in the distant past. With virtually no criminal convictions, and none of higher ranks for either massacre, both events will continue to be misrepresented in American memory. In contrast, the book examines American representations of atrocities committed by foreign powers during the Balkan wars, which entailed the prosecution of ranking military and political leaders. The authors analyze news accounts of the war s events and show how articles based on diplomatic sources initially cast Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic in a less negative light, but court-based accounts increasingly portrayed Milosevic as a criminal, solidifying his image for the public record ... -- Book Description.

Reports on the existence of mass graves in Iraq, attributed to the repressive practices of the Saddam Hussein regime. Following a brief review of government massacres of civilians, a post-Hussein program to identify the remains in the mass graves is described in terms of public education & awareness, evidence gathering & forensic site investigation, exhumation of select sites, & Iraqi involvement. J. Zendejas

As Rwanda and Yugoslavia indicate, atrocities policing ("humanitarian intervention") is, in our current global polity, unreliable and carried out crudely. This becomes apparent when it is compared with domestic policing. It is the result of the system of sovereign states, into which atrocities policing does not readily fit. Even innovation to accommodate it leads to the haphazard interventions we have seen in this decade. But the sovereign state system, which developed in Europe in the context of a particular historical contingency and was then endowed to the rest of the world through decolonization, is not the only possible way of organizing the global polity. Thus, the author offers as an alternative the concept of a democratic global federation in which atrocities policing - including preventative policing - can be conducted in a much more reliable and responsible manner. While such a global political organization may seem utopian, in the long term it is not, given how radical change has been in the past century and can he expected to he in the next one. Moreover, it provides direction to current institutional reform and adds to current decisions about atrocities policing the issue of the longer-term consequences for global practices and institutions. ; Comme le montrent le Rwanda et la Yougoslavie, la gestion des atrocités (les «interventions humanitaires») est, dans le dispositif de nos affaires publiques globales, menée cavalièrement, et de façon totalement non fiable. Ce fait devient patent quand on établit la comparaison avec la gestion et au maintient de l'ordre domestiques. Cette situation résulte du système de l'état souverain, au sein duquel la gestion des atrocités n'a pas vraiment sa place. Même les innovations visant à accommoder les choses n'ont pu mener qu'à la série d'interventions improvisées de la dernière décennie. Or le système de l'état souverain, qui s'est développé en Europe dans le contexte d'une contingence historique particulière etf ut ensuite disséminé sur le reste du mode via la ...

David Walls's article in the last issue of New Politics, "How Project Censored Joined the Whitewash of Serb Atrocities" (Volume IX, No. 1, Whole Number 33, Summer 2002), elicited commentary from Bogdan Denitch & critical responses from Peter Phillips, Diana Johnstone, Edward S. Herman, & David Peterson. Each critical response is followed with a reply from Walls. Adapted from the source document.

The international community has determined it carries the responsibility to protect civilians from atrocity crimes if a state is unable or unwilling to do so. These crimes are often perpetrated in authoritarian regimes where they are legitimized through an exclusionary ideology. A comparative case study of Pol Pot and Milosevic indicates that whether the leader truly believes in the ideology he puts forward or merely uses it instrumentally to manipulate the population, is an important variable, which affects the manner in which third parties can respond effectively to these crimes. While Pol Pot was motivated by his ideological zeal, Milosevic used ideology to create a climate in which mass atrocities could be perpetrated in order to garner further power and prestige. In Max Weber's terminology, Milosevic was guided by instrumental rationality while Pol Pot acted on the basis of value rationality. This case study compares two crucial moments—Vietnam's invasion of Cambodia and NATO's bombing of Serbia when the crisis in Kosovo escalated—to analyze the responsiveness of the two leaders. It is argued that ideological leaders are less responsive than non-ideological leaders to foreign policy measures targeted to stop or mitigate the occurrence of atrocities.

In the long history of warfare and cultural and ethnic violence, the twentieth century was exceptional for producing institutions charged with seeking accountability or redress for violent offenses and human rights abuses across the globe, often forcing nations to confront the consequences of past atrocities. The Holocaust ended with trials at Nuremberg, apartheid in South Africa concluded with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and the Gacaca courts continue to strive for closure in the wake of the Rwandan genocide. Despite this global trend towards accountability, American collective memory appears distinct in that it tends to glorify the nation s past, celebrating triumphs while eliding darker episodes in its history. In American Memories, sociologists Joachim Savelsberg and Ryan King rigorously examine how the United States remembers its own and others atrocities and how institutional responses to such crimes, including trials and tribunals, may help shape memories and perhaps impede future violence. American Memories uses historical and media accounts, court records, and survey research to examine a number of atrocities from the nation s past, including the massacres of civilians by U.S. military in My Lai, Vietnam, and Haditha, Iraq. The book shows that when states initiate responses to such violence via criminal trials, tribunals, or reconciliation hearings they lay important groundwork for how such atrocities are viewed in the future. Trials can serve to delegitimize violence even by a nation s military by creating a public record of grave offenses. But the law is filtered by and must also compete with other institutions, such as the media and historical texts, in shaping American memory. Savelsberg and King show, for example, how the My Lai slayings of women, children, and elderly men by U.S. soldiers have been largely eliminated from or misrepresented in American textbooks, and the army s reputation survived the episode untarnished. The American media nevertheless evoked the killings at My Lai in response to the murder of twenty-four civilian Iraqis in Haditha, during the war in Iraq. Since only one conviction was obtained for the My Lai massacre, and convictions for the killings in Haditha seem increasingly unlikely, Savelsberg and King argue that Haditha in the near past is now bound inextricably to My Lai in the distant past. With virtually no criminal convictions, and none of higher ranks for either massacre, both events will continue t ...

Mass Atrocities, Risk and Resilience examines the relationship between risk and resilience in the prevention of genocide and other mass atrocities and explores two broad areas of neglect. In terms of prevention, there is very little research that analyzes how local and national actors manage the risk associated with mass atrocities. In the field of comparative genocide studies, to date there has been very little interest in examining negative cases. Although much is known about why mass atrocities occur, much less is established about why they do not occur. The contributions in this book address this neglect in two important ways. First, they challenge commonly-accepted approaches to prevention. Second, they explore negative cases in order to better understand how local and national actors have mitigated risk over time.